Merry January, everyone!
I'm up to page 466 of Tiger, Tiger, and the amount of nudity in the comic (which is far from a lot but more than none) is getting uncomfortable. Like, it's not porn, but also here's a dude who clearly just had sex and while he's definitely not doing that at the moment here's his penis anyway. This on top of all the boobs from earlier. On the plus side, I'm looking forward to seeing Sausage eat Ratattack or whatever his name is.
Meanwhile I'm at page 370 of Gifts of Wandering Ice and my major gripe right now is the junk psychology. Mirror neurons, empaths, etc. But it's too late. I'm hooked on the story. I still think the character writing is not a strong point bit I'm attached anyway. Nothing for it but to see this through to the end and find out what happens to these dorks.
Anyway, on to new business.
So I don't think I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know when I say that Daughter of the Lilies exists, and it is good. But it hasn't been featured here yet, and it's just resumed updating as of November, so now seems like a good time.
For those who don't know, or who need a refresher,
Daughter of the Lilies is a fantasy comic written and drawn by Meg Syverud (credited as Meg Syv) and colored mostly by Yoko Weaver (with some help from other colorists and Meg herself from time to time). It centers on the adventures and occasional misadventures of "Thistle" (the latest in a long list of plant-based pseudonyms), a young woman who goes to great lengths to conceal her identity. Also she is a huge magic nerd and it is very important to me that you know this.
She joins a small team of adventurers-for-hire led by Orrig, an incredibly strong, kind, and proficient orc man vit some version of Russian accent. The team's muscle is the Brent, who bears both a crush on Thistle and a chip on his shoulder over the racist treatment his one-fourth orc heritage got him. The final member is the archer Lyra, a blonde, beautiful, brash, boorish elf whose personality is just about as far from Tolkien's Galadriel as it gets. It's your typical ragtag misfit found-family setup.
In Chapter One, the gang's current job is to clear a mine of man-eating monsters known as cave elves. One of them badly injures Brent's arm by, naturally, taking a bite out of it. Another fights Thistle and ends up ripping her mask off. Seeing Thistle's face is enough of a shock for the monster that he panics and runs straight for Lyra, who rewards him with a quick death. Most of the rest of Book One is a flashback revealing how Thistle ended up joining Orrig's crew, followed by the chapter where Thistle's true nature is finally revealed to the reader (but not to her teammates).
If you don't want spoilers, I recommend
heading straight for the first page, because the arc that's going on as I write this puts the big twist about Thistle's identity on full display. If you don't care about spoilers, read on:
Yeah, Thistle's a Cave Elf. She hides because of the way everyone thinks of Cave Elves as monsters.
So what we saw of cave elves in Chapter One was meant to get us going along with the rest of the team's and society's biases before slamming us in the face with the fact--which in hindsight should have been obvious--that a handful of cave-dwelling cannibals are not reflective of an entire race and do not justify thinking of sapient beings as subhuman monsters. There are very clear parallels between the way society thinks of cave elves and the way it used to think of Orcs, and a non-negligible percentage of folks still do.
Brent, who was traumatized by racist bullying, unknowingly hurts Thistle with his own racism. He calls the cave elves "pus-eating mange flies" and it's not clear whether he means specifically the ones that tried to kill him or just cave elves in general, or if he even cares about the distinction.
The story strikes a delightful balance between being a fun romp and dealing with some incredibly heavy stuff. Tone-wise, it's more or less in line with Phantomarine, a little more pulpy than Suihira and less so than Freelancers. It's a more overtly fantastic and magical world than The Sword Interval or Widdershins, to the point that (to Meg's chagrin) it has been mistaken for a Dungeons and Dragons fan comic. There are hints that it's post-post-apocalyptic, but thus far the story hasn't really leaned into that; you just see wreckage of present-day stuff on the periphery.
So how about those content warnings? Well, let's start with what the lady herself says on page 2:
CONTENT WARNING
Daughter of the Lilies is widely considered to have a PG-13 rating, as it contains depictions of gore, violence, emotionally distressing events, and implied swearing that some readers may find upsetting.
Reader discretion is advised.
In the mouseover text, she adds: "If this comic were released in the 80s, it would have gotten a PG rating, maybe."
Here's my take:
- You got your standard issue fantasy racism, including some that the story deliberately tempts the reader to accept at first. Normal racism hasn't shown up as far as I recall; Orcs are green but humans (and, I think, elves and dwarves) seem to come in the usual range of human ethnicities and I don't think thatt's commented on.
- Overall, the story is mercifully free of cheesecake. There is one major exception: The current arc starts with an over-the-top parody of a racist and misogynistic pulp fantasy about a voluptuous, chainmail-bikini-clad elf hero who fights evil orcs. It's meant to be absurd rather than titilating, but T'Fa'Ni still does a lot of breasting boobily.
- One of the major characters is consistently topless. [EDIT: Okay, not always, but frequently.] I mean, he's a dude, and he's not objectified, and he kind of has a dad bod? But also he is Very Muscles.
- There's mild gore. While it's handled as gracefully as possible, and most of it is off-panel, people do tend to bleed when they're stabbed, and we see a fair bit of the inside of Brent's arm as it heals. One character receives severe chemical burns that leave her scarred. I'm not sure if the opening content warning is overstating its case or if we just haven't seen the worst of it yet.
- There's also death. Mainly animal death, but also they very much killed those cave elves. The cover for one chapter is a rotting deer carcass. The deer shows up briefly as an illusory(?) zombie later. There's also a brief image of a dead lamb lying in a pool of blood.
- A plot-important minor character is tormented (literally and figuratively) by the way his homophobia drove his son to suicide.
- A plot-important major character is deeply traumatized by having been raised by a narcissistic, manipulative poopnozzle.
- Paperwork.
- Horror elements, including mild body horror, involving overtly demonic creatures.
How's the art? Good. Apparently it was a bit rough in the original version of the first chapter, but that had been redrawn long before I started reading. It's not as tight and realistic as The Sword Interval, but a bit more so than Phantomarine, and it's easily on par with both in terms of overall quality. But as a wise man once said, you don't have to take my word for it:
Non-spoiler images spoiler-tagged for space:
Non-non-spoiler images spoiler-tagged for spoilers:
One final note:
you can get the commentary pages as a pay-what-you-want download from Hivemill since they're no longer available on the comic's site. Meg goes over all of Chapter One and describes what she's learned from it, and then Yoko spends several pages talking about her coloring process. (I'm actually not 100% sure if Yoko's part is part of the download, though.)
Enjoy!
