#but rather the very real-world sort of read-between-the-lines thing that my family background raised me to recognize

[sheliesshattered]

pausing the niche-interest podcast-style interview to process the bizarre connection my brain had just made was not enough

going back and re-listening to the section that had made my brain go "oh? oh." was not enough

the flurry of google and wikipedia and reddit searches to track down bits of corroborating evidence about that one innocuous background-information section of the interview was not enough

pacing around my house while I tried to grapple with this strange, possibly true, frightening-if-true bit of information was not enough

no, I needed a solid 30 minutes of mindlessly scrolling my Tumblr dash to just let that information sit, and now I might, maybe be ready to listen to the rest of the interview

[kindness-ricochets]

I’ve been seeing a lot of thoughts and hc of autistic wylan lately and you seem to also be a fan of the concept. May I ask why? Exactly? I could definitely kinda see it but wanna hear you thoughts you’re always so eloquent

Hey there anon! Sorry for the delay—I’m guessing you already found an answer to this elsewhere while I was off Tumblr for a bit, but just in case, here are my thoughts. This will be heavily personal, but… well, you can’t very well ask an autistic person about autism and expect neutrality!

Autism is different for everyone and can be difficult to pin down, so while Wylan is arguably autistic, he misses several beats that for me would have made him definitively and undeniably autistic. For example, when the bells start to ring, triggering black protocol—I work in a place with a lot of bells and am frequently caught too close to one and normally press my hands over my ears until it’s over because that sound is like shrapnel raking across my insides. All of them. Not just the ear and brain parts. Wylan doesn’t have that sort of visceral reaction, but that may just mean he doesn’t have the same sensitivities that I do, or to the same level. He also never, that I recall, eats meat—as weird as that might sound, eating meat is incredibly complicated with heightened sensitivities to taste and texture. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized it was strange to get up from the table to spit out my food because it viscerally repulsed me. So it might be that Wylan is autistic and has different experiences than I do. Those are things I would include in a story as major indicators of a character being autistic. This might also mean that his father’s way of raising him taught him to hide unusual reactions and stimming behaviors. It’s not that much of a reach to assume a man who tried to abuse the dyslexia out of his son would take the same approach to autism. (More on autism and abuse later.)

So while I’m going to lay out why I read Wylan as autistic, that’s why I think it’s valid to read him as not being autistic as well. Both are valid.

A final caveat, I am well overdue for a reread of the books, so I likely left something out or could have found better examples. Take this as a few of my reasons for a personal headcanon. Anyone who feels differently, that's fine! We can each read things our own way :)

1 - Hyperfixation: The way Wylan loves music

Most of the Crows’ backgrounds color how they see the world: Kaz’s shrewdness, Matthias’s tactical thinking and superstition, Inej’s faith and Suli wisdom, etc. That’s a sign of good character writing. But very little of Wylan’s upbringing seems to have influenced how he sees the world. It comes closest when he thinks about how his father would scorn his new friends, but we never see that scorn from Wylan.

The way a hyperfixation feels, it’s like you’ve always lived in a close parallel world, never fully been a part of the other one where it seems like everyone else lives, but suddenly there’s this bright shining piece of your soul laced through the other world. It lets you connect, it lets you exist in their realm, and you can’t help but filter everything new through that lens because it’s the brightest, most wonderful thing. (I had been between hyperfixations for a while when I started a new job; six months into that work, I read Crooked Kingdom. One of my coworkers thought I had fallen in love, it was that marked a difference.)

So, combining these: Wylan never really acts like he was part of his father’s world, and indeed is in some ways separate from the other Crows, but he parses everything through music, his hyperfixation. He sets words to music to remember them, like he does with the contract. Even his own anxiety is made sense of through music, when in his first narrated chapter, he sets it to music: what am I doing here what am I doing here…. When he’s overwhelmed, his thoughts are “a jangle of misplayed chords”. The Crows have backgrounds that influence how they react to the world, but Wylan’s hyperfixation is his means of experiencing and understanding the world.

2 - Literal thinking: Wylan responds to exact words

In this post, I went into detail on the line where Wylan suggested waking up men to kill them. Wylan is generally unsupportive of killing people—Oomen, Smeet’s clerk, his father… he advocates not-murder in each of these situations. Accepting his aversion to murder, his suggestion to wake men up and kill them seems like a genuine reaction to Jesper saying he doesn’t want to kill unconscious men. Wylan takes things literally.

This happens the most with Jesper, probably because Jesper talks to Wylan the most. Nina and Matthias don’t really register him past how he might be useful, Inej is usually quite direct, and Kaz is very deliberate when he speaks with Wylan. This really interests me because Kaz tends to vary his speech more than the others do, he adapts more to being around other people. He jokes a little with Jesper, spars with Nina, speaks more openly and more sharply with Inej, and he’s precise with Wylan. Kaz may not know what autism is, but he recognizes what’s effective with Wylan.

Another example is when Wylan is sketching the Ice Court plans and Jesper says it looks like a cake. There are plenty of valid responses here: pointing out that concentric circles look like lots of things, that it’s just a sketch, telling Jesper to stop looking over his shoulder. Instead, Wylan says that the Ice Court is sort of like a cake. That… doesn’t sound like something Wylan would normally say. He’s not addressing the whole situation, he’s addressing the specific words Jesper said.

One of the most heartbreaking examples of this (to me, anyway) is with Marya. Wylan does the same thing with his mother, when she asks if he’s there for her money and says she hasn’t got any, and his response is, “I don’t either.” We understand as readers that what Marya is communicating here is that she is so accustomed to being utterly ignored unless she is being used, and if she told Wylan that no one visited but to take advantage and she assumed he was here for the same reason, he would say it wasn’t the case. But he just responds to the immediate statement.

There are a lot of examples of this.

3 — 0% perception, 100% creativity

Wylan can identify things that don’t make sense or that he doesn’t understand, but at the beginning of the series he can’t make leaps, only ask questions. On the Ferolind, he wonders about the source of water at the Ice Court; though Kaz doesn’t say as much, he was clearly wondering, too, because he eventually figured out the underground river. There’s an interesting parallel here where, in the beginning of Crooked Kingdom, Wylan asks a question about how they’ll break into Smeet’s and Kaz tells him to use his eyes instead of running his mouth—at which point Wylan is able to figure it out. I don’t think this is because he never tried before, though, but because no one ever bothered to teach him. Kaz can be harsh but he gives harsh corrections rather than harsh rejections and Wylan learns from him.

It’s hard to understand the world for people with autism. The world is designed and run by and for people whose minds are fundamentally different from ours, whose thoughts and experiences are unlike ours. Imagine trying to learn English or Spanish or Mandarin or any other spoken language if your first language was olfactory. That’s sort of what it’s like for someone with autism to just get dropped into the world and expected to figure this out.

This can be attributed to Wylan’s upbringing, but I disagree with that because none of the others were brought up in the Barrel, either, and Wylan doesn’t understand trade or politics with any special skill. Kaz wasn’t born in the Barrel, but he managed to go from “stealing is wrong” to “wrong isn’t my concern” real quick; Colm Fahey didn’t raise his son on gambling and firefights; the Ghafas never expected their daughter to be away from the family. Only Nina has relevant training—and even that’s precious little, she left school way too early. The others figured it out; Wylan needed a bit more help. He also seems surprised by the way his father conducts business. Wylan takes things on face value—like the time he’s surprised someone would do something, simply because it’s unlawful. This is something he expresses to a group of gangsters. He’s never been taught the way of any world and these things are not intuitive to him.

But Wylan isn’t stupid.

He doesn’t know how to understand the world, but he does understand how things go together. Given a pointy diamond, a handle, and a screw, he cut through Grisha glass. He carries flashbangs and magic napalm, he recreates military hardware—Wylan understands how to make things interact for a specific result. But to me the most telling thing isn’t just that he puts together chemical pieces, it’s that he figured out Jesper controlled bullets. He saw the pieces and put them together.

Wylan can understand when things don’t make sense, but he can’t make sense of them—yet when he understands things at their basic level, he understands them without preconception, for what they are. This is a very autistic way of thinking about things, it goes back to the literalism. He can’t make the leaps of logic other people can, but he also doesn’t make the assumptions they do—“I’ve never heard of a bullet Grisha, so that’s not a thing” vs “Well Jesper’s an almost impossibly good shot and he controls metal and bullets are metal, so why not?”

4 - Broken brain/body connection

Wylan’s great at chemistry and drawing and playing flute or piano—but he’s something of a disaster other times. This is in particular contrast to the other characters, all of whom are physically adept. Meanwhile it’s a challenge for Wylan to climb a rope ladder and he spends a full paragraph trying to figure out what to do with his hands. It’s easy to say, well, he’s used to a sedentary lifestyle, but at this point he’s not. He’s worked in the tannery for months. He’s just physically awkward.

I have less to say on this point only because it’s about something I don’t fully understand myself. I don’t really understand what it would be like to have a body that just… does things? Like normal stuff? Without tics and stims. No idea. Only that Wylan’s discomfort in and seeming lack of mastery of his own body feels very relatable to me.

5 - Abuse

One of the most familiar things about Wylan is how he has been so thoroughly abused and broken down that he’s afraid to do or say much of anything. Again, this is a place his background can be an obscuring factor. Of course Wylan didn’t think to blow up the walls when the first met the parem-juiced jurda and got trapped, he’s a spoiled rich kid! Except, he also startled when Jesper said his name later. Wylan didn’t hesitate because he was spoiled, he hesitated because he had no confidence.

He also thinks Kaz would laugh at him for playing music at his mother’s grave. Now, personally, I can’t see Kaz laughing at Wylan—being indifferent, thinking it’s pointless sentimentality, shaking his head, maybe commenting sharply that they need to go if they don’t have the time. But not laughing. Kaz is a snarky, sharp-edged jerk sometimes, but he doesn’t go out of his way to criticize, he just lets people know when they inconvenience him.

Wylan has been trained to identify attention as negative by an overbearing abusive father who literally saw him as less favorable than a demon. Now, that may have been hyperbole, but Jan criticized everything he could about Wylan—art, music, emotion—and made clear that he was worthless and competent to nothing. (Jan Van Eck can suck a rotten donkey dick but that’s neither here nor there.)

A lot of people with autism experience levels of bullying that have similar impacts. Or as the kids these days are calling it: we go to school. We go to school where we are weird. Where we look weird and move weird and talk about weird things and there’s a whole little bevy of asswipes to makes sure we know it. I got teased more for playing Pokemon and sitting alone reading than the kid who pissed himself onstage at assembly. (This was before Pokemon was cool. I’m old.) And that is not unusual for autistic kids. It’s also not unusual for this to be compounded by relatives or even parents who may be trying to help but don’t understand and can make things even harder.

So we can’t read social cues and we’re taught at a vicious age that everything that comes naturally to us is wrong. Imagine trying to interact in society with that background. There is no guide and most advice from neurotypical people isn’t actually what they mean. It breaks you down.

Wylan’s anxiety isn’t definitive of autism, but isn’t something that was incredibly familiar as someone whose neurodivergent experiences created a strong level of anxiety.

6 — High Compassion, Low Social Competence

Wylan isn’t very good at making friends. In fact, none of the Crows likes him much in the beginning, and only some of them soften toward him by the end. (Matthias and Nina come to respect his skills as a chemist but neither seems to particularly like him.) But you can see throughout the books that Wylan wants to connect with them and be one of them, he just… isn’t. He’s off-beat. He’s weird. He asks questions and mimics behaviors (trying to be cool and tough like Jesper, saying “mission” like Matthias does, imitating Kaz’s scheming face) but he doesn’t quite get how to adapt.

But he still cares about people. Not just them. Everyone. He cares about the people they leave in the ditch outside the prison wagon, he cares about Hanna Smeet, he cares about Alys. He cares about the people who’ll take a hit from Kaz’s sugar caper.

Wylan’s awkward social skills have undeniable big autism energy. I posit his compassion does as well. This is simply who Wylan is, and that means being someone who cares about everyone. I have nothing to back up that this is related to autism. I can say that it’s like me. (Not to brag.) I can’t turn off the part of my brain that says everyone matters. Individuals can opt out of that compassion, but they have it by default. There’s a certain agony in feeling a pull toward and love for just about everyone and yet an inability to develop meaningful connections with them, and that keen loneliness… it just burns.

Again, it’s not definitive of autism, but it’s very similar to an autistic experience.

I said in the beginning that I didn’t think Wylan certainly had autism and I stand by that, but he is a powerfully honest reflection of many people who do. So he can be understood to have autism, and that’s part of the reason some people have that headcanon.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Are you Christian? You usually seem very negative about it with Jake but Nat talks Bible stories and you own a Bible?

There are a few things to unpack in this ask, and I’ll try to touch on them all. 

CW for frank talk about religion/Christianity, child abuse, domestic violence

1. I was raised in a very conservative rural Christian community in which the closest I came to knowing an open atheist before I was in high school was that my best friend’s family didn’t go to church. It was the kind of conservative Protestantism where my friend in high school being Catholic was cause for commentary by my extended family, who were concerned that if I attended church with her I might get into “idol worship.”

I wanted Card Captor Sakura tarot cards once because I thought the art was beautiful and had a family member threaten to burn them.

I took Christianity for granted as the foundation of the world until I watched it used as a cudgel against the people I knew who in some way did not fit a mold that made no sense, and I became aware that the strictures I was living in were subjecting some of the people I loved to utter misery, hatred, and violence. This is before I was able to even conceive of my bisexuality. 

The older I get, the more I see how the American Christianity I grew up with is merely a weapon, twisted and corrupted from the very words that its adherents claim to most believe in, used to excuse and justify bigotry, selfishness, and cruelty. Learning about the history of Christianity used as a weapon during colonization did a lot, too, to make me see that what I read, and learned, in the Bible was not Christianity as most of its adherents understood it.

Would I identify that way now? I don’t know. There is such a weight of negativity, when we have watched those great and pious Christians support tearing children from their families, executing prisoners, justifying all those things they once taught us were unforgivable sins unless you repented, and selling the soul of the national Christian to gain a little power and a justification for their own bigotry.

If you shall know them by their fruits, there are a lot of rotten fruits.

There is a lot of good in Christianity, but it has lost so much ground by catering to the worst and refusing to stand up for those who need love most. The very people we are called to hold our arms out to are turned away for the tiniest, flimsiest, most ridiculous reasons.

The person I have known in my life who most embodies Jesus is an atheist and she is working herself to the bone trying to serve undocumented communities along the border in Texas, despite a consistent risk to her own health from the violence she is routinely threatened with.

2. I don’t really think the comparison of Nat to Jake is a fair one. Jake grew up in an abusive environment, and his experience with church was a congregation that turned away from the obvious signs that he and his mother were being abused. 

Jake experienced being told his father was the ‘head of the household’ and he should be more respectful. He experienced his father’s bullying, violence, and homophobia. He experienced his mother being told that she should try to “steer” his father away from abusing her, or be more faithful, or call on God for help, when the people who could have helped her chose not to.

He saw his father wear the mask of an affable family man, and how everyone chose to believe the mask, because it was easier for them if they did not see a woman and her son who desperately needed a way out.

Jake’s experience was, as a whole, a deeply negative one. And if you think it’s not true to life, I would challenge that you are ignoring a lot of stories of very real people who have experienced and survived this exact thing.

While I have not modeled Jake on a single person, every aspect of his upbringing, right down to being told that if he respected his father as an authority more that the abuse wouldn’t be so bad and being sent back to his mother when he got old enough to fight back and couldn’t be used to control her from afar any longer, is something that happened to someone in real life.

A lot of these things are hidden - but they are still real.

Nat, meanwhile, has a background of some similarity to my own, in that nothing was perfect but the church was not inherently negative in her life, it was simply part of the foundation. She has a lot of joyful memories of her childhood in church.

A lot of us are walking around who may not attend church, at least not regularly, but who were raised on Bible stories that we can still recite word for word even a decade or two later, and who can sing whole songs from Veggie Tales, who could right here and right now burst into “THERE’S A RIVER FLOWING DEEP AND WIDE” at the top of their fucking lungs. You want to hear about Jacob wrestling with God? I can recite parts of it from memory. I can sing “It Is Well With My Soul” right now. How Great Thou Art, all the old hymns, they’re still in my mind and my heart and I still find so many of them beautiful. 

I still think of Bible stories when making comparisons, sometimes, because it’s very much like any memory - your mind pulls on the strongest associations automatically, and our childhoods are foundational. 

So, yeah, Nat thinks about those stories and what is left between the lines, because they’re part of her identity, no matter how she lives, now. She also tells Jake, when following the ambulance to the hospital, “we take the hand that God deals us and we hope for the best”. 

I would argue Nat has retained some faith in God as a force of good, but she has retained a faith that requires her to do the hard work, make the hard choices, and stand up for the ‘least of these’ rather than hoping someone else will, rather than waiting for someone with more power or more authority or more money to do it.

Nat is my view of the ideal Christian - imperfect, prone to mistakes, but her compassion knows no boundaries, and she will stand up for the weak ones, and those who need her, even at the cost of her own freedom and life if necessary - but she doesn’t sit around proclaiming it, she doesn’t need the world to know it, she only needs to show through her actions, be known by her fruits. She fucked up before, sure, but she’ll spend the rest of her life working to undo that failure and how it hurt so many people she could never have understood at the time, with the information she had available to her. If I had to pick a song to define how I see Nat’s view of religion, it would be Dear Me by Nichole Nordeman.

If Jake kept any shred of positivity towards religion, it would be because of living with Natalie Yoder, who actually quietly lives out all the shit that other people just say really loudly while publicly supporting the opposite.

They’re different people, with different life experiences and therefore very different ways of looking at Christianity - and neither one of them is me, not fully. Neither one fully reflects where I am, in my own beliefs. 

I understand them both, but I am not my characters, and I don’t want their mindsets or beliefs to be taken as mirror reflective of my own, because they aren’t.

3. For the record, I own five Bibles. Three were gifts, two I bought myself a long time ago. The archeology Bible I bought myself and I still fucking love it, it’s cool just from a history nerd perspective even. I have never thrown a Bible away in my life, and I don’t get rid of them. 

It’s just a superstition, I guess, but I’ve never been able to. 

When my father died, he had something like seventeen Bibles, many deeply worn and torn. I can’t tell you how we agonized over what to do with them, because throwing away a Bible seemed so deeply wrong. We had to sort of gin each other up to be able to throw any of them out, and we still kept some.

But, yeah. I own a few. 

I think you are likely to discover that a whole lot of us raised very Christian still have Bibles in our houses/apartments, whether we currently practice or not. 

Some of us may only have them for still-religious family members to see, to hold off a series of questions we don’t want to answer. Some of us have them because they’re just part of our lives, like the walls and the kitchen faucet. Some of us still sit down to read them, sometimes, because we still feel moved by the stories that lived in us first.

Some of us keep them for all those reasons and more.

[dajokahhh]

Alright, time for some pretentious sociological-esque rambling. This is gonna be long as hell (its 1822 words to be specific) and I don’t begrudge anyone for not having the patience to read my over-thought perspectives on a murder clown. CWs for: child abuse, 

I think a lot of things have to go wrong in someone’s life for them to decide to become a clown themed supervillain. A lot of people in Gotham have issues but they don’t become the Joker. I think that as a writer it’s an interesting topic to explore, and this is especially true for roleplaying where a character might be in different scenarios or universes. This isn’t some peer reviewed or researched essay, it’s more my own personal beliefs and perspectives as they affect my writing. I think villains, generally, reflect societal understandings or fears about the world around us. This is obviously going to mean villains shift a lot over time and the perspective of the writer. In my case, I’m a queer, fat, mentally ill (cluster B personality disorder specifically) woman-thing who holds some pretty socialist ideas and political perspectives. My educational background is in history and legal studies. This definitely impacts how I write this character, how I see crime and violence, and how my particular villains reflect my understandings of the society I live in. I want to get this stuff out of the way now so that my particular take on what a potential origin story of a version of the Joker could be makes more sense.

Additionally, these backstory factors I want to discuss aren’t meant to excuse someone’s behaviour, especially not the fucking Joker’s of all people. It’s merely meant to explain how a person (because as far as we know that’s all he is) could get to that point in a way that doesn’t blame only one factor or chalk it up to “this is just an evil person.” I don’t find that particularly compelling as a writer or an audience member, so I write villains differently. I also don’t find it to be particularly true in real life either. If you like that style of writing or see the Joker or other fictional villains in this way, that’s fine. I’m not here to convince anyone they’re wrong, especially not when it comes to people’s perspectives on the nature of evil or anything that lofty. Nobody has to agree with me, or even like my headcanons; they’re just here to express the very specific position I’m writing from. 

The first thing I wanna do is set up some terms. These aren’t academic or anything, but I want to use specific and consistent phrasing for this post. When it comes to the factors that screw up someone’s life significantly (and in some instances push people towards crime), I’ll split them into micro and macro factors. Micro factors are interpersonal and personal issues, so things like personality traits, personal beliefs, mental health, family history, where and how someone is raised, and individual relationships with the people around them. Macro factors are sociological and deal with systems of oppression, cultural or social trends/norms, political and legal restrictions and/or discrimination, etc. These two groups of factors interact, sometimes in a fashion that is causative and sometimes not, but they aren’t entirely separate and the line between what is a micro vs macro issue isn’t always fixed or clear.

We’ll start in and work out. For this character, the micro factors are what determine the specifics of his actions, demeanor, and aesthetic. I think the main reason he’s the Joker and not just some guy with a whole lot of issues is his world view combined with his personality. He has a very pessimistic worldview, one that is steeped in a very toxic form of individualism, cynicism, and misanthropy. His life experience tells him the world is a cold place where everyone is on their own. To him the world is not a moral place. He doesn’t think people in general have much value. He learned at a young age that his life had no value to others, and he has internalized that view and extrapolated it to the world at large; if his life didn’t matter and doesn’t matter, why would anyone else’s? This worldview, in the case of my specific Joker, comes from a childhood rife with abandonment, abuse, and marginalization. While I will say he is definitively queer (in terms fo gender expression and non conformity, and sexuality), I’m not terribly interested in giving specific diagnoses of any mental health issues. Those will be discussed more broadly and in terms of specific symptoms with relation to how they affect the Joker’s internal experience, and externalized behaviours.

His childhood was, to say the least, pretty fucked up. The details I do have for him are that he was surrendered at birth because his parents, for some reason, did not want to care for him or could not care for him; which it was, he isn’t sure. He grew up effectively orphaned, and ended up in the foster care system. He wasn’t very “adoptable”; he had behavioural issues, mostly violent behaviours towards authority figures and other children. He never exactly grew out of these either, and the older he got the harder it was to actually be adopted. His legal name was Baby Boy Doe for a number of years, but the name he would identify the most with is Jack. Eventually he took on the surname of one of his more stable foster families, becoming Jack Napier as far as the government was concerned. By the time he had that stability in his mid to late teens, however, most of the damage had already been done. In his younger years he was passed between foster families and government agencies, always a ward of the government, something that would follow him to his time in Arkham and Gotham’s city jails. Some of his foster families were decent, others were just okay, but some were physically and psychologically abusive. This abuse is part of what defines his worldview and causes him to see the world as inherently hostile and unjust. It also became one of the things that taught him that violence is how you solve problems, particularly when emotions run high. 

This was definitely a problem at school too; moving around a lot meant going to a lot of different schools. Always being the new student made him a target, and being poor, exhibiting increasingly apparent signs of some sort of mental illness or disorder, and being typically suspected as queer (even moreso as he got into high school) typically did more harm than good for him. He never got to stay anywhere long enough to form deep relationships, and even in the places where he did have more time to do that he often ended up isolated from his peers. He was often bullied, sometimes just verbally but often physically which got worse as he got older and was more easily read as queer. This is part of why he’s so good at combat and used to taking hits; he’s been doing it since he was a kid, and got a hell of a lot of practice at school. He would tend to group up with other kids like him, other outcasts or social rejects, which in some ways meant being around some pretty negative influences in terms of peers. A lot of his acquaintances were fine, but some were more... rebellious and ended up introducing Jack to things like drinking, smoking cigarettes, using recreational drugs, and most important to his backstory, to petty crimes like theft and vandalism, sometimes even physical fights. This is another micro factor in that maybe if he had different friends, or a different school experience individually, he might have avoided getting involved in criminal activities annd may have been able to avoid taking up the mantle of The Joker.

Then there’s how his adult life has reinforced these experiences and beliefs. Being institutionalized, dealing with police and jails, and losing what little support he had as a minor and foster child just reinforced his worldview and told him that being The Joker was the right thing to do, that he was correct in his actions and perspectives. Becoming The Joker was his birthday present to himself at age 18, how he ushered himself into adulthood, and I plan to make a post about that on its own. But the fact that he decided to determine this part of his identity so young means that this has defined how he sees himself as an adult. It’s one of the last micro factors (when in life he adopted this identity) that have gotten him so entrenched in his typical behaviours and self image.

As for macro factors, a lot of them have to do specifically with the failing of Gotham’s institutions. Someone like Bruce Wayne, for example, was also orphaned and also deals with trauma; the difference for the Joker is that he had no safety net to catch him when he fell (or rather, was dropped). Someone like Wayne could fall into the cushioning of wealth and the care of someone like Alfred, whereas the Joker (metaphorically) hit the pavement hard and alone. Someone like the Joker should never have become the Joker in the first place because the systems in place in Gotham should have seen every red flag and done something to intervene; this just didn’t happen for him, and not out of coincidence but because Gotham seems like a pretty corrupt place with a lot of systemic issues. Critically underfunded social services (healthcare, welfare, children & family services) that result in a lack of resources for the people who need them and critically underfunded schools that can’t offer extra curricular activities or solid educations that allow kids to stay occupied and develop life skills are probably the most directly influential macro factors that shaped Jack into someone who could resent people and the society around him so much that he’d lose all regard for it to the point of exacting violence against others. There’s also the reality of living in a violent culture, and in violent neighbourhoods exacerbated by poverty, poor policing or overpolicing, and being raised as a boy and then a young man with certain gendered expectations about violence but especially ideas/narratives that minimalize or excuse male violence (especially when it comes to bullying or violent peer-to-peer behaviour under the guise of ‘boys will be boys’). 

Beyond that, there’s the same basic prejudices and societal forces that affect so many people: classism, homphobia/queerphobia, (toxic) masculinity/masculine expectations, and ableism (specifically in regards to people who are mentally ill or otherwise neurodivergent) stand out as the primary factors. I’m touching on these broadly because if I were to talk about them all, they would probably need their own posts just to illustrate how they affect this character. But they definitely exist in Gotham if it’s anything like the real world, and I think it’s fair to extrapolate that these kinds of these exist in Gotham and would impact someone like The Joker with the background I’ve given him.

I have no idea how to end this so if you got this far, thank you for reading!

[elliepassmore]

The Winter Duke review

4/5 stars Recommended for people who like: fantasy, magic, lesbian characters, power struggles, political intrigue, mysteries, LGBTQ+ representation I really enjoyed We Rule the Night and so was excited to see this author had published another book, albeit not in the same world. Unfortunately, I didn’t like this one nearly as much as I liked Night, even though it did follow through on its wlw potential. For starters, Winter Duke starts off very slowly. I really struggled to get into the book despite its premise and despite the fact that there is some action in chapter 2. However, chapter 1 and many of the chapters that followed were rather slow going and involved a lot of discussion and not a lot of action. Even the parts when Ekata gets to travel Below were somewhat meh (though I will say that the worldbuilding was fantastic and I very much enjoyed the descriptions of Below). Nevertheless, I feel like even with the tension in some scenes, most of the action occurs in chapter 2 and in the last 1/3 to 1/4 of the book. Another issue I had is that Ekata lets people push her around too easily. She is grand duke and, yeah, sure, maybe she didn’t want the position, but she was still raised as a princess or whatever the duchy equivalent is, yet she lets people bowl over her like its nothing. Ekata then complains that people don’t listen to her and do things without her knowledge, but she barely stands up for herself. Maybe the things that happen in the book would have still happened if she had asserted herself, maybe not, but she wouldn’t have been so passive about it at least. Further, though she admits she’s unsuited to the position of grand duke, she allows her ministers to not tell her things and doesn’t even read the documents she signs about trade agreements and what not. If she wants to at least be a good provisional grand duke and get people to listen to her, you’d think she’d put a little effort into making herself knowledgeable. To be fair to her, she does start trying to remember the dignitaries present, but that’s only halfway through the book. My third issue, which is also still kind of my second issue, is that Ekata doesn’t like her family and wants to be better…but then she tries to act just like her father and brother as soon as she becomes grand duke, even when people suggest to her that maybe she shouldn’t try to replicate them. She uses her brain to try and sort through the curse, but she doesn’t use it to try and rule and instead attempts to mirror her despotic father. Her behavior even impacts how she interacts with the people Below, who she’s long wondered about and loved and wanted to study, and the people she loves, and not in a good way. I get making mistakes and mirroring the behavior of people we know, and I get using stuff like this for tension, but my issue with this comes in when so many of Ekata’s problems would’ve been solved if she used her own brain for five minutes instead of trying to be her father and brother (or even looked over the end of her own nose). Like, she’s complaining that she doesn’t want to be grand duke, then refuses a parliament. Like…why? Just why? She’s afraid of the absolute power her father and brother would have to kill her and believes in her family’s right to rule instead of ‘peasants,’ but she doesn’t see the irony in how parliament would take away that absolute killing power and in how the woman she says is more a mother than her own is a freaking peasant. So many of her issues and tensions in this book would’ve been avoided if Ekata had just stayed herself the entire time. For things I do like, I enjoyed the focus on science + magic. Bartlett does a good job combining the two in a way that makes sense and doesn’t contradict one another. Magic in this world is less understood than science, but there are still rules and ways to study it alongside more concrete things like anatomy and chemistry. There is a more heavy lean on magic in this book than there was in Night, but I liked the different balance and found the exploration of it interesting. In this same vein, the worldbuilding was excellent as well and I enjoyed the little details that didn’t have much to do with the plot, but made it feel more real. There’s good LGBTQ+ rep in the book as well. Ekata is, obviously, gay and Inkar is as well. Sigis, one of the antagonists, is at least bi, if not pan, as is Lyosha, Ekata’s oldest brother. Several other named characters are nonbinary and at least one or two is asexual. There are also unnamed characters who are gay or bi as well. I think there’s also probably a lot of fluidity allowed in the world in terms of gender representation, since there are some women in the book called ‘prince’ and Ekata herself is called a grand duke, not a grand duchess. I also really liked some of the side characters. Aino, Ekata’s nursemaid and quasi-adoptive mother, is an absolute powerhouse. That woman manages to not only take care of Ekata and protect her from literal dangers that may creep into her room, but she also manages to fend off some of the ministers and dignitaries, steal Ekata’s mother’s jewelry, and plot to help herself and Ekata escape. Truly a background hero. Aino clearly cares for Ekata and wants what’s best for her, and she seems like an excellent person to have as a friend and defender. Further, Aino often provides some snippy commentary that I enjoy. Inkar, Ekata’s trial wife, is also a character that I enjoyed, but she, like Ekata, is stuck up in certain ways from being raised royalty, which causes some issues between her and Aino. To Inkar, the world of Kylma Above is completely foreign to her and her interactions with everything are as new as ours, making her one of the vessels for worldbuilding. Despite her view on servants, she doesn’t have the same problems Ekata seems to sympathizing with more common people and she gets on splendidly with the guards of the palace. Actually…aside from Aino, PM Eirhan, and Sigis, she seems to get along swell with everyone around her, even those who were once held hostage by her or her father. Overall, Inkar’s a very enjoyable character to read about. As for the main character, Ekata, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I listed a lot of the problems I have with her above, which led to me thinking I just wasn’t a fan of her character until around the last fourth or so of the book. On the other hand, she has some very funny lines throughout the book and I enjoyed how she was focused on science and used it to calm herself. I also liked her obvious love for Kylma, even if a lot of her thoughts about it are coated in ignorance or memories of her family. Overall I don’t think I entirely like Ekata, but I definitely don’t dislike her. I feel bad for her, honestly, since, as mentioned, a lot of her problems could’ve been circumvented if she’d just decided to be herself the entire time (and maybe extend herself a little to learn about the duchy, the dignitaries, and the agreements she’s signing). There are a lot more bad guys than good in this one, and it seems like one is around every corner. Eirhan is perhaps the most slithery of them, and it’s hard to tell whose side he’s on, though it largely seems to be his own. I found him to be an infuriating character, but didn’t hate him the same way I hate Sigis. Sigis, Ekata’s foster brother and a king in his own right, is just downright horrendous and deserves a sword through his back. Slimy and conniving, Sigis revels in others’ discomfort and is the picture beside the dictionary term ‘toxic masculinity.’ He does not, I believe, know the meaning of the word ‘no’ and simply thinks the world is his for the taking and by right. Overall I feel pretty much the same way about this book as I do about Ekata: I don’t dislike it, but I don’t entirely like it either. The worldbuilding was good and I really enjoyed the two main side characters, even if I didn’t like a lot of the other characters (though with them being antagonists, I’m going to say that was on purpose).

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

Misfit of Demon King Academy 1 | Healin’ Good PreCure 13 - 14 | Lapis Re:Lights 1 | God of High School 1 | Muhyo and Roji’s BSI s2 1

Misfit of Demon King Academy 1

This originally had the ecchi tag on its anime entry on AniList…or, at least, that’s how it was in my memory…but now that I see it doesn’t have that, it’s just another reincarnation isekai-type series. Let’s dig into it!

I…think this guy is meant to be portrayed as “hot” because he has the piercing eyes and he’s tall (against the girls in what will presumedly be his harem), but he kind of looks like your standard Potato-kun in a white outfit…so, uh…*shrugs*

Uh…is that guy meant to be Indian? You can’t get more obvious than the “Indu” family. Update: You see his brother later and Leorg has fairer skin, so maybe not.

LOL, “Flame of Darkness” makes someone nothing but a chuunibyou.

Uh…this is called The Misfit of Demon King Academy, y’know? Anos (Anoth?) is gonna get in, you bet your butts.

The owl is cute.

…guy, that 3 second rule thing was actually funny, but the more you think about the joke, the less funny it gets. Show: 1. Me: Infinity -1

Just from appearances, I wanna guess Misha is an ice or light magic user, or whatever equivalent the show has.

Is this what Assassin’s Pride could have been…?

How did the mother (Anoth’s) think her kid maturing that fast wasn’t weird?

Mushroom gratin? Is that an actual dish?...Yep, seems so. Sounds nice. I like mushrooms.

What’s up with young mothers in anime these days? Then again, the only other point of reference I have is Masamune-kun’s Revenge…

I thought it was the other Indu guy we saw earlier. This guy’s…not that bad-looking, though (LOL, my preferences ring out loud and clear…)…welp, spoke too soon. There he is. Update: Leorg kinda looks like Hakuto Kunai from Demon Lord, Retry!, come to think of it.

If Zepes died several times over the course of this episode…would one more death actually matter? (Not really, to be honest. Zepes is a scumbag.)

Come to think of it, this anime got postponed due to COVID, yeah? Was that why there was a sakuga spot earlier…?

Was that Sasha (Misha’s sister)? I found her name while checking if the anime was postponed.

I like the colour choices in this show, at least.

I don’t think this show has the best sense of comedic timing. Let your jokes breathe, dammit! That’s what comedic beats are for!

In a season with more offerings, I might get rid of this or pause it, but the season’s fairly sparse as it stands (darn virus!) so it stays.

Update: I didn’t notice, but an Anime News Network staff member wrote that Anoth’s surname is familiar…if you read Harry Potter.

Healin’ Good PreCure 13

Gotta start in the middle for this and work our way back. Note I did watch the 1st 2 eps without subs earlier this year when they were on the official PreCure YouTube, so I’m ahead of most people.

(From wandering the wiki and the news) I’ve seen nothing but pink/blue/yellow Cures these days, so I kind miss the more adventurous colours like green and orange…but then again, I never really liked green. It’s the colour of envy and…as petty as it sounds, I think I developed that bias because green is stereotypically the colour of rot, vomit (aside from anime’s rainbow vomit) and stinky things.

I didn’t notice this, but there’s a faint highlight on the Cures’ eyes (red for Grace, purple for Fontaine and blue for Sparkle).

It’s a drone! In PreCure! Yay! (It finally hit me exactly how much of a distant dream it’s been – from watching Suite and episodes of most of the other PreCure ‘til now – watching PreCure legally as a simulcast is! It’s crazy and it only took, what…5 years between Suite and this? 16 if you count from Futari wa to Healin’ Good.)

Is it that drone?

Hah? This is almost like the electricity-themed PreCure I came up with on the fan wiki. It’s not like I could sue Toei for it, though…they own that stuff, I only own what came out of my own imagination.

The subs say “Rate”, but “rate” has a meaning in English. No wonder the initial wiki translations say “Latte”, especially because the queen is “Teatine” to match.

Okay, so Mei is the sis and Yota is the brother. Got it.

Hey! What if there was a PreCure where the villains had devastated another world before? That would really raise the stakes.

“[T]hunders” (sic)? Thunder is the sound, lightning is the flash. Which one is it?

I see. As soon as they identified it as the Element of Lightning, I sort of guessed they could add it to their repertoire later, and I was right.

Its’s nice to see they put a woman in the moving company as well. Proves that girls can do anything they set their minds to, even what are supposedly “men’s jobs”.

I guess from the face I should’ve expected the element to talk, like the Fairy Tones from Suite, but I didn’t really figure that out until I saw it talk,

I feel like Hinata should’ve gone to see how Mei made her juice. That way, the two might be able to make similar-tasting juice…but that’s just an idea.

Healin’ Good PreCure 14

I feel like Byogens were responsible for Nodoka’s sickness, much like they are for Latte.

“Energy Source” seems to refer to a place where energy appears…I know that sounds a bit dumb if you don’t realise genki hakken means something like “appearance of energy (for a person)”, but…yeah, the PreCure series is like this. Unfortunately, that’s what you have to deal with.

I feel like this “teamwork overcomes all hardships” message is important in this time of COVID-19.

Guaiwaru = “condition is bad”, or ill health (guai ga warui).

Is that the element of air? I thought the PreCure would’ve used their element of lightning to fix the steamer, but hey, teamwork works too.

I’m a weeny bit peevy they translate minna to “girls”. It’s correct in context when it’s been translated that way, but minna means “everybody”.

I imagined Hinata saying “Watashi no smartphone ga!” instead of “Atarashii sumaho ga hoshii!”

Lapis Re:Lights 1

Eh…COVID-19 means I gotta sample things I’m not so crazy about.

Why is one of the first lines in this show “My behind hurts!”?

Bristol? Is this England?...Nope, it’s a place called “Mamkestell”.

I was thinking this girl…I think the reviews said her name was Tiara…was going to sing to the flower to make it perk up again, but nup, she whistled to it. That seems a bit irrelevant, to be honest. (I would prefer an all or nothing approach to a wish-washy approach like this…as in, if this is an idol show, then either go all in with the singing and dancing, or do something else that’ll catch my attention.)

Tiara’s face looks hella generic.

For some reason, I get this ominous feeling when the word “witch” is mentioned…must be the instinct from Madoka popping up again.

Lemme guess. Lynette is the bookworm?...*sigh* Just another method of showing a character is a bookworm without actually showing their reading a book, which I think is counterintuitive.

Get some protective gear, girls!

Rosetta keeps saying “Yes” (in English).

Lemme guess…people ship the dumb one and the smart one? They’re like a gender-flipped Dice and Gentaro, only the smart one is more uppity and the stupid one is more sporty.

The word appears to be noumei, but that exact word doesn’t seem to exist. Lavie seems to say the word is the opposite to something else, but I can’t tell what that is either…

Albino rabbit, eh?

…people probably ship Rosetta and Tiara too, right? *sigh*

So there’s…no singing in this fantasy/idol show. Whistling is how you invoke magic…so how is someone who can’t whistle supposed to invoke magic?!

Whose idea was it to put the OP in the middle of the episode?

It was “Neechan, daikirai!” “Forget you” is a fairly loose translation…

Little Miss Rosetta = Rosetta-chan.

I think Tiara called Rosetta “sensei” when the former wanted the latter to take care of her (i.e. take her to their dorm).

Titi = Tiara. I didn’t actually figure that out because I thought it referred to the rabbits.

Gah! These almost-real-world names (or real world names, in regards to “Bristol”) are gonna drive me NUTS!

*sigh* Boob jiggle.

*sighhhhhhhhh…* Lemme guess, there’s a potential expulsion on the horizon? Update: Yep. Dropped.

God of High School 1

First Webtoon series I’m covering here.

Oh, I checked out the first chapter of the webtoon because CR linked it to their anime page. The only difference I’ve seen from that, aside from fleshing out the backgrounds, is…that creepy skull (?) on the wall.

You can tell it’s Korean when I don’t understand what the text says. (I don’t know Korean, but I do know some Chinese and Japanese.) Update: This is Japanese-dubbed, but they left the Korean text in.

That intro is much more powerful now that the backgrounds are fleshed out.

Ooh, the colours in the OP are very nice!

Hmm? They’re starting with the grandpa, rather than starting with “I’m Mori Jin, 17 years old”? Good choice.

The expressions in this show are funny. I like them already.

Waittttttttt…I dunno how Korean names work. Is Mori Jin’s first name “Mori” or “Jin”? Update: I checked it up, and I got even more confused!

KORG Arena seems to be…from Marvel? Like BnHA references Star Wars???

*sigh* Moonbucks? Again?...and of course the girls only talk about “hotties”. We need a Bechdel test in this thing.

The comments on ch. 1 said “A new Luffy is born”, so now I agree with it…but they’re not going to show how Mori Jin was enlisted for GOH (as they seem to abbreviate it)?

There’s Japanese, English and Korean in the afro dude’s comments.

I’m amazed that tall dude with the spiky hair wasn’t more surprised about Mori Jin and the girl passing by…

Would those glasses on Mori Jin’s head be any help? Update: Turns out those aren’t “glasses”…they’re a sleeping mask.

Kamina glasses!

They put CR and Webtoon advertising over everything in this anime…geesh.

These red parts of people’s noses are gonna bug me, aren’t they…?

It should be battle royale, right? Update: Okay, so I checked and both are correct spellings.

This seems like the sort of thing that would never get funded because you need to pull off every battle scene right.

They cut the initial fight with “Blondie” out, but that actually makes things more interesting! Good choice.

Lemme guess – Mori Jin is going to have to fight this Kang Manseouk guy at full power one day? *shrugs* (Can I stop referring to people by their full names already??? I can’t stop until I know which is the first name and which is the last.) Update: So the wiki finally helped me out and Mori is the first name and Jin the last, meaning I can call him “Mori”. Got it.

*Mori suddenly pulls the prisoner’s pants down* - That was…random.

I liked it more than I thought I would! (Just for reference, the other protag dude is called Han Dae-wi and the girl is Yoo Mira.)

Muhyo and Roji’s BSI s2 1

(Update for the Tumblr fans: I finished s1 outside the seasonal format.) 

Kokkuri-san never goes well in anime…

Where does Nana work again…?

I don’t think Muhyo and Roji are legally (magically legally?) obligated to tell Nana anything about what they do.

Yay! Goryo is animted for the first time! He has such a beautiful voice~!

Notably, Roji wouldn’t have had a smartphone in 2004 (or whatever year close to that when the manga put this bit out).

Goryo (5) vs Muhyo (6). Didn’t figure this out at the time I read the manga.

I think the subbers misgendered Goryo. Goryo is a dude, as can be gathered from the name “Daranimaru”.

“Waka”? Does that stand for “young head [of the office]” or something?

Okay, whose bright idea was it to pair Now on Air (female vocalists) with Muhyo and Roji’s (a series dominated with dudes)…?

Ah, Funimation is on the production team of this anime. That would explain the dub rights.

[scripttorture]

I’m an Anastasia fanfic and I wanted it to be more realistic. In terms of Russian revolution and being held captive and (almost) killed, would what Anastasia went through have qualified as torture since the people doing it were now in power? My thinking is the torturers (abusers?) have a lot of anger that is motivated by politics and personal ambition and hate for the family. They are incompetent enough that Anastasia escapes, but how can I portray incompetence as a result of torture and not

(Anastasia 2) not simply them being ‘new’ and inexperienced considering the revolutionists haven’t been in power for years like the Romanovs. I was also considering memory problems as a symptom to echo the amnesia she had in the film. I am also considering anxiety, insomnia, an aversion to touch, and perhaps one more traditional symptom from the masterpost. If you have a suggestion for it, or any other aspect of the story, that would be appreciated.

-

I’m not familiar with this fandom but I’m assuming it’s not some kind of niche history fandom? I had to ask round the Fam to get an explanation for this, so I think we can safely say I’m unfamiliar with the canon.

 For the sake of stating my biases I find the idea of a children’s movie centred on Anastasia Romanov a little… macabre. But hey I watched sausage smugglers growing up and played games centred around police brutality, so who am I to judge? I might ot ‘get’ the story but think I can help. :)

 I’m going into this with a little bit of background knowledge about this historical incident (ie the death of the last members of the Romanov line) but I don’t know much Russian history to put it into context.

 I’ll start with the first question: yes I think legally speaking you could make an argument that any abuse the Romanovs suffered was torture. Whether the people who held them were technically in power or not they were an armed group powerful enough to control territory. It doesn’t matter whether they were recognised rulers, they were in de-facto control of a significant area and number of people. They were organised. They had a command structure.

 This is a sufficient level of control, power and organisation that, yes, I think you could class them as torturers. It’s certainly not the action of a lone individual doing something horrible on a whim. Abuse in these circumstances would be either ordered or tacitly condoned.

 That makes it torture.

 I think your characterisation of the torturers’ motivations seems sound. This is something that can happen.

 I would add a note of caution here that perhaps applies more to history then the canon you’re working from. A lot of people had a lot of legitimate grievances with the Romanovs. Russia had just come out of a disastrous war, flu had killed a lot of people and I think there was also a major problem with food supplies throughout the country.

 Tsar Nicholas was at best incompetent in a way that lead to the deaths of millions of his subjects. He presided over disastrous wars, economic collapse and widespread attacks on Jewish people. He is widely reported to have refused to take advice or change his mind with changing circumstances.

 Russian losses in Nicholas’s war with Japan are estimated at between 43,000-120,000 people. The organised attacks on Jews during his reign claimed an estimated 4,500 lives. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 1905 led to an estimated 1,000 dead or wounded. And then there was the First World War, to which Russia lost an estimated 2 million soldiers and almost half a million civilians. For context the high estimates say Russia lost 2% of their population.

 There were a lot of poor, sick, starving people who had lost loved ones over issues that seemed trivial and far away. While the royal family was incredibly rich and not doing much to help their people.

 This by no means justifies their abuse and murder. But be careful about trivialising the anger these people felt. They had cause. And while the Grand Duchesses didn’t have much real power the Tsar and Tsarina certainly did.

 By directing their anger at the monarchs they were targetting someone who had caused many of their problems. Having lived in an absolute monarchy, I can understand their frustration and the urge to lash out at an easy target rather then settle down to the harder work of solving the problems absolute monarchs cause.

 I don’t know what this cartoon shows of the Romanov’s treatment and deaths.

 My impression from what I’ve read is that the rumours surrounding the survival of one of the younger daughters came from the lack of bodies. There was also a report that the girls (this was apparently true of some of servants too) had sewed jewels into their corsets, in order to hide them from the guards and that bullets had ricochetted off the diamonds, acting like armour.

 Several of the girls were stabbed to death after the shooting stopped. An account claims one of them survived this and was clubbed to death at the mass grave.

 Survival in the sort of scenario the Romanovs actually went through is unlikely because it isn’t the torture that killed them. This was an execution. Of a large number of people yes, but the executors wanted to ensure every single one of them was dead. So after the bullets stopped and the smoke cleared they stabbed the bodies, they cut throats.

 This is not unusual in these circumstances. It is pretty rare for someone to survive these kinds of mass shootings of prisoners in a confined space.

 Honestly the closest I can think of to a survivors account is this. The victim is a child describing one of the worst attacks on a school in the modern era.

 My instinct is that for someone to survive the kind of attack that the Romanovs and their servants were subjected to, she’d have had to be both very lucky and very obviously wounded in a way many people would assume was fatal.

 I’d suggest using that. Have medical professionals comment on how unlikely, or lucky, the story is. Have the executioners notice this one is alive and then shrug and say well she won’t be for much longer go ahead and throw her in the pit.

 My instinct is that this is separate to torture.

 The Romanovs changed hands several times over the course of their imprisonment. As I understand it conditions for them gradually worsened but were not originally torturous.

 Later prisons cut their contact with the outside world completely, discouraged talking amongst themselves and banned talking to the guards. Some of them had no natural light and there are accounts of both the children and the Tsarina being threatened with guns or shot at for being too close to windows or trying to look outside.

 I’m finding it difficult to definitively say what they went through because the accounts I’m finding don’t seem to understand clean torture. So I’m seeing a lot of possible abusive actions here, but I’m unsure how to label them all because they’re being described inconsistently.

 They weren’t in solitary confinement, but there are definite attempts at isolation here. There are accounts of the daughters being sexually harassed (no accounts I could find of assault, this was all verbal or crude graffiti). I am unsure if the rations constituted a starvation diet or not. The son was deprived of medical care. The prison conditions certainly seem torturous towards the end, but I feel like I’m missing a lot of details that would let me describe precise physical effects.

 I don’t think you need to go into detail about any of this if you don’t want to but you could use this period of imprisonment to establish the incompetence of the guards.

 I would do it by writing two distinct groups of guards. One group that threatens and harasses and potentially tortures the family, and a second group who don’t do these things, concentrating on guard work instead.

 Having established the two groups I’d show that while the first group is on duty the family or their servants can actually get away with more things. So- if the first group is harassing older sister Olga, they may not notice that the Tsarina was too close to the window again.

 If the idea is that Anastasia escapes before the family is executed then I’d show that happening while the first group of guards in on duty. If she’s there when the family are executed then I’d have members of the first group displaying the ‘well she’s mostly dead’ attitude that allows her to survive.

 Essentially it’s about showing that if a guard is concentrating on making their prisoner feel bad, they are not concentrating on where all the prisoners are and what they’re doing. If a guard treats making the prisoner feel bad as their primary task then that guards has stopped doing their job.

 If you’re using an escape then a way to do this would be to have one member of the family ‘provoke’ the torturers, creating the opportunity for some of the children to escape.

 Amnesia, in the way it’s traditionally used in fiction, is not how memory problems due to trauma typically work. I get the impression you’re aware of that.

 I prefer using accurate memory problems but I understand that the canon has probably left you in a difficult position here.

 Typically torture/trauma survivors don’t forget their identity or older, childhood memories. They also don’t typically forget the abuse they suffered. In fact it’s more common for them to remember it in awful (but not necessarily accurate) detail.

 There is an exception: young children, under the age of about 7, can sometimes forget large chunks of their identity after trauma if they are then raised by people who can’t/don’t reinforce that identity.

 The real Anastasia was 17 when she died. That’s too old to forget who she was.

 So how do we square this?

 My instinct that mixing several memory problems rather than relying on memory loss alone is the better bet.

 Anastasia is the name of a saint who was apparently very popular in European Orthodox churches. A lot of girls Anastasia Romanov’s age probably shared that name. And a lot of them probably changed it to something less associated with the church when the Bolsheviks took power. Making something old and essential like her name a decision rather than a result of trauma would help.

 But I think the main piece of advice I have would be use inaccurate memories rather then memory loss alone, as the major memory problem.

 Because if this child is aware that most of her normal day-to-day memories are inaccurate, then she could remember vast chunks of her childhood and dismiss them as false.

 At the height of their power the Romanovs had a lot of servants. Anastasia could remember the palaces, the royal family, the wealth she was surrounded by, and assume she saw this as a servant rather than as a member of the family.

 If her memory is patchy anyway then that seems like a reasonable conclusion. She could also remember being arrested and imprisoned, being harassed by guards, being cold and hungry. And this would fit with her earlier conclusion because many of the Romanov’s servants were treated badly by the new regime (some of them died with the family).

 Insomnia would feed into this and make it worse.

 Partly because insomnia in and of itself causes memory problems (it interferes with our ability to form longer term memories) and partly because of some of the other effects serious insomnia can have: microsleeps and hallucinations. Microsleeps are short periods of unconsciousness that occur when someone is very very tired. People can dream vividly during these short periods of sleep. And the result can be a blurring of reality and dream as they sleep in short bursts and then wake again, unaware that they slept at all.

 Combined with the occasional hallucination and inaccurate memories this sort of scenario could very easily make a child doubt her own memories. It could result in a situation where she does remember big chunks of her life and childhood but convinces herself they were not real or interprets them differently.

 She might end up remembering her father and The Tsar as two separate people. She might convince herself she was a servant in the palace because that seems the more likely explanation. She might mix up memories of servants she knew from infancy with memories of family members.

 Combined with anxiety and avoidance of these memories (or anything that brings them up-) I think you could quite plausibly build up a character who hasn’t so much forgotten her past but is really confused about it. When memories are this muddled and painful it’s often easier for a character to just claim they don’t remember. Especially if there’s a lot of discrimination against mentally ill people in the setting. Because- well explaining that your memory is a mess and you hallucinate tends to convince people you’re ‘crazy’, whereas telling people you ‘don’t remember’ and you were badly injured often leads to a more sympathetic response.

 I’ll finish this up with the question of any additional symptoms.

 I think that if you’re using two types of memory problems (memory loss and inaccurate memories) with anxiety and insomnia then you’ve already got a reasonable number of symptoms.

 If you wanted to include more I think panic attacks and social isolation could both fit very well with the symptom set you have and the setting/character. Social isolation does seem like a particularly likely outcome for a child who was imprisoned for part of her development, lost her family and is suffering from severe mental health problems.

 There aren’t really bad picks, it’s more a case of thinking about what fits with the character you want to establish and the story you want to tell. If you want a story that’s got a more optimistic bent then suicidal feelings and addiction in a teenager may not be good picks.

 Personality change might be a good pick but I think that depends on how much of your story deals with Anastasia before her family are killed. For personality change to work well in a story I think you need to be able to establish the character’s personality before and after the traumatic event. That might not work with the plot you have planned.

 I have a post on sleep deprivation here that you might find helpful.

 Beyond that, I think you’ve got a good starting point here and a reasonable, realistic concept.

 I hope that helps. :)

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[fursasaida]

ask meme: something about visual art? I think of you as someone who posts about interesting artists -- what kind of work do you like/seen anything good lately/do you have a fine arts background/whatever you'd like to talk about

Hmm, this is interesting! I haven’t really thought about My Relation to Art in a long time.

I do not have a fine arts background in any formal sense. I drew a lot in middle and high school and I was pretty good! But not so good that it really made sense to pursue it in a serious way. (I did freehand a sort of mini-mural in watercolor and highlighter on the wall of my dorm room freshman year of college that the maintenance people preserved and the kids who moved in the next year liked, which still makes me smile to think about.)

I do have sort of an ad hoc art…history and theory background, I guess, in that I was raised by people who care about art a lot and who brought me to museums and galleries all the time. My dad tells a story about being at some sort of Renaissance art exhibit and me, age 4, asking to be told a ghost story, so he looked around and told me the Passion of Christ, lmao. I also had a sort of godfather figure (family friend, not an actual godfather because we’re not…Christian) who is very active in ~the art world~ and to whom it made sense to take me to the Whitney Biennial for my 15th birthday as like a nod to a quinceañera (he’s Cuban). So I grew up viewing and critiquing art as kind of a matter of course?

As for what I like, I think that’s tough to pin down. Sometimes it’s a color palette. Sometimes it’s a mood. Sometimes it’s a conceptual angle. There are definitely times when the ~concept~ really overwhelms the work, which pisses me off. (if I can’t make any kind of sense of this without reading your statement, or if your statement seems like a bunch of verbose handwaving concealing the lack of an idea, then I will very often be completely turned off. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at something and thought “cool! interesting! intriguing!” and then read the title and gone “oh, lord, never mind.”) But I also tend to struggle with art that doesn’t seem to have much of a concept. “Concept” doesn’t have to mean a super-specific idea, just, like: why did you make this. I always have a soft spot for things that seem to be complicating the notion of representation, which usually means either problematizing the apparent “real”-ness of whatever is depicted, or problematizing the medium (I really couldn’t care less about most of Picasso’s work, but some of his early sculptures are clearly trying to mess around with the question of where the line is between a painting and a sculpture–screwing with the picture plane itself rather than its perspectival illusion–and I love those).

I think this is why I’m drawn to things that present light as almost a solid object, a volume or substance; things that suggest hidden recesses or depths; installations that suggest different kinds of realities or spaces interacting with “normal” spatiality through temporal disjuncture or spatial collision; some exercises in surrealism and abstraction; things that mess with the illusion of objects or bodies as singular, solid items/presences that have a natural order. So, for example: Damien Hirst is tough for me because a lot of his ideas are in line with my interests, but his stuff feels so conceptually overblown and pretentious that I’m always kind of torn. Jeff Koons pisses me off because it’s like all concept and nothing else; his stuff feels so ironic and full of knowing distance that I’m like, fuck off, your heart isn’t in this, you are risking nothing and your art is incapable of moving me. Because I suppose what I like about art that messes with these ideas is that usually it communicates something about how that person sees the world or struggles to understand it. I think that’s why so many people find Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro so fascinating and affecting–it conveys something about his experience or way of seeing and thinking. I simply do not believe that balloon animals really preoccupy Koons in that kind of way. (I have a less intense version of this problem with Warhol.) Whereas I find kind of love expressed in this Ralph Goings interview not only very moving but also evident in the supposedly photorealistic nature of his paintings, the attention to detail and the evident care with which they were made. This is also why I like artists’ studios and/or homes-as-art-projects. But I can’t explain, for example, why I like Kandinsky so much. That’s just like, you know, #aesthetic.

At the same time, I’m a geographer, and geography has a very intimate relationship with the visual, so there are certain forms/concepts that show up in art a lot that are directly relevant to my work: the (supposed) division between nature and culture; landscape; the city; maps; scale (here and here). When I’m working on an idea, aspects of what I’m thinking about naturally pop out in everything I encounter or see, so I often end up sort of making accidental moodboards for a given project by virtue of reblogging things and tagging them a certain way (I did this somewhat on purpose for my MA thesis, but it happens anyway whether I mean to or not–though the contents aren’t only art). I guess you could say I think with images as well as words or concepts; my thinking moves back and forth between different kinds of registers (academic, artistic, pop-cultural, etc), which I think is extremely normal but becomes a particular practice of mine through the way I produce this archive that is my tumblr. For example, I really didn’t give a fuck about intimism until I’d watched Black Sails, at which point the underlying values/ideas in intimism became very interesting to me, and so now in turn I’m interested in intimist art or art that feels related to that now-abandoned movement. And of course therefore the ways in which intimism is related to those core interests I elaborated above are now evident to me. I’m interested, going forward, in trying to do this in a more conscious and organized way and thinking about it as a possible teaching tool.

ETA: I think in some ways the whole thing I’ve written here could be summed up with my interest in memes, which I maintain are not only politically important (this is no longer controversial, given…Everything) but also have a special kind of logic of how the visual interacts with the representational and communicative. Hence this a-joke-but-not-a-joke tag.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Markedly Worse Than Expected

by Dan H

Sunday, 27 February 2011

Dan really disliked Marked~

As Ferretbrain enters its fifth year (have we really been doing this for that long?) I sometimes fear that our articles in general – and my articles in particular – have become too self-referential. This is especially true given that recently most of what I have been reading has been books that were voted off from our recent

TeXt Factor Special

.

Six months or so on, I'm still rather pleased with the way the original TeXt Factor turned out – while the whole premise is clearly stupid, every time I've actually tried to finish one of the books we voted out (at least, one of the books we voted out before the point where everything got quite good) I've felt that the experience thoroughly vindicated our original decision to just stop reading the damned thing.

This was certainly true of Marked.

We voted off Marked in

the first round of the Halloween Special

for a variety of reasons, mostly that its protagonist was a horrible, horrible person and that all the stuff about the heroine's “Cherokee ancestry” felt like a big pit of terrible fail waiting to happen.

We were basically right.

Faint Praise

A friend of mine used to have a saying which he used to employ in order to acknowledge the fact that something which he felt was utterly without merit presumably had some value to other people. He would say: “For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like.”

This is about the limit of my ability to praise the (apparently very popular) Marked. I can see how it would appeal to certain types of person in certain types of ways. Unfortunately the type of person is “horrible people” and the method of appeal is “by playing on their worst and most selfish instincts.”

Okay, this is an overstatement, but basically Marked is written in the voice (and presumably for a target audience) of a teenage girl who is unbelievably selfish, utterly judgemental, hates everybody who is not part of her immediate social circle, and who believes (it seems quite justifiably) that she is the centre of the entire universe. This is not necessarily a problem in itself – it is perfectly reasonable for books to have unsympathetic protagonists, and as an evocation of a particular kind of thoroughly horrible teenager Marked succeeds admirably – the problem is that the protagonist's repugnant qualities are routinely vindicated by the world in which she lives, and frequently lauded as virtues (particularly her harsh and incessant condemnation of girls she considers “sluts”).

Identity and Appropriation

An area of American race politics about which I know absolutely nothing, and which I would not under ideal circumstances touch with a barge pole, is the question of who is and is not entitled to legitimately identify as Native American.

To present a broad, oversimplistic view of a complicated situation, there are a lot of white people in America who unreasonably appropriate Native American culture and identity, often on the basis of a spurious blood connection (“I'm one-seventeenth Cherokee!”), people also often use this sort of iffy cultural appropriation to excuse other sorts of crappy behaviour (“I'm one-seventeenth Cherokee therefore nothing I say can ever be construed as racist”).

Where it gets more complicated (and I am aware that it gets vastly more complicated, and that this is still an oversimplification of the complexity of the whole thing) is that there are plenty of people who genuinely are “one sixteenth Cherokee” and whose claim to a Native American cultural heritage is never the less completely sound. Not all Native Americans live on reservations or run casinos. It is very tempting for people like me to assume that if somebody lives a life which is more or less the same as my own, that said person cannot be a “real” Native American – this of course is actually a form of subconscious racism, it is easy for me to assume that all Native Americans live picturebook lives of harmony with nature and genteel poverty, when in fact they're twenty-first century people just like me.

Now the thing is, I do think that the way in which “Zoey Redbird” identifies with the Cherokee people in Marked actually does fall into the category of skeevy cultural appropriation but I am very very conscious that I am in danger of dismissing somebody's real and genuine cultural identity just because they don't fit my personal stereotype of a member of their race.

So to start off with, here are some things which I don't think cause a problem, even though they might seem to.

I do not think it is a problem that Zoey passes as white. A lot of Native Americans do.

I do not think it is a problem that Zoey is essentially a normal American teenager. It is extraordinarily important to remember that Native Americans are not some kind of fantasy race, they're real people. I am absolutely certain that there are sixteen year old Cherokee girls who read Gossip Girl and had crushes on Leonardo di Caprio.

I do not think it is a problem that Zoey moves freely between two cultures, taking the elements she likes from both. A person of mixed cultural and racial heritage has a complete right to all of the elements that make up their identity, not just the minority part.

Finally, I do not think that it is a problem that, looking at the photograph in the back of the book, P.C. and Kristin Cast don't “look” Native American. This is true for two reasons. Firstly, pursuant to my first point above, it's possible that they're actually genuinely from a Native American cultural background, and just happen to have relatively pale skin. Secondly, as ever authorial intent is not a major concern. Even if P.C. And Kristin Cast are presenting a cultural identity to which they have a legitimate claim, they might still be doing it in a way which feels like or encourages appropriation of that culture.

Here are the things that do make me think that the Native American elements in Marked can be read as skeevy cultural appropriation:

Firstly, Zoey's Native American heritage is exclusively associated with magic, mysticism and the supernatural. Her one link to that part of her heritage is her Grandmother, who runs a lavender farm and is part of a long line of Cherokee wise women. Zoey is, of course, the natural heir to that power. Her Grandmother is also, for some reason, entirely au fait with and accepted at the House of Night, which is otherwise extremely dismissive of humans. Zoey's Cherokee heritage is routinely cast as part of the same world as the vampires. Although in this world the vampires are clearly the cool, sexy, interesting people and we are supposed to sympathise with them they are still ultimately not human. Although the series (being very much a teen-angst Family Romance) takes a very dim view of humans in general, that does not really make it okay to put “humans” in one box and “Native Americans” in another

On a second, related note, the spiritual beliefs of the Cherokee people (to which Zoey is heir, and for which she feels a strong affinity) are presented as compatible (and at times interchangeable) with the clearly Wiccan-derived beliefs of the House of Night. The vampyre rituals which involve drawing pentagrams, calling the corners, and raising the four elements are presented as blending seamlessly with Zoey's grandmother's traditional cultural practices, despite the fact that pentagrams and a four-element cosmology are strictly European cultural artefacts. It even declares that the Greek Goddess Nyx is one and the same as Grandmother Spider which, well I don't actually know enough about either figure to tell you the differences or similarities, but we're dealing with figures from completely different mythologies – I strongly suspect that saying “Nyx is also Grandmother Spider” on the basis of their both being female deities with an association with night is sort of like saying “Jesus is also Eros” on the basis of their being male deities who have an association with love. It all combines to create the strong impression that Marked uses Cherokee culture as a source of cool special effects and exciting mystical sounding ideas, rather than as something that real people really believe in.

The third thing that pushes my skeeve buttons regarding Zoey's Native American identification is that her “Cherokee features” are always exaggerated by her vampirism. Zoey is always at her most Cherokee when she is at her most inhuman, her most exotic, her most unnatural.

To put it another way, there is never any sense that Zoey's Cherokee heritage is just a part of her, it is never something she just takes for granted as part of her cultural background. It is always presented as something alien, exotic, and mystical. Now I recognise that this could be seen as a realistic portrayal of a sixteen year old girl. It's possible that if you were sixteen and felt like an outsider as many do, that you would fixate on a part of your background that you perceived as mysterious and exotic and would exaggerate the mystery and exoticism of it. On the other hand the rest of the world reinforces this creepy Othering of Cherokee culture – Zoey's heritage really does give her magic powers, her Grandmother obviously feels Zoey really gets it, and of course no amount of subjectivity on the part of the narrator can explain why Cherokee spiritual beliefs are suddenly so compatible with Wicca.

I've spent a really long time talking about this, which is ironic because it's not actually the thing I found the most annoying.

Ain't Shit But Ho's and Tricks

I spend a lot of time on FB dissing people for being sexist. Usually I'm on (comparatively) safe ground because the people I'm dissing are men, and usually what I'm saying is something like “I think this author is being sexist in this way, and I think I can recognise it because I think they are indulging in a sexist impulse which I sometimes recognise in myself.”

I find myself in a difficult position with Marked in that I find its portrayal of women and girls extremely troubling, but am naturally a bit leery of saying “hey, you women are writing about women wrong! Let my penis explain why!” On the other hand, the whole book is full of creepy gender-essentialism and slut-shaming and it's important to recognise that women can be sexists too.

In the first episode of the TeXt Factor Halloween Special, Kyra observed that the thing about Marked was that it really did feel like it was written by a Mom-and-Daughter team, in that it often used very teenage language to express very adult concepts. To put it another way, Zoey reads like a teenage girl who has totally internalised the preconceptions and prejudices of her slightly creepy, more-conservative-than-she-thinks-she-is, sex-negative mother.

So we keep getting lines like:

Did you know that your oldest daughter has turned into a sneaky, spoiled slut who's screwed half the football team? Kinda like those girls who have sex with everyone and think they're not going to get pregnant or a really nasty STD that eats your brains and stuff. Well, we'll see in ten years, won't we? Of course there are girls who think it's 'cool' to give guys head. Uh, they're wrong, those of us with functioning brains know it is not cool to be used like that. Tucked into her countrified jeans was a black, long-sleeved cotton blouse that had the expensive look of something you'd find at Saks or Neiman Marcus versus the cheaper see-through shirts that overpriced Abercrombie tries to make us believe aren't slutty.

And that's from the first ninety pages.

Now I don't want to get too far up on my Minority Warrior horse here, I don't want to say “this book is harmful to young women” or “this book is actively immoral” or anything but as the book progresses it does seem to send profoundly unhelpful and contradictory messages to its primary audience.

The vampyres of the House of Night have a matriarchal society (although it seems to be grounded in some distinctly patriarchal ideas), and the vast majority of the adult vampyres we encounter in the book are female, and every single one of them is drop-dead gorgeous and incredibly sexually alluring, and their sexual allure is held up as something to aspire to.

For example, here is the description of the Vampire High Priestess Neferet:

She was movie-star beautiful, Barbie beautiful. I'd never seen anyone up close who was so perfect. She had huge, almond-shaped eyes that were a deep, mossy green. Her face was an almost perfect heart and her skin was that kind of flawless creaminess that you see on TV. Her hair was a deep red – not that horrid carrot-top orange red or the washed-out blond-red but a dark, glossy auburn that fell in heavy waves well past her shoulders.

I'm breaking this up here mostly to draw attention to the next line, but while I'm adding filler text, I'll just quickly ask: what the hell is up with “almond-shaped eyes”, it's used everywhere but seriously what the hell other shape are eyes supposed to be?

Anyway, the description continues thus:

Her body was, well, perfect. She wasn't thin like the freak girls who puked and starved themselves into whatever they thought was Paris Hilton chic … This woman's body was perfect because she was strong, but curvy. And she had great boobs.

So having just spent half a page describing this woman who fits exactly into an unrealistic, unattainable beauty standard and how amazingly wonderful and gorgeous this makes her and how girls can and should aspire to look like her, she then takes a random sideswipe at girls who aspire to a slightly different beauty standard.

Now just to be clear, I am not complaining that Zoey is not in favour of anorexia. Eating disorders are bad and people who have them need help, not condemnation (I'm not going to get into the whole pro-ana thing here). But Zoey doesn't say “this woman was beautiful because she was confident in her own body, unlike those girls who feel so much pressure to conform to other people's ideas that they puke and starve themselves.” No she says as an objective statement: This Woman's Body Was Perfect. I know we don't get much detail about Neferet's figure, but we aretold that she's “Barbie beautiful” which combined with “strong but curvy” implies fairly strongly that she looks more like Christina Hendricks than Amber Riley.

When Zoey talks about “those freak girls who puked and starved themselves” it sounds a lot like as if she is criticising aims rather than methods. Certainly she is extremely critical of the (one or two) fat people she meets in the book so her issue is clearly not with people trying to lose weight. The problem with “those freak girls” is not that they're trying to make themselves thinner (that's only sensible) it's that they're doing it in order to look like Paris Hilton, instead of like a “real” woman.

I should probably take a step back here and say a couple of things (the second being, in part, a counterpoint to the first). The first thing I should say is that it is possible that the House of Night series is actually being extraordinarily subtle and sophisticated, and that all of these examples of Zoey being judgemental about other girls are going to be shown to be false and hypocritical in future volumes, but I sincerely doubt it.

This brings me to my second point, which is that I can absolutely see where a lot of the problems with this book come from. If I was a mother, trying to write a Young Adult book with the help of my teenage daughter, I would almost certainly wind up putting these kinds of messages into the book in the honest belief that I was setting a positive example for young girls. A lot of Zoey's most hateful pronouncements feel like the kinds of half-truths that a well-meaning parent would tell their daughter in order to help her more-or-less get by in the complicated world of adolescence. If you're trying to explain to your fifteen year old about oral sex, I suspect most parents given the choice between:

“It has lower risk than vaginal or anal sex, but you can still contract most sexually transmitted diseases, if you try it and find you don't like it then stop and don't let anybody make you feel you have to, on the other hand if you find you get pleasure out of it then as long as you're aware of the risks then it's alright, and doing it won't make you a bad person. And remember that just because you give a guy a blowjob it doesn't mean you have to have sex with him, but also remember that guys might not see things the same way, most importantly remember that nobody has the right to control what happens to your body except you”

and

“Girls who do that are stupid and have no self-respect.”

most would choose the latter. Most mothers, I suspect, would far rather tell their daughters that oral sex was something only bad girls did than have to have a conversation about what spunk tastes like. Then there's the risk analysis element: from a perfectly understandable perspective, if you tell your kid that it's okay to enjoy giving head, then the worst case scenario is that she dies of a sex-disease. If you tell her it's not okay to enjoy giving head, then the worst case scenario is that she misses out on something she might have found sexually fulfilling. I can absolutely see why, if you were a parent, you would want your little girl to grow up thinking like Zoey.

The problem, of course, is that it just doesn't work that way. Teaching your children to be frightened or ashamed of sex doesn't, in practice, stop them from having it (the waters are muddied here by the fact that actually a lot of teenagers – by accident or design – avoid sex anyway) what it does is make the sex they do have less safe, both physically and psychologically.

But I digress.

In the latter half of the book, most of Zoey's ire is directed at Aphrodite. To be fair, Aphrodite is a horrible person (although she's kind of made of straw – like most school-story rivals her role is to be a threat to the heroine even though the heroine is superior to her in every way). When we first meet Aphrodite, she is trying to give a guy a blowjob. This is evidence that she is a terrible person. Pretty much the whole of the rest of the book is devoted to the systematic observation that Aphrodite is evil, and therefore a whore, and therefore more evil. She pretty much never appears on the page without Zoey having some criticism of her sexual conduct: her boobs are too big, her lips are too red, she moves her hips too much when she dances.

It is worth remembering that all of this is set against the background of a supposedly matriarchal society. The book makes a great play of the fact that it is women who rule the world of the vampyres, but their matriarchal culture seems grounded in patriarchal assumptions about gender roles. So yes, the priestesses are in charge, but all of the warriors are males, because Male Vampires Are The Protectors (this is stated very explicitly, at least three times) and while the book is very big on Goddess Worship and feminine imagery and The Almighty Power of Womanhood, it does this by presenting a very specific, very conservative, and very contradictory idea of what it means to be a woman.

So all of the adult vampires are presented as beautiful and sexy and confident and powerful, but Aphrodite is condemned for being the wrong sort of beautiful and the wrong sort of sexy and the wrong sort of confident and the wrong sort of powerful. The whole book is a study in the fucked up, contradictory rules that young people, particularly young women are brought up with. You mustn't be fat, but you have to have curves. You have to be sexy, but you can't want sex. Boys have to want you, but can't think they can have you. You have to be strong and clever, but not too strong and too clever, and not too ambitious. You can be beautiful and terrible and powerful and unbeatable, but your role will always be to serve others, and no matter how much power you have, you must leave your protection in the hands of the males, because they have their role just as you have yours.

Cultural appropriation and horrible gender-fail aside, the book is also just shoddily paced. Like a depressing number of these books, the heroine is such a complete Mary Sue that the only real tension is exactly when she will employ her effectively unlimited power to solve whatever the current problem is. Marked sets up quite an interesting plotline involving students dying and coming back as evil spirits, but it only kicks off in the last third and is clearly intended as the metaplot of the entire series. So the climax of Marked is just Zoey's showdown with Aphrodite, except that Zoey has near-unlimited supernatural power, and has the actual high Priestess of Nyx on her side, so in the end you wind up feeling kind of sorry for Aphrodite who, in a certain sense, just gets bullied mercilessly by the asshole protagonist and half the teaching staff.

Indeed you can sort of see the final confrontation as a microcosm for everything that is wrong with the book. In theory, Zoey is supposed to be the plucky underdog going up against the socially and supernaturally superior Aphrodite. In fact the reverse is true. Everybody hates Aphrodite (because she's an evil bitch whore slut whore bitch hag slut whore), the entire teaching faculty and the Goddess Nyx Herself have outright stated that Zoey is all that and a bag of chips. So what casts itself as an inspiring tale of triumph over adversity is really the story of somebody with every conceivable advantage stomping over somebody who does not have those advantages. In much the same way, the book casts itself as being this subversive, anti-authoritarian text (it spends a lot of time condemning the People of the Faith for their hypocritical, controlling natures and there's a particularly galling bit where Zoey “I Hate Sluts” Redbird goes on about how much she hates closed-minded people) when it actually just reinforces a lot of deeply conservative, borderline harmful ideas.

So yeah. One to avoid maybe.Themes:

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Young Adult / Children

,

Judging Books By Their Covers

~

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Melissa G.

at 17:59 on 2011-02-27Thanks for slogging through this for me, Dan! I almost want to read it for how bad I know it will be, but I can't quite manage to put my brain through such torture.

My only knowledge of the House of Night series comes from the few chapters of the fifth book that I read with my student. At this point, Zoey's special snowflake-ness is of epic proportions. She has all these tattoos now, which no one has ever had before OMGWTFBBQ!? She's so special it hurts, and not just that, it seems like she knows she's special and Better than You and thus goes around with this air of superiority.

And, dude, poor Aphrodite. It's like her character is constantly getting shat on by the author despite the fact that she is no threat at all anymore and that at this point she and Zoey are FRIENDS. She's been completely de-powered at this point (she is human now, what?), and it just seems like the author keeps taking potshots at her as she's trying desperately to crawl out of range. It's just painful to watch.

Moving on, the fifth book has a lot more sex/sexual situations in it between Zoey and Erik, and I actually found it almost too sexual for a teen book. But perhaps that's me being prude. Shrug. Might also be noteworthy to mention that Zoey lost her virginity to not-her-boyfriend because he magically seduced her or something, which is all kinds of annoying to me, because it's not HER fault she lost her virginity to another guy. I mean, god forbid she just make an actual mistake and have to take real responsibility for it. But no, we'll just make it someone else's fault.

Also from the fifth book on the subject of race fail, a character named Kramisha gets introduced. Kramisha is the very epitome of the sassy black girl stereotype. She talks with poor grammar and outdated black slang, and she's all sassy and confrontational. And you can argue that these kinds of black people do exist in real life and there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but from what I can tell, Kramisha is the only black character around so it's a little unsettling that she's so cartoonishly stereotypical.

We also have token gays!! And they spend all their time talking about being gay, and how being gay means they know how to cook, and how they watch Project Runway (because, you see, they're gay), and how they know about interior design because they're gay, and gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay. I think you get my point. It's just a bit much. Let them have another character trait. Really, it'll be fine. Also, one of them was described as walking in the room "[screaming] like a girl" and fainting. Fantastic. This is one of those "get off my side" things, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, that was my rant. And granted, I haven't read much of the book (not to mention it was the fifth one) so my complaints may not be entirely grounded, but these were my impressions. And I really can't bring myself to read another word of it because it's just garbage. For so many reasons.

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Dan H

at 19:49 on 2011-02-27

At this point, Zoey's special snowflake-ness is of epic proportions. She has all these tattoos now, which no one has ever had before OMGWTFBBQ!?

Yeah, she gets a lot of those at the end of book one (tattoos seem to magically appear on Vampyres as a consequence of their utter awesomeness, although I'm not really sure it counts as a tattoo if it occurs naturally, isn't that just your skin?)

The super-specialness starts out pretty unbelievably insane in the first book and sounds like it only gets worse. In book one we discover that Zoey not only has powers of a variety which are normally only developed by adult vampires, but that her powers are also stronger and greater in number. Basically all adult vampires get a supernatural power called an "affinity", and very rarely they might get an "affinity" for one of the five elements, even more rarely they might have an "affinity" for two or more elements. Zoey of course has an affinity for all five elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit) already and this has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN HISTORY EVER.

Moving on, the fifth book has a lot more sex/sexual situations in it between Zoey and Erik, and I actually found it almost too sexual for a teen book. But perhaps that's me being prude.

I suspect that's one of those YMMV things. I'm personally okay with sex in teen books: I mean they're already saturated in sexual imagery, and I'd kind of rather they were honest about it. Does she at least stop being so judgmental about other girls' sexual behaviour?

Might also be noteworthy to mention that Zoey lost her virginity to not-her-boyfriend because he magically seduced her or something, which is all kinds of annoying to me, because it's not HER fault she lost her virginity to another guy.

I think what would annoy me more in this situation would be if she lost her virginity to another guy because of being magically seduced, and the book didn't flag up that this was, y'know, date rape. Annoying as "I cheated on my boyfriend but it is okay because it was MAGIC" is, it's somewhat less annoying than "I was magically coerced into having sex with a guy, and the only thing that matters about this fact is that it was unfair to my boyfriend because he didn't get to take my virginity."

Also from the fifth book on the subject of race fail, a character named Kramisha gets introduced. Kramisha is the very epitome of the sassy black girl stereotype ... from what I can tell, Kramisha is the only black character around so it's a little unsettling that she's so cartoonishly stereotypical.

I believe that Shaunee (if she's still in it) is black as well, as is one of Aphrodite's minions (although I believe the text describes her as "obviously mixed" - because you can totally tell whether somebody is mixed-race just by looking at them).

We also have token gays!!

Ah, Token Gay is also in the first book (Damien, yeah). To be fair they get some points for allowing the guy to have an actual relationship, although they lose them again for taking the "gays = women (= gender-essentialist stereotypes of feminine behaviour)" angle.

I suspect that a lot of the tokenism actually comes about as a result of everybody except Zoey being an entirely one-dimensional character who exists solely to tell her how awesome she is (or to tell her that she isn't awesome and be proven TOTALLY WRONG).

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Melissa G.

at 20:57 on 2011-02-27

The super-specialness starts out pretty unbelievably insane in the first book and sounds like it only gets worse.

Yeah, I forgot to mention the bit where her dream with Kalona (which is not really a dream) tells us that she's the reincarnated form of Kalona's lover/person who sealed him away. The Mary Sue-ness is mind-boggling.

Does she at least stop being so judgmental about other girls' sexual behaviour?

I didn't notice anything blatant, but I wasn't really looking for it. And I don't feel like going back and checking. :-)

I think what would annoy me more in this situation would be if she lost her virginity to another guy because of being magically seduced, and the book didn't flag up that this was, y'know, date rape.

I'm not sure how it was handled exactly because it happened in the book previous to the one I was reading. But I think it was considered to be sort of date rapey. All I know is that's why she and her boyfriend broke up, and it's made her feel sort of hesitant about having sex again.

I think the sex aspect might have bothered me more because it sounds like an adult writing a sex scene in an adult way that just happens to have teenagers in it. If that makes sense. It felt much like romance novel writing, which there isn't anything wrong with but it turns the sexual situations into fantasies rather than what I would feel is a realistic description of a teenage relationship. But as you said, YMMV.

I believe that Shaunee (if she's still in it) is black as well,

Oh, right, I forgot about her! Fair point. The fifth book kind of just kept lumping new characters and old characters on me from the second chapter on so it was hard to keep them all straight.

I suspect that a lot of the tokenism actually comes about as a result of everybody except Zoey being an entirely one-dimensional character who exists solely to tell her how awesome she is (or to tell her that she isn't awesome and be proven TOTALLY WRONG).

Yes. This. So much.

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Dan H

at 21:59 on 2011-02-27

Yeah, I forgot to mention the bit where her dream with Kalona (which is not really a dream) tells us that she's the reincarnated form of Kalona's lover/person who sealed him away. The Mary Sue-ness is mind-boggling.

I don't think Kalona's shown up yet.

I think the sex aspect might have bothered me more because it sounds like an adult writing a sex scene in an adult way that just happens to have teenagers in it.

I think I see what you're saying, although I doubt I'll read further to see for myself.

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Melissa G.

at 22:05 on 2011-02-27

I don't think Kalona's shown up yet

Kalona is a scary powerful God-like dude that got released in the fourth book. He's the big bad for the rest of the series, I think, and of course he's obsessed with Zoey.

Apologies for spoilers, but I don't think anyone cares?

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Wardog

at 11:24 on 2011-03-01If anything this review just validates our joint decision NOT TO READ THE DAMN THING.

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Robinson L

at 21:06 on 2011-03-25

If I was a mother, trying to write a Young Adult book with the help of my teenage daughter, I would almost certainly wind up putting these kinds of messages into the book in the honest belief that I was setting a positive example for young girls.

You know, the more I grow up, the more I fortunate my sisters and I are to have such freaking amazing parents.

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[chiefbeck]

ACT 1: The Early years  Chapter 3: The kid

This is the part of every transgender book that I am tired of; so, I will make this short. 

This background is important in a way, as it lays a foundation. It gives a blueprint of where I have come from and things that have influenced me early on in my life. I would like to think that as we grow older, our childhood has less of a hold on us as we gain new knowledge and experience things first hand. There is no need to dig around for some nugget of gold that will explain the end all, be all of our existence in the past because we no longer live there; we are creatures that live in the present. I don’t say this to be flip, but the search for an answer as to why anyone is transgender is going to be made in vain. There is no moment in time, no sequence of events, no light bulb going off on top of my head, and no switch that was flipped that made me transgender. I know that there is a desire for people to wonder why something happened. But being transgender isn’t like a battle scar where I can say, yes, this is where I got shot. Nor is being transgender like some philosophy that you model your life after. It’s not like being a born again Christian where you say, this is the day I became transgender. There are some things you have to accept as a fact of life, like a person born with extreme intelligence or a learning difference.

The question that seems to pervade everyone’s mind is why or how did you become the way you are today?

The short answer is that I have been transgender all my life. From the moment I took my first breath or perhaps even while I was still in the womb, I have always been me. I lived as I could to coexist with my family and community and hid my identity under layers of whatever information was gathered at the time to make my disguises and armor.

Sometimes, the best defense is to not be seen at all. In order to cloak my true nature I camouflaged myself in a facade of ultra-masculinity to keep those around me from getting at the truth or getting past the disguise. The more layers of disguise I could stack upon me the safer I was; at least that is how I felt. The layers I sometimes compare to an onion and the real me was the center; no one ever gets through all the layers and I constantly work on the layers to make them thicker and stronger. No one will ever know me.

I have hundreds of stories while growing up that I could draw upon to prove my point. I can talk about buying a motorcycle and living in the woods in a pine branch lean-to, crashing on bicycles, drowning in a pond, falling through ice when playing hockey, getting stabbed by pitch forks. I can go on at length about playing house with my sisters, boxing with my brothers. There are tales of tea parties and baseball. I lived fully as a "regular" boy and escaped sometimes into my femme world when the climate was right to do so, and the risk was minimal. My gender was fixed at birth in my soul and in my mind; it was also fixed in my body that I was given at birth. I lived in two worlds, and that is not saying it is good or bad, just that it is, and it isn’t accepted as the norm. I did not become transgender because of religion or because of my dad paddling me as was insinuated in a recent book. No one becomes transgender, just like no one becomes white or Asian or left-handed. I am transgender, and it is something that is deeper than societal or learned behavior. I was never trying to escape from anything, and I think after 40 years, we can discount that I was going through some sort of "phase" in my life. I cannot turn it off. It would be like turning off blue eyes. There is nothing to find from my past as a cause; I am transgender just because that is what I am.

Children are born as blank slates to a degree. There are things that just are, and there is no way to change that. You are born Transgender, that’s just the way it is. In the same way a child is born a piano protégé. Though you are born a certain way and that is hardwired into your brain, at the same time you learn things like hate, taste in art, prejudice, and so on. We are a blank slate and hungry to start our journeys into this world, to learn everything we can. Sometimes the world teaches us love, and sometimes it teaches us hate. We can live in bounty or we can suffer famine. Along the way we are taught a myriad of lessons, and sometimes we are taught to hide just to survive and make it to a brighter day.

I was born in 1966 in Long Island New York. It was around 10:23 am, just in case anyone wants to do some star charts on me. I had a reading once for the time of my birth; the person that did the reading said a few things, mostly positive. I always wonder how accurate stars charts and astrology really are. I don’t know, but I am not closed minded about it. I do believe there are many things in this universe that we cannot comprehend. I want to study some astro-theology and maybe decide for myself rather than jump on a “for or against” band wagon.

Back to the story; I was born in New York to a very average family. My grandfather on one side was a football coach and my other grandfather was a NASA engineer. The engineering side is a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln, which is pretty cool. One of my Great-grandfathers was the founder of Uppsala College and a Lutheran minister. I think much of my family history ended up in me in one way or another. So what does that make me? A confused liberal republican engineer who wants to be a Lutheran minister? Maybe not.

The day I was born, the struggle with my gender began. It started with a lie. Perhaps not a lie but a mistruth. It wasn’t a blatant lie, it wasn’t spoken out of malice or ill will towards a seconds old infant. But the doctor looked at me, red and shivering in the cold of the new world that I just entered and announced quite confidently, “It’s a boy.”

The doctor didn’t know any better, neither did my parents. During the time there was no widely available knowledge that gender was more fluid than previously imagined. The parents took that information and did the best that they could with it. The doctor said I was male and by the looks of my physiology, I appeared as a male, so they would raise me on the assumption that I was male. Unfortunately the information they got was wrong, and I was set on a course that was not right for me. We all did the best that we could with the information that we had. My parents would raise me as a boy, and even though I had a suspicion that things were not quite right with that Y-chromosome that got in the way of the truth, I would do my best to live up to societal pressures of what being a male was. At least, when people were watching.

I was born into a very straight-laced, middle of the road family in Long Island, New York. My parents were very religious; belonging to an evangelical church, they were also from the generation of world war two, the fifties, where everything was conservative, and there were firm divisions between everything. That division was not just about gender, but right and wrong, American or Communist, Catholic or Protestant. To them all things functioned in the binary. I’m not saying that it is right or wrong, it is just the way things were. As we grow in a culture that starts to blur the lines with everything, sometimes I can see the appeal of the binary system, but in all things moderation is the key, and knowing where to apply that binary system is vitally important.

My parents missed out on the free love of the 60s and the new way to raise kids; they followed the biblical proverb that says spare the rod, spoil the child. Sex or any discussion of your body were simply not polite and were frowned upon. So, I grew up never even knowing what the birds and the bees were or that they even existed. I grew up in the dark when it came to dating, sex, gender. I hadn’t an inkling of anything of the sort. I also learned that there were things that you kept to yourself. If you had an erotic dream and messed the sheets you didn’t discuss it, you just did the laundry and no one questioned why. In the same vein, you didn’t bring up the fact that though you had a penis between your legs that you knew you were female. It was not my parent’s fault. That was how they were raised, and that is how they raised me. It was how the culture was back then, it was what was considered the norm, and everyone wants to be viewed as normal.

I had one older sister and one older brother and two younger sisters. I was smack dab in the middle of five kids. My mother was a homemaker and a dedicated and dutiful wife as required in the years before the feminist movement. My dad was a football coach, very tough and slow to show affection, especially to his sons. He made it onto the New York Jets back in the Joe Namath days. He was very religious and taught me a lot of lessons, usually the hard way. I was a stubborn kid, strong willed and at times, a troublemaker, very much the typical middle child.

I was the one in the family that always got caught doing something wrong, even if I didn’t commit the offense. If there was a broken lamp or something was out of line, I was to blame, or maybe I just took the blame as I could handle it. I became a good lightening rod for anything that went wrong in the family; at least that is how I saw it from my vantage point.

There are memories you have as a child, good or bad, that you remember certain instances of them and not all the events that led up to them or that followed them. When I was eight, one of the ways that I would play with my older sister was by dressing up in one of her outfits and jumping up and down on the bed. I loved watching the skirt flair out around my legs and feeling the fabric swish around me. It was fun, we were laughing, and I was able to be the real me. Kristin didn’t have a name back then, I didn’t have some kind of epiphany about who or what I was. All I knew was that I was happy and nobody seemed to care.

I can’t remember how the game started. I don’t know who suggested that I put on dresses and jump around. My sister was older than me, but I was beyond that gullible point in life where I would do something just because someone older than me suggested it. Whoever made the decision to allow me to put on a dress was neither here nor there, it just was. It would be kind of asking who made the decision to sit by the window or sit in the back of a station wagon, it is immaterial.

Unfortunately the game was short lived. One day we were playing and I was wearing one of my sister’s ballerina outfits. I don’t remember whose idea it was that day, my sister’s, or mine, but again, that is not an issue. The game had been established, and it was one of the things we did, good, bad, or indifferent. It was right; it was fun; I was me; and the world was spinning around the sun. Only this time, my dad walked in on us, and I was taught that it was wrong to gender bend, that it was wrong in some way.

I got the paddle.

Out of all the times I was punished as I child, this one is the punishment that bothers me most. If I had broken a window or stolen a cookie before dinner, I wouldn’t have cared. I would have known that was the risk, and I would take what I had coming to me. But not this time. This time I did nothing wrong. I didn’t break the rules. I was just being me; I was only having fun. Perhaps if I had snuck into my sister’s room and took things without asking or if I was sneaking around, being clandestine, I would have understood being punished. But I wasn’t doing that. I was just being me and having some fun as myself.

From that day on I hid the wishes and dreams of being what my spirit was telling me. Was it my spirit talking? I don’t know, but it was something very deep inside of me that was telling me who I was; the outside world said NO.

It would be wrong of me not to put this here. Times were different back then; a swat on the ass with a huge two handed paddle was an acceptable form of punishment. I never questioned my dad, the school, the church or anyone using corporal punishment, because in the culture of the day, it was normal. Nowadays, you give kids a time out, and they play video games in their bedrooms and laugh about how difficult it is being punished.

Contrary to popular belief, my dad never beat me. He didn’t pound the transgender into me. I am not transgender because this is my way at retaliating against my dad’s discipline. Even now he is a huge part of my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. There just wasn’t the kind of information going around back then about gender variant children, and he didn’t know any better; none of us did. It was the seventies; he worked as a football coach, and showing love by not sparing the rod was the credo of the day. Enough said. Though he may not have been affectionate toward me like he was toward my sisters and though it may have been a double standard that the boys would get the paddle when the girls got sent to their room to get all weepy, I never doubted my dad’s love for me, and I always wanted to make him proud of me. Outside of this one time disciplining me, I most likely deserved more whoopings than I got for doing a lot of stupid things like children were known to do. He was always fair, and anyone that played football for him will say the same.

My dad said a prayer and then kissed us on the forehead every night for bedtime. He was a great dad, and I wouldn’t have any other father in the world. He was doing the best that he could and provided for the family, and that’s all you can ask for from a man. I look back and wish I was half as good of a father to my own children; that is another story that we will get into later.

My Mom was a good mother; she took care of us and I don’t know how she did it. Five kids running around like crazies back in the 70s. She had her hands full. I remember once I climbed a stepladder to look in a bird’s nest up in the rafters. I wanted to see the baby birds. The nest and rafter were covered in lice. I didn’t know and was there peering inside. I started itching all over – itching real bad. I looked and saw my skin crawling. It was scary. I ran screaming into the house. Without missing a beat she said, “Go up to the bathtub and start the water.” No yelling, no fusing just started vacuuming and then cleaned me up. My mom was selfless and dedicated to the family.

Like I said, my family was very religious and kept the line, adhering to church doctrine; the “NO Kristin”, may have been rooted in religion, or it could have been our family’s social construct. It is hard to say. Children of today have a much more fluid view of gender and many other things that would have been prison offenses in my day. With the

advent of the Internet and social media, things are not as easily kept away from the inquisitive nature of kids.

[lilwriterinalostworld]

Red virgin Pirates Debut Chapter

Whittle

2670, 320 years after The Great War

10 million suns, 800 dives and five winter peaks later we're finally getting the bow fixed. "What d'ya think, Wit? New fixture, mermaid or a double-tailed dragon?" Wit is short for Whittle and Whittle is my name, or well nickname. But seeing as I've been called this for my whole life on y'old Bloody Mary I take it as my real name. Really my real name, or so they say the name that they found me with, is Weasly. Not sure what my ma had in 'er noggin when given me such a shite name. Anyway, Whittle, Whittle is a combination of Weasly and little cause they found me when I was little and I 'aven't grown so much since then. "Double tailed dragons are bo-or-ring" Luce complains. Luce is Nance's daughter, Nance short for Nancy- the most original nickname of our crew- is our cook. She said a little more of 'ese things called nu-nutrinos-nutrinuous? Nutriends- Nutriunts? And I'd have grown slightly taller. I'm just happy that I didn't rot away in the alleys like the nameless do. Instead, the crew of Bloody whisked me away and now I'm a part of the family, one of the Red Virgin Pirates.

"She 'ave the longest hair? The dragon 'ave the sharpest teeth?" I ask.

"She was damned well a beauty but he was askin for double the price for her then the dragon." Luce replies

I roll my eyes. Those keepers always tryna cheat us. "We'll take 'er anyway."

"Ya didn't even ask the price Wit?" Lunes replies.

I turn my head away from the heavy waves crashing into the port to glare at Lunes. Lunes is the prettiest girl on the ship with 'ese blue eyes and long blond locks, but also the weakest and most pitiful. She and Luce are the only one who ever step onto the shores in the day. Lunes takes down what we each need and then they buy the supplies for Bloody. Which is why it has taken winters to fix our bow. But she does have her blessings. The girl's beauty makes all the lads swoon, so we tend to get better prices on most things. Those that we can't get cheap, we steal. Lune's face pales. "Oh, ya mean at night?" I roll my eyes and look back at the sea. You'd think after a few years on the decks she'd know the ropes by now.

Picked up at an old bedding house we saved 'er from the leers and dirty touches of older men. That first night she'd been all tears. Nance had led 'er to the kitchen where she locked them both in for oceans. When they finally came out, she was as thin as a stick and the rest of us were a growling hungry, nutty rats' nest of a crew. We gave 'er quite the fright we did.

I think Luce said she'd boil her skin and bones into a delectcy?-deliatcle?-delectable? soup. I'd said I'd relish that soft skin as a blanket and roast her flesh over a fire.

I can't say she's warmed to us since but she's as much of a part of the crew as I am.

"I'll go tell Ash then." Lunes says lightly, then scampers back off below deck.

My fingers tap the chipped railing of the balcony as I drift off into my future.

10000 old coppers was a mighty sweet amount. We could buy some of that sugar Bird always raves about. Bird has probably the weirdest background of all of us- she's apparently a princess. I'd be damned if that short squat of a girl with muddy brown eyes and frizzy hair is a princess. But I'd be twitching if I said she didn't talk about all these weird things that few of us 'ave ever heard of.

A long green fruit that has a soft inside, a juicy, tender slab of meat called a steak and a sparkling red drink that makes everyone dangerously dizzy called wine. The last one sounds just like the ale we drink on 'ere, or that everyone but me drinks. I can't stand its vile taste. Instead, I get to enjoy the early hours of the morning, stopping everyone from falling overboard. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing a few of them taking a nice cold dip in the moonlight hours.

Wherever Bird is from is apparently now long gone. Torn apart by a rift and then, in its weak state, raided by neighbours.

She doesn't talk much about it, but when she does her eyes soften and her shoulders slump.

"Oh Whittle, what are ya doing standing there all dreamy?" I feel heat attack my cheeks and clench my fists. Scowling, I face Stern. She's a whole body taller than me and a better fighter by a right hand and she doesn't ever let me forget it.

She's also the captain of our beauty, and the daughter of a sea sleeping pirate.

"Dreaming of all that money?" She asks. I shake my head.

"I ain't ever dreamed a day in my life."

Her lips tip up at the corners, and with her long legs she saunters over to ruffle my hair.

"Oh Whittle, do I have to remind ya of the time ya were so lost in the clouds that we found ya with a rat nibbling at ya ankles?" My cheeks burn further, and my hand instinctively clasps the hilt of my dagger savouring the feel of the smooth wood against my palm.

Some things just feel so right; the cool wind on a festering day, the first sign of the red fish come warming season, the sheer power of a storm that forks and the hilt of my dagger, polished and smooth, sat against my palm. I ring my bottom lip through my teeth before grinning.

"Want to say that again?" 

~~~

"What's the key thing we have to remember tonight?" Stern utters impatiently as she paces up and down the deck in front of us. I roll my eyes, it was just another attempt for her to regain her control over us after our last robbery-if you could even call it a robbery. Nothing was gained unless you count a single pearl earring –not even a pair, it was such a success. "The dog down the street?" Ash asks jokingly, knowing full well how much Stern 'hates' dogs. Hate is what she says because she doesn't want to admit her deep, irrational fear of them, but we see how she reacts. Some old sailor must 'ave scared her with some grizzly tale when she was wee. "Ashen you brat, why don't you go off back to your doting mother and father?" Luce replies, she pauses for extra effect. "Oh, yes, how dreadfully sorry I am. I forgot, you killed them both." She smiles serenely.

"By the winds! Luce don't you think that was just a little bit far?" I ask, apprehensive, my hand already inching downwards to where my dagger rests in the lining of my scratchy pants. "A LITTLE?!" Ash screams finally regaining the ability to speak. "THAT WAS COMPLETELY UNCALLED FOR!" Her face reddens and she steps right up to Stern so she's standing over her. "You know full well I had nothing to do with that fire." She grits, "take it back bitch."

"Evidence saysotherwise." Luce chants.

"It was, planted! PLANTED!" Ash says her fingers sprawled out in desperation.

"Guys, get a GRIP." Stern asserts. "Sort this out later when we're back on the ship for Ocean's sake!"

Now I should explain, there's not normally this much tension on ol'Bloody. However, that robbery that I spoke about, well it went awry because of a single person, Luce. Luce though, being the excellent sea worthy pirate, would never go down with her ship, so she pushed the blame. We all know that Ash did nothing but that hasn't stopped Luce from throwing some nasty comments towards her. In all honesty Luce just really needs to untie the topes and kiss Ash, this tension has been between them for far too many moons now. Oceans forbid either of them actually make a move before one of them dies in some unfortunate accident. "Would you guys get a hammock?" I sigh and they both turn their heads to glare at me. I raise my eyebrows in indignation, "the moon and stars are running out so you can keep on brawling or call it peace and we can actually get with kidnapping this rich ass girl." 

We crowd behind the back window of a tall three-story house. "By the old world!" Ash exclaims, as she marvels at the beauty that we can see with the remaining glint of sunlight, from the heavy star that has just passed below the horizon. She was right, the wondrous structure of strength and curves with holes where glass once of mustbeen, was probably from the old world. Conserved or rebuilt to fit the fashion back then, frivolously glamourous. It was a far cry from the insulated steel boxes that lined the shore, in their neat rows, weather beaten but sturdy and reliable. Having never lived in a house I couldn't say that I would rather live in either. But standing there I dreamt a silent dream that maybe one day I'd be able to appreciate such luxury.

"Ok girls," Stern utters quietly slashing the silence and my thoughts of silks and slippers."On my count; 3, 2 , 1." As soon as she says one, I'm scaling the fence. The daylight is slipping away further and further down the horizon. The house thickens their security at night so we can only act now; before the change of guards but also not in broad daylight. There are far more shadows to fit into at this time. Not that I have such a hard time keeping hidden with my short stubby stature.

I hoist myself up to the top of the first window. Thank god the house has such a luxuriant design; all this extra building material makes for very convenient foot holes. My role in this kidnapping-not that we've done too many kidnappings in the past- is to sneak in and smother her with this rag covered in this strong stench of a chemical while she rests peacefully in her bed. It will knock her out. The others are working on taking out some of the guards stationed around the house and clearing a path for me to drag her down and then through the back door.

Sounds simple enough but as we learnt from the robbery things can very easily go very wrong. I climb up the pipe that runs along the house. Yes, you're reading this correctly, they have running water, fresh running water when so many people still walk miles to wells, even more so than in the old world. Bird trailed the piping and it leads to a fresh river from a spring in the nearby mountain. They must be epically rich to be able to afford the old relics of technology capable to produce such a feat of engineering. We were originally going to contaminate their water, but with money come maids and butlers and we didn't want to hurt anyone more than necessary.

I make it to the girl's window without making a peep of sound; I'm deathly silent on my feet thanks to years of training, or well sneaking food on a rickety ship. It's not my fault I was extremely malnourished and that my stomach was constantly growling in anguish. When I look inside the window the first dagger to our plan hits me and I immediately must balance right on the edge of the ledge to stay out of her view. She's awake, just great. The girl who we've tracked for the last month and maintains perfect routine down to the time she falls asleep, on the one night we want to kidnap her, is awake?!

I sigh and look down to where Lunes stands ridged against the wall. "Hey, Lunes!" I whisper towards her and she almost jumps ten feet into the air. Not entirely sure who appointed her watch today. She'd be much safer and more satisfied if she were back on the boat. In fact, maybe if she lived in a house like this, that would suit her perfectly -if we were still capable of living that kind of crazy life in this age. This rich girl's father must have ripped the arms off babies to acquire his fortune. As gruesome as it is to say, in some parts babies arms have become a delicacy, don't ask how I know. I'd like to forever forget the plate I saw, the long soft pink arm and the tiny hand clasping a plum in its little fingers surrounded by the tongues, of what species I'd rather not guess.

I purse my lips at her to indicate that she needs to signal to the rest of the crew that something's up. She immediately begins to mimic the softest and sweetest bird songs of one of the few species that can still be found on this island. It's the sweetest little thing, with green tipped feathers and a black tipped beak. It's also a massive nuisance of a thief and has these tiny thin bones than get stuck in between your teeth. Rumour has it it's a mutation from the famous roach of 2067. Turns out the ugly flying things weren't the only things to survive or flourish in that region.

After a while Lunes stops, and something red catches the corner of my eye, a long strand, like the silk of a spider web. It reflects the sun's embers and I freeze as still as a statue. Hair, she must be right by the window. Whose idea was it to choose bird call as our signal tonight?!

I stretch my eyes far around and I can see some fingers against the bottom of the window, her nails are these long shiny things, covered in sparkles and I feel my eyebrows break my stiffness, rising as I almost bark out a laugh. This was taking the piss. Each finger of hers could probably feed a family for three months.

I wait for what feels like forever with the shallowest breathing, tension in my every muscle. If she took very much longer, we would have to go to plan C, which was non-existent, so we were basically screwed. No, don't ask what happened to plan A, and, yes, we've already had a short, costly fight about it.

When she finally moves from the window and slams the 'protective' glass panes into place I suck in a deep breath. We had just enough time. On average, the night shift arrived after the first star was visible in the night sky.  Now there are only the planets haunting us above our heads. When I peak into her room, I see she's moved these black swathes of fabric that block her from the outside, I sigh. I would just have to knock her out while she was awake. Honestly something that was rather exhausting, but right now it looked like we didn't have another choice, I pull my sharp beauty of a dagger, ok it's not that pretty but appreciate its blood value of ten. Yes, it's killed ten people, ok not all mine to claim, but ten and it's basically almost legendary. At least I like to think it is. It's the one thing I can truly claim as mine, and it's been with me ever since that fateful day when we took down those nasty, blue satin, bastards on that useless, stink of a Sapphire roughly two moons ago.

I jam my blade underneath the window and hoist it up. It squeaks in this awful way as if I've disturbed this nest of rats, and I recoil almost falling off my small ledge of stability. Fortunately, she never comes forward and this girl is firmly planted on this thin strip of roughness to live another day. I raise the window just high enough so my small ass can fit in and then gently pull across the black fabric, the room is as dark as a royal dungeon and it takes my eyes a while to adjust. They take in the lush carpet that looks like it killed tens of sheep, the table with a tall mirror and a million mighty fragile but beautifully crafted glass bottles filled with all many of liquids that catch the moon light; the painting of these bright yellow flowers in a curvy jar that must be far more vibrant in the daylight and then the four poster bed. What heaven it must be to sleep in that bed. Unlike an ordinary bed it has a roof of this rich fabric. I can only imagine how many soft tufts of feathers make up those pillows and how much support that mighty mattress must offer her back. Confusion crowds in my brain- there's something missing from her room. I search around until I realise how stupid I've been. Where the fuck is the girl? "Shit." I swear, as I'm taken down by this mass of black that has been standing unnoticeably still in the corner of my vision. She pulls down her curtains with me and I'm immediately surrounded by nothing but blackness. Well this was going just great. She clamps me down under her full weight.

"Who are you? What do you want from us?" Her voice is the strange combination of eloquent letters, a harsh bitterness and the quietest quiver of fear. I would reply, expect I don't know what to say and I'm currently focused on breathing through this suffocating material and all of her weight crushing my lungs, since when were girls this heavy? I feel a sharp point pressing into my bare calf free from under the blanket. "If you don't speak, I'm cutting a clean line down your leg." Oh, oceans above, she was a little dramatic. I cough and sputter until she lifts up the blanket over my head. I find myself staringat  floral wallpaper in front of me. She digs the tip slightly deeper. "Ok," I choke out. "I'll speak, would you just get off my lungs first?" Maybe she's foolish, or I'm incredibly convincing and charming, because she lessens her weight and I throw her off my back. She coughs in shock, and I twist and clamp her arms down. I'm face to face and nose to nose with her. Her soft skin touches my rough calloused and silky garments scratch against my coarse ones. I'm confronted by these pale green eyes, assaulted both parts by innocent and beauty and then the fierceness of her expression with her fire curls. Her small limbs struggle against my muscled and I hold her down with relative ease. "Who on Earth are you?!" Disgust curls her lips.

"Someone you'll wish you never met." I grin. "Now you can make this easy or go down the hard way. I'd recommend the latter seeing as your frail, pale skin probably bruises pretty easily." She spits in my face, giving up trying to fight me off and I roll my eyes. "Why doesn't anyone go down easily these days?" I muse aloud. I kick up my knee into her chin knocking her head backward and I one of my hands shoots to the pocket in my shorts. I feel around in the bottomless pocket for the small but vital foul-smelling cloth to realise that it must have fallen out in the hustle. In the seconds it takes my eyes to dart around the room and locate it, she regains focus and now it's my turn to have my head thrown backwards against the ground. Her hold on me is weaker though this time and more panic has ebbed into her eyes. "Who are you?" she says, her tone still surprisingly strong, but her eyes constantly darting to the door. Well at least something must have gone right tonight; Ash and Stern must have successfully disabled the guards. I slowly inch my hands to towards the cloth just in reaching distance. "I'm Whittle," I reply, and she looks directly into my eyes, I pause my movement. "Whittle?!"

I scoff, "Come on it's not really such a bad name is it?" She almost, almost cracks a grin. But worry keeps lines etched into her face. "What do you want, gems, coins, some of the finest fleece all the way from the mountains of tremulous?"

I shake my head my hand ever progressing towards the piece of cloth. "What then?!" She says her voice exasperated but yet again contrasting with the confusion and deepening fear in her eyes. Whatever fanciful life she must live she must be very used to concealing her emotions. My fingers clamp around the cloth.

"You my dear." I say and thrust the cloth into her face. She moves backward in shock, but soon her limbs go limp and she's falling backwards. I reach forward quickly and stop her head from thumping against the floor. Not for her though, simply because we decided it would be less effort to take out every guard. I send out my bird call, the call of a small fat black bird which lives in almost any congregation of steel bone houses. Shortly the door creeks open and Ash and Stern appear in its entrance. "What took you so long?" Ash asks. "Could have done with some help up here." I mutter and gesture my head downwards towards the knocked out ginger beauty. The worry lines still etched into her forehead even in her slumber. Ash and Stern walk over to help me pick her up. "Help you when you had the easiest job?" Ash scoffs and I glare at her. "We were keeping watch for the other guards anyway." Stern says studying the girl.

"We've got the right person?" I ask.

"None of the other rooms were occupied," Stern muses. "And how many houses do you think are left out there like this one." Ash chimes. I rest my hands under her body, while Ash clamps her hands onto the girl's legs with no regard for the fragile unmarred skin, and Stern cups her head. We hoist her up and carry her downstairs with haste. "I wish all the houses still looked like this." I sigh, most were now either piles of rubble, drawn upon and battered so they were unrecognisable. "You'd rather live on land?" Ash replies surprise raising her eyebrows. I share a conspirator grin with her, "Oh hell no, these legs only know life on the rocking decks. Maybe though, maybe if I'd been born into one of these places or like in the old days, a place where one only had to worry about getting the luxuries others had, would I be able to appreciate and relate to the rest of human race and the enjoyment they gain living on land." Ash shakes her head and smiles wistfully at me. "Sometimes, or should I say, most of the time, Whittle, you say things that make absolutely no sense."

[relationtrip-blog]

Chapter 2 - In Search Of

Before I jump into my first major relationship I should probably explain to you a little bit about myself and my background... perhaps give a little context.  I grew up in affluence.  Both of my parents are pseudo celebrities, known mostly for their major accomplishments back in the 80′s but still relevant and working regularly on their own merit to this day, which basically means we grew up with plenty of money to live comfortably but not in absurd excess.  Before I was born my mother was on a hit TV show when my father, a prestigious singer and producer at the time, spotted her on the screen.  Now, his story was that he saw her talent and knew he needed to produce an album with her, but anyone that knows my father knows that he more than likely just wanted to get in her pants.  And with a bit of time, effort, and elbow grease into her pants he got, and thus my genesis.  

Shortly after finding that my mother was pregnant my father proposed (gotta make it legit and hope the good lord didn’t notice), they got married and moved in together.   Mom convinced Dad to take custody of his two daughters from his previous marriage, as their mother was/is a drug addict, and the four of them formed a happy little family into which I was born.  

Now I love my parents, both of them, very very dearly.  But the purpose of this blog is honesty both with myself and with all of you.  Parents are wonderful but they’re flawed humans just like any of us, and mine are no exception.  

Their marriage went just like you might think your average celebrity marriage might go meaning it lasted about two and a half years.  My father, being the age old contradictory stereotype of gospel singer/R&B Sex Symbol, just couldn’t keep all those women’s mouths and vaginas away from his dick, and my mom, not being stupid, caught on and confronted him about it.  But as we all know when a liar gets caught what do they do?  ...Lie more and deflect the blame onto the other person.  But my dad’s insecurity was also coupled with bouts of anger bordering rage,  triggered by that deep fear of self that so many of us experience in our lifetimes, and he would get violent.

My first memory is from when I was two years old and It’s clear as day.  I was laying in my parents’ bed with my mom, she was sleeping soundly, I was half in half out.  Their four poster bed sat beside a long flowing vanity desk that spanned the length of the opposite wall.  Everything in the room was white.  My dad sat at the vanity desk in complete distress about something, In hindsight I’m sure he and my mom had been fighting.  It was easy to tell just by a glance that there was something boiling beneath the surface of his skin.  From there my memory is a bit hazy until moments later when it was snaps back into crystal clarity by what seemed like a small tsunami of water pouring over my mom’s face.  She woke with a start, as did I, and there was my dad, standing over the bed steaming, his chest heaving as if he’d just run a marathon and his knuckles white from gripping the water pitcher he had just emptied onto the two of us.  He threw the pitcher across the room and it was off to the races.  I’m not sure exactly what was said as my understanding of the english language at the time was rightfully sparse, but it was terse, angry, and heated.  I’d later come to find that he had a tendency to grab, push, throw, and sometimes hit if he felt a lack of control.  He did it with my mom, he did it with my sisters and as I got older, he did it with me.  Shortly after that incident my mom finally got the courage to pack up her things and leave.  Pitcher-pocalypse is the one memory I have of my parents being together.

I bring this up because studies have shown that children of divorce are much more likely to experience divorce in their own love lives than those of parents who are still together which might lead me to believe that we have an inherently more difficult time navigating those choppy relationship waters.  Why?  I often spend time wondering what impact my parents’ divorces have had on the way I view relationships.  What beliefs about love and commitment and the meaning of such things lie buried deep within my psyche? And yeah, that’s right, I said divorces... as in multiple.  As in both of my parents have been married and divorced four times.  Each.  And of their eight collective divorces I’ve been witness to five of them.  I still wonder to this day if I actually believe in the possibility of real commitment.  But then I think that perhaps when I encounter it I get scared and I run.  Or maybe not.  We tell ourselves that it was the other person who made us unhappy but maybe we just made ourselves unhappy.  Or worse, convinced ourselves we were unhappy when we really weren’t.  Because we don’t believe it actually exists.  Because happiness only exists in fairytales.. right?

Anyway, my relationship with my mother from then on was a close one.  We would fly all over the world living here for two months or there for five while she filmed shows and movies.  France, Italy, Germany, Texas, New Zealand, we were never in one place for very long and it was the two of us against the world... sort of.  While my close relationship with my mom was a blessing that I would never trade for the world, it also put me in the position of being the person on the end of her bed when the men in her life couldn’t meet her expectations.  When her relationships would disappoint and ultimately end.  And looking back, that’s a lot of responsibility for a kid.  I often felt ineffective because I couldn’t fix it for her or make it better.  I couldn’t save her.

On the other hand my relationship with my father grew worse.  I was afraid of him, terrified really.  He was somewhat absent, would fight and fight to have me over at his house and then leave when I was finally there.  He was an angry man who needed to control every aspect of his environment and if you didn’t fit into that narrative he would intimidate and bully you until you conceded.  And if that failed he would physically force you to submit (given that you were smaller than him of course).  A large majority of that side of my family is convinced that it’s just the “Old School” way of raising kids.  My take is that there’s a very thin line between “Old School” and abuse, a line that was crossed thoroughly.  I recall the mantra being something like, “No bruises where anyone can see.”

Now I don’t share any of this to garner any type of sympathy from anyone bored enough to read my ramblings.  My relationships with my parents today are actually amazing, even with my dad.  Over the last ten years we’ve grown incredibly close.  These stories are not meant to ask for a pity party but rather to lay the groundwork for my earliest understanding of relationships, both for your benefit and mine.  I’d imagine it’s important in the process of understanding my relationship to relationships.  As far as I can gather the relationship between my parents and their multiple significant others instilled in me a the delicate, rare, and sacred nature of lifetime partnership as well as a contradictory fear of it.  My relationship with my dad sparked a thirst for approval and acceptance.  My relationship with my mom left me to feel like I couldn’t save her from all of the heartbreak.  Destined to repeat these patterns throughout my lifetime I’ve constructed an existence in search of.  In search of life long love but too afraid to accept it.  In search of approval but looking in all the wrong places.  In search of a way to rescue her, whoever she may be.  In search of answers, looking for them in others when I can only find them within myself.  Trying to work out the issues from the very first relationships in my life through my relationships now.

In search of...

In search of...

In search of... me.