Manipulative Love

This week on What the Smut we are talking all about manipulative lovers and other amazing historical characters in A Year and a Day (Medieval DeWarenne Trilogy Book 1) by Virginia Henley. The book is set in medieval Scotland during the First War of Scottish Independence. In the first half of the episode, we are talking about the historical figures in the book including Edward Longshanks, John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey, and Robert The Bruce. We were lucky to have our guest and historical book reader Amanda come to the rescue. As bad as we are at math it has NOTHING on medieval English/Scottish history. In the second half of the ep, we got to chat about the non-historical characters. You really can't lose with these characters! A racist granny, a dick-faced bad guy, a sweet cunning lady, and a normative and normative manly type man. Join in and see if you can count how many times Kandy says colonialism...

Our manly man main character thinks quite poorly of women. He sees them as manipulative beasts so we spent quite a lot of time talking about manipulation. I think we answered the question of what makes manipulative lovers and then some. A manipulation is just a tool and pretty much everyone uses it. We even managed to bring perspective, intent, and ethics into the thing. Hey, as long as it's not math or history...