The Land Across Expedition - Chapter 1 comments
Added 2021-06-27 23:25:25 +0000 UTCComments
I will be incredibly surprised if it could map to a real place. Bulgaria borders Turkey, but they aren’t at war with Turkey, but “The Turks”
2021-06-29 19:27:04 +0000 UTCI’ve thought about the Transylvania connections before, but hadn’t actually tried to map the country in TLA to a real geographic place. I say and looked at a map and it’s pretty hard to see anything besides the Transylvanian plateau is quite literally “the land across the mountains”. So clearly there’s some hidden world or alternate dimension or dreamland or whatever in the same place as the Transylvanian plateau. Now I hadn’t really thought about the Greek angle at all. I’ve recently been really interested in the Bactrian Empire and kinda hoped there might be a connection there, but the above article shows that there is an interesting history of Greek culture in Romania. There’s a bit of a minor mercantile angle/subplot/backstory that will come into play later in the book - as others have said, I don’t think it’s really possible to have spoilers in this book. I really like TLA on the surface level read - in a way it’s an adventure romp a la Pirate Freedom - but now you’ve got me returning to the book with more of a critical third eye. It’s clear that there’s a lot of potential good/evil/light/dark symbolism, and it’s clear that the narrator might be more than he lets on, but I hadn’t really given a hard though to the anachronistic language and now I’m really stuck on that. Almost like an inverted Ern Smithe - he seems to speak normally but his inner monologue is a hundred years out of fashion.
snorlax
2021-06-29 19:07:48 +0000 UTC
