Dragon Fire Turtle*

Dragon fire turtle*

What I’ve Been Reading Lately: Cradle

Fundamentally, every work of art, every story, is an attempt at communication. The author chooses to ask us a question, and we find the answer in the dialogue between the author and ourselves.

Cradle is a series that asks the question “If one dude did magic kung-fu to another dude so hard he exploded, would that be sick or what?”

And we, the readers, answer “Absolutely the FUCK yes.”

Cradle is a world where everybody has the capacity to practice the Sacred Arts, which are primarily the discipline of using mystical energy to be as bullshit awesome as possible. You aren’t allowed to be a major character in this series until you have committed at least one (1) act that would look sweet as hell if it was airbrushed onto the side of a stoner’s van. 

At one point we meet a member of a king’s landscaping staff. Her job is to mow the lawn, trim the hedges, and keep those damn slugs out of the vegetable garden. She can also command trees to rip you apart and devour your life force for herself, because fuck you, it’s Cradle. People just do that here. 

The main character is a young man by the name of Wei Shi Lindon, who has a natural deficiency that makes him extremely weak in the Sacred Arts, and is therefore banned from studying them. He responds “respectfully, no” and proceeds to spend the following ten books learning Sacred Arts and punching everything. 

It’s a little rough around the edges, but I had fun reading it and the author clearly had fun writing it, so I think it succeeds as a series. Would absolutely recommend if you just want to have a good time reading something. 

(Naturally, I got deeply attached to the biggest bastard in the main cast, because he’s hilarious. This man is a bitch and I like him so much.) 

As a delightful bonus, unlike most action series, the treatment of the female characters is genuinely excellent. The author is not here for fanservice, he is here for FIGHTSERVICE, which is when EVERYONE FIGHTS SO HARD THE LAWS OF PHYSICS GIVE UP. We’re ten books in to a twelve book series and I have yet to see a single woman’s boobs described on-page. 

In Cradle, when a teenage girl is worried about her body changing, what she means is that she’s unsatisfied with the amount of swords she can use at one time, so she’s going to grow six extra arms to hold six extra swords. Surprise! THE NEW ARMS ARE ALSO SWORDS, because the time spent picking up a sword to fight with it is time you didn’t spend swordfighting, and that is unacceptable to her. Now she and her eight swords are going to suplex a dragon, because on Cradle we know no gender politics, only THE BLADE.

Also, there’s a turtle.