#I literally think nobody has ever told them that current portrayal did not fix the issue

[the-final-sif]

So! Some good news regarding the tribal mob mod situation on the QSMP!

I got in contact with the mod's creator and against my expectations, they were actually very open to hearing feedback and didn't realize that people still saw their mobs as native stereotypes. They were upset and remorseful that the mobs were being refereed to as natives, as that wasn't their intention. Apparently, the original idea was a specific creature from Zulu mythology, that they then attempted to expand out into it's own thing without realizing how it looked to someone not approaching it from that context.

Once I explained to them what the issue was and how it was coming across to people, they saw the problem and realized that they didn't want people to think that about the their mod pack nor did they want to hurt people by invoking racist stereotypes.

We talked for awhile about the problem and various ways to fix it, and they actually really do seem to care about the problem and want to do better. They're going to work with their team to redo the mob design/mechanisms to fix the situation and will get better feedback and work to avoid doing anything like this in the future. I'm actually pretty impressed by how open they were to feedback and how willing they were to want to do better once they were told that people were being hurt by the portrayal in their mod.

Time will tell exactly what will happen there, but for now, they are aware of the issue, they're sorry, and they're going to work on fixing it. So there's that to be hopeful about.

[infinite-xerath]

Runeterra Retcons 4: Varus

Unlike the other Champions I’ve covered, Varus’s history is surprisingly straightforward. He was released all the way back in 2012 and, as far as I can recall, was the first Champion to ever receive any sort of major promotional material in the form of a short comic. He’s very straight-forward in both concept and design: a man willing to sell his soul, his very humanity, for revenge on the people who took everything from him. Given that this was before Kalista was added to the game, Varus had little choice but take matters into his own hands by bargaining with a vaguely-defined Eldritch being who would give him the power he needed in exchanged for taking over his body.

Original lore here

Varus’s lore is a very traditional revenge story, albeit with a slightly interesting twist in that he is the maker of his own tragedy. Varus opted to place his duty over the well-being of family and, in the process, was unable to even TRY to protect them while his village was being reduced to burning rubble. Out of grief and rage Varus turned to bargaining with the very entity he fought so hard to keep confined now that he no longer has anything to lose.

I and many others liked Varus’s story, and to be honest, Riot could have honestly just kept him more-or-less the same when they updated him post-retcon. Just remove the mention of the League and maybe better-define what the black flames were, and you’d be good. In fact, Riot technically did the former, as his second lore is basically identical save for removing any mention of the League of Legends.

Now, it’s at this point that things start to get a little more complicated. Now, if you want a more comprehensive breakdown of the Darkin and their history, I advise you go check out the part centered around Aatrox and his long and convoluted history, but tldr: the Darkin were a race of beings of whom only five remained, and it was later confirmed with Rhaast that they’re specifically a race of living weapons with the ability to possess whoever wields them. Now, while Varus was specifically possessed by an ominous black flame called Pallas, many drew parallels between him and the other Darkin characters, especially since Varus’s also seemed to be alive.

Given that the flames were never really elaborated on or given a proper origin story, Riot decided that it would probably be best to just go ahead and retcon Varus into being a Darkin as well, and nobody had any real qualms with this. It was a common fan theory for years, so why not? Just change the story a bit so that the flames were actually just a Darkin bow all along and boom, you’ve pretty-much done all you needed to properly fit Varus into the new post-reboot Runeterra.

Well, apparently Riot did not feel this way, as it was with Varus’s 2017 retcon that they decided to finally give fans a proper origin story for who and what the Darkin were. That origin story goes a little something like this.

Alright, so Varus is now an alien. They decided to make Varus himself the Darkin, rather than the man who would later claim the bow. OK, that’s fine. I mean, the whole alien thing is kinda weird and still very vaguely explained, but again, my full thoughts on the history of the Darkin as a whole can be seen in the Aatrox analysis. What I think is most important here is that Riot made an attempt, however sloppy, to explain who and what the Darkin were and finally give context to why Aatrox and Rhaast are such big threats to the world.

Now, it’s the next change that got a lot of controversy around it. Rather than just change the name of the Ionian guard who let Varus possess him, the guy who lost his family to the Noxian invasion, Riot decided to replace him with a pair of entirely new characters: Valmar and Kai, a duo of gay Ionian hunters.

Now, I’m just gonna get this out of the way: I’ve got no real qualms about gay relationships in media. Hell, we have a few LGBT Champions in the game already, and even some in the broader expanse of the world. My main gripe comes from the introduction of Valmar and Kai themselves, and how they’re just sort of these… Nothing characters. I mean, in the first lore, we knew who Varus was. We may not have known him well, but we could at least get a general sense of his character: he was proud of his skill, committed to the duty given to him even at the risk of his family, but ultimately succumbed to grief and rage when his decision caused him to lose everything he held dear. Varus was a good man warped by the loss of his home and loved ones, and that made him a fairly compelling character.

Valmar and Kai are… Two gay hunters. That’s it. That’s literally all we know about them from the bio alone. I mean, yes, Riot released a comic to further expand on these characters, but if your answer to the questions raised in your story are “go and read this extra supplementary material for context,” that’s… A problem.

On the topic of supplementary material, Riot also released a music video about Varus. It’s… OK. I personally don’t care much for the song but the visuals alone are really well-done. It’s supposed to detail the conflict between Valmar, Kai and Varus, but most of the context behind it is explained in the comic and short story.

Honestly, Varus’s retcon is kind of baffling. I mean, he didn’t receive a visual rework, his kit remained pretty-much the same as it’s always been, and he doesn’t even have any new voice lines in-game to indicate that he’s three different guys all stuck in one body. In fact, people who play him in-game without reading the lore probably wouldn’t ever be able to guess as much. Riot went to so much effort promoting Varus’s lore update with a music video, a new bio, a new color story, and a three-part comic, but they really haven’t changed anything about him in the game itself. They put more effort into him than they do for most ACTUAL Champion VGU’s. So… Why?

Admittedly, this is where I’m going to delve a bit into conspiracy theory territory, but I genuinely believe this is a case of Riot trying to push League’s first openly queer relationship. Seriously, Valmar and Kai are the first time a character in League has been confirmed gay IN THE LORE ITSELF and not just through a random tweet. Now, the word “pandering” gets thrown around a lot these days, and I don’t really like to use it, but it really does feel like Valmar and Kai were added JUST to have a confirmed gay couple in the lore.

The fact that they’re not even acknowledged IN THE GAME ITSELF really makes the whole thing feel like an attempt to just appeal to the LGBT crowd, though I’ve seen plenty of people in that community react… Less than positively to the portrayal. I mean, two gay guys are literally trying to hold back a corruptive, even influence with the power of love. I don’t wanna delve too much into the political side of things here, but that’s honestly about as cliché and stereotypical as you can get. Fans in general were extremely displeased that the man they knew as Varus, this genuinely tragic figure from the original lore, was replaced by two guys who’s only defining character trait is how much they apparently love each other.

Apparently, these complaints came through loud and clear, as Riot would update Varus one final time after deciding to retcon the whole alien plotline. So, let’s have a look at how his current, canon bio handles him.

Alright, well… Riot heard the complaints, but whether or not they fixed him is another matter. It seems like they tried to give Varus back his original origin story, basically making the archer we new from his first bio Shuriman. The problem is that there’s significantly less context for him now; we don’t know anything about his family, we don’t know why the temple he’s guarding is so important, and the story never even explicitly states that his family died!

I guess it’s implied because the Ascended acknowledged his “sacrifice,” though him being rewarded by becoming a demigod doesn’t quite have the same impact as exchanging his life and soul for a shot at revenge. On top of that, Varus seems pretty quick to give up on the whole “sacred duty” thing, despite the story claiming that being the thing he “he held above all else.” It all feels like a botched effort to mix his original bio with the new Ascended lore that Riot tied in with the Darkin.

Then, of course, there’s Valmar and Kai, who are… Still just gay hunters. They haven’t been expanded on at all. They helped drive the Noxians off from their home, Kai was apparently wounded, and Valmar decides that dipping his lover in an ominous pool of evil to save his life is a bad idea. Seriously, the bio states that they “inadvertently” freed Varus, but there was nothing accidental about it! There was no bargain, they weren’t tricked, it was literally just one guy making a stupid decision that got him fused with his lover and an ancient evil being.

Also, can we address the fact that Varus still wants to avenge the destruction of his race? Who does he want to avenge? The other Ascended? The Ascended who literally warred with each other for centuries? The same Ascended that HE FOUGHT AGAINST during the civil war for control of Shurima? Did Riot just… Forget that he’s not an alien anymore in that brief paragraph? They stated earlier that he was a cruel, merciless killer who just went to slaughter whoever he was told to slaughter, so for some reason I don’t feel like he’d care all that much about his “race” being felled. Oh, and there’s also still the unnamed warrior queen, who I THINK is meant to be a precious Aspect of the Sun? It’s never really stated in the bio itself.

Alright, enough ranting. Varus’s current lore suffers from one major fault: it is trying way too hard to tell several stories all at once. It tells the story of Varus as a human, Varus as an Ascended, Varus as a Darkin, the “story” of Valmar and Kai, and how they got fused with Varus. The writers tried way too hard to cram everything into a single bio and, as a result, nothing is elaborated on. Nothing is really explained, we don’t get to know the characters who are involved in the gestalt entities now known as Varus, and reason for his current existence AS a gestalt entity are just kinda silly, if we’re being honest.

So, how can we fix this? I admit: this was a tough one. There were a lot of different directions I could go when rewriting Varus’s lore, but I decided to take the Kayn approach, where the human host in the focus of the bio. Originally, I did have a whole bio written out for Varus and how he became an Ascendant, but I ultimately realized that I was going to run into the same issue Riot did: trying to cram way too much into a single character overview. So, instead, I chose to focus in more on the story of Valmar and Kai, and how the Darkin Bow was freed after ages of confinement. Without any further ado, please enjoy.

For years, the Darkin Bow has remained confined within the Ionian city of Pallas. The bow’s true nature has long been lost to time, though legends say it holds the spirit of an ancient god from a vast desert land. Others claim that the bow itself is something much older and viler than history itself dares to remember. Whatever the truth may be, the people have Pallas have guarded the bow for generations, choosing only their most skilled warriors from the task. Among them, none seemed better-suited for the task than Kai and Valmar.

Kai and Valmar were inseparable since they were children. Kai, a prodigy marksman, was known for his sense of humor and fierce resolve. Though infamous for his pranks, Kai would never hesitate to step in and defend someone in need, no matter how poorly the odds stood in his favor. By contrast, Valmar had trained in the ways of swordsmanship since he was old enough to grip a blade. Diligent and studious, Valmar was what many considered a model samurai in the making, yet he was also unendingly curious about the world and the many wonders it held.

At a glance, Kai and Valmar seemed near-total opposites, yet the two formed an unbreakable bond from the day they met. Kai would often accompany Valmar to explore the surrounding wilderness, only for Valmar to shelter Kai whenever one of his pranks went awry. As each boy matured, mastering the bow and blade respectively, their bond became something deeper than simple friendship. Valmar was a part of Kai, and Kai a part of Valmar. Neither was complete without the other, and so it came as little surprise that when Valmar was chosen to guard the Temple of the Bow, Kai soon followed.

Together, Valmar and Kai drove off many would-be thieves seeking to claim the cursed weapon’s power as their own. The two fought as one, each arrow from Kai’s bow in perfect sync with every swing of Valmar’s blade. Eventually, they came to be known as the Locust and Mantis, for the whirring of Kai’s arrows and the elegance of Valmar’s blade. It was believed that none could stand up to their combined might… Until the Noxians came.

From their post at the temple, Valmar and Kai watched in horror as the invaders stormed their home, setting fires and killing anyone who dared to stand in their way. For the first time, two warriors found themselves at odds; Kai wished to help defend the people of Pallas, but Valmar insisted on protecting the temple. In the end, neither had much choice in the matter, for the Noxians soon had them cornered on the temple steps.

Valmar and Kai fought for hours, their combined might slowly waning against the invaders’ onslaught. Kai’s strength was the first to give out, yet before death could reach him, Valmar stepped in the way to shield his partner from the blow of a Noxian axe. Kai watched in horror as Valmar fell to the ground, lifeless. Enraged, Kai fired all the arrows he had left before taking up Valmar’s sword, slaying the Noxian forces assaulting the temple. Even still, he knew it would not be long before more came, seeking to claim the forbidden bow.

In that moment, Kai heard a voice calling to him from within the temple. It promised him vengeance and the strength to fight back. Driven by rage and grief, the wounded archer let the voice guide him inside, just as more Noxian invaders began their ascent up the temple’s stairs. It was there, in the darkness, that Kai at last set eyes upon the cursed weapon he and Valmar spent years protecting: a bow thrumming with unearthly power. Kai hesitated for only a moment before grasping the bow, letting its power wash over him.

Kai’s mind was filled with images and thoughts not his own: a vast desert empire, a man made a god, betrayal, war, and finally, imprisonment. These were the memories of Varus, an Ascended being who devoted his life to serving Shurima, only to be abandoned in his time of need. His bitterness and hatred had summoned the Darkin Bow, granting Varus the opportunity to seek revenge on those who had wronged him. In the end, Varus was sealed within the bow, becoming one with it… And now, he would become one with Kai as well.

As Varus’s memories filled Kai’s mind, the Darkin’s power corrupted his body. Varus prepared to usurp Kai’s form entirely, but to his surprise, the Ionian’s drive for vengeance matched his own. Kai was prepared to give anything to avenge Valmar, his fallen half, yet he would do so with his own hands rather than entrust the task to a fallen god.

Even as their minds fought, the archers’ new, fused body moved on pure instinct. One by one, the Noxian forces in Pallas were felled by crimson arrows born of pure malice. Seeing the corpses of his kinsmen and the ruins of his home only fueled Kai’s rage, which in-turn empowered the Darkin in his grasp. Finally, the two archers came to an agreement as the Noxians fled: Varus would lend Kai his strength, in exchange for the Ionian’s body once Kai’s vengeance was complete.

Now on borrowed time, Kai has but one objective: to find and kill everyone he holds responsible for the destruction of his home and the death of his partner. To Varus, however, the destruction of Noxus is but the first step toward a much larger goal: revenge against the gods who betrayed him, and the world that sealed him away…

So, that’s my take on Varus’s lore. Now, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that I only have one of the lovers being possessed. Frankly, I felt that this was probably the best direction to go with; Riot still hasn’t updated Varus in any meaningful way to include Valmar and Kai in any of his voice lines, and something tells me that, being owned by a certain Chinese company, they probably never will. Given the circumstances, I figured it was probably best to give him a backstory more befitting of his in-game voice lines, which still portray Varus as a man on borrowed time who’s giving what little he has left in pursuit of vengeance.

Even so, I decided to try my hand at fleshing out Valmar and Kai. The first thing I did was change them from random hunters to trained soldiers tasked with guarding the temple. This not only harkens back to Varus’s original lore, but it also gives them more of a reason to stand their ground against the Noxian invaders. I also wanted to flesh out their personalities a little more, because I’ll be completely honest: I legitimately couldn’t remember which one was which even after skimming back through the comic. I forgot that Kai was the one who was injured in the original story, not Valmar, but quite frankly it matters so little given how poorly their characters are fleshed out.

Now, as for Varus himself… Well, like I said: I did have a whole bio written out for him that ties into the new Darkin lore I introduced in my Aatrox analysis, but I decided to focus the story more on Valmar and Kai and only have that backstory briefly alluded to. A tad disappointing, I know, but hey, it’s still more than what we learned about Rhaast from Kayn’s bio.

So, that was Varus, the Arrow of Retribution, otherwise known as Riot’s botched attempt at LGBT representation. He’s a far cry from what he started out as, and yet, hilariously, he’s really not on account of them still not updating anything about him in-game. In that respect, the Varus you play as in League isn’t really even the same character(s) presented in the lore. While I still firmly believe that his backstory never needed to be changed so drastically in the first place, I least wanted to present the potential that this direction held, and how badly the opportunity was squandered.

Oh well. At least the music video still looks nice.

[scioscribe]

on writing depression, writing while depressed, fantasy, and utility

I’ve been in a mild depression lately and most of the writing I’ve done over the last two weeks has been disorganized and incomplete: snippets rather than stories.  None of it is for anyone else and none of it even could be for anyone else, because it’s all disgustingly well-tailored to my own sloppy emotional needs and, even beyond that, thoroughly rooted in intensely designed AUs of canon that are vivid to me and undoubtedly ridiculous and unrecognizable to anyone else.  Even my wife thinks they’re self-indulgent.  But what they all are, when you come right down to it, is a very particular brand of hurt/comfort.

I’m especially brutal to my favorite characters when I’m depressed, because, dammit, I just want to read about well-deserved comfort, and I don’t have the time or even the emotional complexity in these periods to work out how to do this in any kind of subtle, plausible way that would actually be consistent with good, emotionally nuanced writing.  This isn’t the time for that.  This is the time for “the characters have inexplicably been kidnapped by torturers with some random and likely unmentioned motivation.”  It’s the time for impractical kidnappings, for (at least feigned) betrayal, for public humiliation, for strange magical harms done to people in decidedly non-magical canons.  I find this soothing.

[More real-life depression talk under the cut, as well as discussion of fictional/literary CSA, domestic violence, death, bereavement, suicide, self-harm, car accidents, sexual trauma, and medical trauma.)

And I used, I think, to be able to write about a kind of fictionalized depression that way, in a manner that I can’t do now that I have an unfortunately close personal relationship with the fucking thing.  For the record, I, at least, have no problem with fictionalized, simplified, and even sentimentalized depression: different stories fill different emotional needs for different people.  (And it would, in any case, be massively hypocritical of me to rail against it even if I wanted to, because nobody is fonder of fictional, soap opera-style amnesia than I am.)  But I can’t write it myself now, because it feels like I’m breaking some kind of inner logic.

What breaks it isn’t the portrayal of the depression as it’s being suffered but rather the way in which the depression is exited, which usually happens when some other character notices how deeply, horribly sad Character A is and provides comfort and support.  And Character A then starts to make their way out of the murky, muddy emotional place they’re mired in.  Something at last feels sort of good.  Something doesn’t hurt.  And then, thankfully, beautifully, they’re pushed down a greased slide to a place of greater emotional stability.

Whereas in my experience, someone notices I’m depressed and extends sympathy and support, and I... I don’t know.  Say it helps?  They are good people for trying to help and I am, when depressed, fundamentally aware of my utter lack of good personhood, so I don’t want to be a trial, which will only make me feel worse anyway.  So I end up in this weird pattern of opening up to someone and then panicking because I realize that there is nothing they can say that will actually help me, that I will in fact move the emotional goalposts on what I want to hear anytime they say what previously seemed like all I needed, and why would I put them in that position?  Why am I so awful?  The solution is to pretend like they have, in fact, totally fixed me, or at least pushed me up onto dry land where I will gradually fix myself, and in the meantime, I make a mental note to try extra-hard to seem normal and happy around them, because I don’t want it to be weird.  I don’t want them to have to keep expending effort and worry that will do nothing.

At the same time, of course, I desperately want them to expend effort and worry, because I’m an asshole with no currently functioning barometer of self-worth, so the only way I know how to feel even marginally better for even a minute is to provoke someone else into telling me I matter.  Provided I can convince myself for at least five minutes or so that they really think that and that they aren’t just saying it to be nice.  They’re probably saying it to be nice.

So I say the thing, I express the self-loathing, I get comforted, and then I tell myself to never, under pain of death, ever mention to that person ever again that I hate myself.

I had this thing at work a couple months ago, when I was doing okay, where a coworker and I were mourning the fact that we’d missed a chance to attend a particular conference.

“I can’t believe we both forgot to register,” she said.

“Well, you had all those meetings around then,” I said, “and I think I had something going on, too, but I can’t remember--oh, yeah!  I was super depressed.  I was really busy trying not to kill myself.”

We actually had a pretty good laugh about that, because I have an unusually cool workplace.

But I get one of those things--one disclosure that I’d sat at work trying to talk to someone on a suicide chat system--and then I’m done, then it has to become a joke.  God knows I haven’t told anyone here that the same thing is happening now.  (Not nearly as bad, though, thankfully.)

People don’t make me feel better.  Love hasn’t fixed me.  So if I tried to write that story now, Character B would bring Character A a blanket and then nothing would change.  In the morning Character A would be the same.  And Character B would try again.  And try again.  And then start to get a little impatient: I mean, fuck, I gave you the fucking blanket, didn’t I?  I hugged you.  I told you that you mattered, that I loved you, that there are so many people who love you.  Why do you not feel better.  How long am I supposed to do this.

...And then one day Character A would either get a prescription that worked or for some other reason come out the other end of the tunnel blinking at the light, and Character B would be like, “What changed?” and Character A would just shrug, especially if it’s the second kind of situation.  I literally once had a terrible, suicidal bout of depression and right at the end of it I watched The Hateful Eight, and it was the first thing I was conscious of enjoying in a really, really long time.  It is probably not true that The Hateful Eight, which I genuinely (and, in addition, a little superstitiously) love, cured my depression, but it did kind of feel like that. This is not a satisfying resolution to a story unless your story is ad copy for The Hateful Eight and you are marketing it exclusively to the mentally ill.

A satisfying resolution to the story is that pain that is felt by someone else--love that bridges the fundamental loneliness of suffering--cures things.  I like that.  It’s the kind of thing that should be true even if it’s not, and it’s the kind of thing that I consider myself lucky to still be able to enjoy in other formats.  Keep writing those stories, if you’re doing that, because they matter.  (And some of them are probably written by people who are depressed, or who have been depressed, the world eerily enough not being endlessly composed of carbon copies of my experiences.)

But where I was going with all this is the kind of ridiculous depression story currently living in bits and pieces on my hard drive, and also the ridiculous, professionally published, over-the-top depression story that I find oddly convincing as a fantasy of suffering by the suffering.

Me first, because it’s simpler.  In addition to the blatant, implausible hurt/comfort I talked about way up at the top of the post, I also keep writing this incredibly weird thing where I can write the traditional depression story by making it a magical depression story.  It makes no sense.  It’s a character who trades a year of happiness for four years of his little brother’s tuition, that’s the level of WTFery we’re talking about here.  But.  It’s about the idea that the sadness has some kind of profundity to it, that it’s been incurred for a reason, and even a noble, self-sacrificing reason.  It’s about how eventually his brother will find this out and figure out a way to fix things, so love will cure the sadness after all.  It’s about there being a comprehensible, emotionally valid reason for why the sadness just won’t leave: buddy, your contract’s not up yet.  This is gloppy, sentimental wish-fulfillment wrapped all around characters I love and want to be okay.

The over-the-top, professionally published fantasy of suffering story is Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life, aka, the Story of How Literally Every Awful Thing in the World Happened to the Beautifully Sad Jude St. Francis.  (Spoilers follow.)  A Little Life gestures vaguely in the direction of being an ensemble story where the narratives of its three other primary characters--Willem, an actor and part-time Norse god of handsomeness; JB, a talented avant-garde artist and eventual acclaimed photographer and part-time drug addict who suffers way less beautifully than Jude and so consequently gets shit on by everyone; and Malcolm, a successful architect and the group’s resident normal--will actually matter, but it gives up on this after not very long.  Which it kind of has to do, because you almost literally cannot tell an in-depth story of even a ridiculously glamorous and successful life alongside Jude’s life, which will dwarf it to the point of making it seem ant-like in its insignificance.

Oh, boy.  Jude.

I was going to summarize it, but the Wikipedia summary is hilarious in its Perils of Pauline approach to it all and is recommended reading, so I’ll just do bullet-points.

* Jude is an abandoned child with no knowledge of his parents (the novel dwells at slightly discomfiting length on how no one can even tell what race he is, which... gets a little weird after a while).

* He is raised in a monastery, because apparently that’s a thing that can happen, where he is treated mostly cruelly and routinely physically abused and neglected, until he reaches an age where the abuse becomes sexual and widespread.  If not every monk participates, no one actually does anything to prevent it.

* The closest thing to kindly intervention he gets is from Brother Luke, young Jude’s only source of comfort, and, naturally enough for this kind of novel, also interested in raping him, just with the illusion in place that they really love each other.

* Brother Luke abducts Jude and takes him on the road and then--oh-so-tearfully--explains how they’re going to have to start paying their way by renting out time with Jude to a series of strange men.

* Mentally disintegrating under the weight of all this, Jude begins to brutally harm himself by slamming his head into the wall; Brother Luke decides to teach him to cut himself instead, as that process is more controlled.  This habit will last the rest of Jude’s life.

* When Jude finally gets away from Brother Luke, he’s put into a group home where the sexual abuse continues.  After a chance at living in a more stable and less horrifically traumatic environment (of course) falls through, Jude succeeds in running away.

* He is picked up by a doctor who promptly imprisons him in his basement and rapes him for months.

* Then the doctor runs him over with his car and leaves Jude for dead.  In fact, Jude is not dead, but he has acquired a lifelong limp and significant nerve damage, conditions that will a) worsen over the course of his life and b) keep him in nearly constant pain.

* Then handwave-handwave, Jude finally finds where the non-rapists live and receives just enough therapy that the novel can vaguely indicate how he’s still functional after all of this.  He gets into a prestigious college and makes a group of lifelong friends, named above, but is especially close to Willem, because Willem is a Perfect Human and Endlessly Patient Best Friend.  They move in together while Willem looks for acting jobs and Jude attends law school.

* Now, not all of this backstory is revealed at once, which is good, because even when spread out over seven hundred pages, there’s still an “oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me” feeling when you get to the part about the doctor.  The novel actually begins with Jude and Willem moving into their first post-grad apartment, and for a while, it seems like this will be a novel primarily about living on and trying to make a life in the aftermath of a horrific past.  Jude’s life is good for a while, though understandably enough continuously shadowed.  He still cuts himself, and he still has mental breakdowns that lead to him making gourmet catering and desserts for everyone (the BEST kind of mental breakdown, bar none), but... he’s doing okay.  He becomes a lawyer.  He acquires A Perfect Father Figure Who At Last Does Not Want to Sexually Abuse Him, a wonderfully kind law professor accompanied by his wonderfully kind wife, who are always ecstatically happy to invite him into their home and in fact even adopt him, formally, when he’s thirty, and start calling him their son.

* If you’re thinking it sounds like the other shoe is about to drop, you are correct.

* JB becomes addicted to crystal meth, but this is not Innocent Suffering Like Jude’s but instead Something He Brought Upon Himself, so when Jude tries to help him and JB lashes out by imitating Jude’s limp and occasionally slurred speech, both Jude and Willem find it unforgivable and sever relationships with him, though they’ll drift back into contact later on.

* After years of everyone talking about Jude’s possible sexual orientation behind his back instead of just fucking asking him like any normal person would do (especially since no one has any real idea of his past), Jude finally ends up in a relationship with a high-powered fashion executive named Caleb whom he meets at a party.

* Caleb promptly begins showing creepy danger signs--he’s especially critical of Jude’s increasing need for a wheelchair and thinks it’s a sign of weakness and Jude “giving in” to his deformity--and before you can say “many survivors of childhood abuse find themselves in abusive relationships later in life,” Caleb has become the abusive husband in every Lifetime movie ever made.  When Jude--with kindly law professor and surrogate dad’s help--sort of succeeds in severing things with him, Caleb breaks into Jude’s apartment and rapes him and throws him down a flight of stairs.  (Actually, Wikipedia tells me this is the second rape in their relationship.  That’s how often Jude gets raped in this novel.  I have forgotten entire instances of it.)

* Jude then tries to kill himself, which prompts Hollywood star Willem to move back in with him.  Jude cherry-picks a few of the less cataclysmically awful stories from his childhood to finally tell and Willem is horrified by them while the reader leans back and smokes a cigarette and says, “Will, you wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen.”

* Willem, despite having been straight to this point, then begins to fall in love with Jude, and you know, I’m all for flexible models of sexuality and sexual desire that proceeds from romantic connection that proceeds from the realization that this person is closer to you than anyone else in the world, but also: come the fuck on.  This could not get any ficcier if it tried.

* Anyway, Jude of course loves Willem back, Willem being a Perfect Human and all, so they begin an honestly very touching relationship, marred only by Jude’s continued self-harm (which he can’t bring himself to stop for good, though Willem does provide him with enough stability that he’s able to minimize it) and their problems in bed.  Willem is highly satisfied with having sex with Jude, but Jude’s life has left him entirely sex-repulsed, and his continued assent to their encounters and his continued concealment of the pain and distress they cause him leads to escalated self-harm.

* Willem finally finds out and Jude at last reveals to him at least 90% of his childhood as an explanation for his hatred of sex.  They cut it out of their relationship entirely and have a honeymoon phase--Willem goes back to sleeping with women in no-strings-attached arrangements that don’t bother Jude in the slightest, and their life together is exceedingly happy and romantic.

* AND THEN WILLEM, MALCOLM, AND MALCOLM’S WIFE ALL DIE TOGETHER IN A CAR CRASH.

* Also at some point in here, Jude lost one of his legs.  I don’t even remember when.  There was a medical reason for it, related to maybe the initial damage or the subsequent damage from Caleb throwing him down the stairs or him burning himself severely on his leg, it didn’t just fall off like the legs of the cows in Cold Comfort Farm, but really, in the wash of all this trauma, who can keep track of the odd leg or two?

* Well, Jude practically starves himself to death, gets help temporarily, and then finally succeeds in killing himself and leaving his devastated adoptive father behind to close out the novel.

It’s actually a good novel if you like this sort of thing.  There’s no real character depth to anyone, because all you need to know about Jude is that he suffers beautifully and nobly and all you need to know about anyone else is that they either love and admire Jude or have raped/are currently raping him.  (The one exception to this is JB, who seems to have escaped from a more complex novel, as he is allowed the occasional spot of selfishness and realistic misreadings of situations, and I seriously considered requesting post-Willem Jude/JB for Yuletide just to see this story travel towards a more nuanced, textured view of life going on and people reconciling themselves with imperfections.)  But Yanagihara writes well and there is a melodramatic but genuine emotional intensity to it all.  I was involved throughout.  But just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, I have to admit that my reaction to Willem’s death was a combination of raw sobbing and horrified laughter.  But again, if you like over-the-top hurt/comfort, this is your kind of thing.  It’s my kind of thing.  I mean, I did finish.  I do actually own this book.  It’s sloppy and hyperbolic, but I like crying and can cry around my criticisms of the text.

I laid all that out, though, not to defend or condemn A Little Life but to contextualize why I think it has an odd power as a fantasy of suffering by the sufferers themselves.  That it’s a voyeuristic fantasy of suffering is pretty obvious.  But it works inwardly, too, or at least it works inwardly for me.  (I’ve talked about this elsewhere, so forgive me if you’ve seen it before.)

No one in A Little Life ever loses patience with Jude.  His pain never exhausts them; his refusal to explain the cause of his pain never genuinely frustrates them.  They wish he would tell them, but his not telling them doesn’t get on their nerves, doesn’t strike them as unfair emotional withholding.  In fact, everyone loves Jude.  His professor adopts him.  His friends stay loyal over decades.  His doctor continues to treat him even after giving up the rest of his practice.  His straight best friend considers him the exception to the romantic rule and has no problem at all at adjusting to a romance without sex.  Anyone who is cruel to him is judged harshly by the other characters, even if it’s the cruelty of a moment.  No one ever tells him to get over it.

It’s not that none of these things never happen, or could never happen, but the unalloyed kindness with which Jude’s suffering is largely received is the melodramatic counterpoint to unalloyed evil and pain that slowly destroy him.

And I’ll go on: there are proximate and instantly comprehensible causes for Jude’s pain.  There are even physical and undeniable signs of his pain.  His trauma is so profound as to justify, for any listener, a lifetime of suffering expressed however he likes.  His depression and self-loathing does not descend randomly, leaving him poleaxed by feeling awful and feeling worse because he has seemingly no reason to feel awful.  He doesn’t talk to people about it, generally--he has nearly perfect self-control around his friends, his pain makes him ungenerous and unfair and snappish on really only one occasion--but if he did, they would concede, automatically, the righteousness of his pain.  They would be amazed at how well he’s doing.

A Little Life provides, for its readers who are hurting, a story where suffering doesn’t come from nowhere, where their emotions are an understandable response to a history of terrible trauma, where loved ones are never tired of dealing with them, where debilitating emotional and physical pain is never enough of an inconvenience to interfere in providing the markers of success and even glamour, where you don’t have to cry your eyes out in a shitty apartment, where you will never lose your job because you don’t show up for three days, where everyone would understand how you feel if only they knew, and where they really do want to know.

And, for that matter, where you don’t have to strain yourself into saying that yes, all of this has helped, yes, you feel better now.  Jude never separates himself from this hypothetical reader by recovering, which would seem, in this light, not like a victory but a hateful cheat.  That bastard--what does it say that he can get better and you can’t seem to?  How, after this steamy bath of melodrama, are you supposed to wrap your brain around normalcy?  His interlude with Willem is an interlude, its happiness so complete as to signal its coming downfall, its happiness so complete as to signal that we have not left this fervently emotional Expressionism.  The car crash is devastating, but it’s also, come on, total confirmation.  Yeah.  That’s how it goes.  It’s okay not to recover--you don’t have to worry that there’s something wrong with you, or weak in you, for not recovering--if you’re Jude, whose every escape is another fall off the cliff.  It lets you indulge in the fantasy of not having to do the exhausting and difficult work of trying, because each effort, on its failure or collapse, only further justifies the preexisting pain.  It’s okay to stay down if every time you stand up, someone punches you in the face.  Just lie there a while.  Just breathe.  People will admire you for it.  People will love you.  No one will say that this has gone on long enough and they just don’t know if they can do it anymore.  They know what’s happened to you.  If they don’t, man, won’t they have egg on their face when you tell them.

If my snippets of self-indulgent fic are about the fantasy of suffering that says that the suffering is somehow profound, that there is concrete proof that the person suffering is good and kind and undeserving of this, that everyone will worry and love you, and that the love will fix things because magic, A Little Life is the fantasy of complete and utter validation of seemingly endless agony.  What I’m writing right now is what I can write because, though I’m not doing great, I’m on medication and I’m doing okay.  The book, on the other hand, is a fantasy for the times when it does not seem like there is any possibility of okayness anywhere on the horizon, when you could not believe in recovery or even treatment and all that will comfort you is a story where it is 100% fine to feel like that because it’s true.

It’s not hard to see ways in which that fantasy could potentially hurt someone--that there could be someone who sees, in that story, not comfort but an awesome rationale for making the same eventual decision as Jude himself does--but life and literature are complicated.  Umberto Eco said that “a novel is a machine for generating interpretations,” and that’s something I find true as well as heartening.  No story runs only in one direction.  People interact with narratives in messy, challenging, lopsided ways; we respect stories, we fall in love with stories, we curl up with them, and we also hit them over the head and leave them to wake up in a bathtub of ice with their kidneys missing because we’re just going to take what we need from them and go, thanks.  I say this because this has been, for me, an oddly utilitarian look at literature--it’s not my normal approach to textual analysis--and I want to pull back from that at least a little.  To draw attention to the complexity and weirdness of people’s relationships to art: that things can work on us in unpredictable and uncanny ways.  And that also, for that matter, you can probably read A Little Life purely for the bits about cooking.

Utility is all you can see, and all you can properly care about, when you need the fantasy.

And then you get better.  And your relationship to those stories changes.  Maybe you come back and say, “Okay, in the clear light of day, I cannot stand this, glad it was there for me earlier, but yikes.”  But maybe, and beautifully, you get Erich Fromm’s mature love, in a literary sense: not “I love you because I need you” but “I need you because I love you.”  I’m in the tunnel between those two places at the moment, and this is the view, looking back and looking forward.

Also, I just wanted to tell everyone how batshit A Little Life is.