Unambiguous Robin 🐦

Hey there it's that time again / Time to hear from your robin friend / Clap your hands and do a dance / She won't stop talking about romance

We're continuing our look into Martis the Brazen today, moving on from the spoiler-free review from last time into a spoiler-full analysis for the rest of this post (though reading the story is not a requirement for reading the post). As usual, this is part of Sapphic Book Bingo.

(Also I'm trying not to enter into 18+ territory but I do talk a little bit about some spicy stuff in this post.)

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The Romance

I feel like I can't really do a bullet point list of observations this time because the story wasn't long enough to get into small subtleties like that. So let's just jump into the core running theme of the romantic aspects of the story: Vulnerability.

The progress of Martis's deepening relationship with Amoret can be measured through how many aspects of Martis's personal shames and anxieties that she has admitted to Amoret. Martis has been hiding these feelings from people for a long time, but she gets a bit of a push to open up in the beginning as a result of feeling like she owes a debt to Amoret since Martis's own sire had indirectly branded her. Once she's already opened up some and has been witness to the fact that Amoret doesn't judge her for it, she gradually decides it's safe to open up about the rest, especially as Amoret gradually opens up to her in turn. It's a well-structured progression.

And I feel that the story ties these themes into the sex scene, as well. As Amoret undoes Martis's clothes, Martis herself likens it to Amoret freeing her from her past guilt (or wishes it was that simple). Martis being unable to hide her dragon form from Amoret is symbolic of having already revealed her past to Amoret. In addition to that, though, the sex involves physical vulnerabilties; some light clawing and biting, showing how easily either of them could get hurt with how much they're willing to be open with each other, if they didn't have reason to trust each other. Amoret admiring Martis's scars and tattoos is another means of finding tenderness in a different kind of vulnerability.

I appreciate seeing a sex scene that ties into characterization and the broader themes of the story like this, not to mention doing so through the added layer of metaphor and symbolism. Admittedly, some of the reason for this is I still find myself not especially turned on by written sex scenes (especially since Martis NEVER ACTUALLY TURNED INTO A FULL DRAGON), but I also just think that sex scenes deserve as much consideration and effort as any other moment that involves the main characters doing something emotionally important to them.

Anyway, I think the broader point to be taken here about romance in general is that "vulnerability" continues to serve as a strong representative of romance, enough that it can carry a (simple) romance all by itself. I will try to make sure that vulnerability is always an aspect of my own romances as well.

Oh look here's another "shitty parents" plotline

Well, sort of. Martis's relationship to her sire Thouros is on the rocks after her mother Rhiannon dies, and the two family members she left behind no longer know how to deal with each other as a result. Martis seems to have other reasons to feel bitter towards Thouros, but it's never made fully clear what all those reasons are, and for her sake Martis says she doesn't hate her sire.

We definitely get some relatable interplay between Martis and Thouros after the two of them meet up, though, as the first thing Thouros does upon seeing Martis is criticize her for visiting xem incorrectly--primarily because she brought someone with her, someone who is quickly becoming important to Martis, adding some queer undertones to the nature of the criticism (even though Thouros's complaint isn't that it's a queer relationship).

The story quickly moves into another relatable situation as it becomes clear that Thouros has what can basically be considered to be Dragon Alzheimer's. Thouros has forgotten that xyr wife has died. In xyr confusion, xe has a habit of singing the lullaby that Rhiannon sang to Martis as a child, which is what caused the local humans of the region to go mad and attempt to sacrifice Amoret.

I've brought up my own bad relationship to my parents multiple times in these reviews, so hopefully it's understandable that this scene hit me kinda hard in a few different ways.

I had already learned through cultural expectations and personal experience that people, in general, gradually become more stubborn as they age. I had already internalized this idea by the time it was reinforced by actual scientific research relayed to me through my psychology classes in college. Apparently, people have a harder time incorporating new information into their worldview the older they get, so somewhere along the line, a lot of people just stop trying. If they find a mental system that works for them well enough to get them all the way to their 50s and 60s, there's not much survival incentive for them to change anything about that--and I think there comes a point where learning new things means removing some of that information that got them so far. A brain is only so big, after all, and eventually that brain starts deteriorating.

With my own parents, what this meant was that anytime I brought them new information they weren't familiar with, the onus was on me to justify to them why they should accept this information, especially if it went against what they already assumed to be true. And I was always at a disadvantage in this regard because they would always have decades' worth of lived experience over me, decades' worth of information reinforcing the beliefs they already had, even if those beliefs were based on false premises. So as I continuously failed to justify any of my own lived experiences to them due to this disadvantage, I gradually began to feel dysfunctional and inferior as a person.

So there is something poignant to me about the lullaby scene in Martis the Brazen. We have a dragon who has aged to the point that xe is now dying of old age, and xe is no longer capable of holding onto any memories other than what is most pleasing to xem. As a result of this nostalgia-induced blindness, the dragon takes actions--singing lullabies--intended to be harmless, but it has an end effect on actual living people that drives them to madness and stirs them to cause harm to others.

I can't help but compare this dragon to human adults in the real world who allow nostalgia to reinforce increasingly conservative beliefs, lashing out against everything new they learn about the realities of the world, instead choosing to dedicate emotional and financial support to the people in power who would hurt anyone who's not like them. All while hiding behind a shield of saying the world as it is doesn't make sense to them, and trying to force the world to return to a state that never actually existed, much like my own parents did.

And the scene in the book is further complicated by the fact that Martis has nostalgia for this lullaby, too; but since she's aware of how it's now being used to hurt people, she has to deal with the additional issue of having something that was important to her being taken and used for causes she never would've used it for, almost like a close friend had been taken from her and been forced to participate in heinous acts. Children in the real world, too, have nostalgia for the childhood that their parents created for them, the comforting beliefs that they were raised with, only to watch their parents age and take those same beliefs and, again, use them as excuses to hurt other people.

And what was ultimately troubling for me is that, in the book, the conclusion seemed to be that the best thing Martis could do at this point is simply make peace with the fact that things have gone the way they've gone. Her sire is no longer in control of xyr mental faculties, and therefore is not really responsible for xyr own actions. Her sire is on xyr deathbed, and is about to reach the point where xe can't cause any additional harm. Martis is not in a position to change anything xyr sire has done, or will do--much like I never had any real influence over my own parents, regardless of how hard I ever tried.

I can't say the book is wrong in regards to any of the above points. I can't say that I think the book is wrong that this is perhaps the healthiest way that Martis can respond to the situation now that it has reached this point. All I can say is it makes me feel a little ill to see this play out this way, with agency and accountability effectively removed from someone who has caused real harm, regardless of how much control they have over it now, and placing the responsibility on xyr child to accept the situation for what it is and make peace with it.

I know an important part of the fight is knowing which battles to fight. That, too, is something my parents taught me, and an idea they used to justify the act of ignoring harms taking place--but I can't deny its truth. We only have so much energy to take care of so many things that need taking care of to be spending that energy on something that may not be able to be changed in the first place, and perhaps the parent-child dynamic, especially, is something that has too strong of a power imbalance for any child to try to override, or blame themselves for when their parents age and inevitably start causing more and more problems as a result.

But given that I'm in the position that I'm in, I can't help but feel that there is some value in holding onto some hatred. Perhaps our own parents can't be changed by us, and because of that, perhaps we shouldn't try. But our resentment towards our parents can still be used to recognize and fight against the harm that is caused by everyone else's parents, and maybe, since those parents don't see us as their children, we actually have a better shot at convincing them. Of making them realize how much harm is being caused, how deep that harm is. At stopping them from continuing to mistreat their own children and the people around them in the ways that they do.

These are just the feelings that were stirred within one girl upon reading this story, though. I don't feel like I can fairly judge Martis the Brazen for its conclusion regarding this one individual relationship, when I don't think it was necessarily intending to extrapolate this conclusion to broader social problems--just the idea of how an individual child deals with their own individual parents, and doesn't let their issues hold them back from building a new life for themselves.

On that note, though...

Martis's shame of her heritage

Although I appreciate the level of metaphor and symbolism in the book, there is one aspect of it in particular where I think it got a bit confusing, and led to some possibly unintentional mixed messages.

So first off, the author Rien Gray is nonbinary, and neopronouns are a regular thing in the world of the story (if you couldn't already tell). In light of this, I think it's more than fair to do a transgender reading/interpretation of the text. To continue with that idea, I think there are a lot of comparisons that can be made between the "dragon" aspect of Martis's physicality and the dysphoria that can come with being trans:

• It is a running theme of the book that Martis is ashamed of the dragon part of herself, and does her best to hide it from other people.
• Her dragon aspect is something that is a genetic part of her. She can live as a human, but she can't change the fact that "dragon" will always be a part of her physicality.
• "Martis" is effectively a chosen name. She was given a different name by her parents, based on dragon naming schemes, that she doesn't use anymore--a deadname.
• At some point in her past, Martis has an emotional meltdown that leads her to go on a rampage; during this time, she enters into a part-dragon form. I suspect a lot of trans people can relate to dysphoria resulting in a questioning/breakdown of the self in a way that leads to similarly stressful moments, maybe even leading to its own destructive actions.
• When she has sex with Amoret, her dragon form "comes out" and she has no means of hiding it, and she's ashamed/embarrassed about it (even though Amoret already knew it was a part of her), enough so that she's tempted to call off the sex until Amoret reassures her that it's okay.
• During sex, Amoret talks with Martis about how, even though Martis is afraid of her "dragon nature" coming through and hurting Amoret as a result, Amoret is confident that Martis isn't the kind of person who would act that way; Martis has a kind heart.

So that's all good. (Well, I mean, it's not good, it's depressing, but it's relatable.) But assuming the connections are intentional on the part of the author, I have to wonder if maybe it was a mistake to create trans symbolism in this particular way, because, well...

I understand the temptation to take a symbol of dysphoria and tie it into something about Martis's inherent physicality; that is, after all, pretty core to the source of dysphoria. But by making it an aspect of Martis that she inherited directly from one of her parents, I feel that the story has inevitably taken all these aspects of personal shame and connected them to the idea of someone's race.

And... okay, after spending some time writing and re-writing this section, I've realized that it's hard to make the argument that this has implications of race essentialism without also making the argument that it has implications of gender essentialism, and while I'm inclined to feel the former, I'm not inclined to feel the latter. And full disclosure, I'm trans but white, so I'm approaching the gender issues from an insider's perspective and the race issues from an outsider's perspective (or vice versa), so to speak, so it makes sense that the two things would hit me differently. (And though I know Rien Gray is nonbinary, I don't know anything about their cultural background otherwise.)

I think the reason feelings get complicated for me is that... When we're talking about someone's sex, that might be something tied to genetics, but it is not something specifically inherited from a parent. It's a roll of the dice. If someone is AFAB, that person isn't AFAB because they "inherited" the "F" from their cis mother and not their cis father, know what I mean? They're AFAB because of a random combination of genes from both parents, and it's something that could happen with any child from any two parents.

So following along with a purely gender-based reading of the text, similarly, it could be said that Martis's sire being a dragon is practically irrelevant to Martis herself being part dragon. Thus, Martis's interpretation of her dragonhood can be seen simply as Martis holding onto the false belief that she has to act one way or another just because of some arbitrary aspect of her physicality. Her story involves learning not to anchor herself to some toxic image in her own head, and simply let herself be the kind of human she wants to be.

But in the actual text, genetic dragon-ness doesn't function like a roll of the dice, Martis is part dragon specifically because she has a dragon parent, and it couldn't have been part of her otherwise. And dragons in this world are portrayed as being fundamentally different from humans, and massively so.

As a reminder, Thouros accidentally brainwashed the local humans into forming a cult just by singing a lullaby, because... that's just the effect that a dragon's singing has on humans in this world. Dragons are beings of such immense magical power that their deaths change the very structure of the landscape. Dragons are so different from humans that the only way that Thouros could produce a child with a human is if the human was an immortal time mage who traded in her immortality for the ability to bone a dragon. (And, well, yes, relatable.)

And the end result of this, for Martis, is that she is of a uniquely mixed lineage with no peers to relate to or learn from, and she sees this very aspect of herself as being to blame for her mother's eventual death. The whole situation carries tones of "Yeah, it makes sense why two people of these different races never came together to have a child before, and it wouldn't be surprising if it never happened again." And that is the nature of the kind of internalized shame that Martis is carrying with her, and connects to the "dragon" part of herself. (Not the human part of herself, mind! She loves that part! It's just the dragon part she has problems with.)

So, to my mind, doing an interpretation of the text as an allegory to racial issues carries some problematic undertones that are not present when viewing the same text as an allegory to gender issues. And yet I feel the story inevitably invites viewing it as an allegory of racial issues due to how the rules of the story's world are written, but at the same time, I have a suspicion that the only reason this reading exists is as an unintended side effect of trying to create a gender-based allegory.

It's just a suspicion. I don't know exactly what was on Rien Gray's mind when writing this, I can only take notice of my own feelings of discomfort I had when reading it and try to analyze where those feelings are coming from. My discomfort may be based on false premises. I may be misinterpreting the reasons of my own discomfort! But I felt like it was at least worth bringing up.

Tropes I noticed

• I've already gone over this in detail, but it's worth a reminder that I've found "shitty parents" to be a really common trope of sapphic stories.
• This is the second sapphic story I've read where the love interest of a dragon is referred to as "treasure", though it's in a darker and much less romantic way this time.
• This is also the second sapphic story in which one of a child's parents dies, and this ends up souring the relationship between the child and the remaining parent.
• This is also the second sapphic story in which two parents took drastic, magic-based methods to ensure a child could be born to their liking.
• Once again these bitches be smelling like scented candles (apple and cedar in this case)

Unorganized notes and observations

• At one point in the story, Amoret calls Martis out for being so closed off, and Martis is genuinely embarrassed about it. I think that was really cute; it is of course part of the appeal of the romance that someone who never opens up to anyone finally gets the release of being able to open up to someone, but Amoret is right to point out that it's Martis's own actions that prevented her from having anything like that with anyone before. But it's also true that it's not like it was really Martis's intention to become so closed off (it rarely is), so her getting embarrassed over it is a cute reaction. I dunno, I just liked it.
• I do relate to Martis's inclination to feel tremendous guilt about her essential nature, and to try to "make up" for it by losing herself in her work.
• I also relate to how Martis brought something personally valuable to her on a dangerous trip, and then after seeing it break still be like "Why did I even bring this, why am I such an idiot dumb-dumb"
• I did not relate to Martis and Amoret's conclusion upon witnessing the death of Thouros to be "Well, time to fuck."
• It's only mentioned in passing, but I like how the relationship between Thouros and Rhiannon could be considered its own romantic subplot. It's even developed to the point where aspects of them that could be perceived as flaws on their own were actually used in ways to help each other and make up for each other's limitations. (To be completely honest, their relationship sounded very similar to the relationship between me and my headmate Felicia.)
• I like that, just because Martis is bound by prophecy to make haste to her destination, this doesn't stop her from going out of her way to help a woman in need.
• I think I may have mentioned this in the other review, but I like that Martis is working for what seems to be a genuinely peace-loving kingdom. I wonder if the castle may actually be more comparable to a commune.
• I like that even the horse is happy to be going on an adventure.

How would I have written it differently?

Well if I wrote a story that was focused on the premise that the protagonist was half-dragon, you better fucken believe I would've portrayed it as an awesome thing.

But like, seriously, that's yet another weird aspect of the whole thing, isn't it? I've seen so many furries talk about how they like their fursonas because those fursonas help them feel more like their honest selves. Here we have a story premise that I think would catch the attention of any furry who hears about it, an aspect of furryhood that could be tapped into, and then the story ends up being about how Martis is ashamed of that part of herself and wishes she could just be human. Especially as a queer story, it just feels off.

And if I wrote a story about someone confronting their parents about their shitty behavior... well, I would've had that play out quite differently than it does in this story, too. 'Cause I'm holding onto some deep bitterness and have no intentions of giving my parents (or anyone's parents) the relief of letting go of it.

Not sure I would've changed the structure of the story or anything, though. I still like a story that's centered on two lovers opening up to each other about their feelings.