Feral Anarchs

I've been flipping through Feral Gentry recently, a comic about fairy politics (and I don't mean the San Francisco city hall) where the tall, dark and handsome (authors' descriptors, not mine) cast spend half their time arranging their hair, posing in bohemian outfits and caressing flowers. At least the partisan machination and other conflict does move along spryly enough to keep me clicking until page 182 where the writer slipped up and actually used the word "anarchs" thereby pointing out exactly why this routine felt both so familiar and so underwhelming. Really, the fact half these fairies have fangs should've tipped me off.

 

From my video game impression of the World of Darkness, vampire society revolves around supernatural power plays, but all this takes place against the backdrop of the mundane world, a juxtaposition intrinsic to dark/urban fantasy and important for storytelling in general. Vampires are predators fighting over hunting grounds while struggling not to trigger a deadly herd stampede, and as George Martin nailed the issue in Fevre Dream, a predator so inextricably dependent on its masquerade would have nothing of its own, enmeshed in a numerically and vitally overwhelming culture, slaves to their own slaves. There's a lot of dramatic tension to work with there.

 

Feral Gentry tries to stage the same supernatural cold war* routine between fairies... but...

1) Each and every one of them appears to live an effortless life of luxury and abundance in their home dimension.

2) To create excuses for courtly pomp and bombast the authors gave them their own culture with their own separate concerns.

3) If they do choose to go slumming in the human world, their mind control powers allow them to live, once again, effortlessly and with little danger of discovery, with no need to leave tell-tale bloodless corpses lying around.

So all the talk of brash young hooligan fairies rebelling against stodgy old aristocrat fairies never gets off the ground, dramatically speaking, resolving to a pissing contest over absolutely nothing, in a corner of the multiverse that affects nothing beyond itself and whose inhabitants have no cause to either leave or return. Two hundred pages into a story that's supposed to end at twice that number, I should have at least some idea what the central conflict is supposed to be about. Here though, both sides come across as the most whiny, navel-gazing wastes of fairy dust since Tinkerbell lost cognitive functions to oxygen deprivation due to the audience not clapping fast enough. As for the protagonist, he's so washed out and devoid of internal motivations that his only defining feature seems to be getting abandoned by his father.

Fine, I'm just halfway through... but halfway through a story about people in doublets with twigs in their hair, the reader shouldn't be struggling to give a shit about the people or the doublets... or hell, at least the twigs!

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* Ever considered how much Vampire: the Masquerade owes to old spy thrillers?