Cathy Malkasian specializes in long, fabulistic comics stories, set in quirky, unrealistic worlds, full of Improving Lessons and buffoonish, obvious villains. She also has a weird aversion to writing about adults, people in the middle of their lives: her protagonists often skip from young to old, and that's very obvious here.
The Heavy Bright was her 2023 book; like all the Malkasian books I've seen, it's not quite a formal allegory but tends in that direction. In the Glorious Before Times, all people lived in peace and harmony and talked with their dead relatives so much that they hadn't even invented writing. (Everyone also, apparently, had perfect memories and the dead are explicitly said to be unable to lie, because we're doing the fuzzy origin myth thing.)
But then a bunch of glowing eggs fell from the sky, amplifying everyone's emotions, but then turned black and fell to the ground, which brought evil into the world. Malkasian never gives a reason or source or point to this: it's a thing that happened, and it ruined the world. Presumably, other equally bad things could also happen at any time - maybe next time there's a rain of tetrahedrons that make everyone greedy.
A group of people who come to be called the Commanders witnessed this, and grabbed the eggs, which allowed them to wipe out entire villages with the power of aggression and anger - the mechanism isn't the same as in Temperance, but it's a very similar thing. These men - they're all men, and I'll get into the sexual politics later - use their power to foment chaos and death to gather political power, which goes on through an unknown number of generations.
We get this story from the dead Commanders, who lose their gender - this is a big deal for Malkasian in this book; there's a lot of talk about "groins" not being important at the same time her main character is explicitly a lesbian in a world hostile to them - after they die, and also, maybe, come to see that the system they devoted their lives to is horrible and evil. There's one woman in this afterlife - Old Bird, who discovered the first egg, way back when, and is on the one hand the keeper of all of the things the Commanders forgot or destroyed and on the other hand the main driver of the plot. Old Bird has realized that the "heavy" black eggs can be converted back into "bright" glowing ones by being whacked with objects with emotionally resonant memories tied to one's ancestors (or something like that), and she recruits a living human to do this.
Arna is the main character, though we don't meet her until after a long introductory Old Bird section. She's the tween daughter of an itinerant puppeteer; they travel around, tell stories to get some coin, and move on. She's not exactly pretending to be a boy now, but as she grows up she's going to have to - girls are commodities in this world, sold cheaply. But then they next place they come to has a Commander lurking about, which means random pointless violence and death. Arna survives; her father does not. And, almost randomly, she finds an egg and tries to eat it with a spoon she keeps on a chain around her neck, an old thing with a long history. This transforms the egg back to brightness - it doesn't seem as if anything can subsequently change it back to dark again, for no stated reason - and also seems to make it go away, out of the world or at least the narrative.
Old Bird has a long conversation with Arna in the afterlife, saying it's now Arna's mission to transform all 100 eggs - whack them all with her spoon, which each time makes her fly into the air briefly and kills the Commander associated with that egg.
Arna sets off to do this, and soon meets another young woman she falls in love with, Sela. Old Bird tells her not to reveal any secrets to Sela, but Arna wants to include her. Now I need to get back into the very particular sexual politics - and the way that Malkasian very deliberately excludes adults from this book.
Arna and Sela are on the verge of adulthood - Arna "buds" (has her first menstruation) when she meets Sela; that hasn't happened to Sela yet. As often with women in oppressive male-dominated societies, Sela dreams of never "budding," of staying just as she is. We don't see men that are young and strong - no obvious warrior types. The Commanders are older, and the trading of women is explicitly by "old men" - both in this section and later in the book. Women in their fertile years are talked about, but don't really enter the narrative.
To be blunt, Heavy Bright is a book about controlling women's fertility that fanatically avoids showing any women in their fertile years, and also has a mania in its afterlife scenes (and elsewhere) about insisting that "groins" - the difference between sexes - are utterly unimportant. It comes across almost as if there's something icky about sexuality - maybe just heterosexuality - and that everyone would be better off either as pre-sexual children or post-sexual menopausal women.
Anyway, what happens is that Sela "buds," which sweeps her up into the sky with a gigantic clamor and Close Encounters-esque light. This ends a section; the action shifts to several decades later.
Arna is now menopausal - again, we don't see her as an adult in the book. First she's a child, and then has her first period just a short time before the end of that section. Then we return to her after her menses have ended, thirty or so years later. Again, for a book about controlling women's sexuality, the women who are actually controlled are never present in their own story - our heroines are all children or post-fertile women.
Anyway, Arna is now chasing the last few eggs. Society has changed somewhat, though it's still lousy and sexist. All women now disappear, like Sela did, at their first period. Girl children are sold like animals, I suppose because everyone knows they'll disappear before long. Violence is much less common - in this world, the eggs initiate violence, and it might not be possible without them. But there's a sexist philosophy that's popular among men, and adult women divided into fertile (good "vessels") and infertile (bad). Although, after thirty years with no young women, I find it hard to believe there's been much fertility recently.
Arna does destroy the last eggs, after some more quirky scenes, and the world is then perfect and special - people can laugh (apparently they couldn't before? Malkasian didn't mention that earlier in the book) and talk with their ancestors again, and Arna is reunited with Sela and her dead father.
Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon. It has goofy, broadly-drawn characters, as might be expected from a creator who spent decades making children's animation. Its allegory is at least muddied, but it has its heart in the right place, more or less. (Though it does seem to have an bone-deep aversion to sex and sexuality that is also somewhat congruent with children's animation.) And Malkasian's pages are lovely and organic, with her usual soft watercolors.
I can't tell you it means anything coherent, but even a vague message of "be nice to other people" and "women are also people" and "remember your past" and "violence is bad" is worth hearing.
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