GUEST POST BY K.X. SONG

Growing up in the early 2000s, I was raised in the era of love triangles. There was Twilight and The Hunger Games, and even Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Looking back, what I found compelling about these romantic entanglements was the idea that the love you feel for different people reveals not only something about the other person but also something about yourself. In this way, love triangles have the potential to illuminate different facets of yourself, and the person you choose speaks to the facet you wish to hold to the light.

The Twilight Love Triangle

What do I mean by this? To use a classic example, in Twilight, Bella’s love for Edward is grounded in the thrill of the forbidden. Edward is everything Bella shouldn’t want and can’t have. He is “bad” for her, dangerous, and full of unknown yet mysterious possibilities. Bella’s continued interest in him points to her thrill of the chase and her inner desire for defiance and unpredictability.

Meanwhile, Jacob, Bella’s secondary love interest, is the exact antithesis of Edward. Jacob is her childhood best friend and someone she has known for a very long time; he is safe, warm, comforting, consistent, trustworthy, and predictable. He is someone who will not change in his affections for her, someone she can depend on, and someone with whom she can easily imagine a life with. Bella’s love for Jacob points to her inner desire for consistency, peace, comfort, and a feeling of home. While these characteristics in Bella may sound paradoxical to the ones described above, both can exist simultaneously. How then do we sort out who we are as people? How can we possibly figure out what we want?

An External Framework

Love triangles, thus, give us an external framework and stimulus to figure out our priorities, goals, and wants. In choosing Edward, Bella decides she wants a life of risk and adventure over a familiar one of safety and comfort. Similarly, in The Hunger Games, Katniss chooses Peeta, who deeply understands her trauma from the Hunger Games, over Gale, whose goals and values no longer align with hers after the formative experiences she went through over the course of the series. In this manner, her choice of a partner reflects how she views herself and which shared experiences she deems more important in shaping who she is today.

In my debut fantasy novel, THE NIGHT ENDS WITH FIRE, my protagonist is a character at war with herself. Raised in a restrictive society that treats women as secondary to men, Meilin has long seen her relentless ambition as a sign of her own depravity. And yet, the more she suppresses this desire for power, the more it manifests in inexorable ways. Meilin’s labyrinthine journey and her consequent romantic entanglements speak to this conflicted nature—of a heart at odds with itself. She is at once someone who craves safety, security, and order, and someone who longs for risk, adventure, and rebellion. A young woman who fears what she can do but also yearns to uncover her true potential. In Meilin’s own love triangle, while one prince offers compassion, safety, and a love that is unwavering and pure, another prince offers a life outside the boundaries of her imagination, and darkness in him that she finds mirrors her own.

As Meilin undergoes her external quest to save the Three Kingdoms, she must also address her core internal dilemmas: as a woman living in a deeply misogynistic and restrictive society, will she prioritize safety and order–as is conventional–or chaos and mystery? Will she strive for contentment in a life that is already more privileged than she thought possible, or will she risk it all for a fate that could be much better–or much worse?

Dualities and Conflicting Desires

Order and chaos, safety and danger—how can dualities like these exist in us? How can we face our own conflicting desires and find agency in a world that glorifies certain behavior in some but vilifies the same behavior in others? What does it mean to suppress your true desire, and yet, what does it mean to feed the beast? These are questions that inspired THE NIGHT ENDS WITH FIRE, and these are questions that Meilin herself considers in her perilous quest for power and freedom. I hope you will enjoy this story of dualities: of magic and madness, love and hate, betrayal and redemption, and of power and its inevitable cost.

 

The Night Ends With Fire by K. X. Song

The Three Kingdoms are in a raging war with deadly battles on every boarder. Meilin is facing battles within herself and grapples with her ambition to be great against the conformity of her life, in a society that thinks women can be bought and cold, just like her father plans to do. To escape her own personal prison of being a wife to and dangerous man, Meilin runs away joins the army disguised as a man. While here, she realizes just how powerful a warrior she is, but still struggles to understand her true self, the life she wants to lead, and which person she wants to be with.

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