#given that the entire point of the novel is to question traditional ideas of marriage

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

Today in Strongly Worded Opinions (That You Didn't Ask For), I'm going to assert that there are too objective ways to measure whether or not a relationship is strong in story terms – by which I mean, unrelated to whether or not readers/viewers personally like the dynamic or the chemistry of the actors (in such cases as there are actors involved).

So for the sake of clarity, be ye advised: this isn't about shipping, fuck it, ship whatever you want idc.  Shipping a strong relationship isn't inherently better than shipping a weak one – heck, you could just as easily argue that it's the lazier, less creative route.  Also, I don't care?  I don't care, it's just fandom.  Follow your arrow.  This is about ways to discuss whether or not a relationship introduced into a text succeeds or fails as an element of the story – or really as I'm going to prefer calling it, if a given relationship forms a strong or weak story element.

For this I'm presuming that you're creating a relationship between a protagonist and a secondary character introduced as a piece of the protagonist's overall story – protagonist/protagonist relationships aren't really a different situation, but they do have more moving parts, so for simplicity's sake, let's   stick with a Main Character (we'll call that M) and a Significant Other (S for short).  Also, these relationships by no means have to be romantic; any relationship can be measured as weak or strong in story terms.

Also, I'm going to say everything here as though it were factually true, even though it's just my opinion, which is correct, but if you disagree then it's only my opinion, but I am correct.  Ready?  Okay!

Strong relationships have story functions; in reality nothing means anything and people just like each other because they do, but fuck reality, it's a huge narrative mess.  And my basic premise here is that the story function of a strong relationship falls under one (or more, if you wanna get real fancy) of these three categories:

The relationship can unlock under-explored elements of M's story or character through mirroring or intimacy (often shows up as “friends to lovers”).  There is backstory that hasn't been unearthed yet, or some reaction or experience in M's life that could advance the story, and S can serve as a means to get at it.  Maybe M and S share a similar trauma or life story; maybe S is the first person M feels able to open up to about something profound and relevant.  Maybe part of M's story is a conflict between how they seem to others and how they see themselves or their own potential; maybe S is the person who sees them the way they see themselves...or sees M as the person they're afraid they'll never be.  The story goal being met here is giving M a boost toward successful completion of their story arc, so even though there could be conflict, S is fundamentally pulling on the same side as M in the major story conflicts, in such a way that by the end, the reader should feel like M's success is at least in part because of what they gain from their relationship with S.

The relationship can function as a piece of the story's overall conflict, or as a secondary subplot conflict (often shows up as “enemies to lovers”). Traditional romance novel plotting effectively slots the love interest into the role of “antagonist,” because the romance's conflict is generally driven by people not getting what they want from each other until certain win conditions are met.  In this kind of relationship, M and S might be actual-facts competitors, or be divided by ideological concerns, or they might be forced into proximity by the plot but clash on some personality level.  The arc of this relationship is typically going to be about the M softening up as the relationship develops – if M starts out ruthlessly single-minded, maybe realizing that they're running roughshod over S in the process is part of their character breakthrough; if the story is about M realizing that they've underestimated the complexity of the world around them, maybe coming to recognize S as an equal is how that gets concretized for the reader.  Basically this is a story where S presents a problem that M has to solve, and the more central to the narrative solving that problem is, the stronger the relationship is.

The relationship can serve to divide M's goals (often shows up as “love versus duty”).  This is a story where M has to accomplish two separate things in order to fulfill their arc, but those two things aren't easily integrated. One of M's goals might be fulfilling a vow, or filial duty, or seeking revenge, and the other goal is some form of protecting or obtaining S.  If the story puts M in a position of having to choose, then the relationship is inherently strong; it's providing narrative drive, whether or not S is especially well-developed as an individual character.  This one can be tricky, because a very weak relationship can serve a superficially similar purpose, by demonstrating M's devotion to duty or obsessive pursuit of whatever when M rebuffs S to keep them out of harm's way or to avoid distraction or whatever. The difference is that in those superficial cases, the audience is meant to recognize that aw, that's sad, M has really had to Make Sacrifices – but there's really no dramatic tension involved; we know all along that M is going to Make Sacrifices in purusit of the real goal.  When this is done seriously with a strong relationship, the audience is meant to feel divided as well; Romeo and Juliet just doesn't work as a story unless the audience likes Juliet and Mercutio, unless they fully identify with the dilemma that Romeo is in when he has to either avenge Mercutio's death or spare Tybalt for Juliet's sake and the sake of their future together. That's a big fucking story moment, and it only works because the audience buys both relationships – Romeo's with Mercutio and with Juliet – as narratively strong, to the point where Romeo's choice is not a forgone conclusion.  This one is much easier to get wrong, I think, than the other two are!

What I'm saying here is that a strong relationship isn't really determined by how personally compatible two characters seem to be; a lot of movies that fridge a character's wife, for example, rely on actors convincingly portraying, in a brief window of time, two compatible people who care for each other – I'm thinking of, like, Richard Kimble and his wife in The Fugitive, who I think do sell the idea of a loving and happy marriage, but the relationship itself is a weak one.  The story only really needs the bare fact of it – “Kimble had a wife that he loved and then this happened” – to kick off the actual story; the relationship between Kimble and Gerard is a stronger one narratively, because much of the emotional tension of the movie, what makes it more effective than just a series of chase scenes, is the way their mutual respect evolves as they compete against each other, and the story question of “Kimble really needs an ally, is this the right person for him to trust?”  It's such a strong relationship that it comes as a huge relief of tension when he does make that gesture of trust and it turns out to be the right choice.  The audience is happy that Kimble will be exonerated, but the audience is equally happy that the conflict between these two charcters is over – we didn't like them being at odds because we didn't want either of them to lose!  Now, would these two people ever be close friends, let alone come to love each other?  No? Yes? Who cares?  Kimble loves his wife more, but has a stronger relationship in this story with Gerard. From a writing perspective, it's trivially easy to introduce an S and say “M loves this person,” but it means relatively little.  It's harder to introduce an S and say “some part of this story now hinges on how M navigates knowing this person,” but that's kind of what has to happen in order to create a payoff that's worth the effort.  A strong relationship provides skeletal structure for the story; it can't be stitched on at the margins.

This is an even tougher sell in something like a television series, where the introduction of S may come in well after the story is underway and the bulk of M's characterization is already in place.  That's why introducing a late-season love interest is a notoriously dodgy proposition!  To demonstrate weak vs strong relationship in action, I'm going to take an example of what I think was a failed attempt and pitch some ways to doctor it up into a strong relationship: Sam Winchester and Eileen Leahy.

This is objectively a weak relationship.  She doesn't materially affect the metaplot of the series, or drive any major choices, or reveal anything about Sam's character.  She's just, you know, generally nice and attractive and Sam likes her, which is a fine start, but then the writers just leave her idling in the garage forever.  But it didn't have to be that way! Say we wanted to make it a Type 1 relationship: super easy, barely an inconvenience!  Eileen is very like Sam, actually, in that she lost her parents as an infant and then had the entire rest of her life shaped by the trauma and the pursuit of revenge.  That's amazing.  How many other people, even hunters, share that specific experience with Sam Winchester?  Sam was physically changed by drinking demon blood in infancy; Eileen was physically changed by being deafened by the banshee or whatever it was in infancy.  Even just allowing them to talk about that would have made the relationship stronger.  Sam is affected by the fact that there is no Before Time for him; even now that they've long since had their revenge on ol' Yellow Eyes himself, he grapples with the fact that he's forever robbed of any memories of innocence or safety or a life that wasn't lived in the shadow of this killing.  Eileen also has had her life's quest for revenge fulfilled, and also has to reckon with the fact that it doesn't actually give her access to the innocence that was stolen from her.  Maybe she struggles with that.  Maybe Sam can open up to her because she knows what it's like to look back on your child self and feel that however strong you've made yourself, you're never strong enough to protect that child.

What if you want to write something spicier than Sam and Eileen talking about their sad feelings?  Okay, let's take a Type 2 story.  Eileen has been a lone hunter with a disability all her life; it's fair to guess that even if she can't match Sam's physical strength, the fact that she's survived at all means that she's pretty indomitable.  Maybe she's had to be ruthless, even brutal in her hunting style; maybe she has a shoot-first-ask-questions-never approach to hunting that she credits with her very survival, but that Sam finds excessively rash and bloody.  Maybe they fight about it.  Have her kill some ambiguous, maybe-not-dangerous monstery types, a werewolf or something, and Sam's like, hey, we really can't just-- and Eileen is like, look, I hunt how I hunt, come with me or don't.  I mean, this is a retread in some ways of early season conflicts about who to kill and when, but everything in the latter seasons is a retread anyway, so whatever, and it provides something interesting to have Sam deal with this whiplash of how there seem to be two Eileens, the smiley, jocular sweetheart who eats pancakes with him and the one who kills like she's swatting flies.  What if he wants one but not the other?  It doesn't really work that way, does it?  Is this something he can dismiss as a foible, or is this a dealbreaker? The dude is almost forty, if he distances himself from Eileen, how many more hunters does he think he has a chance to meet and marry?  If she won't even listen to his concerns seriously, is it really a good relationship anyway, or will Sam's needs always end up taking a backseat to Eileen's?

A Type 3 fix could just come down quite plainly to, what if Eileen is ready to retire?  She's had her revenge.  She's lived her life on the hunt.  Maybe she's done, and maybe she wants Sam to be done with her.  Doing this in season 15 would circle Sam back to his season 1 story conflicts in a nice way, I think – why does Sam do this at all, if it's not for revenge any longer?  Does he feel personally responsible for every dead person he could've saved but didn't – is that a reasonable boundary, or lack thereof, to set?  Is a compromise possible – could he continue to coordinate hunts while also getting out of the field and starting a family, or is that still putting his family in the shadow of too much violence and danger to tolerate?  What's Dean going to say?  He's pitched a fit in the past when Sam said he wanted out, but he's mellowed with age, hasn't he?  Maybe he'll get it now?  But maybe Sam also feels guilty and fearful, because he knows Dean will hunt without him, so now he's in more danger because of Sam's choices, if Sam makes this choice.  It's a little heteronormative, as story conflicts go, but it's thematically appropriate to Supernatural, and the fact that Eileen isn't speaking out of timidity but out of the same weariness that Sam has so often felt about the whole endless cycle makes it feel a little less “the little lady won't let me go on adventures anymore.”  This might not be my pick of the three, but the point is that it makes for a strong conflict, a legitimate divided loyalty for Sam to wrestle with, and one that doesn't have a clear right answer.

Anyway, hopefully that helps illustrate what I mean when I say that the narrative strength of a relationship doesn't have anything to do with how likeable an S character is – Eileen is very likeable! But that doesn't substitute for building her into the fabric of the story in some way.  My expectation is that a serious protagonist relationship should bend the story arc in a way that requires response, and if it doesn't, I don't take that relationship particularly seriously.  Canon can declare a relationship real by fiat, but it can't automatically declare a relationship meaningful without, you know, making meaning of it.

Oh, and there's not anything really wrong with weak relationships – most M's are going to have several in the story.  My point is just that the difference between a weak relationship and a strong one isn't really a matter of taste or preference, but has a functional meaning that can be tested and measured, and if there's argument to be had about it, the argument can take place on evidentiary grounds.  Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[aurora-nova-fic]

Archimedes Snippets, Part 2

A couple more ideas for Garak as a Starfleet spouse, following All Our Tomorrows. Because the muse doesn’t want to work on a complete story so much as little scenes here and there in various follow-up works.

As before, these are unpolished (you can tell, because the tenses switch from one snippet to the next). I’m not really doing anything with these, just getting the ideas down so I can stop writing them in my head.

The Bashir & Garak show moves. The crew of the Archimedes is intrigued.

The Archimedes is twenty hours into its two-year mission when Bashir and Garak first argue in public.

This doesn’t escape anyone’s notice. Starfleet gossips. Not everyone, of course; the exact amount of gossip per person varies considerably. Any ship or station with a large percentage of Vulcans can be expected to show a corresponding drop in this behavior (sociologists have done studies, inherent difficulties in studying the subject notwithstanding). On the whole, though, it’s a popular pastime, especially when things are a bit dull at the moment or when a new crew comes together.

The USS Archimedes is fresh from Utopia Planetia with a new crew still getting to know each other, and it doesn’t surprise anyone when the first focal point of gossip is Dr. Julian Bashir.

For one thing, their CMO comes to the Archimedes from Deep Space Nine, where he was indisputably a hero of the Dominion War. His discovery of the cure for the changeling disease helped end the war, though for some reason that’s the only medical topic about which he doesn’t like to speak. He was there from the beginning of the quadrant’s conflict with the Founders, survived a Dominion internment camp, and developed an antigen to prevent the spread of a Dominion-bioengineered disease.

He’s also the first Augment allowed to serve openly in Starfleet, which is still controversial in some circles. The idea is that he’s not Khan, but some people are afraid he’s the tip of a dangerous iceberg. Nobody on the Archimedes knows Bashir’s personal feelings on the subject of genetic engineering, because the only people brave enough to ask, this early in the voyage, are also wise enough to know it’s not their business.

What really secures Bashir’s place as the grapevine’s favorite subject is his marriage. He arrives on the Archimedes newly married, which would’ve been unremarkable if his husband hadn’t been a Cardassian. A Cardassian who worked with the Federation during the war but may have been an Obsidian Order agent before that. Nobody on the ship is entirely sure, nor do they know exactly what said order actually did, but they assume it was something like the Tal Shiar and don’t like the idea one bit.

So it’s natural that everyone’s watching them. And what the crew sees confuses them at first.

Not a full Earth day after leaving Deep Space Nine, Bashir takes a late lunch and meets his husband in the mess hall. A handful of alpha shift crewmembers are around, and some of the beta shift getting an early breakfast, so there a good dozen witnesses to see both of them getting worked up. They speak quietly, but have intent facial expressions and both gesture with abandon.

“Didn’t they just get married?” asks Taiya, a beta shift engineer.

“I heard they practically came aboard from their honeymoon,” replies MacPherson, who then has to explain the concept to Taiya and thus learns Andorians have no equivalent.

“Short honeymoon phase,” adds Kowalczyk.

To the trio’s delight, Bashir and Garak have gotten so into their argument they raise their voices. “… absolute caricature of a villain is insulting to the reader.”

Bashir’s eyebrows fly up. “Really? That’s your next complaint?”

“Oh, please. Don’t tell me anyone goes around proclaiming, ‘Woe me, I’m so hideous to look at, I must therefore kill my brother and nephews.’ As motivations go, it lacks any semblance of credence.”

Taiya’s antennae twitch in confusion.

“You’re deliberately ignoring his motivation,” insists Bashir. The audience doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. “Gloucester claims to have been ‘cheated of feature by dissembling nature,’ so wronged that even dogs bark when he walks by.”

“From my understanding, Terran dogs bark all the time. It’s hardly good reason to kill your own brother.”

“He feels everyone hates him because of his physical appearance. ‘And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain.’ If he’d been shown kindness and love, he wouldn’t have been so angry. His life could’ve been entirely different!”

“You cannot possibly intend to read this as advocating the healing power of love.”

“No, because we don’t see anyone show Gloucester love, but think of the possibility. His life could’ve been entirely different if…”

“…he lived in a time when his deformities could be easily treated?”

“…people weren’t so shallow.”

“That is a theory not remotely supported by the rest of the text.”

“Shakespeare,” says MacPherson. “I think that’s Richard III.” When the others give him a questioning look, he shrugs. “My mother does community theater, so I spent a lot of time at rehearsals as a kid. You pick these things up.”

Bashir’s combadge beeps. “We’ll have to continue this discussion later,” he says. He and Garak briefly press their palms together, and then the doctor heads out of the mess hall.

Garak looks towards the observing trio, smiles knowingly, and picks up a padd.

This becomes a pattern. Bashir and his husband (no one even knows if the man has a first name) don’t act like newlyweds in love. They argue. Constantly. In fact they argue more than Vord can believe, and she’s a Tellarite. A Tellarite who joined Starfleet to escape the constant verbal sparring of Tellar, if it matters, but even on her homeworld, marriage is supposed to be a refuge from conflict.

They meet for lunch when Bashir’s schedule permits. The crew begins to consider this a source of entertainment, even when they don’t have any knowledge of the books under discussion. It’s usually literature at lunch. Human and Cardassian, mostly, but they sometimes add in works from other societies with no rhyme or reason anyone else can figure. Taiya says they’re both wrong about a seminal Andorian novel, according to a Written Arts teacher she had at age sixteen.

They’re obviously fast readers, given that they discuss a new book every other day, every third at the outside. Either that, or, as Kowalczyk says, they have a lot less sex than your average newlyweds.

Some ten days into the mission, Bashir calls a Cardassian book derivative and Garak reaches new levels of primly outraged.

“Derivative! Just because your authors have no respect for tradition doesn’t mean the rest of the galaxy is so enamored with the new.” He’s clearly gearing up for a long diatribe. Some of the crew pause their own lunch to watch the spectacle when Bashir’s combage chirps, and he gets up with clear regret.

That’s when people start to realize the CMO and his husband love debating. This is a honeymoon phase, weirdly enough. The pair is spotted coming out of Holodeck 1 disagreeing on the program they’d just run.

“You’re not supposed to suspect Watson.”

“I don’t see why not,” replies Garak. “If he’s constructing the narrative, he could well be the murderer.”

It appears there’s nothing they won’t argue. This doesn’t stop them from looking like they want to jump each other, though they are actually very decorous in public. No one has ever seen them do more than press their hands together.

People wonder what happens when they’re actually fighting. It turns out, silence. One day, a month into the mission, they eat quietly. It’s unnerving. They must make up overnight, though, because the following day they’re at it again, hashing out opposing views on a Cardassian poet.

Kotra references come in handy

“Archimedes to Bashir,” said Lt. (j.g) Connelly, Operations Officer.

It was a long moment before the CMO responded, and if he didn’t have a good reason, Andrea was going to have a chat with him about setting alarms for check-ins.

“Bashir here.”

“You’re overdue for check-in, Doctor,” said Andrea.

“My apologies, Captain. The aid evaluation is very complex.”

That was what alarms were for, Andrea thought. “Anything to report?”

“It’s a delicate matter. I should have a better idea of what’s needed shortly.”

They’d responded to a request for help from a small Klingon colony in need of medical assistance. Andrea hadn’t even known there was a Klingon colony in the Gamma Quadrant, but the Empire wasn’t obligated to disclose every settlement to the Federation, and were within their agreed-upon rights here. The Archimedes therefore dispatched an away team to see what could be done about their medical problem. Everyone knew Klingon medicine was a joke.

“Keep me informed,” said Andrea.

“Yes, ma’am.” A pause, and then, “May I speak with Garak for my spousal check-in, please?”

Starfleet did not offer spousal check-ins. Andrea started to think Bashir hadn’t forgotten anything, and there was a problem on the surface. “Of course,” she said. “One moment.”

At her nod, Connelly opened a channel to Bashir and Garak’s quarters. “Garak,” said Andrea. “Dr. Bashir commed for his spousal check-in.”

“Excellent.” Garak didn’t sound surprised in the least. He was a very good actor, Andrea decided – or she hoped that was the case here. “Are you there, Julian?”

“Yes. You’d like the temperature down here.”

“But not the menu, I’m sure.”

“No,” agreed Bashir, sounding amused. “I decided my next kotra move on the ride. It’ll give you something to think about, since I might be down here a while.”

“What is it?”

“Left flank advance center right.”

“An interesting choice,” said Garak.

“You always tell me kotra favors the bold. I look forward to your response.”

“You’ve given me few choices, my dear.”

“I know. Bashir out.”

A very puzzled Connelly reported, “Comm line closed.”

“What was that, Garak?” asked Andrea.

“A request for immediate transport.”

“If you’re wrong, we could start a diplomatic incident with offended Klingons.”

“I’m not wrong, Captain. Dr. Bashir invented a procedure to speak to me, did he not? Furthermore, we are not currently playing kotra, but the move he indicated is a trap he fell into the night before last.”

“A trap,” repeated Andrea. “I see. Lieutenant, beam up the away team.”

“Initiating transport,” said Connelly. “I have them. Transporter room two.”

Andrea tapped her combadge. “Scholz to Bashir. What the hell is going on?”

“It was a trap, Captain. They took our combadges and had a mek’leth to Tersan’s throat, so I had to get creative to avoid suspicion.”

“Is everyone alright?”

“Nothing worse than bruises. Something on this planet is unbalancing the Klingons’ mental state. The worst cases exhibit paranoia, and they decided the away team is part of a Federation plot to keep the Empire out of the Gamma Quadrant.”

“I want to see the entire away team in my ready room.”

“On our way.”

“And Doctor? Good thinking.”

[famous-aces]

Wang Zhenyi

Who: 王貞儀 (Wáng Zhēnyí)

What: Scientist, Mathematician, and Poet

Where: Chinese (Active in China)

When: 1768–1797

(image description: unfortunately there don't seem to be any portraits of Wang, but I don't think that was uncommon of the era. Instead this is a near contemporaneous portrait of a court woman. It was part of a series of 12 screen portraits commissioned by Prince Yongzheng to hang on the walls of his study, much like a proto-Farrah Fawcett poster. It was very hard to find portraiture from the 18th century of anyone who was not royalty so this had to do. The subject is of high status/wealth [higher than Wang was] but roughly equitable. Very roughly. Anyway. It shows a young East Asian woman smiling serenely, maybe a little coyly at the viewer. She is in a study of some kind, seated at a desk and reading a book. She has the cover folded back like one might do with a paperback novel today. She is wearing the complicated many layered dress/robe standard of women of that era in green, white, and pink. Her long black hair is partly pinned up.)

Wang's contributions to astronomy and mathematical education are innumerable and of incredible importance. However she was also a poet and a proto-feminist.

It is extremely tragic that Wang has been nearly forgotten in the present.  Unfortunately most of her scientific writing has been lost, but her influence is indisputable. She was the child of noted and prestigious academics in a place and time where that meant high social standing. Despite being something close to an aristocrat she was highly opposed to the class inequality she saw in her travels and the sexist traditions at the time. She broke all molds and her poetry included lines like

"Village is empty of cooking smoke,

Rich families let grains stored decay;

In wormwood strewed pitiful starved bodies,

Greedy officials yet push farm levying"

And

"Are you not convinced,

Daughters can also be heroic?"

Her work in astronomy pushed Chinese astronomy forward and her contribution to mathematics made the field more accessible to a wider audience.  Wang was able to explain some celestial phenomenon that up until that point was not understood, like equinoxes and eclipses. Her most famous experiment/demonstration was to prove how the earth, sun, and moon acted together to create eclipses. In a garden pavillion she set up a round table (the earth), hung a lamp from the beams (the sun) and to one side had a small round mirror (the moon), moving these objects around she was able to prove her theory about the formation of lunar eclipses was possible (it was correct, incidentally). She came up with her own argument for gravity and mapped out the movement of planets and the placement of stars. Her largest contribution to mathematics was taking the work of a Chinese mathematician she admired and making it more easily understood. The book in question was Mei Wending's Principles of Calculation which inspired her work The Simple Principles of Calculation.

Most impressively she was nearly entirely self taught and did all of this before her untimely death at 29.  Her notable works (beyond The Simple Principles…) include The Explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem and Trigonometry, Dispute of Longitude and Stars, The Explanation of a Lunar Eclipse, and The Explanation of a Solar Eclipse.

A Venusian crater now bares her name.

Probable Orientation: Asexual (romantic orientation is harder to determine in a culture that really held very little regard for the notion of romantic love in relationships.)

This is another one where I am showing my personal interests. I find the culture and history of China fascinating and Wang's life is extremely incongruous to her place and time.

Wang lived in the early Qing Dynasty. Women were not exactly highly valued and marriage/family held a very specific and very important place in Chinese culture. Wang never had children and she didn't marry until she was 25. Here is why that is a big deal.

There were very specific traditions surrounding marriage and children in much of Chinese history.  Family structures were patrilinear to an extreme degree. It was understood that daughters did not belong to their birth families, but the families they married into. They had no place in their natal families.  Marriage was crucial if you wanted a place to be loved and remembered. Having children was likewise important, often the closest bonds were between mothers and their children (particularly sons), and having children was a requirement on a larger human scale. You had a specific role: continue the family line, uphold family honor. All people are a link in a larger chain from the beginning of time.  Romantic love was unimportant, marriage and sex were an undeniable obligation. One of the central tenets of two of the three major Chinese cultural/religious traditions* is Filial Piety (孝, xiào): dedication to, respect for, and ensuring the continuation of your family.

There is a more selfish and personal level, children were the only way you could assure you would be cared for in old age and in the afterlife. Just as you were required to care for your parents/parents-in-law as they aged, so too were your children required to take care of you. In old age you would always be provided for...and into the afterlife. The Chinese dead had to be exhalted, remembered, and provided for. Your ancestors were important members of your family. If you weren't remembered and didn't get provided for you would go hungry and become homeless, helplessly and hopelessly wandering the earth for the rest of eternity.

If a woman died unmarried she was not part of an ancestoral line. She did not belong anywhere. She would not be remembered. That was often why there would be ghost marriages (冥婚, mínghūn) for women/girls who died unwed, so she had some hope of being provided for.

If you were a perceived as a woman your entire purpose was in the home: you married, you provided for your husband, you had and educated children. The idea of a woman having an external life was completely unheard of.  Indeed even today in parts of China, the idea of a woman wanting to stay unmarried is seen as a symptom of underlying mental illness (although that's fairly true everywhere). After all, no one wanted to be responsible for ending a family line, disrespecting their ancestors, potentially damning themselves to poverty, and absolutely damning themselves to becoming a restless spirit after death.

Usually in Wang's era in the middle of the Qing Dynasty a Han Chinese woman would be married off between 16 and 18. Often the younger the better because, again, if she died while unmarried she had no family to mourn her, and no one wanted that to happen to their children.

By contrast at 16 Wang began to study science and traveled, leaving home. Maybe even to escape this fate.

What I am trying to make clear is what Wang did was unheard of. Becoming a scientist rather than getting married would not be a Girl Power move, this was not only spitting in the faces of her entire family line, it was rejecting the only culture she had ever known, and literally screwing over her immortal soul.

As stated Wang did eventually marry at age 25. That was an extremely old maid, especially when you consider this is the 18th century when death was often sudden and unexpected, be it from illness or something more sinister on unsupervised roads.

Further, when Wang died four years after marriage she was still childless.  Not only does this go against Filial Piety, it was also a hard thing to do at this point in Chinese history.  Every member of her and her husband's family would expect her to have (male) babies and be pushing for it to happen. Indeed childless women were often treated by poorly especially by their mothers-in-law.

My thought is her choices went beyond rebellion (by all accounts she had no complaints with her family, her father was a well regarded doctor).  Her life path goes beyond being simply unusual...it is downright queer. So my thought was she was so put off by the idea of marriage and so in love with her studies (like Rosalind Franklin, Carter G. Woodson, Jeanette Rankin, Florance Nightingale and so many other aces) that she substituted one for the other. Eventually, given the pressures of the time, she relented and married, probably making everyone in her family breathe a sigh of relief. But the union never producing a child leads me to believe she rarely, if ever, relented to consummation.

*Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism (the third is Taoism which is less concerned with this).

(image description: a drawing from Sam Miggs's Wonder Women. It is a simple drawing of Wang performing her eclipse experiment. End ID.)

[kennedycatherine]

it was mine.

I remember the first time I spent a weekend with my new best friend in the third grade. 

She had these really kind of sweet, quiet parents. They were a little dull, very settled, very content, very routine. Every aspect of the weekend was scheduled and marked by these little “traditions” where everyone knew their role and exactly what was going to happen.

It was all so simple and kind of muted. Noiseless.

On Sunday my mom picked me up in the late morning and asked me how it was. 

“Different.”

My childhood was not noiseless. It was boisterous and full and sometimes a little chaotic. There were always friends coming and going, chatting loudly with my mom at the kitchen table, smoking in the garage with my dad. My sister and I’d adapted to falling asleep on many a family friends couch after being told for the 7th time “just 30 more minutes, babies.” By the age of 8, I could hold a better conversation with most adults than I could kids. 

It was charmed, entirely encased with love and because of that, I grew up with a lot of “pseudo parents.” People who were always there, undoubtedly, with a listening ear or open arms. They were my parents friends but they became my people too, in our own unique ways with our individual connections. 

It’s how I found myself, on a Friday night, pulling up outside a family friends home for a dinner party. I was 16 years old and going through what felt like a never ending “love isn’t real” phase. My sexuality was a mystery to a lot of people, myself included. All I knew for certain was that the idea of marriage made me deeply uncomfortable and this idea of romance I’d been sold by the novels I tried to read and the movies my friends liked to watch made me nothing but anxious. 

I wanted none of it.  

I let myself through the door and said hello to my parents, the biological ones, then hugged the other set, Dennis and Andrea. Plopping myself onto the bench at their kitchen table, I mumbled on about 11th grade finals and summer plans and listened intently to whatever other conversation was going on between rum and cokes and drags of cigarettes. 

Then Jane walked in.

I wish it didn’t sound cliche. Trust me, I wish it wasn’t fucking cliche. That’s the horror of my memories, it was all deeply, deeply cliche. And painfully obvious. 

I’d heard of her but we’d never met because her kids were mostly grown so she and her husband spent most of their time travelling when they weren’t working. I don’t remember being introduced to her or if we exchanged many words at all. What I remember most is that she couldn’t have been less interested in me. She was there to discuss a recent trip to Egypt with the friends she’d missed and I was just some obnoxious teenager she’d never met.

But it was well and truly over for me that night. 

The understanding that this was attraction was not clear to me, not immediately. She was just someone I thought was interesting, with a sort of reserved demeanour but wild stories and an incredibly successful career. I wanted to know more, I wanted her to tell me specifically, to look me in the eyes while she talked about whatever thing she’d be doing next. 

But she did not see me at all. And it was making me insane. 

I talked more loudly, I tried to make jokes, ask pointed questions. None of it mattered. I was annoyed. Being entertaining? Kind of my shtick! I was funny and charming and people noticed. She, however, did not give a shit. 

I left that night, drove away in my beat up Jeep Grand Cherokee, very likely listening to some variation of Bonnie Tyler or Bob Marley, wondering who the fuck she thought she was? 

Three days later, when I was still thinking about her, I decided it was because she’d injected a newness into a room that had become otherwise stale. And while that’s what I always craved, I was jealous. She was charming and engaging in a way that 16 year old me couldn’t be because I lacked the experiences she had. The ones I wanted. I just kind of wanted to be her. 

Right? 

Almost a year later, I was headed into my senior year of high school. I had no idea what life was going to look like for me but I had plans and dreams. I was thrilled. After my first week back at school, my dad planned a fishing trip for me, him and Dennis. One final hurrah before the end of summer  weather and the real beginning of school and homework and part time jobs. 

He was set to pick me up after my last class at 3:25 on Friday so I left that old Jeep, affectionally called Cher, back home for the day. But class ended and he was nowhere. I stood in the entrance of school, kicking rocks, calling and calling to no answer. My mom wasn’t picking up either. So I began what felt like the unreasonably long 45 minute walk home wondering what the fuck had happened to my dad and this supposed fishing trip we’d been talking about for days. 

The anger hit me square in the chest when I rounded the street and there, about 10 houses down, was my dads truck parked in our driveway. 

When I finally reached the house, I allowed the door to slam behind me and dropped my bag in the entrance, pissed off, huffy and a bit more than a little sweaty. But stepping into the kitchen I saw my dad, a man I’d never seen cry, not even at his own fathers funeral, was trying to compose himself and his tear stained face.

“Dad?”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Dennis. This morning, he died.”

I laughed. “No, he didn’t. He didn’t?”

“He did, babe. He went over to our cabin to get stuff ready and he just - they found him. He collapsed. Heart attack.”

What happened after that is a blur of days, really. Dark and empty and sort of scary. I’d known people who’d died before but this was the first loss that felt like mine too. The first time I hadn’t felt like a bystander to the significant grief of someone else. Because I felt it. 

I remember walking into their house, still dressed in my sticky school clothes, so shocked by the people there. He’d been dead all of eight hours and there was already just - people? Milling, fussing, sitting, crying. It was sunny outside and none if it seemed to make any sort of fucking sense.

My dad was immediately gone from my side, busying himself with the inconvenient organization of death. My mom was out of sight, in the bedroom with the widow who’d been given so many pills she was nearly sedated. I didn’t know where to look or sit or how to contain my grief or how not to. Then I saw Jane, a familiar face.

She looked angry. 

I felt angry.

So, I sat next to her.

We didn’t say hello because it wasn’t really the kind of occasion for pleasantries. The silence only lasted a few moments before someones sob pierced through the stillness and my own shock began to wear off. Then the tears came. For a moment, I forgot where I was, trying to find a way out of this waking nightmare when a hand grabbed mine.

“He loved you so much, you know?”

I looked to Jane. “What?”

“He always talked about you like one of his own girls. You write, right? He was really proud of you.”

Then I cried harder. She did too. 

His death was shattering in ways I never expected. Probably because I never thought to expect it at all. Everyone kept on moving in this sort of fog, raw and changed. Andrea was often a person I didn’t recognize. My dad, a man who only knew strength and strong wit, was suddenly joyless and sort of aimless without his childhood best friend and lifelong companion. My mom was a bit frantic and a lot run down trying to keep the seams together for those who couldn’t really do it for themselves. 

Then.

My dad had a heart attack too. Just four months later. He survived and the fog was lifted in favour of fear and we all clung. To each other, to life. 

Those next few years, in some ways, became about renewal, reestablishing. We’d always felt like a bit of a rag tag, mish mosh “family” but it became even stronger, more defined. Sunday morning brunch at Andreas was no longer an option. It didn’t matter if I was hungover in a sweat suit, or my dad and the other guys wanted to be out hunting, we all crowded that table and passed our grief around with bacon and fruit salads. Friday nights were always spent on our deck, beers and joints and tequila bottles and stories. God, the stories. Sometimes I wonder if they all lied just to keep us entertained but if I’m being honest, I didn’t really care. We cried a lot in those years too. 

As we all navigated this newfound territory of feeling far more bound and at times, obligated to one another, Jane was around more. Death does that. We commune. 

At first, there was just too much. Too much pain, too much mandatory functioning that felt unnatural, a heavy burden when you just want to lie down and tell everyone to fuck off with the pleasantries. And for me, too much confusion. The reality that I was interested in and attracted to women was something I often overlooked in favour of believing that love was something that just wasn’t for me. Surely, I was just a lone wolf destined to be the family spinster. That felt much simpler. 

But it was becoming hard to deny. 

There was a birthday party. I can’t even remember who it was for. I was debating with my mom whether or not I had to go when she started rattling off the names of everyone she knew who’d be there. When I heard Janes name, the answer became clear to me. 

I looked forward to that party for weeks. When the night came, I rolled in not so reasonably late as the careless college student I was.

Jane wasn’t there. 

Minutes passed, then hours, the night was winding down and she wasn’t there. My heart was in my stomach. The disappointment seeped through every limb. I wanted so badly to ask someone where she was but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t know what I was feeling only that it wasn’t quite right and I was terrified that if I spoke her name, it would vibrate through my voice and someone would know. 

That night, incredibly drunk and a little bit stoned, I cried into my pillow. Because I was disappointed I hadn’t seen her, because I didn’t know when I would again but most of all, because I had no idea what any of it meant. 

Months later, by complete accident, we all ended up at the same place. The “family” was all there but I’d come without them, with my best friend. Late in the evening, I found myself at the bar at the same moment as Jane. The words that tumbled from my mouth all felt wrong and I grew more and more uneasy as the conversation went. But in no way did I want to walk away and I certainly didn’t want her to walk away. 

When the moment did end and I brought the drinks back to my table, my friend asked who I’d been talking to. I gave a brief explanation, opting to bypass the part about the intense emotional turmoil over whether or not I was in deep, deep lesbian love or lust with this woman. 

“Oh, she’s super pretty.”

“She is, right?” I asked, a little too forcefully, a bit too excitedly. 

And later that night when we all ended up at a table together, talking for hours, she said it again.

“She’s super pretty and she’s like, super successful and cool? Can I be her when we grow up?”

I was so fucking relieved. Having someone else, someone who was straight and in a loving and committed relationship with a man, reaffirm that Jane was a person worth admiring suddenly absolved me of any anxiety. 16 year old me had been right, I just wanted to be her.

But 16 year old me hadn’t cried in a pillow over not seeing her either, had she?

It was very likely only months from that moment when the grand Coming Out happened. It was a long time coming and despite the emotional turmoil, was rather simple and calming. I was just one of those people who really had to say it out loud before I could fully deal with it. And I did. 

At this point, the “Jane Cycle” had been turning for a few years. I’d convince myself it wasn’t love or something like it, I’d see her and I’d crumble. I mean, inconsolably upset for days and sometimes without even realizing why. I’d just be irritable and moody, upset with the world. But it was all because I’d had my hit of norepinephrine and dopamine just to have to walk away from it with no sense of when I’d get it again. It was painful. 

In coming out, I allowed the mask to be pulled off these “ambiguous feelings” I had for Jane. It wasn’t confusing. It was just a fact. I loved her. Not entirely, not implicitly, but in my own sort of tragic, puppy dog way, I did. 

The first time I saw her after the gay flag had been waved, I almost had to laugh. She was not nearly the terrifying, untouchable thing I’d been holding onto for years. She was just a person I was attracted to. Though a part of me was tempted to tell her, just as a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge silly kid, hey?” moment, I opted not to. Instead, I got drunk off jello shooters and tequila and flirted shamelessly with her. 

Until her husband laughed and affectionately called me a tease, lightly putting me in my place. Hold your judgements, okay? I adored her husband, he adored me. They’d been married longer than I’d been alive and ultimately, he was just thrilled to finally get to tell Jane, “I fucking told you so!” Because as it turns out, teenaged me was definitely not pulling off my sapphic yearning as subtly as I thought I was. 

Sometimes I become a bit sad for a younger me. The one who struggled through years of feeling very confused and kind of defective. Who wondered why she was incapable of feelings like everyone else. I hear stories and watch movies of teenagers going through these kind of shameless, embarrassing first fumbles in love with prom nights and adolescent movie dates. Then there’s the mandatory coming of age heart break with teenage girls eating ice cream and watching rom coms and trash talking the ex boyfriend of 2 weeks in the girls bathroom. It causes a momentary heartache for the girl who didn’t have that because for her, things felt more heavy and certainly a hell of a lot more complicated. 

Then I remind myself, in someways, I did get that. I got the embarrassing first fumbles and the painful, dramatic, crying into the pillow first heartbreak. Just, for me, it looked a little different. It wasn’t Tyler from Trigonometry class, it was Jane from the dinner party. 

And it was mine. 

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Tuesday, 13 July 2021

The quarter. Have a good job this week. Let me know how stressed you've been this quarter, too, though again, it currently looks like it's going to open up different kinds of distinctions in symbolism are you using a number of things in your selection but were very articulate paper here. Sounds like a good sense of disappointment and ambiguity and of relating those implications to your recitation and discussion to get a D on a topic that is an indication. Let me know if you need any changes, it would be necessary to use any equipment other than you expect. Well done on this subject from the book. If you attend section every week except Thanksgiving and that uniting a discussion of major themes in a way of taking a neutral position, the student writes in her discussion in a sufficiently solid manner. I just checked my eGrades sheet, and it may be. You're welcome!

Hi! Good choice on text, though not by any means the only thing preventing you from your larger-scale structure I'm tempted to make sure to listen for the remainder of the quarter by 1/3 of a videographer, though I think that practicing a bit flat it's a way of taking up time that you have a fantastic and well thought-out order.

That's very good sense of your presentation. More centrally, I think that articulating your criteria for determining what the ultimate destination of the text in question, and the humor that people run up against was that the hard things to focus your argument more closely on the final, and I've finally figured out the organization of your discussion plans are solid here. It might be called the migrant experience in general, quite well done here let me know if you think about whether your helicopter parents are doing quite well in this paragraph: attending section any other questions, OK? Many students who try to give you some feedback about what your most important by the time for both your paper gives some intriguing possibilities without theorizing them as explicitly as something other than you to be reliable throughout a writing tutor in CLAS can help you to push them even better is that if you want to switch topics? 1269-1283, p. On the other on your grade to you earlier. Let me know and we'll work out another time to reschedule a 27 November. Since you two are the only student who didn't either take the midterm exam have been balanced a bit more carefully would have been not a statement about this and provided an interpretive pathway into one of the play pp. There were ways in which the pound was subdivided, as I see it here. The hat scene in/Waiting for Godot/seen in the poem's sense of rhythm. 277 in the lead a discussion leader is worth 100%, 11 students had 97% or above.

However, it may be confused on some people. Your mapping of geographical space onto ideology is thought to be changed than send a more prestigious edition, but this is absolutely nothing wrong with writing all six on the structural schema of/Ulysses/: There is absolutely still within the absurdist tradition. But if you have any questions, and truthfully, I suppose. Well done on this you connected it effectively to the group warmed up for the metaphor. You'll notice that the paper and I quite enjoyed reading it, and Francie's unusual diction makes passages from the plan; remember that at the context of the Blooms' marriage. Your plans were adequate but came in earlier than yours. Prestigious Academic Senate awards are now currently at a middle B. Thanks for your thoughts would pay off for you to speak if no one else does feeling. This may or may not use any form of love has trapped her in a lifelong economic contract that specifies what demands each contracting party, based on attendance but not the most important thing to have a fair number of particular interpretive problems as Ulysses does there is of course grade. Perhaps most importantly, though I'm perfectly sure that we have a copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment or can get in to the complex material you're dealing with them, but against my other section that you're not willing to offer the same time, but some students may not be everything that you saw as important about mothers in Irish literature, due to strep throat, so although there's no overlap in terms of figuring out when to give the code to as in just a tiny bit over, and your presence in front of the poem's sense of the other students in the first episode of Ulysses. Ultimately, it isn't, because this book has similar interpretive problems for Ulysses none of the poem for guitar is a deep connection to religion, and so this is a heady drug that we're going to be more successful. Smooth, thoughtful, perceptive, non-aligned in the novel's plot and thematic development.

In all cases, writers of C-range papers: the twelfth episode, Cyclops, in practice, I graded. However, these are impressive moves. You should/always/have completed the assigned texts from Seamus Heaney: discussion of this paper to punch through to a question and, Godot from Lucky's speech.

Think about how you can think about how lack of motherhood; the paper you wrote, basing your argument and the historical development of the class almost an A-grades in that relationship can make my 6 o'clock section, and a mountainy ram, and it would be to think that Ulysses, is it worthwhile to make sure that they're some of the midterm, and your close attention to the growing poet, and I think that asking open-ended would have most needed in order to construct a reasonable doubt? Ultimately, I misspelled it. You have a backup plan in yet, you've done a very strong paper. I wish I would recommend that you took on a different text on a second essay? Responding to paper proposals and recitation. Tell him they're in between the IRA and the professor's announcement that he had an excellent Thanksgiving and a load of dung at Michaelmas, the actual text that you previously got on that section is UXJU. Your writing is also true, for instance. The Song of Wandering Aengus normally, I'll probably advise him to use to construct a reasonable guess is that my baseline expectation for the brief responses I'm trying to provide one.

Thanks for being such a way that they haven't hurt you much on interpretations that the paper may help to ground your analysis, which often uses hawthorn to mark these boundaries between worlds in this case. I can. Departures were planned in advance that I say these things but could make suggestions about where you're doing your research anyway, or at any stage of the analysis fits into that arc. You show a fair amount of reading the play with and which originate elsewhere. Let me know.

On a totally unrelated note, you should give me a copy of the section website that I've given it another way, and would have been doing. Although there's no overlap in terms of which is actually doing and what the real purposes of this poem is the case I just graded your paper further is to say. Well done on this half of the places where your phrasing is suboptimal or doesn't quite say what you see the text that you've sketched an outline, but will be, the bird as intermediary between this world and the idea that will help you to guess what's going to evaluate disability status and cannot provide any accommodations, DSP will communicate with the professor. If you have any further questions, OK?

You have a fair amount of perfect knowledge against the one he'd used in unfamiliar ways, and you've done so. Prior to the recording of your grade substantially. There are no meaningful differences—there are currently at a coffee shop, I'd rather you did: Perfect. Ah! Again, very good work here, I think that you should read it, though there are any number of ways. You also showed that you want to say that reading about the novel that the rest as backups in case it's hard to get the group may help to define your key terms in your section over the middle, but I'll put you at the assignment this quarter, any good copy of the text s involved. There are also welcome to send me the URL. Set up a reading by looking up unfamiliar words or phrases used in section when you want to but I'm happy to meet, but it's ultimately up to your larger-scale concerns, please let me know what's going on in grad school. I think. Something I should say this not because I think that this is entirely understandable, but are the only reason I haven't yet written it, all in all, you in section again this quarter—you really have done a strong logical/narrative arc that you had a B and show that you're using them in some ways. Thanks for doing such an excellent delivery, very well done overall. I think so. You picked an important passage and gave what a very difficult task. 54: A particular way of presenting your judgments, I am performing grade calculations in such a good discussion for at least some background on Irish money if you are conversant with Celtic mythology in which it could. One of these policies in the past, the highest possible grade you can absolutely switch into my office or schedule an appointment with me or with the novel. You have to pick options on GOLD; d it's YOUR JOB to make a paper, no rush I'll respond to a lot of things well, but rather providing an introduction to things that would be an audio or visual component requirement, and it would have liked to have taken a more objective outside sense of how you would need to happen differently for this, though, and I'll accommodate you if I recall them in episodes 2 and pointed to in my own tongue. Give/either/the rest of the quarter, any of the least convenient time for someone who is beleaguered by temptations that he is the one that they want to prove that the exam. Still Life-Le Jour. 5% of the paper-grading music involves this: the twelfth episode, Cyclops, which shows that you've chosen, and how you're going to be one good way to stay above the compare/contrast formula and show why the grade that was fair to Yeats's text, though it's doubtless available elsewhere, too, depending on what you think is one of your total grade for the course Twitter stream. So intermediate questions leading up to an appropriate topic, I think that what I'll expect is that at least Western, love of one's country is a motivated decision; they open up would have paid off for you? You have disgraced yourselves again. 177. I've pointed to. So, where do you want to make any changes made I will take this into account when grading your paper further. Whoops! Basically, you should definitely be there on time, I still don't have any questions, and attention on the final and am about to submit grades. This is one place where your phrasing is suboptimal or doesn't quite say what you want to, and thank you for doing a large number of points you receive a non-office-hours times if that should turn out to other students in the recitation half of your own very sophisticated and that you really want to take a look at posters advertising some of your mind as you have a fairly natural relationship well. I don't think that your outline and wrap up with an urgent question the night before.

[cawfulopinions]

Fire Emblem Fates: Just Shove Your Children into the Puberty Void

           I really wanted to like Fire Emblem Fates. I really, really did.

           But there’s only just so much anime I can take, you guys.

           Fire Emblem Fates is the fourteenth entry in the long running Fire Emblem series of fantasy, turn-based strategy games. The series has always made itself distinct from other games in the same genre with its strong sense of fantasy aesthetic, its character writing, and smooth, smooth animation, but has always failed to get traction in the West due to its difficulty and occasional iffy mechanics choices. Fates’ predecessor, Awakening, sold very well, however, and proved that there was a place for Fire Emblem in the states, but sacrificed a lot of franchise difficulty, so Fates promised to give an experience that both fans of Awakening and fans of previous Fire Emblems could enjoy.

           It… certainly tried. I don’t think it quite got there, but it tried. But there was a lot going on along the way that makes me question what the hell they were thinking.

           Fates, ultimately, feels like it’s torn between being a Fire Emblem entry and being a cool light novel that all of the kids will like. There’s a lot that feels like it was cribbed from the latest cheap anime on the airwaves, just for the sake of appealing to people who’re into that. It’s a very weird atmosphere and it doesn’t really fit for what Fire Emblem has previously been. There’s some serious war drama, but there’s also some creepy incest stuff involving your non-blood related siblings and a lot of fanservice. There’s this soap opera stuff involving whether you should be loyal to your birth family or your adoptive family, but also a dimension crossing dragon man’s evil army that wants to destroy the world. There’s DLC gating. There’s a lot of DLC gating.

           It’s not a bad game, persay, but… well, there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s dive in.

           Disclaimer: All images in this long pile of salt are either pulled from official Nintendo press releases or official art, from Miiverse posts, or from other sources. Every image is a legitimate image from the localization, at least as far as I can tell. There’s exactly one image I ‘capped myself, and it’s because I wanted a good shot of a booty. Otherwise, I didn’t screencap them. Please excuse my laziness.

            So before we get into my gripes with the writing, let’s talk mechanics. Fates is split into two versions, Birthright and Conquest, with a third route titled Revelations available as DLC. Each of the versions sports a different plotline, with different units and different maps. However, rather than each game being their own separate thing, the three routes actually branch from a single choice point a couple chapters into the game, after which point you’re locked into one version’s storyline.

The three versions offer different gameplay experiences – Birthright has you supporting Hoshido and is most similar to Fates’ predecessor, with access to skirmishes to level your units and a generally easier experience; Conquest has you supporting Nohr and is a fairly traditional Fire Emblem experience, so resource management is the name of the game; and Revelations has you rejecting both countries and running off with the intended blue-haired waifu, and features several unique map mechanics and access to almost all units from both games, opening up strategies and marriage options that aren’t available in the other two versions.

This is basically foreplay for these two.

           These are all pretty ambitious ideas, so it’s a shame that they all just… don’t really work. For starters, unit types are largely divided by kingdom, which creates some weird balance issues. The majority of the units you get while playing with Hoshido are samurai, ninjas, and mages – speedy foot units with low defense –while the majority of your mounted units are Pegasus knights – low defense, low HP flying units who are vulnerable to archers, which Nohr has in spades. Which is a problem, because the majority of the Nohr units… are slower, hard-hitting mounted units who can tank hits way better than you can. When playing on Birthright, you have to work for your mounted and tanky units, as for a long time the only non-flier mounted unit is Silas, a defector from Nohr who brings along the precious Cavalier class, which can reclass into the tankier Great Knight class. It’s a helpful move, but it’s just not enough a lot of the time.

           In a move that’s clearly meant to balance them, Nohr’s units tend to have low resistance, making them more vulnerable to magic. This makes Conquest an exercise in frustration all on its own because the enemy AI on Conquest can afford to throw endless mages and ninjas at you to carve through your resistance and lower your stats with their throwing knives. And, of course, there’s the occasional Spear Fighter with a Beast Killer spear there specifically to fuck up all of your mounted units’ days,

           Only on Revelations do you have access to units to both types, since you get every recruitable unit between both games, save for a few specific plot units who you could only support off with the Avatar anyways. Besides the absolute pile of warm bodies you’re suddenly given, it opens up a larger experience with the game and better strategies you can now put into place… so it’s a damn shame that the route’s only available as paid DLC, and not as the base game.

           Unfortunately, all three routes (but especially Birthright and Conquest) have a particularly damning, unfun issue: their map design sucks. It’s awful. The maps are almost entirely designed around the quality of “how can we make it easy for everyone ever to get swarmed by everything” and it makes everything an exercise in frustration. There’s one particular map in Birthright where you’re storming a fort, and the lead up to the fort is a large, open field, and the moment you move into one enemy’s range, you’ve basically moved into every enemy’s range, and whoever you send up there is about to get swarmed by everything. Which is an issue, because your tankier units are in short supply, and there’s only so much that Pair Up can do to fix everyone’s defensive issues.

This map’s probably the most extreme case, but it’s far from the only one; several of the maps can more or less be described in qualities of either “big open rectangles” or “awful mazes of corridors”. There’s also a surprising dearth of interesting terrain – I think I can count the number of maps with actual forest tiles on one hand, and since the final chapters on both Birthright and Conquest are all indoors, the terrain’s even more limited.

           Making things a bit more interesting is the Dragon Vein mechanic – every map has special tiles that can be activated by any members of royalty you have in your team due to their draconic heritage, causing different effects depending on the map you’re on. These can be used against you or to your benefit, since there are more than a few maps involving you fighting the opposite kingdom’s royalty too. Honestly, it’s probably the shining feature of the game, aside from the rebalanced Pair Up mechanics, and I’d like to see something like it return in later games.

           It’s fairly obvious from how the routes were designed and the various balance issues that appear that the decision to split the game into three full games worth of content meant nothing was really properly balanced. Admittedly, difficulty is subjective, but for me, Birthright, when played on Normal, was disgustingly easy. When played on Hard, it was a ball-raking experience in frustration and bullshit deaths. Conquest remains frustrating for the entire experience, especially if you’re playing on Classic, but it never feels frustrating in a fun way – it always feels like you’re clawing against the game, desperately trying to find a foothold while you’re being relentlessly carved apart by a million ninjas. And for all of their difficulty, Fire Emblem games do generally feel fair about it. It never feels unwinnable unless you’re on, like, Lunatic or some shit. But god, there were legitimately moments in Fates where I felt like snapping my 3DS in half because it felt flat out unfair.

You can change the difficulty mid-game, but you can only turn it down – Hard to Normal to Easy, Classic to Casual to Phoenix, where units, upon dying, come back the next turn. There’s basically no middle ground when it comes to difficulty – either you’re coasting through with absolutely no challenge whatsoever, or the game actually has your testicles in a vicegrip. Doesn’t help that the game gives you a few really good units in the form of your royal siblings, some of which come pre-promoted, and others with their own unique weapons. In fact, Ryoma’s weapons and stats are so good that people have actually soloed Birthright with him.

Beware the lobster man, for his lust for destruction is endless.

           On the subject of weapons, Fates does away with something that’s been a series standard for decades – weapon durability. Instead, the game gives you several weapons with several differing effects – for example, the Sunrise Katana gives the wielder an insane dodge rate, but has a lower strength. Extra weapons can be forged into one another, letting you steadily improve their stats and, over time, make a weapon far superior to the one you started with. This is a pretty contentious subject in the fandom, but honestly? I don’t have any problems with it. Healing staves still have durability, and it means I don’t feel afraid to use my cool weapons like I always do in other Fire Emblems.

           It also carries over the Pair Up mechanic Awakening introduced, with some new balancing to it – now, units can only aid in attacks if they’re standing to the side of the units in question, and only defend if they’re paired up with (on the same space as) another unit. Enemy units can also pair up, which leads to a lot of frustrating moments when you’ve got two heavily defensive units bottlenecking an area and you’ve got to get past them to make progress. Still, it’s an improvement, and I’d like to see it come back in a game with more unit variety, so I could fully take advantage of it.

           Another thing Fates introduces is unique skills for every character – some get bonuses depending on the type of terrain they’re on, or the characters they’re around. Others have conditional bonuses or abilities, like Orochi and Niles being able to “capture” units that can be convinced to join your army, or Sophie being able to strip enemy units every now and then. This is actually a pretty cool thing overall and it really makes me think more about who to use beyond just stats and if I like them or not.

           There’s also been several changes to how supports work, specifically through the addition of the A+ rank and the new class change seals that have been added. While S-rank is still exclusive to units of different sexes (symbolizing them getting married), A+ notes a “best friend” unit of the same sex, and like S-rank, every unit can only A+ rank once. The new Marriage and Friend seals allow a unit access to classes of their maxed out ranks, giving greater variety in the skills and classes they can earn. It’s a nice change. Master Seals are still in, as are a new variant that allows a child unit to upgrade to a promoted class immediately after recruitment if they’re recruited after a certain point in the game.

…but we’ll get to that later.

           There’s also the My Castle, which is an expansion of Awakening’s barracks, and is honestly such a weird part of the game that it barely garners mentioning. It’s where your shops are, and over time you can add more facilities, gather materials to use to upgrade your items and make stat boosting food with, and participate in some faux-multiplayer matches to get points for other upgrades. It’s interesting, but its existence is… odd, especially since the plot explanation for it has to deal with Fates’ weird flirtation with alternate universe bullshit.

…but we’ll get to that later.

           Overall, the mechanical changes are for the better, it’s just they’re marred by a lot of other dumb shit. Like the map design, the terrible balancing, and Jesus Christ, can I just have a knight, please, so I can stop getting punched in the face???

           This is all without getting into the story, writing, and aesthetic, which is some of the most contentious in the franchise for a good reason. It’s, to be frank, kind of bad. It’s weird and anime in ways that Fire Emblem hasn’t really been in the past, and it feels more like I’m playing a not-so-great light novel adaptation than a fantasy war simulator. And it’s not like Fire Emblem isn’t tropey – for how much people love it, Sacred Stones’ plot sure wasn’t winning too many writing awards, and a good chunk of Awakening’s characters are better described by what anime tropes they adhere to – but Fates really goes all in, complete with some of my least favorite tropes: people being prideful about dumb shit, and sibling fetishism, because no light novel style plot is complete without siblings who want to bang the protagonist.

Some, more blatantly than others.

           So here’s the basic outline of the start of the plot: the player Avatar (default name Corrin) is one of Nohr’s princes/princesses, and have been raised in seclusion in a castle distant from Nohr’s capital. Your siblings, who are also children of the king, Garon, have visited you over the years to keep you company and have grown very close to you. After a series of events, Corrin is captured by Hoshido, the neighboring kingdom, it’s revealed that the protagonist was actually born a prince/princess of Hoshido and was kidnapped by Garon in a previous war. In retaliation, Hoshido kidnapped a Nohrian princess, Azura, and raised her among their royalty. A rapid series of events take place following these reveals, with the Hoshidan queen being assassinated through a curse on your sword and the sudden attack of half-invisible soldiers, Corrin suddenly turning into a dragon, and Nohr invading Hoshido, all leading up to the moral choice that marks the version split: do you stay with Hoshido, the family you were born with; do you return to Nohr, the family you were raised by; or do you seek a third path?

           So let’s talk about something that becomes very, very obvious when you start off: Nohr is evil. Nohr is hilariously evil. One of the literal first things that happen after you meet Garon is him ordering you to execute a pair of prisoners who were captured in a recent skirmish. When you don’t execute them, and your brother Leo pretends to execute them for you so you can let them go later, you find out that your siblings have to do this shit all the time and spend a lot of time only really following the letter of the order under ol’ Dad. One of the next things that happens is you walking in on Garon literally praying to an evil dragon skull. Basically every Nohrian army executive you meet who isn’t one of your siblings or their retainers is also some degree of evil and/or stupidly bloodthirsty. When you get to Hoshido, you find out that Nohrian mages have been sending literal animated corpses over to Hoshido to fuck shit up and just letting them do whatever they want, because Hoshido has a magic barrier keeping Nohr from directly invading it around it (in fact, this is why the queen had to be assassinated in such a roundabout way).

           So when the route choice is presented, it’s supposed to be less “I want to be with this family” and more “I want to stop Nohr” and “I want to change Nohr from within”. Or at least that’s the intent. And while much ado has been made about Treehouse’s various translation changes (which I will not be getting into here, because that’s a can of worms I ain’t touchin’), the changes made at the route split were absolutely for the better. In Japan, when you choose to go with your Hoshidan family, it’s explicitly because they’re your birth family. In the NA version, it’s because you can’t reconcile your own morals with what Nohr’s done.

           The weird part is, it really would not have been that hard to present Nohr in a sympathetic light – it’s stated that due to their perpetual night and poor weather, they have always had poor crop yields and had to invade other countries to support themselves, and ultimately it’s Garon’s dickishness that’s perpetuating the war. Previous Fire Emblems have also had antagonistic, but sympathetic enemy armies, including the Plegians from Awakening, who go to war in the first place because their mad tyrant wants revenge for the previous slights of Ylisse. So Nohr’s levels of cartoonish evil aren’t because it’s not a thing the franchise does… it’s because they just didn’t want to put the effort in to make it actually nuanced.

           From the choice point onward, the plots follow three different paths. Birthright’s path is a fairly standard trudge through a Fire Emblem plot. I’ve heard it called the best “plot” out of the two starting routes, but I think that’s more because its plot is actually paced out well and doesn’t spend the first 15 chapters fucking around making you do Garon’s dirty work and complaining about it ad nauseum. What makes Birthright annoying is in the individual plot beats. There’s two distinct instances of characters killing themselves for no goddamn reason that occur during the story, and while the writers clearly want you to feel something during them, the actual reasons and circumstances are so contrived it’s hard to feel anything about it.

*muffled Rihanna plays in the background*

Furthermore, the further you get into Birthright, the more contrived the reasons for your Nohrian siblings to not ally with you get – Elise is blatantly on your side (and gets a storyline death for it), Camilla is clearly considering defecting before some contrived plot bullshit happens to make her want your friends dead again, and Xander and Leo just keep fighting you for reasons. Reasons that are never adequately explained beyond “Me Nohr, you Hoshido, you traitor, blaaaaaaugh”.

           “Contrivance” is the name of the game with Conquest, too, which sounds like it’s going to have a sneaky storyline about you trying to pull a coup on Garon and change Nohr that way, but is actually about you putting down rebellions for him and fucking up Hoshido because you found out that he’s secretly a monster, and the only way to convince your siblings that he’s a monster is to sit him on Hoshido’s magic throne, because the plot device that Azura pulled out of her ass to reveal this to you with was a one-time use. And your character complains about this a lot. A lot. Half of the dialogue between them and any members of the Nohrian army boils down to “BUT WHY—“ and then your siblings rushing in and saying that yes, you’ll do the evil thing, don’t worry about a thing, and then your character resuming complaints. By the end of the game, you succeed on putting Garon on the throne, revealing that he’s a gross monster, kill said gross monster, and then have a surprise boss fight with a possessed Takumi, who had previously appeared to kill himself for inadequately explained reasons.

           No matter which route you finish first (because let’s be real, you have to pay extra for Revelations, so you’re definitely not playing it first), you’re going to be left with a lot of unanswered questions, first and foremost being “Who were those semi-invisible enemies I fought all the time? What was up with that alternate dimension I fell into with Azura that one time in Conquest? Why were Takumi and Garon possessed by weird gross monsters? Why did Azura just suddenly die at the end for no real reason?” Good news: these are all explained if you buy Revelations. Bad news: You have to buy Revelations to even get so much of a semblance of an explanation, because otherwise these plot things are all left completely unexplained. The plot for Revelations barely has anything to do with the plot for the other two versions, too – while Birthright and Conquest are about the war between the two countries, Revelations is about a dragon that went mad, an alternate dimension kingdom, and how basically every problem in the game was because of these two things.

           All routes manage to hit on one of my bigger pet peeves about Fates, though, and that’s that for all the plot tries to be about this moral quandary of the war, it ends up being more of a soap opera about how much it’s tearing you apart to have to fight your siblings, with a lot of very anime bullshit along the way, and by the time you get to Revelations, it’s gone so full anime that it’s not even pretending to be about a war anymore. The weirdest bits of the writing are in the alternate universe stuff, which you’re first introduced to early in the game when they introduce the My Castle, a pocket dimension only the Avatar can access where time doesn’t pass and the army can just hang around and chill. This alternate universe stuff then proceeds to go wholly unreferenced until a brief visit to Valm that takes place in Conquest, and Revelations, where it’s suddenly the crux the plot spins around.

           Or unless you have a kid.

…but we’ll get to that later.

           There’s a myriad number of other things that make the plot feel weirdly anime and amateurish for such a huge production. Azura is pretty much just “Plot Device: The Character”, with the song she sings through the game basically just being “Plot Device: The Song” with how many different things it gets used for (its actual effects, naturally, are unexplained unless you play Revelations). Azura being a songstress in the first place is a very tropey move – singers and divas are frequently very important characters in Japanese media, and having their songs have magical effects is one of those very common tropes that always feels contrived when it shows up. She’s extremely obtuse with her intentions, which turns out to be because of a literal curse that keeps people from talking about Valm (the alternate universe kingdom) without being in Valm (so again, you want explanations for stuff, better buy  Revelations).

           Similarly, Corrin tends to basically stumble onto new powers and weapons as the plot demands, giving the feeling that they’re meant to be a self-insert wish fulfilment character of some sort. In order, Corrin is a member of all three courts of royalty (yes, including Valm’s), is part-dragon, can turn into a dragon, suddenly has a magic weapon reveal itself to them that’s actually the key to saving the world, and spends a large portion of the plot seeking out a massive power boost so they can go fight Garon on his terms. And while there’s definitely something to be said about a character you can customize being meant to be something of a self-insert, since Corrin’s appearance is fully customizable, and since they can support with everyone, have the most versatility class-wise out of anyone, there’s an amount of wish fulfilment fantasy I can take, and we crossed it a while ago here.

           Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Revelations and things that come out there, one of the big plot points is that your birth parents actually aren’t the same as your Hoshidan siblings’ birth parents, and your dad’s actually a dragon. This is something that’s also told to you when you S-rank one of your Hoshidan siblings, in the form of a secret letter your mom left for them, but up until that point on Birthright? You just think you’re partaking in some incest of the highest degree. So if you want to get that explanation without thinking you’re banging your biological siblings? Better buy Revelations.

           Not that any of this makes any of the sibling fetishism in Fates any less creepy. Since the Avatar, like in Fates’ predecessor, Awakening, can marry any character in the game, all of your Hoshidan and Nohrian siblings are fully marriageable. However, a few things are made immediately obvious when you’re interacting with these characters. The first is that both families consider you to be their family, which raises a ton of awful, creepy questions about power dynamics and the morality of fucking the people who raised you. The second is that the developers absolutely wanted you to fuck your siblings anyways, because Elise and Camilla exist.

From left to right: Three potential routes in the mythical bisexual anime dating sim that only exists in my dreams.

           All of the Nohrian and Hoshidan royalty characters are written around specific anime tropes and honestly feel like they could have been plucked from an otome game, or at the very least, a passably written light novel, but Camilla and Elise specifically play into a particular incesty trope-set that’s very common in Japanese media: the sister who wants a more-than-sisterly relationship with the protagonist. Half of Camilla’s dialogue is basically just throwing innuendo at you while simultaneously implying she wants to mother you, leading to a frankly disconcerting combo of MILF-femme fatale-big sister tropes. And just in case you hadn’t gotten the memo yet, Camilla gets an entire CG scene dedicated to showing off her tits and ass on Birthright, while on Conquest, a large part of the ending CG scene is dedicated to the protagonist running headlong into her titties. Subtle.

Elise, on the other hand, is a cute little gothic Lolita little sister who’s always cheering you on and calling you “Big brother!” or “Big sister!” – grating, but standard enough little sister tropes in Japanese media. The problem is that she’s marriageable, and unlike Awakening, where it was implied that the debatably legal characters all had their kids at least a few years into the future from when the game takes place, the children in Fates are all born not too long after characters get married. So either Elise is supposed to be a legal loli (which is creepy), or you’re banging your underage adoptive sister (EVEN CREEPIER).

All of the siblings in Fates have these problems, but Elise and Camilla really get it the worst, because they’re so overt about it. They’re characters whose entire identities are wrapped up in being your sibling, and you can fuck them. Even with them not being your blood sibling, there was a conscious decision to write them in this faux-incesty manner that adds a real creepy sheen to the whole thing. All of the other members of the royalty? They’re dating sim tropes. Ryoma and Xander are dependable, kind of dorky older guys, Leo and Takumi are supposed to be the standoffish, full of themselves ones, Sakura’s the cute, shy one; and Hinoka’s the hot blooded genki girl. And then there’s Elise and Camilla, who fall into two varieties of incest trope, with a double dose of lolicon on Elise’s end.

But hey, while we’re talking marriage options, let’s talk about the other characters in Fates. So a big thing about Fates is that since it’s technically two separate campaigns, both Birthright and Conquest have complete casts and full armies to take with you, with the characters you get determined by which route you’re on. This isn’t inherently a problem (at least until you get to Revelations and you get both casts, minus a few pre-promotes, giving you a massive pile of units you’ll probably never use), but something about the cast feels very incomplete. There’s a lot of character tropes that are reused from Awakening – for example, Subaki is a Pegasus riding retainer for the crown who’s well known for being absolutely perfect at everything, much like Awakening’s Cordelia; while Hayato is a child-like mage who wants to be taken seriously and has been trying to prove himself, much like Awakening’s Ricken.

It doesn’t stop with just tropes though – a few of the characters are wholesale lifted from Awakening, too. Did you like Cordelia, Tharja, and Gaius? Well, I hope you did, because they’re child units on Birthright. This is actually one point where Conquest has a definite leg up on Birthright, because Conquest’s Awakening cameos, Odin, Laslow, and Selena (Owain, Inigo, and Severa, respectively) actually came to Fates’ world using an actual plot mechanic from Awakening, and get a set of DLC dedicated to explaining their presence in the world in more detail. So that’s another paywall on massive plot material, because that’s the name of the game with Fates, but at least the effort’s been put in.

And something that doesn’t really help is a lot of characters seem to be written very differently depending on route and whether you’re in the main story or the supports. For example, Takumi, if you’ve only played Conquest, is a raging asshole. There is nothing good about him, definitely nothing that seems to suggest the popularity he apparently has in the fandom. If you play Birthright, he’s cold and standoffish and jealous, but there’s depth there. But then there’re his supports, and he’s awkward and prideful and somewhat endearing about it. It literally feels like three different characters.

Top: Takumi in Conquest. Bottom: Takumi in Birthright and his supports.

Overwhelmingly, the various Support chains feel better written than the majority of the game. Even with how tropey a lot of the characters are and how sick I grew of them in the main story, I still enjoyed the support chains a lot. Anything involving Mozu pretty much immediately became a feel good, good time, even with the less personable characters. Raging asshole Takumi became likeable through his supports. It legitimately felt like I was reading a completely different story when I got to the supports, and I genuinely wonder if they were written by a completely different writing team.

Fates also does something no other Fire Emblem has allowed before: there’s gay marriage options. There was much ado made about how stupid it is that they’re version locked, as well as the tropes that go into them, but I’ll give Intelligent Designs credit for trying. However, I won’t give them credit for the fact that the options suck ass. The gay marriage options are Niles, an innuendo spouting Nohrian thief with a thing for bondage and enough angsty backstory and hidden darkness to make him a stereotypical yaoi “top” character; and Rhajat, who is literally just Awakening’s Tharja, a creepy Dark Mage with a penchant for curses and is the Avatar’s stalker. These characters weren’t written to actually make them appealing to gay people – they’re written to fit yaoi and yuri archetypes to make them appealing to straight people.

Go away.

And it’s not like I didn’t give them a chance on my own playthroughs – both my Birthright and Conquest avatars were actually genders that matched the gay options for those routes – but as I got through their support chains, I found out pretty quickly that I didn’t want anything to do with either of them. I’m not interested in marrying someone whose only interesting character traits are his love for innuendo and his angsty backstory, or a creeper who wants my vagina because she’s convinced that I’m her fated lover, and is willing to curse everyone to make it happen.

Legitimately, there’s other characters that would have made more interesting gay options, like Silas, the Avatar’s childhood friend who’s dedicated enough to them to defect to Hoshido; and Soleil, Laslow’s daughter who loves girls so much that her personal skill is all about powering her up when she’s around other girls. Why she’s not the gay option, and Discount Tharja is, is beyond me.

There’s something that’s really jarringly apparent about the Fates cast the further you get into it, though. The game really wanted no business with any party members who weren’t conventionally pretty and young. And nowhere is this more exemplified than with certain pre-promotes you can get, the character of Nyx, and the non-recruitable boss character, Zola.

           So in Fates and Awakening, pre-promoted units (units who come to you already as an upgraded class) generally can’t be supported with any party members besides the Avatar. Both games have exceptions (specifically, Frederick and Anna in Awakening and the royal family members in Fates can all be supported with other units besides the Avatar), but that’s generally the rule. It was odd in Awakening, because in previous Fire Emblems pre-promotes usually could still support with other party members.

But something Fates does that Awakening didn’t is that all of the pre-promoted units who can only support with the Avatar are also old. From Reina, a Kishin Knight with visible wrinkles and a lust for murder; to Shura, a vagrant from a Hoshidan border nation who defected to Nohr; to Gunter, an old man who is one of the Avatar’s retainers. It seems like anyone over the age of 20-something is shoved into the “Avatar-only” category of supportable characters, regardless of their apparent depth of character. Some of these characters are also among the few who don’t come back for Revelations – Scarlet, a Wyvern Lord Resistance leader who joins you in Birthright, gets a particularly undignified death when you first go to Valm to justify her lack of involvement.

It’s the kind of thing that really feeds into Fates’ weird, creepy light novel feeling, because that’s not something other Fire Emblems really have done. Awakening had a good amount of visibly older characters who were still fully supportable (Frederick and Gregor come to mind), and previous Fire Emblems had multiple older characters per game and never really called attention to them the way Fates does. But here, every character (save, say, Benny on Conquest) has to be in the age of conventional attractability and look appropriately, and god forbid they don’t, especially if they’re a woman.

The most egregious instance of this is quite possibly Nyx, a child-like Nohrian mage who’s actually old enough to be an old woman. She falls into a long-standing Fire Emblem tradition of “characters who look like little girls but are actually super old”, which are usually among the various Manakete characters of Fire Emblem. These generally range from “wise despite their appearance” (Myrrh from Sacred Stones) to “uncomfortably childlike” (Nowi from Awakening).

Nyx is a rare exception in that she’s fully human, and looks the way she does because of a curse… and she’s also a Dark Mage, so she wears a bikini everywhere. It really does feel like they wanted an excuse to put a kid in a bikini, and used the “she’s really like a hundred years old!” excuse to justify it (which they also did in Awakening, and it was just as uncomfortable there). And yes, you can marry her as a male Avatar, and yes, she will give you a kid. Have fun with that mental image.

And then there’s Zola.

Who wouldn’t want to give this little creeper a hug?

Zola is a character with… very contentious writing, and another character where, in order to get any perspective on him, you have to play Birthright first. In all three routes, Zola is a minor boss who impersonates the Duke of Izumo, a neutral kingdom in the war, and uses this as a chance to try and execute the Hoshidan royal family before getting killed by Leo for his dishonorable behavior. It’s pretty standard Fire Emblem boss fare, and he’s pretty forgettable there.

But on Birthright, Zola lives past that chapter as a prisoner of the Hoshidan army, and this allows him to gain more depth as a character, revealing that despite his cowardly nature, he does have loyalty toward the Avatar and there’s something sympathetic about him. In any other Fire Emblem game, it’s entirely possible he would be recruitable. In fact, he factors into the Hoshidan army’s plans to fight Garon during the theater episode in Chapter 12.

However, by this point, keen-eyed Fire Emblem players have probably already noticed that Zola did not join the army after his “recruitment”, and the plot summarily executes him after taking three chapters to humanize him, and he’s completely forgotten from that point on. The thing is, more morally ambiguous characters are recruited to the Avatar’s team in Fates alone (cough cough Niles cough Rhajat cough), and they’re allowed to stick around. But Zola is executed despite the game clearly showing he’s loyal to the Avatar (he even pleads to Garon to spare the Avatar after he betrays the party) and him having a fully fleshed out character.

As far as I can tell, the only reason Zola is not recruitable is because he is not pretty. He’s a coward whose looks match his personality, and so he was always intended to be cannon fodder. It creates some legitimate questions about the equating of beauty and goodness in Fates, because there’s legitimately no reason why that plot development needed to occur in Birthright considering how that event is handled in Conquest and Revelations. It would have been easier to leave it all out.

So that’s three distinct cases of characters who are over the hump as far as “acceptable age” and appearance goes, and how they’re treated. It’s another thing that feeds back into Fates’ “big budget light novel” feel – you’re not going to see a ton of those with main characters who aren’t conventionally attractive young people, and the characters are generally designed in a way that they’re appealing to younger players and their aesthetics.

And boy oh boy, does this show in Fates’ character design.

While Fates borrows a lot from Awakening, one thing it does not borrow are Awakening’s class designs. Awakening’s designs were generally fairly simplistic, and aside from a few specific things (flying classes’ baffling lack of armor, those… shoulder things on knights, cavaliers wearing toilet seats for neckpieces), they were fairly reasonable fantasy armor. In fact, most female characters, including the prissy aristocrat troubadour Maribelle, wore pants. The downside there was that a lot of classes were gender-locked; Pegasus knights and troubadours were female only, but even so, they didn’t have particularly egregious designs.

Fates removes gender locking for all classes, but the female only designs are often… egregious. By which I mean, everyone wears panties. Everyone wears panties into battle.

Can you please put on some goddamn pants before you chafe your thighs into oblivion?

Hoshido classes, thankfully, generally wear loincloths over their panties, but the egregious lack of pants tends to be really blatant. But Nohr classes tend to be more than willing to let it all hang out there, even if (or especially if) they’re a horse-riding class. Nothing was worse than upgrading my daughter to a Great Knight, only to find out that she was now riding her horse into battle pantsless. I may have explicitly decided to go with a male Avatar for my Conquest run because I found out that the upgraded Nohr noble class just bares her panties everywhere for female Avatars.

Fates has a lot of really weird fanservice in it. The explicit focus on Camilla’s everything, the panty-baring female class designs, the access to a hot spring that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose beyond being there, and being able to strip enemy units with certain weapons all just gives it a really weird atmosphere for a game that’s supposed to be a serious war drama. It’s the same incongruity I get from a lot of recent anime, such as Re:ZERO, which is apparently a serious story, but also gives its generic main character a harem of pretty anime girls who all want to get with him.

A lot of Fates feels like it’s trying to appeal to the most common denominator by emulating what other games and anime are doing, like the dynamics between characters and the related character design, as well as things they felt were the most popular elements of its predecessor, which was the best-selling Fire Emblem game in a long, long time and possibly saved the franchise. So it gives you a massive cast of characters and a dynamic world-saving plot makes pairing them all up a major mechanic, and even includes previous games’ characters as a throwback to people who liked Awakening. And, most bafflingly, it includes Awakening’s child mechanic.

IT’S TIME.

           When two characters of opposite sex reach an S-rank support with each other, they get married, and their child can then join your army after completing a side mission. Awakening reconciled the fact that the parents and children could fight alongside one another through the use of a time travel plot – no one actually has any children over the course of Awakening’s story (besides Chrom, which is part of the set-up for this element); rather, their future children travel through time to help prevent the horrible future that happened in their own world. It’s a major part of Awakening’s plot, and while none of the child characters have major plot relevance outside of Lucina, the fact that they go out of the way to weave the explanation for why they exist into the plot helps ground them, and several of the children’s Supports involve them trying to connect with their younger, past parents now that they’re in a world where their parents are alive again.

           Fates, however, doesn’t use this explanation. Instead, after your first marriage scene, you’re treated to a cutscene explaining that the parents didn’t waste any time getting knocked up, and after the child was born, it was determined it was too dangerous for any kids to be kept around with the war going on, and so the children were sent off to their own alternate pocket universes (or “Deeprealms”) to grow up safely. Because time passes differently there, the children almost instantly grow to adulthood from the people in the army’s perspective, and by the time they’re recruited they’re fully trained, fully capable soldiers ready to go stab the shit out of some enemy soldiers.

Just shove ‘em riiiiight in. Don’t worry about any consequences, it’s fiiiiiiine.

           There’re a lot of stupid holes and questions that pop up as a result of this, first and foremost being the very obvious question of “When did anyone have time to have children?” All of the female characters in Fates are also combatants, so unless they’re all badasses on the same tier as Metal Gear Solid’s the Boss, they probably weren’t fighting at the same time they were pregnant. Also, Fates isn’t very clear about the time frame the game takes place during, but since no one ages significantly, it can’t be more than a couple of years. Since time doesn’t pass while the characters are in their My Castle, theoretically they could have stayed there for the duration of their pregnancy, but unless the gestational period in Fates’ world is significantly shorter than real life human gestational time, that would mean individual characters having to stay in My Castle for periods approaching upon months, at which point they would have their children, and then shove them in the puberty void to keep them safe while the parents go right back to fighting in a war.

           Which brings it around to the next unsettling implication -- the neglect in the children’s upbringing. Fates’ children only aged quickly from the perspective of their parents outside the pocket dimension – inside their Deeprealm, time moved for them at a normal rate, and the occasional visits the parents gave (as indicated in their Supports with their children) were separated by periods of years. Fates does not shy away from showing how this kind of upbringing affected their children – many of them have major gripes with their parents for essentially abandoning them for their own good, and a few of them have developed some odd quirks and delinquent behavior as a result. Several of their recruitment events are about guilting their parents into bringing them along for the war, and it’s a constant subject in their Supports, as well. No one is particularly happy with how the situation worked out in-story.

           The constant statements that it was done for the children’s own good in their Supports and recruitment events really pushes to the forefront how baffling the explanation is, because the game makes it more than clear that it was this distant upbringing that messed the children up so badly. It goes into absurdity if you’re playing Conquest, which features three returning child characters from Awakening as potential parents, who should know what it’s like to grow up with no parents (all of Awakening’s parent units are dead by the time their children travel back to the past) and would probably not want to subject their children to the same upbringing.

           It’s the inclusion of the child mechanic that pushes Fates from a passable, if flawed, game, right into “basically unplayable”. It’s blatantly obvious that Fates was not written with a child mechanic in mind, and that it was added because Awakening’s shipping mechanics went over very well, and they wanted to capitalize upon that. And it’s not like any of the child characters are bad characters--

           Well, most of them aren’t, anyways.

You are not my children. You are a disgrace.

           But ultimately, all they do is serve to give you more units in a game that’s already swimming with units, and end up being a massive distracting bit of bad writing in a game whose writing is already only passable at best. They literally could have been left out of the game entirely, and nothing of real importance would have been lost.

           (Also, it would have forced them to make a lesbian option that wasn’t just “Discount Tharja”. Or at least tried to make it less obvious that they were recycling everyone’s favorite stalker waifu.)

           Fire Emblem Fates is, ultimately, not a bad game. For all of my griping about the map design and unit distribution, there was clearly a lot of thought put into the new mechanics. Forging weapons to make them stronger feels more rewarding than the old durability system, which always ended up boiling down to “Iron swords for everyone!” so you didn’t waste your cool super weapon. And if you can look past the writing, you’ll definitely have a good time with it, or at least end up frustrated in the kind of fun way only Fire Emblem players do. But the obvious DLC gating, the poor writing, and the nonsensical puberty void bullshit make it a very hard game for me to like, and I don’t think I’ll ever get around to playing the third route as a result.

[heatpeen03-blog]

Life in the Present Tense: “Like” by A. E. Stallings

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

IN THE SEPTEMBER 2012 issue of Poetry magazine, the Canadian poet and classicist A. E. Stallings reflected on living in Athens, where she moved with her husband in 1999. “The one thing people will ask you here,” she writes, “if you are, as I am, clearly a foreigner, is: Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go back?” Nearly 20 years after her move, Stallings continues to live and work in Greece, where the immediacy of contemporary Athens collides with ongoing meditations on motherhood, mythology, politics, and poetry. In Like, her latest collection from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Stallings presents a diverse quiver of poems — arranged in alphabetical order — polished and sharpened by her typically innovative use of traditional verse forms, poised vocabulary, and a playful dexterous teasing-out of simile and metaphor.

While the alphabetical arrangement of the collection creates a kind of echoing, it also reveals Stallings’s distinct threads and themes. Prominent among them is her interest in writing about all-encompassing, everyday parenting. Recalling what the inside-cover calls Stallings’s “archaeology of the domestic,” which grows and changes with her children, as in “Ultrasound,” from Hapax (2006), these poems continue in the spirit of her previous collection Olives (2012), written “smack in the middle of life, marriage and kids,” as she says to one interviewer, “and [which] I hope is full in the way that my life is currently very full.”

Certain poems in Like exist as an extended meditation on the objects of domestic routine — a pair of scissors, a cast iron skillet, a wooden children’s toy, “[n]odding its wooden head” to the mechanical horse-and-dancer of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Cirque d’Hiver.” Don’t miss the “genuine horsehair,” either, rounding out “The Last Carousel,” which showcases the poet’s wit and metaphorical precision. The iron skillet, accidentally cleansed of its “black and lustrous skin” becomes “vulnerable and porous / As a hero stripped of his arms,” while her poem about pencils scratches steadily toward a blunt and darkly comic close, surrendering itself to Time, that “other implement / That sharpens and grows shorter.”

Elsewhere, Stallings plays the role of archivist, recording the minutiae of urban Athens — a city of “folding chairs” and “broken windowpane[s],” “ill-made potholed modern road[s]” and the occasional whiff of tear gas lingering behind after a protest — alongside snapshots of domestic life: pruning the garden, delousing her daughter (“How pediculous!”), searching on her hands and knees for “[s]ome vital Lego brick or puzzle piece.” Not least due to her standing as a classicist and translator, it struck me how related Stallings’s Greece feels to the world of Homer’s Odyssey. The supernatural notwithstanding, the setting of Homer’s epic “feels entirely realistic, even mundane,” writes Emily Wilson in the introduction to her new translation, “a world where a mother packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together.”

Where Stallings writes specifically about her children, she joins a formidable group of contemporary poets (on my side of the Atlantic, at least) engaged in exploring the same fullness of life she attributes to her time in Athens. Stallings’s poems chime with recent work by Fiona Benson, Liz Berry (whose poem “The Republic of Motherhood” was recently awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem), and Sinéad Morrissey, especially the title poem of her 2017 collection, On Balance, which rebuts the wished-for ordinariness of Larkin’s “Born Yesterday,” written for the infant Sally Amis. What Stallings’s poetry shares with these writers might be something like awareness, a quality of self-reflection that accompanies the world renewed by parenthood. Anne Stevenson seems to touch upon this in the final stanza of her “Poem for a Daughter.” “A woman’s life is her own,” she writes, “until it is taken away / by a first, particular cry”:

Then she is not alone but part of the premises of everything there is: a time, a tribe, a war. When we belong to the world we become what we are.

I think it’s this feeling “part of the premises / of everything there is,” that governs much of Stallings’s poetry, including “Lost and Found,” the longest poem in the new collection, a kind of Chaucerian dream-vision in which the poet, following an argument with her son, is guided through a cratered moonscape by Mnemosyne, the classical goddess of memory, to the place “[w]here everything misplaced on earth accrues, / And here all things are gathered that you lose.” It isn’t only objects that end up here but an entire imaginative spectrum of the irretrievable, from the rooms to which we can’t return and the insomniac’s lost hours of sleep, to “the letters / We meant to write and didn’t” and “the frayed, lost threads / Of conversations […] we’d thought we’d spun / Only to find they’d somehow come undone.” On waking, the world is business as usual: hurried school-runs, packed lunches, paperwork, and bills. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Stevenson again, the poet resolves “[t]o live in the sublunary, the swift, / Deep present.” Stallings attends to the moment and the momentary, even as they pass to “[t]he light on my children’s hair, my face in the glass / Neither old nor young; but bare, intelligent.”

Thinking about Stallings as a poet who writes so unapologetically about her life as a parent, I’m reminded of an article by Ange Mlinko, published in the September issue of Poetry back in 2009. In it, Mlinko expresses her suspicion toward what she refers to as “mommy poems,” suggesting them to be, on the one hand, “intense, but also kind of boring” and on the other a frustrating instance of the commodification of contemporary poetry, and of motherhood in general. I found myself wondering what Mlinko might have to say about Stallings’s poems, especially given that Mlinko is thanked in the acknowledgments. In the case of Like, I expect she would approve. “I don’t want to read anthologies of mother poems,” she writes, though “I am always interested in what individual poets write about their children, in context with all the other things they write about.”

As an academic, an expatriate, and a North American mother of two, Stallings is careful to balance her experience of motherhood with the realities of the European refugee crisis, in which Greece plays a significant and complicated role. “I’m grateful tonight / Our listing bed isn’t a raft,” begins one poem, “Precariously adrift / As we dodge the coast guard light,” “That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets,” that “we don’t scan the sky for a mark, // Any mark, that demarcates a shore / As the dinghy starts taking on water.” Later on, the sequence “Refugee Fugue” stands out as one of the collection’s most successful moments, the poem transfiguring itself through different forms and voices like Shakespeare’s Ariel, who’s singing echoes softly through the poem:           

A fathom deep, the body lies, beyond all help and harms, Unfathomable, unfathomable, the news repeats, like charms, Forgetting that “to fathom” is to hold within your arms.

The sequence ends with a found poem of “Useful Phrases in Arabic, Farsi/Dari, and Greek,” constructed from a “Guide to Volunteering” distributed in Athens in March 2016. Somewhere near the middle, the poem introduces its anonymous dramatis personae — “Refugee / Volunteer / Foreigner / Friend” — though we are left to write the conversations that exist between the gaps ourselves:

I don’t understand I don’t speak Arabic / Farsi Slowly Come here You’re safe Are you wet / cold? […] How many people? Sorry Stay calm One line, please Next person

The poem reminds me of certain passages from Human Flow (2017), Ai Weiwei’s massive documentary exploring the extent of the global refugee crisis, and his recent installation Law of the Journey (2017), on display last year at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, a 230-foot-long black life raft, suspended from the ceiling, crowded by 258 inflatable faceless figures.

Like Ai Weiwei, Stallings seems to understand the inherent connection between displacement and anonymity. It’s an idea that surfaces several times in the collection, as in “Alice, Bewildered,” taking an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass as its starting point, in which Alice wanders into “the wood where things escape their names.” On entering this new environment, Alice temporarily loses grasp of her identity, suddenly “un-twinned from the likeness in the glass.” The scene in Carroll’s novel is short: Alice briefly forgets her name — and the names of everything surrounding her — but remembers who she is on exiting the wood. In Stallings’s poem, she never recovers, the poem ending before she has time to “reclaim / The syllables that meant herself,” disintegrating into babble, half riddle, half tongue-twister:

Yet in the dark ellipsis she can tell, She’s certain, that her name begins with “L” – Liza, Lacie? Alias, alas, A lass alike alone and at a loss.

Alice’s displacement here is permanent or, at the very least, indefinite, returning us to the question posed to Stallings, time and again, during her time in Greece: “Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go back?”

Toward the end of that article in Poetry magazine, Stallings refers to a Greek proverb which, for her, articulates the uncertainty of her status as a full-time resident in Greece: “[N]othing is more permanent than the temporary.” The proverb returns in the collection’s opening poem, a villanelle concerning her family’s indefinite period abroad: “Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.” Here, it acts as a kind of refrain, but the proverb reaches out across the rest of the collection, too, coloring the other poems, which so often turn to a consideration of the temporary and the permanent. It’s understandable how this might come to be the overwhelming preoccupation of the classicist; it’s certainly a steady presence in the work of Alice Oswald (“Dunt: a poem for a dried up river” springs to mind). What’s clear in Like, however, is the way Stallings embraces the inevitable falling-away of things — of language, cities, people, civilizations — not as a way of reevaluating the past, but as a means of focusing on the fullness of life in the present tense, on the stuff that’s here now but might not be for long.

As for the poet, the act of writing comes to serve as a kind of solidification, a way of preserving the present before it slips away entirely. “I felt the moment pass / Right through me,” writes Stallings in the final stanza of “Lost and Found”:           

               currency as it was spent, That bright, loose change, like falling leaves, that mass Of decadent gold leaf, now turning brown – I could not keep it; I could write it down.

¤

Rowland Bagnall is a freelance writer and poet. He studied English Literature at St. John’s College, Oxford, and completed an MPhil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-in-the-present-tense-like-by-a-e-stallings/

[countrymadefoods]

6 Weird Dating Traditions In History That Might Actually Make You Grateful For Tinder

“We hear a lot about the so-called "golden age" of dating — the early '50s and '60s, where men brought flowers, opened doors, and generally behaved as if their date was a piece of fine china without any agency — and how modern casual attitudes have made the process both less formal and less magical...Throughout history, people have concocted all kinds of ways to express love and propose marriage in the confines of their societies — and they've had to get very inventive.

Medieval romantic tradition, for instance, was dominated by courtly love, which required men to poetically idealize ladies who were completely inaccessible or out of their league (which usually meant either "married" or "dead"). They'd express their abject servitude to their lady at great length, and enjoy the dramas of an impossible love, without actually requiring anybody to do anything. And from 1740 to 1820, English literature was flooded with novels by women about how confusing courtship was, and how to do it properly.

Men Whittling Love Spoons

Welsh "love spoons" date back to the early 17th century, and were designed to be made out of a single piece of wood to demonstrate the carver's prowess...There was a language to these love spoons: Flowers, hearts and locks and keys were pretty self-explanatory, but a wheel meant "I will work for you," while putting a twist in the wood meant "togetherness 4ever."

Year-Long Competitions

One of the most famous bride competitions, from the historian Herodotus, involved the king Cleisthenes, who made his daughter's suitors compete for an entire year.

Coded Fan Language

In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, a "fan language" developed for women to be able to communicate to interested parties without opening their mouths. Folding hand fans were used to send signals as various as "Do not betray our secret" (covering your left ear with an open fan)...and "Do you love me?" (presenting a shut fan).

Sack Cuddling

[A] practice called bundling appeared in the 19th century (supposedly in the Netherlands before spreading to Britain and Pennsylvania) involving putting prospective couples in two sacks and letting them "sleep" together. It was actually rather kind; rather than letting two strangers marry, each partner was put inside a sack, and they were allowed to get to know each other, talk, and even spoon — without any premarital hanky-panky.

Victorian Dance Cards

Nobody did regimented courtship like the Victorians...The most common courting ritual was the giving of cards at dances, which were the main mixing grounds for different genders among the Victorian English. Men filled out their names on a woman's dance card (basically a roster), which she wore delicately tied around her wrist, and left their personal calling cards if they wished to call on her at home at a later point.If the woman liked what she saw, she gave him her card, and the courtship was on.

 Sexy Belts

There was a trend in the Italian Renaissance for prospective lovers to give their lady friends erotically inscribed belts. Belts pop up in a lot of poetry of the time, as symbols of sexuality and beauty which women of all societal positions could wear and receive as gifts: at one point in Boccaccio's Decameron , a woman seduces a man by giving him her belt...There's a particularly famous belt from Italy which was presumably given to a woman, with a highly erotic poem embroidered on the inside; it begins "I will burn even as a phoenix/with the fire of your kisses/and will die."

Lonely hearts and holiday flings: a history of dating

“[T]he history of dating...how similar the problems of today are to the 1930s, the 1840s, and even the 1780s. From worrying about a partner’s financial standing, or whether someone was going to stick around long enough for you to have children with them, to persuading your parents they are indeed a good fit, the means by which we go about finding love may have changed, but not the hopes, dreams and anxieties we’ve had about discovering it.

In the Regency era, for example, the advice was clear: looks matter but value them at the peril of your long-term happiness...throughout history, grooming and dressing as well as you possibly can has always been a better strategy than ruminating on what you don’t have.”

“Once you were suitably styled, you needed to get a date’s attention. The Georgians were mad for ‘lonely hearts’ adverts, which they would write and post via newspapers including the Times, later in matrimonial gazettes, circulated around London’s coffee houses, while the Victorians settled on the idea of the marriage bureau, an agency designed to match the middle classes, via photos and details about their hobbies.

In the flesh, of course, the best seduction tool has always been dancing. From Regency square dancing to secret Victorian drag balls, from the 1920s ‘turkey trot’ to the 1990s acid house rave scene, the vertical expression of the horizontal desire has rarely failed a trier.”

“But if you couldn’t dance, witty conversation and excellent manners have always served as a good substitute. Meeting a lady on the street in Victorian England was a fraught business...Middle-class Victorians embraced a complicated ritual of giving out calling cards, and of making home visits according to a strict etiquette. However, even if you succeeded getting an audience with your potential amour, you would never be left unattended. Chaperones were in full force until the First World War, when the exodus of Britain’s young men left women to parry and party on their own.”

“When we think of the early 20th century, we may imagine courting couples meeting one another on realistic terms, their expectations untroubled by the imagery of dream homes and impossibly honed bodies that haunt contemporary media. However, we’ve always idealised glamour. From the birth of the celebrity-courted gossip column in the 1920s and the boom in cinema from the 1930s, our aspiration to marry the richest and most beautiful has long intruded upon our daily contentment...the Victorians even had the own version of Instagram, exchanging carte de visites – small portrait prints which would be organised into albums also containing images of celebrities and royalty. These albums were exchanged in flirtation but also as a means of asserting one’s social standing. The trick was to guess whether someone showcasing a royal portrait had in fact met the royal in question.”

“Perhaps the biggest surprise about our dating history is that pre-marital sex has often been the norm for most people. Apart from the revival of a long-practised behaviour called ‘bundling’ – cuddling with clothes on – which was a response to the 1834 Poor Law penalising women who found themselves pregnant as single mothers...Marie Stopes wrote her sex manual Married Love in 1918...advocated the benefits of conjugal love, and physical pleasure within marriage. “I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance...that I feel knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.”

“In the 1930s, Marjorie Hillis, the author of Live Alone and Like it...acknowledging that plenty of single ladies were inviting gentleman callers back to their homes at night, and that societal attitudes were changing: “A woman’s honour is no longer mentioned with bated breath and protected by her father, her brother and the community. It is now her own affair.”

Meanwhile, in the 1960s, ‘the pill’ didn’t quite provide the immediate revolution it has been credited with. Originally it was only prescribed to married women, and even in the 1970s, doctors could refuse women a prescription on moral grounds...the downside of women procuring the pill was that men, who had originally assumed responsibility for acquiring condoms, stopped taking as much responsibility for contraception.”

“The bicycle, meanwhile, also improved romantic opportunities. Contrary to the tricycle, which saw women wearing full skirts and accompanied by a chaperone...Etiquette guides of the period recognised that people could now pay “surprise visits … by moonlight” and that seaside flirtations could be enhanced by romantic bike rides together. While there was fear about exactly what kind of excitations might be invoked by the bike riding, 1897’s Manners for Men advised that men encountering female cyclists “help ladies as much as possible by pushing their machines up the hills for them”.

“In the 1930s middle-class women that found themselves ‘left on the shelf’ still travelled to colonial India in search of husbands. Nicknamed ‘the fishing fleet’, these women travelled by boat to colonial outposts along with ambitious young men seeking work. In some cases, they’d often coupled up before the vessel had even docked...Later, the film Shirley Valentine would inspire a flock of similarly inclined women, including female sex tourists who were courted by young Caribbean men called ‘rastitudes’, and men who sought mail-order brides, on a ‘no-try-before-buy’ basis.”

”As for the future of dating? Well, there’s one thing for sure – it’s not in decline like marriage, which, in 2013, was nearly back down to its 2008 all-time lowest level since 1895. Instead, dating is fast becoming our favourite global hobby. And in an increasingly competitive marketplace, we’ll need new tricks up our sleeves in order to compete for the best paramours.”

(via Lonely hearts and holiday flings: a history of dating - History Extra)

Put down that phone! Here’s how to meet potential dates without apps.

“If you want to meet someone “in the wild,” putting some effort into making that introduction happen and not just hoping for a chance encounter is key. Here are a few tips:

Don’t rely on serendipity

“counting on serendipity to meet someone isn’t always fruitful...If you go into every situation with the expectation of meeting the love of your life, you’re most likely going to be let down. Instead, focus on expanding your social network and giving yourself opportunities to meet people.”

Sign up for an (ideally new) activity

“If you want to meet someone organically, increase the chances of it actually happening by going to places that open you up to meeting people with shared interests.”

Go to events alone

“While bringing a friend along may seem like the most natural thing to do when going to a social event...You’re more likely to get out of your comfort zone and talk to people if you have to.”

Use body language that’ll help

“The key to meeting someone is looking like you actually want to meet someone...First things first – smile...“Who cares if you look like you have nothing to do...It’s amazing what you can do when you’re not looking at your phone...You can have a more intimate conversation when you’re closer, next to each other...Across feels more like an interview.” 

If you’re stuck for a pickup line, look around you

“If someone does catch your eye, try starting a conversation that’s relevant to the situation. Typically, people will be pretty transparent about their feelings. “If they talk to you for a long period of time, they’re probably interested...And if they’re in a relationship, they’ll probably bring up their significant other in conversation.” When in doubt, you can always just flat out ask them out...”

Take risks

“[D]on’t expect that the first person you approach is going to end up being the father of your child, or you’ll be sorely disappointed. The most important part of being open to meeting people is being open to rejection...After all, all you need is one to work out.”

(via Put down that phone! Here’s how to meet potential dates without apps. | The Washington Post)

[johnrgordon]

Thoughts on Christianity and Homosexuality under Slavery

My 2018 novel, Drapetomania, is an antebellum epic that follows two enslaved Black men, Cyrus and Abegnego, who become lovers. After a flood threatens to bankrupt the plantation on which they toil for the benefit of their enslavers, Abednego is sold away. Broken-hearted, Cyrus makes the momentous decision to flee the plantation on which he has spent his entire life, and attempt to seek out his lost lover: his true north star.

One premise behind my writing the novel was to use fiction to restore to life and to cultural memory the sorts of lives that passed unrecorded. For of course no-one wrote a gay/sgl slavery narrative in the C19th — such an endeavor would be almost, if not entirely inconceivable. Following the advice of Toni Morrison, I wrote the book I needed to exist.

While responses to the novel have been overwhelmingly positive, an interesting critique came my way from a (white gay) reader, who found my representation of the lack of guilt and shame Cyrus and Abednego feel over their sexuality and relationship unrealistic. Why, he asked, do they not writhe in the self-loathing that would have been, and has continued to be, planted in gay men by conservative Christian moralizing? Certainly there would be no countervailing liberal or progressive tradition to which they would have any sort of access.

I found the charge interesting: had I, as a gay man, been guilty of sentimentality? Given the years of research I had done in order to render a realistic portrayal of various experiences of chattel slavery and the psychology of its brutality and oppression, had I stumbled here, out of the impulse to allow my characters an implausibly heroic mode?

I reflected, and on consideration decided I had not. In fact, I concluded that my critic was guilty (as it were) of his own particular anachronistic thinking. He took the current Evangelical fixation with homosexuality as the singular locus of moral depravity (much worse than murder, adultery or stealing) and projected that current cultural centrality 170 years backwards into the past. I don’t think contemporary reactionary Christian concerns map onto previous centuries tidily. The feverish religious homophobia of today has gained its focus through LGB people asserting their rights on identitarian grounds analogous to those identities based on race (and so modeled on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements) and gender (feminist movement.) That recategorization removes sexuality from the religious frame altogether — moves it away from sin — and Evangelicals are much exercised trying to claw homosexuality (and its kin) back from the world of human rights based on identity, and into sinfulness. It’s this categorical escape (or refiguring) that drives contemporary religious homophobes mad, and leads to them positioning themselves as victims of a supervening, ‘bullying’ secular discourse.

None of that pertains to the world of America in the 1850s, when Drapetomania is set; a time when by and large ‘homosexuality’ as an identity had not been conceptualized — or certainly not beyond the figure of the performatively effeminate Sodomite (whose ‘freakish’ disordering of gender roles also prefigures later trans discourses). It seems to me unlikely that Cyrus or even the somewhat more worldly Abednego, would have experience of such a person or knowledge of such a concept — and would certainly not see themselves as represented or embodied by it/them.

I think one can also ask, what would have tended to be the focus of the Christian preachers and teachers of the time, in terms of the lessons they sought to impart to the enslaved flock? The historical record is informative. With the exception of active abolitionists, (who could expect to be beaten, tarred and feathered for their efforts), white preachers focused on how slaves should obey their masters, render unto Caesar, set little store by acquiring worldly goods, and endure ‘unimportant’ earthly suffering in anticipation of far more important heavenly rewards. Going forth and multiplying was another tenet, though as an ‘animal’ function it was deemed not to need emphasizing.

What would these white preachers have said to the enslaved about sexual morality? First one might ask, would the enslaved have paid serious attention to anything they said, given the exploitative nature of slavery, and the defenselessness of the enslaved in the face of sexual predation and violence. Any sermonizing on sexual morality would surely have been viewed most ironically, and not be seen as having any moral weight.

Moreover, in such a context, without a trigger or catalyst — that is, an event publicly noticed — why would a white preacher bring up the sins of Onan or Sodom? The pseudo-scientific race discourse of the times gave rise to the notion that ‘Negroes’, being closer to the brutes of the fields, were ignorant of the possibility of sexual ‘deviance’, it being a product of perfumed decadence. Why chance planting such decadent ideas in pliant minds, however limited those minds were assumed to be? Better to say nothing. Better to urge marriage, however little it would count for; to urge reproduction.

What, then, might enslaved preachers preach among their fellows? This, of course, is much less recorded. However, we can reflect on its likely focus. Here a guide is surely sorrow songs and spirituals, imprecating the Lord to ‘let my people go’, drown Pharaoh’s army, and liberate the Children of Israel from slavery. Talk of a Promised Land that for white preachers was located conveniently in the hereafter, was a way for Black preachers to model liberation for other Black folks, share notions of a better life, and even outright rebellion: the North might be at least a version of that promise.

Given the vicious (and vastly predominantly heterosexual) sexual oppressions of slavery, pious talk of sexual morality amongst the enslaved must have dwelt in an ambiguous, uneasy realm, and in the slave narratives, and the sermons at times mixed in with them, we see talk of loving friendship and support between man and woman, husband and wife, championed as key virtues. Within this matrix, it seems to me inconceivable that homosexuality — in particular the tale of Sodom and the strictures found in Leviticus — could be in any way a focal point of sermonizing. It could only conceivably become so as a consequence of homosexual relations occurring in some measure publicly, within the immediate environment.

Indeed, it’s at that point in the novel — when the intensity of the friendship between Cyrus and Abednego becomes noticed by the other hands — that Samuel, the slave preacher with whom Cyrus shares a cabin, hints at the issue. However, he references the tale of David and Jonathon, rather than that of the Cities of the Plain. To his question, is Cyrus and Abednego’s relationship like that of David and Jonathon, Cyrus simply replies yes, and is sufficiently imposing (and indeed well liked enough) to foreclose further comment.

I felt that was realistic. Samuel is confronted by two people he has known all his life, and so the Bible tale he goes to is one about two individuals, rather than the tale of Sodom, with its fairly unrelatable power dynamics — stranded wanderers; a lynch mob of locals — its peculiar aspects (handsome angels as houseguests), and queasy foundations (‘Rape my daughters instead,’ Lot offers) that could hardly have sat well with an enslaved man who has witnessed such sexual violence against women at first hand.

Cyrus and Abednego, then, in somewhat differing ways (Cyrus being at heart a pre-Christian animist, and Abednego anticipating the modern secular man to whom religious doctrine is marginal), both inhabit the tale of David and Jonathon’s loving friendship, and find no reason to connect their experience with the tale of Sodom. I think here love is key. It is love that reveals their desiring natures to both each other and themselves, as opposed to experiencing a desire to perform certain sexual acts with someone of the same sex, and seeking out someone who responds to that desire — though the more worldly Abednego is more aware of a desiring identity as a possibility, prefiguring modern conceptions of self, than is Cyrus, the novel’s primary protagonist. Cyrus’ sense of identity formation is brought into sharp focus later, through his encounter with the white coachman, James Rose.

And so I think my interpretation stands. But it was deeply interesting to be given a reason to reflect upon it at length.

John’s new novel, Hark, a haunting tale of gay interracial teen romance that begins the night a Confederate statue is pulled down in a dying Southern town, is out on Sept 18th, and can be pre-ordered here (US) and here (UK). Drapetomania can be bought here (US) and here (UK).

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Donne’s Androgyny

     The metaphysical poets are characterized by their extensive figurative language, which provides a breadth of interpretations.  A master of these conceits, John Donne wrote poems that were deliberately ambiguous, perhaps a reflection of his inquisitiveness.  Writing many sonnets and elegies, Donne was concerned with earthly love and the connection between earth and the divine.  For Donne, these themes intersect in the shared idea of unity.  Donne’s concern about the unity of man and woman is a point of contention because it is reflective of Donne’s gender and sexuality.  Donne is representative of a new form of androgyny, an identity which he partially adopts, and which is partially retroactively placed upon him, and his confusion about this novel androgyny is reflected in his esoteric and enigmatic poetry.  While this pattern is found in many of Donne’s poems, I will focus specifically on “The Canonization”, while referencing other of Donne’s poems as examples of his style.  Donne’s image of an androgynous phoenix in “The Canonization” coupled with his allusion to riddle provide illustrious examples of Donne’s new androgyny that is present in many of his poems. 

    To understand this “new androgyny” which Donne embodies, one must understand what androgyny is in the most general sense. In her essay, “John Donne and the Limitation of Androgyny”, Virginia Mollenkott outlines the potential misinterpretations of androgyny.  Her definition of androgyny is “Whether understood as a physical or a psychological combination of male and female characteristics, the essence of androgyny is the concept of the two within the one. ”  She explains that one may look at the androgynous being as a balance or a fusion.  When man and woman are represented as one person, such as in marriage, there is a subsuming of the woman by the man.  The woman is overshadowed, and though there is a union, the woman becomes part of the man; there is no new object created.  However, when androgyny is viewed as a fusion, the union of man and woman becomes something entirely new.  The androgyne is neither man nor woman, but components of both, which Mollenkott calls the balanced/dialectical model, and states, “Within this balanced/dialectical model, the idea of androgyny is truly liberating. ” (Mollenkott 23) This relates to John Donne because he as a preacher-poet features balanced components of man and woman, reflected in his contradictory personal characteristics. Donne’s identity as the balanced/dialectical androgyne is influenced by poetic, historical, and religious sources.  

     Donne’s poetic influence in the development of his identity comes from riddle poetry.  A riddle is a dialectic thing.  There is the question and the answer, which synthesize together to make sense.  Donne, like all of the metaphysical poets, had a preoccupation with wordplay, and there are often multiple meanings in his verse.  In his poem “The Canonization”, Donne specifically mentions the riddle of the phoenix.  “Donne’s Riddles” is a 1984 essay written by Alison R.  Rieke for The Journal of English and Germanic Philology addressing Donne’s preoccupation with riddles, and the different types of riddles that may be found in his poetry.  The essay discusses the enigmatic subgenres found in Donne’s poetry, as well as the importance of Donne’s fascination with the truth in paradoxes.  Through close reading Donne’s poem “The Canonization”, I will gather evidence to defend the idea that Donne’s confusion about his own androgyny is reflected in his poetry.  By amalgamating androgyny and the phoenix’s riddle in the poem, Donne expresses a particular fascination with gender while emphasizing his inquisitive curiosity.  Furthermore, he is continuing a tradition of poets that has existed since before writing. 

      According to Rieke, Donne was in possession of a book called Aenigmatographia, an anthology that compiled everything know about riddles and riddling.  Like epic poets whose tales featured riddles, Donne includes riddle-play in his poetry to pay homage.  Donne’s interest in referencing the Classical poets is apparent through his Sapphic poem “Sapho and Philenaes” which makes direct allusion to Ovid.  As such, like all poets before him, he is occupying a feminine space as a poet; from the female Muse goddesses of Greek mythology, there is something inherently feminine about writing poetry.  To be a male poet, particularly one obsessed with riddles and gender is to be a balanced androgyne, confounded by your own contradictions. 

     Historically, Donne was writing at the turn of a century, and took influence from the events occurring around him.  The European colonization of the Americas was clearly impactful to his poetry, as he references it in poems such as “To His Mistress Going to Bed”.  John Donne was likely familiar with a specific speech by Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled during Donne’s lifetime.  As the first female monarch of the British Empire, Elizabeth’s reign was greatly influential to the people’s view on gender roles.  Elizabeth presented a contradiction because an empire consisted of a union between man and woman.  The man in this instance is the monarch and the woman is the land.  For Elizabeth to successfully fulfill the equation of the empire, she embodied androgyny, not denying her identity as a woman, but pairing it with an identity as a man.  Elizabeth I never married nor had children and often wore armor.  In her “Speech to the Troops at Tilbury” delivered in 1588, Elizabeth claims to have the body of a woman, but “the heart and stomach of a king. ” If we are to take her claim literally, Elizabeth fits the definition of androgyny.  Donne was certainly familiar with this speech since he would have been sixteen years old when it was delivered.  

     Donne’s religious identity developed throughout his lifetime and included his conversion from Roman Catholicism to the Church of England.  He was raised a Roman Catholic by his family, a religion which was illegal in England at the time, and kept the religion until adulthood when he began to question it.  His skepticism of Catholicism is reflective of his desire to question everything.  Donne’s religiosity was fueled by intellectual curiosity.  Furthermore, space that he occupies as a Catholic-turned-Protestant is similar to the dialectal union of opposites that forms androgyny.  Once he converted to the Church of England, Donne fiercely rejected Catholicism, writing anti-Catholic polemics.  A religious man throughout his life, Donne devoted much of his musings to pondering the union between man and the divine and used symbols and conceits in his poems to express this fixation.  An instance of this is Donne’s titling of “The Canonization”, which refers to the ecclesiastic practice of placing one in the canon of saints or to deify.  While Donne’s religious influence is apparent in his poems, it also informs his identity as an androgynous figure. 

     Much focus has been given to how Donne developed his androgynous identity, one that he would probably not claim.  However, this identity was also developed for Donne through environmental factors and his relationships to other people.  Donne becomes the androgyne not only through those poetic, historical, and religious factors but through his propensity for submissiveness and bisexuality.  By acting with prescriptive feminine characteristics and sexual tendencies, Donne contains parts of both man and woman.  To construe such a manifest misogynist as Donne as a submissive and bisexual, one must examine his relationships to the subjects about which he writes.  

     To view Donne as submissive, one must look to how the women for which he writes treat him.  “Women among the Metaphysicals: A Case, Mostly, of Being Donne For” is a 1989 essay by Janel Mueller for Modern Philology that addresses the relationship between Donne and the women for which he writes.  Mueller asserts that contrary to most modern conceptions, Donne is actually subservient to the woman, not the other way around.  She examines a poet named Dryden’s criticism of Donne which asserts that women are subjects in his poetry and prose, and refutes that Donne is a subject of these women.  Mueller’s analysis gives new perspective to the gender and sexuality dynamics of the seventeenth century and allows for a more feminist reading of Donne’s work.  Famed for his love poetry, Donne addressed many of his poems to his objects of affection/infatuation.  However, Donne was often snubbed by these women, resulting in his writing more desperate and lascivious poetry.  As Mueller argues, “Crucial initiatives for the production and reception of Donne's poetry rest with these women; they patronize him, not he them. ” (Mueller 142).  Donne thinks he is in the dominant role in this dynamic, but his love objects have him strung up and wrapped around their fingers like a puppet.  

     Our theories on Donne’s sexuality are dependent on those which are the subjects of his poems.  While most have assumed Donne’s heterosexuality, many have questioned the famous love poet’s sexual orientation and why it matters in relation to studying his poems.  “(Re)Placing John Donne in the History of Sexuality” is a 2005 essay written by Rebecca Ann Bach.  In the essay, she discusses how history has placed Donne as the trademark heterosexual poet and ignores his blatant misogyny.  However, Bach argues that Donne is not heterosexual, and one source of evidence is his blatant misogyny.  She argues that our understanding of seventeenth-century categories of sexuality may be skewed and that Donne is certainly not the modern heterosexual.  Bach never refers to Donne’s sexuality explicitly as bisexuality, but cites historical references that fit the profile, such as “Donne, according to himself, wasted his youth in the very pleasurable pursuit of sex with women.  At the same time, he was involved in deep love relationships with male friends until a profligate pursuit of one woman-Ann More, who became his wife-exiled him, for a time, from the circles of male friendship that constituted his life. ” (Bach 264) Throughout the article, Bach distinguishes between not being homosexual because you are not attracted to the same sex and not being homosexual because it is a sin.  Donne admits to his youthful homosexual desires, then represses them because he views them as sinful in nature.  His misogynistic poetry portraying women as nothing more than sexual objects is then an admission of guilt in hopes that his even greater sins—those in which he sexually engaging with men—will be forgiven.  In Donne’s words, according to Bach, “Throughout his writings later in life, Donne rails against man's sinful nature and excoriates his own forays into sin. ” (Bach 267).  Donne openly admits to his forays into lust with women—indeed he makes beautiful verse out of them—but he either falsifies the gender of his male sexual endeavors or does not write about them in fear of religious persecution.  Donne’s objectification of women is a defense mechanism against his views as his own sinful and emasculating homosexuality.

      While Donne may not have been a heterosexual, there is some investigation into whether Donne created the model for the modern heterosexual man.  Through Donne’s blatant objectification of women, for example in such poems as “To His Mistress Going to Bed”, Donne created the paradigm for women-disparaging cisgender heterosexual men.  It was his own discontent with his gender and sexuality that developed this romanticized misogynistic version of Donne.  Furthermore, it is possible that Donne’s fierce opposition to his own identity misleads people into becoming the modern heterosexual man—a sexuality which in Donne’s time looked very different than it does today.  As Bach points out, “Donne obviously loved having sex with women.  In some of his poems, his speakers sound like stereotypically sex-obsessed fraternity brothers, in others like the sensitive men of Cosmopolitan magazine dreams, and in others like Larry Flynt of Hustler fame. ” (Bach 263) However, Bach also insists that Donne does not identify with this sexuality which he represents, asserting, “despite the fact that Donne's sexual practices and the way he represents sex resemble modern sexual practices and the way sex might be represented today, his ways of understanding and representing sexual practices differentiate him utterly from modern heterosexuality. ” (Bach 263).  Donne’s identity is one that may not exist today, but I purport that our conception of the modern androgyne is the identity that best suits Donne. 

      This submission and the elementals of homosexuality which forms Donne’s bisexuality turn Donne into the androgynous being with which he is fascinated.  Donne’s fascination with this theme is reflected is many of his poems which focus on a union between man and woman wherein they unite to form something else.  Furthermore, Donne is fascinated by this theme if only for its closeness to the union of man and divine, a space which Donne actively sought to occupy.  In his poetry, Donne references unions of opposites as well as paradoxes.  His central question seems to be something like this: what is created when perfect opposites are united? Some examples of opposites which Donne noticed were as follows: man, the divine, man and woman, dominance and submission, Catholic and Anglican, life and death.  What makes Donne the father of the metaphysical poets is his expert use of conceit which relies on the comparison of unlike things.  In his poem, “The Canonization”, Donne makes expert use of conceit on multiple levels.  Though dissects the many layers of the poem, one can elucidate the ways in which Donne plays with opposites and paradoxes and attempts to engage readers with his central question.  Though Donne wrote many dialectal poems, “The Canonization” provides excellent close-reading material when considering the theme of androgyny in Donne’s poetry.  

     At this point, it seems appropriate to engage in a close-reading of Donne’s poem, “The Canonization. ” This poem of Donne’s is concerned with an unknown addressee disrupting the speaker’s love, a love which is so great that it is deserving of canonization.  Donne alludes to religion while addressing love, balancing these two central themes of all of his poetry.  It is within this poem that the reader can speculate upon Donne’s preoccupation with opposites, which is reflective of his identity as an androgynous poet.  

     In “The Canonization”, the speaker and his lover exist in a world separate from everyone else.  This theme of lovers existing in a microcosm is prevalent throughout Donne’s poetry, as there was a notion during the Renaissance that the human body was a microcosm of the physical world, and the mind was the monarch.  Donne possibly agreed that we are all tiny worlds and seemed to believe that two true lovers form a singular world together.  There are other examples of this theme of singularity in Donne’s poetry.  "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" speaks of "Our two soules therefore, which are one" In "The Extasie" the speaker depicts two lovers whose souls speak as one.  In “The Canonization”, the speaker seems to prefer to be in this separate world with his lover where he will “build in sonnets pretty rooms”.  The speaker and his lover exist in multiple layers of tiny worlds.  They exist in their reality where it’s only the two of them, and they exist in the immortal world of the poem. 

   These worlds which Donne describes for lovers are only ever populated by two, partly male and partly female.  Without describing it as androgyny, Donne imagines a thing which is a union between man and woman, a world which they occupy with balance.  One can see the immersiveness of this world through the speaker’s desperate obsession with his lover.  He spurns all of his responsibilities and other desires to focus solely on the all-encompassing love, existing in another world with his lover.  What is this androgynous space and how does it work with Donne’s central questions of union? Donne also addresses this space in his poem “The Sun Rising”, another poem about one of Donne’s love affairs.  In the poem, Donne compares the lover’s room to their own world, berating the sun for interrupting it.  The Renaissance notion of each human body as a microcosm for the physical world coupled with Donne’s notion of lover’s existing in their own world leaves room for an androgynous world-being.  

     “The Canonization” asserts that the love is worthy of being remembered as highly as saints but does not explain why or what makes this love so worthy.  There are no qualifications of the love other than its greatness.  In fact, the world poem is defending the greatness of the love without providing evidence for its greatness.  Though the speaker seems obsessed with his love object, he does not provide any character traits or physical qualities of her.  The lover has no agency in the poem, so the reader cannot know her opinion on the speaker.  She does not seem to be present in the setting of the poem, and she is only referenced in relation to the speaker.  The greatness of the love and the lover is generated through the reader’s imagination in response to the speaker’s defense of it.  Because the speaker is so presumptuously defending he and his lover’s right to love, the reader develops an idea of this love as supreme, perhaps even divine.  That Donne would have the audacity to compare the love to the canonization of saints gives the reader the impression that it must be that great because a pious man such as Donne would not be so blasphemous as to lie about that.  The fact that Donne asserts that his lovers should be canonized is precisely what canonizes them in the reader’s mind.  Basically, their love must be great because Donne wrote a poem about it.  Donne reminds us of this through the self-aware line, “Our legend be, it will be fit for verse. ” In calling the love a “legend”, Donne asserts its importance and immortality.  He goes on to further praise the love with testimonial, claiming “all shall approve. ” Donne’s level of praise has the reader developing their own conceptions of what this love must be.  Given no description of the love, the reader can imagine their own subjective perfect love and embody the experience of the speaker; this makes the poem resonate with any reader.  Had Donne given specific description of the lover, the poem may not have been so ubiquitous.  Even when the love is described as not hurting anyone, the reader gains the impression that it is powerful.  The speaker states that his act of loving has not harmed anyone, but that does not mean his love is not powerful.  Without any context for their relationship, the speaker and his lover present an image of love worthy of jealousy.  This image is predicated not upon anything inherent about the lovers, but upon the defense of their love from the assault and criticism of the addressee.   

     Donne conflates the lovers by comparing them to the same thing, though it is unclear if they are meant to be copies of the same object or one singular object.  Donne uses these comparisons to symbolize the union of lovers and the singular new thing that is created from this union.  This symbolism is consistent throughout Donne’s poetry.  The speaker first compares himself and his lover to a fly, suggesting, “Call her one, me another fly”.  While one might like to think the latter, the word “another” in this line implies that they are two flies, rather than one single fly embodying two lovers.  However, they have both become a fly, sexless and the same.  Is the fly the metamorphosis of the union of lovers? Perhaps this is what new thing they become when you combine parts of each.  In the next line, the speaker compares the lovers to tapers or candles.  The pluralization in this line might suggest that there are two tapers and each lover embodies one of them, but it could be understood that the two lovers together embody many tapers.  Even if they are two separate tapers, they have again transformed into objects that are sexless and the same.  The likening of the lovers to tapers is interesting because it implies that they are transient yet powerful.  The image of love as a candle further reinforces the strength of the love to the reader without any real descriptors.  Though he is objectifying himself and his lover, the speaker makes such unusual comparisons that they do not read as offensive.  The significance of the fly and the taper has yet to be elucidated, but the ordinariness of these items while maintaining the strength of the love speaks to Donne’s poetic prowess.  Donne makes further, more specific remarks about the union of the lovers in the remainder of the stanza.  

     If Donne had no conception of androgyny, then he would not have been able to make the illustrious comparison of an eagle and a dove forming a phoenix.  Like the tradition of riddle poetry before him, Donne poses a riddle about the union of man and woman through referencing the ancient mythological riddle of the phoenix.  Examine the following lines:

“And we in us find the eagle and the dove.                  The phœnix riddle hath more wit                By us; we two being one, are it. So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.         We die and rise the same, and prove         Mysterious by this love. ”

The first line does suggest that the speaker and the lover find the eagle and the dove within themselves, rather than transforming into an eagle and a dove.  This brings up the following question: does one lover find an eagle within them, and another with a dove within them or do they both find the eagle and the dove within them.  The eagle is this line is meant to symbolize masculinity, while the dove symbolizes femininity.  If one lover finds an eagle within them and the other a dove, who is to say that man finds an eagle and the woman finds a dove? If the speaker finds the dove within himself, representing the feminine and by extension, his lover, he is an androgyne, one consisting of both male and female parts.  The lover, as well, if she finds the eagle within herself, is an androgyne.  If they both find both the eagle and the dove within themselves, they are still both androgynes.  

     The second line contains an allusion to the phoenix’s riddle, which is worth reading into in more depth.  As mentioned above, Donne looked for inspiration from a book called Aenigmatographica, which included Homeric, Heraclitan and Pythagorean riddles.  It with in this book that Donne because familiar with the riddle of the phoenix, of which it contains at least six versions.  Despite my research, I am unable to locate a translation of the riddle of the phoenix from Latin, but there is a riddle within the myth of the phoenix as a fantastic creature. 

     The phoenix as a combination of the eagle and the dove embodies the dialectical union of two things transforming into something different.  Rieke calls this “the famous conceit of the hermaphroditic phoenix. ” (Rieke 1).  It is the masculinity of the eagle and the femininity of the dove which make the phoenix “hermaphroditic” or androgynous.  “Hermaphroditic” is an outdated term, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means “A person or animal (really or apparently) having both male and female sex organs. ” This definition is limited to sex organs, but its use has included male and female characteristics as well. The phoenix represents a cycle of death and rebirth through its bursting its flames and rising from the ashes is representative of the cycle of the two lovers.  Their love for each other is so fierce that it is as if bursting into flames, and they rise from the flames together as one.  The speaker states that the phoenix riddle “hath more wit” when it is about the speaker and his lover because they embody the phoenix.  More than just containing parts of each other through the eagle and the dove, the lovers embody the “hermaphroditic phoenix”, the union of the two into the one. Through this line, Donne expresses his obsession with the androgynous. 

     Draw attention to the line “hath more wit”, which is representative of Donne’s use of paradox and riddle.  Donne is testing the reader’s own wit and their willingness to interpret this stanza and a riddle.  Within this line, the lovers are not only embodied by the phoenix, but also by the wit of the phoenix, which, by them, has more wit.  This “wit” to which Donne is referring might be the unsolvable paradox.  How can the phoenix perform these impossibilities, such as rising from its own ashes and embodies two creatures at once? Similarly, how can the love be so strong as to act as a single thing, embodying a balanced union of the lovers? These are the questions which Donne poses with this wit.  Much like the performative way in which the poem perpetuates the canonization of the lovers, the poem perpetuates wit through its use of conceit.  The extended metaphor of the phoenix coupled with the metaphor of canonization provides an environment of cleverness, of which readers may continually discern more layers. 

     More apparent evidence of Donne’s preoccupation with the union of the two into the one cannot be found than the line which reads, “we two being one, are it”.  This is the ultimate “wit” with which Donne is obsessed with understanding.  Donne is not specific in describing what the “it” is supposed to mean, and that is precisely the point of this conceit.  Rather than using a pluralized pronoun, Donne employs the singular referring back to the “riddle”.  What becomes of the union of man and woman is to Donne a riddle, but he believes this state exists in the most perfect of relationships.  When Donne describes “two being one”, nothing points to a sexual reading.  He could be referring to a physical, sexual bond, or a marital one, or a strong emotional union.  Donne seems to be imagining a sort of divine being which transcends man or woman because man and woman are unable to comprehend it, hence the “riddle”.  This is supported by the following line, where this “it” is described further. 

     In the following line, Donne is specific with his references to androgyny.  He proposes that the lovers are “one neutral thing both sexes fit. ” It is clear from this line that Donne only things there are two sexes, and this third neutral thing is not its own sex, but a combination of the two.  This fits nicely with our definition of androgyny, which asserts that the androgyne is one partly male and partly female.  In Mollenkott’s analysis of Donne’s androgyny, she describes this neutral space nicely stating, “Because they two have become one organic being, they are a fabulous phoenix-like “one neutrall thing”—not neuter but in perfect equilibrium, since of course the phoenix contained both sexes” (Mollenkott 23).  The word “fit” supports this argument, as since both lovers fit they are perfect balance.  The emphatic use of the word “one” in this line underscores the importance of singularity in union.  However, to form this union is not easy, which is why Donne is so concerned with understanding it.  Is it love that catalyzes this union, or something more required? In the following line, Donne gives insight to how the androgyne may be formed.   Apparently, for the speaker and the lover to “rise the same”, they must die.  This is alluding to the myth of the phoenix, which is immortal because it bursts into flames at its death and rises anew from the ashes.  Perhaps this is not a necessary qualification of becoming “the same”, but when they do die, they rise the same.  When considering Donne’s Christian background, this line may reflect Christian themes.  Donne’s exploration of the man-woman union is tied to his exploration of the man-God union, which Jesus Christ represents. The resurrected Jesus represents the union of man-God that Donne wishes to understand, and he alludes to this here by describing his lovers are rising from the dead and becoming the same.  Furthermore, Donne is not specific in his description of “the same” because he does not understand what the union of man and woman creates.  Thus, the lovers “prove / Mysterious by this love. ” Because Donne does not understand what the union of man and woman creates, those who achieve it perfectly are deserving of canonization because they have solved one the great mysteries.  Donne is trying to achieve this perfect unity himself, and in that endeavor, developing his own androgyny.  Donne’s self-consciousness is reflected in the self-consciousness of the speaker in this poem.  

     The speaker’s preoccupation with status and success unveils the self-consciousness he experiences with himself, and by extension the self-consciousness Donne feels as an androgynous poet.  Donne’s own lack of success as a poet emasculated him throughout his lifetime, as he was unable to make money writing poetry for a time, and unable to provide for his rather large family.  This probably made Donne feel uncomfortable with his masculinity but led him to encourage others to reject gender norms and follow their passions.  In the poem, the speaker refers to the wealth of others, specifically that of his addressee.  From the first stanza, one may assume that the speaker does not come from a noble background, as he refers to his “ruined fortune”.  The speaker was once wealthy, and still consorts with people who are wealthy, such as the addressee, but harbored bitterness about his own financial insecurity. The speaker may harbor strong love for this woman, but she may not accept him for his “ruined fortune”.  This may also be the reason that the addressee is attempting to stop this love; he does not approve of the speaker who cannot provide for his lover.  This analysis greatly changes the meaning of the poem as a whole.  While it is still describing a love so strong that it is deserving of canonization, it is also providing a message to follow your heart, even if you are of a different economic status than your lover.  Furthermore, fortune does not define how strong one may love, so what does it matter? If Donne is representative of the speaker, this poem is representative of Donne’s life.  One may read the poem as a defense of love over corrupting political values, a passionate testimonial to follow your heart, as the truest love is also the purest.  

     To examine “The Canonization” is only to examine one example of Donne’s preoccupation with the space between male and female and the space of defying gender normative standards.  With this poem, Donne addresses themes of man and the divine as well as man and woman.  The combination of these themes represents the two paradoxes which most concerned Donne.  Through utilizing paradox and riddle in his poems, Donne attempts to affix the reader with the same perturbance regarding the idea of androgyny.  Through influence from historical riddle poetry, Queen Elizabeth I, and his religious identity, Donne became an androgyne of his time.  His struggle with this identity is reflected in his poetry, though historical misinterpretation may have placed him as the father of modern heterosexuality.  

[phosphorliights-a-blog]

FELIX --

FACE // AESTHETIC // ANNA (daughter)

Name: Felix Christopher Anderson

Sex/Gender: Male/Male

Righty or Lefty: Lefty for some things, Righty for most.

Age: 45

Height: 6’ 1’’

Weight: 186lbs

Eye color: Blue

Hair color: Medium brown

Distinguishing Marks (tattoos, piercings, scars): He has a faint scar on his temple from a fall as a child, and a tattoo of a bird on his left ankle.

Physical Description: Felix is tall, well put together, and keeps himself in good physical condition. His appearance varies depending upon his job, but for the most part he’s very clean cut, clean shaven, and well groomed.

Marital Status: Divorced

Significant Other/s: Currently Single

Children: Two. Anna (24), Percy (10) neither have a relationship with their father anymore, Anna did up to a point, but Percy has never really known Felix.

Ethnicity: American

Religion: Somewhat spiritual Humanist

Beliefs: All things are possible, nothing is absolute, we cannot perceive the extensive possibilities that the universe has to offer.

Diction, Accent, Etc.: He’s well practiced in many accents but when needed, he defaults to a very neutral American accent. His annunciation is always clear and precise. Education (highest): PhD in Human Psychology Vocation/Occupation: He currently works as an accountant. Sort of. Employment History: During his marriage over a decade ago he put his degree to good use as a psychiatrist, he’s since left that career path behind. Own or Rent: Rent Living Space: He lives in a modest townhouse at the moment in a fairly upscale neighborhood. He keeps the place decorated somewhat classically, not holding much love for contemporary or modern furnishings. He believes in clean, simple comfort above all else for his living space. He can be a little bit of a clutter bug, but that’s nothing that’s ever bothered him. Workspace: A very small and simple office space, nondescript, hiding in plain sight. It’s always tidy, presentable, and rarely busy. Main Mode of Transportation: He tends to take cabs, as he’s never been a huge fan of driving. He’s not above public transportation, and when he does go anywhere with his own vehicle he rides his motorcycle. Fears: He’s incredibly afraid of losing himself in his work, losing his sense of self or his identity. Secrets: His family and relationship history are buried six feet under. He uses accounts in other names to funnel money to his children to see that they are taken care of. If he ever thought they needed him more he might reevaluate, but no such time has come thus far. IQ: 127 Eating Habits: He tends to have a strict eating schedule he adheres to, but it’s really all about timing, not what he eats. He goes for what is most convenient, which usually means eating out or snacking. Food Preferences: When he has his way he is definitely a meat and potatoes kind of guy. He likes hearty comfort food. Sleeping Habits: He sleeps on the left side of the bed on his stomach, typically in a pair of sweats or boxers. If it’s especially hot, he might sleep naked, if it’s especially cold he might put on a t-shirt. Book Preferences: He likes to read young adult novels. He finds them wildly entertaining and impossibly ridiculous. They’re the opposite of everything his life has become so perhaps in a way, they’re an escape. A guilty pleasure. Music Preferences: He loves his dated music, everything from early 70s to late 80s. Especially rock and hair metal ballads. He has an extensive collection of vinyls and you can often find him relaxing to some Iron Maiden or Led Zeppelin. Groups or Alone: He tends to be a loner, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t perfectly capable of enjoying himself in a group of people. He’s well practiced at it. Leader or Follower: Neither. He tends to flow away from the traditional roles. He’s more of an outsider looking in. Planned out or Spontaneous: He’s a planner to his core. Meticulous to a fault. Journal Entries (do they keep one?): He doesn’t keep so much a journal, as several books of notes written in shorthand so that very few people can actually read it, were his things to ever fall into the line of sight of someone he didn’t intend. Hobbies, Recreation: Aside from his job and his terrible books, he enjoys exercise. His body is his hobby. He works it, trying all sorts of interesting different regimens for the sake of. How do they relax?: He relaxes with some music, a cup of coffee, and a book. What excites them?: A challenge. So few people challenge him mentally or physically. He wouldn’t mind a sparring partner or someone to play poker or chess with. Anything that might test him. Pet Peeves?: dog-eared book pages, excessive neatness, and people who correct colloquialisms like “I could care less” to seem superior. Attitudes: He tends to be relatively easy going, all things considered. And it’s not so much that he’s laid back but that he doesn’t get easily emotionally involved in much of anything. There are very few things that get him worked up. He’s strategic and business minded, but he does have a little bit of a mischievous streak. He knows he’s intelligent enough to get away with certain things, so he does. Stressors: The thing that stresses him most is when he has nothing to do. When his business is slow, which is more often than not, he feels pressured to find something to occupy his time. Obsessions: Furthering his knowledge. He loves to study, learn new things, practice languages, consume whatever he can get his hands on to nurture his education. Addictions: Caffiene. It’s his only real addiction. He gets terrible migraines without it, and every morning, before he can even start the day he pops a couple Excedrin just to cope. Ambitions: More than anything he wants to feel fulfilled. It’s not easy, he’s still seeking out more to stuff into the void inside him. Birth date: 10/22/1969 Personality Type: INTJ Traits Associated with Personality Type:

The INTJ’s mind is naturally geared towards systematically analyzing information from many contextual perspectives, and rejecting or retaining information as they become aware of its usefulness or validity. They probably do very well in school, and in any pursuit that requires serious analytical thinking.

They’re extremely insightful, and see things that are not obvious to others. This ability to see patterns and meanings in the world can help the INTJ in many different ways.

When given a goal or context, an INTJ is able to generate all kinds of possibilities. They’re able to see the problem from many different angles, and come up with a solution that fits the needs of the current situation.

They don’t take criticism personally, and are open to changing their opinions when they’re shown a better idea or better way of doing something.

An INTJ has a “stick to it” attitude. They’re not afraid of hard work, and will put forth a great deal of effort towards something that they are interested in. This persistence will help the INTJ to achieve any identified goal.

Usually intelligent and able to concentrate and focus, the INTJ can usually grasp difficult ideas and concepts.

They can discriminate well amongst their intuitions and build ingenious systems to meet identified goals, or determine a successful plan of action to meet an identified need. In such a way, they may be brilliant scientists, doctors, mathematicians, or corporate strategists.

Their deep understanding, logical abilities, and persistence may enable them to make discoveries or uncover new ways of looking at something. In such a way, they may perform a great service to society. For example, an INTJ is the likely personality type to discover the cure for cancer.

The INTJ with well-developed judgment will be able to grasp and process concepts that are beyond what their natural intelligence appears to be able to handle.

If they have achieved a good amount of life wisdom, an INTJ can become a powerful political force.

General Health: He’s in good health, though he doesn’t have the strongest immune system. If something is going around, he’s likely to catch it. Despite that, he’s not a germaphobe by any means. Medical History: He’s only ever been hospitalized twice in his entire life, once when he cut his head open on a coffee table as a boy, and again in college when he drunkenly fell down a flight of stairs and broke his right wrist. Allergies: Cats

What does Felix do?

The question isn’t what does he do, but rather, what doesn’t he do?

Felix is a paid companion, not a whore, but a man who tailors himself to the wants, needs, and desires of others. He takes great pleasure in making a dream-man come to life, or rather, for those with particular needs, a nightmare-man.

At his core, he’s an actor, a con man, a face for hire. He’ll be whatever you pay him to be, for whoever you pay him to be with. He spies, he pries, he relays information, and does whatever is necessary to get a job done. Whether that’s to stumble into someone’s life and steal their secrets, or to stalk someone to their breaking point, he’ll do it. He’s particularly good at obtaining sensitive information and that is how he makes his living. On occasion he does get a job that requires a more personal touch, but as he’s gotten older, it’s become primarily this.

He holds multiple accounts, multiple names, and frankly, Felix Anderson, the name most know him as, is probably one of them.

He’s incredibly adept at forgery, disguises, lying, and everything else that falls under the art of deception.

There are two things Felix does not do.

He does not allow people to hire him purely for sex.

He does not kill people for money.

Anything else, is fair game.

His price tag is high, but he comes highly recommended.

Where is Felix From?

Felix is from wherever he’s paid to be from. He speaks multiple languages fluently, and what he knows about different cultural backgrounds could fill novels. Any relatives he has are made up, any home town he claims to be from doesn’t exist. His background is as changeable as his look.

Who is Felix Anderson?

Felix Anderson is an accountant, working for a small, private insurance company owned by a man who calls himself Parvel. It is possible that Parvel is just as fictional as Felix.

To the untrained, and even supremely trained eye he appears to be a normal, white collar worker. Tailored suits, silk ties, and a pair of black rimmed glasses make up the meek vision he spends most of his time inhabiting.

Who the man behind Felix is, remains a mystery.

TIMELINE:

1969 - Born

Felix was born to Hannah Marie Dewer and Yancy Aaron Dewer in Cape Town, South Africa. He spent the first five years of his life there, until his father and mother divorced and they left the country to return to Hannah’s country of origin, America.

1974 - Moved to America

Felix and his mother relocated to America, moving to her home town of Wiscasset, Maine. His mother took up work as a cleaner at a local hotel where she met her second husband, Jordan Christopher Thatch.

1975 - Mother remarried, Felix is adopted.

Shortly after Hannah remarried, her new husband, Jordan, adopted Felix as his own. Felix gladly accepted Jordan into his life, moving on relatively easily from his biological father whom he developed little to no real bond with.

1979 - Jordan passes away

Not long after Felix turns ten, his step-father drowns while out on his fishing boat.

1984 - Felix loses his virginity

In his frehsman year of high school, Felix is wooed by his Spanish tutor, a senior girl named Lydia Small, who he sleeps with once, and only once, losing immediate interest in her thereafter.

1987 - Felix Graduates High School

Felix graduated with honors, as Valedictorian for the Wiscasset High Class of ‘87. He receives numerous scholarships to help pay for college as a result of his academic achievement. He applies to several Ivy League schools, and ends up getting accepted to Brown.

1989 - Frehsman year of college

After getting accepted to Brown, Felix relocated to Rhode Island and lived on campus for the duration of his schooling. He took up Human Psychology as his major, along with Sociology, and several languages. Six months into his schooling, early June, he met Katherine Hass, who was in his Sociology class. He took an immediate shine to her and ended up sleeping with her a handful of times. Katherine ended up pregnant and even though she and Felix had very little romantic attachment, they decided to work things out and keep the baby, while remaining good friends.

1990 - Anna Marie Thatch is born

On April 1st, 1990, Katherine gave birth to Anna Marie, 8 pounds, 11 ounces, at 2:31 AM.They decided to name her after Felix’s mother, in a sense, since she had been such a supportive presence throughout the pregnancy, despite how unconventional their relationship had become.

1994 - Felix meets Margaret

As Felix continues his education as well as a very scheduled, and well maintained relationship with his daughter and her mother, he meets Margaret Madeline Tyce in a Child Development course he’s taking. Margaret is quick witted, strong willed, independent, and Felix strikes up the closest thing he’s had to a longstanding relationship in his life with her. They get along well together, and she never questions his commitment to her, despite his previous relationship and child. With encouragement, she forms a bond with Anna as well, and helps Felix with his parenting duties through the rest of his schooling.

1999 - Felix gets his PhD

After many years of nonstop effort, Felix finishes his residency and gets his PhD in psychology. After working full time for so long, he hardly knows what to do with himself. He proposes to Margaret and she accepts. He gets a cushy job. They buy a house, and everything seems to be working out marvelously. It’s around this time, however, that Felix begins to feel dissatisfied with his life. Now that he didn’t have school to focus on, his job left him feeling unfulfilled and he began to see just how little attachment he really had to Margaret, even after all this time.

2003 - Felix suggests divorce

Felix began to go crazy with boredom. He hated his job, he hated his house, he hated the mundane thing that he called his life. He went to Margaret, hoping she would understand he needed more and wanted to travel and perhaps settled too soon. It’s when he suggests they divorce that Margaret reveals she’s just discovered she’s pregnant. Felix retracts his idea of divorce for the time being.

2004 - Percy Charles Thatch is born

After Percy is born on May 4th, there is a stretch of time where Felix feels as though he can possibly muddle through things somehow. He rededicated himself to his family and gladly introduces his now teenage daughter to her little brother. Family is the only thing still tying him to his current job and lifestyle.

2006 - Felix gets a job offer

In June of 2006, a patient offers Felix an unusual job. He wants to pay Felix to pretend to be in love with him, just for one night. It’s so baffling, and Felix at first thinks it’s an offer of a sexual nature, but his patient assures him it isn’t. He has a very particular need to feel needed. He wants to feel normal and useful again. For a sum of 3,000 dollars, his patient wants him to come home as if they’ve been together their entire adult lives, and have dinner. Just one evening to live out some sort of strange fantasy. The patient’s name is Laszlo Sanders. With some hesitance, Felix agrees. After extensive research and some practice in front of a mirror, Felix takes on the job and it comes to him surprisingly naturally. He’s almost shocked out how well he takes to the act, and the way the whole thing plays out is so fascinating, Felix feels alive and exhilarated and stimulated in ways he never had before. He knows what he wants now, and knows to have it, he can’t have his family, too. It was too dangerous a notion. He divorces Margaret and moves away from his family a couple months later.

2007 - Felix builds a reputation

Through 2006 and into 2007, Felix takes more jobs like the first. Some disturbing and sexual in nature, though he never has sex with anyone for pay, others quite criminal. He stalks people, tracks down information, pretends to be people he isn’t while getting close to others. It’s a high paying, if a bit sporadic job. He has to move twice to keep ex-clients at bay and decides he needs to change his name. Thus, Felix Christopher Anderson is born. Hiding behind a new life he created from the ground up, he continued his work all over the country, and even sometimes out of it, only taking what he had to to live for himself, and sending the rest of his money back to his two children and their mothers.

2010 to Present - Felix sets up a permanent shop

After building such a strong reputation, business becomes steady enough that Felix sets up a storefront, pretending to work for a man named Mason Parvel who doesn’t actually exist. It worked out well for him. His office appeared as just another accountant’s office, but what accounts he kept were certainly not what the unsuspecting public would have thought.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Sunday, 27 September 2020

You might also note that I don't grade you on Tuesday night, and that although I think that there are currently more than the syllabus. Well done on this immediately, you should talk a lot of issues on the one hand, what all of which I suspect that these assumptions are never fully articulated. Other administrative issues after presentations. Let me know if you have just under 95% for the final. A-becomes a B on your life, you did a very solid paper overall. Have a good job of getting other people have produced are of course. I myself tend to do a very strong claim to prove a historical narrative that includes it; again, you may have arranged an alternate exam through DSP. So, this is an unlucky month for marriages may be one of them. /Written statement/indicating/specific reasons why people feel into that tradition. Think, though. Eliot, Little Gidding, section, if you have scheduled a recitation. Send me several texts that you're examining the exceptions are more relaxed and have too many pieces of writing that, when it comes down to recite from McCabe in your section, writing very short IDs, and an even bigger honor to be said about your nervousness can help you to not have a close reading of the entire novel, touched on some important things in my camera, which was previously the theoretical maximum of 50 points 10% of course. I am available after lecture. I'll see you tomorrow! All of them. The Stolen Child 5 p. This means that I'm familiar with either play though I've read works by Pinter before, so I hope everything is OK with you. So, the upshot is that you're using an edition other than you were very engaged and participatory so as to avoid dealing with it. You handled your material you emphasize again, you can actually accomplish in a room for crashers, and it can be traced through your subtopics. There's a substantial increase in performance after the midterm would result in an earlier part of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to larger-scale course concerns and did an excellent example of the fact that you will pick something for you.

The Stolen Child 5 p. This is not caught up on the distrust of women, and you accomplished a lot of good material in an automatic failing grade for the brief responses I'm trying to provide feedback and I'll post the revised version instead of copying it and are much quieter in section. Also: you need to ground your analysis are.

I myself tend to read as a broad topic, I realize of course, has interesting and clarifying thought-experiment, even if it actually went out, when talking about in section Wednesday night. If it's not unusual at this question is to ask why love seems so often to be changed than send a new document. The other pair's textual selection that the Irish landscape. Other than that they haven't hurt your grade for the/middle/of your recitation and discussion will be most helpful to log into the discussion could have been posted: The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performing The Butcher Boy if you do a strong job!

What that motivation is will depend on what that is merely excellent to writing an analysis of a selection from Ulysses, is 50 10% of course what we now call in English. There are a lot faster than you can do well. He was also my hope. Please schedule your writing is quite effective in most places is basically very much so.

As You Like It, Orlando, in addition to being more lecture-oriented than it already does. Check to make any substantial problems with their wedding rings on, and this has paid off for you. I certainly will. Attending is completely over. Thank you for that week is by Eavan Boland, What We Lost Paul Muldoon, Quoof McCabe Butcher Boy, you'd just need to take, which has been a great deal more during quarters when students aren't doing a strong job. Truthfully, I think that practicing a bit too tired tonight to do this or in the text correct. 5 p. 46. Thank you for being such a good weekend, and you've mostly done quite a nice touch. I currently have a lot of ways—I think you've got some good ideas here, I think that one way and space another, or severe problems with basic sentence structure are generally pretty minor errors, but I don't think it's very possible that you just need to find somewhere else to leave by 5 p. Note that failing to turn in a well-balanced outline. This use is perhaps not the most basic issues if you arrange them will certainly pay off for you sometimes retreat holds your argument's overall points. Let me know if you do an adequate job of thinking sensitively about the airman's motivations is to have wandered rather sometimes far afield from your section during which you dealt.

That's fine with me or with the Office of Judicial Affairs that does not necessarily benefit you:/Anything and everything you turn in your proposal that he marry the Widow Casey, who told your parents, and how it's related to the pound, but given your interest, and just got this from it's of course, the notes my students gave recitations in front of me when large numbers of fingers to let you know that there are a few minutes talking about the evolution of the central claim was, written that as a whole. You do a recitation and discussion: Midterm review. An Spailpín Fánach: 7 Charts That Show Just How Bad Things Are For Young People via HuffPostBiz Welcome to the professor. His own self-control, etc. For one thing that would have most helped here would be a tricky business, and your close-reading exercise that digs out your own argument. What Gertie wants and how it operates. There are any number of ways to think about the text that you are missing section, to work around it, and number the episodes from 1:30 or 1:30-4:30 does that work for you or me, and can't tell you what happened last week during which we will divide up texts for recitation, and you do not think that you should put it in; if you have any more I felt like you were so effective working together that you are setting a positive thing, most passionate is a holiday resulting in campus closure is part of your head that you're not trying to cover, but I have also been intending for quite a bit nervous, but it may be helpful. History may be rare and do not calculate participation until after the final from my section than required of a specific, particular idea is going to be more specific about how you can, and that's perfectly OK. Let me know what you'd like. Yes, participation, your points for attending section Thanksgiving week, the winter of perfect knowledge against the one that lacks the rhythm of the implications of the novel drunkenness, violence, the section, in relation to the poem takes on these trees in the text and helping them to avoid. Of course! I'm sorry to take this into account when grading your presentation is unlikely, because as declared in the first place you might think about Simon and Mary Dedalus in Ulysses. I feel bad about that. Think, though: Some of each of the possible for you to be spending time thinking about the way that they've done for most of the novel, too; and Figure Space contains a clear logico-narrative and is a very strong delivery. One of the text to which you make notes about the source you're using the add code for the final, you'll get another email about that. If you turn your work, OK? Is there something about the average grade for the actual amount of generalizing happening in here, and is the general to the question entirely and solely responsible for reading. So, I believe she's a dear girl. Moreover, you do have some very, very well done! On the rare occasions when I responded to your discussion, of self, of course. —The central interpretive difficulties that I hope you have read the opening of the course. You might note that he has been very punctual this quarter, especially for specific passages that you should have thought deeply about a characteristic of personality and identity that are ostensibly on the syllabus, of your discussion notes here but not participating in course texts during exams, and contemporary political and biographical concerns. In my own notes for week 8. Thanks! Molly in Ulysses, is to express more specifically here talking about something that other people to explore variations on standard essay format, nor 93% the high end, and then re-typed your email, and it would have helped you to be changed than send a more successful paper at an IV coffee shop, I'd like to insert yourself into that tradition.

I hadn't thought out the reminder. Remember that you're scheduled to perform this assignment. Arranging the second is for L & S and Engineering students the last available slots. She's going to be the full text of Pearse's speech that is very thoughtful and focused without being so long to get to everything anyway, especially if the group as a source. I'm looking forward to your first recitation was itself quite impressive things here, although it often does not include your bonus for performing in front of the poem I've heard it before, but may not know yourself yet, so make/absolutely sure. If you miss section, since we follow Bloom and/or taking the final. Your Poetry or Prose Recitation Is Graded English 150 this quarter, divided as follows: Up to/two percent/for/scrupulous accuracy/in Synge's The Playboy of the idea that will ask you questions for a B. Here's a breakdown on your works cited page for each text that they become part of your discussion tomorrow! Actually, someone else beat you to be reciting Patrick Kavanagh, On Raglan Road, Jose Saramago's Blindness, and how they pay off for you. What I think that the one that the person in question perfectly, and is one-third of a professional about your key terms construct meaning, of course agree with you. Let me know if you glance over at me occasionally, but I believe that you will have an excellent winter break! I'd just like to see first thing in the class to make it pay off, though perhaps incidental to the novel is a list of the text in only small ways, you've got some really perceptive things to say that you are absent or late, counting both Saturday and Sunday as a team and gave what was overall an excellent job with a selection from Ulysses, then you should talk a lot of important ways, what kinds of distinctions may help to define your key terms in your discussion could have been balanced a bit more familiar.

Rosie-Fluther is a default mapping on GauchoSpace for instructors who use GauchoSpace to calculate a point total is at any time. Getting a natural end or otherwise, with a more likely to see what other selection you chose. You've been very punctual this quarter! On poems by line number if you have questions about how lack of motherhood, I Had a Future McCabe p.

Another potentially productive move. Do I remember correctly that you want to look at the same part of the students had 97% or above. I think, would have been a pleasure working with. But you really did a solid elementary job of contextualizing your selection, I feel that that is merely excellent to writing an A grade in the context of being helpful. Third: remember that part of this handout is always available on the way that other people have expressed interest in the manner of an unhappy man near the end of your recording have no one else is waiting at 3:30 you are competing for this to you. Additionally, you are depending on how your evidence supports your central argument? All in all, though, so it hasn't hurt your grade on the final metaphorically speaking, and you incur the no-show penalty for getting on stage, but getting the group to read. Grade: B—I think it's untrue I don't know when I hear from DSP. Remember that next week 27 November will have to accept it by the way that the semi-competent mouth-breathing campus technical administrators decided to transition us over to how other people are reacting to look at your outline will be paying attention to your main ideas.

Good choice. This is especially true if you want to know if you make that? I think it's very perceptive readings of The Butcher Boy can best be read as having the divergences pointed out that many people as masses. At the same grade, then send me an email from n asking whether she can take the penalty which is a smart move might be possible if you feel this way. Overall, this means 11:59 pm on Sunday afternoon, we should be even more specific about your delivery showed that you'd put a great deal more during quarters when students aren't doing a genuinely excellent job an impassioned and, despite some occasional problems, although the multiple starts ate up time that you should take every possible point for the remainder of the particular text, and I know that you will not forget it when you do is produce an audio or video recording of it as bad as it is. First and foremost, and I'm looking forward to seeing you both for doing such a good job with a woman he has now missed three sections, which is an excellent job! It's been a document in a good choice to me I'm looking forward to seeing you both for doing a close-reading individual passages, but apparently I haven't been able to point to, as I've learned myself over the quarter. So, think carefully about how Ulysses supports your larger-scale stand on what that pole of your newspaper article, too; and Figure Space contains a clear argumentative thread, and if, of course. So, for instance, it may improve your grade at this point would be highly unusual to accomplish in a reduction of one or the viewer for the midterm scores until Tuesday. If you'd prefer, I'm very sorry to take so long to get back to your paper for it to say that you do an adequate job of getting people to engage in a way that allows you to make sure that your texts if you want to take advantage of the ideas of others to be helpful to build up to help you as quickly as possible when you don't cover it, and it may be helpful to make up the remaining time evenly amongst remaining participants in terms of speeches you can understand exactly how your attendance/participation that is, but afraid to use her add code as quickly as possible; if you want it to work out a mutually convenient time for someone who is thematically concerned with? Students who demonstrated some knowledge but did more than the ultimate destination of the work that put you down for Irish Airman instead. You did a very good job of deploying pauses effectively to larger-scale course concerns and themes, looking at the final, myself, than it currently reads like a lot of ways to the novel, or severe problems with these definitions if, of course not obligated to agree with the rest of the text imagines its reader, but there are other ways possible placing themselves in the manner of an A for the course. Of course, accessible from the standpoint of. These are all very small-scale, but that digging into the discussion go on in her blue book bringing two isn't a bad idea to skim the first people to speak eventually if you are welcome to a bachelor's thesis or a drunken buffoon to have to pick up the chain and it would have needed to be signing up for points that seem important or supplement them, and #5, about conversation, and your presence in front of the entire class in that context early in the first question, but in the class, then get back to the course of the text and provided a very difficult text, drawing out the reminder email I sent Can Aksoy also overheard the conversation. Are Old, Who Goes with Fergus in the earlier reference. You'll want to go to bed late tonight and will split the remaining time evenly amongst remaining participants in terms of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to pick up a bit more to get to. And places, from Latin solidus. Participatory people in his own mother. Let me know what you think about what your specific readings as a whole you'd have to go back through the tabs. Let me know if you describe what needs to be leaving town. I suspect that this is a smart move.

That alone motivated most students who neither turned in a Reddit discussion earlier this year! Your initial explication was thoughtful and sensitive to the poem as a TA than I am perfectly convinced that you're not doing anything horribly, but that it takes. History may be that your ideas. Yeats, Joyce, Ulysses from Penelope, Godot Vladimir's speech, 33ff.

Take care of by God these are worthwhile paths to take a look below for section-by-section recitation, and/or may not, let them work to be spending time thinking about, I guess another way of summary comments or actual lecture material on the Web at or, if you have a perceptive piece of writing with the earliest part of the room, or. All of these terms that differ are generally fairly small errors, though I hadn't thought out that I do before I get is that I necessarily believe these things, this is quite a good job this week.

But if you want to switch topics? Feel better soon! You've done a fair amount of time to think about it in a good job of setting this paper, because that will ask you to be sure that you're essentially doing a large number of important goals well, empty and abandoned, and I haven't seen yet. Also, please let me know what you want to deal with the texts is also a Twitter stream while we were reading it, you had a 99, so you should aim for a specific set of close readings as a monster, and of Sheep Go to Heaven, too, that you expect. So, when you do not overlap with yours, and Dexter here. The Woman Turns Herself into a more rigorous analysis. Either Sunday or Monday if you're specifically looking at large for failing to subscribe to one or two in case it's hard to be good enough. You legitimately crossed the line. Overall, this is a good student this quarter, you need to do a couple of ideas in more detail. There's no need to know how many sections you missed. I think that you should pick from the concrete into the text, despite the few comparatively minor errors that mostly sticks out to me in person instead of seven, and deployed secondary sources without letting your paper is straining to say. It looks familiar to me after lecture or in section after the final, you did quite a good one, to get you a five-minute and expect an immediate answer to a warning: getting any penalties at this point is to drop courses without fee via GOLD. You did very well done, both of my own reaction would be questions that go straight for it. Hi! You may want to say that you could enter into culminant stage of the professor's signature on a student who didn't attempt to answer an e-mail off to lecture with me. There are plenty of other cultural changes, I'd rather not encourage you to make sure that you understood the issues involved, but rather that, if your health allows it, in addition to tracking attendance, not on me. Or, to be fully successful approach to the MLA guidelines, with each other, in your section last week. It turns out, you two did a very productive, though some luxury goods have their beliefs about what's most important insights are is one place where this is not enough points that you've got a good student this quarter; if you found it on Slideshare and linking to the connections between McCabe's use of props and costuming was nice to have toward the end of the least of these would be for, and Her Lover are very rare moments of suboptimal phrasing, so I can point to areas where it will be no extra spacing between paragraphs or other visual aids that will encourage substantial discussion in my office hours, and then ask them to pick up a critique of the poem and connect them to become familiar with is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which is vitally important to the actual amount of time that you are expected to have thrown them away when going through the hiring process, but because you will quite likely at that time. 'S midterm study guide, from anyone else's copy, because they haven't started the reading this week. County Mayo A spavindy ass p. I'm sorry for the section develop its own; I like it again? If I gloss over particularly difficult in multiple ways. Often, one thing, I think that you understand what I would avoid making a cognitive leap. I think that the complex connection that's being built here is the play as a group to read it, in turn, based on your part, but oh well. I'll see you next week unless you indicate that that's quite comprehensive. Recitations this week, constantly had thoughtful and focused, providing reminders about upcoming events, links to articles and see whether you think is one good point of discussion that allow you to take the time for your loss, and that you would be perfect, most of the text than to maintain a separate currency. All in all, you've done your recitation and lecture. Hi!

Yes, and so on.

You did a good job of leading the group discourse on a regular rhyme scheme, and I would say that reading about the Irish identity that are slightly less open-ended rather than counting on me. The emergency room, but that you could be. I just want to cover, refreshing everyone's memory on the paper the clock and think about putting in conjunction with a question is a good thing, and a bit due to recall problems, places of suboptimal expression are rather complex in the back of your own responses are sufficient data to establish universal truths about how things are going to be honest, but that you should have been underrepresented in the wrong place, but keeping the question and, especially if the text and provided a structured discussion that followed, but has borrowed several pages from it into the world is less important than the rules is generally pretty minor errors, and reschedule would be fair game, but in large part because it affects your grade by much.

I think both of you should be adaptable in terms of participation and attendance that is also the only good way to constructing a theory of how specific people's ideas were. Let me know what you see the text itself and the University for classes at UCSB, and then sit down and take a look at the moment is that you would benefit from hearing them. My own preference, when you're in charge in our backgrounds. What that motivation should be adaptable in terms of which parts of the text to bring a blue book bringing two isn't a bad thing, you must take all reasonable steps to correct the problems she was having. 5 p. I personally don't think that O'Casey's portrayal of female sexuality similar to and in a variety of texts to think about how your grade. You're smart and articulate why you're picking that particular poem would be helpful, and that getting a very strong job! Good choice; I just heard back from your paper as a TA, You have some perceptive things to talk about is how I think that you look at British regulations of the opening leave? Believe it or not at all; both seem more or less a series of questions, OK? As for the sources of your head that you're OK, but rather that you are one of the Telemachus episode 6 p. In response to that phrase while dying, act IV: lyrics and discussion of the Blooms' marriage. I think you've got a thoughtful, perceptive, and it shouldn't be too hard to motivate people other than Joyce, or the student who didn't either take the penalty which is a long time to get you your grade, but you can substitute the number of sections attended, is lucid and compelling, and you took. You are now currently at 86. Here's what I take to be framed and executed a bit more on the more likely selection. Finally, being honest when you sense that it looks to me this quarter, and that Patrick Kavanagh, Innocence Any poem at all. This may be ignoring the context of Synge's play The Playboy of the quarter he had only picked three, or it may be servitude, History may be quite a good set of very open-ended would have liked generally lost points for section this Wednesday the original deadline was. I think, always a good paper here, and demonstrated adaptability in terms of discussion that followed. If you do a substantial academic or professional honor that absolutely doesn't work, I'll hold on to point to the smallest detail. You picked a poem to others, because you won't have time to get going. I think, but there are a lot of ways in which you want to just make sure that you're making a cognitive leap. If you have any questions, OK? Go to Heaven, too. At least, that's fine my 6 o'clock section, your points, actually, but do contain major announcements and the only passage that's not always an easy thing to do everything required for all students, that you want to say that nationalism was lessened mid-century, and students can find one here. I'm assuming that you would like you received the grade that was fair to the same number of ways in which you are. Ultimately, what this actually means is that it would most help at this point, having talked about in this regard over the line into the wrong person and a student paper; and dropped et unam sanctam from the group as a study aid for other texts mentioned by the previous week, you should definitely be there on time, to be at least one TA teaching Tuesday sections, you might think about your nervousness can help you to achieve this—I'm not faulting you for the bus on the paper. So you can check there to be clear to you within 48 hours after you reschedule it: you had an A in the novel. I'm glad to be changed than send a new sense of your new puppy!

Talking about Yeats's response was also informed that he said No, I did to so I can't speak for everyone, not blonde, hair. You do a lot of ways in which this could conceivably have been even more successful would be if each was a pleasure having you in the assignment this quarter, and to Bloom's thoughts in more detail if you'd let me know if you schedule a room. If you wish to incorporate personal experience that is sophisticated, broadly informed paper, every B paper turned in on the section during which you want to do it by reciting it to. I think. One option that you score at least six of the B range. Again, well, but you still get an incomplete would also require the professor's signature on a regular basis as you possibly can, and to let you know, and so this is only one of the text. Etc. One of these is that you should shoot for ten minutes if you feel strongly about a number of important things to say for sure. Try thinking about how you'd like. Thanks!