Fridge / Heralds of Valdemar

Fridge Brilliance

• Why does Firesong become obsessed with a lifebond when the Mage Storms and their effect on the land are driving him insane? One of the other books reveal that lifebonds usually/often form when someone extremely powerful is in danger of going insane: the lifebond anchors them. As a Healing-Adept, it's probable that he subconsciously knew what was happening to him and what he needed - it's not made clear whether lifebonds are divine intervention, something the more powerful person does subconsciously, or both.
  • How much of Darkwind and Elspeth's questionable behaviour in that trilogy is them being influenced to mental instability by the Mage Storms themselves, albeit on a much lesser level than Firesong??? (i.e. fixation rather than obsession)
• In By The Sword it's revealed that Valdemar has forgotten the Binding Ancient Treaty between it and Rethwellen. Sounds strange, and then one remembers that Selenay was a teenager when she became queen and her father died in the prime of his life. Even if her grandfather was part of how the treaty was formed, between her sudden ascension to the throne and all the other things that happened along the way, a treaty like that being forgotten is very justified! Additionally, while the agreement itself was non-magical, the circumstances that led to it directly involved a mage (Kethry) and magic, so the Valdemaran compulsion against magic was likely also working against people's memory of the whole business and the treaty that resulted from it. Not to mention, on the Rethwellan side it involves a member of their Royal family being an utter psychopath, to the point of another member had to orchestrate a coup on the crowned king! That's the sort of thing that tends to be hushed up.
• Also in By The Sword Kero gets stampeded into a near hopeless position toward the end of the book by Hardorn's forces because she is a skilled tactician and officer. She knows in her gut that no infantry force that size could maintain the forced marches needed to harry light cavalry such as the Skybolts for any length of time without either mutinying outright or coming apart at the seams from casualty-induced morale failure, and even those commanders having no moral issue with using magic to avoid those problems normally have enough sense to avoid being so spendthrift with manpower or mystic energy. Too bad King Ancar lacked both morals and sense, making things a large scale version of the frequently cited dangers of fighting someone who has no idea what they are doing.
• Why is Selenay so very incensed at the murder of Kris (even above him being a Herald and one of her people), and grief-stricken at his death, even naming one of her twins after him? Because he's also one of her few remaining blood relatives - he was close enough in descent that he was the front runner for replacement Heir if Elspeth didn't get Chosen.
• More on this on the WMG page, but given that Elspeth spent two of her most formative years in childhood being groomed and manipulated by a foreign spy, and the rest of her childhood and half her adolescence being manipulated and betrayed by a man who'd been considered near-family for three generations, it's no wonder that her extreme aversion and reaction to any kind of manipulation as an adult borders on Fatal Flaw and Idiot Ball. Especially since no one around her growing up seems aware of how childhood trauma can affect a person throughout their lives and took steps to fix it.
• Kordas passing his children off as Hakkon's bastards until the escape plan happens is actually hitting two birds with one stone. In addition of taking noble children hostage under the cover of educating them, the Empire is mentioned to be quite heteronormative. Hakkon is gay (at least according to his on-page love life), so being the official biological father of children who are not supposed to be Kordas', yet need a good excuse to live under his roof all while looking somewhat like him, makes for the perfect "alibi" if anyone asks. And any environment in which Kordas can finally openly be his children's father would ideally also be one in which Hakkon no longer needs to worry about needing that specific kind of "alibi."

Fridge Horror

• When reading the Fridge Brilliance entry above about Firesong, and his lifebond obsession. Now think about Lavan Firestorm, who turned out to be lifebonded to his own Companion (meaning they both had Single-Target Sexuality). When Lavan lost her, he went utterly insane, and turned himself into the equivalent of a low-grade nuclear weapon. Given that example, and how powerful Firesong is (and let's not forget what his ancestor Vanyel, managed while sane and lived to tell the tale) if Firesong hadn't gotten the help he so desperately needed, without a lifebond... what could Firesong have done in his self-destruction?
  • Similar to the above, on a lesser level — suppose someone of the right temperament were around and Firesong's need for stability forced them together. Once the immediate crisis passed, they would be stuck with each other, quite possibly not even in love (one character notes that it's usually love that cements the bond), an obstacle to Firesong's natural romance with Silverfox, and afraid to break the bond for fear of the consequences listed above.
• Vanyel's solution to finding himself as the last of the Herald-Mages involves the Web-spell that causes vrondi to follow non-Herald mages around until the sense of Being Watched gets to them and they go mad or leave the country. He later tasks Stefan with spending his life trying to convince the population that non-mage Heralds, with their Psychic Powers, are just as good as Herald-Mages, but Stefan can't manage it - magic is just more versatile and Vanyel in particular was so powerful and prominent that he's still remembered with awe decades after his death. So Vanyel works a Brainwashing for the Greater Good spell that makes Valdemarans unable to think about magic as anything but a long lost thing. These are treated as a good thing and to be sure, being watched by vrondi keeps mages from working inside the borders for long! But there could have been new Herald-Mages almost immediately after Leareth died and stopped killing them - they could even have been Tayledras-trained, given that Vanyel trusts the Hawkbrothers.
  • In By the Sword, magic is such an Outside-Context Problem that Valdemarans, able to consider magic and mages as real only while under attack by Hardorn, have no idea how to handle them. Winds of Fate proves that pretty much as soon as Hardorn eased up, Valdemarans forgot again and it takes real effort for them to think about magic without dismissing it. This is a serious weakness that means for the hundreds of years those spells were active, every hostile mage was a new, horrifying discovery that they couldn't properly learn from and strategize against.
  • There's also the question of what happened to everyone manifesting the Mage-Gift within the borders of Valdemar. Some become Heralds who have their Gifts misdiagnosed and trained as Mind-Gifts, like Elspeth, but this is a setting with a tendency towards Traumatic Superpower Awakening and resultant Power Incontinence that only training can resolve - Tylendel and Vanyel's Mage-Gifts both burst out in a severe way with great strength and they needed specialized attention from people who understood what was happening. The short story Weight of a Hundred Eyes in the anthology Choices features Paxia, an unwitting mage who keeps tapping powers she and those around her can't properly think about to address disasters in her community. She experiences the watching vrondi as an intense and painful feeling that is worse around Companions, which stop and stare at her. Eventually one gets a Herald to escort Paxia out of the country. Free of the vrondi and able to think clearly, Paxia feels like she's been tortured for years and has now been exiled from her home for something that was never her fault, and furiously considers how many others are like her.
• There isn't a unified system for keeping track of the date in Velgarth, so trying to place anything historically is a bit tricky; on Kickstarter Mercedes Lackey said whenever she's wanted to start over and write something in Valdemar without involving an established cast of characters, she sets it in some era she hasn't done much with. Part of that Kickstarter entailed fans trying to piece together a unified timeline.
  • The Fridge Horror is that the short story Out of the Deep has been placed somewhere in the fifty years between Last Herald Mage and The Collegium Chronicles. In Out of the Deep Valdemar is ruled by King Chalinel, who's had twelve children including Crown Prince Tanivel, noted to be Elspeth the Peacemaker's great-great-grandson. The Collegium Chronicles (which were published at around the same time) have King Kiril and no word of a huge family. Put all together, and neither Jisa and Treven nor their presumed son Chalinel had long lives or a long rule - it's noted as unusual that Kiril got to retire, suggesting that they didn't get to do so - and something happened to many of those eleven siblings, including Tanivel.
• How does Nyara, raised in Mornelithe Falconsbane's compound as something less than a human being, know enough about children and childcare to get as specific as she does when she goes on a mild Child Hater rant, especially talking about babies that cry through the night and can't be comforted and keep getting sick? The value of human life in that compound is very low and Nyara had siblings that Falconsbane killed - it cannot have ended well.
• There's a shifty aspect to Companions that is rich fodder for Ron the Death Eater speculation - when they Choose a Herald-to-be, the new Chosen is so utterly struck by the experience of being seen and loved by their Companion that even though several of them don't want to be Heralds at first, the prospect of losing their Companion is repellent and they soon agree. Kero and Skif come around instantly as soon as Sayvil and Cymry respectively ask if their new Chosen really wants to leave them. Alberich digs his heels in harder, because as a Karsite captain becoming a Herald of Valdemar sounds terrible, but his new bond with Kantor is too great to put aside and he doesn't want to hurt them both by severing it. Becoming a Herald means putting aside most previous concerns and making major personal sacrifices, often including a final one, and taking on motivations that seem alien to non-Heralds. Tylendel could not make Vanyel understand why he was so driven to devote himself to others; years later, Vanyel understood this all too well but couldn't explain it to Stefan. A Companion's love is genuine and they usually are right there with their Heralds though, backing them up in danger and assuming the same risk, shoulder-to-shoulder with them in any given long and grueling struggle.
  "Something enfolded him, wrapped and cradled him in an emotion he almost didn't recognize. And when he realized what it was he wept, and as he wept he returned it with all his heart and wrapped the giver in the gift. They trembled together there, in an embrace so close that there was no room for thought." (Brightly Burning, Kalira Choosing Lan)
  • However, when it comes to the Sword that Sings, there doesn't seem to be any ethical standard at work at all. In the short story Trust Your Instincts, the Sword shares a sense of warmth with Fayne, who'd used it to indicate the current Queen of Rethwellen. A year later Fayne still remembers this warmth. Even thinking about it for a moment gives him a "shudder of comfort", and he becomes obsessed with it and longs to hold it again as the sword exerts influence on him.
    The more he tried to ignore it, the more his brain actively sought the memory of the warmth from the sword to calm his spirit. [...]
    That thought continued growing over the rest of the day, until Fayne found himself tossing in his bed and sweating, unable to find anything even close to resembling sleep. He tried meditation, but the Sword That Sings invaded his thoughts even there, becoming a compulsion and a need. He knew he had to feel its warmth once again. [...]
    The moment Fayne saw the blade, it captured his entire focus. Nothing else seemed to matter. He moved forward as if in a trance, bare feet shuffling against the stones, his hand reaching out even before the blade was within reach. Before long, he stood next to the dais with his hand hovering over the hilt, shaking with the anticipation of gripping the magical sword. Fayne closed his eyes tight and curled his fingers together around the hilt, anticipating the welcome, calming warmth.
    • It then convinces him through torturous visions to steal it and head, unprepared, into the mountains in winter. He has a friend for part of the way who's critical of it and his willingness to follow it and isn't as convinced as Fayne that it's benevolent. The story ends with Fayne realizing that the Sword did in fact intend for him to die of exposure in order to leave it in a mountain pass - and not minding as he freezes to death, because it sings to him and makes him feel good. Maybe it has an Omniscient Morality License, maybe not, but it's unsettling to think of Psychic Powers being used in such a way as to make someone happily go to his death when in this case there certainly would have been a way to get the sword lost and found again without it.