Seduced by Moonlight--chapter 18

So yesterday I wound up with chickens. Four of them. They are about a month old, have a great deal of feathers, and make the most adorable little peeping noises. This is an adventure that I have very little knowledge about. I have already learned that you can feed chickens everything. If it goes in a compost pile, it goes in a chicken coop. I kind of like this, as we've been avoiding buying a lot of fruits and veggies as they eventually go bad. Having something to do with leftover veggies that isn't "Throw them away" is really, really cool. Also: fuzzy idiots are adorable.

Also: The book giveaway I started over on Goodreads? It's in the home stretch now. So if you haven't entered and you'd like to? Go do that.

So. How's Merry?

It wasn’t that Maeve Reed’s personal jet wasn’t comfortable , because it was.

Any complaining after this sentence is invalid.

Oh, and it's the fact that Doyle has a flying phobia. You know who else has a flying phobia? The author of this book! What a coincidence.

Frost continues to pout that Merry is thinking about Doyle.

This continues to be pointless and annoying. This guy should not be in this relationship if it effects him this badly.

Rhys knelt in front of me. He was wearing his white eye patch with the tiny seed pearls on it.

...you know, there comes a point where even Jareth would go "That's just too damn much for me". His eye patch. Has seed pearls. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. That's what you get if you put Tarintino in charge of directing a fantasy movie.

Rhys gives Merry back the Queen's ring in a very melodramatic fashion. Seeing as how it hasn't come up since the first book, you may have forgotten that it's the magical version of a fertility test. It finds people their One True Wub while also indicating wheither or not they'd make a fertile match. Because we have to remember, the Fae are infertile right now and fertility is all that matters.

 Rhys owned a house outside the faerie mounds. A house with electricity, a television, and everything. He was probably one of the only sidhe who knew who Humphrey Bogart had been, or who Madonna was.

So Rhys is a sociopathic asshole too. Okay, gotcha.

Seriously. If he lives outside of the fairy mounds he should understand social systems well enough to know that the Mound is not healthy, has never been healthy, and that trying to follow its rules OUTSIDE of its juristiction is probably the dumbest thing you can do short of sticking a fork in a light socket. He should be helping people get out, not playing hide-the-beefsteak with Merry. He should be capable of recognizing that Merry is just as fucked up as the rest of the Fae royals.

But then again, this is an LKH book where an eight-foot wingspan (and, for that matter, bedroom) is considered large for a human sized bird. 

  Sage tromped up the aisle to us. He was wearing a pair of Kitto’s dress slacks and a T-shirt that had had to be ripped up the back to accommodate his wings.

WAIT. WAIT ONE GODDAMN MINUTE.

SAGE IS KITTO'S SIZE? IS HE SHRINKING? HE HAD BETTER BE GODDAMN SHRINKING. LKH SHOULD NOT INTRODUCE YET ANOTHER CHARACTER THE SIZE AND PROPORTION OF A PUBESCENT CHILD. THAT'S JUST...NO. LADY SHOULD KNOW BETTER.

(Galen's) hair spilled over his naked upper body, because his wings were even larger than Sage’s, and though we’d tried to get a silk-and-spandex tee over them, in the end we’d been defeated.

At this point I'm assuming that LKH got a lot of the damned things from a wholesaler.

And then the ring info-dump, which is still going on, takes a turn for the stupid. And homophobic.

Rhys nodded. “The ring had begun to fade in power— we knew that because the great matchmaking ball had failed some decades before. A sidhe would come to the door of the ballroom, and no one would step forward. But we didn’t understand that the ring had kept us safe, not just happy and fertile.”

See, in their fertile true-love matches, the Fae were perfectly safe. The ring guaranteed a happy ending, so if you were in a ring approved true love match no one would die. But if you're gay, or your true love isn't fertile for whatever reason, you're SOL.

“Until the battle of Rhodan,” Frost said, “where we lost two hundred sidhe warriors. Most of them had been wed to their love matches.”

This infuriates me beyond all reason. Imagining that society--the pressure to marry your ring-match, the shame of having an unapproved lover die. You'd even be denied the right to properly grieve because that wasn't your "one true love" or whatever. In fact, you know what that straight up reminds me of? The assigned marriges of the FLDS. Doesn't matter if it's a prophet getting messages from God or a fucking fairy ring, having your partner assigned for you without your imput is FUCKING WRONG.

Thank god that goddamn ring's been broken for thousands of years. That's probably one of the VERY few things that has kept the Faerie Courts anything close to sane. You throw that level of control on top of the rest of it, you got a pressure cooker waiting to explode.

And of course LKH is taking a hot-button human right's issue that everyone has issues with (FLDS mormons aren't the only ones marrying off their CHILDREN, for example. And I'm deliberately using US only examples because most people believe this doesn't happen in the states. That it's just something that happens in "third world" countries. Yes. Yes it does.) and is turning it into an uber-romantic fairy-tale ending because WHY NOT. Yes. Let's push the stupidity Disney started when they sanitized the rape out of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Pushing the idea that you can know somebody is perfect for you within seconds of meeting them, that love is an instant connection felt across a crowded room, how could ANYTHING BAD HAPPEN BECAUSE OF THAT.

And of course Merry is terrified at putting on the ring because it will make her choose just one of all her lovely lovely men.

...I now want to rewrite this entire story and make it be all about Merry bucking all these fancy rules and just doing what's good and healthy because this current shit is making me sick.

What if the ring didn’t find my perfect match here and now? What if my perfect match wasn’t any of them? What if that was why I hadn’t become pregnant?

For the TEN THOUSANDTH TIME, IVF. Go get a petri dish, go get knocked up, sort the rest of this shit out later. And you can't even argue that the man-made shit would be bad for the fairy baby because I believe all the stuff used for IVF is glass.

I stared back down at the box. If the ring chose someone else, Galen would have to find a new dream, a new love, a new everything.

 And people do that all the time. It's sad, but it's part of life. If you don't want to give people up, don't give people up. Don't hang with the restrictions. As long as you mantain your own health and the health of however many lovers you get, you do what you need to. Following arbitrary rules erected by a magic ring and a psychotic queen isn't healthy. Even the Christian God is more flexible than this shit.

The chapter ends with Merry opening the ring box.