#Mayedai

[veliseraptor]

I think its really sweet/cute when you tag Xue Yang posts with 'my boy' or 'baby boy'. Sometimes when I see pics of him now I go 'Lise's boy! Baby boy!" in my head (and I haven't ever read/watched this media property).

sometimes i'm like. "i don't want it to seem like i'm infantalizing him, i actually find that really irritating when i feel like people do that" but also he is my baby! he is just a tiny little cultivator! he said it himself!

anyway i'm glad you enjoy it, he's so important to me ♥️

[mayedays]

Finally chose a synagogue. Cantor is quite a bit too 'support the troops' about the IDF for my tastes, but the 20-30-somethings often go out to dinner after services and they seem...more reasonable. So, some hope of making friends there.

[mayedays]

With respect to the previous tags:

#mordecai in a little baptism gown is actually incredible thank u#lackadaisy#now...catholic mordecai....things make sense

Mordecai is not Catholic. He's very obviously Jewish (although probably neither religiously observant nor pious).

This page of the comic shows his letter to his mother has Hebrew letters on it. This is pretty unambiguous Jewish-coding.

As for the gown, I can find a couple pictures of Jewish infants in similar gowns, so I don't think they were exclusively Catholic.

I've seen baby Mordecai floating around here and there and figured I might as well make a decent post for him so people can view it properly if they'd like. I don't think anyone really knows it was my patron piece lol

Made by the wonderful @lackadaisycats 🩷

Enjoy!

[notallthosewho-wanderarelost]

I hope my most recent ask didn't upset you.

Not at all! I think I was just really busy when I got it and didn’t get the chance to respond. And then I completely forgot about it, I’m really sorry.

I’ll try to find and answer it later today, I’m on mobile right now so I have no idea where it is.

[veliseraptor]

@mayedays replied to your post “Sometimes I get immensely sad that you're not in...”:

What do you see as the other options? Bc the alternatives to defanging or death that I can see are (1) the author subjecting the antagonist to serious suffering/punishment (up to and including 'fate worse than death') to appease readers' sense of justice or (2) the fandom becoming so much more toxic towards the character (and their fans) bc of rage that justice (read: punishment) "wasn't served". (And I hate those options too! This feels like a no-win situation!)

​I feel like you are talking about something a little different than I am, first of all, in that you seem to be talking about the canon fate of characters in-universe whereas I was specifically (in this post) talking about the way characters get written in fandom. But since I'm here and this does feel relevant to my interests, I'll take it!

Firstly, I don't think that avoiding a storytelling choice because "readers/fans will react poorly" is...a good way to do writing. An understandable way in this day and age, certainly! But I also think it's generative of...well, you know how people talk about the phenomenon of media being bleached of its color for the sake of not offending potential advertisers? That's what I see happening as a result of this kind of implied emotional terrorism, or fear of emotional terrorism on the part of writers.

Like I said, I think it's understandable to be scared of how people are going to react to something you write, whether that is for your own sake or the sake of a hypothetical reader - it's human to want to avoid unpleasant experiences. But I think caving to that fear, or accepting that as a stifling force on the creative decisions a writer feels at liberty to make, is neither desirable nor inevitable.

Secondly - it is relevant that I was talking about fandom here, because in a canon setting the antagonist is probably going, in some form, to have to lose. But if I'm engaging with this purely on the personal level of "how do I like to see writers handle their antagonists," there is a wide variety of ways for a narrative to treat its antagonists with grace. Even if an antagonist dies horribly, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a narrative decision that I by nature have a problem with. (I have discussed before the internal conflict for me between 'but I want this character to live :(' vs. 'it makes for a better narrative if they die', including with several of my own original projects.) But the way that defeat or death is handled can make a world of difference in my (personal) response to a text.

I have read books where it feels like the aim of the text is specifically punitive: it wants to punish the bad character, it wants to make them suffer, it wants to illustrate that they deserve it. I tend to not enjoy that. It's not the only way to write an antagonist's defeat, and not even the only way to write an antagonist's death. It feels miles better to me, as someone who tends to get invested in antagonists, to read a text that doesn't come with a punitive mindset baked in. (Punitive texts aren't inherently bad, they just tend to not be for me.)

But that isn't the only way to write a conclusion, and there are ways of hurting or even killing an antagonist that don't have to feel like the goal of the narrative is specifically to punish them. (I wrote a whole essay about an example of this! There were footnotes and everything.)

But I think the bigger thing here, that is perhaps just a distinction between the way I approach this question and the way you seem to be, is that the question you're asking is predicated on the understanding that the question of "how a text handles its villain" is a matter of how readers/fans will react to a text, and that is a major determining factor in how a story should be told. I just fundamentally disagree with that, and I think a story that is written under those premises is going to suffer.

[mayedays]

Learning to embroider. It's going okay--the hardest parts are tying knots in the string, and separating embroidery thread into its constituent strands (bc apparently you often don't use the whole thread). We'll see if I manage to maintain this hobby.

[mayedays]

I mean, w.r.t. to BoE remembering Earth...if the Billionaires' ships experienced relativistic time dilation then it might not have been anywhere near that long for them, from their perspective. I'm not entirely sure if what we know about the Billionaires' interstellar travel method supports the possibility of time-dilation, and I'm not sure that the dilation would be sufficient to make those numbers sensible, but it wouldn't shock me if Muir did it anyway--she seems pretty comfortable with hand-waving on other science topics in this series.

You all know that one Tamsyn Muir interview where she says Nona takes place over 100,000 years and well, I, at least, thought it was a typo. Well. John does nuke the whole earth--and if the River(?) scenes in Nona are anything to go by, he didn't resurrect anybody but Alecto right away, and also there's nuclear snow described iirc. Do you think he waited 90,000 years until the radiation died down to start resurrecting his friends and that's why he's insane. Because he spent 90,000 years with nobody but the soul of the Earth for company

[jgoodenart]

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[instafashionfix]

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[notallthosewho-wanderarelost]

From @mayedays:

Curious about your tags. What about Demon in the Wood did you like so much? And why do you have a love-hate relationship with TGT?

First off, I have to ask- is your username an October Daye reference?!

Sorry this took me so long to get to! I’m going to answer the second part first so I can end on a positive note.

Fair warning, you’ve unlocked a thing I rant about a lot.

There are a lot of reasons I have a love-hate relationship with The Grisha Trilogy. I really love almost all of the characters, I love the concept for the world and how unique so much of it is, and the world-building is generally great. A lot of the things about the world that felt incomplete or off and didn’t make sense to me in TGT got explained in more depth in King of Scars, which really fixed most of the problems I had with the world-building! There are still places where it has holes that bug me, but it’s overall so interesting and unique. (And it’s not over, so those holes might still get filled in!) The whole cast of characters is just fantastic, I love them all very much. There are just so many interesting characters in this universe! I could easily sit here and list characters and why I love them, but we’d be here all day and this post is going to be long enough so I’m not going to do that, haha.

As for why I hate it, it mostly comes down to a couple of big things: the completely mangled Russian- that absolutely didn’t have to be mangled since Leigh Bardugo says outright on her website that she could have gotten a Russian translator but just refused to- and the way that the plot takes away all agency from Alina so that she spends almost all of the series reacting instead of acting. It makes her seem boring and plain in a Bella Swan-type of way, when she’s actually a great character who just gets bulldozed by the plot over and over. There’s a similar problem for Mal, except that for him it gets compounded by the fact that he has no other personality traits aside from “loves Alina” and “embodies all toxic YA love interest tropes,” so he winds up seeming like a complete non-entity as a character. The show improved on this so much though. I absolutely have to give them credit for that. They did a great job both in making Mal a three dimensional and likable character, and in giving both Alina and Mal agency and letting them make their own choices. It really went a long way in letting them be three dimensional characters instead of pieces who got moved by thee plot, which was such an improvement.

To go back to the Russian language thing, my mother immigrated to the US from the Soviet Union, so I grew up speaking both English and Russian as a kid. I think this is called being a heritage speaker? So I’m not a native speaker, but Russian also isn’t exactly a second language for me. But it’s still extremely jarring to see near-nonsensical Russian in this book when it would have taken only a tiny bit of effort to make it correct! For example, the Ravkan part of the epic “I am not ruined, I am ruination” quote isn’t grammatically correct at all, and it sends me out of the story every time I read it... but one time I decided to see if I could make it grammatically correct, and it took me maybe 10 minutes with the help of Google Translate. A native speaker would’ve been able to do it faster and without Google Translate. It also took me several weeks of thinking about it to figure out where the word “otkazats’ya” came from, and that’s because 1. It’s actually a verb, not a noun (and it’s written slightly differently than how it’s pronounced, which made it harder for me personally to figure out since as a non-native speaker I’m not used to the quirks of written Russian) 2. It doesn’t mean “abandoned” like the book says, it’s more along the lines of “to politely refuse.” But it also would’ve been so easy to turn into a noun! You just change the word ending to make it a noun: make it “otkazat’niye,” which would translate to something like “the refused.” Easy fix!

Another thing is the last names not being gendered correctly- I understand why Leigh Bardugo may not have wanted to use patronymics, which is fine, it is a fantasy world so it doesn’t need to be an exact replica of real-life Russia- but why on earth not make Alina’s last name Starkova instead of Starkov, and Aleksander’s Morozov instead of Morozova? Baghra’s last name is correct, Aleksander and Ilya’s aren’t because Morozova is the female form. It’s not that complicated.

The fact that there’s a minor character whose name literally just means “hello” (Privyet) is also stupefying to me. It’s not like she ran out of names to use! Especially since she treats names and nicknames/diminutives as basically separate names, when they’re not.

...while we’re on the subject of names, as far as I can tell Mal’s first name is gibberish and obviously just an excuse to call him “Mal.” I don’t even know how to start fixing that, but a native speaker probably would.

The Grisha orders only ever being used in plural is also pretty jarring but again would’ve been a quick fix- “Corporalki” for multiple Healers/Heartrenders, “Corporalnik” for one male, “Corporalka” for one female, and then it’s the exact same endings for the other orders.

Obviously writing a fantasy world gives some leeway with language, but quite a lot of Ravkan isn’t her using Russian words in different ways or changing them in a way that makes sense, it’s just straight-up grammatically incorrect, poorly-used Russian. The few language changes that I feel made sense are things like having everyone drink kvas instead of vodka to make things feel more fantasy-like (kvas is a real drink, though I think it’s not alcoholic? But it’s what people always drink in Russian fairy tales) and changing “kaftan” to “kefta” so as not to evoke the 70s for readers who are going to be primarily American. Those are in line with what you’d expect to see in a fantasy, whereas using a verb as a noun, having incorrectly gendered last names, using only plurals, and using gibberish Russian when she could’ve easily NOT done that is just the author mangling a real-life language for no reason, and extremely jarring to anyone who speaks Russian.

Now, as for why I like Demon in the Wood so much- that’s actually a bit of a hard question to answer! I think it’s partly for character reasons- the Darkling is a fascinating character, and it’s really cool to get a glimpse into his childhood and see why he started down the path he did. The story really makes you feel for him. He’s an outcast among outcasts, and all he wants is the chance to live a life that doesn’t consist of running and hiding. He’s a kid who goes through something horrible and has to do something horrible to survive, and you can really understand why he fights so hard for power and stability for Grisha in TGT, even though by then he’s lost sight of who he’s really fighting for. Basically, Demon in the Wood made me go “OH MY GOSH, the Darkling is Grisha Magneto!” which is a really awesome character concept/parallel.

You also get to see a younger Baghra in Demon in the Wood, and she’s an equally fascinating character. She gets much more dimension in this story, and it really made me appreciate her a lot.

I think the other reason Demon in the Wood resonated for me is that it shows you just how bad things were for Grisha before the Darkling founded the Second Army. A bit of a tangent here, but I’m Jewish, so when I was reading TGT a question I kept wondering about was “where is the Jewish analogue in Ravka?” Turns out, Leigh Bardugo herself is Jewish, and she once said in an interview that while there aren’t meant to be any direct analogues to real-life peoples in the Grishaverse, there are a lot of parallels, and the Grisha themselves are the “Jews” of the Grishaverse. Which makes a lot of sense when you think about how Grisha in TGT are both looked down and considered elite at the same time. (I’m not going to go into it here, but this is historically how people have looked at Jews. All those antisemitic conspiracy theories about how Jews secretly run the world, etc.) Anyway, the Grisha village in Demon in the Wood and what happens during the story, and the way non-Grisha people are described to feel about Grisha in the story reminds me very much of what I know about Jewish history and how people have historically treated Jews. My thought about the Darkling being Grisha Magneto occurred to me way before I read that Leigh Bardugo interview, but everything about this clicks into place so neatly- it’s really well-done. She says in the interview that she did a ton of historical research for TGT, in addition to some previous knowledge that she talks about, so I have a feeling all these parallels are on purpose. Demon in the Wood is just a really interesting read because it lets you see how things were like for Grisha prior to the Second Army, and it shows you why the Darkling went down the path that he did. It’s essentially the inciting incident for everything he goes on to do, and it’s fascinating to put in context with everything he does in TGT.

Here’s a link to an article that talks about Judaism in Shadow and Bone and has lots of excerpts from the interview of Leigh’s I mentioned. It also links to that interview if you want to read it in full.

[mayedays]

I don't think it was random, but I do think it was probably subconscious on John's part. I think he was essentially projecting the pattern of the relationship between himself and Alecto onto the most obvious pairings of his friends in their original lives.

I.e., he understood Mercy and Christabel as a matched set because they were closest to each other in their previous lives, but he was still more strongly connected to M-- so Christabel drew the short end of the stick. He couldn't make them both necromancers while making Nigella and Cassiopeia cavs because that would upset the pattern. Similar with Pyrrah and Gideon--he likes both a lot but they are an obvious pair and only one can be the necromancer so the other has to be the cav and he had a stronger relationship with G-- than P--. A-- and his little brother are another pair.

Post-apotheosis John understands himself as half of a pair. The relationship deifies (defines?) him, so I suspect it has an impact on his self-conception and world-view. Pre-apotheosis John may or may not have understood his friends as pairs--we only get his perspective from post-apotheosis where his perceptions have possibly already been warped, biasing him to see he loved ones like...idk Noah's Ark animal pairs, or maybe they were genuinely kinda like that. But it seems like too much a coincidence that even in John's backstory, pretty much all of the pairings are already present and emphasized (C-- and N--, P-- and G--, Titania and Ulysses, M-- and the Nun) or they were literally related (A-- and his little brother, who is generally referred to as "A--'s little brother' I think). It otherwise seems unlikely that his original set of friends would have a 50-50 split of adept to non-adept and it seems thematically stronger for John to be subconciously pressing those closest to him into a relationship similar to the one that has reshaped him.

TLDR/Summary: I think those pairings of his friends were already present pre-apocalypse, if not in-actuality than in his head, AND/OR once he becomes part of a necro-cav pair it starts to shape how he perceives and remembers his friends and their relationships and he subconsciously stamps them into a shape similar to his and Alecto's relationship.

I'm curious that you think that the existing lyctoral necro-cav pairs shows that John can't choose at will who is a necromancer & who is not, because to me it's the opposite! The fact that both scientists & the lawyer (of intellectual occupations) all end up as necromancers and theis companions as cavaliers strongly suggests a guiding hand. Who do you think he would array differently if he had the power?

A few different reasons! All of them boil down to #vibes. My thoughts on this are all over, and I think it IS possible he chose them. I just think it’s slightly more likely he didn’t.

tldr: if he chose who got to be an adept, I think it was more intuitive / subconscious / accidental than a planned out choice with forethought behind it.

Assuming that he absolutely wanted to create matched pairs (why though? more thoughts below) I AM a bit puzzled over the criteria. It's not just intellectuals, they all were—“a cop and six different kinds of nerd.” Anyway, here are my thoughts, one by one.

Augustine, Mercy, and G1deon: these are obvious. They were his long-time friends, unflinchingly loyal, total enablers. If he did pick and choose, they were always going to be an automatic in.

Nigella: that’s easy also; she seems to be the member of the gang John was the least close to, brought into the gang by someone who was mildly critical of him. She IS a pass.

Alfred: second to least fave, though he was the one who figured out the dirt of the FTL fleet by following the money. (He IS a nerd, and more STEM-adjacent than Cassy. Finance runs on probability theory) I can see why he’d have been left out, though; John doesn't think much of him.

Cristabel: this is harder to justify! John had a very high opinion of Cristabel. He called her ‘sister,’ he saw her as a guide, and near the end they worked closely together trying to find the soul. Maybe he resented her for the way she forced him to ascend, but I didn’t get that impression from the flashbacks + John loves having people around who have their own failings, so he can feel better about himself. If he could bestow necromancy, I don’t get why he wouldn’t have picked Cristabel.

Pyrrha and Cassiopeia: these are the ones that leave me the most perplexed. They’re both strong-willed women who weren’t afraid to stand up to John. But Pyrrha was the one who betrayed her cop friends to warn him, who stood by him even after he killed her former colleagues, who encouraged him to be a “bad wizard” — she absolutely enabled him every step of the way. Cassiopeia, by contrast, was by his side in the early stages and ditched her bosses for him, but she seems to have stuck around just as much for Nigella as for “the cause,” if not more. She drops under the radar a third into the flashback narration when things get weird, and only makes herself heard again near the end to call out John; the only one who did. I really don’t get why he’d have picked Cassiopeia. Likewise, I don’t see why he didn’t pick Pyrrha; it’s true that Gideon was always close to her and “never knew who to pick,” but when it counted Pyrrha never went against John, and also, you know. He did wipe their memory. I don't think he saw Pyrrha as a threat.

Ulysses and Titania: ????? They were science projects. He had no attachment to either of them. Why not make more of his original friends into necromancers and give them Ulysses or Titania as “companions” if he was that attached to that model? The only scenario I can see in which they were included would be if John brought them back before anyone else to serve as a test case, but I don’t get why he’d have kept them around. I can, however, see John keeping them around if they randomly came back as an adept/non-adept matched pair and he was like, oh how nostalgic, control group yet again.

More broadly—regardless of who was picked, I don't think he planned out matched adept/companion sets.

One: Lyctorhood wasn't John's initial plan. He didn't bring them back thinking “I’m going to make my besties my immortal warriors and they’ll need a loyal companion.” He brought them back planning to keep them near him, and possibly to make them immortal. He accomplished that, successfully, for hundreds of years—but their immortality was conditional on their physical proximity to him. (John being John, this would be a feature, not a bug!) and didn’t come with huge necromantic powers. They were still killable. That only became a drawback once they were “on the clock for the resurrection beasts,” when it was imperative that his friends should also be his trusted lieutenants, able to carry out missions all over the universe. “God should be able to touch all of creation,” but he can’t do that if his fingers have to stay by his side. That’s why everyone ascended at the same time and the cavaliers went to their death. Before that, though? There was no point. I doubt he knew of the RBs until after the resurrection was complete.

Two: why the necro/cav pairs? I just... don't see why he'd split his friends into matched couples. I think it’s way more likely that the concept of “death wizard and death wizard’s fighting sworn companion” as social roles and as a tradition, is something that evolved because the original disciples made it a custom, rather than because John designed it to be that way. And, if he could bestow necromancy at will, why not give it to everyone who’d stood by him? Why did it have to be an even number split in couples, everyone with their companion? Like, I don’t think it’s out of character for John to go on a godly power trip and decide who gets to have powers. But I also don’t see why he would create a divide within the group. (Later, after 200 years, I absolutely get why he’d want to be THE most important person in all his Lyctors’ lives. But I don’t get that same vibe from immediately post-apocalypse, based on the flashbacks)

Basically, it's both some of the choices in who ended up a necromancer, and just... the forethought that this decision implies. John isn't a great schemer IMO, and I doubt he was especially lucid in the time right before the resurrection; I don't think he sat down and started worldbuilding his new social order and space empire. (Yes, he very much did build the Houses like a DM worldbuilding for an RPG campaign, but that happened more gradually and his friends had a lot of influence. I don't think the beforehand had much planning involved.)

Also: a lot of what John does, power-wise, is vibes. His soul merging with Alecto was done totally on the fly. Figuring out you can bestow necromancy, figuring out how necromancy is bestowed, doing some trial and error until you know how it works, and only then resurrecting your buddies—IDK, that’s a lot of planning.

Anyway. This is why I think that if he MADE a choice, it was subconscious. That's why more in line with how John does things.

[veliseraptor]

Did you ever find a decaf tea that you liked (to replace caffeinated ones in the afternoon/evening)?

oh man, I wish I could say yes. I have lately been drinking just lady grey decaf when I want a black tea fix in the evenings, and otherwise I have my herbals that I kind of cycle through (of which honey vanilla chamomile has become my go-to 'calm down lise' tea)...oh, and a decaf mint green tea that's pretty nice. but nothing I'm really in love with, at this point.

there is a decaf hot cinnamon spice harney & sons that I need to try, I like the caf version of that one so probably I'll like the non-caf? but haven't done it yet.

sometimes I think it would be nice if I was just a little less caffeine sensitive. but then I'd probably have to start drinking coffee to wake up in the mornings and I don't want that

[mayedays]

I keep trying to figure out why I’m still so irked by (a) what Tamsyn Muir is doing with John and (b) the fandom reaction to John (despite the fact that I’ve accepted, at least intellectually, that she means for him to represent both the Father and the Son and therefore he is not simply meant to be: a Christian projection of Christianity’s flaws onto the “God of the Old Testament” that needs to be fixed by Jesus (supersessionism FTW!)).

Warning for me spending a lot of time hand-wringing about something that probably isn’t that important and possibly me putting my whole foot in my mouth and sticking my nose where it probably doesn’t belong. Simultaneously! And possibly incoherently! [In case someone unexpected stumbles across this (and the previous paragraphs weren't clear enough) I feel the need to clarify: this isn't a callout post for Tamsyn Muir, this is me trying to work through and analyze my complex feelings about her work and the fandom response to it. As such, it may contain statements that are presumptuous and you shouldn’t read this post if that’s likely to upset you.]

I think there are a disparate things going on that continue to grate. I think one of them is that, as a Jewish Atheist, I don’t consider God to be real and therefore I don’t consider him responsible for Christianity’s sins (e.g. imperialism/colonialism, child sexual abuse, etc). I consider *Christians* to be responsible for it, so to have Jod be simultaneously a “Christian” Emperor, Space-Pope, and a diagetically unambiguously real God all at once...it feels kinda weird that they are all being conflated/merged into one character, since I only consider two of those three to be real and therefore accountable for the violence of Christianity (obviously there have been many popes and Christian emperors, I’m treating them as one for simplicity). I also wouldn’t want to blame Jesus for this, like, yes! let’s blame the Jewish man murdered by the Roman Empire for the Roman Empire hijacking the religion he inspired and using it as a tool of Imperialism, and then the British Empire also using it as a justification for Imperialism, etc!! And since John is also a Jesus figure, this is another angle where the choices seem weird, because I keep going “is she trying to blame Jesus for it?!” even though I know that that’s stupid and simplistic. Of course, if she genuinely believes/believed in God-as-told-by-Catholicism, then it makes sense that she would blame him (and Jesus) for Christianity’s sins--he’s an all-powerful figure! If he’s real and he didn’t want Christians to commit evil, why didn’t he intercede? But for me it just feels a little like absolving individual Christians of their choices

So: I don’t much like seeing a Christian author hang the responsibility for Christian violence on the Christian God/Jesus because it feels like its absolving the Christian masses of how they interpreted God and used God to justify violence. And I’m not entirely sure that this is what she’s trying to do...but it does seem that this is how its being received by the fandom, many of whom hate Jod with maximum vitriol (I am still bitter about the fact that the first time I dared venture into the John Gaius tag, I only made it to the third page before I  found a long character-hate screed that end with the writer hoping he would be tortured forever. I will always be bitter.) but often don’t hate the other Ninth-house characters with near as much passion. Abigail, and Magnus, and Harrow, and Gideon, etc. are typrically all approached with a degree of sympathy despite being implicated in the Nine Houses’ colonialism--they are not the people at whom the buck stops, and they are actively being prevented from understanding their world accurately by Jod, who is lying to the entire Empire.

Additionally, because I am a Jew and therefore a member of a group that has historically been one of European Christianity’s primary victims, I feel some amount of...idk, resonance? kinship? (is it presumptuous to say this? god, probably, but I hope any readers will bear with me while I try to explain further) with aspects of the Māori experience as victims of Christianity. Like, obviously there is a lot of difference between the experience of being Māori and subject to colonization and being Jewish and subject to Christian persecution, perhaps there is more different than there is similar, but both communities are still in the “screwed over by white Christian society” camp.

This in turn means that it feels kinda upsetting to see someone who is probably white (or Pākehā, more specifically--caveats on this in the next paragraph) creating a Māori man as a symbol of the moral transgressions of Catholicism and Imperialism. To put it another way, I probably would have rage-quit the series if John was revealed to be a Jewish character (who converted to Catholicism) instead of a Māori one. Maybe that means I have hopelessly plebeian (or pedestrian) tastes, but I would not be okay with a Christian writer doing with a once-Jewish character what Muir is doing with this Māori one (although, I suppose “Jewish person dies and becomes Christian God” is literally Jesus’s arc, so). So I’m kinda in a constant state of “what! the fuck! does everybody else know! that I don’t! that makes them comfortable with this!” and “maybe I’m just being absurdly rigid and dogmatic?!?”.

But to be fair, It is entirely possible that Muir could actually be Māori, and that she is simply private about her ethnicity/ancestry, which is her right. I agree that she has a right to privacy! And yet, this means I can’t put my anxiety to rest, because it puts Muir in a state analogous to a quantum superposition--because I can’t make the measurement, she is both Māori and not Māori at the same time. I could just cut the Gordian knot by saying “anyone can write what they want, but how they handle it is open to criticism, and one’s ability to handle fraught material is not solely determined by ones identity markers” thereby making her identify irrelevant (which I suspect is her view on the matter) but I can’t simply say that because while its true that anyone has that right and that perhaps identify should be irrelevant...that doesn’t mean they are entitled to me as audience and there are certain narratives I don’t want to read (if the makes my tastes hopelessly plebeian/pedestrian, so be it!), and I have to decide if I’m willing to risk reading Alecto the Ninth without knowing if Alecto the Ninth is going to confirm that this is the narrative she is writing. I think my best bet is to walk away from the Gordian knot by saying ‘I don’t want to read Alecto the Ninth’ (or ‘I won’t read it until someone with my same intuitions about this says they think its fine’). And yet, I just kinda keep spinning...somehow this doesn’t lay to rest this issue. I suppose its because I really do want to read it, and I keep trying to bargain for an outcome I can tolerate by reiterating the argument about why she would never write my worst-case (or adjacent) scenario. But I can’t control what Muir writes, so there isn’t any point in endlessly mentally bargaining with the universe. Its also likely that I don’t really believe “I don’t have to read this, I don’t owe her anything”. Because she’s right in that interview, marginalized authors really ARE put under greater scrutiny...and therefore I feel bad about refusing to read something because “it might offend me”. Obviously the loss of my single purchase for AtN won’t make or break anything, but I still have the sense that I’m being part of a problem.

And the stupidest part is, intellectually I can’t really bring myself to believe that Muir would be so crass as to make a Māori character as a scapegoat/symbol of Chrisitianity’s sins (or the British Empire’s sins) so he can be brutally punished for the catharsis of the (probably mostly white) audience. But I have Anxiety! The Condition and I also don’t really trust my own intuitions about this. Maybe its my judgment that’s borked, or there is an angle I’m overlooking.

And then of course there is the problem that I find some of (what I presume are) John’s emotional/self-esteem problems painfully relatable (which may be a sign that I’m just projecting) and therefore am doing a bad job of maintaining separation and so taking everyone’s hatred of him as judgment of myself (despite the fact that I have never done anything nearly as bad as John). So...that part is fun.

[mayedays]

Made some homemade labneh because I was hoping it would be more like the small-batch labneh that I can get at the mediterranean grocerer than the mass-produced labneh I can by at my usual grocery store. I'm not sure it was exactly like, but it was definitely an improvement over the mass-produced stuff (which is really more like sour cream--not remotely cheesy). Also it was dead-easy. Literally just high-fat plain greek yogurt mixed with salt and allowed to strain overnight in a cheese-cloth (suspended over a bowl). Will definitely be doing that again.

[mayedays]

The guy who responded "yes" to "should France should adopt English" can't be serious right? (What function could that possibly serve?!?)

I’d add that many modern constructions of nationalism are based on and inextricable from INTERPRETATIONS of deeply held cultural identities and practices that are thousands of years old as well as the aspects of culture that are inescapable panopticons - language, food, agriculture, religion etc. That coexists in a complicated manner with the fact the nation state is a modern concept. there are a few hundreds nation states on earth and thousands of ethnic groups. There is simply no way to universally allow for a nation state as an inalienable aspect of self determination that’s internationally codified without some of the borders of those nation states stepping on the borders of others. The sooner everyone could be a big boy about this

[mayedays]

need to stopping being on tumblr so much as its destroying my ability to concentrate. will be trying to set myself a timelimit of 30 minutes a night