Comments on The Web of the World

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I think this is an amazing portrait of Vaire-as-spider, very striking both because of your empathy with her in her non-human form and in terms of your thoughts about the function of her weaving - that what she does is not merely to record. It is also an extremely interesting theory about the origin of Ungoliant and the nature of her fall.



Hello Himring - Thanks very much for your comments! I can't take full credit for "my thoughts" on what Vairë accomplishes, though. Without the Levinas angle, I probably couldn't have articulated that, so credit to his awesome early work for being so very, very apt for accessing Vairë.

I'm very pleased the spider-form idea worked for you - I'd thought of Ungoliant first as transforming into a spider, like a malevolent Arachne, but between that form's suitability for Vairë, too, and the idea that nothing is evil in the beginning (not even spiders...), I thought it might be interesting to make that the natural image of Vairë and her helpers.

Dwim

This is a really thought-provoking look at Vaire...and the rest of Valar, too, because of the implications here.

The Valar are interesting, because they're just so different from humans, and I think that makes it hard to get inside their heads. You've done a wonderful job of it, though! The idea of Vaire as a spider is really fitting.

You had a lot of really great lines in here:

"To love what is in its having been more than feathery may bes is hard."

and

"She had looked then – the one free act of Lady Fate within Time..."

That second one especially implies a lot about the Valar and how and why they make decisions. I like how Vaire's choosing not to look isn't a lack of ability, but a decision based on the inevitable consequences of doing so. That sounds like such a frustrating way to live, to have the power to do something and yet know that you mustn't use it...

Anyway, I thought this was really interesting!