Carry On

[got_quiet]

My book club has locked in our schedule for the next year and I've started participating now that I can read a lot of these books on my phone, so I just finished all three books of the Carry On series.

This is more gay YA genre fiction. The spoiler free tl;dr is that I read all three books in the trilogy in three days and enjoyed them it a bunch. The first book sells itself as part ghost story, part magical school, part chosen one narrative, and it's exactly that. I haven't read anything else by the author, but it appears the main characters, Simon and Baz, were originally part of a fake series that was the focus of her book Fangirl, which tracks, because the book has a paint by numbers sort of fandom vibe. Not in a bad way mind you. Sometimes I have a strong hankering for that AO3 OW mode and that's what this is. The plot is predictable but the characters are fun, and give me all the self-hating and fatalistic boys. Baz's miserable internal dialog was tailor made for my id.

The second two books break away from the more formulaic magical school stuff of the first, and I felt they were stronger for it in a narrative sense. The side characters also got more interesting and the adventure is more fun. The final ending of the trilogy was not super satisfying, but it wasn't major bummer either.

I only have one major gripe about the first book, and that is the way the main villain is handled. This is a very tropey story, but the only trope that I'm tired of is the one where someone sees a wrong and in trying to right it becomes a cartoon villain, and their defeat makes everyone happy and eager to get back to being an unjust society. Here The Mage is driven entirely by a desire to reform the magical world, so that things like class, blood quantum, and absolute power are not the deciding factors for how much opportunity you have. He wants to do terrible things like let more than the most elite go to school, have better representation on the ruling body, and make fewer things hereditary. And of course in the process of creating those reforms he does a little murder, almost destroys the magical world, and runs roughshod over what civil liberties are in place. There's no real nuance to him. In the very beginning I thought the book might give him a little bit of an internal conflict but nah. So that was a disappointment. (I did like that the book sort of casually points to The Mage as a villain early on by using his sexism as an orange flag.)

But really other than that I have few complaints. The book is tightly focused on the evolution of Simon and Baz's relationship. It starts in their final year of not-Hogwarts, and I thought the (extremely minimal) world building was done well. It's fitting that a story where idiom and shared cultural touchstones are the source of magical power relies on the shorthand of "This is not-Hogwarts" to fill in six or seven years of gaps so that Simon can be like "remember in year three when" and as a reader I'm like "yeah that tracks."  The magic system I liked too. Rather than go with funny Latinish, the oral component of spells relies on cultural touchstones. Cliches, slogans, memes, etc. The book dodges the trap of becoming dated with memes by explaining that the more established and enduring the phrase, the better the result. Once the "Normals" stop saying something it loses its power. So "I can has cheezburger" may have manifested you a meal for a few years, but "out, damn spot" has been doing laundry for literally centuries.

The worldbuilding gets a little confused in the later books as the association with Harry Potter kind of comes back to bite it in some ways. On the other hand, the books get stronger when they stop leaning on the expy stuff and everything starts to stand on its own. Since not much is actually said about the school I assumed it was basically Hogwarts, but in the second two books it seems that mage society in these books doesn't really know much about anything other than their particular talent for casting. They don't know much at all about other magical creatures and don't seem to care to know, or at least don't teach anything about it. Nor do they know much about their own magic, because people keep trying to pull weird shit and no one can seem to identify it as a problem. The magic in the book walks a fine line between "has rules" and "doesn't have rules" and that felt like it was causing problems at times.

The supporting cast and little side bits of the book start out a little shallow but get better though the series. I suspect that Agatha is not popular in the fandom but I liked her a lot. I wanted her to escape in the first book, and think she got a decent happily ever after by the third. The poor girl really got shafted in the second by being a bit of a sexy lamp, but she was a sexy lamp that was really pissed about the whole thing lol.

The fact that in the end Simon was not able to realize that his mother had spoken to him hurt my heart more than anything else in the book. And Simon being without power in the end also sucked. The way the story ended generally I felt kind of meh about. The Excalibur thing felt random as hell. Like, "shit gotta tie this end up real quick..."

I think Simon was great but Baz is certainly my fav. He's very much a not-Draco if Draco was interesting, intelligent, and self-hating. I'm also a sucker for sad people who manifest their sadness with verbal aggression. Baz spends a good portion of the first book thinking that he's a monster and that his own mother would have killed him if she knew what he had become, that Simon hates his guts and is destined to kill him because they are born on separate sides of an incoming war, and that literally any small scrap of enjoyment he gets out of life (like oogling Simon from afar) should be cherished before he's fucked. And of course he doesn't want to go to a therapist over any of this. I thought the swap from enemies to lovers between the two was slightly sudden but the book really does kind of know what it wants and goes straight for it, so, "I'm gonna kiss you so you don't immolate yourself in self-hating suicide" is on-brand dramatics. I'm greedy so I wanted Baz to hang on to the angst for a little longer than he did, but it probably wouldn't have served the narrative, lol.

Comments

[autumndaze]

Oh I love the Simon Snow trilogy :D It's so fun!!

Yeah I didn't like that a big part of the narrative was "the villain was a progressive gone wrong", which is a valid story-telling device (and very reflective of real life) and possibly a reflection on Dumbledore in this very much Harry/Draco fanfiction, but it's like... not fun when that's just all it does. Yeah, the One Progressive In Charge Was Terrible, so now let's go right back to... reversing all the good stuff he did lol Was there no one else in the society doing the work he wanted to do whom we could turn to? No? Even the few other sort of progressives we know of are shitty, and I imagine this might be a reflection on how if you only rely on the privileged to make changes in the world, all you'll see is a perpetuation of the shitty systems they were privileged in, and not real change. But it's... not a fun narrative to read lol And you'd hope by the end of three books they'd um... start trying to fix that lol

I also didn't like that Simon remained depowered :/ The story has stuff to say about disability, trauma, and child abuse, but all in all it mostly feels like a giant fuck you to Simon with no real plus sides other then "well he has a boyfriend now except when they get into another silly will-they-won't they fight." Glad he has a support system??? At least??? When he's not starting fights with them??? Sometimes the trilogy stands on its own and sometimes it just feels like "here's a Harry Potter scenario and how it should be handled and we're gonna drop that and move on to the next thing" (e.g., Simon getting therapy/not getting therapy after all his Hero/Failed Hero stuff). I read escapist entertainment to escape from a world where you don't get a happy ending after getting injured/mental illness. So seeing this character just get Stuck with this stuff and not really getting any conclusion other than "sometimes life just sucks" is... well it might just be that narrative isn't for me, I guess.

I liked Agatha honestly. I felt her story was a bit eh at times but overall I liked her.

Also yeah, I love Simon, but Baz is just the best lol Angsty boi :3 Their back and forth and angst was largely fun (though worse I think in book 3, when it kept switching back and forth arbitrarily and too speedily).

I feel like the discordant "has rules/doesn't have rules" thing might be reflective of how like... a society that functions by privileging the few is a fractured, unorganized society of disinformation and non-functionality, which is kind of worrying when you look at the trajectory of the US. It's not pleasant to read as a narrative, though, and I don't think the series has answers for it (nor does it have to, necessarily), other than like... honesty, support, and democracy is better than lies and tyranny. But it just looks shoddy because so much of the trilogy is "pick up the shiny thing and drop it once a new shiny thing appears" lol.

All in all the series has things to say and I'm not sure how well it says them other than acknowledging their existence. But it's nice we got Simon/Baz out of it and I hope they stay happy forever. And I do love the trilogy, too :D

[got_quiet]

Yeah Simon/Baz was worth it. I think that's all the author really cared about too, or at least that's how I explain some of the issues around the worldbuilding/messaging. Simon's a kid who just sort of fell into his role and never really showed any proactive interest in changing the world, and the narrative doesn't worry about it cause he's not really worrying about it. I usually am into the setting almost more than I'm into ships but this time I kind of just want the two of them in as many iterations as possible.