#from a mythological perspective Fate is ridiculous and I love it so much

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Absolutely pissing myself at 'Cu Chulainn hunting down Elisabeth Bathory to tell her her music is crap' being an actual plot point in this fucking game.

[morsking]

And so we have concluded Lostbelt 2! Now that I’ve experienced it for myself, I have a much clearer picture about how I feel about this chapter. As I progressed one thing became very clear to me, and that was that Hazuki Minase likely did NOT have any influence with this chapter, and its weakest points can be attributed to its main writer, Hikaru Sakurai, once we more closely scrutinize her work.

For starters, I would like to apologize to the people who kept trying to tell me Minase had nothing to do with the writing of Losbelt 2. You were correct, I simply acted stubbornly because I was terrified that one of the writers I loathe the most had returned to haunt and corrupt the franchise I hold very dear to me. I insisted on blaming him for any flaws because he was an easy scapegoat and a bogeyman, and while we all agree he is a pervert and a hack who should be fired, it is simply not fair to point fingers at imaginary criminals. A person should always be held accountable only for the misdeeds they have actually committed. Indeed, we may now explore Lostbelt 2 and the integrity of its writing with a more objective perspective, or rather as objective as I can manage to be.

The overall theme of the Lostbelt is “acknowledging one’s emotions as a vehicle for personal growth”. The issue persistent in the setting of Lostbelt Scandinavia was that it was a place where only young humans were allowed to survive. These humans would be oblivious to what real growth and prosperity were really like. They were innocent, and emotionally and intellectually stunted groups of people who only knew to live for the truth of their eventual demise. They lived short, rushed lives where they would stay ignorant of basic human experiences, such as love, grudges, aging, vice, hate, competition, and companionship because they devoted themselves to living how Scathach-Skadi ordered them to. They were unable to think or decide what to do for themselves, and were thus incapable of not just taking the reins to decide their own evolution as we do in Proper Human History, but also of fathoming doing such a thing in the first place.

This is a mirror to Ophelia Phamrsolone. Ophelia was conditioned to only listen to others for purpose and direction. Ophelia doesn’t actually know how to listen to her own feelings or even what those feelings even are because she was never allowed to connect not just with herself but with anyone. Ophelia, like Surtr points out, is still very much a little girl terrified by everything around her because she has no balance, no capacity for finding her center as a healthy and normal human being would. Unbeknownst to herself, all her interactions with others are a plea for help. Her very first interaction with Mash in 2017 was asking her if she’d like to have lunch with her and Pepe because Ophelia is terrified by male strangers and wishes to connect with other women as well. Ophelia’s conversations with Kirschtaria are also her not knowing how to proceed with challenges and therefore appealing to authority both for comfort and advice. Finally, her monologues with the Alien Priestess are Ophelia venting about how she feels, as if she were unaware of what to really think of herself as her helplessness and indecision drown her in a lake of self-loathing. 

These cries for help extend to the way she summons her Servants. Ophelia is noted to be incredibly proficient at evocation. Some might even call her a genius. In fact, she is such a genius she unknowingly managed to contract not just with one, nor two, but three different Servants all at once. The first Servant to answer her summon was Sigurd, the King of Warriors from Nordic mythology. The second Servant was Surtr the King of Giants and Scourge of Ragnarok (titled by yours truly), who hijacked the summoning and took over Sigurd. The third, and most pivotal, was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor whose Spirit Origin was modified to embody the “ideal Good Fellow who could make dreams come true” rather than the actual historical Napoleon.

What these three Servants have in common is that Ophelia wished for all of them from the darkest depths of her heart. Ophelia desired capable Servants who could give her some form of direction and stability. 

Sigurd, for example, is a hero renown for rescuing Brynhild and giving brand new meaning to her life by showering her with love and devotion. Love and devotion are things that Ophelia not just desires to be shown but actively struggles to adequately express to others because she has never known what it’s like to experience those things. To Ophelia, Sigurd represents “being given that which you have never known and finding fulfillment”. 

Surtr, on the other hand, embodies a darker type of direction: the terror stagnation, conformity, monotony, inaction, and eternal suffering. Surtr exercises control over Ophelia by threatening to destroy the world if he is released, prompting Ophelia to flash to her childhood locked away by her abusive parents every dreaded Sunday. Surtr locks Ophelia into a state of helplessness and indecision where she has to carefully consider how she will proceed with dealing with Surtr. Ophelia has decided to lock herself in with him as a way to prevent him from breaking out of both Sigurd’s body and the physical prison inside the Lostbelt’s sun. This is a situation where Ophelia is in a constant state of stress and fear, since as a Crypter the last thing she could ever want to see is the destruction of yet another world by her hands. More personally, the death of the Lostbelt would also mean death for Ophelia, as she has failed her purpose once again and thus would have no worth as a person. However, what Ophelia cannot understand, because Surtr himself does not, is that Surtr’s destructive impulses are how he wants to show love and devotion towards her. Surtr has reasoned that since their worlds abandoned them after they failed to perform their ordained tasks, the only thing left is to annihilate them completely as retribution for their suffering. Surtr does not wish to hurt Ophelia, but because he is a being defined only by his overwhelming desire to burn everything, he cannot help her heal or grow in any way that matters. All he can offer is annihilation. To Ophelia, Surtr represents “self-destruction through a static state of being”.

Finally, there is Napoleon. Napoleon represents a pronounced antithesis to Ophelia’s entire personality. He is an upbeat, improvising, confident man who chooses to not stress over things because what he is seeing is only what lies ahead, not what lies in front of him.He also breaks her defenses by asking something so ridiculous and unexpected as her hand in marriage when they have only just met. Napoleon refuses to give in to any negative outcome regardless of how much the odds are stacked against him, as he demonstrated in Scathach-Skadi’s throne room where he refused to let Sigurd kill his Master despite being restrained by Skadi’s paralyzing rune. He demonstrates this once again when he blows his final shot at Surtr during the final battle, sacrificing his own life to give Chaldea the opportunity to regroup and bombard Surtr to bring him down. He is called the Man of Infinite Possibilities precisely because he faces the unknown head on and finds the best path to walk for his comrades to advance. He does not let fear take over his heart and judgement, he creates a rainbow as a bridge connecting the present to the bright, shining future. He is precisely the hero Ophelia needs, because he embodies “the bravery to grasp your own future and find your own direction”. 

But analyzing these characters further is a post for another time. What I want to get into are the gripes I have with this Lostbelt. 

Now, I could lead you on through a couple more paragraphs before I wham you with what this all means in a much higher metatextual level, but I don’t have the time nor the creativity to do that so I’m just gonna give it to you straight. This square between Ophelia, Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon is the storyline that matters most in Lostbelt 2. Scathach-Skadi matters little despite her own parallels with Ophelia and being the Lostbelt King, and the situation with the Lostbelt’s inhabitants matters even less. Why?

Because Lostbelt 2 is Sakurai coming full circle and writing an otome game like Fate/Prototype was meant to be before Fate/stay night became a thing. 

SHOCKER!! SOUND EFFECTS OF SURPRISE!! DRAMATIC KAZOOS GALORE!!

Now, that’s exaggerating a little. Or maybe not that much, actually.

What Sakurai was doing was applying conventional otome game tropes into the setting not just what she’s familiar writing for, but because Lostbelt 2 is inherently an incredibly self-indulgent project. 

There is a classic trademark otome fantasy at play here: the fantasy of multiple men being devoted to a female main character a player can relate to. There is no denying there is a certain appeal to the idea that there are several handsome men all willing to devore their entire lives to a person. Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon all embody certain otome game love interest archetypes. Sigurd is the cold, composed, intellectual man who is actually earnest, just, affectionate, and wise. Surtr is the dark-hearted troubled man with fiery disposition struggling with expressing love. Napoleon is the strong, confident, borderline pixie manic dream boy with almost zero brains but plenty of empathy and... *ahem*, physique to make up for his seeming lack of tact and intelligence (he’s a himbo is what I’m saying but that comes as no surprise). The problems arise with Napoleon himself, however. Napoleon hounds Ophelia with marriage proposals she refuses time and time and again. When he proposes to her in front of Chaldea for the first time, the narrative has Mash take Napoleon’s side and urges you to do the same because Sakurai believed the reader would’ve caught on to what’s actually going on between Ophelia and Napoleon. 

The issue here is that Sakurai’s clues up to that point had been far too hidden for the player to make a proper connection, and it’s not until AFTER the proposal that the player discovers Napoleon is predisposed to fall in love with whoever summons him because that’s what Ophelia wanted out of an ideal Servant. Because of the poor execution in presenting all these factors that completely recontextualize the relationship between Napoleon and Ophelia, when Sakurai has Napoleon say “You did not reject me therefore you DID agree,” we jump to the conclusion that Napoleon is engaging in extremely reprehensible behavior and ideology reminiscent of dangerous and abusive men IRL rather than take it as harmless flirtation from a well-meaning oaf of a man as he tries to break the shell of his beloved. Sakurai invokes a very dangerous trope that does more to excuse misogynistic behavior when done incorrectly rather than successfully appear as a romantic gesture of attempting to liberate a loved one from the clutches of isolation and victimhood.

On a larger scale, the application of these tropes is where Lostbelt 2 starts to suffer, and that’s where Sakurai’s writing further begins to resemble Minase’s. Sakurai spent so much time building these interpersonal dynamics that she spent the least amount of effort actually building upon the situation of the Lostbelt and Scathach-Skadi’s character and motivations for keeping the Scandinavia the way it is. 

Upon scrutiny, it’s not very difficult to pick apart the setting and make a mark out of the glaring logistical inconsistencies of maintaining a population of only 10,000 humans for a span of 3,000 years by having them reproduce at 15 years old at the latest to execute them at 25. Anyone with a passing understanding of biology would know that forcing children to carry babies to term can lead to terrible health and psychological complications that would certainly end up in a lot more miscarriages, stillbirths, and failed attempts at impregnation than actual successful births. The problem here then is rather evident. Sakurai wanted to use the fact that all these children are young, innocent, naive, gullible, and ignorant to draw a connection to Ophelia’s own psychological and emotional circumstance. However, she realized that because she was writing a setting that obligated her to work around a 3000-year gap between Ragnarok and the present day. She needed something that would compromise the need for a realistic system that would ensure the reproductive viability of a human population through such a long period of time and the thematic vehicle of childhood and repression of growth as a way to connect Ophelia to her environment. This compromise ended up working for the absolute worse because she chose the worst possible system she was aware was the worst possible system she could’ve come up with and therefore decided to forsake that part of the plot without going through the implications of it and leaving the specifics to the reader’s imagination so they could sort it out in her stead.

This unwillingness to properly explore the problematic implications of Scathach-Skadi’s system not only deprived the player of a possible engaging storyline where child endangerment, a common theme in the Nasuverse, is explored and criticized through a different angle, but also actively hurts Scathach-Skadi’s connection to the player because we never get the opportunity to debate with her about her ideology and the state of the Lostbelt. We never hold her accountable for enforcing such a brutally predatory and dehumanizing system that targets children, instead Sakurai opts to build her up as a flawed, self-absorbed mother figure desperately trying to combat the extinction of the remnant of her world who also never really learned how to deal with the revelation there is an entire life she did not get to have in this universe that we MUST sympathize because she occasionally sees through the characters and acts kind towards them until the time comes for us to fight her in earnest as a matter of principle completely divorced from the question of how she’s managed her Lostbelt. The fact Scathach-Skadi’s model of sustainability does not work is made obvious by the fact it takes place in a Lostbelt, what we are trying to get at here is that it does not work from a writing standpoint because of all the different holes you can poke on it before you’ve punched through the paper screen entirely and revealed the superfluousness of it all. 

There is nothing inherently bad about self-indulgent storylines. If I’m being honest, if Sakurai wanted to use Ophelia and Musashi as self-inserts to fantasize about romancing the different kinds of characters she finds attractive, more power to her. But the problem surrounding Lostbelt 2, which is the same problem that plagued Septem and Fate/Extella, is a veritable lack of restraint from her part as a professional writer in charge of a multi-billion dollar mobile game. What the writing room over at Type-Moon has to realize is that they are no longer a small doujin writing circle that can get away with whatever they want because they operate under obscurity. They are visible to the entire world and will be held accountable and criticized as professionals by consumers and their peers in the industry. A little bit of self-fulfillment in a published work never hurt anyone, you can cater to yourself most of all with your professional work (I mean, just look at She-Ra), but you must be sure that in your pursuit of indulgence your work does not suffer for it and ends up alienating and disappointing your fanbase and giving them the wrong impression of what you stand for. 

Anyway we’re popping the biggest bottles when GudaMoth becomes canon this December. 

[tobeornottotc]

The hidden rules of TKEM and why understanding it will help you understand the show.

The rules of TKEM and why understanding it will help you get the show. 

Being in the TKEM is so reminiscent of the first time I realised how deep shows could be and how cunning their creators are when forming a whole new universe/rabbit hole to fall into. My first ever show to do this for me was the Disney show in America called Girl meets world. I remembered how much we hated at first the first season, how we cringed at the plot lines, the quotes and the whole meta aspect of the show. I remember the first time I noticed the gateway, a couple which was so secretly hidden in subtext that kept jumping at me and in my need to understand why I felt this way I went and researched other people’s thoughts on this. To my surprise other people felt the same way I did. In the next season we had the full plot twist, this couple had been in love with each other for at least 2 years, and no one knew. But once we understood the rules of this show, going back to season 1 felt like a slap in the face, it was there all along, the reason for why everything was confusing was done on purpose. Sorry for going of tangent, but that’s also what happened with me with TKEM episode 1-6. This was the show I waited for all year, I am obsessed with Kim Eun Sook, not even because of her deep writing but because of all the love stories I have been addicted to because of her. She knew how to make me be obsessed with a new world and she made Korea look so amazing. So, I waited and by the end of episode 6 I was devastated I couldn’t understand certain choices in this drama and it made me very depressed honestly. Until I finally noticed a gate way, I mistakenly stumbled like I always do into knowing one of the rules and then I fought to get to the bottom of it. And just like I was heavily tricked by GMW, TKEM did the same and I am so grateful I didn’t stop watching it. So, for all of you confused about the show, here are some things that could help you understand this show even more. I call them the rules that the show seems to be following. Everything is done on purpose. Let’s begin:

Why TKEM is so confusing 

1.      The confusing storytelling and jarring world building and Taeul’s polarising character.

 This was hard for me during episode 1-4. I remember sitting there wondering why on earth everything was so confusing, nonlinear, and why it felt rushed. I understood that KES stories can sometime feel like this, no plot at first before she hits you with the reveal. But this story felt odd and didn’t pick up the plot until episode 6. I also why watching things in Gon’s POV was so confusing, why did he know so much and yet so little? Why did we not understand why he was acting the way he did. Until I finally got the first rule, the story isn’t in Gon’s POV. The story is narrated by our Present Taeul who’s reminiscing about the story whilst she interrogates Lee Lim. This is the first scene we are introduced to in episode 1. That’s because we’re in a flash back being narrated by Taeul. As Taeul in our current episode figures out more about the two worlds, the mythology and the plans Lee Lim has we get more information then. Remember in the first episode she is really confused by Gon, she refuses to believe in the world, and everything feels to bizarre. It’s the same way we feel about the show from those episodes, we feel frustrated she doesn’t believe Gon but at the same time we also find him so ridiculous. 

I have another post about this but TKEM uses Alice in the wonderland as a base (GMW did this as well), it uses both books Alice in wonderland and through the looking glass. I had previously thought that because Gon is our main character, and he goes into the parallel world, he is our Alice. I was wrong. Taeul is our Alice in Wonderland. She also states it to Gon when she enters Corea the first time. When Alice first enters wonderland, she is confused by the bizarreness of Wonderland.  Just like again for the first 5 episodes we are, everything makes no sense, Gon speaks gibberish most of the time using mathematics and science, he’s also very annoying. This is because Taeul is flat earther, she believes in things that she can see, so the first introduction to Gon and other’s is simply crazy to her, she is adamant that its not true. So, we wait until she goes to Corea and finds out that everything is right. Once she explores Corea we finally start to see a linear storyline, we slowly start to understand more about other things like Lim’s goals, her real feelings for Gon, we finally get to start to notice that the show is withholding a lot of information and its slowly coming together. This is also because Taeul is trying to solve the murder mysteries connected to Lee Lim, as she learns more we also start to see more about his goals. She’s our source of information, she’s privy to some parts of the soul but only when she takes part in it. That’s why we don’t understand why Gon chased after the white rabbit it was so odd, because that’s all she knows he did. She also doesn’t know how time travel plays into this, so as Gon figures out about this, its because she’s also starting to recognise it too. 

This is also why time is so nonlinear to us. The flashbacks make no sense, some of the stuff like Fate (yoyo boy) are to cryptic for us to get. Taeul doesn’t yet know their part in this. I think its also why we don’t see a lot on Prime minister Koo either, because all Taeul probably knows about her at this point is the girl who wants to marry Gon for his throne and the girl who she admires for being in power. This also happened in GMW, the audience in the first season saw things through a 12-year-old girl’s perspective so everything felt cheesy, cringy, and nonsensical. It’s done on purpose, we the audience just like Taeul feel like Alice in wonderland, the more she gets to understand why the rabbit is running and is going to be late, the closer she gets to that trial at the end of the book, the more she grows up, the more the story starts to make sense. Taeul’s earth is no longer flat, things are now being pieced together so we also get to know more about that. Be Patient. The directing is done to make you think things are being overlooked, because Taeul is also overlooking important hints.

 2.      The directing is wacky. There are too many characters that are pointless. 

This is another thing that really annoyed me the first 6 episodes, the way the director uses the nonlinear timeline. Especially when we don’t have any information for why we should feel a certain way. An example of this is Taeul running into Gon’s arms when the whole episode she’s been hating and fighting with him or when she breaks down in episode 10 when he appears and kisses her before leaving. What we know is that this doesn’t make sense, we don’t understand what’s making her do this because we normally find out in a flashback of the first 25 minutes of the next episode. Because the next episode is always a week away. We the audience feel cheated and simply confused. 

Funny thing about this is once you understand this show is about time travel. The director’s choices start to make sense, we have so many timelines already showing up, Gon can travel back in time, and forward, just like we the audience also end up doing. The normal ending of the even episodes is us in the future of Taeul’s narration before we are flung back into the past in the next episode to get what happened. It’s done-on purpose. 

 Another confusing thing about the show is the way the director shows us the two different worlds. This show is chucked with so many side characters, it’s like Goblin whenever he goes to help someone, or the grim reaper goes to take someone’s life. Unfortunately, while it worked for Goblin in a linear narrative, this show has the rule of two, there twice the same amount of characters we know, they have another parallel self in a different world. With the directing its hard to know when these worlds differ, we are always confused by the characters we don’t know where they belong to. But that’s because Taeul doesn’t know at that moment about Lee Lim’s plan to replace the dopple gangers, just as the two world are bleeding into each other (remember Eun Sup feeling the heat of the hot chocolate of Yeong on his iced tea), we get even more confused as to where everyone is from. That’s what Lee Lim is doing replacing everyone in a different world and making them become part of that world. The director does this by withholding information about the side characters so we just as Gon and Taeul are confused by who they are and why they are important in certain worlds. The director is doing this on purpose. Its meant to be confusing.

3.      The powers of the flute is so confusing. Lim’s plans make no sense and for the first 6 episodes he hides doing nothing but being ominous in the background. 

The title: The King Eternal Monarch

Points to consider:

·  The word eternity is defined as something that keeps on going on and on and doesn’t have an end. This is the biggest rule of the show, Gon is stuck in a cycle/loop where he must keep on ruling and fighting for the throne. This is what the show is about, that’s why the flute is so important, and unbreakable sword his father has gifted him. They are artefacts representing Gon’s plight to keep trying to control his reign. He’s the noble blood that’s fated to keep doing this repeatedly. So the question is how? We know this, it’s time travel. The first 6 episodes is about Gon learning about the powers of the flute, he recognises time is important, he recognises that the person who saves his life comes from the future, he knows that person is connected to Taeul because of her id card. He understands this because he understands science and maths, that’s why he speaks in scientific and mathematical terms at the beginning to Taeul. He was explaining what this show is, it’s a sci fi, its going to focus on sci fi themes such as time travel and parallel dimensions. From the beginning the show has explained using Gon’s lexicon that this is all about time travel, its about the character getting to the point where he must save himself again. Taeul is the reason why he’s doing this. That’s why she’s the person he searches for, for 25 years. 

We have two people fighting for the throne to be king. Monarch is to do with the royal family and the control over a government. The fight for the throne is the whole plot of this show, just like in through the looking glass, Alice ends up mistakenly in a battle between the two queens, it’s the same thing. This is a battle for the monarchy, with two different people who have different reasons why they want the throne. Gon however is the king we know; this story is about him through Taeul’s eyes.

4.      The pointless conversations with characters and confusing scenes. 

Literature is used as devices used to help us understand what’s going

 I already have posts on this, but each story mentioned, each book helps us understand and foreshadow this whole show. It also makes us understand more about the show. There are so many stories mentioned, the myth of the manchipasseok and the dragon king, (the flute), the wonderland series, King Arthur, the book about flowers (the book Lady Noh reads), the poem Gon reads  (Invoking the name of the dead), Greek mythology on the fates (the yo yo boy). Kim Eun Sook does this in all her fantasy stories, in secret Garden it was little mermaid but the man as the mermaid, in Goblin it was the mythology of the grim reaper and Goblin, the poem about first love etc… She does this to help the audience not feel cheated by the ending of the show, she already has told you what’s going to happen. This is exactly why the directing choices are the way they are, the plot is told the way it is. Each of our characters are connected to a tale. If you need to know more look at my posts about Things to know about TKEM to know where its going.

 5.      Their relationship is rushed and confusing. 

This is solved by knowing how the subtext and the mathematical references explains their relationship and why it’s so fast.

 These are also used to tell you about the rules of the show. The maths theories are not my strengths, but these are so important. Gon has mentioned Taeul’s role in the story by telling her she represents the number zero when he confesses to her. He’s again reiterating that this story is happening because of her, she’s the most important factor in this whole show.  There’s so many mathematical references that I can’t analyse but if you’re able to do so, you’ll crack more about each of the characters especially why Taeul and Gon act the way they do.

There’s also subtext which everyone has been missing out on. I believe in the theory that our current timeline is not the first time Gon and Taeul have interacted. This is the reason why Taeul easily falls for him once he shows her evidence of his world. She already felt those feelings before, and she recognises it but she can’t explain why. Therefore, Gon instantly chases after Luna as the white rabbit without any explanation, something is making him do this, he’s used to doing this. I’ve spoken so much about Lady Noh and Buyeong also knowing about this too, they know Gon and Taeul have done this too many times, and they remember, why they do I don’t know. There’s also the red balloons I mentioned in the land of frozen time (the pink sky land that has no sun or rain) I think they represent how many times we’ve been through this loop before. If Gon and Taeul have known each other longer than centuries, it would explain why all he wants to do is find her, and why she easily accepts her fate to love him and be with him. The way they act shows you that subtext is important in understanding the show, why she moves away from his hug when he first approaches her like she’s expecting it, why she can’t stop thinking of him, why she talks about her tragic fate and then rapidly tells him she loves him so they speed up their relationship, why easily runs to him after he goes back to Corea. She loved him also from the beginning. 

The songs and osts are also important to understand the subtext. There are many songs portraying Taeul’s thoughts when she first met Gon. I have posts on this. There are so many songs foreshadowing the ending of the show, and the whole eternal loop of the show. Gon’s main purpose is to find Taeul he does this by always opening the gates. Taeul’s main purpose is to wait for him because it’s her promise to him.  (Listen to please don’t cry and dream, maze  and orbit read the English lyrics). Therefore, Taeul and Gon don’t build their relationship slowly, they’ve already passed that stage in their previous meetings, that’s why he proposes to her in episode 2. He knows this. 

Sorry for the lengthy post. I didn’t even go into details about the fight for justice and Fate and destiny as a rule as well of this show. But my other posts talk about these two. 

[kyloren]

Why Reylos Are A Bright Spot In The STAR WARS Fandom

It’s impossible to parse all of this out or to really say who’s “right” or “wrong” or what “right” and “wrong” even mean in fandom spaces. From my vantage point, the Reylo community is one of the more forgiving and accepting out there. It’s comprised of not only women, but plenty of men and non-binary Star Wars fans, from different races and orientations and experiences. And that’s true of any shipping community. In a fandom as large as Star Wars, there should be room for all of us to express joy or grief or surprise or disinterest in our cultivated spaces. It’s how we all choose to cross-pollinate that could use some work.

But Reylos aren’t deserving of the intense condemnation that comes from larger voices in the fandom. The ridicule feels specific and exclusionary, and rooted in gatekeeping sexism. Comparing them to the Fandom Menace is ridiculous. That group created blogs dedicated to roasting journalists, creators, and fans. Meanwhile, the Reylo community (along with Ben Solo fans) poured much of their frustration and sadness over The Rise of Skywalker into an act of good, by raising money for Adam Driver’s charity, Arts in the Armed Forces. How much money? As of this writing, over $76,000, more than double the charity’s fundraising goal for an entire fiscal year.

full article below the cut:

Why is romantic love such a controversial thing in fandom? It’s something I ask myself a lot, as a person who writes about shipping and who desires the kind of love that stories tell me might exist. I’ve spent most of my life in fandom spaces—participating in conversations or observing and examining them—and have witnessed firsthand how objectionable fictional romance can be, especially in fandoms that appeal to and target men. Why is this the case, and why is romance a thing we use to punish women looking for escapism in genre stories?

It’s hard to say, but it remains an endemic and undeniable strain. Shipping, which is fandom code for wanting two characters to be together, is often snickered at or seen as some frivolous element of appreciation. It can lead to shaming that feels personal and accusatory, as if your interest in a fictional relationship is a roadmap to your own intentions and experience. This attitude towards shippers is especially present in the Star Wars fandom, where the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren is steeped in a seemingly never-ending controversy. There are fervent supporters of the romance between these characters, a plentiful contingent of opposers, and those who don’t really care one way or another but still seem fit to criticize.

Why has the “Reylo” ship created such a stir? Let’s dig into this subset of the Star Wars fandom: where it started, why it’s accumulated so much negativity, and why the Reylos don’t deserve the bad reputation they’ve acquired, especially in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker.

THE ORIGINS OF REYLO

The release of The Last Jedi was a rough time for a lot Star Wars fans. The film—the eighth in the Skywalker saga and the second in the Disney-era sequel trilogy—made a lot of bold storytelling choices, which divided the fandom into camps. Those who loved the meditations on the Force, Luke Skywalker’s troubled hero’s journey, the complicated characterization of Poe Dameron, Finn and Rose’s failed mission, and the strange developing bond between Rey and Kylo felt at odds with anyone who saw otherwise. Many disliked Luke’s arc, or the apparent sidelining of Poe and Finn, or the democratization of the Force. The disagreements spiraled into something bordering collective mania. It’s a debate that still rages today, and that seeped into the conversations we’re currently having about The Rise of Skywalker.

I loved the movie, but found the discourse numbing. Positive Twitter conversations were instantly marred by detractors, and every passionate argument was upended by accusatory nitpicks. I felt discouraged from participating in any of it, and I felt bitter towards the Star Wars community in general. Until I found the Reylos.

After stumbling on podcasts like What The Force?, Skytalkers, and Scavenger’s Hoard—all female-hosted programs—I realized there were plenty of encouraging conversations about The Last Jedi happening in fandom. I also realized most of them were Reylo-oriented. Suddenly, I was exposed to the exact conversations I always wanted to have about Star Wars: deep dives into mythology, redemption arcs, symbolism and dualism, religion, poetry. And all of that was encompassed in Reylo. All of these larger stories, focused through these characters joined by fate and purpose, who represented opposing ideologies of the Force.

There was so much to dig into. Rey and Kylo have a classic enemies-to-lovers storyline, a romantic trope seen in fairytales like Beauty and the Beast, classic literature like Pride and Prejudice, mythological stories like that of Hades and Persephone, even modern genre television like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s typically used in women-oriented storytelling, as it affords duality and compassion to both parties; a distribution of power that makes the women as complicated, compromised, and interesting as their male counterparts. Rey’s interest in Kylo adds a layered intrigue to a character otherwise patently “good” and “pure,” words commonly associated with women, forcing them into palatable, antiquated gender roles.

Their relationship feeds a part of the fanbase who craves that kind of female protagonist. One who represents their own burgeoning lust, complicated compassion for the men they chose to care about, and temptation towards things we’re told to fear. Through the Reylo relationship, Rey took on another angle, one that finally made Star Wars feel like a story for me.

THE BACKLASH

I also learned right away what it meant to be a Reylo in the Star Wars fandom. The relationship between the light-sided Rey and dark-sided Kylo was riddled in turmoil. In The Force Awakens, a scene where he straps her down and interrogates her is considered by many to be abusive. The language Kylo uses to seduce Rey to his side in The Last Jedi is also seen as manipulative and problematic. He tells her that no one knows her like he does. In their opinion, he’s attempting to groom her to his standards, to turn her into what he wants against her own will. Those against the relationship will tell you that it’s a dangerous and negative message to send to young girls.

And here’s where I’ll say something potentially controversial amongst my fellow Reylos: I don’t think these people are “wrong.” Because everyone’s experience and perspective is their own thing to interrogate, and it’s not up to me to tell people how to feel about something–even if I disagree entirely. What I do take issue with, however, is the need to interrogate someone else’s preferences or fantasies. There is an infantilizing element to the backlash, as if those opposed think that Reylos haven’t reconciled with the themes presented to them, and are merely choosing to ignore them because they think Adam Driver is hot.

The way I see it, relationships like Reylo—power fantasies oriented on the feminine psyche, with an antagonistic male—fulfill two things I love in storytelling. They are pure escapism; the happy ending those of us drawn to the incurable are never afforded. And they are instructive, as they exemplify the patriarchal schism between men and women: that we are not equal, but that women love men anyway because of the compassion that comes naturally to balance that division. It shows how we can mend those gaps through patience and understanding. It’s archetypical and fantastical, sure, but that’s what Star Wars is: a fairy tale that wrestles with society and humanity in broad strokes.

That said, there are other reasons for dissent. Some fans ship Rey and Finn, and see their romance as a better avenue for a healthy relationship. Some have experienced personal trauma and can’t abide a romance that mimics and negates their pain. Others just don’t see the Reylo thing at all. Absolutely all of that is valid. Shipping should never be a competition or an authoritative moral stance on any side. Rey/Finn shippers are just as valid as Reylos because it speaks to what someone personally craves and desires. The shaming shouldn’t exist on any side—but because it does, the passionate defense comes in.

REYLOS DON’T DESERVE THE HATE

That knee-jerk self defense has drawn a lot of ire to the Reylo community in the aftermath of The Rise of Skywalker, the final film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. On paper, the Reylos were given a lot of what they desire: Kylo Ren is redeemed and turns back into Ben Solo. Rey and Ben fight side by side and even share a kiss. But then Ben dies and Rey ends the movie alone, something that irked the shippers. They saw the ending as a grim conclusion for Ben and a way of punishing Rey for expressing her desires. To many, the ending feels hopeless and feeds into this stereotypical notion that for a woman to be strong, she must be single — as if romantic love weakens us.

There are other ways to read the ending, and many fans found power in it. That’s the beauty of film: that it’s entirely subjective. But in their profession of disappointment, the Reylos once again became a punching bag for the fandom at large. A recent BuzzFeed article compared the way Reylos reacted to The Rise of Skywalker to the way the Fandom Menace—a trolling, abusive, anti-Disney hate group—reacted to The Last Jedi. (Never mind that their “source” for this reaction was a tweet from a prominent member of the Fandom Menace, and that many of the complaints in question were either fabricated or from non-Reylo accounts.)

It’s impossible to parse all of this out or to really say who’s “right” or “wrong” or what “right” and “wrong” even mean in fandom spaces. From my vantage point, the Reylo community is one of the more forgiving and accepting out there. It’s comprised of not only women, but plenty of men and non-binary Star Wars fans, from different races and orientations and experiences. And that’s true of any shipping community. In a fandom as large as Star Wars, there should be room for all of us to express joy or grief or surprise or disinterest in our cultivated spaces. It’s how we all choose to cross-pollinate that could use some work.

But Reylos aren’t deserving of the intense condemnation that comes from larger voices in the fandom. The ridicule feels specific and exclusionary, and rooted in gatekeeping sexism. Comparing them to the Fandom Menace is ridiculous. That group created blogs dedicated to roasting journalists, creators, and fans. Meanwhile, the Reylo community (along with Ben Solo fans) poured much of their frustration and sadness over The Rise of Skywalker into an act of good, by raising money for Adam Driver’s charity, Arts in the Armed Forces. How much money? As of this writing, over $76,000, more than double the charity’s fundraising goal for an entire fiscal year.

I also know that the Reylos helped me find my way back to loving Star Wars, gave me endless professional and creative inspiration for the last two years, and deepened my interest and love of storytelling and mythology. I know I’m not alone, and I know that the Reylo shipping community has made Star Wars finally feel like a fandom they were allowed to love. That’s something I hope fans with different access points to the world of Star Wars might think about before they wag a finger or call Reylos fake fans or mock their interests and experience. Star Wars can and should be for everyone, and how we find our way into the galaxy far, far away is a unique, personal, and beautiful thing. Love is what it’s all about at the end of the day. Even romantic love.

by Lindsey Romain for Nerdist [find article HERE]

[chronicparagon]

Onmyoji AU: The Phoenix from the West, Blessed and Cursed

Disclaimer: This verse is based on the Onmyoji rpg and information I found about North America during the suggested time period and from other AUs. This includes the early encounters with European settlers and the damage of colonialism. Although  I could not find records of Native Americans being in Japan around the earlier eras, other ethnicities have been there.This includes Yasuke, a samurai of African descent from the 16th century. This also touches on Eastern mythology of the phoenix. I thought this would be symbolism of Harmony’s journey of rising from tragedies, if that makes sense. I did my best to combine Eastern and Western Indigenous perspectives and this I will continue to work on it. 

This could be subject to change when more information can be found and this AU is open to suggestions for improvement. Triggers are tagged.

TLDR: A cleric who would not let bad things that happened keep her down. She travels as a healer with the capabilities to bless and invoke divine intervention, which can affect weaker spirits and demons.

It is hard to say where she came from. Most people did not know the past behind the quiet young woman who holds a gift that is both a blessing and a curse. 

Her journey began as an infant brought to the Land of the Rising Sun. 

She was seen as a commodity like her people including her mother. She was born to an Indigenous woman held captive by travelers who bore the skin that was as white as snow and hearts as cold as the bitter winters.  Horrible barbarians indeed with greed driving their twisted scheme. Search for gold and precious resources ravaged the land the native people held sacred. They retaliated against the invaders, but these strangers always seem to come back in greater numbers. They attacked the villages, slaughtered the bravest of warriors including the woman’s husband and the father of her child who came to the world in the darkest hours of the night, just before the dawn. Her name was Mato Ciqana (Little Bear), after her father, Mato.  Though her mother used to call her Ciqana for short. She was not quite like most babies. A quiet infant who was never fussy or rambunctious and many found endearing for this and for her eyes. 

The child’s eyes were not the beautiful dark hues seen by her people, but bright silver, much like the moon. There is a reason to this, but the truth would not be known until later in the child’s life.  It was an early sign of what she would become.

Though originally intended to be a slave, a man took pity on the young mother and her baby and took them in. He later married the mother and took Ciqana as his own child. He gave her the name Harmony. 

The girl lived her early childhood in Europe and she was more rebellious. Most children made fun of her for her darker complexion, which often led the girl to get into fights. She was scolded for this, but that did little to stop her when she or others were targets of harassment. She lived up to her name, as fierce as the grizzly bear when the time came.

It was often discouraged, but Harmony’s mother secretly taught her about her roots. She was taught her tribe’s language including prayers. Though she was deemed lucky to a protected life from what would have been a grim fate, this would not last. Her father served as a protector of missionaries who would travel to Japan. Harmony and her mother went along with them. This is where blood drenched Harmony’s story.  The attack came in the dark of the night when missionaries arrived to Japan. Sinister beings that are not from the mortal realm found fun in reaping the foreign souls. 

Almost everyone perished, almost. 

When the time came to kill the child, Harmony’s ability came to her aid. She came from a line of  wičháša wakȟáŋ and wičháša winyan, holy men and women who healed the people and served the spirits. Though the holy people and healers were chosen by the spirits through dreams and rituals, her first calling came in a dire moment. One of the two demons cast hellish fire on the girl, just to watch her writhe and cry for mercy. Harmony does not remember how it happened. She tearfully said a prayer in her native language, her heart pleading for salvation. Eyes shut tight, she heard the anguished cries of her devilish assailants before they perished by a holy light. They were weaker demons who would fall to holy powers. Harmony remembered the screams, the painful burns of cursed fire searing into her skin, and the tears she shed for her mother. 

It was then that darkness swallowed the world around her. Surely, this would have been the end had it not been the child’s will to live and divine intervention that she invoked. 

As always, light followed darkness. Harmony woke up to the golden morning light, no longer out in the lone road but in the home of a kind old man. He was a doctor who came across the massacre with the girl being the only survivor. Knowing she is alone, he adopted the child despite not knowing where she came from. From there, he gave her a name to help her blend into Japan’s society. 

He called her Mizuki after her gray eyes that shine as bright as the moon. Though she preferred the name Harmony or her birth name, she had no choice but to accept the new name. Though her heart could never be healed after losing her family, she slowly adapted to her new home. Unfortunately, she was badly burned, leaving scars carved into her skin. Ridicule from the village children for her appearance and not having a family incited her old habit of defending herself with violence. 

Harmony had to learn the hard way that she should not resort to fighting as she grew older. The fighting stopped as she grew older, but while she became a gentle young woman, she would not tolerate injustice. She became more withdrawn from other people, often seeking refuge in the forest embracing the village where she practiced the old prayers and honed her skill in healing on animals, granting every one of them a new chance at life.  While she was taught to be a proper lady, Harmony was not denied learning the ways of medicine as she had an interest in it. Her guardian taught her what he knew, and she incorporated it into her healing capabilities as well as holistic healing that her mother taught her.  Harmony would never forget these teachings as it is her way of honoring her people and the spirits who protected her when near the clutches of death. 

The old doctor has plans for Harmony who he insisted to call Mizuki as she neared marrying age. There were several suitors as they heard about the girl with skin kissed by the sun and silver eyes that resemble the moon. She held the reputation of being quiet with a kind heart as an adult, nothing like the wild child who acted out. Though her scars turned most of them away, which made courting difficult. She did not mind being single. No, she was not against marriage and wished to have that someday, but believed she was not ready for it. She took her time, though the rejections for her imperfections often hurt her. It didn’t help when rumors about her being inhuman for her healing which was not deemed as normal for humans. 

The woman’s life would take another turn as tragedy struck once again. Demons attacked the little village. Harmony did what she could to protect her home and guardian. She did not abandon it, just as her ancestors from the west who stood their ground when invaders attacked. 

But there were too many to fend off herself and she fell, seen as dead, but her body was not touched as she laid unconscious in the blood of her fellow villagers. This was due to outside forces intervening in her favor. This was yet another pivotal moment as she would find herself in another world. It was filled with warmth and light. She remembered seeing a proud bird flying above her before it perched before her. It was then that she found that the bird was a phoenix. A powerful voice came from the bird. 

“Fear not, child. I have not come to harm you.” He begins, “I come with a message.  You have seen what you can do. You can heal the wounds of the body. Your heart is strong and yearns heal broken spirits and spare the innocent souls. This all part of your destiny. You are called to become a holy woman, one who holds the gift of healing the body, mind, and spirit. You hold the gift to protect the weak from darkness and cast away evil.” Harmony remembered these words as though it was yesterday. 

“You must go forth and use your skills to heal the sick, protect the weak, and bring light to this dark world. This is the path you will tread. You are like myself. You fell in darkness and cursed flame, but you have risedn again. Just as you will rise again from the ashes where you lay. Go forth and be the light.” 

Go forth and be the light...

 The dream faded with the spirit’s last words. That was when she woke in the ruins of her home. That is when she noticed a new mark on her body. It’s a mark of a bird with wings outstretched on her back. It was the mark of the spirit.   Forced to relive the darkest moment of her life. Alone and surrounded by people who perished in brutal ways.

 To this day, Harmony would not forgive herself for being so weak as she wanted to protect others. How she wept for the people around her. Despite their distrust in her and how they made fun of her as children, her heart remained pure and full of love for others. Harmony did what she could for them, giving the villagers their last rites from what was taught to her on this land and from her mother. She gave her goodbyes to the doctor who raised her, no matter how her heart ached, she knew it must be done, using her knowledge and skills to bless the bloodstained earth and free the souls.  

That was what she did before leaving with what she could salvage. 

From there, the young woman moves on with the spirit’s words on her mind and a new mission: Tend to others in need, embrace healing, and use her abilities to banish evil with the same methods as her ancestors held close to them.  She is blessed to be a holy agent and healer, cursed to live on land that is not her own, which affects the strength of her gift and cursed to have little acceptance for she carries marks of hellish fire. But despite these misfortunes, they did not keep her down. She still lives with kindness and bring healing energy. 

She rose from the ashes of devastation and heartbreak, just like a phoenix.

[mlynar-nearl]

Talk ahout gods owo

cracks knuckles

for some backstory on what goes into my characterizations and why i write: mythology is one of my special interests. almost all of my attempts at writing an actual novel all the way up to this one (the one i hope i can actualize) have involved fantasy elements, magic, and SOME sort of mythology or a mix of all of them. as you can imagine, i spend/spent a lot of time thinking about these things. like, way too much. it’s a little ridiculous. 

first of all, i approach the norse gods from a refreshing, non-anthropological, literary perspective. my god, this is wonderful, by the way. it is so relaxing to get to move aside all discussion of where the different versions come from and just focus on reconciling them into one continuity. it is disgustingly zen. that said though, again, this is all literary, and all my interpretation that goes into The Book. 

there are a lot of holes in norse mythology at large in a literary sense that one needs to fill in, especially regarding motive. there are wayyy too many times someone just does something without there really being an obvious “why?” there is no motive, they just do it. so a lot of the work i do with the characters involves giving them a why. Keep in mind that the book is in first person perspective, so the portrayals of characters may be skewed depending on how my pov character (a god herself, wink wink!) sees them.

Odin is a static side character but he’s one of my favorites for interesting. lawful neutral to lawful evil, I don’t give him a positive light for much. He is ruthless, power-hungry, and all-powerful, and that’s what makes him such a formidable enemy. He is a cunning strategist, and his relationship with his family essentially exists in what they give him in terms of renown or gain. this is why i tagged that post with a joke about Odin and Tyr. He is absolutely a hundred percent willing to let Tyr lose a hand to pack up that Fenris wolf business. he doesn’t care. 

His character foil is Loki, a character who is portrayed in other places as not caring, but to me, cares very very much, perhaps too much at times! He has many children, and his twins were executed for no articulated reason. What is the point if not emotional torment? Thus, I extrapolate that Loki loves his children. Throughout the narrative, and this is okay because it’s not really discussing plot too much, there are situations where Odin stands by and lets his family get hurt, whereas Loki actively tries to save those he loves and fails. They were childhood friends once, and the fact that they trusted each other enough to become blood brothers is indeed most important- theirs is a relationship that is getting I-don’t-feel-so-good dusted. 

Overall, Asgard falls a lot under Odin’s opinions as a business-oriented lawful neutral. His word is final. Contrast this with Jotunheim, where, in my worldbuilding, there are various warlords, tribes, and clans, who all have similar spiritual beliefs but completely separate governances- you can see why they would object to a somewhat totalitarian advance of Aesir.

There’s not a lot of harsh black and white, though. 

This interpretation is all about flipping the script. The enemy is not always The Enemy, sometimes they’re just people. 

and sometimes, through your own actions, you cause someone to become your worst enemy, sealing your own fate, and, if you act on the scale of the gods of Asgard, the fate of your land. 

[thebookishgoddess]

ELLA DISCUSSES: AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT - AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH TAMMI

Hello everyone! Today, I’m going to talk about a new author that I’m sure you’ll all love simply based off the amazing synopsis she has for her book. Her name’s Elizabeth Tammi, author of Outrun The Wind, a mythology-inspired sapphic novel based off the Greek female warrior, Atalanta, to be released on November 27, 2018! If that doesn’t spark up your interest yet, I don’t know what does!

I have had the utmost pleasure of interviewing her about her upcoming novel, her journey into writing it and a fair little advice for any aspiring authors out there. But first, we all have to wonder--who exactly is Elizabeth Tammi?

Elizabeth Tammi was born in California and grew up in Florida, but is currently double-majoring in Creative Writing and Journalism as an undergraduate at Mercer University in Georgia. When she’s not writing, you can probably find Elizabeth at rehearsal for one of her vocal ensembles, or at work for her university’s newspaper and literary magazine. Her other interests include traveling, caffeinated beverages, and mythology. Outrun the Wind is her debut novel. (Taken from Goodreads)

Honestly, I am so impressed because the fact that she can handle university and writing an entire novel tells us so much about her dedication as both a student and writer. And it definitely shows how she definitely must have put all her heart into writing that she got a book deal not long after. 

But enough of my rambling and awe. Read on to see my interview with the amazing Elizabeth Tammi!

What inspired you to write Outrun The Wind? 

Spite, honestly! I was simultaneously captivated and frustrated by Atalanta's original mythology, and wanted to tell my own interpretation! Plus, I had lots of other interests about Greek mythology that I wanted to explore via long-form fiction, like the huntresses of Artemis, relationships between the gods, and the oracles at Delphi.

What makes Outrun The Wind unique from every other mythology-inspired novel? 

I think-- or hope, at least-- that Outrun the Wind stands out because of its exploration of a lesser-known myth and deals heavily with themes like female strength, sexuality, and is told from the perspective of two teenage girls. It's a younger and female twist on a mythology that isn't very kind to women, so I hope readers enjoy that point of view.

Who is your favorite non-main character from your book and why? 

Probably Nikoleta, a demigoddess daughter of Ares who also serves Artemis as one of her huntresses. Nikoleta has a super deep personal connection to me, because the very first draft of a book I ever finished was actually her story of growing up in ancient Sparta with quite a harrowing destiny; while that first manuscript was pretty terrible, I still have hopes of returning to it someday, and I was so glad that she got to make an appearance in Outrun the Wind-- it feels very fitting, since she's been with me from the start of my writing journey.

Who or what inspired you to start writing? 

My parents really raised me as an avid reader, so I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't love books. As early as about seven years old, I knew I wanted to write my own. Now, I didn't actually start writing seriously until I was about 16. Prior to that was just some random snippets, and of course, some fanfiction haha (which was actually, looking back, a great way to learn how to structure scenes, dialogue, descriptions, etc. in an environment I felt comfortable in)! Anyway, I think being surrounded by so many fantastic YA stories growing up just really pushed me to try writing my own. Obviously, Rick Riordan was probably my biggest 'hero', but other authors like Leigh Bardugo, Kiersten White, and Maggie Stiefvater also definitely inspired me!

Tell us what the journey was like in writing Outrun The Wind, from the start of the idea up to the point of having it published. 

This whole journey with Outrun the Wind actually only spans about 2.5 years from first getting the idea to the book being published on November 27, 2018-- which felt like forever, but ask any other author, and they'll tell you this was ridiculously fast haha. I got the initial idea when I was 18, the summer before I left for college, since I had been reading up on more Greek mythology and stumbled across Atalanta. She was a character I knew a bit about, but after reading her whole story, I was left feeling instilled with some sort of purpose/passion to tell her story as I imagined it. I drafted the first terrible version during the first semester of freshman year, worked with my critique partners, and started sending it off to various publishers and agents during the end of my freshman year. 

Ultimately, Flux offered me a book deal last fall, during my sophomore year. From then, I went through three rounds of edits with my fabulous editor to make sure the book was ready for publication, and the very final version was sent off this past March. Then ARCs went out in May, and are being read/reviewed as we speak, in preparation for its official release date of November 27th-- nearing the end of my fall semester of junior year! Whew. Looking back, I know this was actually really fast from start-to-finish, partially because I'm a somewhat quick writer, and partially because I'm not with a Big Five publishing house. But when I was in the thick of it, it felt like there was so much waiting involved. That's just the publishing industry though!

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be? 

Start sooner! I know 16 isn't old by any means, but it frustrates me that I knew I wanted to be an author by the time I was seven...but it took me almost a decade to start pursuing it seriously! I keep thinking what more I could have accomplished already if I'd started when I said I wanted to, haha. But that's okay, I'm glad to be doing it now. The moral is, if anyone reading this wants to be an author, there's no better day to start than today!

Writing a book is no easy feat. What's the one advice you wish you had upon writing your novel that you could give to aspiring writers wanting to get their work out there? 

You're so right-- there's really nothing easy about writing a book, but it's a challenge that I get joy out of. Anyway, I do wish someone had told me when I first started writing my own novels that comparison is so, so toxic, frustrating, and pointless. In this industry specifically, every author has their own struggles and had their own path to publication, so it's impossible to try and compare successes. Every single writer feels insecure to a degree and that's not going to go away once you get a book deal. It's important to be disciplined and consistent, but also remember that this isn't a race, and you should never rush into something that feels sketchy or uncomfortable. If you're querying, do extensive research on where you're sending your work out to!

It has been such a honor interviewing this incredible author! Let’s get a glimpse of her amazing debut novel, and what Outrun The Wind is really about:

The Huntresses of Artemis must obey two rules: never disobey the goddess, and never fall in love. After being rescued from a harrowing life as an Oracle of Delphi, Kahina is glad to be a part of the Hunt; living among a group of female warriors gives her a chance to reclaim her strength, even while her prophetic powers linger. But when a routine mission goes awry, Kahina breaks the first rule in order to save the legendary huntress Atalanta. To earn back Artemis’s favor, Kahina must complete a dangerous task in the kingdom of Arkadia— where the king’s daughter is revealed to be none other than Atalanta. Still reeling from her disastrous quest and her father’s insistence on marriage, Atalanta isn’t sure what to make of Kahina. As her connection to Atalanta deepens, Kahina finds herself in danger of breaking Artemis’ second rule. She helps Atalanta devise a dangerous game to avoid marriage, and word spreads throughout Greece, attracting suitors willing to tempt fate to go up against Atalanta in a race for her hand. But when the men responsible for both the girls’ dark pasts arrive, the game turns deadly.

Again, you guys, Outrun The Wind comes out on November 27, 2018! Copies are available over at NetGalley to request for if you can’t wait to read it. I myself am quite excited to read this book because you all know I have such a soft heart for anything mythology-related! Make sure to click that Want To Read on Goodreads! ;)

You can follow Elizabeth Tammi on many of her social media platforms such as Tumblr at (annabethisterrified), Twitter at (@ElizabethTammi), Instagram at (elizabeth_tammi), and at elizabethtammi.com!

[booksandwords]

Kate Kelly by Rebecca Wilson

Read time: 3 Days Rating: 4/5

The quote: The newspapers' love-hate relationship with Kate had them admiring her 'dangerous smile' and the 'great natural intelligence' it revealed. But, at the same time, they made nasty comments about her class of origin and the destructive family from which she came. The press praised the Kelly sisters' love for their brother, but they ridiculed Kate's blind loyalty and willingness to support Ned's unlawful activities. People were attracted to Kate's charisma, boldness and grit, yet at the same time they wanted to condemn her for those traits. — Rebecca Wilson

When you have the name Catherine there is no shortage of historical figures you share a name with. Saints, royalty, actors, singers, academics basically everything (with or without the derivations). Catherine Ada Kelly known as Kate (aka Ada Foster, Ada Hennessey) is a Catherine I've known of from an early age as a Melbournian with an interest in the Kelly legend. When I saw this book I knew I needed to read it. Kate is rarely spoken about as her own woman and it was instant grabby hands when I saw someone had. Most of this review is going to be a bullet point dump of good things, things my Kelly loving self had forgotten or never knew.

The first thing that needs to be said about this book is that Kate Kelly is a bit of a woman of mystery, an enigma. While Rebecca Wilson has written Kate Kelly off primary sources as much as possible there is a lot of contradiction and mythology around her. What do we expect, she's part of the Kelly family. As such Rebecca Wilson has needed to find a narrative and stick to it. You cannot talk about Kate Kelly without talking about the Kelly Gang.  So this does go into the crimes of the Kelly Gang but never intended to take a stance on the place of the Ned Kelly legend in Australia or even really the legality or morality of their acts. This is her story, not his or theirs. If she shares the story with anyone else it is her older sister Maggie. This could be seen as the story of the Kelly Gang from the perspective of the women in their lives, Kate, Maggie and Ellen. It is a female-driven piece. Secondly, this is written in a narrative style. We read a lot of Kate's story as a story, not as a fact dump. It humanises people, people that aren't often humanised. It shows Ned and Dan Kelly, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne as brothers and friends not as hardened outlaws, legends. It is written in a narrative style but it's not linear. Part 1: The Disappearance of Kate Kelly contains the discovery of her body moves through her early childhood and later life. Part 2: Kate's Tumultuous Life in Victoria covers the five years between 1878-1883, starting from the fateful visit of Constable Fitzpatrick through her aiding of the Kelly Gang and what Kate Kelly did next (also 'The Disastrous Fitzpatrick', what happened to the idiot Fitzpatrick who started this mess). Part 3: Remembering Kate picks up where part one ends in the inquest into Kate's death and how it impacted as many people around her as can be traced. This breakdown is well done and flows well.

Something I did not expect coming into Kate Kelly was the tears. I teared up more than once in this. While it is obvious that the people were all dead, their ends and their stories were so much more distressing and painful than I expected. The Glenrowan Seige was painful to read. While Kate wasn't there it is pivotal to her life so we see it, in a way that is painful. The narrative choice for Dan Kelly and Steve Hart is to my mind also the most likely but also lead to one of the most distressing moments. But dear lord reading Kate and Maggie watch the in burn made me tear up, the words they yelled were soul deep. Steve, Joe and Dan were already dead but they didn't already know that. Then the desecration of Joe's body (normal for the time?). This is the section that brings them crashing down to earth in the hardest possible way. It forces their status as brothers and friends on you. Then you get Ellen and her premonition (I didn't look for the source on that one) messed me up as well. Most of the emotional punches though are in Part 3, the life of the Kelly family is written in pain and blood, their lives are short and oh I was not okay. I had such sadness for Kate, for the boys, for her family, the wrongs done to them all by a system rigged against them and those like them.

Rebecca Wilson is very clear as to her chosen narrative. This includes the birth dates of Kate Kelly and the relationship of Alice King to Kate Kelly. On Ellen Kelly (nee Quinn, should be King). As well as her seven children with Red Anne (1853), Ned (1864), Maggie (1857), Jim (1859), Dan (1861), Kate (1863) and Grace (1865) I did not know Ellen had 2 children with second husband George King, Ellen Junior (1873) and Jack (1875). Wilson posits that Alice (1878) was Kate's daughter by Fitzpatrick but that is a debatable point. Others think she is simply another of Ellen's daughters. Using the dates provided by Wilson, Kelly was only 35 when she died. Wilson doesn't weigh in on the cause of her death it is kinda open-ended which I really like. The last chapter does give some idea of Wilson's suspicion but it does leave it open to interpretation. One thing that is of great importance that gets lost in the whole Kelly Gang case appears on page 149 under the heading Treated like Outlaws. June 1880. During the shootout at Glenrowan, the Kelly Gang were not outlaws, the law that made them such had lapsed. At that point, the boys still had their legal rights, the right to a free trial, innocent until proven guilty. Like it or not that is written in law and really not open to interpretation. It is one place Wilson does weigh into the politics of the Kelly Gang situation.

Kate Kelly's attraction to her husband was well expected. He is exactly the wrong kind of man. Possessive, jealous and violent. But everything was just an escalation of his existing traits. His spousal harassment and negligence were obvious from an early point.

Side note bless feminism and suffragettes that we got past the bullshit that was the status of 'female covert'. The past is a terrible place.

Kate Kelly being misrepresented and misunderstood in her own time and turned into part of travelling shows is awful. Her having to see it is worse.

"There were different rules and expectations for women when it came to crime." — Good to know some things don't change I guess. (p.34)

"That ain't fair, Paddy." "Nothin' is ever fair, Kate. Forget about fair" — The book paints Quinn, often vilified, in a positive light. But I really like this quote. It is the Kelly's their lives were unfair and painful. (Kate Kelly & Patrick Quinn, p.116)

So anyone looking up Ned Kelly finds the Jerilderie letter fairly quickly. But I don't remember ever seeing the Cameron Letter, signed by Kelly abut written by both Joe Byrne and Ned Kelly. It was written and sent earlier.

I did not know half the details of the chaos from Jerilderie. A church? Seriously? Well yeah, I guess they would have been good religious boys. They rightfully blame it all on Constable Fitzpatrick without him none of this would have happened.

So. Keitmayer's Waxworks. There is a lot going on there and I don't know where to start. Keitmayer was the first to display the Kelly armour. This is Madame Tussaud's but twisted and warped. I know where to end though. Keitmayer ended up displaying Ned Kelly's brain HIS BRAIN! Ugh.

"What price friendship? What price a life? How could he do this to my family?" — The family caught in the middle is more women. This line really does mark the beginning of the end for the Kelly Gang. Joe's anger at the betrayal. Interestingly the women in question were pissed. And I can't even with how much respect I have for them. Knowing their boys deserve better than their supporters in prison. (Joe Byrne, p.147)

The petition for Ned Kelly's reprieve is hella scary. Approximately 34,000 signatures. Maggie and Kate did that.

Nope, nope, nope stuff the government at their fascination with Ned Kelly's body. They kept it and essentially played with it. It wasn't until 2012 that the body was returned to the Kelly family and interred in Greta cemetery (sans skull because people are dicks). At least Kate Kelly got a proper burial even if her family wasn't present.

It kind of feels like Jim is the familial protector to Ned's breadwinner and father figure to Red's kids. Jim was certainly Kate's protector after Kate's death and Ellen's caretaker.

"She hoped that bringing her mother home was the full stop to a chapter she would never have chosen to write herself." — I appreciate the idea of Ellen coming home as a new beginning. Pity, it didn't work out like that. (p.276)

The Disastrous Fitzpatrick is most welcome. This man caused so much damage and destruction. He wronged not only the Kelly's but so many young women of the time. His life path was suitably grim given his role. I really like the addition of Cookson's quote about Ned Kelly in relation to Fitzpatrick: He really was a superior man. Under better circumstances he would probably have been a leader of good men instead of a gang of outlaws. (p.292)

"The death of Kate could not be thought of without remembering the death of Maggie and then memories of all of the other deaths in his family and among his friends. This circle of death and tragedy seemed to hold an endless presence for what had been his entire life." — Jim's life was pain as much as Ellen's was whereas Ellen lost her children Jim lost his siblings. Worse the only reason he wasn't at Glenrowan with his brothers and friends was a recent jail term, he was laying low. Can you imagine the survivor's guilt? (Jim Kelly, p.312)

"Once an outlaws sister, always an outlaws sister; she felt naked without a gun." — What can you say to that? It's a good point. (p.329)

I want to add a performance of Ye Sons of Austalia by Daniel Kelly. An extract of these lyrics from this traditional song are used in the book.

I appreciate the inclusion of the newspaper articles interpreted throughout and the image section. What I will say on the photos is that the Kelly's come from good genetic stock. I didn't realise that the famed photo of Ned Kelly was taken on the day he hung. "Ned Kelly bushranger and murderer has been sentenced to death. We should never forget the fact that the first settlers in Australia were convicts of the worst class and that their descendants still retain the traditions, feelings and habits of the criminal classes from which they sprung. For this crime of bushranging there is only one effectual remedy—death." — Let me explain why I like this quote so much. I love that middle bit 'we should... they sprung'. There is a theory that the reason that Australians are the way they are as a culture, especially women, is that we come from those women like Ellen, Maggie and Kate Kelly. Those convict women who worked hard, held their families together and gave birth in some of the worst situations. From convict women to convict brides to free settlers. Only amplified by those immigrants in the 20th century from matriarchal cultures. (The Northern Miner, 4 November 1880; from p.205)

Honestly, I think if someone had an interest in strong women from Australian history but did not know much about the Kelly legend this could be read with some ease. This is Kate's story, knowing her family isn't needed what is needed knowledge included. For those who do know the Kelly legend, this is a different and welcome interpretation of it, from the perspective of the women. How they moved on the impact that their names had on their lives. The choice of a narrative style for the writing is intelligent it pulls you in, makes you see these people as people, made me emotionally invested. In the authors note there is a line "I feel that Kate Kelly ought to be respectfully remembered for all her complexities, triumphs, strengths, weaknesses and tragedies, all the assets and flaws of the human condition that make us who we are.". And after reading this book I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Not only is Kate Kelly a reminder that there is always more to a person than meets the eye, that we are all human and we are all subject to pressures.

[mermaidsirennikita]

April 2018 Book Roundup

In April, I read silly books and I read books that were deadly (literally) serious.  It’s possible that the most well-written book I read was Madeline Miller’s Circe, which I loved and found much more satisfying than Song of Achilles.  But the most enjoyable book?  It was Laura Thalassa’s Pestilence, the romance novel about a girl, an apocalypse, and a sexy horseman who spreads disease.  What more could you want?

Pestilence by Laura Thalassa.  4/5.  When the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse show up, all technology fails, sending the world into chaos.  Then they disappear.  Five years later, Pestilence has reappeared, and wherever he goes a plague kills everyone in his path.  Sara, an ex-firefighter, has been sent to kill him.  When that fails?  She becomes his prisoner--with Pestilence claiming that he’s keeping her alive to make her suffer.  Of course, that’s not what’s really going on, and yes, this is a full-blown romance novel.  It’s also one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read all year thus far.  Sara and Pestilence’s romance is ridiculous, engrossing, hilarious, and yes, pretty sexy.  One thing I loved about this book is that while Pestilence is in his very nature a conqueror and pretty much a living plague--he’s also very boyish and inexperienced and the book makes that inexperience very sexy.  Because Sara’s experienced.  Sara is sarcastic, foul-mouthed, and pretty sexual; and very rarely do you come across a romance novel that lacks a serious alpha male.  Like, yes, Pestilence has his dominant moments, but overall he’s more like... sorta hapless.  I mean, spoiler alert, they have sex, what a shocker, and when Sara is annoyed that he’s not being more chill about it he’s like “I GAVE YOU MY ESSENCE SARA~~~~”.  It’s one of those books.  I loved it.

I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon.  3/5.  Anna Anderson was famous for pretending to be famous--after an attempted suicide, she claimed to be Anastasia Romanov, and was so convincing that people who met and were related to the grand duchess backed her.  “I Was Anastasia” explores Anna’s life--backwards.  Meanwhile, the story of Anastasia Romanov is told moving forward.  Somewhere, they meet in the middle, as does the truth.  In a basic way, this is a good historical fiction novel.  It doesn’t reinvent the wheel.  The thing is that if you know anything about Anastasia, you know about Anna; there aren’t any twists to be had.  What kept this from being a four-star read, aside from the fact that it was a bit expected, was one thing concerning the grand duchesses that is pretty debatable from what I understand, and--I’m not sure it was necessary.  But if you’re into the Romanovs, you may want to check this out.

Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History by Tori Telfer.  4/5.  A collection of write-ups on female serial killers.  What sets this book apart is that, aside from Erszebet Bathory and Nannie Doss (as well as the Benders, vaguely) I really hadn’t heard about most of these women.  Telfer steered clear of discussing extremely obvious women like Aileen Wuornos, instead focusing on cases that largely took place before the second half of the twentieth century, with one murderess dating back to the thirteenth century.  Of course, this means that there was often more speculation and less hard evidence, but for most of these women I think there was a pretty good case to be made that SOMETHING was going on, even if it wasn’t as salacious as some might believe.  And Telfer doesn’t just stick to typical American and European women, either--she touches about the Egyptian sisters Raya and Sakina, famous for killing a remarkable number of women, and Oum El-Hassen, a Moroccan murderess whose motives remain a mystery to this day.  More than a profiling of these individuals, however, I’d call this book an analysis of how we interpret female serial killers culturally.  Why don’t we take them as seriously as we do male serial killers?  Why do paint them, often, as more sexual than truly frightening?  Telfer doesn’t shy away from the gory details and while you might feel some empathy for these women, she doesn’t hesitate to report that some were very likely psychopaths, with no remorse--but then, that doesn’t take away from the fact that some were poor, some were abused, and some didn’t really see any better options for themselves.  The Angel Makers of Nagyrev--not one murderess but a group of Hungarian village women who, over fifteen years, killed around 300 people for a variety of reasons--were particularly interesting and kind of heartbreaking.  Highly recommend.

Tangerine by Christine Mangan.  2/5.  In 1956, Alice goes to Tangiers with her new husband--a man she barely knows--John.  Haunted by an event that happened while she was at school--an event she barely remembers--Alice struggles with anxiety and paranoia, and can’t adjust to the strange world of Morocco.  However, her past catches up to her in the form of Lucy, her old school friend.  This is essentially a 40s/50s film noir/psychological thriller movie a la Hitchcock in book form. Unfortunately, while I feel it would have worked as a movie of that style and era, the writing wasn’t attention-grabbing.  Pretty, but a bit dull.  I couldn’t tell much of a difference between the voices of Lucy and Alice, though they alternated, and the “twist”...  I don’t need a twist in my thrillers--a real one, that is--but if there is going to be one it should be decent.  This was fairly pedestrian.  A missed opportunity, especially painful because the authorb describes Morocco so well.

Indecent by Corrine Sullivan.  3/5.  Imogene has always envied the rich kids who went to elite boarding schools.  Now a grown woman, she becomes a teacher’s assistant of sorts at a fancy prep school for boys--only to find herself attracted to one of the students.  This is not an easy read.  If anyone reads it and believes that Imogene’s victim--because horny seventeen year old boy or not, he is that--was the bad person here, nah.  I don’t think Sullivan intends it that way at all.  Imogene is a study of a predator who became that way through insecurity and arrested development.  She thinks like a teenager.  She constantly critiques herself--her body, her relative lack of sexual experience.  She compares herself to teenage girls, for God’s sake, and is all impressed by a seventeen year old boy’s “experience” and “charisma”.  By being in Imogene’s mind...  You get how a predator becomes a predator.  Some aren’t born that way, and the line between a woman in her early twenties and a boy in his late teens COULD conceivably get blurred--but it’s always the adult’s fault, and this book doesn’t shy away from that.  I wouldn’t say it was a fun read, but it was interesting.

The Day of the Duchess by Sarah MacLean.  3/5.  Malcolm, the Duke of Haven (yes) has a problem.  He needs an heir--but to have an heir, he first needs a wife.  Actually, he has one; but Seraphina, the title-chaser who “trapped” him into marriage left nearly three years ago.  Now she’s shown up asking for a divorce, which isn’t all that easy to get.  Malcolm makes her a deal: if she helps choose his next wife, he’ll grant her the divorce.  Of course, Malcolm would far rather keep Seraphina around than have her select her replacement...  so his real plan is to woo her into staying with him.  This was a pleasant, enjoyable read that varied from the typical romance novel in that the hero has done a genuinely bad thing--not just a mildly upsetting thing--and there are very strong problems in the marriage.  Malcolm and Sera are both pretty wounded by what they’ve done to each other and one major thing neither one of them could have really helped.  The angst was real.  And the sex scenes were good--lots of emphasis on female gratification in this one.  But parts of the story were kind of like... too much comic relief for a novel with the kind of backstory this one has.  I’m not saying it had to be a serious story AT ALL, but Sera has this chorus of sisters and I liked them at first but it become... too much.  However, I’d still call it a solid historical romance.

Circe by Madeline Miller.  5/5.  Known as the witch who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs before capitulating to his charms and will, Circe is a character who was present for or linked to some of the most interesting parts of Greek mythology.  Here she gets her own epic, beginning with her birth as the nymph-goddess daughter of Helios.  Eventually exiled to an island, far from the other gods, Circe encounters everything from sailors to fellow witches and kings, and even monsters.  This is a literary fantasy, the writing as beautiful as it was in Song of Achilles, but dealing with a story much more dynamic and interesting.  Circe is a character who is at times deeply caring while not losing her selfish and destructive streaks.  She has reasons for her behavior, but she isn’t declawed in the least.  Miller tells the more horrifying parts of her story with taste, and at times, humor; but you never lose the sense of the epic in this novel.

The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton.  4/5.  As the king of Innis Lear ages, his obsession with the stars and prophecy leave his kingdom in a perilous position.  Drawing together his three daughters--the warlike Gaela, manipulative and child-starved Regan, and the favorite, Elia--Lear promises that he will name his heir.  But no matter who he chooses, the sisters are prepared to go to war for the crown, and for the fate of Innis Lear.  Obviously, this is a retelling of King Lear--Gratton evidently found the initial portrayal of Lear’s daughters lacking, and really takes that to task here.  And to be sure, Gaela, Regan, and Elia have far more depths than the women in the original play.  But the fact is that I could have done with more of them, and less of the perspective of others.  When the story is with the sisters, it’s enthralling.  But often, there’s the perspective of Ban, a pivotal character--an embittered bastard with remarkable power--but perhaps not the most compelling voice.  Then there’s the fool’s daughter Aefa, Ban’s mother Brona, the sisters’ uncle, and more.  Gratton also often delves into the past, revealing plot points but more than that developing the characters.  Which is good.  None of what is in this book is bad, really, but it’s held back from being as good as it could be by too much of the less important stuff.  For example--Gaela and Regan have a very compelling, codependent relationship.  Gaela is driven to be king, and Regan has sworn to support her no matter what and have children that will be Gaela’s heirs.  The problem being, of course, that despite the fact that she’s the only one of the sisters in a loving relationship, Regan seems incapable of bearing a living child.  The differing struggles of Gaela and Regan are amazing, and deserved more pagetime.  With that being said, this is a super compelling story, and worth checking out.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.  4/5.  Michelle McNamara, as many know, died in the middle of writing her exhaustive book on the Golden State Killer--a title she coined.  Obviously, the killer has since been caught, but he wasn’t when Michelle was researching.  The result is a gripping, incredibly well-done book on a monster.  It reminds me somewhat of In Cold Blood, but without the closeness to the killer--less sympathy, more drive to find and punish him.  McNamara was up front about her own flaws, with the book itself highlighting her obsessive nature.  But ultimately, the only thing I can really critique about her work is beyond her control; it is somewhat disjointed, as friends had to piece the book together after she died.  However, it’s a remarkable example of true crime lit.

[bookiemonsterph]

An Ember In The Ashes

Synopsis:

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.

Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear.

It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do.

But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy.

There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

Title: An Ember In The Ashes Series: An Ember In The Ashes Author: Sabaa Tahir ISBN:  1595148043 (ISBN13: 9781595148049) Pages: 446  pages (Paperback) Published: August 29th, 2017 by Razorbill (first published April 28th, 2015) Characters: Laia, Elias Veturius, Helene Aquilla, Marcus Farrar, Keris Veturia Genre: High Fantasy, Young Adult, Romance, Dystopia

A remarkable work of dark YA fantasy—beautifully crafted, and laden with Arabian mythology.

Told in alternating dual POV from the perspectives of spy/slave Laia and unwilling soldier Elias, readers experience this alternate history-feeling dystopian fantasy from two very different sides of society. An Ember In The Ashes takes place in what one might imagine from an ancient Roman Empire’s brutal takeover of a more scholarly Middle Eastern nation (without the word ‘Roman’ ever coming into play, of course). A world in which immortals, Jinn, efrits, ghouls, and wraiths exist and affect things—though very few humans seem cognizant or capable of detecting these supernatural forces.

It was a little hard for me to get attached to Laia at first. Not because she wasn’t a sympathetic character, but because I kept expecting her to die in literally every scene. She's constantly fearful, hopelessly outmatched, and shows no signs of the competency needed to keep herself alive. I appreciated that she wasn’t some ridiculously awesome warrior woman, but as the daughter of resistance fighters, a handful of survival skills would have made some sense. (Also would have gone a long way in helping me risk rooting for her outside of the basic instinct for railing against injustice.) But I don’t mean it to sound like more than half a criticism, because this aspect also highlights the degree of high-wire tension that’s maintained for most of the book.

Sabaa Tahir’s writing is impressive. Her voice is strong, her worldbuilding immersive, and her descriptions evocative. It’s hard not to appreciate how the supernatural elements are gradually woven into the worldbuilding. For a good bit of the book, I found the overarching storyline more of a compelling drive than the main characters (especially since the chances of Laia surviving felt incredibly slim.) But I didn't really mind. I was curious enough just speculating over what was happening on a grander political and preternatural scale.

Content Note: This is a cruel, domineering society entrenched in misogyny; and as such, it’s made clear that rape is a commonplace occurrence. But while it is frequently implied, it is never shown in any graphic detail. (There is an attack on Laia at one point that seems to have this intent, but graphicness of that scene is purely in the violent brutality.) If the mere mention of rape is triggering to you, this is something you may want to consider before reading. This reviewer personally found its handling realistic-yet-tactful. And while the violence and torture places it solidly in the mature YA range, I wouldn’t call even those elements gratuitous.

For those who don’t care much for love triangles, be forewarned that there’s something of a love parallelogram going on here. Elias has an obsession-at-first-sight reaction to Laia (as do a couple of other male characters). And the romance angle seems a touch rushed into, what with how very little most of the characters get to know each other and that constant threat of death looming over everything. (Helene and Elias’ confusing best-friend feeling for each other is easily the most organic and convincing of the pairing options, mainly because they have so clear an established prior history.)

The leave-off is a bit of a cliffhanger, with lots of questions left wide open. 

[elvellonath]

In Defense of Earendil - Meta

Okay, so I’ve written this rant in response to some things I’ve seen concerning Earendil, and considering I play an Earendil I can’t exactly leave it unspoken. It’s long as fuck, so please know that before you click the read more, but as a long story short I will say this:

Earendil is a complex character who should not be so simply looked at. He’s not a villain, and the fact that everyone seems to have little compassion or consideration for him as a character should be thought over twice. Now to each his own, but do not expect me to sway on this without a well thought out explanation from any haters. Don’t bother if you haven’t looked at Earendil from his point of view.

Before we begin, I would like to say a few words concerning Earendil. I know the fandom is split between two factions: Those who believe that the Feanorians were wrong to adopt Elrond & Elros, and those who believe that Earendil was a shit father to begin with and have no respect for him whatsoever. Both of these, I might add, are completely and totally biased, and are far too one dimensional for me to give any credence to. While I will not disagree that Earendil could have done better, I would like to point out a few things in both arguments that are amiss.

Namely:

Think out side the box

Now, let's start with facts and counterpoint that second statement of Earendil being a shit father.

Earendil's Heritage.

This is a factor that gets so often overlooked when those who have this argument look at Earendil. For starters, he is of the house of Finwe. The house of Finwe was --clearly-- a house of those who were incredibly familycentric. More specifically, the house of Fingolfin is from where he hails, and just by the interactions of all the rest of the family with each other it's clear that no matter what family always came first. Always. That being said, Earendil was raised by Idril, daughter of Turgon, and frankly I doubt Idril would have raised her son to be the prick so many seem to think. Here's further proof of the family itself: Fingon.

Fingon, who when everyone was angry with the Feanorians and wanted nothing to do with them went into enemy territory to save his cousin. Fingon, who was so greatly loved, who had his own faults, but it's clear he was admired etc. You see where I'm going with this? Shall I list all of Earendil's family who by proxy would have affected him with the stories of them, who show the very grain of how Finweians think of family? No? I'll go on then.

Secondly, the house of the Edain-- fucks sake, just look at every single person from these houses from Turin to Haleth --there is a line of loyalty and family honor which is so deeply ingrained in these houses there's no way that Tuor didn't put that same family value in his son in any way, shape, or form.

Proof of this in Earendil himself? Mom and dad sail off, and Earendil builds a ship to find them because it's his parents, and for whatever reason he's trying to get them back. Now this has a drawback: frankly he married a woman who was nowhere near his equal in family ties, probably because her own family was slaughtered when she was a small child. Now Earendil had his faults, I'll give anyone that, spending so much time away from growing children is something that can harm them. HOWEVER, let us consider things from his point of view.

He marries Elwing, he has a wife, his parents sail to the west and NO FURTHER WORD IS HEARD FROM THEM. His family and therefore his upbringing would demand that he has answers, that he makes sure everything is alright, etc, etc. Now, he has kids, kids who he worries about and doesn't abandon, he leaves them with his wife. I repeat: he didn't abandon them. It would be against his very grain. His very upbringing. He left his children with someone he loved and trusted, with someone who he believed would do what was best, and I'm sure he visited in between months at sea.

My own father was in the navy when I was very young, and he was gone for almost a year at a time, I won't lie and say it didn't affect me --it did-- but that didn't mean he was a bad father. There's plenty of people who can say the same I'm sure, who were raised with men who weren't around much. Men who didn't have a choice. But that doesn't mean the father's don't love them, and in turn just because Earendil would sail away and come back, and sail away doesn't mean he didn't love Elrond and Elros. Furthermore, he left Elwing with them, which for all intents and purposes is something that every single military man does with his family. And yet no one blames them.

Here's another aspect that should go into his character and should be understood. Think for a few seconds one specific character that is mentioned by name that Earendil looked up to and loved.

Ecthelion.

Now we don't know much about Ecthelion, but in general it's clear what sort of elf he was. He was the type of elf that was looked up to greatly, the type of elf who was willing to lay down his life for the lives of everyone around him. The type of elf who stood in front of a balrog and died so that others could live.

But moving on.

The Opinion of Others on Earendil

Now this is something which should be noted for all those who condemn him: when Tolkien created Earendil as the first part of his  legendarium. Earendil's mythology was his first written part, and thereby sets the tone for the entire mythology. Entire. Mythology.

Earendil is clearly in high regard in Middle Earth, from Galadriel to the Valar themselves. The Phial of Galadriel is made from the light of the Silmaril which Earendil carried through the sky, he was known as Gil-Estel ...the star of hope. Now tell me this: if Earendil was the ass that he is seen as, just why would anyone give him such high honors? Furthermore, why would Tolkien who clearly knows what a son of a bitch is like (i.e., look at Eol please), make Earendil such a centerpiece of his writing if he was as horrible as people seem to think him?

'The light of Earendil, our most beloved star'

Either Galadriel is supporting a man who was atrocious to his own kids, calls him 'our most beloved star' in complete lies, or he wasn't atrocious to his own kids. Just Saying.

Earendils fate

This is something that boggles my mind so seriously. If Earendil gains anything, it is my compassion. Now to do this, I'm going to need you to open your mind just a fraction and look at things from Earendils perspective. Now, some might say this is conjecture, but I'm looking at the personality of Earendil as given in canon, plus some logic.

Earendil's parents leave, they sail west, and no word of them ever returns. So, he sets out to find them, which is completely reasonable given the ban on the Noldori to return to Aman. He builds a ship, and he sails off, scouring the sea as best as he can in hopes that either he'll find his parents, or if he doesn't at least he'll find some word of what might have happened to them. He leaves his wife and children for months at a time, though comes back because he loves and misses them (because he would, people), though he's driven to have this one last loose thread closed.

He sails off one time, and he is completely cut off from the mainland, and the next thing he knows a swan lands on his ship, and the next morning this swan turns into his wife. Naturally he asks what happened, and naturally she answers him with her side of the tale of what happened in Sirion. Given his drive over his parents disappearance, I doubt he'd take a "oh I left when the feanorians (who were provoked by Elwing, don't forget) were going to kill me"

"What happened to our sons?" he probably asks, as would be normal. And here is where it's questionable just what the answer was, but based on his reaction I think we can probably guess that somehow he got an idea that their sons were no longer alive for him to rescue. Why do I say this? because he immediately sets sail for Valinor, not caring for the ban, and intending to plead to the Valar to intervene because this is getting out of hand.

Is this the reaction of a father who doesn't give a shit about his kids and abandoned them? No. this is the reaction of a father who is so grieved by what he probably believes is the death of his kids, that it gives him a mission, it gives him a purpose beyond his parents, and whether or not he'll succeed he's gonna die trying. He sails west, and he begs the Valar to intervene, and they do.

Things happen, yadda yadda, war of wrath etc. The Valar then give Earendil a choice: immortality or mortality. Earendil wanted mortality, which would mean he'd be sent back to middle earth. Elwing wished for immortality, and due to his love of her he chose immortality himself.

And here is where I wonder how the fuck nobody has any compassion for him.

What happened to Earendil? Was his ending a happily ever after? Hell. No. Earendil was given a fate that in many ways sucks. Think about it. His immortal life is spent alone, sailing the sky with the silmaril which he's given custody over, he gets to look down on everything that happens, and who knows how he responded when when he first found out his kids were alive. He gives hope to others, but has anyone ever considered what it must be like for him? He sails the skies, a hero to so many-- but to quote The Song of Achilles 'give me one hero who was happy'.

Then consider thousands of years pass, his one son is forever parted from him because he chose mortality, his other son eventually sails to Valinor, imagine all that time that they had lost that now must be caught up on. Like he should incite your compassion, people, not your contempt.

The Feanorians

Something that frustrates me is the idea that to support Earendil must mean that one cannot like Maedhros and Maglor for what they did. This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I adore what the Feanorians did for Elrond and Elros, the adopting of the twins when I read it actually helped me to fall in love with them so much. It was beautiful how admidst this blood and terror there was a moment that they took, and they did some good. The fact that Elrond is the way he is in later installments because of them is beautiful.

In addition, the Feanorians had the same family oriented thinking that Earendil might have had people. Just something of note.

But to villainize either the Feanorians OR Earendil as if to say one had to be wrong because the other was right is absolutely absurd. Tolkien didn't do it, so why does anyone else? There's a complex situation here, people, there's a situation that should be thought of from all sides. Earendil is no villain. The Feanorians are not villains. They all played their parts, and when their part was over it was passed to someone else.

Conclusion:

Do not look at Earendil so simple minded, or we will have issues. He is as complex of a character as any other character in Silmarillion, and should be treated with the same respect anyone might give Sauron, or Finwe, or Feanor, or Fingolfin etc. etc. etc. 

Therefore, think. Just think. Take yourself out of your shoes and put yourself in his for a moment. If you can't do that, then I'm sorry, I don't know what else to say to you. Hate is an immature response, and born from not taking in enough facts. That’s all I have to say on it.

[davidmann95]

I don't want to sound too, ah, plebian, but can you explain the meta-plot of Multiversity? The Just, SoS, etc, were all very fun, but the Ultraa Comics stuff went over my head.

Not at all! Multiversity was weird as hell,and in terms of getting what the point of it all was, it doesn’t help that mostof the one-shots only tie in thematically (aside from the basic idea that TheGentry are corrupting these worlds) rather than how in Seven Soldiers everythingcomes back plotwise for the finale. There’s breadcrumbs - a piece of Monitormythology here, a suggestion that comics reflect other events in the multiversethere - but by and large, the one-shots serve to lend context and emotionalweight rather than directly inform the larger plot with Uotan, Superman and therest of the heroes.

Iwrote about Multiversity before, always with the intent ofdoing a follow-up piece going more into the individual issues, so here’s mefinally getting around to that now that it’s been, oh my god, two years sincethe series wrapped; you’ll probably want to read that article first, since mywhole “Multiversity is about time” thesis from that is the centerof pretty much everything I’m going to talk about here, especially at the end.I’d also recommend David Uzumeri’sannotations for Comics Alliance of all the chapters up through Mastermen,and @charlotteofoz‘s excellent piece on UltraComics, as well as the piles upon piles of other great writing aboutthis book out there.

Continued below; this is a long one, obviously with plentyof spoilers.

Since Multiversity #1 is one half of alarger story that’s bookended later (it’s not even the first chronologically,since a couple characters from The Just are already at theHouse of Heroes), let’s start with SOS. More than each issue as anartifact unto itself - this thing would be even longer if I went into that, andthe annotations I linked to I think already do a more than satisfactory job inthat regard - I want to talk about these in terms of how they inform the whole,and Society of Super-Heroes sets down the template in twomajor ways in that regard:

1. Each of these stories correspond to a given decade of thehistory of the superhero - in this case, in spite of the 1920′s trappings, thatthey’re going through the parallel universe equivalent of World War II and thepresence of a number of Golden Age figures suggests this is meant to be read asrepresenting the pulpy heroes of the 1940s.

2. Each of the chapters of Multiversity correspondto a classic story published by DC Comics, but grotesquely inverted (similarly to how each arc of his Batman and Robin mirrored a classic Batman story, ending with Batman and Robin Must Die! inverting his own Batman R.I.P.); here, thefirst standalone installment of this latest multiversal threat is naturallymodeled after the original “Crisis on Earth-One!/Crisis on Earth-Two!”JLA/JSA crossover, except this time when the two parallel Earths make firstcontact (through the same crystal ball as in that original story no less), itleads to war.

And much more than a simple categorization like theabove, SOS introduces the major shared conceit of theone-shots: the degeneration of the superhero as a concept through theintroduction of time to the proceedings. In this case through wartime, as thepromise of the birth of the superhero at the beginning of the story is undoneby 5 years of hell, grinding our leads’ ethics down to the level ofkill-or-be-killed, with Doc Fate remorselessly torturing a man for information(in what I have to read as a reference to Doc Savage’s “Crime College”),Immortal Man reverting to his most primal roots, and Atom literally beating anopponent to death. It’s the most straightforward “well, in the real worldsuperheroes couldn’t be that moral” deconstruction possible, but framed as theconsequence of conditions the superhero wasn’t built to deal with rather thanan inherent failing. In that regard, while I don’t think Multiversity wastypically much influenced by the then-present goings-on at DC in the comics orelsewhere - Morrison’s said more than once that most of the issues werescripted years before the art was done, minus some tweaks here and there - it’shard not to read this issue as at least something of a reaction to the New 52and particularly Man of Steel, especially with lines like “Doc.I just killed a man. I–I brought you some time, but myprinciples–I–I killed a man.” And that fall is the direct, literalvictory of the villains of the story.

For The Just, while it owes a debt to All-StarSuperman since itwas originally planned as a spinoff of that book - an acknowledgeddebt given the appearance of Klyzyzk Klzntplkz’s Hyperpoon, even though thecircumstances of Superman’s death in here preclude this being set in that world- in spirit it’s a broken mirror to Kingdom Come and theglitzy, too-cool, airbrushed ‘90s milieu it inhabited, hence the legacy heroesand Ben Oliver’s photoreal style being notably similar to Alex Ross’s here.It’s Kingdom Come’s party scene, except for 40 pages, andSuperman never comes in to whip them all into shape. They just keep drinkingand dancing as the world burns.

In truth though, this isn’t really a comic about legacycharacters; they’re a shorthand for time having passed and the superheroicidentities having degraded over time, but it’s no coincidence that this is theonly issue to actually have characters going by Superman and Batman as theunambiguous leads (or that Superman’s a useless dope, while Batman’s the onlycompetent one but also infinitely more ridiculous and transparent than hethinks), because it’s about the DCU specifically as a decades-long construct atthis moment in history. If most of the other issues are about time damaging thesuperhero through inevitable contact with real-world morality, this shows thepainful endgame of spinning their wheels without end: they become heartlesscopies of copies of themselves, all their battles knowing pantomime, muggingfor the cameras even as there’s nothing left for them to do that anyone caresabout, least of all themselves as they question why anyone even buys comicsanymore. The Just is the CW’s DC Universe twenty years fromnow, where most of the audience has left and the budget has been slashed tonothing but just enough viewers are sticking around that they have to continueit somehow, so it devolves into old-fashioned CW soap opera bullshit, becausehow that’d apply to these characters is all they have left in their arsenal:Superman’s angry that Batman’s fucking Lex Luthor, but will they ever admitthey just want to fuck each other instead, readers? Tune innext month to find how out we’ll delay giving the answer!

Then we hop over to 1980s political horror and theinevitable shadow of Watchmen, in…maybe the best, or at leastmost remarkably-constructed single issue of a superhero comic of thedecade? Pax Americana certainly felt like it when it came out.In any case, our main concern here is another consequence of time as applied tosuperheroes: the desire, as embodied by President Harley, to force them to makesense in the real world in tune with an ‘adult’ perspective. In an attempt torectify his guilt for accidentally killing his father, the first superhero andthe only morally pure one - his entry to the murky world of adulthood, assignified by the second-to-last line “Remember? That was when it allmade sense, right?” - he wants to reconfigure superheroes into virtuous,regimented tools of the government, with himself as the greatest hero of all asa resurrected American Christ to lead the world into a new golden age.

It fails horrifically of course, because his worldview - theworldview shared by Captain Adam, and Doctor Manhattan, and Watchmen itself- is by Morrison’s perspective inherently flawed, incapable as it is ofperceiving the repercussions and chaos of truly ‘real’ humans. Take notewhen Harley’s consciousness expands that at first it fragments into personal,evocative, visceral imagery, but when that expanding holistic view of theuniverse is inevitably too much to hold all at once, it simplifies back downinto simpler symbols, shapes and geometric solids, much in line with howMorrison spoke of Watchmen’s structure in Supergods asconfining and inflexible. Where Ozymandias’s plan to save the world went offwithout a hitch - at least until it lead to him putting on a robe andkidnapping Tim Drake, as continued this November at a comic book store near youin Doomsday Clock* - Harley’s fails catastrophically, because inthe ‘real’ world superheroes wouldn’t obey genre and narrative conventionsto the extent the likes of Nite Owl and Rorschach still do, living as they doin a world that still has flying Owl-cars and villainous master plans; anyonewho put on a mask to fight crime would be violent, callous assholes of thedistinctly uncharismatic variety whose grand schemes fall apart, whoseinvestigations never reach resolution, and who end up inevitably co-opted andrendered obsolete. In the end, as we saw with Peacemaker defending Bush toHarley’s barely-restrained glee, and the V.P. lecturing about selling childhooddreams back to adults, underneath all his mature aspirations Harley just wantedto find a way to force the world to let him love something the way he did whenhe was a boy…but as Adam reminds us, when you take it all apart to thatextent, there’s not really much left, and even if you put it all back togetherit can never be the same.

* I maintain it’s a very real possibility that PaxAmericana, meant to close the book on Watchmen once andfor all, was a part of what led to its revival; that someone in DC caught windof it during production and figured “oh man, Watchmen’s aboutto get some play again, now’s the time to do something with it.”

That brings us to Thunderworld Adventures’ 1950scolor TV world of retro adventure, the logical retort to the rest of Multiversity andthe one it needed to be complete: if time destroys superheroes, why not justturn back the clock and make it like it was when you were a kid? But unlike itscounterpart comic All-Star Superman (Morrison mentionedrepeatedly in interviews that this was him giving Captain Marvel the All-Star approach,and the structure - of Marvel facing off against counterparts of himself in theface of his inevitable doom, with his scientist arch-enemy finding a way togive himself his powers - is more than a little familiar), this isn’t anattempt to recapture the best of those elements in a modern context, but a purenostalgia exercise.

Yes, that means a happy ending, and clever fun, and a nicemoral about the self-destructive nature of evil. But from a modern perspective, thatalso means the mad scientist experimenting on his own children, pointing outthat Billy Batson is an exploited youth not subject to child labor laws,Captain Marvel Jr. winning a fight by preying on a bullied girls’ insecuritiesabout her appearance with a smile on his face, and a monstrous Sivana coming ahair’s breadth away from graphically murdering Billy. Morrison mentioned ininterviews that deep down Thunderworld had signs of the sameugliness as the other issues, and it’s true; even if we go back to the good olddays, we’ve still been informed by our adult experiences, and it’s just notgoing to look quite the same. No matter how much we might want to go retreatinto a neverending Binder/Beck fairyland, we’ve seen the leering, muzzled faceof the serial-killing, likely pedophilic Hannibal Sivana. Not that it’ssecretly as cynical of its subject matter in the same way as the others - thewizard Shazam reminds us that there is something beautiful at the heart of themagic, and that we lose it the more we try and replace it with something coolerand colder - but it’s pretty on-the-nose that Sivana’s ultimate plan is to getpeople to buy years on the clock to waste, essentially selling their old livesback to them piecemeal. In the end, when Captain Marvel’s faced with theprophecy of a darker, more morally challenging threat, he doesn’t confront it,but tosses it in the trash to fly away with a picture-perfect smile. But weknow the truth: he has to. There is no such thing as timelessness, andattempting to capture it will ultimately show cracks in the foundation nomatter what.

Moving into the Guidebook’s extended homageto “The Flash of Two Worlds!” - one with a distinctly 60s feel, between all theKirby getting thrown around and the build-up of DC mythology - we get to seewhat comic book time actually looks like from the outside (via the perspectiveKamandi, from a world where time has truly passed to the tune of anapocalypse), with Fox and Infantino’s simple tale of a costumed crimefightermeeting his own childhood storybook hero metastasizing into a time-shatteringhistory of reboots and retcons and parallel worlds, and two wildly differentproducts of that process coming face-to-face. After Thunderworld andthe finale it’s the most openly optimistic of the bunch, with the irrepressiblejoy Morrison clearly takes in all the nerd arcana and Lightray’s assertion thatlight will conquer darkness in the end, but it also ends with a Justice League,reduced conceptually to animatronic cartoons of themselves, dying andresurrecting in one manufactured Crisis after another for all eternity.

Hitting Mastermen, this is probably the mostdiscounted of the bunch, especially given it reads the most like it’sunfinished. However, I’d say it’s a pretty complete tragedy (especially thanksto @globegander‘s essayon it as a spiritual adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen),and much like with The Just - the other least-loved of theseries - the trappings on display are largely a way of facilitating what it’s talkingabout. It’s the story of a nation in power of men with pipes looking overnuclear families with dogs, where rich white boys complain that they shouldn’tbe held responsible for the actions of their ancestors, newscasters refer togenocides perpetrated by their nation within the last century as “theethnic and ideological purges of the Hitler era”, and theretaliation against them by terrorist insurgents is from a nation they broughttheir war to. It’s very much a story of America (2000s America specifically, inline with the decade parallels in play), and while Overman still wants to makeeverything right because he’s Superman, unlike its counterpart in Superman:Red Son which shows him managing to redeem himself from similarcircumstances to some extent, Mastermen makes no bones aboutthe fact that he is damned, utterly and irrevocably, just as aconsequence of being born into this society. Time here has destroyed thesuperhero by way of conformity, with well-meaning champions of truth, justice,and the Nazi way as barely-witting defenders of a corrupted status quo,unquestionably incapable of transcending what they’ve become. Hence whySuperman already exists as a comic when Hitler learns of Kal-L, the symbolismof two Jewish kids in the depression co-opted by the powers-that-be as thefascistic representative of amoral nationalistic interests, corrupting whatSuperman is supposed to stand for until even his attempts at rectifying thingscan only compound the problem. In essence, it’s the darkest possiblecontinuation of The Curse of Superman from Morrison and GeneHa’s Action Comics #9 - and it comes to the same conclusion ofwhat it takes to fight back in the finale later on.

Ultra Comics - both the comic and the character,insomuch as there’s any meaningful division between the two - is the anti-FlexMentallo, down to the point of mimicking its four-act structure of thehistory of the superhero via montage, only replacing a ‘Renaissance’ asMorrison put it following comics ‘Dark Age’ with further brutality andadolescent defensiveness. It’s the horrors of every other chapter rolled intoone: Ultra’s an innocent superhero from circumstances that become moreunsettling the more you think about them, pre-packaged with his own ridiculousbackstory and history, who goes on an adventure forcing him to realize themorality his world is built on is impossible and defined by society rather thanan objective moral code, and he’s trapped forever in the violent structure ofhis story, consigned to repeat his life forever until it loses all meaning. Itis, as Charlotte Finn put it in her analysis, a killer bullet to the idea ofthe superheroes, hence why it’s a horrific cursed contaminant across themultiverse: in our world it’s just a depressing comic, but to a superhero it’sirrefutable evidence that their entire existence is meaningless, time almostliterally corroding him throughout the issue as he moves from optimisticsuperhero to cynical super-agent to old and realizing it was all for nothing todead. Even our own world is threatened after all, with the suggestion that allthe uplifting Flex Mentallo meta-stories and 70s Starlin-stylecosmic headtrip consciousness expansion comics that Morrison’s made so much ofhis own bread and butter on are as compromised as the rest of the genre.Incapable of saving us in the face of a larger culture preaching the embrace ofnihilism and a doomed tomorrow when the only thing a terrifying number ofreaders have gained from the message is a desire to complain about writers “rapingmy wallet” - and that without that ability to inspire, all comics, all fictionitself can do, is steal our time and rush us all the faster into thegrave courtesy of the Oblivion Machine.

With the bookends, there’s fairly little to say I didn’t inthe original article I linked to above - i.e. that it flips the premise of timeinto a positive, showing that rather than using it to spin the wheels of thesuperhero genre in perpetuity until it devours itself through exhaustion orcontact with elements it can’t bear, or framing it as something to bedisregarded in spite of the consequences, it can be used to push things forwardinto more diverse and fruitful territory (hence not only the premise of theseries, but Multiversity sounding similar to Diversity), coming up with new andbetter stories. Much as Morrison is historically onboard with pulp heroes andlegacy heroes indicative of expansive superhero universes and structurallycomplex comics and retro comics and American superheroes and meta superheroes,there’s a difference between coming up with new stories in those contexts, andrerunning the old ones over and over again, which is probably why each of thosecomics, like I said matches up with a previous decade and comic, including someof his own, finally spinning here into the 2010s and DC’s own Crisis cycle.

While the first half of the bookend is in Morrison’s ownwords him doing himself to the point of parody - the self-insert character, theMonitor mythology, the weird villains yelling about conformity, thecomics-talking-about-comics, running into alternate company equivalents as apossible commentary on the state of the industry, etc. - the second isexplicitly the analogue to Morrison using his ‘corruption’ of contact with thedarkness and perpetuation of the neverending story for a paycheck to introducethe forces of the absurd, impossible and unexpected, i.e. the New, to defeat ahomogenizing, corruptive force designed to make everything the same and bleakto the point of literally forcing the Multiverse to relive the same Crisis overand over again, i.e. More Of The Same. It’s a slight twist on his typical Youngvs. Old/Children vs. Parents concerns (as best exemplified in his DC work in Seven Soldiers of Victory), but in theend, all of this is Morrison talking about something very, very simple: thatsuperheroes can absolutely be broken, but there’s a chance to save them andmake them something good and true again that might be able to reach us,literally by the end of the book, and it’s not by rerunning the same oldstories into the ground and unthinking conformity, but through doing new anddiverse and exciting things with them to inspire us in new ways. It’s Action Comics #9 as a 400-page epic.

I’m pretty sure that’s what Multiversity is about.

[paulisweeabootrash]

First Impression: Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody

Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy?

It's Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody

More isekai

I'm not that surprised to see...

... Ahem.

Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody (2018)

Episodes watched: 3

Suzuki Ichirou (no, not that one), a programmer for a game company, is working on a "death march" of rushed changes to two RPGs, falls asleep under his desk after 30 hours of work, and finds himself dreaming that he is in another world... one that seems to be a combination of his two games.  The game/dream world has saddled him with the name "Satuu", the character name he uses IRL while testing things.  The subtitles, meanwhile, have saddled him with the name "Satou", despite it being spelled on-screen as "サトゥー" (a small ゥmodifying the ト from "to" to "tu") and despite him and other characters clearly pronouncing it with a long u (or ɯ if you want to be even more pedantic than I am).  So that's an odd bit of carelessness on the part of the translators that bugs me more than it really should.

Anyway, he starts out at level 1 but with a game-breakingly powerful set of starting abilities which were proposed to fulfill an obnoxious client request IRL.  Using his OP starting spells on an army of lizardpeople that attack him causes him to level up rapidly, and with no way to save or quit, he sets out to explore the world and how it works.  As you do if you're a game designer trapped in a game.  Satuu finds his way to a walled city governed by callous bureaucracy, overt fantastic racism, and slavery, the last of which is casually handed out as the punishment for overstaying your visa — or apparently for being a demihuman.  Luckily, he escapes this fate, having crafted a convincing story that he lost his papers, and is instead issued new papers courtesy of a magic scanning device that informs him that his character is 15, apparently the age of majority in this country, and that he still appears to everyone else to be a lowly level 1 although his early rush of experience points has actually pushed him all the way to level 310.

On his way into the city, he saved Zena, an NPC soldier, while her unit was fighting a wyvern, and she responded predictably by (1) developing a crush on him and (2) showing him around town to go do "this anime works by RPG rules" things like buy things from street vendors and explain the background mythology.  Zena and Satuu then intervene to stop an angry mob trying to kill a group of demihuman slaves they believe to be in league with demons, although figuring out why they're doing it requires a couple of leaps of inference from Satuu that I'm not sure were really warranted given the information available.  After he talks down the crowd, a demon does turn out to be present, and it teleports Satuu and the slaves into a dungeon they have to find their way back out of.  It is at this point where I really hope Satuu believes this is all a dream, since he doesn't take much convincing to accept that the slaves consider him their new master.

It's got some pretty good gags centering around the world functioning by game mechanics.  For example, he acquires skills when he is in a the situation to first use or observe them, meaning that Satuu "acquires" the skill "hand-to-hand-combat" by coming in direct contact with an NPC for the first time... when the wyvern mentioned above flies into him while he's mid-jump.  Likewise, he acquires the skill "Abduction" by quietly subduing agitators who are encouraging the angry mob.  The latter action demonstrates exceptionally well how completely ridiculous a world functioning by RPG rules can be.  He sneaks through a crowd in broad daylight incapacitating people in one hit each and drags them away undetected, then apprehends the ringleader and successfully calms the crowd down by bullshitting an off-the-cuff speech.  Throughout this, he is also rapidly and accidentally obtaining numerous "titles" ranging from "clown" to "god-killer" and quickly decides that revealing his true level and alarming-sounding set of titles would cause more trouble than it's worth.

Although clearly a show playing with the silly implications of video game logic, it kind of comes off like someone had an idea for a game they couldn't implement so they made a show about what the game would've been like.  Much more work seems to have been put into the fictional user interface and worldbuilding than into the characters or animation quality so far.  I don't know if I have a good basis to evaluate this as a game in general since I am not a game designer nor do I play RPGs frequently, but I do want to flex my degree a little on the user interface.  There are distinctive icons and good indicators of the current system state (icons changing colors to indicate what mode of interacting with the world, the minimap, animated and therefore eyecatching notifications of newly-acquired skills), but it also contains a lot of tabs and drop-down menus, so the whole thing seems like it would be more at home in a game you can pause (or at least greatly reduce the play speed of), not one unfolding in real time.  The UI must also be more similar to those in the games Ichirou works on than the game world itself is for him to figure out how to use it so quickly and consistently — although to be fair, this does make sense with the interpretation that it's a dream, and even if it's not, we do see him explore the interface a bit and he's presumably getting a lot of practice in with it if he sees it constantly while moving around in the world.

I like the ambiguity it has so far about whether it's an elaborate dream about games brought on by overwork or whether he really has been transported to another world.  My wife (who told me to watch this) informs me that future developments tip the scales much further toward it being a real world, not a dream, but I haven't gotten there yet.  She also informs me that Satuu just sort of shrugs off keeping the slaves as slaves.  So... uh... yikes.  Either way, it has an intriguing premise, but I'm not impressed so far, and at only 12 episodes long, I seriously doubt it will do much to flesh things out.  But hey, I've been surprised before.  I'll keep watching it, but I'm not doing a followup post unless something really surprising happens that changes my impression.

-----

W/A/S: 2 / 2 / 6

Weeb: Not weeb so much as geek.  RPGs with these sorts of backstories and mechanics are hardly exclusive to Japan.  The premise of working on a "death march" may be the most foreign-sounding thing to the average American audience, but it's a software industry thing, not a Japanese thing, and the term was even coined by an American.  Or perhaps the particularly Japanese variety of demihumans as humanoids with dog or cat or lizard features instead of the Germanic/Anglosphere elves, dwarves, trolls, et cetera.

Ass: Very little, especially considering the costume designs and lonely teenage POV you might normally expect from this genre.

Shit (writing): The idea that the fantasy otherworld contains an unwise cheat-like starting condition the protagonist himself opposed including in one of the games he works on IRL is a pretty funny and clever justification for an OP character.  Plenty of details are revealed in dialogue, mostly between Satuu and Zena, but the dialogue itself doesn't seem very natural, even for NPCs trying to fill in a player on vital background information about the game setting, but then.

Shit (other): I love that we see the user interface whenever we're viewing events from Ichirou/Satuu's first person perspective.  The opening and ending themes are very good, the other music is okay.  It's a nice touch by the voice actor that Ichirou/Satuu talks in a noticeably higher-pitched voice to other characters when talking or even thinking in-character than out-of-character, which highlights the age gap between himself and his character.  Even though the CG used for certain elements (the UI, wagons, horses, lizardpeople, demons) is better than that used for, say, the unnaturally-moving draft dragons I complained about when I reviewed Re:Zero, it's also somehow harder to look at and everything but the UI looks even more out of place than the Re:Zero dragons.  The 2D animation is disappointing, too.  The character designs are nice, but in motion, any given shot has very few moving elements, sometimes have very low frame rates, and I swear I saw Ichirou appear in-frame instead of smoothly entering it in a scene in ep. 1.  I also strongly disliked the backwards speech during spellcasting but by ep. 3 it started growing on me.

Content warning: slavery, obviously.

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Stray observations:

- Credit, or at least lack of annoyance, for the 29-year-old lead finding the innkeeper attractive instead of her 13-year-old daughter.

- Who eats quiche with their hands?!

- The line "I might be able to use this Abduction skill... Better max it." is definitely something I would expect to hear a lot of RPG players say, but that doesn't make it any more reassuring.

[mittensmorgul]

6.18: *waves hello at Dabb from 1861*

So how important is this episode to s12? Considering it was written by Dabb, reveals the origins of the Colt, has Samuel Colt PUT THE GUN INTO SAM WINCHESTER’S HAND, and makes Dean an agent of the Colt’s original mythology as the actual person who used the gun to kill a phoenix with it in Colt’s original journal, I’d say it’s CRUCIAL to understanding the events of s12.

Like, possibly one of the most relevant episodes to consider when trying to understand the puzzle of s12.

No I am not overselling this. I’m definitely underselling it here.

I keep talking about the events of 6.20 as being important to understanding s12, but HONESTLY THAT IS THE PRESTIGE. That’s the distraction. The real trick to s12 is what’s happening under the surface. The underling Winchester Family Dynamic and all of the emotional underpinnings have their true foundations in 6.18. This is where the real trick will happen.

And I’m basing all of that speculation on the return of the Colt. Because this is the episode that makes Sam and Dean CENTRAL FIGURES in the mythology and history of that gun. It’s the episode that gives THEM the absolute right to it, as part of their family’s legacy that’s been literally stolen by interlopers.

It’s a part of their history that Mary just DOES NOT UNDERSTAND, or she never would’ve betrayed them to steal it and hand it over without question to the BMoL.

And if that’s not symbolic of EVERYTHING in s12, then I don’t know what is.

Everything else in s12 is set dressing.

Like Dean’s “set dressing” where he was going for “authenticity” that he quickly realized was so not authentic to the reality of 1861. His stupid serape, and their too-clean clothes were the furthest thing from authentic... But they learned quick, adapted. Not only did they blend in, Dean practically fell into the role of Sheriff.

Everything about Sunrise, Wyoming in 1861 turned Dean’s expectations on their head. He was forced over and over again to confront his own assumptions, expectations, and beliefs and face the truth-- in everything from his ridiculous blanket cape, the terrible whiskey, the whole place being so much more “germier” than he expected, right up to the fact that Samuel Colt himself had been a hunter. 

DEAN Well, we do know one thing that'll kill friggin' anything, right? SAM Yeah, the Colt. DEAN So, you go get the gun. SAM But isn't the gun coming here? I mean, according to Samuel Colt's journal? DEAN Yeah, but people here barely even know who Colt is. Maybe you got to go find him and make history.

(and yes, this is how you do time travel PROPERLY in a story)

Because the Colt has always killed the phoenix, because Sam and Dean had always been the ones in 1861 who’d made that happen. They’re not CHANGING history, they were part of it. They just didn’t KNOW they were part of it until after they went back and experienced it for themselves from the present... The present had to “catch up” to the past so it could loop around properly.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

RACHEL Castiel, I've been hearing things. Things I don't want to believe. Just tell me if it's true. CASTIEL If what's true? RACHEL You know. Your dirty little secret. CASTIEL I have to defeat Raphael. RACHEL Not this way, Castiel. CASTIEL Rachel. RACHEL We put our faith in you, and...look what you're turning into. CASTIEL I don't have a choice.

(WORST. PHRASE. EVER.)

We begin to understand just how desperate Cas has become in fighting his war. Put together with Death’s warning about the souls and what we learned he was doing in 6.17 that Sam and Dean don’t really understand yet, and the fact that we find out Crowley is really still alive in 6.19, and actually WORKING WITH CAS, the horrible truth of everything is slowly being revealed to US in a way that makes us just want to scream at the tv screen, but Sam and Dean are still in the dark. They still don’t have this full story, which is what leads Dean to honestly still trust Cas until all his illusions shatter in a ring of holy oil in 6.20.

But this time, in s12, the illusion isn’t Cas’s deception, it’s Mary’s...

Sam gets to convince Samuel Colt that he is worth of the gun, that he’s a hunter from the future. He proves it, and then some.

SAMUEL COLT All right. (he places Sam's blackberry behind his desk on the bookshelf) SAM A-all right? That's -- uh, that's it? SAMUEL COLT Well, when you've done this job as long as I have...a giant from the future with some magic brick doesn't exactly give you the vapors.

And he has Colt’s journal, and passes all of Colt’s tests:

SAMUEL COLT (nods) Not bad. (Samuel opens his jacket so Sam can see the colt in his holster) You don't want it. It's a curse. Believe me. SAM Great. Then let me take it off your hands. SAMUEL COLT You go put on a few more miles and come back, and we'll talk. SAM Trust me, I've got plenty of mileage. SAMUEL COLT I'm doing you a favor. Believe me. SAM So, what? You can really just sit there? SAMUEL COLT I've given my whole life to this. I'm done. SAM So it doesn't matter what happens. SAMUEL COLT No, it doesn't. SAM So everything you did, it all means nothing? Give me the gun.

Meanwhile back at Bobby’s, Cas lies about Rachel to Bobby, telling him that she was “corrupted” by Raphael and had turned on him. But it’s just another “regrettable” thing he’s been forced to do because of circumstances.

And we get a visual depiction of just what Cas might want with all those souls he’s been amassing-- and a hint of just what he might’ve been able to do if he could just tap into the power of all the souls in Purgatory.

CASTIEL The human soul -- it's pure... energy. If I can siphon some of that off, I-I might be able to bring Sam and Dean back.

But we also learn the truth about the Phoenix that Dean knows he has to kill. Just like the monsters in s12 who are truly “innocent” and don’t deserve to be killed just for what they are, Finch was just trying to live his life when it was torn apart...

ELIAS I was married to a woman. Good woman -- human. We lived outside of town, didn't bother anyone. DEAN Sure, freak with a heart of gold. ELIAS You want to call me "monster," fine. But all we did was go into town. I go into the bank for five minutes. I come out, she's gone. And then I heard her scream. (Exhales sharply) This... man had her pinned in the alley. I go to stop him, he pulls his gun, shoots me, then her. She died in my arms. 'Course, I don't die. The shots brought the Sheriff. Next thing I know, I'm in iron. That's why I want him just where he is -- trapped, scared. I saved the best for last.

He’d done NOTHING to deserve this. Like the monsters in s12 that have been attacked by the BMoL and their misguided plans.

But back in s6, Dean was locked into this “fate” to kill the phoenix. His ashes were the only thing that could potentially stop the Mother of All Monsters from destroying humanity in revenge for what Crowley (and Cas, but that’s still the prestige of s6, and s12 is about addressing this from a new perspective where only these surface trappings are similar and the underlying story is buried underneath, in a neat REVERSAL of these two stories of s6, because now in s12 it LOOKS like the betrayal of 6.20 is the “main story” like it was in s6 but that’s actually the SIDE STORY the way Eve was the “side story” in s6... I hope that makes sense... essentially the script has been flipped).

In s12, Dean’s the one standing “outside the story” and isn’t “fated” to shoot the phoenix (metaphorically, anyway). He’s the one writing the pages this time around, and not relying on waiting for history itself to catch up to them the way Samuel Colt’s long-fated care package did.

Because at this point in s6, Sam and Dean were entirely absorbed in and distracted from the REAL larger problem (of Cas and Crowley going after the souls of Purgatory to weaponize them against Raphael). To them, at this point in s6, Eve WAS the big bad. They didn’t understand yet that she was merely a SYMPTOM of this larger scheme. They were buying into the prestige, and when the penny dropped they were entirely unprepared despite Death’s warning, despite EVERY HINT EVER that it was “about the souls.”

And that was partly due to Dean’s unshakable faith in Cas.

And hell if it didn’t get shook real good before the end.

But this time? Dean trusts his instincts. And Cas HAS been essentially honest with them, has made that dying declaration to them of Who He Is (A Winchester), that he loves them and is family to them.

Their family that doesn’t end in blood.

And Dean DOESN’T trust Mary, or the BMoL, even if that’s his “legacy.” Because family don’t START in blood either.

He’s keeping his own council and trusting himself and the people who’ve put their trust in him.

The one thing he doesn’t know is how Sam came to have the Colt in 12.17. And when he gets that truth, the Colt will have served its other main function: As the key that unlocks the metaphorical Hell Gate Samuel Colt was building back in 1861, and that opened in 2.22 to spit out John Winchester on the orders of a yellow-eyed demon...

And then the circle can be complete.

That’s the trick of s12, right there.

[i-just-like-commenting]

The Northrop Frye Theory of A Song of Ice and Fire (or, why you can be certain this series won’t have a downer ending)

The affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular fiction which is real enough to be plausible in its incidents and yet romantic enough to be a “good story,” which means a clearly designed one. (p 139)

This quote comes from Northrop Frye’s 1957 essay “Archetypal Criticism” in his book Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. An influential Canadian literary critic, Fye is especially known for his work on William Blake. I’d been familiar with his theory of the four mythoi (generalized story patterns) since high school, and while reading A Song of Ice and Fire I became convinced that Martin has to be aware of it as well. Thus I decided to read the entire essay it comes from to test the idea (not an easy task; it’s 110 pages of very dense text), and that conviction has grown to the point that I want to write the man to ask him directly.

Of course, it doesn’t entirely matter if Martin has read Frye’s work, because his mythoi are archetypes. Frye’s theory of archetypes doesn’t necessitate a collective unconscious like Jung’s; rather, he’s talking about the cultural legacy Western society has inherited primarily from Hellenistic and Biblical traditions, the tropes and symbols we all recognize instinctively. It’s part of our cultural unconscious, the background noise we’ve all received since childhood.

There’s a lot in this essay that could be applicable to aSoIaF, such as how wolves and dragons are classic archetypes of evil or at least dangerous and untamed nature, or how literature versus mythology gives you more freedom to subvert archetypal meaning, but I want to focus on his idea of mythos, and how he argues that there are four major mythoi, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, and that they archetypally correspond to the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

You should already be able to guess a little of where this is going.

Spring is comedy, which in its broadest outline is not just a story with a lot of humor, but a story where upstarts - often young or from marginalized categories - take on an absurd obstacle (especially a social convention) and win. Villains tend to be more laughable than hated, and ideally it ends with as many people being redeemed/included as possible.

Summer is romance in the Medieval sense of the term, which is a good vs evil story. The hero has to defeat a great evil (a tyrant, a monster, a witch, etc.) usually through great sacrifice (sometimes even their deaths) but either they or their cause ultimately triumphs in the end. Quest narratives from Greek mythology or Arthuriana fit in here, as would Tolkien, Harry Potter and most comic book superheroes.

Autumn is tragedy, where a hero is doomed by their own choices but also by a sense of inevitability, where fate or a kaleidoscope of forces beyond their control or awareness force their downfall. Heroes fail or become villains themselves. Society winds up in a worse state than it started out at, or innocence is jaded by experience.

Winter is irony, where the purpose is to expose an unjust system without necessarily meaning to defeat it. Much irony uses humor to make the criticism go down easier (pure invective works well in essays but not in fiction) and becomes satire or parody, but there is a measure of anger and contempt here not present in traditional comedy. Humor isn’t required, though, and Frye includes  Brave New World, and 1984 in this genre, accurately predicting that dystopia would become a trend.

Now, these mythoi are not completely clear-cut and they tend to bleed together at the edges. If a comedy emphasizes the villains and how ridiculously bad they are, it bleeds into ironic satire. If the villains are downplayed and the focus is on the struggle of the heroes, it becomes more romantic. Likewise a romance can turn tragic when a hero’s own weaknesses are the cause of evil or his difficulty in defeating, and so forth and so on.

I would argue that the seasons in A Song of Ice and Fire, once that can go on for years, for complete stories or complete arcs, correspond fairly well to Frye’s model. Allow me to present some examples:

The Dance of the Dragons explicitly takes place during autumn (harvest season in the North) and is a tragedy of epic scale, with huge amounts of death and devastation across the countryside. Jealousy and ambition - not to mention the sexism of inheritance laws and schemes laid down decades ago - lead to the near-destruction of Westeros. The next king Aegon III grows up in winter and becomes a depressed fatalist who dies young, a parody of the usual boy-king tropes associated with summer.

“The Hedge Knight” is set in late spring, and has the set up to be a spring story, wherein a self-appointed hedge knight and his squire defend a puppeteer from an evil prince. The emphasis on Dunk as a character and the underdevelopment of Aerion, however, should hint that this is already a more romantic comedy. By the end, it has indeed become a summer story, with the deaths in the combat to reach its happy ending. It is still a fairly comedic (that is, innocent and uncynical) romance, enhanced by the awareness of the reader that you are seeing the origin story of a good king and his Lord Commander.

“The Sworn Sword” takes place in full summer and presents as a simple summer story of good Ser Eustace vs the evil Red Widow, who Duncan even imagines like a witch. This is subverted as Duncan realizes his master was a traitor and the witch a victim of circumstance, but rather than lead to true parody (an ironic category) this merely means a reevaluation of what the “sides” in play are - conflict vs peace. Through a battle where Duncan even figuratively dies (near-drowning is often a metaphor for death), peace prevails and while the wedding isn’t his, Duncan still wins the lady’s heart (a common chivalry trope).

“The Mystery Knight” is a little later in the summer, and we even get dragons, metaphorically at least. This is the one that most conventionally follows a summer storyline, since the people wanting to foment another rebellion for no good reasons are clearly the wrong side here - not that all the people on each side are purely “good” or “evil,” just that a rebellion for the reasons they give serves no purpose. What’s more, from an archetypal perspective it’s actually Glendon Flowers takes the role of the hero, not Duncan. He goes through early battles, is betrayed and imprisoned, then rescued so as to defeat Daemon, vindicating himself and dissipating the rebellion. Dunk, Egg, and Brynden Rivers are his supporting characters, as fitting their positions as a rustic knight, a hidden noble, and a wizard.

That Aegon V’s reign starts in winter is sign that, for all his good intentions and successes his reign as a “good king” will ultimately be undone later, to serve only as a foil to the bad rulers we meet later. And oh would I love to know what season Summerhall burned in...

Then there’s the False Spring whose infamous tourney is mentioned so often in the books. Howland Reed gets his dignity restored by a scrappy woman, one of them is the mystery knight who wins the cheers of the common folk, and Lyanna gets a token from a prince. Total set up for a comedy, right? But of course this isn’t; it’s a false spring, immediately followed by winter resuming, so we really just saw autumn, as Rhaegar’s choices regarding Lyanna precipitates a series of disasters that ruin him, her, and the nation.

Now, what about the main story itself? Well, we start in late summer in A Game of Thrones, and the first novel does indeed resemble a tragic romance, as Ned dies as the victim of intrigues he had no way of knowing about, but his cause is ultimately taken up by his son and by Stannis. More importantly, we have another hero much more obviously go through a struggle-death-rebirth arc at the end in the form of Daenerys and her passing through the flames to become the Mother of Dragons.

Ned’s death, however, is “the sword that slays the season,” and autumn follows in A Clash of Kings and it continues until the end of A Dance with Dragons. I don’t think I will be controversial in saying that the tragic is the main tone of the series, as even heroes with the best intentions fail, and as many of the villains themselves are revealed to be tragic figures warped by their pasts or their cultures. If I were to go through every point of tragic archetype that winds up in this series, this post would be even longer than it already is. Suffice it to say that Littlefinger is an archetypal tragic antagonist (p 216) and Frye’s six descending stages of tragic hero - from innocent child to antivillain - has some obvious parallels to the ordering of tragic moments - from Bran’s fall to Cersei’s walk of shame. One of my favorite quotes of this essay should resonate with any fan of the series:

Of course we have a natural dislike of seeing pleasant situations turn out disastrously, but if a poet is working on a solid structural basis, our natural likes and dislikes have nothing to do with the matter. (p 215)

Ultimately even disaster and misery can be entertaining if well-written.

As for winter, it should also be noted that for all extents and purposes it is winter in the North for all of books 4 and 5, and the triumph of the Boltons, their farce with “Arya,” and our only potential hero being Theon of all people stinks of irony. Snowfall begins in the Riverlands just after Jaime takes Riverrun, a sign not just of looming famine but that whatever hopes Jaime had for undoing the damage his father did will ultimately be in vain. And of course the chaos that Varys’ assassination of Kevan will bring to King’s Landing is also pure winter material, and comes precisely as winter arrives.

But what will the series be overall? Certainly various character arcs or storylines have different tones, but can I predict what the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire will be? Yes: it will be a romance.

Why can I be so sure? Frye subdivides the romance into four parts: the agon, a hero’s initial challenges and setup, the pathos, where the hero faces off against their enemy and often loses, the sparagmos, after the hero’s defeat when all hope seems lost, and the anagnorisis, either the literal rebirth or the postmortem recognition of the hero as others finish what they started. Thus Frye concludes:

The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized, or doomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy. (p 192)

In spite of all its tragedy, in spite of all its subversiveness, this is still ultimately a romance, a hero story, good triumphing not evil. I mean, the evil is literally represented by winter, the classic mythical enemy of a romance (p 187), and the heroes aided by spirits of nature, who “represent partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature and partly a world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and which retreats when approached.” (p 196)

The difference is that of mode (here you have to go back to the first essay in the book, p 33-34). Traditionally romance has been written in what Frye would call “mythic” or “romantic” mode, where the heroes are either flat-out divine (as in Greek myth or the figure of Jesus) or human but endowed with marvelous powers (as in most fairy tales or Biblical legends). Sometimes it is written in “high mimetic” form, where the hero no longer has superhuman power but is still larger-than-life in their abilities. It is almost never written in "low mimetic”  that emphasizes the ordinariness of its protagonists, how they are just like us, or in full ironic mode where the “hero” is someone we’re meant to scorn or pity.

Tolkien wrote somewhere between high mimetic and romantic (though his Silmarillion is mythic) which is what we’re used to in fantasy novels. Martin’s innovation is starting us in low mimetic or even ironic and gradually pushing us up into the realms of the supernatural. That’s why it’s harder to recognize the romantic element of A Song of Ice and Fire than in The Lord of the Rings. It feels like it should be irony, a deconstruction, but it is in fact Martin’s attempt at a more realistic (in the sense of believable human characters) reconstruction of the oldest, most archetypal fantasy tropes.

And so of course it will end in spring - or at least, with a dream of spring, the hope that out of this awful mess a better society can be built in the ashes of the old. THe Republic of Westeros...? Maybe that’s asking too much. I’ll settle on Sansa Stark, First of Her Name.

[femslashrevolution]

It ain't that deep, bro. It's just important.

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

So, this may catch some folk by surprise considering how ridiculously queer I am, but, fun fact: your humble author didn’t actually learn that queer people existed until she was in high school.

(This is relevant. I promise. Hang in there.)

I’m not kidding. I was sitting behind this girl in a creative writing class, my first week freshman year of high school. She was telling a story to another student, and in the course of it made a joke in which she pointed out how incredibly bisexual she was.

It was like I got struck by lightning.

I’d gone to a catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade. And Holy Family was actually one of the more progressive, kind-hearted schools in the area. I know now that most of the teachers didn’t actually believe the official Church doctrine on the subject of The Gays. So instead of telling us that homosexuality was a sin, they just…never brought it up. If they never mentioned gay people, they wouldn’t have to toe the line and say we were going to hell!

Aaaaand the end result was that I literally was never informed that liking girls was like…a thing? You can do that? That’s an option?!

Mind you it still took me like another six months to figure out why I’d had such a powerful reaction to that realization. Because, you know, obviously I wasn’t gay or anything. You can feel free to insert a mental laugh track there, I’ll wait.

I bring this up because to this day, I remember that lightning-strike sensation. The birth of a whole new universe, fresher and wider and better than the old one, right behind my eyes. I swear to god the colors were brighter that day.

In the months and months between that moment and the moment when I was willing to admit even to myself that maybe, possibly, like girls just a little, I started reading femslash. I read a lot of highly questionable het fics too, obviously, because I was fourteen and look shut up we’ve all made mistakes.

I’d be lying if I said femslash was what helped me realize I was gay as all hell, because it wasn’t.  I handled that just fine on my own, thanks. The fics themselves weren’t actually the catalyst, it was just that I realized I was seeking out f/f pairings and, hmm, you know, maybe there was a reason for that. Really, femslash didn’t start to mean much to me, or connect me to a community, until I started writing it. And…oh, man. That was the watershed. That really was where I came into my own.

I was seriously unprepared for the level of gratitude femslash authors can receive.

Thing was, I wasn’t even really…doing much, from my perspective. I was just…writing fic, like always. I’d watched the Star Wars prequels and fell in love with what was to me the obvious femslash pairing–seriously, watch Phantom Menace and tell me with a straight face that Padme’s handmaiden isn’t in love with her. And I’d gone looking for fic only to discover a massive pile of nothing. That’s thankfully changed a little since; I like to think I kicked off the Padme/Sabe renaissance. But for a decent chunk of time there, I was the only person writing that pairing on the entire Internet.

Let me tell you–that was a trip and an half.

And the response was…pretty average, as AO3 goes. It wasn’t like I became an instant celebrity or anything. But people got so freaking excited, to a degree I had never expected. I think I’m a decent writer, I’m pretty used to people liking my stuff–but people, when they read the Padme/Sabe fics, were freaking out. They overflowed with enthusiasm, they tripped over themselves talking about how invested they were in this pairing now. Overwhelmingly, responses fell into two categories: “I’ve shipped them for years, I thought I was the only one!” or “I’ve never even considered this, but now I can’t stop.”

That’s the moment. That, right there, is the thunderbolt.

It’s why I work so much with what are, on the surface, kind of done-to-death tropes. 5+1 fics. Sith AUs. Humorously snowballing miscommunications that result in Hijinks And Shenanigans™. Dark AUs. Single-point canon divergence “what-if” fix-it fics. Coffeeshop AUs. My flagship Padme/Sabe piece is, loosely, an Arthurian mythos AU. Hell–my current project, because apparently I hate myself, has turned out to be a series of ~20k oneshots for a different Star Wars femslash pairing based on the plots and settings of Disney movies, just for fun.

Now to my credit, I do pull twists on the tropes! I adapt them, I explore variations, sometimes I subvert them entirely because some tropes are pretty unhealthy relationship models; but the fact is, my playground is tropes and AU settings. The latter is because I, as a writer, really enjoy stripping both plotlines and characters down to their core. (What are the really essential elements of this story that I can use to transplant the plot into a Galaxy Far Far Away? What are the core personality traits and features that these Star Wars characters would keep, their turn of phrase–things that will make them instantly recognizable even if they’ve been relocated to 17th-century France?) But the tropes, that’s something that for me is an integral part of why I and a lot of other people read and write femslash.

I do it for that lightning-strike sensation. That moment where someone stumbles across a Beauty and the Beast AU, or a faerie tale, or a story about defying fate to escape an arranged marriage, or something else they’ve seen a million times–except this time the protagonists are queer women, and nobody questions it, and they connect to the basic premise in a whole new way.

Sure, the characters’ love may be forbidden–but it’s forbidden for the same reasons straight people get to have forbidden love. Because one of them is a commoner, because they’re Sith and their masters are rivals. Because the Jedi Code forbids it. Not because they’re queer. Never because they’re queer.

(Mind you I’ve also written some Meg/Christine stuff, wherein the problem is ABSOLUTELY that they’re queer. There’s a place for that. But you’ll notice, if you read my Phantom of the Opera fic, that Mme. Giry figured it out ages ago and, while she might worry, she never disapproves. We face enough examples in the real world of parents rejecting their queer kids. I don’t feel a need to include it in my fic.)

And for a lot of people, these are just fun fics about their favorite pairing. That’s great in and of itself; we’re all starving and scrabbling for crumbs, and my readers are honestly the sweetest and most appreciative people I could ask for. If I just make them happy, hey, my job’s done. But every so often, I get a review or a private message and I can see that thunderbolt realization. I can see their universe opening up.

We can be fairy tales too?

We can have soulmates, these archetypal stories I grew up loving can be about me? We can change each other for the better, we can be heroes, we can be murderous self-indulgent evil-is-sexy Sith, we can be the ones charging the dragon?

We can be genre fiction–stories about assassination attempts and royal duty, intergalactic politics and Greek mythology and dramatic rescues that have nothing to do with the sexuality of the protagonists? We can just…be there because we are?

We’re allowed to do that?

That’s an option?

About the Jo:

Blog | AO3 | RP/etc

22-year-old Psychology major; cis, very white, extremely queer, terrible Cherry Coke habit. In a continuing blood feud with the continent of North America, will bore you by talking about dogs and/or various other animals if you give me half a chance, and I reject the false Star Wars/Star Trek dichotomy. Star Trek is for hope, Star Wars is for stabbing Nazis in the face, and both are Good.