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December Meme: Valdemar & Companion Soulbonds
Starting this meme off the right way by completely forgetting I had a prompt for the 1st, heh. Oh, well; I have a prompt for today, so I'll move the missed one to the 3rd.
Well. My love for Valdemar and its Companions goes back - as I imagine most people's does - to Krait at circa 14 years old. They had an even bigger impact on me, however, as they were my first "real" fantasy novels; all my life I've been drawn to fantastical elements in storytelling (The Last Unicorn was my favourite movie from pretty much whenever I first saw it), but I'd never read an actual genre paperback "fantasy novel" before the day my best friend showed up with a book featuring a white horse on the cover and Lackey's name on it. Being a typical horse-crazy girl, I asked her what it was about; and "telepathic talking horses" was an answer guaranteed to hit every weak spot. :D
Naturally, I loved it; I don't even remember which one of the series I read first, though I suspect it was one of the "Winds" trilogy. The Most Important Thing was definitely the Companions! I think it's probably pretty telling that there seems to be an age range wherein "magical talking/telepathic animal companion" is the most awesome story idea ever. (Insert some thoughtful conclusions about puberty and a tween's changing emotional footing making the idea of deep yet safely nonsexual intimacy deeply appealing.)
Anyway, that was very much true for me, too; I wanted to write ALL the fanfiction about Heralds and Companions, even back then when fanfiction wasn't something I knew about as a wider phenomenon. And then I discovered the Last Herald-Mage trilogy, and the whole fascinating concept of a Companion being able to reject her Chosen, and the circumstances involved in that, and that was even better - because nothing makes an already-interesting concept more intriguing than encountering an exception! (The same thing applies to my reaction to human-human soulbonds, e.g. Vanyel's reborn love and Firefox's unhealthy obsession; my favourite stories in the soulbond genre are the ones that go: "But what if that didn't work out that way in somebody's experience?")
As I got older, Lackey's more frustrating habits with regard to writing/Valdemar become more notable and irksome to me (as I grew out of their target demographic, and became familiar with them and began to yearn for variations on the theme), so I don't still have the immediate connection to them that I once had. Nonetheless, as my first exposure to the Telepathic Animal Friend and the fantasy genre as a whole, they'll always be very special to me and will probably always be the underlying foundation on which my further explorations of soulbond tropes are based!
Well. My love for Valdemar and its Companions goes back - as I imagine most people's does - to Krait at circa 14 years old. They had an even bigger impact on me, however, as they were my first "real" fantasy novels; all my life I've been drawn to fantastical elements in storytelling (The Last Unicorn was my favourite movie from pretty much whenever I first saw it), but I'd never read an actual genre paperback "fantasy novel" before the day my best friend showed up with a book featuring a white horse on the cover and Lackey's name on it. Being a typical horse-crazy girl, I asked her what it was about; and "telepathic talking horses" was an answer guaranteed to hit every weak spot. :D
Naturally, I loved it; I don't even remember which one of the series I read first, though I suspect it was one of the "Winds" trilogy. The Most Important Thing was definitely the Companions! I think it's probably pretty telling that there seems to be an age range wherein "magical talking/telepathic animal companion" is the most awesome story idea ever. (Insert some thoughtful conclusions about puberty and a tween's changing emotional footing making the idea of deep yet safely nonsexual intimacy deeply appealing.)
Anyway, that was very much true for me, too; I wanted to write ALL the fanfiction about Heralds and Companions, even back then when fanfiction wasn't something I knew about as a wider phenomenon. And then I discovered the Last Herald-Mage trilogy, and the whole fascinating concept of a Companion being able to reject her Chosen, and the circumstances involved in that, and that was even better - because nothing makes an already-interesting concept more intriguing than encountering an exception! (The same thing applies to my reaction to human-human soulbonds, e.g. Vanyel's reborn love and Firefox's unhealthy obsession; my favourite stories in the soulbond genre are the ones that go: "But what if that didn't work out that way in somebody's experience?")
As I got older, Lackey's more frustrating habits with regard to writing/Valdemar become more notable and irksome to me (as I grew out of their target demographic, and became familiar with them and began to yearn for variations on the theme), so I don't still have the immediate connection to them that I once had. Nonetheless, as my first exposure to the Telepathic Animal Friend and the fantasy genre as a whole, they'll always be very special to me and will probably always be the underlying foundation on which my further explorations of soulbond tropes are based!