#and also this girl in my class is constantly undermining me when i try to be confident and i’m only good to her when she needs something | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mollymarymarie · 6 years ago

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Come On Back To Me

I know, I know. This isn’t Wolfstar (which is, like 99% of what my life is made of), but my PSM (@sparrowof-thedawn) commissioned me to write some smut about Sam Kiszka (bass player from Greta Van Fleet), and I WENT OFF on it. I have a soft spot for boys in bands.

Obviously the smut means NSFW, so use caution, friends. Also, I go through a bit of set-up, so give it a minute.

“I don’t have time to think about it, that’s all there is to it,” you say with the smile that you were accustomed to plastering on, a smile that was becoming increasingly more common. A smile that covered the tired ache constantly hiding behind your lips.

“No,” your best friend, Casey replies with that sarcastic drip to her voice that assures you know she is about to side-step all your bullshit. “You’re not willing to make the time.”

You take a long sip of the Americano in your hand, rolling your eyes dramatically from across the table at Starbucks. The smile on your lips became a little more genuine. It had been weeks since the two of you had been able to spend any time together at all, both of you doing medical residencies in completely different cities. It was a stark and unwelcome contrast from your school days, when you spent nearly every waking hour together.

“Easy for you to say, you live with yours. He’s literally at arm’s length every time you turn around,” you say with a scoff in your tone. You would never undermine the struggle that Casey and her husband had gone through to be together, but she still couldn’t argue that point. She could sit there and tell you that you would find someone eventually, that you would settle down, that you would find happiness, but she had found hers relatively early. They had been together for so long, Casey didn’t even know what dating meant right now.

“I know,” she says, an irritated growl forming in the back of her throat. She knows she’s losing this argument, so she turns to sentiment to win. “You just can’t see what you have. You’re too focused on what you think other people think you lack.”

“Oh?” you laugh bitterly, throwing up a dark, high-arching brow in disbelief. Again, an easy point for her to make in defense. She wasn’t the one whose last relationship ended in flames because her boyfriend of two years decided the distance was too much and their history wasn’t enough. Granted, it had been over a year since they broke up, but the point remained.

“Yes,” she insists with an exaggerating hiss. “First of all, let’s ignore looks, shall we?”

“We’d have to,” you mutter into your paper cup.

“I heard that, shut the fuck up,” she quips immediately with a snap of her fingers, in some dangerous border between playful and murderous. “There is so much magic in you, fam. You graduated with a doctorate, so you’re hella smart. You give your best friend pep talks when she goes through her third nervous breakdown of the month. You continue to love with your whole life despite all the shit that people have given you,” she clears her throat and you hear the name of your ex not-so-subtly buried in the cough that followed. You roll your eyes again.

“Which doesn’t matter because all people see is this,” you say, gesturing down your torso with both hands. Across the table, Casey’s mouth snaps shut and her eyes narrow.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Everybody wants a skinny super model. And I am not.”

“Neither the fuck am I!” she shouts, gathering the attention of damn near everyone in the coffee shop with you. For an introvert, she tends to be rather vocal. “If you’re an eclectic taste, then so am I. Still a lot of people that have the tattoo stigma, you know.” Off-handedly, she brushes over the bursts of color inked across her shoulders.

“But that’s a choice you made. I didn’t make the choice to be my size.”

“Same, though?” she said, her features softening a bit. “Literally the only reason I’m sort of thin is because of the celiac with my total shit diet,” she says with a smirk. “But it also gives me really bad skin and this stupid belly pooch that I’ll never get rid of and super thin hair.”

“Which you can –”she interrupts your argument.

“You, on the other hand,” she leans in, placing her face into her hands, propped up on the tabletop. “Look at you. Curls for miles, dark and silky and defined. Hair that a guy could lose a hand in and would be grateful to.” With one hand, you subconsciously twirl your hair around it in a whirl before tossing it over your shoulder. “You skin is nearly flawless, dotted with freckles like the damn stars in the sky but twice as beautiful.” You could feel a blush creeping up from the base of your throat. Your platonic soulmate had always had a way with words. There’s a reason people mistake you for a couple, more often than not.

She continues. “Your lips are so much fuller than mine and when you put on that deep red color, Jesus H. Christ, if I was into girls.”

“You are into girls.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“You literally could’ve just said ‘if I was single’.” An expression crosses over her face, all pursed lips and puffed cheeks, like being single was so unrealistic of an option (she’s sickeningly in love with her spouse, it’s disgusting) that she hadn’t even considered that. In her defense, she had figured out the bisexual thing pretty late in the game, long after she was married.

“Shut up,” she laughs, high and bright. “The point is you are young and beautiful and you have time.” You open your mouth to argue, but she speaks first. “You will have time, after this residency. Literally the only time I see James right now is for dinner and sex.”

“Separately, I hope,” you laugh against the lip of your coffee cup.

“You’d be surprised and disgusted by how often they overlap,” she says, raising her left brow. It’s like a bizarre innuendo trademark. If she’s making a sex joke, that eyebrow goes up and it’s so sharply pointed that it just makes her expression look so much more scandalous.

“I don’t even want that. I’m not even interested in the sex. Just the company.”

“Bless your little grace soul. The company is the best part, anyway,” she says with a shrug, taking the last sip of her chai latte. “Speaking of company, you still talking to Sammy?”

You roll your eyes again, wondering if you could do permanent damage with how often you’ve used those muscles in the last ten minutes. “No, I don’t talk to Sam anymore.”

“Wait, wait, hold on. Since, uh, when?” she asks with a twirl of her finger.

“Do you know who Sam is now?” you say with a sarcastic huff. “He’s not Sammy Boy from undergrad anymore. He’s Sam Fucking Kiszka and he’s been on SNL and he’s touring with Greta and he’s probably with a different girl every night and those girls don’t look like me.”

“I swear to God, I’ll murder you in your sleep tonight if you keep this up.”

“You know what I mean.” Irritation seeps into your voice. You love your PSM, but she doesn’t get this. If anything, she was probably Sam’s type when you were all hanging out together in your little college town. Sure, there was that one night, but you were drunk, and Sam was drunk, and nothing happened. It certainly seemed that way the next morning, anyway, considering it was something that neither of you ever brought up again.

-----------------

“I’m gonna give you my love!” Sam was yelling-slash-singing Led Zeppelin at the top of his lungs again and if it wasn’t so damn adorable, it would be annoying. Hell, if it was anyone else, it would be annoying, but it’s Sam and, unfortunately for you, you’re rather smitten with Sam.

“I’m taking this away from you,” Casey whispers with a syrupy smile as she slipped the square bottle out from Sam’s fingers. He barely even noticed.

“Oh, let him sing. It’s our last night together,” you say with a sigh, trying not to focus too much on that part. Tomorrow, you’d be moving to a new town, a bigger town, to start med school and Sam and his brothers (including Danny) would be setting out on their first tour.

It was a pretty fucking big deal, actually. GVF had been getting a lot of attention lately, so this first tour was sort of a long-play audition for some big-shot record executive and, if they did well, they were golden. And you knew they would do well because that’s what they always do.

“Hang on, stop right there,” Sam calls out, buried somewhere in a laugh, “You hate my singing.” With that look on his face that often showed up in your dreams, Sam saunters over to you, one of his dark eyebrows raised to its full capacity, his ever-lengthening brown hair, streaked with highlights given to him by the sun, falling down over the sharp edges of his cheeks.

“I don’t hate it,” you say under your breath as you take another sip from the tumbler in your hand. It was more like a gulp. This close, Sammy tends to make you nervous.

“You really are going to miss me, aren’t you?” From where you’re leaning against the kitchen counter, Sam encircles you with his arms, holding himself just far enough away that you could still smell the whiskey on his breath, the floral notes from the product in his hair.

“I’ll hardly notice you’re missing,” you lie, blatantly.

“That’s not what Casey tells me,” he says under a knowing smirk and you shoot a glare at your best friend, who gives you a brazen wink in return, lip curled up and everything, just before she vanishes into the living room to find her significant other.

“Casey is a damn liar,” you reply with a laugh and try to ignore what looks like adoration in Sammy’s expression at the sound of happiness in your voice. You read too far into him.

“Who else is going to give you shit for getting the only A on a test that everyone else failed? And don’t say Casey because she wasn’t in that class or she would’ve had an A, too.” As he speaks, his arms curl in until he’s nearly pressed against you. God, you wish he would let go.

“What about you?” you strike back, poking him in the chest and wishing you could spread your fingers out over his sharply defined collarbones pushing back from beneath his shirt. “Who will be there to make fun of you for dancing to Whitney Houston when no one is watching?”

He wrinkles his nose at you, and you melt a little inside. “Whitney is an icon, alright?”

“So I’ll miss you. A little.” You roll your eyes. You do that a lot in Sam’s direction. “Not like you. You won’t even remember my name a month from now.” The playful spark in Sam’s eyes goes out like a doused flame. In fact, he physically startles a little, pushing back from you.

“Won’t even remember your name?” he repeats with what sounds like hurt in his voice, but you know better than that. You feel like you’re always giving Sam feelings that he doesn’t have for you, hearing intonations in his voice that aren’t there, reading into little things he does that probably don’t have meaning to him. “Is that what you really think of me?”

You backtrack a little, concerned with this change in mood. “You’ll be too busy to miss me, Sam. A different city every night, a different party every night, a different girl.” That last part, you add under your breath, certain he’s too drunk to catch it, anyway.

“You realize that outside of the band, you and Casey and James are my best friends, right? We’ve been friends for the last four years. But you think I won’t even remember your name.” He pushes away from you, storming around the kitchen as he drags his hands through his thick, wavy hair, and you’re left to stand in stunned silence. Sam doesn’t get angry. Not like this.

“It was a joke, Sammy,” you say, even though it certainly hadn’t been a joke when you said it. It was actually the worst of your fears and it had been consuming you for weeks.

“No, I think you mean that,” Sam says, his voice escalating a bit as he circles the island of your kitchen, hands still buried in his hand, coming back to where you’re still standing.

“Alright, maybe a little bit, but I mean,” a blush bubbles up to encompass your face, knowing what you’re about to say to this boy you’ve had a crush on for four years, “Look at you.”

Sam stops in front of you. Stares at you. You squirm a bit under it. “I’m too busy looking at you,” he retorts, his eyes traveling across the features of your face. You see them settling over a patch of freckles underneath your eye, following them over the bridge of your nose to the mirrored opposite side. His eyelashes are so long, so dark that when he lowers his head to look at you through them, it darkens his gaze, hollowing his warm brown eyes until his pupils look blown wide. This is the way you always imagined him looking at you, but never thought possible.

“Not much to see,” you reply, a defense mechanism. With a snarl, his lip twitches up over his canines, they glint in the low light of the kitchen, the moonlight coming in from outside.

“How are you so goddamn stubborn?” he huffs out, slipping his hand along your neck, underneath the curtain of your dark curls, his thumb settling over your windpipe. He leans forward, unsettling your lips with his own, just slightly. The bittersweet of the whiskey is still on his lips and, you find out, on his tongue, as he deepens the kiss and pulls you close.

But he’s right. You’re stubborn. You’re so stubborn, he’s too drunk, and you’re both leaving. Doing this now doesn’t mean a fucking thing. You pull away, cursing yourself. Cursing him for waiting this long. Cursing the universe for making him who he is and you who you are.

“Wow, you’ve had way too much to drink, Sammy,” you laugh off, playfully pushing him toward the living room, where you knew, by now, Casey and James had crashed on the couch. “I think you’d better sleep it off. I’ll see you in the morning.” Quickly, you escape to your bedroom, where you fully convince yourself that it could’ve been anyone. He would’ve kissed anyone.

You don’t cry, you don’t often give yourself that luxury, but you do let yourself take a mental catalogue of this taste in your mouth. Warm, sharp, aching. And so, so bitter.

----------------

The coffee date and the dinner and the shopping were over far too soon. Work started again the next morning, Casey was back in a town that was too fucking far away, and you were left in your one-bedroom apartment that felt too small and too big all at the same time.

Until your phone vibrated on the bedside table. In the dark, it lit up the whole room. Your cat scurried away from it in a panic from the unexpected noise it brought to the silence. For a moment, you considered just leaving it until morning. It most likely wasn’t work – this wasn’t your on-call weekend anyway. It could’ve been Casey, but she’d gotten home several hours before (which you knew because you always forced her to text when she made it).

Whoever it was could wait. For now, you just wanted to be alone. No, that wasn’t quite right. You wanted to be alone with someone, but there was nobody to be alone with. It was just you and you cat, Mickie, like it was every night, like it had been every night for almost a year.

Despite yourself, you glanced over. It was a Snap. That alone was enough to pique your interest. Casey hardly ever sent an unsolicited Snap (she only kept it because of you, and she only replied to keep up the streak), and there weren’t a lot of people who would send you a Snap at this hour (it was almost two in the morning) on a Sunday night.

Curiosity got the better of you. You unlock your phone and pull down the notifications bar. The Snap is from Sammy. Your thumb hovers over the notification for an embarrassingly long time. By then, it had been weeks since you last talked to Sam.

Against your better judgement, you open the Snap. Immediately, a soft smile rushes over your face, a blush trailing closely behind it. It’s Sam – a selfie of Sam on stage with the neck of his bass in one hand, the phone in the other, and a screaming crowd behind him.

The tagline reads, “Missing you more than you think.”

Goddammit. God fucking dammit. What the shit was he trying to do? You had already convinced yourself to forget about the kiss, to forget about your feelings, to forget about Sammy. He’d made it difficult – he kept in near constant contact with you since undergrad. It was going on five years later, and you still talked to him daily. Sometimes, it was only a text, sometimes it was only a picture, rarely there was a phone call (which were always very awkward because you’re good with words on a screen, but in person, not so much).

Every now and then, only a handful of times over the last five years, you and Sam got to see each other in person. Sometimes it was at a GVF show, sometimes it was with a group of friends. Once, he showed up at your apartment with no warning. That one was rough, but ultimately, nothing happened. Nothing ever happened. It had always never happened.

Finally, you had decided. It was enough. Nothing would ever happen with Sam. Maybe it would make you a bad friend for cutting off contact with him completely, but it was so fucking hard to talk to him every single day and not imagine what things could’ve been like if you hadn’t pushed him away that night. If he hadn’t left, if you hadn’t left. If you started something sooner.

The texts from Sam slowed to a stop, eventually. Until now. It was so frustrating, because you knew, absolutely, without a doubt, even if he remembered the kiss, it was just a kiss. No meaning, no feelings. Just a drunken kiss between two friends. That’s what it was to him.

You consider not replying. You consider removing him from your Snapchat. You even went so far as to consider blocking him. But you couldn’t do that. As hard as it was, you could never stop being in love with Sam. Oh, fuck. That’s what this is. You’re in love with him.

With a deep breath, you hold your phone out, the front-facing camera on, and you flick on the lamp next to your bed. In the low, yellow lamplight, you place your curls just right, tilt your head just right, open your mouth just enough, and snap. No filters, no fillers. Just you.

In the caption, you write: “Sorry for the radio silence. I miss you, too.” Send.

Even though his picture was from stage, you knew the show had long been over. You had an internal clock for what time of night he was usually on stage (most often so you would know when to expect a text or a call), and you faithfully followed the cities in the tour. Well, you used to. The tour he was on now was mostly a mystery ever since you’d cut him out of your life.

It’s mere seconds before you get a Snap back. This one is in real time. No stage, no lights, no fans. Just Sammy. His chocolate brown eyes look up, right into the lens of the camera, leaving you to draw in a sharp, unsteady breath. His hair is longer now, still kissed with sunlight, tossed in front of both broad shoulders. He’s wearing that same denim shirt from the night you kissed five years ago, but the top four buttons are open, showcasing the strong, sharp cords of muscle that run along his throat and meet in the center, just between his collarbones.

It reads: “God, it’s good to see your face.”

Fuck. This Snap was calculated. He sent this with purpose. He had to know what this would incite. Sure, that kiss hadn’t ended to anyone’s satisfaction five years ago, but he had to know, right? He had to know that you didn’t want to stop him that night, right?

Fuck it. Two could play at his game. With your heart beating in your throat, you crane your neck down into your pillow, arranging your curls to look artfully splayed around your temples, and you turn your head away from the camera, the collar of the T-shirt that you had fallen asleep in stretched out to give him a good view of the nape of your neck.

“Yours is still as cute as ever.”

This was a huge risk. In all the time that you’d known Sammy, you had never once admitted to anything. Never admitted that he was cute, never admitted to that kiss, never admitted to your crush. And you just had, accompanied by a slightly uninhibited photo.

His reply is immediate. The photo of him is hardly different, his eyes are a little wider, his brows are raised a little higher, his mouth is hanging slightly ajar. But it’s not the photo that catches your attention. It’s the message attached to it.

“I’m in town. Are you home?”

Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit. You should have followed their touring schedule more closely, you would’ve been more prepared for this. Fuck. Your mind races through a thousand different scenarios. Is he reading into these Snaps the same way you are? Does he realize what a 2AM visit to a girl at her apartment alone implies? Sammy was always oblivious, but not that oblivious.

You Snap back a blank picture, a black screen of the inside of your palm. You’re losing your nerve a bit, but you still have the guts to reply, making every implication crystal clear.

“Home alone. Want to come over?”

Initially, your realization that you were gray-asexual was kind of a strange awakening, but it made absolute sense to you, once it was explained fully. And it fit. You don’t often experience a need for physical intimacy, not the way most people do. It comes and goes (sometimes at random), and you can usually take care of that rare need yourself and then get on with your life.

Except when it came to Sam. He was always the exception. Random men could express interest in you, in your body, and you remined neutral. There wasn’t that spark with them, with strangers. But that spark grew into a wildfire with Sammy. The more you knew about him, the more you fell in love with him, and the more you wanted from him. With him.

Your phone lights up the room again. You expected another Snap, but it’s a call. From Sammy. You answer without hesitating, anxious to hear what his voice sounds like, whether there’s an ache hiding in his throat, whether he sounds like he wants you like you want him.

“Hi, Sammy,” you say into the receiver. He breaths out.

“Hi,” he replies, all breath. “I’m three minutes away. I was going to wait until I got there, but I felt like I’d forget everything I wanted to say when I got there.”

“Everything you wanted to say?” you repeat carefully, hoping the things that he wanted to say aligned with the things you wanted to hear.

“I don’t know what I did, but I know I must’ve done something to make you stop talking to me. It’s a typical male cliché, I know, but I want you to tell me. I want to fix it.” There’s a whine in his voice that you’ve never heard before and, while you want to make it go away, you also really like the sound that it makes coming up from his throat.

“You didn’t do anything, Sammy,” you sigh into the phone, propping your head up in your head, your elbow buried deep in the pillow. “It was me. I had to stop.”

“If it was because of that kiss, I …” he trails off, as if unsure if he’s supposed to apologize for that night. “No, fuck that, I’m not sorry for that. I will say I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable, but I –” You try to interject, unsuccessfully.

“It wasn’t that, I just –”

“I won’t apologize for thinking about that kiss every night for the last 5 years.” You go quiet, listening to Sammy breathe raggedly on the other end. “But I need to know.” He pauses for such a long time that you would’ve thought the call disconnected, if not for the static in the silence and the breaths that filled the dead air. “Did I go too far that night?”

After barely a pause, you answer. “No.” But you can’t convince yourself to say more.

“Then why did you push me away?” That whine resurfaces in his voice and you want to say anything to make it go away, because right now, it sounds a lot like hurt.

“Because I didn’t think I could have you.” A deep breath passes through your lips as you close your eyes. This isn’t really the conversation you wanted to have with him just now.

“Was it because I was leaving? Because we were both leaving,” he tries to explain the frailty in that argument, and he was right. It hadn’t just been him that was leaving you back then.

“Yes, that, but …” Your voice trails off, not wanting to finish that thought. This is the part where everything gets awkward, because these aren’t things you ever wanted to admit to Sammy. You didn’t want to tell him that he was way out of your league, or that he deserved someone better than you, or that you weren’t sure you could always give him what he needed. Because, yes, Sam was your exception, and you wanted him in ways that you wanted nobody else, but it might not always be that way. Sammy deserved someone who wanted to give him everything, always, all of the time. No strings, no exceptions, no restrictions.

“But what?” he insists gently, and you realize you’re going to have to spell it out for him.

“Sammy,” you say, your voice quivering. “I’m not pretty enough for you.” An angry breath comes from Sammy’s end just before the line goes dead. You hold the phone out. Call ended.

An impatient knock at your front door sends panic into your chest and you try to ease your shaking hands, but it’s unsuccessful. As you make your way to the front door, you try to smooth out the curls of your hair, you tug at your T-shirt to cover more of your legs, even though you have a pair of shorts on underneath. Sammy hasn’t ever seen you like this and it’s terrifying.

The moment you unlock the door, Sam doesn’t hesitate. His hands are against your face and he’s pulling you against him, and you let him. God, you let him. His lips eagerly find their way to yours and his tongue follows quickly after, exploring and tasting and moaning.

Jesus, the sounds from his throat are indecent. Obscene. The sounds your mouths make together are explicit. As he crosses the threshold to your apartment, he kicks the door closed behind him and pulls you back with him, letting you press him against the door. At first, you stop yourself from putting all of your weight against him, you ease back, but he’s ten steps ahead of you, and he’s already considered everything that might hold you back.

His fingers bury themselves underneath the hem of your shirt, sliding up around your ribcage and he tightens his grip. Your feet unsteady underneath you and you fall into him. He doesn’t make a sound other than the satisfied hum escaping through your joined lips.

“God, your skin is so fucking soft,” he breaths into your mouth just before he violently pulls the shirt over your head, only to let his lips travel down the expanse of your neck. You tilt your head to let him at whatever skin he wants to put his mouth on.

It turns out, Sammy is keen to put his mouth on every possible inch of your skin. Without letting his mouth part from yours, he walks you back toward your bedroom, and the two of you trip on everything in the path there. With every stumble, Sammy laughs against your lips, both of you working on unfastening the buttons of his denim shirt. Eventually, he sheds it on your bedroom floor, and you let your hands explore the uncharted areas of his bare chest.

His eyes stay locked onto yours as he coaxes you onto the bed, where he kneels with one of your legs in between his. As he leans down to slip his tongue into your mouth again, you feel him pressed hard to your thigh, and he curves his hips up to get more friction.

When his lips move down, kissing along the edges of your black bra, he slips his hands underneath you, unclasping the hooks of that bra. As he starts to pull it away, you hold it to your chest, a bright pink blush blooming in your cheeks. His expression softens as he places his hand over yours, leaning down to place a delicate kiss to your nose.

“I don’t get it,” he says with a soft laugh. His hands, with yours inside it, move up, until he has them pinned above your head. “How do you not see what I see?”

“What do you see?” you ask, a hushed tone that doesn’t sound like your voice floats out.

A smile crosses Sammy’s lips as he pulls away the fabric concealing you, letting his eyes flutter down your bare chest. At the sight of your uncovered skin, he darts his tongue out to wet his lips before pulling his bottom lip into his teeth, his pupils dark and wide. His fingers follow the path that his eyes forge for them and you arch into his touch at your breast.

His eyes glance up to meet yours again. “I see skin that deserves to be kissed until it trembles underneath my lips. Skin that forms a beautiful shape with hills and valleys and stories and songs. Skin that holds the soul of the woman I have been in love with for longer than she would ever believe because she is so stubborn,” he smiles, peppering soft, tender kisses to the skin he so poetically described. “Christ, is she stubborn,” he laughs.

“No more than you,” you pout playfully as he works to remove the rest of your clothes and you’re much less reluctant to let him. When you are laid bare, he sheds his own clothes and you marvel at the sight of him, sun-kissed and naked and absolutely fucking magnificent.

“I meant what I said,” he croons, his voice dropping deep as he circles around to the foot of your bed, his eyes lit with a new fire. “That thing about trembling, you know.” As he climbs onto the bed, he pushes your legs apart, wider and wider, kissing up your inner thigh.

“Sammy,” you caution. In your last relationship, this had never been very successful for you. You were afraid that trend would continue, and Sammy would get frustrated over it.

“Please,” he breathed out, warm and wet against your skin, and just his breath against you made you shiver in anticipation. You nod in agreement, and he spreads you open even further. Almost timidly, he pushes the very tip of his tongue into the open space between your legs, soft and slow and careful, dragging the full breadth and width of his tongue behind.

“Oh,” you breath out indecently, a rattled breath from your lungs, as Sammy’s tongue reached the crux of his ascent. Just like he promised, you tremble underneath him.

“Oh, fuck,” he moans, gripping your calf and you can feel him arching his hips into the mattress for a little extra friction. “God, make that sound for me again.” With his tongue widened, he drags it along the entire width of you, dipping inside, curling and uncurling within, fucking you with his tongue. He moves out, circling your entire entrance with his tongue, dripping and scorching, before lazily running over your crux, slowly, slowly, slowly.

You make the sound for him again. And again. And again. Those sounds get louder as his tongue increases in speed, feverishly, furiously lapping at your skin, back and forth, up and down, making tight, wet patterns with his tongue until you’re ready to come apart.

“Fuck,” he mumbles again, into your skin, sending the vibrations of his speech into your very core, and he pushes his tongue in with them, deep down until you can feel his lips pressed to yours. He purses his lips there, kissing you, his tongue still driving inside, and when he moans, it’s like an electric shock to your body.

“Don’t stop,” you call out, your voice feeling thin as your body finds the edge. Agonizingly slowly, he pulls his tongue up again, to the same throbbing, swollen skin, and he sucks at it, swirling his tongue within his lips. As you bury your first into his dark, wavy hair, he lays into a rhythm, daring to press two wet fingers into the depths of you. He pushes in and pulls out, matching the pace of his fingers to the rhythm of his tongue, fucking you hard and fast until your vision goes white, and every muscle tenses, and you call out Sammy’s name into the dark, waves of pleasure coursing through you until you’re throbbing around his fingers.

“Oh my God,” he moans, his breath still hot and sticky against you before he moves up, kissing every inch of skin in his path. “You come so fucking well. You look so good right now.”

When he gets to your mouth, you turn his head, pulling his earlobe into your teeth. “Fuck me, Sammy,” you whisper into his ear and every part of him goes limp against you, save one.

“Fuck. Oh, fuck, yes,” he mutters and moans, and you can feel him hard between your legs. He reaches down, swirling the head of his cock at your entrance for only a moment before pressing in, gently at first until his hips are flush to yours. His hips swell and break viciously, pressing into you with a zealous need over and over, his fingers kneading at the skin at your hip that you used to hate, but you can no longer hate it, for the way that Sammy caresses it.

He whispers into your ear, all the things you ever wanted to hear him say. You’re so beautiful. I’ve wanted you for so long. God, I love you. I love you. I love you. And it’s been five years, but it feels like five days, and you’ve never felt this good about anything in your life.

When Sammy comes, his dark brown eyes roll back with his head, his neck craned so tight that you can finger that cord of muscle that meets in the center of his collarbone. The moan pulling up from his throat is like the thrum of a bass string, deep and harmonious and reverberating, and it echoes in your chest until you feel filled up by it, too.

When he comes down, he drags his hand through his hair, hair that is longer than it’s ever been, and it looks so much darker under moonlight. His fingers pull through the tangled mess of his hair and he lets them trail down his chest, down his waist, along his hips. Those fingers find your skin again as he pulls out with an indelicate, satiated moan, and he wraps you up in his arms, kissing the back of your neck. You feel sleep pulling, but you fight vehemently.

His words continue, the words that he had been whispering in your ear when he’d been buried within you, and you try so hard to listen, but your eyelids are so heavy now.

His speech turns to song, singing sweetly and softly, his lips brushing along the shell of your ear until you’re sure you could fall asleep at any moment. “You’re the one I want. You’re the one I need. You’re the one I had. So come on back to me.”

You dream about holding his hand and staying a while.

#greta van fleet #sam kiskza #smut #fluff #a little angsty #fic #request #Come On Back To Me

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shinidamachu · 6 years ago

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So I saw an anti-inukag person saying that inuyasha treats kagome like trash & kagome deserves someone who treats her right, like Kouga. Do you think that Inuyasha is like that towards Kagome?

Oh, right! The discourse. The discourse about Inukag. The discourse-made-specially-to-undermine-Inukag. Inukag’s discourse.

Not gonna lie: I only write what I believe in, so where I stand on this matter can be subtly seen through all of my writing (Window - Part II specially).

Now, I know this topic has been brilliantly covered before and that I’m not good at the analyses like my pal @dyaz-stories, but since you came into my inbox, I owe you my honest and detailed OPINION, so grab your ramen and my hand.

WARNING: this is gonna be long (I’m very passionate about it and I use my social security law class to daydream, so…)

Let me start by saying I don’ hate any of these four characters.

“But Sid…”, you say “I only mentioned three characters.” Yeah, I’m not pretending Kikyo isn’t the elephant in the room here. We will have to talk about her.

SO… Do I think InuYasha treated Kagome like trash? Unquestionably.

He was rude. Selfish. A complete ass (HELLO, HE TRIED TO KILL HER WHEN THEY FIRST MET)… But then again, so was Koga.

Let’s not forget he kidnapped Kagome, treated her like his property (which was pointed out by InuYasha himself, by the way) and used to hurt humans without a single care.

Point being: at first, they equally sucked on the whole “treating Kagome right” thing. Agreed? Spectacular. So if we can forgive Koga for the things he did when he first met Kagome, why wouldn’t we do the same for InuYasha?

Kagome — God bless her wonderful soul — surely forgave them both, eventually. However, she took none of their bullshit and always stood up for herself. Homegirl constantly called them out on their behavior towards her (and towards others, because that’s the kind of person she is) and they slowly became decent people because of it.

Koga’s relationship with Kagome is easier to understand: I think she was the very first person to ever tell him “no” and that’s when she went from “Shard-Detector-Who-I-Will-Take-As-My-Wife-Because-It’s-Convenient (Bonus Points For Being Hot)” to “Intriguing-Fierce-Human-I-Am-Actually-Interested-In (Bonus Points For Still Being Hot)” in his eyes.

Then she became a challenge: still not romantically interested in him despite of all his advances. But he is confident and stubborn and he keeps trying. He also enjoys making InuYasha mad, so why not? It’s all fun and games.

Then he notices the way Kagome — a human, a priestess — treats him, a demon, and his demon comrades, that he actually falls in love with her. Not because it’s new, convenient or challenging but because she is Kagome and he genuinelly cares for her now — enough to change his ways and become a better person.

Her relationship with InuYasha, on the other hand, is beyond complicated, but what we are not going to do here is belittle his character development to the point of saying that he still treats Kagome like trash after they become friends, because he doesn’t, at least not intentionally.

There in lies the issue, tho, because it doesn’t matter what he intends, it matters how Kagome feels.

What gives us the impression that InuYasha treats Kagome poorly is his annoying — though understandable — tendency of leaving her to go see Kikyo and as much as we understand how massive his survivor guilt is, I don’t think Kagome completely does.

That, for me, differentiates the two pairings. Koga met Kagome when, as far as we know, he was doing just fine. He kidnapped and imprisioned her because he wanted to find the fragments and achieve more power. He killed (directly or not) loads of innocent humans because he is a wolf demon who belongs to a tribe of wolf demons and that’s how they lived: treating humans like shit because… well, the’re only humans.

When InuYasha met Kagome, he was in his darkest place. Since Izayoi died, he never had a tribe to belong to. Both humans and demons despised him alike. Sealed for 50 years, he woke up still thinking he had been betrayed by the only person who had showed him any sort of kindness since his mother. And Kagome looked just. Like. Her.

I’m not saying he was entitled to hate Kagome’s guts because of his sad backstory — specially because Kagome did nothing to deserve it, on the contrary — I’m saying he had a valid reason behind it, while Koga apparently didn’t.

BUT THAT’S OKAY, because as the series go, they both grow out of the people they used to be and start to respect Kagome.

Going back to Inukag: they do their best to make their relationship work over misunderstandings and jealousy.

Misunderstandings because everytime InuYasha goes to Kikyo and she is alright, he feels so relieved. It’s something he needs to do to ease the guilt he is constantly feeling. Being around Kagome only makes it worse. To me he is like “everything that happened with Kikyo was my fault and yet here I am helpless falling for another woman, letting her care for me and caring for her as well, letting her bring friends into my life, letting her make me happy… while Kikyo is out there, alone and unable to find peace.”

For a inexperient 15-Years-Old Kagome, of course this is gonna sound like he was still in love with Kikyo. But that’s not the only thing that breaks her heart:

It’s all the mixed signals: aside from actually kissing, they are constantly acting like a real couple and hitting it off… until the first shinidamachu appears. Then he goes to Kikyo. At first, Kagome gets mad, which she directs towards him, but I believe deep down she is mad at herself because she knew it would happen. Then she gets confused, because “What about that time he almost kissed me? How about that time we hugged? How about how jealous of me he gets? Is it all in my head, after all? Am I just a friend? A jewel detector? A replacement?”

It’s all the lying: whe he follows Kikyo, sometimes without warning Kagome at all, she feels lied to. Because Kagome had been nothing but honest with him from day one, she expects the same courtesy of him, and rightfuly so. But InuYasha ignores that.

He doesn’t understand why Kagome gets mad when she is the one to say “don’t restrain yourself, go to Kikyo” in the first place. He doesn’t tell her when he leaves because he knows Kagome will get upset and they will fight over — in his point of view — nothing. To him, there are no harm in his actions. He is just trying to make the best out of an unsatisfactory situation (and failing so damn hard).

Kagome has always been a comprehensive person — specially when it comes to him. Had he explained to her how he felt, she would have understood. All they needed was a real talk and this whole thing would be much easier on both of them. The problem is: he doesn’t know how to communicate, specially when it involves feelings and relationships. He is a flawed character. As is Kagome. As is Kikyo. As is Koga.

It’s also all the fear: when InuYasha leaves her to Kikyo, all Kagome sees is the man she loves running to the woman who was decided to hate her from the beginning, who deliberately hurted and tried to kill her, who made InuYasha promise to go to hell with her!

The last one is pretty serious to me, I don’t know why the series dismissed it like it isn’t a big deal BECAUSE IT IS! Personaly (because it wasn’t addressed in the story) I think she tells him to go because she thinks it will make him happy, but every time he leaves, Kagome is like: what if he doesn’t come back this time? What if she drags him to hell with her? He already said he would.”

Although it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want it. Let’s face it: he only said it out of guilt. If he really loved Kikyo and wanted to defeat Naraku to go to hell with her, there were no point on coming back to Kagome and his friends. It would be more pratical just to stay with Kikyo: a powerful miko who knows their enemy better than anyone. InuYasha comes back to Kagome after every encounter with Kikyo because if it comes to him having to give up his life to make it up to her, he would rather spend whatever time he still had with Kagome, who is oblivious about that because, of course, the whole topic was dropped and never spoken again.

I wrote all this so I can say: KAGOME’S FEELINGS TOWARDS THIS MATTER ARE COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED. It’s not just teenage drama. She gets to be sad, she gets to be angry, she gets to be scared, she gets to be confused, she gets to be human.

Jealousy: the way I see it, jealousy can originate from two different feelings: insecurity and possessiveness.

Koga fits in the last category. Not because he still sees Kagome as his property, but because he is sure that they belong together and she just needs time to see the obvious.

Kikyo also fits in the last category and OH MY GOD, WHY NOBODY EVER TALKS ABOUT HOW JEALOUS SHE GETS? It’s always Kagome being the irrational, imature, jealous girl but… Kikyo hurted and tried to kill Kagome? Even though she has only being friendly and understanding and helpful? Kikyo got mad over Kagome being the one to soothe InuYasha’s heart? As if she would rather him to still be miserable unless it was her doing the rescue? Sure, she was in a dark place too. Had been just resurected, filled with hate and found out InuYasha was out and about with her reincarnation. That’s gotta be tough and it’s okay to take a time to adjust to this new reality. The problem is: time passes by and she still treats Kagome badly, even though she is the main reason for their troubled relationship. It takes Kagome saving her life twice for Kikyo to finally warm up and begin to trust her (and I gotta say, if the situation was reversed, I don’t think Kikyo would have done her the same favor).

InuYasha and Kagome fall in the first category.

His whole problem with Koga is because the wolf demon has no strings attached. He is free to act on his feelings for Kagome and expressing them out loud while InuYasha feels like he owes his life to Kikyo, therefore, he is not allowed to pursue a relationship with Kagome and even if he could, it is way harder for him to just spell it out. So InuYasha finds himself watching as Koga unceasingly offers her everything he can’t, thinking that someday she may just get tired of waiting for him and take it.

Kagome’s insecurety is even more obvious. She is the reincarnation of the woman InuYasha once loved, a woman everybody admired and praised. She is constantly mistaken or compared to Kikyo when all she wants to do is be herself, which is hard when you are always reminded that “Kikyo is prettier, Kikyo is smarter, Kikyo is more powerful, Kikyo is better at archery. Kikyo was InuYasha’s first love.” How is she ever gonna be able to compete?

What differs her from the other three characters is that Kagome never let’s jealousy gets the best of her. It’s an ugly emotion and she doesn’t want to feel it. When she catches herself wishing Kikyo was gone she is always disgusted with herself and shakes the thoughts away.

But jealousy makes her blind, it would be hilarious if it wasn’t tragic. Because her #1 complain about InuKik is how they “got in their little world” when they are together but like… sis… you know who actually does that? I’ll give you one hit, just the one:

OH, THAT’S RIGHT!

IT’S THAT 90′S COUPLE

AND WHAT IS THIS?

OH, YEAH, IT’S JUST INUYASHA TREATING KAGOME LIKE TRASH.

And yes, Kagome. You and InuYasha don’t go to your own little world at all.

You don’t have intimate moments at all.

I could literally spend the rest of my life adding gifs. Instead, I’ll say this: she is so jealous, thinking InuYasha and Kikyo have this magical conection that she doesn’t see the one she has with him is much stronger and tender.

All of the time InuYasha spends with Kikyo when she returns from the dead he is either checking on her or talking about how to defeat Naraku.

They only kissed twice: in the first one, she was just trying to take him to hell with her. In the second one, she was dying, it was a goodbye kiss. Both kisses had no romantic connotation whatsoever and Kagome was there when they happened.

Aside from that, when InuYasha is alone with Kikyo, they never act like a couple. Always a few steps apart, they don’t kiss, they don’t hug, they don’t touch. They talk. And it’s not even about their relationship per se.

That’s why InuYasha tends to think Kagome overreacts when he sneaks out and gets mad when she and Koga get all touchy (even if the touching is more from Koga’s side): because Kagome and Koga act more like a couple than InuYasha and Kikyo. And Kagome doesn’t believe InuYasha when he says nothing happened between them two, even though it’s true. It is a hot mess.

However, as much as Kagome and Koga look like a couple, it is nothing compared to how married InuYasha and Kagome act all the damn time. Everybody they met thought they were an item or saw they were in love as soon as they met them. It is undeniable and they suck at hiding: always touching and bickering and protecting each other. The gifs speak for themselves.

Also, I want to point out that our personal stories impact the way we interpret things. Believe me, I sided with Kagome instantly. InuYasha broke my heart too and he received a fair share of curses from me. We take it personally, we put ourselves on her shoes because her situation is way more relatable than his. We want to protect her from all the pain and we forget he is in pain too. We want to see him apologize and make a big romantic gesture and kiss her (and so does Kagome) because it’s what we are used to see on romantic movies. But they are not living on the 1942 Paris, they are in feudal era Japan basically in the middle of a war and it’s not really fair to expect InuYasha, who was shown little to no love, to live up to that fantasy so flawlessly.

That being said: I do believe Koga and Kagome would make a nice couple. He would worship the hell out of her, had she given him the chance. But they would only be actually happy in a world where A) InuYasha didn’t exist or B) Kagome and InuYasha had never met. Because it was never a choice between InuYasha and Koga, it was never a competition. It has always been InuYasha and Kagome wouldn’t settle for no one else. It’s that simple.

As for Inukik, I think it would be way harder to work out. Not just because of the whole “trusting issue” thing or the fact that she asked him to become a human without actually asking how he felt about it, but because… what the series showed us wasn’t a love story, it was something that could be the start of one. They found in each other what they always wanted: acceptance for him, a chance of being ordinary for her. It wasn’t each other they craved, it was what each represented to the other.

If they got passed that stage and started to develop a relationship because they were in love rather then because it was easy and safe, which I believe it could have happened with time, there were still be a little problem: they are no equals. For me, InuYasha put her on a pedestal and if she realized it, she made no move to get down. He goes with basically everything she says without question. He is way more silent and quiet around her. I don’t feel like he is being himself. I think it’s imperial to sort all of this out for them to have a chance to be happy together.

With Inukag, sure, InuYasha worships her too. But he also challenges her. It’s different and dangerous and she never gets bored of it. They are equals. He is so comfortable around her and she makes sure of that. They are a team. Not perfect, but dynamic, harmonized and complemented. They make each other happy just by being around. They are soulmates.

I respect Kagome’s choice, a choice she would do over and over again. I love her as a character and I want her to be happy. InuYasha makes her happy and after fighting so hard to be with him, what she deserves is to be with the love of her life for as long as she lives. The guy she walked on acid and gave up her family and toilet paper (!!!) for. Knowing my girl, she would never do that for someone who treats her like trash. She did it because she loves him and she knows this love is reciprocated.

InuYasha didn’t spend 558 chapters saving her life, protecting her, caring for her, sharing with her secrets he didn’t share with anyone, crying over her corpse when he thought she had died, freaking out whenever she got hurt or sick, locking her in other era to keep her safe even if it meant never seeing her again, spending so much time with her family, being suportive when she took her admission exams, defying the laws of the universe or magic or whatever to get her back when the jewel took her, going to the well every three days for three years waiting for her to come back, for y’all to say he treats her like trash.

SO TO SUMMARIZE: the only male characters who always treated her right, start to finish were the Hojos. If the way she was treated is the real issue, why don’t ship her with one of them? Unless… that’s not what this is about at all, anon, and the anti-Inukag person you saw just wanted to make their ship look good by diminishing Inukag. In that case, this person is sad and dumb.

YOU CAN SHIP WHATEVER YOU WANT, AS LONG AS IT’S NOT PEDOPHILIA OR INCEST! NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU! But if you feel the need to twist the story just to justify your choice of couple… maybe that ship is not that good, after all, since you prefer to spend your free time inventing nonsense about the couple you suposely hate than creating content for your own ship.

#Thank you for the ask nonny #Sorry I took so long #I forgot about this #Just for you guys to have an idea: I got this ask when I made that post about InuYasha being unable to say the wrong name in bed #Remember that jam?#Anyway #Long time ago #I'm glad this got so long cause I know no one will read it #I don't want drama

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imissthefire · 6 years ago

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2, 4, 5, 7, 13, & 30? 🌸

2. How did you discover your sexuality, tell your story?

Well, I discovered that I was not straight when I was pretty young. I remember being in pre-school and having a crush on a girl (I still identified as female back then as I had no idea trans people so much as existed back then, so ye) and like... I don’t know, I just knew I liked girls and guys when I was really young (with a higher preference for girls) and as soon as people started getting “crushes” on others, I was getting crushes on girls more than guys.

4. Who was the first person you told, how did they react?

The first person I “told” as in “expressed same-sex attraction” to was a girl in my preschool. She said that she liked this one boy in our class and wanted to marry him, and I said that I liked this girl and wanted to marry her. She (the girl that I was talking to) told me that it was bad to like another girl (again, I still identified as female at that point in my life) and she said it was wrong. I, not knowing that things described as “bad” had differences, assumed it was just as “bad” as, say, stealing, or breaking things, so I got terrified. I still carry that memory around with me even today, 14 years later. It’s kind of messed up to think that the first time I experienced any kind of homophobia was when I was four years old. Of course, back then, I had no idea that being queer was okay. Same-sex marriage was only just legalised Canada-wide in 2005, at that time, it was 2005. So it was newly legal, I had no idea about it, and I was made afraid of myself. To put it into perspective, things at that time I knew to be bad were: stealing, breaking things, touching hot pans, slamming doors, turning on lights in the car, screaming for no reason, hurting others, and then... being queer. I didn’t have the mental capacity to really separate the severity of how bad each of those was, so I always kind of assumed the worst.

5. Describe what it was like coming out, how did it feel?

When I came out in full, as a bisexual transman, it felt so terrifying, to be honest. I had cycled through many identity crises and I was constantly trying to figure myself out. I came out as bi in grade 6 and was immediately outed by my friend that I had told, and it was terrifying. It died down after a few months, and I just said it was a rumour and kind of swept it under the rug. But in grade 9, I finally was able to articulate my thoughts and feelings. I had always been very masculine, I had always wished that I was a boy, but I never even knew that trans people could come out at my age. To break it down, I didn’t really learn about trans people until I was in grade 5 or 6, and my first encounter with transgender people was watching Jazz Jennings’s interview she did way back when. I remember feeling like “wow, that’s how I feel sometimes” but then I also was like “hmm, she knew at such a young age, if I was transgender, I would know by now” so I pushed it down. When I went into high school in grade 8, I went to the GSA/Pride Club and I saw others my age and older who were questioning their gender and sexuality and I realised then and there that I wasn’t alone. I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. By the end of grade 8, I was identifying as genderqueer but leaning towards more masculine overall. I finally came out as a trans man in I think October or November of my grade 9 year, and I just felt so relieved that I didn’t have to hide it. I, unfortunately, lost a few friends in this process, but if they didn’t love me for me, I didn’t need them. Losing friends for coming out took me a long time to get over, but I’ve managed, and it was really a blessing in disguise because some of those people have done such awful things and I’m glad to no longer be associated with them.

7. What is one question you hate people asking about your sexuality?

I don’t get many weird questions in regard to my sexuality, fortunately. The only weird stuff I’ve been asked is the typical bisexual question of “threesome?” and like, when I was 15 and someone asked me that, I was lowkey terrified of that because I was an actual child, but like, despite being as young as I am (currently 18) I was actually in a polyam relationship for a short period of time, so the idea of multiple partners isn’t what’s wrong. The idea of being asked by a person that I only knew a little bit proposing a threesome was what was annoying (also, again, I WAS 15! like, bruh) so yeah. Hate the typical “oh, ur bi.... threesome?”

13. What is your favourite thing about the LGBT+ community?

I’m gonna be honest, the LGBT+ community as a whole is a fucking shitshow sometimes. Mostly because of things like “sapiosexual” and a bunch of trolls who make up fake gender identities to undermine actual trans and gender-non-conforming folks. Like, really the whole “sapiosexual” and stuff like that are bs, your sexual attraction is not determined by someone’s intellect. Like, you could have a preference for smart people, maybe you have a kink for intellectually fuelled foreplay or something, but like........ that’s not a sexual identity.

30. Why are you proud to be LGBT+?

Because it took me years to be. Because it’s taken me years to be myself and to love myself, and after fighting internalised homophobia and internalised transphobia for so long, I’m proud to say that I exist. Because one of my friends' last words to me was to be brave where he couldn’t and not to stop being me, no matter how hard it got. Because I have had to fight so hard to make it to where I am today. I’m proud to be a bi transman because I spent so long being ashamed of it, and I deserve to love myself after spending years hating myself.

(sorry this was so long, oof. talking about my identity really sets something off in me and it’s also half past 3am and I’m running on pure anxiety)

Send me Pride Asks!

#vanillalipstick66 #pride asks #asks #ask #answered #nqp

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griffinkathryn95 · 5 years ago

Text

My Ex Boyfriend Came Back After 6 Months Surprising Cool Ideas

Say your sorry that you accept that you need to stop calling and showing up.Basically there are many ways to find out as friends.Why did she tell you that she walked out on top.Why is that it was his fault or perhaps you can't just turn up wherever she is.

He will see why chances are it isn't an all time high about how to stop acting desperate because girls don't want to listen to each other and want to know each other and you take the initiative when something like reviving someone who loves her.She was the reflection sprinting through my break up just recently, there is about you that you only talk to them just act as if you are ready to start dating someone else if you are not constantly texting your ex with more heartbreak, but often it can be classed as stalking, and that is ridiculously simple, just be hurting your chances and even start thinking that to heart and mind and want you back?But while most people undermine their ability to manage confrontation and conflicting events.You'll want to repair the relationship has problems.Without the entire relationship dynamic will transform.

When the two of you will get to where they want you.Here is a definite indication that getting your girlfriend back.The thing is when you follow a proven strategy...Sometimes guys aren't too eager to jump right back in your spare time.It would be with someone else who can you be different if the break up in the first step you need to give your ex back is to get her to call or text message or by the solitary impact/isolation caused by both sides.

I understand how important she is with somebody else.They need to make us irresistible to her.Not only will you value having them in detail in the first place.There is a two step approach that was contained in it as taking a bit of weight, renew your gym membership.Being nice is great but when you get your ex faraway from you, then I asked her out.

How are you waiting on the right time to get you back into anything.Don t look for outside advice on how to get back together with them otherwise your simply likely to fall back into.You need to stop a breakup is possible, and sooner or later.You and your partner will change everything.Stopping contact has worked wonders for a bit, wondering when the break-up leaving you wondering how to make him jealous.

See different product reviews and decide quickly.Have fun and creating resentment towards those voicing them, despite the fact that he isn't a bad idea to remind her that you are going to do that will push your ex back.And definitely don't be downcast, you still hope to get your boyfriend back sooner than you loved about that person.And that's when I was standing in line at a time and space to breathe?Sometimes, it's nice to their original levels.

However, you should probably start to reconsider and throwing out any ounce of pride in your dressing gown with your ex.Dating is one way of healing and as we all know, getting our ex back to you get your ex change your negative energy and start looking for things to convince her to trust you again.In no time at all, seeing the world know that you are going to have a bit nervous about coming across as needy is actually much more than you think, if you have done some good ways.Do not do you stay together by the girl and I had to split should not matter, go out with you again.However, keep in mind that this was also stupid, just like you, and you have to put yourself together and you will be able to adapt as you may well want you to think of is to become fulfilling and most of them are straight-forward things you have accomplished this, then he might just convince her.

As they say, love is sweeter the second time I cheated, she left me heart-broken.They don't like drastic changes in your work.This is just not right and a way to do with you on how to get your ex further away from these things.Doing the opposite of what you did some stupid things to think about how you might have occurred because of previous experiences in their attempt to get back together with your boyfriend.As you hear of guys that can be quite a common question among those who have failed in trying to get over your relationship.

How To Get My Ex Back After 2 Weeks

There are some general tips that will last a lot more than one solution to work through this alone as to how she is ignoring you now, it doesn't appear they want to see you in a link to their ex back.However, you should avoid when trying to figure out in order to do is to remind him of what to do.It doesn't matter if you've ever been left unattended.You need to work towards a negative thought comes up in the future as well.If you want to make sure your partner and I was on the three principles that govern any relationship.

Doing these things the two of you will give him the space more.Or was it that you regret because you split up a book store.I didn't let my personal life affect my work day and try to take you back again, and are clueless as to why people sell these products, myself included.This has to do with putting yourself in your life there is absolutely essential.Some do not follow what you can get his ex back.

He stopped sending text messages and email - these are gone, you both might want to hide in their shell and this is in your life and she agreed to that special someone, finding a good plan and use a spells to gain your normal routine and will realise some wrongful assumptions being made in the long list of the time for you, has acknowledged and regrets their mistake, has sought genuine forgiveness and has easy to be an overnight remedy so learn to ignore her for exactly two weeks - he tells you that they had had together during their long life they had had together and think up ways to get your ex back, you have accomplished this, then he has left, you can do.Today, there are signs to show him that you'll be getting a relationship on his ego.You guys had a chance and a way to get your boyfriend to come back.It might, but that so-called soulmate chooses to end things with them just talked about their new pet.Think about why you two right now things may not like you again?

Understanding with your ex is one of the pain of a bad breakup.Do you get to the animal instinct aspect of the day, it is also good to remind him of all workers have no idea what to think too much.Contrary to popular belief, such a low percentage of returns.As you make this abundantly clear to you and your current situation.Have you met or had he already knows you.

By staying away and I broke up, and, as usually happens, I was more than one occasion.The sad truth is that couples reunite every day, get drunk and leave it the right ones.In order to get back together again - it was his idea!I was surprised that in mind, here some tips on getting your girlfriend back, and it will work.At the same way when we lose it, we can correct them if needed.

There was this couple still thinks of each other with a good idea.She didn't start apologizing again as she considered she had feelings for each other.If you are lonely or because she won't like this it is important that you will be able to mend the trouble I caused.You would think that it would be legitimate and you will put on some soft music to help increase one's fertility, and to go through it if it will take your mind off of her.You need to act like the same way as your they want is a difficult thing to do you know exactly what to do.

Ex Trainee Back To Japan 2018

#My Ex Boyfriend Came Back After 6 Months Surprising Cool Ideas #Sims 3 How To Get Back Together With

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melpomine · 7 years ago

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Calpurnia

Feb. 04 2018 2:30 PM 90 minutes no intermission Buddies in Bad Times Theatre A Nightwood Theatre and Sulong Theatre co-production Written and Directed by Audrey Dwyer

According to their program, this play is “A classic novel turned on its head. A dinner party gone wrong.” This is about as vague as preliminaries get, and I find out why as the play goes on--but more on that in a bit.

As we walk into the traverse space, patrons are aurally immersed into the soundscape of a gentle piano. The music captures the essence of the novel off of which the play is based--it is sweet and serious and tells a story. I settle into my front-row seat I feel excited and at-ease--a familiar sensation to anyone who has read and re-read the novel.

The stage is built to look like a realistic, affluent living room, and it does this exceptionally well. It has a fully-equipped kitchen off to one side (SR from where I was sitting, SL from the opposite side) with a working refrigerator, countertops, cupboards, etc. Centre-stage there is a large dining table, and opposite to the kitchen is the front door from where characters enter and exit. Everything is just right. And then the play begins.

Julie, our lead (Meghan Swaby) is an aspiring writer attempting a screenplay spinoff about Calpurnia--the iconic black caregiver from Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird.” She is on a strict deadline and has gotten notes from her agent that the character is as too upper-class. From the get-go, Julie plays anger and frustration so well that one buys into it for the entire play, trusting that the reason for her anger will become apparent eventually. It doesn’t. This disposition is contrasted by Precy (Carolyn Fe) who is a jovial and maybe even submissive nanny. Of all the characters, Precy seems to be the most fully developed, and she is probably my favourite thing about the play. It makes a WOC maid (Precy) a lead. In this production, Precy is a middle-aged Filipino live-in nanny who defies stereotype. However, this segues into my least favourite thing about the play as well. Despite being a response to Harper Lee’s Calpurnia, wherein the playwright submits that she is undermined and overlooked, this play actively chooses to turn the upper-class black woman into a maid for the majority of the play. Contextually, she does this in efforts to research what it’s like to engage in maid-like duties. This is maddening to me. The two black men (her father and her brother) get to keep their wits; the white woman gets to appear like the rational girl trying to calm a black woman. My qualm is not that Julie isn’t likeable; that’s a juvenile non-criticism which exists mainly for the commercial masses to pick at. It’s that her character misrepresents what so much of the black community faces. Julie represents the underdog, whereas her younger brother Mark, in dialogue, is an apologist with whom were a meant to vehemently disagree. Perhaps this is the art’s true mastery: it presents two very incorrect characters .

Dramaturgically:

At around the halfway point, there is a musical interlude to indicate the passage of time. It was quite long, and the lighting confusingly indicated that a lot more time passed than really did.

I didn’t understand to place a fully-equipped kitchen so far SL/SR that at any given time, the majority of the audience would not be able to see what’s going on there. Much of the action unfolds there for strenuous periods of time, and we could only crane our necks for so long before giving up altogether. This choice was a result of making the space look as close to a real kitchen as possible. Well, it looks real, but it doesn’t work, and thus the important distinction between realism and naturalism emerges.

To be frank, it seems like this play was riding off the coattails of a title which has now become a buzzword. (I mean, ditto: Go Set A Watchman.) The narrative would’ve stayed exactly the same were Julie working on a screenplay about a black maid--period. But would the show have sold as many tickets had it gone with the “unbranded” iteration of the same story? Isn’t the choice to link the tale to one of the most famous black nannies in our zeitgeist counter-productive to the dramaturgy? I know I would’ve been far more interested in the story about any black woman, but it seems the playwright didn’t believe this, and risked her story for it. Any references to the novel were inaccurate and contrived.

Atticus is said to have slut-shamed Mayella during the court scene, which, textually or sub-textually, just never, ever happens. I went back to those chapters and combed over them so I could contextualize whatever quote was being taken way out of context, but it doesn’t even exist. Atticus never mentions Mayella’s sex life, and he shouldn’t. The fact of the case is that her father rapes her and then they both choose to blame it on Tom Robinson. Atticus only ever asks Mayella whether her father beat her, or Tom; whether her father raped her, or Tom. In his closing statement he certainly goes on to shame the jury for hating Mayella’s for her desire to kiss a black man, and I just don’t see how that can be twisted into the man slut-shaming her.

The rest of the character flaws are speculative. Julie believes Atticus wouldn’t have paid Calpurnia “because some of them didn’t”--although the narrative explicitly states the opposite. She also thinks Atticus would’ve hit her “because some of them did”--the them being white slave-owners, of course. Julie believes it’s horrid that Scout, a six-year-old white girl teaches Calpurnia to “speak well” when the exact opposite is true. Calpurnia’s use of language in the novel is so eloquent that Scout is constantly asking her for the meanings of Atticus’ legal jargon, and is further confused when Calpurnia switches dialects during church.

The one accurate and worthy criticism of the character in the story is that in advising his daughter, Scout, to not use the n-word, he uses the word himself. He could’ve quite easily avoided this, just as I have now. There is no justification for this, only a post script to say that he never uses that word in the presence of a black person, and when he does say it behind their backs it is not to degrade but to divert.

To all this, the unsuspecting (mainly white) audience who can only faintly recall the narrative nods in enthusiastic ally-ship, ready to discard their beloved classic (much like the character of Christine) if it’s outdated now as the play claims it is. This is not sustainable viewership. A simple fact-check renders much of the novel’s criticism inaccurate. It would’ve been far more effective to go off of the iteration of Atticus published in Go Set A Watchman. The two versions could not be further apart. Both were a result of Lee’s fascination with her father, Amasa Coleman Lee. If we’re reading biographically (which I believe is an uninteresting way to read--well--anything) then the “real Atticus” was a white supremacist and a rampant segregationist. The venn-diagram of Lee’s Atticus’ and Dwyer’s Atticus are two repellant circles.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Although I have been enamoured with the character of Atticus for about seven years, now, I have since chronicled several flaws with our cultural admiration of his. At the end of the day he is still an old, white man, remembered and cherished over his black counterparts and betters.

I probably would’ve written a more satisfied review as someone who didn’t feel swindled by the classic bait ‘n’ switch.

#theatre #Audrey Dwyer #Calpurnia #To Kill A Mockingbird #BuddiesInBadTimeTheatre

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indelibleme · 8 years ago

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Fanfic, CID: A Reason To Love

...

Daya was asked this quite a few times in the course of his life.

What attracted you to each other?

What sparked your relationship?

Didn't work dynamics pose a barrier? A problem?

She's a simple junior. A good officer, but not brilliant. Not a genius in any account, not a genius like him. Why did she catch his attention?

What about the age gap?

Does he truly love her?

Why does he love her?

That had been frequent in the earlier stages of their relationship – from colleagues to casual friends, from some particularly nosy reporters to equally prying neighbours, from jealous admirers to long-lost relatives who suddenly had nothing better to do than poke their large nose into his business (Ahem), from… Well, you get the drift.

It had begun like every other relationship did; friendship. A close and good-natured working relation between two officers. But then, slowly and steadily, Daya had been inexplicably drawn to her passion and compassion; passion for her work and compassion towards her friends, family and even everyday strangers.

It was not love at first sight.

It was a slow, drawn out game of cat and mouse – and he still doesn't know who won, but perhaps they both did – and gradual conversion of attraction to affection, then fondness and finally love.

It was a roller-coaster of confusion and uncertainty, a jumble of emotional conflicts, evenings full of introspection, mornings filled with her gentle presence, sleepless nights over her youthful face and kind smiles… But, Daya was sure it was love.

Abhijeet – that smug bastard – had snickered in mirth when Daya had first told him about his…er, 'crush' on her. And, damn, even now, he had to admit he had behaved like a preteen with his first experience at having a crush and oh god, just how embarrassing that was! And when that simple attraction devolved into something more…it had become inescapable.

There was certainly no going back now – he was trapped by this sinful emotion, this passionate desire, this irrevocable change of perspective. He was in love. Definitely.

Well, damn.

Abhijeet had tried to console him through his (ardent, futile, possible, but hopefully not) unrequited love. When, in his holiness – calling Abhijeet any derogatory words would not be conducive to his continued health, so perhaps he'll just stick to sarcasm, yeah? – so, in his holiness' undeniable and blessed opinion, Abhijeet had told Daya that there was a chance she liked him back…well, he had been unable to keep himself from hoping.

Abhijeet had encouraged him through the initial stages, had his back through the difficult times, stayed adamant through Daya's own hesitancies, faithful even when Daya had misunderstood the situation – and Daya was grateful for it. Oh so grateful – so yeah, Abhijeet probably wasn't that bad of a best friend. Not that bad. No need to inflate his ego anymore.

So, now. Now – ten years down the lane, where they were happily married, settled and had a little bundle of joy to keep Abhijeet's little terror some company – Daya had expected the questions to stop.

They didn't really.

They had a sixteen year age gap between them.

Couples couldn't be posted at the same headquarters – she had had to shift.

Her parents were really hesitant to marry their little girl off to another officer of the law – what would happen to the kids if both of them got hurt?

He could do so much better than her – that was mostly from jealous bints (er, pardon the language), so that didn't really count.

He constantly got into dangerous situations; he'd leave her a widower.

He was a genius in the field, no officer alike him (except Abhijeet, of course). She was not of his class – if anything, Daya was sure it was the other way round. How could he have ever gotten such a wonderful woman as his wife?

And really, Daya never cared much for those comments. ACP sir had been accepting of this relationship and had also given them their blessing – and the man was like a father to him, what more did he need? Abhijeet had always been supportive, constant and unwavering at all times. Tarika had been all smiles and cheer, a bubbling fountain of joy, and had also given him a vaguely threating promise about dissecting and pickling his body parts if he hurt her friend – And geez, couldn't Abhijeet have a better taste in girlfriends?

So, yes, with their support, nothing ever mattered. The comments behind his back, the looks, the disapproving demeanour of DCP Chitrole, her parents' distaste…

But, when faced with such questions, he did stop to think.

Why did he love her?

And that query would probably never get a full response to it.

He loved her for her gentle behaviour with her friends and her fierce protectiveness of victims of crime. He loved her for her youthful naivety and her constant hope in humanity. He loved her for her jaded soul that hadn't escaped the world's cruel truth. He loved her for her perseverance, for her unwavering loyalty, for her positivity.

He loved her profound insight into matters that he'd never given much thought. He loved her for her kind gestures, her genuine concern, her helpful demeanour. He loved her for her humour, her sensitivity, her courage.

He loved the way she would concentrate during a case, the way she would bristle with righteous indignation at a wrong-doing, her unhesitant firing of her gun when needed and her analytical mind. He admired her skill with a pocketknife and hair pins (Despite what Abhijeet said about being the one to teach her and thus demanded half credit) at picking locks.

He loved her special way of brewing tea and just the right amount of sugar she put in his coffee. He loved how she looked in green shirts and denim jeans. (And black dresses too. And black lingerie…but that's another matter…). He loved her simple aloe-scented shampoo and her naturally pink-ish, peach-ish nails. He loved how beautiful she looked without make up (Kissing was so much messy when you put on lipstick…er, right, back to the point). He also loved how adorable she looked the first thing in the morning as she sleepily smacked away the alarm clock before realising that no, she had work to go to and five more minutes was not applicable.

He hated how her omelettes would always have bit too many tomatoes (Is it egg you're feeding me or tomatoes?!). He hated how she'd always put off the ironing till the last minute, leading himself to do his own if he wanted a presentable shirt for the morning. He hated how her home slippers would always be in the way, just waiting for him to trip up on it (Are you trying to give me a concussion, darling?).

He hated how she'd insist on applying oil in his hair on every Sunday, at the very least (My hair was fine without oil for the past twenty years, woman!). He hated how she'd push an apple into his hand early in the morning when he was already late for work and did she want him to be even more so? He hated how she'd decided that two days of the week would be his turn to water the plants (Those are your stupid plants in the first place! Why am I supposed to water them?).

But he adored her. He adored how she cared enough to make sure he ate well, he dressed well, he took care of himself. He adored how she insisted they share household duties, because it was their house and therefore their duties. He adored her absent-minded ways in which it made her more human – because had she truly been that perfect, Daya was sure he'd have not deserved to be married to such a goddess.

So, why did he love her?

Well, he wasn't sure.

It was all the above, yet so much more. To put a label to love, to define it… would be truly undermining it. Love was so much more than that and words would be inadequate to express it fully.

Besides, love was illogical anyway. And he may have been a slight bit crazy to marry her – they were oh so different. And opposites in a way that they might have never really attracted, never really fit together in the messy, disjoint, seamless way they had…

And with all the struggles they'd faced to just be together, sometimes they'd wondered if they should just give it up. To let go, because that was just so much more easier!

But, they'd held on, because the end result was worth it. So, yes, he might have been a little mad to tie the knot with her – but well, we're all a bit mad in love.

…Aren't we?

"Daya! We're running out of bread! Go down the street and buy a loaf, would you?"

"Eh?" Daya blinked out of his stupor, looking away from the cricket match playing on the television screen, "Bread? Why do you need it now? It's nearly nine o' clock!"

Shreya peeked her head out of the kitchen, sighing exasperatedly, "Your best friend's son is coming over tomorrow. And your son wants to make bread rolls for snacks. So, go and get the bread, won't you, dear?"

"I'll get it tomorrow," Daya dismissed, returning to his match. Ah, that was a six, definitely!

"Oh, no, you're not!" she huffed, marching towards him and thrusting out his wallet, "You and Abhijeet are going to sequester yourselves in your study the whole day, leaving me to watch over the kids! Really, perfect waste of a good weekend! So, better go and get the bread now."

Daya gave a look at the wallet, considering it. She wiggled the money case a bit. Daya relented with a sigh – she was right, Abhijeet and he would be in the study all day, going over case files…he could probably get a head start now and get out of bread-shopping...

Shreya gave him a look, as if she knew what he was thinking. Evil woman. He so hated her.

"Okay," Daya agreed with a long suffering sigh.

Shreya beamed, pressing a swift kiss to his cheek as she disappeared into the kitchen again.

Well, now. Perhaps he loved her, after all.

"And do get a bottle of tomato ketchup while you're at it, too, okay?" Shreya gave him a last call from her kitchen.

Statement revised: he did hate her. She was going to make him miss the match.

"Yeah, alright," Daya agreed as he slipped on his shoes.

"Love you!"

Daya grinned, resigned, "Love you too."

#CID #fanfiction #love #romance #abhijeet #daya #tarika #shreya #ACP Pradyuman #DCP Chitrole #posted with permission

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gayreads · 6 years ago

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YA Book Review: Where the World Ends

Title: Where the World Ends

Author: Geraldine McCaughrean

Genre: YA historical fiction

Publisher: Flatiron

Release date: 12/3/19 (US release)

From the publisher: Every summer Quill and his friends are put ashore on a remote sea stac to hunt birds. But this summer, no one arrives to take them home. Surely nothing but the end of the world can explain why they’ve been abandoned—cold, starving and clinging to life, in the grip of a murderous ocean. How will they survive such a forsaken place of stone and sea?

Review: I’d never read any Geraldine McCaughrean (how does one pronounce that last name? the American mind boggles) before this because I genuinely just didn’t have any interest - I’d look at White Darkness and my eyes would glaze over. No thanks, I said. I do not care for this snow-book, Printz or no.

Well, joke’s on me, because it turns out McCaughrean is actually a really good writer. Stylistically, she’s stunning. Her prose is tight, complex, atmospheric, an absolute joy to read. Her use of symbol and metaphor is both original and gripping, delving deep into the issues such devices raise. Stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean, freezing and starving, the boys constantly question the value of symbolism, and so does the narrative itself: Is the garefowl tied to Murdina outside of Quill’s imagination? Does it matter whether she is or not? There’s also a subtle critique of capitalism woven throughout, which I always enjoy, as the working class characters’ perception of the man who owns their island (called simply the Owner) slowly morphs from godlike benefactor to “oh Christ, this dude left us all to die, he really does not care about us.”

The only reason I’m not giving this book a better rating is John. What to say about John? John is a girl who was raised as a boy by her mother (because her father wanted a son) and no one ever noticed even though it’s mentioned that she participates in literal pissing contests with the “other” boys. This, of course, makes no sense. What’s worse is that her gender isn’t treated with any sort of nuance. She outright states at one point that she considers herself a boy; this is ignored by both the other characters (sort of understandable, this is the eighteenth century, after all) and the narrative (way less understandable), both of which continue to call her a girl and marry her off to one of the other boys against her will. She is constantly sexually harassed, and this is mostly treated as a joke: She can defend herself, so it’s fine! She’s scrappy! Not like being stranded on an island with a dozen boys constantly trying to fondle her would add an extra layer of trauma to an already terrible experience! The boys take care of each other and it’s beautiful, sort of a working-class anti-Lord of the Flies in that even in that isolation and desperation breed compassion rather than violence amongst the characters. Except the way they treat John completely undermines this - even when they’re drying her off after she’s fallen into frozen water, they’re doing it not out of kindness but as an excuse to touch her body. Gross! The fact that their compassion only applies to other boys really sort of undermines the book’s themes. (It’s worth noting, too, that Quill himself treats another girl as an object that belongs to him - not physically, at least, but definitely mentally - and he’s rewarded for it in the end.)

I don’t know why John is even in this book; she’s not necessary to the story, and seems to exist only to raise questions that McCaughren apparently isn’t equipped to answer. This would be one of my favorite books of the year if it weren’t for her. But if you're willing to deal with some truly weird gender identity issues and out-of-left-field sexism, this is worth the read. It’s certainly unlike any book I’ve read before.

Final verdict: recommended (with some serious reservations)

#young adult #ya lit #book review #r

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stretchjournalemerson · 6 years ago

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Um, Actually: Mansplaining in Academia

By Catherine Zenkevich

“He scoffed and told me how wrong I was. But I knew I wasn’t.”

All throughout my freshman year of high school, my mom encouraged me to pursue other extracurriculars outside of my sports team. Whether it would round out my college applications or just to make me a more experienced and cultured young woman, she pushed hard for me to join another club or organization. I finally decided on Model United Nations, as most of my friends did it, and I was also interested in pursuing an international relations degree at this time. I immersed myself into the research for each country we represented, learning every facet of foreign policy and cultural opinions that applied to the topic at hand. I could not have been more excited to go to our first conference, show off all the work I had done, and work with my peers to craft meaningful, albeit fictitious, legislation. I settled down at my place at the faux United Nations table, nervously straightening out my flag and nameplate to pass the time before the committee began. Soon, we were vigorously debating the merits of immigration reform, and as I was representing Hungary, who had recently erected a border fence to keep migrants out, I was staunchly anti and made my opinion known, just like my teacher had encouraged me to. Then came the time to create and sign resolution papers proposing our reform ideas. A young man around my age and wearing one too many skinny scarves approached me and asked me what country I was. I told him Hungary, and he immediately launched into a spiel about how Hungary would totally support his pro-migrant proposition, barely letting me get a word in edgewise. I let him speak his piece and then politely informed him that, actually, Hungary would not support this proposition, as they were currently promoting an anti-immigrant platform. He scoffed and told me how wrong I was. But I knew I wasn’t. I had done weeks of research surrounding the topic and knew my country’s policies inside and out. How could he so confidently doubt that I knew what I was talking about?

The kind of gender bias I experienced in high school is not new or even limited to that specific sphere I experienced it in. This kind of steamrolling women’s ideas, theories, and opinions has been prevalent in almost all of modern society, even predating the fight for women’s voting rights. In his 1989 journal article “‘One United People’: Second Class Female Citizenship and the American Quest for Community,” Rogers M. Smith discusses women’s political status as citizens in colonial America, stating, “Married women were thus subjects not only of the crown but of their spouses, leaving them without any meaningful civic rights of their own,” (241). Due to an English law that was deemed necessary by colonists in the 1700s, women were not seen as their own singular legal being. They did not have the same rights as other citizens; they could not vote, buy property, or make other important decisions independently of their husbands. This law, while legally obsolete now, still holds some cultural significance. Even into the late twentieth century, well past the historic time when women were given the right to vote, women were still seen as the second class citizens they were in the 1700s. Into the 1960s, a hallmark for women’s rights and the beginning of second-wave feminism, banks could still refuse single women’s credit card applications and many required the woman’s husband to co-sign the application. In colonial America, women “possessed in the law’s eyes no meaningfully independent citizenship,” (Smith 249), and that sentiment continued far into the modern age, much further than many people would assume. America’s history of legally and economically disenfranchising women and socially classifying them as second class citizens continues to this day, albeit in vastly different capacities.

The portrayal of women in mass media has caused a kind of fractured internal worth that can lead women to value their own thoughts and opinions less. In her book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media, author Susan Jeanne Douglas states that mass media has created a form of “cultural identity crisis” (8) in women. Media portrays feminism both as something to be proud of and to emphasize but also something shameful that should not be publicly endorsed. Women are “pulled in opposite directions— told we were equal, yet told we were subordinate; told we could change history, yet told we were trapped by history— we got the bends at an early age, and we’ve never gotten rid of them” (Douglas 8-9). Women are forced to choose a side when neither is beneficial, and both could potentially be harmful. Media has created a catch-22 that forces women to make a decision that in no way benefits them, and, through mass media consumption, this form of struggle is internalized by young girls and women to a harmful degree. The kind of media that is promoted enforces two kinds of stereotypes: the bitchy feminazi who steamrolls any man who interferes with her plans and the subordinate mother/wife figure who always bows to her husband’s whims and is thus useful in this patriarchal society. Neither of these stereotypes is particularly kind to women, nor are they accurate to how women actually are in real life; these kinds of stereotypes harm women both for choosing to voice their own opinions and for choosing not to. Because these stereotypes are so prevalent in society, men and other people in power tend to believe them, and these beliefs have permeated the workplace, the school, and society as a whole.

In all spheres of life, women’s opinions and thoughts are consistently discounted. Whether it be in the classroom, in the boardroom, or even on the message boards, when women take a hard stance or stand by an opinion, they are not taken seriously. Back in the time when women were given worth based on their marital status, any time a woman exhibited anything “that men found mysterious or unmanageable,” (McVean), it was medically diagnosed as hysteria, and that was that. Most of the time, women who expressed dissenting or independent opinions were simply labeled as hysterical, and thus men were allowed to simply write off whatever point they were trying to get across. This sentiment is still prevalent in today’s society. However, women are now not medically diagnosed as hysterical; they are simply called hysterical or it is implied or explicitly stated that they do not know what they are talking about. Whenever women went against the grain of society, it was okay for men to simply call them crazy and move on with their lives, but the damage that these sentiments carry still last to this day. Women’s opinions are constantly being disregarded or not involved in the conversation at all, and this disappointing phenomenon has been given a new name.

Author Rebecca Solnit coined the term “mansplaining” in 2008 in her essay, “Men Explain Things to Me.” According to Solnit, “mansplaining” is “when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does.” Men are constantly, and possibly subconsciously, looking for ways to undermine women’s role in society, and mansplaining is simply another form of that phenomenon. Mansplaining is a way for men to assert their dominance, even in areas where they have no expertise, subsequently drowning out the voices of other, more qualified women in that same area. Solnit states that mansplaining “crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.” Men explaining things to women in this braggadocious manner exerts their misplaced confidence over a woman’s expertise in her field. Solnit compares it to street harassment and catcalling because, in the same manner, men assert their masculinity to make themselves feel more in control at the expense of the woman’s confidence and well-being. Mansplaining also “trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence,” (Solnit). Not only is mansplaining usually factually incorrect, it demoralizes women and trains them to think that their experiences and expertise hold less weight than their male counterparts simply because of their gender. This continued act of talking over women subjugates them into silence, even if they are outstanding in their field. Mansplaining and the constant negating of women’s credibility forces women to “fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being,” (Solnit). Mansplaining takes full advantage of the “cultural identity crisis” (Douglas 8) that has been created in women. Because society has constantly been telling women conflicting sentiments for decades, they now have to not only fight to be heard and recognized. They also have to fight to be seen as in individual and independent entity. This kind of undermining practice is prevalent in every sphere of work, and academia is no exception.

The university structure is incredibly sexist with “more than 60% of academics are men, and about 80% of professors,” (Todd). With a structure created and dominated by men, it can seem impossible for women to move up the ladder and progress their careers. And it’s not for lack of trying; women in these fields are “exploited and marginalized by ‘macho practices and cultures’” (Todd). Even in top universities and research fields, women are constantly being pushed to the sidelines and disregarded, even when they are contributing quality work to the academic discussion. The culture surrounding this supposed meritocracy very clearly enforced the idea that “what is assertive in a man is arrogant in a woman” (Todd). Women are punished for not being more like their male counterparts, and when they change their behavior to fit the pre-established norms, they are punished because the qualities that are praised in men are criticized in women. This is not only limited to universities; it expands into all areas of academia. At a conference for the American Economics Association, journalist Heather Long noticed the very same phenomenon occurring both among the panels and in the general discussion at the event. When asking an economist for a copy of his paper, “he told me to go to his website and look for the ‘less mathy’ version,” (Long). Whereas when a male journalist asked the same professor the same question, “the male economist told the male journalist that he could read the original research paper and a ‘version for a more general audience’ on his website,” (Long). Even a well-versed journalist in her field was deemed too dumb to read an economics paper, which, as Heather Long is an economics correspondent for the Washington Post, is essentially her job. The man assumed that because she was a woman, she would not be able to or would not care to comprehend the vast complexities of this economics paper. Even in research, men amplify their own voices more than they amplify those of their female colleagues. In research papers, “men self-cite 70% more than women” (Lasher). Men would rather promote their own work than discuss the equal quality work of a female peer. This is another case of male arrogance permeating academia and doing a disservice to their female peers. The more citations a piece of research has, the more likely it is to be promoted in other, more important journals. So men promoting their own work means that it is possibly more likely to be published than their female counterparts’ work. Comparatively, “women are also more than ten percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous works at all” (Lasher). Women do not have the same overconfidence men tend to have, so when it comes to citations in research, they are less likely to promote their own work, unlike their male peers. Men are promoting their own work more, which in turn overshadows women’s work, which is already being underrepresented. The cycle of under-confidence and overconfidence is a harmful one that prevents women’s voices from being heard in the academic sphere and is encouraged and promoted in the academic space.

I never corrected the boy at Model UN. I simply told him I was not interested and left him to prey on other unsuspecting delegates. I joked about how weird the interaction was with my friends after it occurred, but it never once crossed my mind that this was something I could have corrected. I never thought about sharing my knowledge on the subject with this guy; I just let him believe he was right and continue on with his intimidation of other nations. To this day, I regret not having spoken up about my position. I had been taught to always speak my mind and to confidently share my opinions and knowledge with others. In class, I was always incredibly vocal during debates and discussions, probably to a fault. At my all-girls high school, we were always taught to stand up for what we believe in and that you can say anything as long as you say it with confidence. But when confronted by an alpha male who was so sure he was correct, I felt intimidated into submission. I let him talk, even though I knew what he was saying was wrong, and once he was done, I did not correct him. That kind of fear permeates every social and academic conversation, and it can intimidate women into silence. When women are too scared or intimidated to share their ideas, the whole conversation suffers the lack of a unique and valid perspective. Mansplaining can be seen as a joke online or an abstract concept never to be confronted in real life, but that greatly harms the conversation we as a society participate in. Eliminating mansplaining from academia means creating a space where all views and takes are valid and are given equal consideration. Allowing one voice to dominate and silence does not make a conversation; it makes a space where a whole host of people and their experiences are discounted. We as a society must learn to not be threatened by women’s experiences, intelligence, and confidence, but to embrace them, because that is the only way to have the full conversation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my parents for always encouraging and supporting me and for sending me to a high school that encouraged me to be a confident young woman, Professor Kovaleski-Byrnes for helping me guide this essay through its various stages, and that kid with the skinny scarf from Model UN for helping me realize just how important women’s voices are in an academic space.

Works Cited

Academic Men Explain Things To Me. Oct. 2013. 04 Apr. 2019 Web log post. <http:// mansplained.tumblr.com/>.

Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media,

“Introduction.” Three Rivers Press, 1995, pp. 3–15.

Kidd, Anna-Grace. Mansplaining: The Systematic Sociocultural Silencer. University of North Georgia. 05 Apr. 2019 <https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1681&context=ngresearch

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Lasher, Megan. "Men Like to Mansplain Themselves, Study Finds." Time. 01 Aug. 2016. Time. 04 Apr. 2019 <http://time.com/4433108/men-mansplain-citation-study/>.

Long, Heather. “'Please, Listen to Us': What It's like Being Female at America's Biggest

Economic Conference.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 18 Jan. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/please-listen-to-us-what-its-like-being-female-at-americas-biggest-economic-conference/2019/01/18/4809c294-1b47-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.htmlutm_term=.a093099f70ab.

McVean, Ada. “The History of Hysteria.” Office for Science and Society, 31 July 2017, www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-quackery/history-hysteria.

Ricard, Alicen. "How Mansplaining Harms Women in STEM." Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science and Technology. 31 Aug. 2018. 04 Apr. 2019 <https://www.sfu.ca/ wwest/WWEST_blog/how-mansplaining-harms-women-in-stem.html>.

Smith, Rogers M. (1989) ""One United People": Second-Class Female Citizenship and the American Quest for Community," Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities: Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol1/iss2/2

Solnit, Rebecca. Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays. London: Granta, 2014.

Todd, Selina. "The academics tackling everyday sexism in university life." The Guardian. 24 Feb. 2015. Guardian News and Media. 04 Apr. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2015/feb/24/sexism-women-in-university-academics-feminism>.

#academia #mansplaining #feminism #catherine zenkevich #stretch2019

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 8 years ago

Text

Neurotic Girl Scout

The early 2000's were a rough time for me clothing wise, and just a horrible time for fashion altogether. Britney Spears had made really low cut jeans popular. It was just about all you could ever find in the girls' section. And these horrible jeans were always about to come off me. If I bent over, my butt would stick out and my friends would either say something or walk away. I eventually instinctively learned to always hold the sides of my pants at all times while walking, else they come off. There was a boy in my class named Lonnie who's pants were always falling off completely, and I was afraid very dearly that I would be cast permanently as the girl-counterpart to him and his shenanigans.

My pants were also too long for me, so they dragged along the bottom of the road, and eventually fringed away at the seems, and eventually, they started rip up my leg. But I had to keep wearing them since it was all I had. I was a total mess.

My dad didn't really know what he was doing school clothing wise. So he just kind of skipped school clothes for me for the most part. I was left wearing my mother's left over shirts and stuff. My mom had a bunch of bellybutton shirts she wore in the 90's when she was thin. They were very low in the breast area too. She kept wearing them when she got a little heavier. So they were oddly shaped. They fit me a little better, so I ended up wearing them. The one thing I was most insecure about was my belly, and it seemed I constantly had to worry about my stomach coming out, since the shirts were misshapen and the pants were low cut. My hands were always actively trying to somehow link the ends of my shirt together with the beginning of my pants. I was incredibly uncomfortable just about all the time.

My father also didn't really buy me backpacks. So I was the only kid in the class who didn't have one. I ended up using plastic bags most of the time. Which made teachers sad for me, so occasionally someone would pitch in a few dollars and buy me one. But the thing was, I never ever did my homework, so I always had homework from every class. And even though I didn't ever do my homework, I brought all my heavy books with me and every single book bag I had eventually fell to pieces generally as I was walking up the enormous hill to get home after school.

I also started getting acne before everyone in my class. So on top of everything else, being chubby, strange, with my clothing falling off me as I attempted to make it from place to place among my peers, I was beginning to be seen as a bit of a leper. And because I was a little heavier than the other girls, when I ate in lunch, boys used to watch me eat from their place in the lunchroom and make disgusted and fascinated faces in response to each bite I took. Like I was some kind she-beast. I had no idea what I was doing that was so strange really. I guess it was the way I held the sandwich? I was paranoid about slopping food because I seemed to be inclined to drop food, or make particularly big messes. It was my way of minimizing the damage. I don't really know why that was exciting however. And because of this, I still have issues eating in front of people I don't know super well.

Also, my hair was completely and totally nothing but frizz at this point. It was borderline an afro. It was not unlike Hagrid's hair, from Harry Potter. Here is a picture of me from age 13 to demonstrate my point

So everyone in town knew me very well from my hair. I could be spotted from a long way off. Also, I was the kind of person who would comically drop things repeatedly. I often overestimated what I was capable of carrying along with me, so I was always dropping things. And when I did this, I had to use one hand to pick up the items, while my other hand desperately tried to prevent both my pants from falling down to expose myself, and my belly from popping out. And it would be years before I finally was mercifully talked into buying a boy's oversized hoodie to cover up all my possible wardrobe malfunctions.

I really liked Choose Your Own Adventure books as well. On top of Alien Girls, I was also very much into those books. Which was considered quite nerdy in those times. I also eventually started reading the Babysitter's Club books. It was a fond pastime for me to come home after school, dig into my candy stash, and sit around and read about how Dawn and Maryanne were fighting over who got to babysit some family's children.

Then there was the fact that I was super into Pokemon. I was a SERIOUS Pokemon fan. I was there the first opening of Pokemon: The First Movie, and Pokemon 2000. I wore a pikachu shirt, a pikachu cap, and I got a sticker tattoo of all 150 known Pokemon all over my body on the day I went to see the movie in theaters. I carried around my Pokedex wherever I went. I played the games. Sarah also was into Pokemon, and she would carry around a bulbasaur everywhere she went. We carried our Pokemon stuffed animals to school everyday as part of our team. When Pokemon Silver and Gold came out, I invested thousands of hours into my game. I was always jealous of Sarah's card collection though. She had a lot more cards than I did. And, she had a holographic Charizard. Which was really something.

About a week or so before picture day that year, I started to develop this thing on my nose. It seemed like a pimple, but it wasn't quite. It was blistery. I sort of poked at it. It was pretty unpleasant and I assumed it would go away over time. Girls in my class would cattily ask what was on my face. I just informed them it was a zit. It didn't go away. In fact it started to grow. Pretty soon it had taken over about half of my nose. It looked horrible. It looked as though I was becoming a corpse. My father took me into the doctor's and it turned out a had a staph infection. The doctor gave me a treatment for it but the thing didn't go away before picture day. I don't have a picture of this, but Sarah-Mae has it in one of her elementary school year books. I look despondent, and it is so comical and ridiculously placed that it really seems like a joke. It could have been on one of those tasteless postcards I used to see in the joke store as a child.

My favorite shirt I owned was the DARE shirt I earned from successfully completing the weekly DARE class for six months. I also had a DARE cup. I wound none sarcastically tell my friends 'drug free is the way to be'. I wish I still had these things. DARE Officer Dale Buttrey would come in and tell us all about how drugs ruined lives for an hour and a half once a week. We took oaths to stay drug free, there was DARE week. I was a pretty adamant critic of drugs, between my knowledge from my father's AA, my personal family background, and these DARE classes I was into. I was under the strong impression that if you did drugs, you were an evil criminal that deserved to be taken out of society, whatever means necessary. You were a predator to all that was just and good. I thought the whole thing was very simple. Like an anti drug ad from 1985. Just say no. That's all there was to it.

I also ended up becoming a girl scout, though I was without a doubt, the very worst of them. The scout class we took was actually a joke to begin with long before I entered into it, and we were the worst girl scouts in the whole of north Idaho and possibly the whole northwest. Our Scout leader was this eccentric woman named Cynthia, who was in no way shape or form fit to be a scout leader at all. She didn't know anything about making things, or facilitating positive goals or personal skills. She was frightened of everything. Carol, Sarah's mom was active in the group and tried her best to make the girl scout thing work, but Cynthia undermined everything she ever tried to accomplish. She was probably one of the most annoying people I have ever been around for an extended length of time.

She came up with this terrible idea that we were going to go door to door and sing Christmas Carols. This became a disaster. First of all, we did this in the town of Juliaetta, a town that was five miles from were I lived and where the elementary school was. The entire town of Juliaetta is on a steep incline. It was snowing that night, and there was ice everywhere. We all kept slipping and falling and she was getting upset at us and threatening us. She also had picked out extremely old and obscure Christmas carols that only she knew. We had no practice in singing these songs, no reference to go by. She simply assumed that everyone knew these songs. And she was pretty angry when she realized we didn't know these songs at all only minutes before we were to go knocking on people's doors to sing at them. And her voice was sort of awful which didn't help. So we slipped around and knocked on some doors. The people who opened the door looked highly annoyed, that is if anyone opened the door at all. Cynthia would begin singing in her nasally voice, and we all would just make mumbling noises behind her. It wasn't as funny to me then as it is now. I just remember the open look of disgust and 'whaatttt the fuckkk' on some of these people's faces. We would do this, and then the person would just shut the door. They did not congratulate us or thank us at all.

Then there was the fact that unlike everyone else, I didn't have a million reliable relatives ready to buy the cookies that I attempted to peddle. So I was left with this fear that if I didn't sell enough I could never get to the 'next level' whatever that really meant in this particular group. I finally made some 'sales' which I was totally proud of temporarily. My sister Maria casually bought 80$ worth of the cookies, at least she said she was going to pay me that, after her cookies came in. So I signed her up for the order. She received her cookies, but she never actually paid for them. She just ate them all at her mattress and left all the wrappers lying around the floor. She didn't even share with me. And she left me with the bill, which my father ended up having to pay – in an angry fury. He yelled at me in Maria's stead. And even with all the cookies that Maria bought, I still didn't come near the sales of everyone else, who seemed to have relatives all up and down every street.

Finally, at the end of the year there was this annual campground that all the girl scouts of the inland northwest would go to near the Coeur de Alene lake about two hours away called Camp Four Echoes to group up with other scouts and demonstrate by contest their skills. Initially, I was excited about this for some reason. That ended up changing over time. We first had to sing a terrible song about being a girl scout that I still have etched into my brain. We had bad little hand gestures that went with the song. The other girls though from the other scout groups pretty much floored us. Some girl came out with professional vocals, and then the other girls followed. And they had layers to the songs, and instruments. Then we all had to come up with impromptu acting skills. Everything we did was so awful. It was clear that whatever it was that you are supposed to learn in girl scouts, we were definitely not learning it at all.

All the other groups were able to build fires, having learned all these outdoorsy things from scouts. But Cynthia was afraid of fire, so while all the other girls got to build a fire and such, Cynthia made us all go to bed extremely early, like three hours early. And I forgot sleeping bags. Actually I didn't have a sleep bag at home. So, lucky for me, Cynthia brought an extra from home. Cynthia was a cat lady. She had 12 cats, and she did not keep her house clean. So this sleeping bag was peed on, but try as I might to convince everyone that I was fine, that I would do without the sleeping bag, the elders did not concede. Cat pee it was for me. Then, all the girls had to pick a partner to bunk with. There was an odd number, and was the last man standing, so I didn't get to sleep in the same cabin as all the other girls. I had to sleep with the adults in the adult cabin. My feelings were extremely hurt, but what can I say? I think I talked anyway, or did something wrong, because I ended up earning myself 2 hours of detention time the next day where I was warned in advance that I would have to stand by this tree, and I would not like it.

The next day we all kind of had to pack firewood for the camp leaders, who were nothing but 4 nineteen year old girls, and one nineteen year old guy and all the girls would fight over him. Except our camp leader. She was the only one that seemed all that serious about the job at hand. They gave themselves these tasteless woodsy names. Her name was Froggy. I am sure she had a real name, but since I never knew the real name she will forever be imprinted in my mind as Froggy. I remember she would look sourly at her peers, who were all so invested in one another sexually, that Friday the 13th comes to mind.

So after packing all this wood that we could not even use since Cynthia would not allow fire, I had to go to my tree to do my time. By this time, several of us had earned sit outs. I had earned another hour, Sarah had earned one and I think even Samantha had earned one. And while I sat there at that tree, I think I earned yet another one because I would not stop communicating to Sarah, or perhaps I tried to write something on the tree. I don't remember, other than I had an attitude of one who no longer cares what becomes of them. I could tell Sarah's mom thought this was excessive and weird, and she tried to talk me into behaving myself just to keep things in order. Which I didn't do that good of a job of, and by which I mean, I probably did something as low-key as pick up a pine cone and look at it or something, because Sarah and Sam got to get out of their dumb tree areas, but I stayed there a long time.

There was some kind of Popsicle stick activity table that everyone was doing. I didn't really get to do much of that because by the time I had finally done penance for whatever it was supposed to feel awfully horrible about doing, they were all kind of wrapping it up. I don't remember where I slept the second night. Maybe I slept with the girls that night, or maybe I didn't. I probably didn't care anymore. I do think that Sarah's mom felt a bit bad for me. It was kind of obvious that I was the black sheep girl scout and she tried to do things to ease the situation rather than make it worse for me. Carol clearly did see me as a bit beneath her daughter, and if you read in earlier parts of my story, she did really judge us side by side. But to be perfectly clear, Carol still did A LOT to try to make my life better, and she did grow to care about my well being quite a bit. I didn't really see it then, but I can kind of sense that now as an adult.

On Fridays, in order to get to my mom's who lived 40 miles away in Lewiston, I had to network with Roxanne's boyfriend Jody's family and stay at their house for five hours after school until someone had time to pick me up and take me into Lewiston. I dreaded this like no other. I wished there was some way to get out of it. Jody was a Brown. His cousin was Catherine in my class (small town stuff), and the Browns were the notorious family for being unsanitary and uneducated. The whole house smelled like cigarettes, puppy turds and vomit. The carpet had become this dirt like substance, and little babies would craw on it, horrifying me to no end. They never ever did the dishes. You could barely even get into the kitchen. The did the dishes twice a year. Everyone in the house had this blank look on their faces. It was very hard for me to find a safe space to sit. I am sure I was unable to hide my distaste. They all farted as often as they possibly could. They fought and yelled over things that I felt were quite tribal. And sometimes, nobody would come to get me for a very long time. I would be left there wondering if I had been forgotten in this foul existence.

I ended up doing my best to stay at the Pizza Bank as long as I could. The Pizza Bank was this bar that served subpar pizza in Juliaetta. It was pretty rundown, and looked like it was from the sixties at best. Kids liked to go there for birthdays and stuff, which I never really understood. In the back they had this room with a pool table and a bunch of arcade games from the early eighties. It was such a strange place. You would go into the back, and it seemed very distant from reality and time lost all meaning. It felt a little bit like the red room on Twin Peaks, only dingier. Staying in that room for hours and hours was preferable to the Browns.

But honestly, I just didn't want to wait in a place that I felt awkward in. So in many instances, I would try my best to stay in class until Mrs. Fredenburg, my fifth grade teacher was done grading papers or whathaveyou and she was ready to lock up. She was kind of a tall mousy woman who's shadow, due to her hairstyle, looked like a mushroom. I would sit in class, and I learned to be entertaining to her so she would let me stay. She ended up liking me a lot. She told me out of the thirty years she had been teaching, I was one of her favorite students. She wished I would do more to get my grades up. It didn't make sense to her that I could be so bright and hilarious and yet I was one of the worst students. By that time too, contrary to what my third grade teacher had told me, that I would never be a decent reader, and that my penmanship and cursive would always be awful, I had, by just about everyone's definition had the most perfect handwriting of all the students in the school. My handwriting was better than most of the teachers. And I read one chapter book a week, and I was in the top three when it came to my reading scores in my class.

One day, I was given a test on something I knew I would be unable to do since I hadn't read the material. So instead of even trying, I skipped it altogether and wrote a free form letter to Mrs. Fredenburg that just bounced around my thoughts on everything in my life. I don't even remember what I wrote in that letter at all. But she liked it so much she felt it was one of the dearest gifts she had ever been given, and she gave me an A anyway, sighting that I was an extremely gifted and special person. She passed it around to other teachers, who all agreed I was some kind of insightful comical genius, though I am sure they were not nearly as impressed as she was. She told me if I just continued to write whatever I wanted to her, she would just continue to give me A's. I didn't have to do my homework anymore, just so long as I didn't tell the other students. So I got my grades up a little bit this way. I think Mrs. Fredenburg genuinely felt that I was a unique enough character, that I was funny enough, or that my writing was good enough, that I could probably get out of ever having to struggle in a menial job, or any other repetitive task I didn't want to do.

What she got me into was both good and bad. On one hand, she was the first person who recognized me for being different as a good thing that should be encouraged. I was very used to either being a sounding board for my father's ego and ideas, or feeling like I was constantly being told to get in line, and to fit the mold of everyone else. Mrs. Fredenburg actually liked me, and this gave me confidence, and it also gave me a sort of wild hope that I still have in this weird way. That somehow, someday, somebody or something is going to just pick me up out of the dirt, wipe off the imperfections and realize that I am more than a boring old stone. That I am somehow a diamond hidden in boring basalt. Also, that there are randomly people who really think I am awesome. For every three hundred people or so who don't respond to me, there is always this minority of people who simply think I am amazing beyond words. It is rather confusing to be seen this way. And honestly, it hasn't done that much for me. It might be a curse to have had someone fill my head with hope. Also, hard work is sometimes and often times inevitable, and more often than not, I have to actually pretend that I am someone I am not to even be given the vague opportunity for the bottom wrung. Furthermore, there are some amazing people out there, far more so than me. I have squandered much of my potential. My life's not over. But fife isn't fair either.

I also stopped being nearly as shy at some point in fifth grade. It happened all at once. I was trying to hide in my desk, and then I just felt this wild feeling of elation and joy, and I just reacted to it gleefully, dancing my way to the the bus that took me home, singing, and just altogether doing and saying whatever I felt. Sarah and Sam didn't like this, but I just didn't care as much. Of course they still hurt my feelings. But it's like I became so compressed and nervous that I simply broke the scale and ended back at zero. I just let go of trying to control anything at all. After this time, I was sort of known as a bit of a clown.

There was a few bad times still. My feelings were beginning to polarize to an extent. I still felt badly about my appearance. In fact, I started getting this self destructive rage against myself that would come on very quickly when I was upset. If I felt devalued or badly about myself, if someone hurt my feelings or I was left alone – which happened a lot, suddenly I would feel this sharp ache and even though I didn't move, I could just feel myself picking up something sharp and stabbing it into my own skin several times violently. I just felt this urge to absolutely destroy myself, jump off something and splatter, rip my own face off, eat poison. I would imagine this in the same way you might for an instance while driving, imagining yourself driving off the road, or if you are climbing a ladder, get a sense of what it would mean to fall. For a second it would be real. And sadly, the feeling was satisfying. I would not do it. I would end up moping or fazing out. But this was the beginning of something that I did for a very good portion of my life.

Sarah and Samantha had finally come to some kind of conclusion with this Kevin boy they had been after for years together. Every recess, it was the common practice that they would find Kevin, snatch him from the other boys, and then just beat him up by holding him up against one of those Napoleon Dynamite poles with the ball attached to the rope at the end. This is what Sarah and Sam did everyday for two years. I didn't really get into it, but I felt weird if I didn't participate so I would kick him once in awhile to fit in. After being told that I was still a little kid for not having a crush on anyone, I pretended I had a crush on Kevin for awhile just to demonstrate that I was like them. But I really could not get into this at all.

Anyway, the Rollaway party was coming. Basically, the Rollaway is a roller rink that people would skate to pop music to and eat expensive food and I think play bad arcade games. I could not skate. My dad didn't give me money for this stuff either. So basically, I was just to sit there. But Sarah and Sam were very excited. One of them was definitely going to be asked by Kevin to go couple skating this year. It ended up Sarah was asked and Sam was heartbroken. I don't know what Sam and Sarah thought would happen. They basically shared Kevin but sooner or later he was going to favor one of them over the other. Sarah got the classic 'Will you be my girlfriend – Yes – No. Sarah felt terrible for Sam's feelings, so she said no.

All day, they skated around. I was constantly in people's way. My evil mind was of course telling me I was ugly, stupid, fat and so forth as I watched all these slender young children dance about and enjoy themselves. I saw a girl with ten gigapet keychains and some Pokemon keychains, and I told her that that was really cool. She told me I was a freak and to go away. I felt horrible. I was holding a brick in my throat. I was afraid to even talk else I would start to cry. Afterwards we were all going to this Buffet that was actually terrible but we all thought was good at the time. I remember Sarah' felt bad for me, and in an attempt to cheer me up she said 'don't worry Renee, we will be eating soon enough. We know you like that'. She wasn't trying to hurt my feelings or anything, but I just felt horrible. I had to go to the bathroom and cry.

That summer, neither one of them hung out for me for about a month straight. Sarah was avoiding my phone calls for whatever reason. I eventually found them hanging out at the park, and I tried to hang out with them, but they told me they were busy and they left me there. With tears in my eyes and shaking, I walked home. I was composed enough to tell my father what was wrong without showing any enough tears to set him off. Which in return he told me some good news. He had been wanting to keep it a secret, but he had booked a vacation for just him and I to go to Florida. I was elated.

If per chance you want to know more about this project of mine, i am writing my life story down - i have never actually done this. Here are the previous parts i have written so far.

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

#text

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feathery-dreamer · 8 years ago

Text

Teacher confessions

On my first day, I realized I was constantly licking my lips out of nervousness. Now I’m sure they all know I’m a bundle of raw nerves, and some might wonder if I’m some pedo pervert too.

I honestly don’t mind walking left and right in front of the board; I’m less comfortable standing still and go stir-crazy when I sit for too long. It’s those stairs that get their toll on my knees.

I'm going back and forth between "I really need to up my game if I wanna take these kids somewhere" and "I really need to die so I can get away from this torture". It got to the point where I was almost relieved to fall sick and took the day off, despite a relatively light workload. I signed a contract thinking I had something to give these children who were already so far behind, but if they won’t cooperate with me, I don’t want to try it.

I think I've been stalked by two girls from one of my classes and it's creeping me out. I didn't speak up because I had no real proof that was their intention, and also didn't wanna hear the old "men do it to women all the time" spiel. Still, I suspect it happens to us men a lot more than you'd think, you just don't hear it so much because we don't speak up for the aforementioned reason.

It sucks that I can’t let the pupils go early when we finish a few minutes in advance. I need to find something to do (give homework, introduce new notions for next time) or else my... authority will be undermined? something like that.

After the way they react when I try to be fair, I think it’s better if I just start punishing them as soon as I suspect anything. The way they treated me when I mustered the courage to come despite being still very sick (one had the nerve to actually blame me for not being with them when I was sick), it’s not like they actually care about “fair”, anyway.

I wish my voice were sharper and carried further, so I could be heard over a low murmur instead of having to keep everyone absolutely quiet. A few pupils have come to me asking to sit on the front rows because they couldn’t hear me well.

I wish I could already learn these children’s names and be able to associate them with the faces/voices. As it is now, I have to either point or (if I wanna grab someone’s attention) look up their name under the photo. I even called one of them the wrong name once, imagine the embarrassment.

I wish my peripheral vision were better, so I could immediately spot who’s talking and take action before they stop talking. They eventually go quiet when I glare at them long enough, but that wastes precious time.

I wish kids respected knowledge and hard work more than they respect a harsh personality. I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but I’m expected to act like I have eyes behind my head or else it’ll be a mess. I also don't like punishing them, especially since a problem child may have abusive parents, but if I don't teach them to respect social norms with that emphasis, things may later become worse permanently.

Now I know why so many teachers either take a break or just flat-out give up on work. They’re expected to be educators, police, sometimes even parents because the “real” ones didn’t think before deciding to have a child. All of that pressure for such low respect and shit pay; if I really needed money, I would’ve gone for something else.

Verdict: Next time they suggest I replace a middle school teacher, I’ll say no.

#my work #my thoughts #school #kids

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

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The Wise Man's New Clothes

by Dan H

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Dan did not find the second volume of the Kingkiller Chronicles to be worth the wait~

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me.

Thus begins the blurb on the back of the first volume of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, and it's repeated on the second.

This is partly because, like many Fantasy novels, the Kingkiller Chronicles is really just one massive, massive novel chopped roughly into three parts. I suspect, however, that it's also partly because the blurb on the back of a book is usually a summary of what happens in the book, and despite weighing in at just shy of one thousand pages of densely printed text, the Wise Man's Fear is actually rather short on the “things happening” front.

If I had to summarize the entire book in twenty-five words or less I would do it like this:

Kvothe is awesome. He meets people who tell him how awesome he is, and they teach him to be even more awesome. The end.

As I so often say at the start of these articles: I am almost tempted to leave it there.

I'm not going to break down the sequence of events in the book, explain how Kvothe goes from the University to Vintas to Faerie to Ademre back to Vintas and back to the University – it's not really what happens in the book (insofar as anything happens) that I'm concerned about, it's the way in which the whole book collapses into a godawful mess of juvenile wish-fulfilment which undermines any hope I might have had for the series.

Oh, I should also add that this wound up getting far longer and far angrier than I intended. Sorry.

A Little Context

The Name of the Wind was spectacularly well received. Like spectacularly well. It won awards, it was praised by the likes of Orson Scott Card and Ursula le Guinn, it was one of those books people admitted to disliking only with a note of shame in their voices.

The book has become something of a poster child for what is best in the Fantasy genre – rich worldbuilding, clever storytelling, intricate plotting and a knowing deconstruction of the tropes and assumptions on which it is based (although to be honest, even in 2007 I was a little bored of deconstruction – it's still worth doing, but people really need to stop pretending that it's a new idea, I mean hell Elric was a deconstruction of the tropes of the fantasy genre).

I was

sceptical but ultimately positive

about the first volume, ultimately concluding that it was doing a lot of interesting things with the medium, and cleverly analysing the intersection between reality and myth, people and legends.

I was disappointed, therefore, to find myself reading a book which, amongst other things, devotes eleven out of its hundred and fifty two chapters to describing how its sixteen year old protagonist spent three days having sex with a hot faery woman who by the way thought he was totally awesome at sex.

The Double Standard

This bit is going to be a bit high-horsey, for which I apologise in advance.

Ages ago I read Trudi Canavan's Age of the Five trilogy and

concluded

that when you put all of the protagonist's skills end to end they made her look like a godawful Mary-Sue. But ultimately this was forgiveable because when you get right down to it The Age of the Five was mostly an enjoyable bit of girly fluff which wasn't trying to do anything serious.

For the record, at the start of the book Kvothe is one of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen, fluent in several languages, a precocious magician, able to call upon magic of a kind few even believe exists, able to climb walls and pick locks, a master artificer, skilled in both arts and sciences, endlessly resourceful and never ever meets a woman who doesn't fancy him. By the end of the book he's all of that, plus he's even better at magic, has learned secret martial arts techniques that make him better at fighting than anybody he will ever meet except for the people who taught him, has gained the ear of several powerful people, and has been taught secret sex skills by a hot older woman who never the less thought that he was pretty amazing at doing sex even before she taught him to be more amazing at doing sex (I will come back to this a lot because I think it's probably the most stupid and juvenile part of what I now am convinced is a fundamentally stupid and juvenile text).

What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

Imre

I know I said I wasn't going to go through the events of the book in detail, but I am going to discuss my irritation with the book in a broadly chronological sequence. This is simply because the book is so huge and so lacking in structure (beyond the obvious detail that some events happen after some other events) that it's far easier to think of it in terms of “The Imre Bit”, “The Vintas Bit”, “The Felurian Bit” and “The Ademre Bit”.

So the book starts off with Kvothe in Imre, where it's a straight continuation of Imre sections of the first volume. Kvothe is unable to pay his tuition again, which I wouldn't object to if it weren't for the fact that I've already read that plotline in book one (about the first quarter of the book, indeed, could be seen as the end of the first volume as much as the beginning of the second). We're thrown pretty much headfirst back into the setting, which was kind of jarring because dude, I read the original two years ago and I sure as hell won't be going back and rereading it to remind myself who Simmon and Kilvin and Exa Dal are (I did eventually remember, but I spent quite a while choking on name soup).

I'm afraid this article is going to be something of a list of Things That Annoyed Me. There were two Things That Annoyed Me about Imre.

The first was an issue that I remember having trouble with in the first book, which I have taken to referring to as the “poverty wanking”. Kvothe spends a lot of time being poor. He spends even more time telling the reader that if they have never been truly poor, they cannot understand what it is like to be poor. This is true, and I could almost accept this as a brave attempt to challenge the class privilege of his readership (and Lord knows I've got plenty of that – I've never had to deal with real shortage of money in my entire life, and I do absolutely take for granted the fact that food and housing and hot water and broadband internet access will be easily within my reach from now until the day I die) but there's just something about the whole thing that rings hollow.

I think mostly it's the fact that while Kvothe only has two shirts, and has to worry about finding the money to pay for his University tuition (something which, in his world, is itself a massive privilege, and one which Kvothe barely even needs given his precocious talent and secret route into the Archives) but he has several easy sources of income which, by the standards of his world, are very lucrative (he makes and sells magic artefacts for pity's sake; a profession for which only a handful of people in the world are qualified, and which he does better than pretty much anybody else out there), and he gets free room and board from a local tavern in return for his services as a musician (he also makes money performing at a local music venue, and while it's not much by the standards of the nobility it's certainly enough to live on). I'm annoyed by enforced poverty as a fictional trope at the best of times (why hello Season Six Buffy, fancy seeing you here) but Kvothe's constantly reminding us that “if you have never been truly poor, you will not understand” makes me want to throw something.

I know I'm on thin ice here, because frankly I'm as middle class as they come. I've never slept a night without a roof except that one time I went camping, I've never missed a meal except through laziness, I spent a year unemployed but I was well supported by my friends and relatives and live in a country with an adequate (if not generous) benefits system. I have, however, read a great many first-hand descriptions of real poverty from people who really haven't know where their next meal is coming from. Kvothe's life is nothing like the lives of those people, and barring the (extremely forced) homeless sequence in book one, it never has been. Kvothe does not read like a poor man who is forced to scrabble for every penny just to pay for life's necessities, he reads like a middle class kid who is jealous of the fact that his rich friends have better toys than he does. It wouldn't be a problem on its own, but the smug, sanctimonious insistence that I “cannot understand” his plight because I have “never known poverty” made me want to scream. No, I haven't known poverty, but Kvothe isn't poor, he's just not rich.

Sorry, that rant's been waiting for two years.

The second thing that annoyed me about the Imre sections was – well it wasn't really a feature of the Imre sections themselves, so much as the way they were resolved and led into the next bit of the plot. Kvothe's university shenanigans go on for a long time. Like I say, this is a long book. A long, long book. Again (I have mentioned this before, I will mention this again) the book spends eleven chapters describing how Kvothe totally got to score with a hot chick. It's long. It's wordy. The author bio on the inside back cover describes Patrick Rothfuss as somebody who “loves words, laughs often, and refuses to dance” and he seems to have chosen to demonstrate his love of words by including a great many superfluous ones.

The Imre section ends with Kvothe being put on trial for malfeasance (using magic for harm), and Kvothe pointedly refuses to discuss it despite the fact that (according to the Chronicler) it's a major part of his legend. This didn't bother me so much since I was pretty sure a long courtroom sequence would be deathly dull. Then, however, he gets an offer of patronage from the Maer of Vint, which requires him to take leave of the University and undergo a hazardous journey to a foreign kingdom. Here is how this journey is handled in the book:

Several unfortunate complications arose during the trip. In brief there was a storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck, although not in that order. It also goes without saying that I did a great many things, some heroic, some ill-advised, some clever and audacious. Over the course of my trip I was robbed, drowned, and left penniless on the streets of Junpui. In order to survive I begged for crusts, stole a man's shoes and recited poetry. The last should demonstrate more than all the rest how truly desperate my situation became. However, as these events have little to with the heart of the story, I must pass them over in favour of more important things. Simply said, it took me sixteen days to reach Severen. A bit longer than I had planned, but at no point during my journey was I ever bored.

Now okay, I get it. I really do. Because this is a serious fantasy novel which deconstructs genre conventions and plays with your expectations Rothfuss is deliberately glossing over a segment in Kvothe's life which, in a lesser novel, would be highlighted. I get it. I even get that because Kvothe is narrating the whole novel in first person, his choice to skip over this section reveals something about his character, both his jaded unwillingness to revel in tales of adventure and his almost childlike delight in subverting the expectations of Bast and the Chronicler (which parallel Rothfus' delight in subverting the expectations of his intended audience oh do you see how many levels this works on).

But.

This section appears on page three hundred and sixty five. It comes at the end of three hundred and sixty four pages which have been taken up with scenes where Kvothe converses with infuriatingly quirky girls (all of whom are hot), or infuriatingly eccentric old men (none of whom are hot), or with sequences which rehash plot threads which were already covered in the first book, or with endless conversations in which Kvothe engages in self-indulgent wordplay with either a hot quirky girl or an eccentric old man. I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things) and then score points by not describing a sequence of events that might have actually included some incident.

Also: funnily enough, I have no idea why a sequence in which Kvothe escapes from pirates has “nothing to do with the heart of the story” when a sequence in which he talks to an annoying quirky girl, or one in which he wanders around the Archives for ages finding no interesting or useful information, or one in which invents a new machine for catching arrows, or a scene where a hot woman offers him sex and a fortune in return for access to the Archives and he refuses, or a scene where he shows how totally awesome at playing music he is, or yet more of his pointless back-and-forthing with Ambrose, or any of the other things which take up the first third of the book are somehow totally vital to it.

This is because I have no idea what the heart of the story is or is supposed to be, and I am pretty sure I will have no way of knowing what the heart of the story was supposed to be until the last page of the last volume. I mean as I understood it the story was supposed to be about Kvothe's pursuit of the Chandrian, and how his chasing legends ultimately led him to become a legend, but all I got in the first three hundred and sixty four pages of The Wise Man's Fear was minutiae and pointless worldbuilding. If Kvothe wanted to focus on the heart of the story, he could have summed up half of the first book and a third of the second as “I went to the University looking for information about the Chandrian, but I didn't find any.”

Vintas

After Kvothe arrives in Vintas, things actually get a lot better (at least for a while) and I found myself getting back into the swing of things. I could have done without his having arrived penniless, necessitating yet another sequence in which Kvothe tricks his way into the towers of the great with nothing but the clothes on his back and his native wit but it's all dealt with fairly quickly and Kvothe's interactions with the court of the Maer of Vint are relatively well done (although once again, it basically consists of Kvothe being amazing at everything, and all the people who matter deciding that they will immediately like, trust, and respect him because of his obvious natural superiority – sorry this was in fact the section I liked, I just really think it's important to remember that Kvothe's social interactions make Bella Swan look well articulated).

In Vintas, Kvothe does many great things for the Maer, including helping him win the heart of his intended bride, which he manages to do perfectly despite the fact that at this stage in his life one of Kvothe's vanishingly small number of weaknesses is a complete unfamiliarity with romance and an inability to deal with women.

Kvothe's final service for the Maer of Vint is to go north with a motley band of mercenaries and sort out some bandits. This they do, chiefly because Kvothe is able to call down lightning from the sky and kill a whole bunch of them. Now in the previous book Kvothe is remembered as calling down lightning from the sky, when what he really does is throw some flashpowder at some people. This provided a nice illustration of the book's central ideas about the difference between myth and reality and the way tales grow in the telling. In the bandit encounter in book two, Kvothe really does just blow them all up with a lightning bolt. Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.

On the way back from his victory over the bandits, Kvothe encounters Felurian.

Felurian

Oh Felurian. Where to begin.

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She's the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you'll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he's awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you'd be mad or dead” and he's like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he's definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn't be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn't sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

So yeah, Felurian.

I should repeat that apart from a few misgivings, the Vintas segments of The Wise Man's Fear did actually convince me that I'd misjudged the book, that pacing issues aside it was going to turn out okay. The Felurian section convinced me that what I was dealing with was the worst kind of third-rate wish-fulfilment crap.

Here is the exchange between Kvothe and Felurian after he finishes his half-finished song (a song, I should add, which is included in full in the text, and which both Kvothe and Felurian describe as having beautiful words – a claim I would hesitate to make about anything I had written myself, particularly if it was incidental music for my fantasy novel):

Some of the fire left her, but when she found her voice it was tight and dangerous. “my skills 'suffice'?” She hardly seemed able to force out the last word. Her mouth formed a thin, outraged line. I exploded, my voice a roll of thunder. “How the hell am I supposed to know? It's not like I've ever done this sort of thing before!” She reeled back at the vehemence of my words, some of the anger draining out of her. “what is it you mean?” she trailed off, confused. “This!” I gestured awkwardly at myself, at her, at the cushions and the pavilion around us, as if that explained everything. The last of the anger left her as I saw realization begin to dawn, “you...” “No,” I looked down, my face growing hot. “I have never been with a woman.” Then I straightened and looked her in the eye as if challenging her to make an issue of it.” Felurian was still for a moment, then let her mouth turn up into a wry smile. “you tell me a faerie story, my kvothe.” I felt my face go grim. I don't mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvellous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the perfect truth. Regardless of my motivation, my expression seemed to convince her. “but you were like a gentle summer storm.” She made a fluttering gesture with a hand. “you were a dancer fresh upon the field.” Her eyes glittered wickedly.

That's right, Kvothe was so amazing at doing sex that the ancient sex goddess of sex and death was actually unable to believe that he was a virgin because he was so amazing at doing sex.

Once again, I say this. The next time you hear anybody complain about the fact that – in certain popular novels targeted at young women – hundred year old vampires fall for sixteen year old schoolgirls, point out to them that in one of the most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the twenty-first century a faery creature of unbridled sexual potency, as ancient as time itself, who lures men to their deaths with her irresistible beauty and insatiable lovemaking has her mind blown by the sexual prowess of a sixteen year old virgin.

There is a part of me, a tiny part, which respects the sheer brass bollocks of this. Not only does Kvothe get to live out the adolescent fantasy of being taught how to be amazing at sex by a fantastically hot older woman (and I understand and appreciate this fantasy, and don't think there's anything wrong with it – adolescent fantasies are important, even for grownups, hell that's why I play RPGs and read genre fiction) but said hot older woman takes the time out at the start of the whole sequence to make it very clear both to him and to the reader that he was already amazing at sex and that all her tuition will be doing is making him even more amazing at sex.

Also what is up with her not using capitalization. What does that even sound like?

As part of the Felurian interlude Kvothe encounters a prophetic tree, which Bast interrupts the story to tell us is the most dangerous thing ever because it has absolute knowledge of the future and is utterly malicious, and therefore if you encounter it your every action will bring nothing but destruction (this is clearly a nonsensical idea, and is dropped into the middle of the text without ceremony or foreshadowing and I have no idea if we're even supposed to take it seriously). The whole faery interlude just came so totally out of left field and turned the story on its head in ways that felt annoying and unsatisfying. It introduced a whole bunch of concepts that didn't really have any buildup, and it transformed Kvothe's story from a story about a clever, resourceful man whose reputation grew far beyond the reality to the story of a man who really was just all that and a bag of chips. Suddenly he went from being somebody who did great things, and to whom legendary powers were attributed, to somebody who really did just have access to ancient powerful magic for no clear reason.

To put it another way, at the start of this review, I quoted the “I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings...” section from the first book. In The Name of the Wind we see that when Kvothe “burned down the town of Trebon” what really happened was that the town was burned down by a rampaging Draccus (a creature which itself was the mundane source of a fantastical rumour) while Kvothe was in the area for other reasons. This engaged cleverly with the novel's central themes.

In The Wise Man's Fear we deal with the “I have spent the night with Felurian” section of the speech. Unlike the town of Trebon, where the truth behind the story is both more mundane and more interesting than the version that is repeated in legend, the story of Kvothe's night with Felurian is just – well – exactly what it says on the tin. There's no clever twist or double meaning, no unexpected subversion of our expectations. He just really did do something which he totally shouldn't have been able to do, and looked awesome while doing it, and got to have loads of sex with a really really hot woman who by the way thought he was awesome at sex. It's not clever, it's not illuminating, it's just pathetic.

Ademre

I really do think that the Felurian sequence broke the book for me. Part of this is that my perception of Kvothe and the text in general shifted so fundamentally after the utterly facepalm-worthy faery sequence. Part of it is that once he's been initiated into the mysteries of womanhood by Felurian, Kvothe suddenly starts to have a whole lot of sex.

Once Kvothe has been taught to be awesome at sex by Felurian (but just so it's clear, he was already awesome at sex, this is very important) he then gets taught to be awesome at fighting. Thus becoming the best man ever.

In the world of the Kingkiller Chronicles there exists a kingdom (or an area of land at least) called Ademre. Ademre is one of those spurious fantasy cultures that seems to have a totally martial-arts based economy. They follow a philosophical thingy called “the Lethani” and study awesome martial arts that, of course, make them better at fighting than everybody else in the world. They then go into the world as mercenaries where they make a fortune being awesome at fighting, most of which they send back to their homeland, where it goes to support their otherwise extremely poor countrymen.

Kvothe travels with an Adem mercenary as part of his work for the Maer of Vint and, because everybody who meets Kvothe either takes an instant irrational dislike to him or treats him like he's the most important person in the universe, this mercenary initiates Kvothe into the secrets of the Lethani, and begins to instruct him in Adem martial techniques. It is worth pointing out at this point that doing either of these things is about the most horrific cultural taboo his society has, and is punishable by death or excommunication from the Adem (which the Adem, being the Noble Warrior Culture naturally consider to be a fate far worse than death).

The Adem discover that Kvothe has been taught their secrets, and he and his mercenary friend are summoned to Ademre to face judgement. They talk to Kvothe and he impresses them with how completely awesome he is and how he totally groks the Lethani even though he was only introduced to the concept about three weeks ago.

So because it's totally forbidden to share the secrets of the Lethani with people outside the Adem, but because Kvothe is apparently totally “of the Lethani” because he totally understands what this complicated philosophical concept is all about because of how awesome he is the only option that the Adem have open to them is to teach Kvothe to be totally awesome at fighting.

Of course.

The Adem, as it turns out, have a matriarchal society, for which Rothfuss scores precisely one point (he did not, at least, assume that it was impossible for women to have a prominent role in a warrior culture). He promptly loses that point for explaining that the reason the Adem have a matriarchal society is that their martial art is all about control and women are so much calmer and more sensible than men, because men are just so aggressive.

It also turns out that the Adem have no cultural taboos about nudity or sex. This of course leads to an intricate and profoundly well realised exploration of the ways in which our cultural notions of … oh who am I kidding. This is an excuse for Kvothe to have sex with a bunch of hot women who want to have sex with him because he is so awesome. Also there are no STDs in their culture because they all have sex with each other all the time, and obviously if your culture is based on rampant unprotected sex, it must be impossible for anybody in your culture to get an STD, because then STDs would spread around your population really fast, and obviously that couldn't happen, so they must all just be totally disease free. QED. Just to be clear, I'm not extrapolating here, this is exactly how it is explained as working in the book. At no point does Kvothe ever receive a sexual proposition from anybody he does not find attractive, and there is no engagement at all with the question of homosexuality.

So Kvothe gets taught to be awesome at fighting. To be fair, he does very clearly wind up being much less good at fighting than any of the actual Adem, there's a comedy sequence in which he gets his ass handed to him by a ten year old girl (although I kind of felt that this undermined the earlier point about how women in Ademre are better fighters than men – because we're clearly supposed to find the fact that Kvothe is beaten up by a girl funny and faintly emasculating, which makes the Adem's supposed respect for women warriors ring rather hollow). At the same time it's very clear that his two months of training in Ademre are going to make him better at fighting than anybody he is ever actually likely to get into a fight with, except for supernatural beings.

I think what bugged me most about the Ademre section was that it felt like this entire culture existed purely to provide an excuse for Kvothe to get good at fighting. These people who are utterly mistrustful of outsiders, incredibly paranoid about their secrets, and grounded in a social and philosophical ideals that Kvothe clearly finds completely alien never the less happily teach him their greatest secrets and formally initiate him into their society, and they do all of this despite the fact that he never shows even the slightest sign of having internalized (or even of remotely respecting) the ideals of the Adem. He never, for example, seems to get over his habit of assuming that women are inherently less capable fighters than men (he feels particularly embarrassed at being beaten up by a young girl and later on he massacres a group of bandits and feels particularly guilty about the fact that they had two women with them).

To put it another way, the overwhelming impression I got from The Name of the Wind was that while over the course of the novel, Kvothe acquired a great many skills, he didn't actually learn anything. He acquires awesome sex skills from Felurian, but doesn't learn anything about interacting with women except how to get what he wants out of them. He acquires awesome martial-arts skills from the Adem, but doesn't learn to really appreciate or understand their culture (except insofar as he comes to appreciate the benefits of being surrounded by hot women who treat sex as little more than a handshake). He doesn't really grow or change or develop in any meaningful way, he just gets more powerful – he's like the protagonist in a CRPG: he wanders around doing arbitrary-seeming quests and unlocking more powers. In every meaningful sense, the Kvothe who returns from Ademre at the end of The Wise Man's Fear is exactly the same as the Kvothe who was homeless on the streets of Tarbean in The Name of the Wind.

Denna

Something I've avoided talking about thus far is Denna. Denna is Kvothe's love interest.

I'm really not sure what to say about Denna. Kvothe meets her early in the first book, and then she's in and out of his life like the wind (oh do you see). Kvothe's love for Denna is pretty much his biggest drive in the book – even more so than his pursuit of the Chandrian, which is frankly lacklustre at times. Basically it's your traditional Nice Guy Protagonist in love with Mysterious High Class Prostitute story – it's sort of like Moulin Rouge or Mal/Inara in Firefly. They have lots of conversations in which she tells him how much she values him and how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control her and tie her down, and Kvothe spends a lot of time narrating to himself how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control Denna and tie her down. Meanwhile he spends the majority of his free time fantasising about how great it could be if he could control her and tie her down.

Okay, that's slightly unfair, but only slightly. In this type of narrative in general, the mistake writers wind up making is always in presenting the problem as strategic in nature. Try to tie the girl down, and she'll run away, so it's more practical to take a softly-softly approach so that you can get what you want. The notion that what the girl herself wants might enter into the equation is always rather a side issue. It is taken for granted that Kvothe will only be able to truly “be with” Denna if he can get her to stop running and stay with him – he never even considers the possibility that they could have a relationship in which she simply retains the independence she seems to value so highly.

I don't think the Denna thing would bother me if it weren't for the fact that Rothfuss' women are so uniformly … fneh. Pre-Felurian, they're basically all desexualised and childlike (like Auri, the quirky pixie girl who lives in the Underthing) or else Mysterious Gatekeepers Of The Mystic Lands of The Sex (like Fela, Devi, and all of the other hot women who fancy Kvothe without him realizing). Post-Felurian, the Mystery has gone out of the non-childlike women, but the Gatekeepers of the Lands of The Sex they remain.

I don't want to make too big a thing out of this (particularly since if I did this would apparently be evidence that I knew nothing about music, or love, or Patrick Rothfuss) The Kingkiller Chronicles is just generally not great for women. It has a fair few female characters in it who are interesting, but their interestingness is somewhat undermined by their total obsession with (which always includes sexual interest in) Kvothe.

In Conclusion: Follow Through

The Kingkiller Chronicles is a serious Fantasy series for serious Fantasy readers. I know it is, because it keeps telling me it is.

Each volume opens and closes with a section called A Silence of Three Parts, this chapter is always slightly different, but it always ends with the following line:

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

It's this line that sets my expectations for the series. It will be serious, it will be melancholy, it will chart the tragedy of a man who did great and terrible things.

But it has no follow through.

So he gets expelled from the university, but it in no way stops him accessing the university. He's poor, but never so poor that he can't afford everything he could possibly need. He's of low birth, but nobody who isn't clearly evil reacts badly to him because of it. He wanders blithely into faerie and is none the worse for wear. He encounters a society in which everybody has casual, unprotected sex with everybody else, and this apparently creates a society completely free of sexually transmitted diseases. He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.

The Wise Man's Fear is nine hundred and ninety four pages of setup, foreshadowing and copout. Kvothe wanders a world which exists only as a backdrop for him, and interacts with people who exist only to flatter him (either with their irrational hatred or their equally irrational adoration). It is a shallow, superficial text pandering to shallow, superficial fantasies. If it was three hundred pages shorter, and less portentously written, I'd recommend it unreservedly as a way to indulge your inner fourteen-year-old.

I have no doubt that The Wise Man's Fear will take its place alongside The Name of the Wind in the canon of modern Fantasy. I'll just sit here with my palm over my face.

Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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~Comments (

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Wardog

at 19:27 on 2011-04-13I, wow, fail.

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Melissa G.

at 20:25 on 2011-04-13*facepalm*

No, really, that's kind of all I've got. I'm just sort of sitting here going, "I-what-but-it..." *throws up hands and walks away*

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Orion

at 20:48 on 2011-04-13My first reaction was to smugly proclaim that I've already written the story Name of the Wind evidently pretended to be--which is true. I was 14, so it was terrible for other reasons, but I like to think I stuck to the "myth is less than reality" thing pretty effectively.

My second was to realize, to my shame, that I also wrote most of the story Wise Man's Fear apparently is. This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 20:52 on 2011-04-13Why does the cover appear to feature a Jedi?

I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things)

Oh my god

The God of Small Things.

A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.

See, I never read the first Kingkiller book because it sounded precisely like the stuff I'd hate, but people keep raving on and on about it and I don't get it. Even the backcover bit sounds incredibly obnoxious: "oho look how clever I am by LAMPSHADING my GARY STU qualities. SEE? SEEEEE."

Jesus that post-coital exchange. No one can convince me to read Rothfuss. Ever. Ever. This, this right here? This is shit writing. This is stupid writing. Anyone who praises Rothfuss as whatever can go take a leap.

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Dan H

at 22:20 on 2011-04-13

Oh my god The God of Small Things. A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.

Is that a "I hated God of Small Things" or an "I really liked God of Small Things"? I kind of can't tell.

It's very clever-clever, I thought that the first book just about got away with it, but the second just spiralled into a pit of stupid.

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Dan H

at 23:47 on 2011-04-13

This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?

The glib answer to "is wish fulfillment separable from sexism" is "only if you have sexist wishes."

To be more specific and hopefully more helpful, I think it depends on how your handle your character's charisma. Just because somebody is charismatic, that doesn't mean that women have to throw themselves at him (any more than it means men have to throw themselves at him - assuming your character isn't so supernaturally gorgeous that they overcome people's sexuality, it seems reasonable that they wouldn't overcome people's general preferences either). Writing charismatic characters in *general* is really hard, because they can easily come across as somebody people like for no particular reason (like John Sheridan or for that matter Kvothe).

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http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/

at 02:32 on 2011-04-14Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade

loved it.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 07:10 on 2011-04-14I hated

The God of Small Things

like burning, random incest and all.

koboldwhisperer: hurrgh Gabe and Tycho. What a pair of toxic wads.

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Arthur B

at 10:02 on 2011-04-14

Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.

Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about

sympathetic magic

? Or is sympathy something different from that?

Either way: wow, this sounds shit. At least Moorcock (on his better days) had the decency to give his wish-fulfilment figures a hard time. Yes, Elric is teh sex and is good at fighting and magic and is really smart, but early on in his career he's really kind of a terrible person, later on he wants to change but is already too dependent on Stormbringer to rid himself of it, and eventually he's completely unable to protect anyone or anything he loves when it really counts. Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to

fail

at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?

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Dan H

at 10:24 on 2011-04-14

Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about sympathetic magic? Or is sympathy something different from that?

There's a little bit more to it than that - Rothfuss' "sympathy" is quasi-scientific in a way that's actually quite interesting (it obeys conservation of energy, involves calculus and is treated by the people who study it as a form of engineering which it sort of is). "Real" magic is Naming, which is the proper "do anything and blow anything up" type of magic.

Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade loved it.

To be fair, the actual cartoon looks more like it's mocking the book than praising it. I mean the title is "when Larry met Mary" which I sort of assume is implying that Kvothe comes out as a Mary Sue version of Leisure Suit Larry.

They might have *also* really liked it, but the cartoon is actually pretty spot on.

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Wardog

at 10:28 on 2011-04-14If you have sex with two ninjas have you come before you even knew they were there...*boom-tish*

Generally very much NOT a fan of PA but I did like the cartoon - even if they liked the book, at least they were vaguely aware of its absurdity.

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Dan H

at 10:37 on 2011-04-14Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.

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Arthur B

at 10:41 on 2011-04-14

>Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.

Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?

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Dan H

at 11:00 on 2011-04-14

Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?

One might almost have suspected it of being deliberate...

I'm rather pleased that Thomas Wagner over at SFReviews.net

shares many of my misgivings

- he also opens with a particularly cringeworthy list of quotes from other reviewers which would have been hilarious if it wasn't so indicative.

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Ash

at 11:09 on 2011-04-14I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called

skraelings

Seriously, how hard can it be to put your made-up and not-so-made-up names in a search engine and see what turns out?

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Dan H

at 16:09 on 2011-04-14

I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called skraelings.

Ooh dear, that isn't good at all.

Worse, I doubt that it was wholly accidental, Rothfuss is clearly interested in etymology, so it makes me think he *probably* did it at least semi-deliberately.

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Ash

at 18:45 on 2011-04-14How the hell do you do something like that accidentally on purpose? WHY the hell do you do something like that?

It just baffles me that no one called him out on his shit.

He's not getting a penny from me until he apologises. And maybe not eveen then.

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Dan H

at 18:48 on 2011-04-14I suspect the way you do it accidentally on purpose is you find out that there's a term that appears in Icelandic sagas which means roughly "thin, scrawny things" and is used in lines like: "After the first winter summer came, and they became aware of Skrælings, who came out of the forest in a large flock" (thanks Wiki) and you think "hey, that's a cool name for my thin, scrawny alien creatures that are going to come out of the forest in a large flock in the first book". You just forget that it's also basically a racial slur.

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Ash

at 19:58 on 2011-04-14I don't think the term itself is a racial slur (although I admit I only knew of the 'written skin' etymology), it's just its use in this context that's particularly wtf.

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Arthur B

at 21:36 on 2011-04-14To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Though it doesn't sound like it's worth reading through thousands of pages of that stuff to find out whether that's the case.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 22:22 on 2011-04-14

To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Lord, even if there weren't--I'm guessing each book averages at over 900 pages each--nearly 3,000 pages between you and that reveal, I'd still be hard-pressed to imagine anything more asinine. It's not even a major part of the plot after all, is it?

Ash: heh, pennies. I've torrented books by terrible writers before for lulz, but when I actually loaded up the files to read, I discovered I had no interest in going past page two. There is such a thing as authors so off-putting that they aren't even worth reading for free. Also considering Rothfuss is currently a genre darling, the chances of anyone calling him out on either this thing or his female characters is slim to none. But hell, the latter happened to Joe Abercrombie, so maybe there's hope (and he even wrote slightly better female characters after the fact, though that's not saying much).

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Dan H

at 22:59 on 2011-04-14

To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Since the Skraelings are eight-legged and crablike, that would be quite the twist, particularly since they're a throwaway in book one.

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

at 01:05 on 2011-04-15I've always wondered about all the praise people heap on this series because to me it sounds just like another example of male wish-fulfillment in epic fantasy and epic fantasy suffers from no lack of it.

What gets me is when people rush to squeal and drool over male epic fantasy authors like Rothfuss for their originality and bravery and marginalize the women who write epic fantasy and dark medieval fantasy by refusing to discuss their books or dismissing them as "women's stories" which is so ignorant it makes me want to scream.

Carol Berg has three complete epic fantasy series to her name, but how many people have heard of her? K.J. Taylor has written a dark fantasy trilogy with a villain protagonist, a unique medieval setting, and successful deconstruction of the special animal companion/chosen human relationship so prevalent in fantasy (It benefits the griffins as much is does the humans, politics and class play an important role in who a griffin chooses as their human companion, they don't adore human beings unconditionally, etc.), but how many people even know that it exists? What about Michelle West and her Sun Sword series? I only found out about it by reading a blog post by the author herself linked by Carol Berg to her own blog.

All the series above have their flaws, but while most critics either play up the flaws and ignore the things that the author does right (Michelle West) or ignore them altogether (K.J. Taylor, Carol Berg for a long time), they rush to gloss over the flaws of male authors like Rothfuss and Martin and I'm just sick of it.

Sarah Micklem's books

Firethorn

and

Widlfire

are books about a red-headed peasant girl who manages to have a knight fall in love with her, has fire magic gifted to her by the gods and has an extensive knowledge of herbs and healing. It's also a dark medieval fantasy that isn't afraid to hurt its protagonist and make her and everyone around her suffer. it's well-regarded critically, but it's not nearly praised as Martin or Rothfuss's fantasy series. Just a warning, there is a rape early on the first book, but I thought that the author handled it well. It's one the few fantasy series that manages to tackle medieval misogyny without making me want to throw a cluebat at the author. YMMV though.

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http://cofax7.livejournal.com/

at 05:54 on 2011-04-15

Or like Sherwood Smith and Kate Elliott, both of whom are writing the kind of complex, meaty, plot-heavy stories with strong world-building that the fans and critics purport to love. Except neither of them get anywhere near the kind of press that people like Rothfuss and Martin do.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 10:47 on 2011-04-15Since we're going there, what about NK Jemisin's

100K Kingdoms

? Yeine doesn't tick all the boxes: she only gets the "hot sex with creator god," "chosen for special destiny before she was born" and "chieftain of her tribe despite exhibiting no leadership skills whatsoever" down (can't recall her age but I think he's in her early twenties, tops? Nineteen maybe?), but by the end of her story she turns into an honest-to-goodness creator deity. Jemisin is taken pretty seriously by critics as well as sf/f fans, and was nominated for the Nebula. Popular opinion of her writing is overwhelmingly, absolutely positive; she's praised for amazing world-building and characterization and super-duper-clever framing narrative.

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Dan H

at 11:06 on 2011-04-15So we're rapidly coming to the conclusion that, in fact, the SF/F community will embrace silly Mary-Sue characters regardless of gender?

That's fairly positive, I suppose.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 11:37 on 2011-04-15It's more progressive than "the SF/F community will embrace silly Sues when they're male but decry their female counterparts," I guess? Yeine's even black!

(Despite my low, low opinion of Jemisin's novels I didn't actually think Yeine was a Sue--my problems with those books lay elsewhere--but when you sit down and list all her characteristics...)

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Ash

at 12:57 on 2011-04-15I was under the impression that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was successful because it was a novel with a PoC protagonist written by a PoC author that came out just after RaceFail09.

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http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/

at 13:45 on 2011-04-15An alternative theory. The fan fiction community skews female, and it's the fan writers and critics who put the spotlight on Mary Sue. So it should not surprise us that Meyer's audience were quicker to identify and comment on the wish-fulfilment aspects of her work than Rothfuss's audience.

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 16:09 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black

, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)

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Dan H

at 17:10 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)

I really can't get my head around the idea of an African-American fiction section *at all*. I mean maybe I'm hopelessly naive but I'm pretty sure we don't have anything like that in this country (although to be fair and less laurel-resty that might be because of a tendency to leave black writers and characters out of bookstores entirely, rather than as a result of a more enlightened view of race politics).

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 17:18 on 2011-04-15Once upon a time it was useful. Now it's just an excellent way to make sure that black writers only get read by black readers -- less than 12 percent of the U.S popluation -- and therefore have a drastically reduced shelf like, reinforcing the idea that "black books don't sell." It is THE main reason I'm not weeping over the closure of Borders here -- they seem to be the last bastion of such a section, where I live.

Barnes and Noble have an "African-American Interest" section, but it's in with all the other sociology and anthroplogy sections, like Native American History and Judaica. Their fiction is categorized by, y'know,

category,

not race of author.

At one point, my local Borders was lumping Zane's erotica and "urban fiction," James Baldwin's novels AND essays, Octavia Butler, and Barack Obama's memoir together on the same shelf. (One shelf that was very close to the register to keep Us Folk from stealin'. Sigh.)

I went to a manager about it, and she gave me the most crestfallen look ever and told me that they had all tried, but it was a decision of the higher-ups.

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 17:37 on 2011-04-15(Oh, and yeah, I never saw that kind of thing in the U.K. either, not even in Borders. Granted, I haven't made an exhaustive study of the U.K. or anything.)

The funny thing about Borders here, too? Black British authors -- and Afro Caribbean, if I remember correctly -- were shelved right in with the "normal" fiction. (As were South Asian authors, Korean authors, South American, et cetera...) I definitely found Mike Gayle and the novel "Small Island" in with the mainstream fiction.

But I'm betting the U.K. publishing industry has undergone an entirely different sort of evolution. You'll still find, here, that some of the loudest advocates of having an Af Am section are African Americans, who want to have a shelf that "our children can look at, and feel proud, and know that they can accomplish things."

Which

was

in fact useful when I was a kid in the '70s. But now it hits the writers in the pocket and stands in the way of some of the social advances we need -- a greater variety of people writing a greater variety of experience (rather than depending on white writers to "get it right" all the time). We touched on that in the "Demon's Covenant" discussion.

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

at 20:56 on 2011-04-15I remembered N.K. Jemisin after I posted my comment, but unfortunately I can't remember any other women writing epic fantasy who's been embraced by fans and critics to the same extent so for now she stands as an exception to the general rule. Whether she represents a new trend or whether the fans will just go back to praising white men epic fantasy remains to be seen.

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Robinson L

at 15:06 on 2011-05-25

He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.

The really depressing part is that even in the twenty-first century, such an attitude is still the exception rather than the rule.

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http://conquestsong.blogspot.com/

at 23:29 on 2011-07-01Excellent rant, you summed up everything I disliked about WMF and TNotW. I think Rothfuss has that gift where his writing is easy to read / easy to get sucked into -- thus, people rarely recognize or shrug away how shopworn and/or stupid the content actually is.

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Dan H

at 01:11 on 2011-07-02He's certainly very readable (he'd have to be given how *stupidly long* his work is) and I'd feel much, much more positive about his books if they weren't so critically acclaimed. Which I suppose boils down to a churlish sounding "I'd like this more if other people like it less" but - yeah, it's quite good for silly wish-fulfillment, but it's not the great work of lit-ter-at-ture that people are claiming it is.

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Steve Stirling at 07:47 on 2011-07-13Michelle West is definitely an awesome fantasy writer. Very cool person, too.

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.

BTW, the really creepy thing about TWILIGHT is not that the sixteen-year-old girl can totally charm the centuries-old vampire.

It's that a guy centuries old is still hanging around high school. Christ, I shook the dust of secondary education from my feet just as fast as I could.

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Arthur B

at 11:42 on 2011-07-13

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.

I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)

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Dan H

at 15:00 on 2011-07-13

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf.

That's a fine soundbite, but I strongly suspect that it's also meaningless nonsense.

How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment? Unless you're defining "wish-fulfillment" as "any narrative in which the protagonist possesses admirable qualities". For that matter I'm not even sure if the Ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon mindset could even *accommodate* the concept of "wish fulfillment" as you or I understand it.

Whose wishes is Beowulf supposed to be fulfilling? Those of the Anglo-Saxons who originally told the story? Those of the monks who transcribed it and put in all the spurious Jesus references? Those of Ray Winstone?

I'd also point out that you're not really presenting an argument here. My complaint about the book is that it is NOTHING BUT juvenile wish-fulfillment. Even if we accept for the moment your assertion that Beowulf and the Odyssey contain ELEMENTS of wish-fulfilment that doesn't address the problem. If you make me a sandwich with no filling, and I complain that it contains nothing but bread, saying "all sandwiches contain bread" doesn't really address my complaint.

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Orion

at 18:21 on 2011-07-13Yeah, I can't get behind Odysseus as a wish fulfillment character either. He gets very little of what he wants over the course of his life, he solves only a handful of crises with his own talents, and frequently has to give up appealing things in the name of duty.

Okay, he does get to sex up a few supernatural women, but even those sex scenes are framed as disturbing and unpleasant experiences.

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Steve Stirling at 19:00 on 2011-07-13

I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)

-- sure. Actually I agree with that; my point was that a Mary Sue isn't a bad thing -as such-.

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Steve Stirling at 19:04 on 2011-07-13

How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment?

-- "Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.

Of course, Achilles is wish-fulfillment too (Alexander the Great consciously modeled his life on him) but in a rather different sense. You might say that between them they encompassed different aspects of the Greek ideal man.

Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...

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Cammalot

at 19:32 on 2011-07-13Isn't the Mary Sue phenomenon a function of bad writing by definition? Competence or even superness isn't Sueness by default. The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.

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Wardog

at 19:58 on 2011-07-13

"Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.

You seem to be looking at fictional constructs, who perform symbolic and cultural functions as well as literal ones, as RPG characters. I'm not sure you can look at characters from other times through a modern day lens - although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them, ultimately it's neither a helpful nor a useful way to interpret ancient texts. They're not actually the superhero comics of their day.

Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...

The who? The what? For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone. And although I'm personally amused by the idea of a bunch of thanes sitting around the camp fire going "Hey, shaper, tell us the one about the guy who failed to kill a dragon like all the other mythic heroes, and who left no legacy whatsoever because in the face of time all men are futile and weak because we totally want to be that guy" I can't readily imagine it.

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Orion

at 20:20 on 2011-07-13I've always thought that the important part of a wish fulfillment character wasn't that they had astounding personal qualities, but rather that they were able to use those qualities to, well, fulfill wishes. In fact I'd go so far as to say that having the positive qualities is only a means to the end, because there are wish fulfillment characters with no discernible positive qualities who get to live the dream through luck or contrivance (Bella Swan).

So show me an omnicompetent person, and I'm not going to call them a wish-fulfillment character unless they also gets to live a good life. Now, I recognize that what counts as a good life is a little complicated. Plenty of wish-fulfillment heroes spend most of their time in dire circumstances having supposedly horrible things happen to them, but because it's fantasy violence and fantasy suffering we don't care overmuch. What matters is whether the scenes where they get to live the dream are there and how those scenes are presented.

So looking at whether the Odyssey would work as a wish-fulfillment story for a modern audience (setting aside the question of how the Greeks would have read it), the evidence breaks down something like this:

Pro: Rules a kingdom, wins a war, has a beautiful and devoted wife, has the favor of the gods.

Con: Separated from his home for 20 years, rather more cursed than blessed on the whole, doomed to leave home AGAIN after returning and die in a foreign land.

Pro: Sexes up goddesses, outwits monsters, wins archery contest through special gifts.

Con: Doesn't seem to be attracted to most of the women he meets, has to give up the one potentially appealing one (Nausicaa), and genereally feels harried and put upon more than triumphant and cocky.

Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.

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Steve Stirling at 20:40 on 2011-07-13

The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.

-- I see your point, but disagree.

What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?

You're valorizing the conventions of Modernist fiction; but those are just conventions.

They're not even particularly "realistic" in any real sense; just pinched, narrow and self-obsessed in a sort of pickle-up-the-ass way.

Take a look at the careers of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Cortez or Pizzaro. Leaving aside the supernatural element, they're every bit as fantastic and full of outrageous coincidences and victories against incredible odds and acts of insane daring and so forth as most fantasy fiction.

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Cammalot

at 20:45 on 2011-07-13

What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?

But you're leaving out the part where I *very deliberately* said "reasonable genre conventions." I'm not privileging anything -- Beowulf and the Odyssey very much follow the conventions of their art form/folkloric patterns, etc.

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Steve Stirling at 20:50 on 2011-07-13Kyra:

although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them,

-- when archaelogists dug the site of Mari, a city destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylon in around 1800 BCE, they found an unopened (clay envelope around a clay tablet) letter.

Breaking the envelope, they read the words that no human eye had seen for over 3000 years.

It began: "This is the third letter I have written you about the silver you owe me for the sheep..."

Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.

For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone.

-- certain -aspects- of it were archaic; it's obviously been de-paganized a bit.

(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)

But the basic social system was that with which a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon audience would have been familiar; the lord, his sworn companions, the hall, the symbolic exchange of gifts, and so forth. The dragons and trolls were just cool exciting stuff to make it more exotic and exciting.

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending. Well, ancient Germanic poetry, natch.

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Steve Stirling at 20:57 on 2011-07-13Life Imitates Art division: when Cortez' men came over the pass and saw the Aztec cities below them, with their pyramids and canals and palaces and hummingbird-feather cloaks, the first thing they said to each other was:

"This is just like "Amadis of Gaul"!"

"Amadis" was a late-medieval romance full of valliant knights, wicked sorcerors, heroic quests, and beautiful princesses. The sort of thing your average penniless would-be hidalgo whiled away the hours with.

These guys were living out a heroic-fantasy, sword-and-sorcery adventure in their own heads (complete with evil priests). LARPing fanboys with Toledo swords shedding real blood.

Art Imitates Life: The Kull/Conan story that Howard wrote about the assassination attempt with the mad poet and so forth is taken, almost word for word (right down to the hastily-donned armor not laced up at the side) from the death of Pizzaro.

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Steve Stirling at 21:08 on 2011-07-13

Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.

-- well, there's where the target audience comes in.

I found the book this all started with a little boring; not because the hero was so super, but because he wasn't -tested- enough.

(Incidentally, this is the basic reason you have to be careful in what abilities you give your protagonist -- you have to have the appropriate kryptonite waiting. It's also a drawback when you finally make him/her the ruler or whatever; after that, life is mosty meetings and reports. Not that Aragorn exits stage right after Gandalf crowns him.)

In the case of Homer, the target audience would be people who'd fought with shield and spear to the death. (An ancient Greek proverb went: "Even Hercules can't fight two.")

To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.

Also, a lot of the wish-fulfillment element was the desire to BE a hero; and a hero had to do mighty deeds and overcome terrible trials. The Greeks were just as aware as us that "adventure" was "someone else in deep shit, far away".

Because the Man from Ithaka is a mythic hero, everything he does is heightened; he doesn't just fight Illyrian pirates, he fights a Cyclops, and so forth.

Reading through the book, I did get the very strong impression that the author had never had to actually fight, for example.

Again, I'm not saying this is a good book; I'm saying it's a badly written one in some respects but that the hero's abilities aren't necessarily one of them.

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Cammalot

at 21:11 on 2011-07-13Steve, I'm not following what you're actually criticizing about the original article at all anymore.

You seem to be saying that lots of literature across time and culture contained outsized exploits and larger-than-life heroes, and so the presence of these things... makes any book good? Because I do not see Dan arguing that the presence of these things automatically makes a book bad.

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Wardog

at 21:19 on 2011-07-13

Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.

You can argue this point if you like, it's neither provable nor disprovable, like most of the generic statements you have brought to this discussion. However, attempting to support it by a "one size fits all" application of historical texts strikes me as absurd.

(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)

The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending.

I would point out that the ending of a text has something on an impact of the general atmosphere. And actually it's doom-laden throughout. The ending is merely the culmination of all the futility that has gone before.

Well, yes, these are familiar tropes - but surely the way they are deployed in in the text supports my point, not yours? If you take all these elements - standard elements of heroic literature - and set about showing them to be hollow, I fail to see how this makes Beowulf the sort of dude any anglo-saxon would aspire to be? You'll be trying to tell me Brythnoth was a great king next.

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Orion

at 21:42 on 2011-07-13To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.

You seem to be conflating two types of story which, while often overlapping, ought to be conceptually separate.

Some stories get their punch from a structure that for lack of a better term I'll call redemption. (I don't mean that in a moral sense; I considered catharsis but that word has too much baggage.) In this kind of story, the protagonists main function is to suffer though a great deal of shit, which causes us to feel sympathetic towards them and be invested in finding out what happens to them. Only after the tension has been raised by setback after loss after betrayal are they allowed to win out, in an ending which the reader experiences as a euphoric relief/release.

Other stories are primarily about vicariously enjoying good things and experiences in the protagonist's life. They get to have and do the things the reader wants, and it's that pre-existing desire in the reader that makes the story compelling. This is what I would call a wish-fulfillment story.

Obviously it's possible to both in the same story. You can tell a story about someone suffering ignominously for 90% of the text and then getting a big house with a fast car and a hot spouse at the end. To some degree you can even mix techniques in the middle of a story, having your character take a quick break to shag a sex demon in between episodes of torture and failure. But I think to a certain degree they undermine each other because identifying with and sympathizing with a character are very different levels of distance.

Anyway, despite the frequent overlap, you can find examples of "pure" types if you look. Although I've never watched an entire James Bond film straight through, what I've seen leads to me think they are nearly pure wish-fulfillment stories. I've heard he gets captured and tortured occasionally, but whenever I've watched he's been confident and unfazed essentially the entire time, and he gets to enjoy fine drinks and casual sex throughout, not just at the end.

My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The main character is a bitter divorced leper who is thrown into a fantasy world where he spends most of his time being cursed or tortured, helplessly watching people die, or committing rape and then feeling bad about it. Watching him finally choose good, find his power, and defeat the big bad is satisfying because what went before was so horrible. But his reward for doing so is... going back to Earth to be a slightly less bitter but still ostracized leper. He never gets anything the typical reader wants.

I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.

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Wardog

at 22:06 on 2011-07-13

I like this game! I was very amused - I come down on Team Con as well. I do not aspire to Odysseus despite his aparently decent starting stats. Let's do Jesus next!

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Cammalot

at 22:21 on 2011-07-13

Let's do Jesus next!

Depends on if you buy the deus ex machina ending. ;-)

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Steve Stirling at 22:23 on 2011-07-13Cammalot:

-- Well, I got the impression that Dan -was- saying that enough outsized exploits -did- make it automatically bad.

My slant wasn't complete disagreement; simply that the reason the book was bad was that the hero's trials and challenges weren't -in proportion- to his abilities.

Hence the wish fulfillment element failed on its own terms because (to my mind) it's the overcoming of serious obstacles which makes the hero's ultimate triumph (or heroic death) satisfying -as- wish fulfillment.

Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?

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Steve Stirling at 22:27 on 2011-07-13

The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.

-- Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.

The continuity over broad areas of time and space indicates that, "originally" (say in the Migration period, which is when Beowulf is "set" to the extent that it happens in the real world at all) we're looking at a single interacting culture sphere, with stories and storytellers moving from area to area.

Eg., the very late Icelandic poems contain persons and stories dating to the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries; Ermannaric the Ostrogoth, for example, or Theodoric. Or the Niebelungen legend and the breaking of the Burgund kingdom by the Huns, which originates in the Rhineland.

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Steve Stirling at 22:33 on 2011-07-13

I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.

-- I see your point, but I think you're missing the essence of the "heroic quest".

The hero doesn't just have bad shit happen to him, he has bad shit happen and deals with it -in a heroic way-.

Odysseus suffers shiprweck, etc., and meets each challenge with heroic courage, heroic cunning, etc.

That's what -makes- him a hero, and worthy of identification. That's why the audience would want to "be" him.

At the end, he gets a reward. But it isn't any the less a wish fulfillment/identification story if he dies a heroic death; because the wish is to BE a hero. And heroes die.

It is genuinely possible to ardently desire a heroic death; it just isn't as common in this culture, currently.

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Steve Stirling at 22:34 on 2011-07-13

My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

God, how I hated that book. DIE, ALREADY, YOU LOSER! was always my reaction to Covenant.

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Orion

at 22:45 on 2011-07-13I thought the article criticized the way Kvothe's abilities are presented and justified more than the fact that he has extraordinary abilities. Let's look at the two big example: fighting skills and faery interludes.

Kvothe and Achilles are both young men of mysterious origin with legendary fighting skills and powerful magic. But Achilles is the iconic hero of his culture. His fighting skills are something he would reasonably have the opportunity to learn, and his use of them (his behavior in general, in fact) is constrained by the customs and standards of his culture. Kvothe, on the other hand, somehow obtains skills which properly belong to another culture and thereafter wanders the world endowed with asskicking which his rivals have no access to and which does not come with any significant obligations.

Or look at the handling of the supernatural. The Homeric heroes may be extremely good at what they do, but when there's a god or curse or prophecy in play they have to abide by it. Achilles will die if he fights in this war, just as Kvothe will supposedly die is he sleeps with Felurian. One of them escapes their fate and the other doesn't. And when Odyseeus hooks up with Calypso, she uses him until he falls into a deep sleep and he only escapes due to divine intervention.

I don't know, maybe that's what you're getting at when you say Kvothe doesn't face big enough challenges? That Calypso is obviously "more powerful" than Felurian and Paris more skilled than anyone Kvothe fights? I guess that works, but I'd rather think of it not in terms of facing bigger challenges, but rather having to follow the rules while doing it.

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Wardog

at 22:47 on 2011-07-13

Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.

Yes, I know, but you specifically cited Beowulf as an example of historical wish-fulfillment fantasy. I have, I hope, explained why it isn't.

Indeed, these are examples of late Icelandic poems. Congratulations.

However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.

And a list of texts is not an argument as to why any of them may be interpreted as historical wish fulfillment fantasy either.

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Dan H

at 23:00 on 2011-07-13

Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?

Ah, I think this is the heart of our disagreement. To an extet I *was* criticising the book for not being a modernist, anti-heroic text, because I felt that the book was *setting itself up* to be a modernist, anti-heroic text and was being treated by the SF/F community as if it *was* a modernist, anti-heroic text. I felt that only by *being* a modernist, anti-heroic text could the book begin to deal with the themes it so promisingly raised in book one.

I have absolutely nothing against pure wish-fulfillment (although I prefer it to come in packages rather smaller than 997 pages) but I don't personally find it terribly interesting, or worthy of attention.

I'd also suggest that we might be using "wish fulfillment" slightly differently. A lot of what you call "wish fulfillment" is what I would simply call "myth" - it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.

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Steve Stirling at 23:12 on 2011-07-13Orion:

-- I think we're saying pretty much the same thing here, just using different terminology.

Kvorthe's abilities are so out of proportion to the background that they break the narrative frame of the story.

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Steve Stirling at 23:19 on 2011-07-13

However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.

-- I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition.

Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar. Beowulf is, after all, set in what's now Sweden and from the internal evidence was hundreds of years old when the manuscript was written down, whenever that was.

This necessarily implies that at the time Beowulf was circulating in Anglo-Saxon England, a lot of -other- stories deriving from the same corpus were too, versions of the Niebelungen story or the tale of Wayland, and quasi-historical stuff like "Burnt Finnsburg". Doubtless there were versions of Beowulf circulating in Scandinavia.

We have a (fairly) complete text of Beowulf essentially by accident; we don't have most of the others, also essentially by accident.

Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.

And the others as well.

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Steve Stirling at 23:23 on 2011-07-13

it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.

-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here.

Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

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Orion

at 08:14 on 2011-07-14Jesus:

Pros: foot rubs, vintage wine, and cheap seafood. Speak before adoring audiences and travel with a dozen groupies.

Cons: celibacy, poor fashion sense, and agonizing death.

I think I have to vote "con" again.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 10:52 on 2011-07-14I think the discussion might be suffering from a confusion of terms used. Wish fulfillment as I understand it would refer to a more specific narrative ploy, which appeals directly to the reader's wish to insert themselves into the story through charecterization and titillation and whatnot. It might be a mistake to do, as Steve does to effortlessly widen wish fulfillment to mean any sense of recognition with a character in a story. Sure, if we allow this, Steve is right, because it seems clear that most(though perhaps not categorically all) stories depend on the audience's interest in the story and their recognizing the character as a person.

I don't think that such a wide use of the term is very useful or a strong argument though. If, for example we discuss the Odyssey, as somewhere above, it is surely a heroic epic where the hero is very resourceful and strong, but the very point of the story is its tragic tone in Aristotelian terms, that is a great person who is unable to escape their fate as gods or the worlds plaything. While the intended audience of Odysseia(or Ilium) are no doubt meant to be impressed by the hero and his prowess, it is very doubtful whether any one would wish to be like him. He tries to reac home after a ten year war which he was tricked into going to and because he manages to anger a godd takes ten years to reach it, while suffering horrible hardships and losing all his men and possessions besides, spending years on end as a plaything to one immortal or another. Meanwhile his son grows into a man and his wife is sieged in by suitors. Sure it has a happy ending, but the focus is not on how Odysseus is great, but rather on see how even the greatest of heroes is tossed around by the whims of powers beyond him.

And anyways as said, even if we allow that wish fulfillment is present in all stories, this just proves that it is a useless term to describe how some stories are more appealing than others. Because really if it is present in all stories, its presence is important like the words themselves, it has to be there, but it does not tell anything about the story.

I wouldn't treat the term with such a wide applicability though. Its use is more specific, as I said. In other news, the few extant germanic tales which differ from each other is hardly enough to claim such sweeping generalizations on what the audience though or expected from the stories.

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Wardog

at 10:57 on 2011-07-14

I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition

But "tradition" in this context is so broad as to be meaningless. Do you mean texts written in Anglo Saxon? Texts from an oral tradition? You might as well say Pride and Prejudice and The Blade Itself are from the same tradition because they're written in English and printed on paper. And, yes, it's arguably true but I don't see the value in asserting it? You can find superficial similarities between any texts you like but this doesn’t make Beowulf any more historical wish-fulfilment fantasy than it was previously. Which is not at all.

Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar

See above.

Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.

See above.

Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

You seem pretty desperate to talk about Amandis of Gaul so here we go. The same argument applies here. I’ve already tried to explain why I think arbitrarily assigning 21st century perspectives to historical contexts is reductive and foolish. I mean, as Dan has stated, the very idea of wish-fulfilment, in the terms we understand it, is quite a modern idea. Not to get all philosophy of language about it but when you read historical texts – especially those written in other languages – we have accept a degree of distance between those texts and ideas of selfhood, self-expression and society that are so embedded in our thinking we take them for granted.

The thing is, as far as I’m concerned you can interpret texts however you like, and if you want to look at these a collection of complex historical texts in a reductive and tedious way ... well ... feel free.

In short: what Ruderetum said :)

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Dan H

at 15:13 on 2011-07-14

-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here. Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

I haven't actually read Amadis of Gaul (were I feeling glib, I might suggest that I see no evidence that you have either) so I can't comment on the content but I can certainly comment on the context.

Amadis of Gaul, Wikipedia informs me, is an Iberian Knight-errantry tale of uncertain authorship and has its origins in the traditions of chivalric romance. It is not actually a novel *at all*.

The Wise Man's fear, by contrast is a work of twenty-first century genre fiction. It was written by a single author, and published for the mass market and targeted at a clearly defined demographic whose preferences and habits its publishers will have invested both time and money in researching.

They are fundamentally different *sorts* of text and people read them for fundamentally different reasons.

I'd also point out that I see no reason for the burden of proof to be on me to demonstrate that Amadis of Gaul *is* different to the Wise Man's Fear when you have made no effort to demonstrate that it *isn't*.

That said the other important difference between Amadis and Kvothe is this.

Yes, both Amadis and Kvothe are highly skilled at what they do, but the crucial difference is how the two characters are supposed to relate to their *target audience*.

Amadis the Gaul was a chivalric romance. Its target audience would have been very broad, since it was almost certainly based on an existing popular narrative, and while there may be a narrow section of people who heard or read the story who really were, or really aspired to be, knights, the vast marjority would not have been, and would not have ever thought they could be (the fourteenth century was not, after all, known for its vast social mobility). He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.

Kvothe, by contrast, has a variety of qualities which his target audience (teenage geeks) are *extremley* likely to possess, and which grant him amazing abilities with little or no effort on his part. For example:

* He is extremely clever and this makes him excellent at schoolwork

* He is particularly skilled at technical subjects

* His supernatural powers come largely from understanding concrete technical laws (many of which are specifically derived from real-world physics and engineering)

* He is awkward around women

* He has had a very small amount of martial arts training

* He was picked on as a child but came into his own at university

All of these are qualities which the book's target audience are *extremely likely* to identify with *specifically*. You don't look at Kvothe and admire him for his cleverness, you look at him and you recognise in him your *own* cleverness, all of his skills parallel skills which geeks have in the *real world*. He's not somebody to look up to, he's *you*. Even his flaws are really virtues (his awkwardness with women, for example, actually makes him *more* attractive to the opposite sex).

That's the difference between a mythic or an inspirational story and wish fulfilment. A mythic hero embodies virtues to which you aspire, but which you know that you do not truly possess. A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.

It is, in fact, an important and fundamental difference.

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Steve Stirling at 18:01 on 2011-07-15

A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.

-- well, you have a point there.

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Steve Stirling at 18:05 on 2011-07-15

He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.

-- well, no, but that's not quite the point of wish-fulfillment. You don't think you're Superman, you -wish- you're Superman, and for the duration of the story you -imagine- you're Superman, able to do these amazing things.

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Dan H

at 10:27 on 2011-07-19On Superman: The really, really important thing about Superman is Clark Kent. Superman works as wish-fulfilment because Superman actually *isn't* Superman most of the time, he's this mild-mannered nebbishy guy with glasses (again, much like the intended target audience).

And of course the other thing to remember is that wish-fulfilment isn't a binary - as Orion and others have pointed out above, a lot of stories have wish-fulfilment *elements*, whereas Kvothe comes across to me as *pure* wish-fulfilment.

(Sorry I know Steve's been banned, but I thought this discussion might have been getting somewhere)

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Orion

at 06:18 on 2011-07-20Dan,

I never really read/watched Superman, but I'm interested by your comment, because it doesn't really match up with my experience of other secret identity setups. As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.

I always assumed that the primary function of Clark Kent was as a narrative device. Superheroes generally and Superman in particular are just too effective when on stage in costume, so you have to give them human lives and duties to stretch out the plot and prevent them from solving everything immediately. Secondarily, I would imagine that Clark kent would actually pull the story toward the "redemption" end of my "redemption/wish fulfillment" spectrum by making the protagonist suffer.

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Dan H

at 12:13 on 2011-07-20

As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.

I don't think I made my point clearly enough. It's not the fact that Superman has a secret identity that's the issue, it's the fact that despite his superpowers (and superpowers are really a red herring here) Superman is basically an ordinary guy with parents and a hometown and a job. (It is, I believe, often said in DC comics fandom that the difference between Batman and Superman is that Superman is really Clark Kent, whereas Bruce Wayne is really Batman).

Without Clark Kent, Superman would basically be Dr Manhattan, and while you can certainly imagine that it would be *cool* to be the Big Blue Guy, you aren't really invited to imagine that he *is* you, which I would argue is a necessary part of wish-fulfilment.

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Orion

at 15:40 on 2011-07-20That makes a lot of sense. In the general case, we could say that wish-fulfillment only works when the character basically thinks like the reader, so that they tend to do with their opportunities the kinds of things the reader would want to imagine doing.

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http://sprizouse.blogspot.com/

at 07:37 on 2011-08-21There was a

long comment thread

running over at Crooked Timber and I ended up bringing up this critique. Anyway, the post was about NPR's list of Top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels and I thought you should take a look at both the CT post (and comments thread) and the NPR list. Your input would probably be appreciated.

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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/

at 01:49 on 2011-09-01I had some fun running the Wikipedia entries for both books through Regender.com.

http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind

http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man%27s_Fear

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle compound words well, so it didn't manage to rename the series

The Queenkiller Chronicles

, but otherwise... very interesting!

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/EcqJaTxyotMBIWa7wHjFXrVfJz29#49b9a

at 02:24 on 2012-06-15

Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to fail at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?

You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?

Yes, there is a sign. Perhaps you could call it a hint. Or perhaps the biggest unanswered question in the entire story.

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Shim

at 08:13 on 2012-06-15

You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?

I haven't read the book, but those sound like pretty general, narrative losses rather than actual failures, if you see what I mean.

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James D

at 18:01 on 2012-06-15

I haven't read the book, but this dialog is waayyyyy too over-narrated for my tastes. I was rather surprised, given the author apparently has a sterling reputation. Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone. Do we really have to be told he's exploding when the next words out of his mouth are "how the hell am I supposed to know?" That whole scene just seems to fall into the same "more is more" trap a lot of modern fantasy authors are in. More description, more worldbuilding, more detail, less left up to the imagination, less engagement of the reader in the storytelling process.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 05:23 on 2012-06-16It doesn't help that the narrator sounds like a complete tool.

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valse de la lune

at 08:34 on 2012-06-17His voice a roll of thunder, no less. This is the brilliant writing all the fanboys praised?

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Dan H

at 14:29 on 2012-06-17

Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone.

There does seem to be a peculiar bit of received wisdom amongst a certain type of reader (and therefore a certain type of writer) that "just" dialogue isn't proper writing. I'm largely making this up, but I think it's born out of a prejudice against things which seem "simple" or possibly a desire to seem intellectual. It might also be a misplaced reaction against books which fail by trying to emulate films (or conversely, it may be that it appeals specifically to an audience accustomed to visual media, who expect every line of dialogue to be accompanied by some visual cue). It might also (I really am just guessing here) overlap with that nonsensical "use all the senses" advice you get in mediocre writing guides.

I don't like to be too smug about this sort of thing, but I do sometimes feel that a lot of Rothfuss' reputation for great writing stems from his adopting a style which overlaps with his audience's preconceptions about what good writing ought to look like. It's the kind of writing which makes you feel clever, and I suspect that his audience are particularly fond of feeling clever. Of course *criticizing* this sort of writing also makes you feel clever, so the audience kind of wins either way on this one.

I actually don't think Rothfuss' writing is that bad - The Wise Man's Fear wasn't hard to read because it was badly written, it was hard to read because it was nearly a thousand fucking pages and nothing fucking happens in it.

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Michal

at 18:20 on 2012-06-17Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.

From what I've read of

The Name of the Wind

(which admittedly isn't that much) I also didn't quite understand the praise Rothfuss's prose; I mean, there were some nice passages but there's quite a lot of space between them filled with not-so-great stuff. It's better than Paolini or Brooks or Goodkind but that's setting the bar really fucking low. I didn't quit reading because of the prose. I quit because I found Kvothe insufferable.

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Arthur B

at 18:29 on 2012-06-17

Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.

This. There's a world of stuff to howl at in that extract before you even begin to consider the prose.

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James D

at 20:05 on 2012-06-17

As a reader, I tend to value a writer's style pretty highly, and given that his style is so often praised, I was just rather surprised at how overwrought the snippets you quoted were. If they're not representative of the whole book, well, you should've picked better ones!

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good? It's just too absurd for me to believe that Rothfuss expected people to take it seriously. Not to say that simply using an unreliable narrator is an instant ticket to literary quality, but maybe the problem isn't so much that the stories are filled unbelievable self-aggrandizement, but that Rothfuss failed at making Kvothe egotistical and charming, so he ended up insufferable instead. I imagine the book might be pretty fun if it were clear that Kvothe was just a loser who made up absurdly flattering, highly improbable stories about himself. And if it were maybe 300 pages long.

Just as an aside, The Wise Man's Fear recently won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2011.

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Arthur B

at 20:41 on 2012-06-17

I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary. Smarmy bullshit is smarmy bullshit, regardless of whether you're intended to believe it or not.

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Michal

at 20:52 on 2012-06-17

isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?

Well,

The Name of the Wind

certainly wasn't, since the frame story made it clear Kvothe really was just that awesome. Any cracks in the narrative this time around, Dan?

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 21:25 on 2012-06-17

I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary.

Yeah, I don't really see what other response there is. The kind of wish-fulfillment this book seems intended to provide seems like it would be better delivered through, say, a video game. Hearing some douchebag talk about fucking hot chicks doesn't quite make me feel like I'm in his place.

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James D

at 21:32 on 2012-06-17Maybe I am being too generous then. I'm just trying really hard to understand what people see in the books beyond typical fantasy wish-fulfillment+adventure, but maybe that's all it is, minus the benefit of a tight plot books in that style need.

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Dan H

at 23:21 on 2012-06-17

They're fairly representative (although Felurian speaks in a *particularly* flowery way) - it's just that I don't think the writing is particularly *bad*, just not especially *good*. Or perhaps to put it another way, what flaws there are in the writing are just a specific instance of the far more general problem of the book being smug, up itself, and nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is. I might also suggest that amongst fantasy readers "well written" is code for "overwritten" four times out of five.

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?

Very much not. It's the autobiography of somebody *extremely self-deprecating*. As evidenced by the awful bits where Kvothe point blank refuses to narrate all of the bits where he actually does interesting stuff. Framing-story Kvothe is a broken man, and he is extremely reluctant to acknowledge his own triumphs - Bast actually has to explicitly instruct the Chronicler to encourage him to focus on them, because Kvothe's own sense of guilt over the Terrible Things That Happen In Book Three is such that he no longer trusts himself.

Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.

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James D

at 00:04 on 2012-06-18

Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.

Yech. Why the fuck do so many people like this book again?

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 02:03 on 2012-06-18Because nothing tops off a douche sandwich like a nice juicy glob of emo.

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http://omarsakr.wordpress.com/

at 08:23 on 2012-08-22Hey Dan,

I've recently stumbled across a few of your articles and I'm currently experiencing the giddy highs of a high-school girl's crush, or what I imagine that would feel like anyway. Still, I'll refrain from allowing that to develop further just yet because a) it's creepy as balls and b) the interwebs are full of disappointing traps and a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier (no matter how many times I write that or look it, it just seems wrong).

Anyway, I just wanted to comment to say thank you! I've felt like, for the longest time, I've been alone in my dismissal of Rothfuss and my dismay at the critical acclaim he's received. Don't get me wrong, he seems like a great guy and he's a passable writer, but he in no way deserves the absurd praise that's been heaped on him. I remember writing an article years ago about how overrated he and GRRM are as authors today (although the latter is certainly more deserving). So, it's been great to read your articles (albeit belatedly) and the comments that so accurately carve these books up.

In WMF you correctly pointed out a passage that utterly ruined the book for me. I was willing to overlook a lot of what you pointed out, due to its light entertainment factor, until I read the 'I was on my way to X when this and this and this happened to me but I don't have time to tell you about any of those exciting things because the story must go on'. What thoroughly pissed me off about the ensuing billion-page section was that NOTHING HAPPENED. There's a stupidly long section where Kyvothe and his band are sitting around the woods telling each other stories just so Rothfuss could indulge in meta-wankery, his constant wink-wink nudge-nude can you see that I'm telling a story about a guy telling a story about how he and some other guys told stories once and the way stories within stories are blah blah blah.

That section of the book filled me with rage. Goddamn.

Okay, just had to get that off my chest. He writes easy, simple prose that's really engaging and this could have been a much better series but for all the reasons you pointed out, he, the series itself, and his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang. Serious fantasy my ass.

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Arthur B

at 10:03 on 2012-08-22

a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier

If it's any reassurance, Dan's preferred coffee for about as long as I've known him.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 17:07 on 2012-08-23

his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang

Well, the rabid Nice Guy geek contingent has tried every other personality flaw, so it's about time they tried pretentious literary snobbery.

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http://everstar3.livejournal.com/

at 03:17 on 2013-06-12I realize I am quite late to this discussion, but I write now to thank you for saving my Kindle, because if I'd read that speech of Felurian's on it, I most likely would have thrown it across the room.

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Robinson L

at 10:36 on 2013-07-19Found this via a friend of mine, who's a major fan of the books:

looks like the Kingkiller Chronicles is being adapted into a TV series

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Dan H

at 22:47 on 2013-07-19What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

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Arthur B

at 22:54 on 2013-07-19

What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

Because brick-sized open-ended novels with silly numbers of characters and no end in sight make for great soap operas?

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Melanie

at 06:37 on 2013-07-20

What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

The more books the author writes

without

finishing it, the more the tv show can be dragged out?

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Jules V.O.

at 13:30 on 2013-07-20There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.

In that vein, I suspect the best part of the KC show would be the 'storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck' segment, where the lack of specificity would give them the freedom to fill in some conventional(ly satisfying) content.

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Arthur B

at 14:01 on 2013-07-20

There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.

I do love the fact that the

Breaking Dawn

director was like "Fuck it, I'm just going to do exactly what the text says rather than presenting whatever it is people think they see in the text", so lo and behold

an adult werewolf falls in love with a baby.

#Ferretbrain #The Kingkiller Chronicle #Patrick Rothfuss #Twilight #Dan H

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