In a 2-part discussion (Part 1 is here), Kate Nagy and Rachel Hyland talk their differing levels of interest in J.R. Ward's forthcoming Black Dagger Brotherhood novel, Lover at Last, which will focus on the relationship between Qhuinn and Blaylock (Qhuay).
Look, I get it. I get why my esteemed colleague Kate Nagy has some reservations–to put it mildly–about the imminent J. R. Ward manlove-fest that will be Lover at Last. Every time (and, oh, there have been times, trust me) that she refers to the couple as “Blah” and “Qwhine,” or calls Blaylock an “emo ghey nightwalker,” I can’t help but chuckle, because that’s really very clever and she’s not entirely wrong.
Unlike Kate, however, I like that about them. Where Kate sees annoyingly asinine reasons having kept the youngsters apart lo, these many books so far, I see a deeper truth, extending far beyond Qhuinn and Blay and the BDB, and even beyond the romance genre as a whole: the difficulty of accepting who you are, of being someone you never thought you’d be, because all you want is to be “normal.”
Take this passage, from 2010’s Lover Mine:
Just as Blay was who he was, Qhuinn was the same: Even though he wished he could be out and with the... male...he loved, he couldn’t make himself go there.
But by God, he was going to stop running from his cowardice. He had to own his shit—even if it made him hate himself to the core. Because maybe if he did, he’d stop trying to distract himself with sex and drinking, and figure out what he did want.
Apart from Blay, that was.
Say what you will about 2008’s Lover Enshrined–-no, really, please, I invite you to unburden yourself fully about Phury and Cormia’s deathly-dull tale–-but at least it gave us the fabled Chapter Forty-Two, to which Qhuay adherents often point as the one that started it all. (And 42 is, according to humorist Douglas Adams, the meaning of life. Coincidence?). Oh, sure, both boys had thought about each other that way before this, with Blay especially focused on such minutia as Qhuinn’s lips, hands and other assorted body parts, but here was The Kiss, the one that Blay asked for so that he would know what it felt like “just once,” and where Qhuinn, still resistant to the idea of a male as his life partner, told his best friend savagely in the Old Language:
“If there are any who dare to hurt you, I shall see them staked afore me and shall leave their bodies in ruin."
In the world of the BDB, surely that’s as close as a declaration to love as anything more mundane; even Qhuinn’s impulsively-spoken, much-later “I love you”—which Blay misinterpreted as being aimed platonically at John Matthew; oh, the heartache!—didn’t carry the weight of this portent. That being, the eminently exhilarating foreshadowing suggesting that rather than go all Butch/Vishous on us with this and make of these Friends Not Lovers, we could instead actually find ourselves here with a full-on M/M love story, out and proud and mainstream. (If one considers PNR mainstream—which this one, for one, does.)
I join Kate in applauding this forthcoming novel’s cultural significance, the way that it brings to the fore a complicated homosexual relationship where in the past there have only been the ultra-Alphas of the Black Dagger Brotherhood and their often subsumed shellans. (Plus, y’know, Payne.) Reportedly, Qhuinn and Blay’s romance was originally intended to be offered up in novella form: Ward herself is said to have told a packed crowd at a Q&A last year, for example, that her publishers would allow the pair their chance at an HEA, but it would be in a truncated format and outside the canon of the wider universe; it has even been suggested that she intended to entitle the release Blay and Qhuinn, so that those who might not want to read “that kind” of story would know what they were getting into. But then in April this year, J. R. Ward’s Facebook status turned it all around. “THEIR TIME HAS COME. 2013—NEXT BDB HARDCOVER…..BLAY AND QHUINN!!!!”
Evidently, Ward’s publishers had seen the (rainbow) light. The clamoring for a Qhuay book integral to the series as a whole was just too strong to be ignored. And for all that Kate and the couple’s other detractors—whether they object to them merely as boring, or on more Biblical grounds—don’t understand what we so adore about this development, all it takes is a quick tour back through the evolution of their bond (an evolution so rare in Ward’s world of heavy-handed fate, Love at First Bite, three-day whirlwind, danger-filled courtships) to perhaps gain a glimpse as to their fascination:
Blay on Qhuinn:
God...this was who he loved, he thought. And always would. It was the thrust of that stubborn jaw, and the dark, slashing eyebrows, and those piercings up his ear and in his full lower lip. It was that thick, glossy black hair and the golden skin and that heavily muscled body. It was the way he laughed and the fact that he never, ever cried. It was the scars on his inside no one knew about and the conviction that he would always be the first to run into a burning building or a bloody fight or a car wreck. It was all the things Qhuinn had been and was ever going to be.
Qhuinn on Blay:
As Qhuinn looked at his best friend’s handsome face, he felt as if he’d never not known that red hair, those blue eyes, those lips, that jaw. And it was because of their long history that he searched for something to say, something that would get them back to where they had been. All that came to him was . . . I miss you. I miss you so fucking bad it hurts, but I don’t know how to find you even though you’re right in front of me.
And Qhuinn’s jealousy over Blay’s dalliance with Saxton is always a good time. He thinks nastily of this rival as his “…slut of a cousin, his cocksucking, suit-wearing, Montblanc-up-the-ass cousin Saxton the Magnificent,” or as “Saxton the Classy Slut,” and grouses because dude looks like a “Ralph Lauren ad” and is clearly keeping Blay well satisfied. Oh, no, he’s not bitter. Not at all.
In last year’s big BDB release, Lover Reborn, we were presented with a teaser of what is to, er, come, re: Qhuinn and Blay. Taking a sample at random:
Abruptly, Blay’s blue stare found his.
And what Qhuinn saw in it caused him to falter: Love shone out of that face, unadulterated love untempered by the shyness that was very much part of his reserve.
Blay didn’t look away.
And for the first time...neither did Qhuinn.
He didn’t know whether the emotion was for his cousin—it probably was—but he’d take it.
He stared right back at Blaylock and let everything he had in his heart show in his face.
He just let that shit fly.
Because there was a lesson in this Fade ceremony tonight: You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye—and he was willing to bet when it happened, you weren’t thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart.
You thought of all the reasons that kept you together.
Oh, poor Qhuinn! The silent pining, the exquisite torment (or exqhuisite tohrment, in Ward-speak) of knowing that another lays in his rightful place, a place he could have claimed for himself if only he had the courage! So. Much. Angst. How can you not love it? And then, whoa: he finds that courage, deciding he is finally over his hang-ups and is ready to make a “future” with his soulmate, matching genitalia be damned.
I can see where some might therefore think that the remainder of this story will play out nice and easy, with Blay pathetically grateful that the Great and Glorious Qhuinn finally deigns to look his way. But where Kate, and no doubt others, see only his-and-his personalized license plates, a tasteful china pattern and the occasional Pride Parade ahead for this tortured twosome (perhaps somewhere around Chapter 4), I, and many, many others anticipate a fun, delightfully frustrating back-and-forth, as Blay becomes slowly convinced of Qhuinn’s change of heart; as he learns to forgive all the rejection and hurt, as he struggles between his bone-deep need for his friend and his genuine affection for stand-in boyfriend Saxton; and as he comes to terms with Qhuinn’s imminent fatherhood, along with the inevitable jealousy over Layla that such a situation can’t help but create.
Meanwhile, our guys also have to find a way to get their somewhat unorthodox love sanctioned by various interested parties–which they might perceive as problematic, especially if one or both of them should at last be admitted into the ranks of the Brotherhood–and also they will have to figure out if it’s even possible for them to be truly mated, because if so how are they then going to feed each other, as is custom? (Can the Scribe Virgin maybe make that happen? And if so, will she?)
No obstacles? A five minute conversation? No. Oh, hell no. Instead, a hundred thousand-plus words of beautiful boys at long last coming to grips with who they are, and who they love—and to the Omega with “normal.”
I, for one, can’t wait.
Rachel Hyland is Editor in Chief of Geek Speak Magazine.
