Heavenly Bodies is a NaNoWriMo novel by troper APieceofToast, set in the land of Usa, with a road trip plot and a high focus on Family of Choice as its chapters switch between the third-person narration of its four oddball heroes. Kind of like A Song of Ice and Fire, if A Song of Ice and Fire eloped with Mad Max: Fury Road.
Usa is a deeply Christian and troubled land. They blame most of the troubles on the angels who keep falling out of the sky and onto the region.
In the city of Houston, the princess of Tejas has just been betrothed to a Luziannan duke. The betrothal is incredibly rushed because Princess Amelia is thirteen years old and cursed to fall into a coma when she has her menarche.
The day after the betrothal is announced, the duke is dead and Tejas's most prized artifact, the Tejan Lone Star, has been stolen by the Kingdom of Magic.
In the middle of this conflict are:
- Kite, a fallen angel of metalworking who lives in Luzianna, a kingdom with a strict angel deportation policy, via citizenship fraud.
- Isaak, the crown prince of Tejas via a convenient marriage, constantly trying to please his father and feeling the pressure of inheriting what could very well be a dying kingdom.
- Amelia, Isaak's stepsister, and the rightful heir to the Tejan throne if not for a curse that will put her in a coma if she ever sheds blood, which she inevitably will, leading her to drastic measures.
- And Hen, a humble bookkeeper from the cult city of the Magic Kingdom. Though he wasn't always this, and as the plot brings him further and further east, his Dark and Troubled Past threatens to catch up to him.
Together, they try to get a giant statue of a star back from the Magic Kingdom.
This book provides examples of:
- 11th-Hour Superpower: Isaak is just as impressive a healer as his father.
- Aerith and Bob: Due to linguistic drift and the tendency of Usans to take names off the rotting buildings of yore, this happens a lot. It's most obvious with the Scotts. Within this single family, we have Evelyn, Tiffany, Ander (short for Alexander), and Microsoft.
- Subverted with Hen, which is just an odd derivative of Henry. Double subverted for Kite, whose name is an alias... for Khadija, an even less likely name given her background.
- After-Action Patch-Up: The scene immediately after they tear out of Houston has Kite pulling into a monastery and getting her broken arm healed.
- After the End: Clearly, but the exact nature of the Fall is unspecified. The Usans state that the angels falling ended the world, but the angels themselves imply an apocalyptic nuclear exchange happened a long while before they started falling.
- All Hail the Great God Mickey!:
- Literally. Enough people holed up in Disneyworld to found the Magic Kingdom out of it which, indeed, venerates Mickey Mouse.
- Not much is seen of it, but the Patriot religion of Merica seems to worship the sheer concept of America.
- The exact details of the Church of Pita are blurry, but judging by the name they're a naturalistic religion derivative of PETA.
- Americasia: To a certain extent in Deseret, as Isaak mentions wearing kimono-derived clothing while living there.
- Apocalypse Anarchy: Not usually, but Deseret and Gilead are pretty chaotic.
- Deseret is in theory a Mormon theocracy, but in reality is more like a mess of fragmented factions that the Mormons think they have under control.
- Gilead is an assortment of city states that doesn't even put forth the notion that it's united, being split between two cultures with no central authority. The rest of Usa just counts it as one country because it's easier to keep track of that way.
- Apocalypse Not: The Kingdom of Magic is... pretty much just Disney World. The terrible labor conditions aside, it hasn't been hit nearly as hard as the rest of Usa.
- Hits even harder in the second book when it comes to light that most of the Earth has already re-developed back to 21st century standards. The destruction doesn't even cover the entirety of North America.
- Arc Symbol: The sun appears a lot to symbolize both Benjamin and Isaak. It's a hint to their true natures.
- Back from the Dead: Kite. Thanks, Isaak!
- Beneath the Mask: Isaak's description of Benjamin implies he has a friendly energy, but he's quickly established as being disrespectful and belittling of his son and stepdaughter. Still, one can think of this as him just being pushy and overbearing until Nolanet reveals that he beats Isaak and it only gets worse from there.
- Beware the Nice Ones: It's difficult to piss off Hen, but God help you if you do.
- Big Fancy Castle: The JPMorgan Castle is this. Titan Point is also featured, but noticeably averts this despite being the home of the Merican royal family - it's more of an Evil Tower of Ominousness.
- Late in the book, we also get the castle Isaak and Amelia live in, though "fancy" probably isn't the right word.
- Bound and Gagged: Kite when Benjamin captures the gang.
- Brick Joke: One of Amelia's early scenes involves Tiffany trying to get her interested in knitting. Later Amelia delivers a monologue about how to kill existential boredom, and Kite suggests...Kite: Have you tried knitting?
- Burn the Witch!: How Hen's sister died.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Joan of Arc totem. It's hollow, and inside there's an... object. All Kite can deduce is that it's probably an industrial pin of some type, and it's made of thunderbolt iron. It's the firing pin from the Duke's gun, which Amelia removed the night before the duel. If anyone important found it, her I Didn't Mean to Kill Him defense would've immediately fallen through.
- Chekhov's Skill: Amelia has a diverse array of hobbies, including puppetry. Guess what she ends up doing to the Duke's corpse?
- Crapsack World: The thirteen kingdoms in Usa range from the Magic Kingdom, which is essentially a massive capitalistic cult founded on the ruins of several Orlando theme parks to Southron, which is paranoid and anti-angel to the point of outlawing literacy, reading being one of the things that they believe led them astray.
- Death by Childbirth: Isaak says this happened to his mother, though Kite seems to think something else went down.
- Description Cut:“Now, let’s not panic,” Amelia said, peeking out of the thicket of trees the group was hiding in to watch the carriage speed away. “Kite has never let us down before—”The carriage exploded.“I… I may need to rewrite this rousing speech a bit,” Amelia said.
- Divided States of America: Whatever the Fall was, it shattered the US into a mess of kingdoms.
- Luzianna has control of Louisiana and an eastern chunk of Texas. Racial discrimination actually doesn't seem as bad as would be expected of a resurrected South. Angelic discrimination, not so much.
- Tejas is essentially just "Texas a bit to the left," having atrophied on its eastern side, but expanded into New Mexico. It's also Hispanic-majority, despite its royal family being seemingly of Indian descent.
- Merica almost resembles the original Thirteen Colonies, though they don't have Georgia. It still claims descent from the Federal government and uses this as a point of superiority}}.
- Southron is essentially a comeback for the Confederacy, though they mix and match elements of the Roman Empire and Nazi Germany, including the Hitler Youth. They also claim to have dialed back the racism, but judging by Hen's experiences, it didn't get any better, it just got more subtle.
- The Magic Kingdom is the southern half of Florida, though it's implied it was a lot bigger before the Southronians started invading. It's completely gone by the end of the book.
- Gilead is an unorganized area that occupies Ohio, the east half of Michigan, and everything else north of Merica and south of the Canadian border. If you, like most Gileadites, don't count the area as a single kingdom, the United States is divided even further into feuding city-states.
- Deseret essentially owns everything west of the Rockies, but isn't very good at pushing its Mormon theocracy on the diverse and eccentric populace.
- Chahta Yakni is mentioned in passing as a Choctaw kingdom north of Tejas.
- Double-Meaning Title: The title refers most obviously to the corpses of angels, but it also refers to planets in the solar system.
- Dry Crusader: Luzianna, though its anti-intoxicant laws are immediately established as ineffective when its heir to the throne turns up drunk in his first appearance.
- Dysfunction Junction: Kite has a Dark and Troubled Past that she won't talk about, Isaak suffers from the PTSD of Benjamin's influence, Amelia is The Sociopath and speculated to be suicidal, and Hen is depressed and struggling with guilt from being pulled into the Southronian legion as a teenager.
- Easily Forgiven: Subverted. Amelia is, but only because Isaak isn't.
- Emotional Powers: Kite's metalbending becomes more powerful when she's under emotional duress. Her anger can vibrate all metal within a certain range, and her death throes can crush a whole rocket.
- Evil Wears Black: Downplayed and subverted. Kite and Hen, who are mostly good people, wear darker colors, while the morally dubious Tejan royal family wears white.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Amelia starts the book with very long hair due to not being allowed near anything that could cut it. Kite cuts most of it off to glue it to the homunculus impersonating her, indicating her newfound freedom and ability to take risks.
- Fantastic Religious Weirdness: A central conceit of the story is how the Christian US reacted to apocalyptic nuclear war. Most present-day Usans conceive of it as some divine punishment - that angels fell from the sky shortly thereafter probably helps. The real origin of angels is obfuscated by a combination of this and language drift. It's difficult to talk about "outer space" without getting religion involved, because the only word they have for what exists above the sky is "heaven."
- Fantasy Gun Control: Downplayed. Guns exist, but are hard to get for reasons ranging from "the angels used guns in the Fall" to the more reasonable "they're just really expensive to make." Ergo, guns made by mortals are newer, but are only prototypes and owned exclusively by the rich. Guns made by angels are in way worse condition, but pack more firepower.
- Foreshadowing:
- Amelia is described as dropping her gun after shooting the Duke. She already knows that the Duke's gun is too sabotaged to fire.
- For comedic reasons, Kite goads Hen into slapping Isaak. Hen finally concedes and gives him a "little" slap, but somehow it knocks Isaak over. Isaak's used to overexaggerating how hurt he is to keep Benjamin from injuring him too badly.
- Fractured Fairy Tale: Each main character is based off a Fairy Tale or Classical Mythology.
- Kite is Icarus, being associated with falling, wings, and being at odds with a character represented by the sun.
- Isaak is Apollo, specifically the slaughter of Python and the outcome thereof.
- Amelia is Sleeping Beauty, though it's implied it would've ended up more like Sun, Moon, and Talia if she hadn't murdered the Duke.
- Hen is Hansel, though his Gretel equivalent ended up going in the metaphorical oven.
- Frame-Up: Jesus Christ, poor Isaak. The book ends before anyone amends this.
- Shout-Out:
- Amelia isn't her birth name - her name was changed after Tejas was converted to Christianity. Her birth name is Arjuna. As in, that Arjuna.
- There's a scene in which the characters start counting how many statues they see on the drive. Most of them are of men riding horses, but the men have inexplicably had their top halves removed, leaving just a pair of legs on a horse. In other words, Chloe Abbott's solution for Confederate monuments
was actually used. - According to Amelia, the nicer part of Tejas used to be an independent nation called Texarkana.
- The sequel includes several to Motel of the Mysteries at Hen's archival job, with a lot of focus placed on a certain undying (read: plastic) plant.
- Most of the religions are either real-world religions or based off real-life groups. Examples of the latter include the Indies and the Church of Pita.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Thirteen year old Princess Amelia, everyone. Blackmails three different people into fixing her Accidental Murder, attempts to throw herself into violent combat with wild abandon, and as it turns out, that murder wasn't accidental. One could argue it's a case of Children Forced to Kill, since Amelia was poised to be in an unpleasant Arranged Marriage, but we don't know how much of the plot was orchestrated by her. But in any case, she clearly didn't expect what happens to Isaak and ends the book livid with Benjamin.
