#i did indeed reread book one for this to make sure my facts were straight

[just-a-slytherpuff]

Harry Potter and the Philosophy of Nice and Good

This thought wouldn’t leave me alone so please join me on this journey as I examine the themes of Nice and Good in relation to Snape and Hagrid. I’ll be looking at the text in Philosopher’s Stone specifically but this is not unique to book 1.

TL;DR Hagrid is Nice but not Good, Snape is Good but not Nice

We can all agree that Hagrid is Nice; he is kind, generous, and caring to a fault. In his very first scene, he asks to be allowed to wish Harry goodbye, kisses him on the head, and promptly bursts into tears at the fact that the Potters are dead and Harry is left orphaned. He is a man full of love and affection who never forgot the little boy he had to leave behind, to the point that on their second meeting, on Harry’s birthday, he even brings the boy a cake to celebrate. He’s clearly happy to see Harry again and excited to be the one to properly bring him into the magical world. 

From this meeting on, Hagrid represents a major source of kindness to Harry; he defends him from his uncle, introduces him to magic, and happily answers his many questions. He’s also responsible for two of Harry’s most treasured gifts: Hedwig and the photo album of his parents.

Throughout book 1 and the series as a whole, he makes it a point to invite Harry and his friends over for tea, regularly looking in on him and checking on his well being. It’s easy to see that Hagrid could be seen as a sort of father-figure or older brother-figure to Harry who is starved for this sort of positive attention.

However, while his actions show that Hagrid is Nice, he is not in fact Good.

When Harry meets Hagrid properly for the first time, it is because the half-giant has just forcibly broken into the shack that Harry and the Dursleys are currently staying at. 

At midnight.

While everyone else was asleep.

He then proceeds to politely invite himself in as though this is normal, makes himself at home, insults his “hosts” and asserts his right to be there despite being demanded to leave because a “ruddy muggle” like Vernon can’t tell him what to do. He uses both his force and his magic to terrify and cow the Dursleys into letting him do as he pleases and, on top of that, hexes Dudley. This leaves him with a permanent pig’s tail which ends up needing to be surgically removed because the magic never fades, even over a month later. Hagrid even admits that he had been trying to turn the boy into a full pig, not just give him the tail, implying that if his magic had succeeded, Dudley could have been stuck in pig form for the rest of his life unless someone had reversed the magic.

And what did 11 year old Dudley do to deserve this terrifying attack from a 63 year old man?

Nothing. 

As far as Hagrid’s temper is concerned, Dudley’s disfigurement is the punishment Vernon deserves for insulting Albus Dumbledore. While much of Hagrid’s anger towards the elder Dursleys is certainly justified, it doesn’t change the fact that he attacked a child for something his father did. And despite all this, Hagrid is framed as a hero in this scene; he is the one to bring truth and magic to Harry’s life, he is the one to defend the sacrifice of his parents, he is the one to rescue Harry from his life of abuse. 

Until he sends him right back. 

Bear with me.

After this assault on their son, the Dursleys flee to the safety of the other room while Harry and Hagrid go to sleep. In the morning, Hagrid does not bother asking for permission and effectively kidnaps Harry as they take the only boat on the island to get to shore, leaving the Dursleys stranded. He brings Harry to Diagon Alley to collect his money and school supplies then almost immediately abandons his responsibility to supervise the boy’s shopping trip because he needs a stiff drink after his roller-coaster ride of a Gringotts trip. 

On their reunion, Hagrid goes on to disparage half of the school, calling Hufflepuff “a lot o’ duffers” and claiming that “there’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin”. This is the first Harry has heard of the house system and already he is being fed bias and prejudice that Hufflepuffs are losers and Slytherins are evil. And not by just anyone, no, but by an employee of the school, an act that seems highly unprofessional. 

He then proceeds to buy Harry a pet, his beloved Hedwig, without his guardians’ permission. This is a problem because, as previously stated, Hagrid will soon be sending Harry back to his “loving” relatives who likely only accept having a raptor in their house out of fear of further retribution. Hell, they likely only accept having Harry back in their house out of fear of further retribution. It’s honestly a miracle that the fear held long enough for him to be left alone the rest of the summer. Of course, Hagrid doesn’t bother bringing the boy all the way home, he simply leaves him on a train that is heading in the right direction and then disappears. Harry has just turned 11 and is definitely not old enough to be left unaccompanied in this way when it is certain he has never made a trip like this alone before. And all this is assuming that Hagrid had any way of knowing that the Dursleys would even make it home before Harry’s arrival, especially since Hagrid was the one to leave them stranded on that island. Luckily, Hagrid’s many attacks on the Dursleys doesn't lead to them resentfully taking their anger out on Harry and the boy manages to survive the summer.

While at school, Hagrid manages to go most of the year without causing any noticeable harm (other than openly insulting one of his coworkers in front of students) until one day he finds himself in possession of a dragon egg. An undoubtedly black market dragon egg at that, given that owning a dragon is highly illegal. But Hagrid does not care for the laws of the land because he has always wanted a dragon of his own and the looming threat of legal consequence is no match for his enthusiasm. Neither is the fact that his hut is too small to support a dragon longer than a few weeks and also made of wood. Nor the imminent danger a baby dragon poses to his safety and that of the rest of the school should the little dragon manage to get loose and wreak havoc, since it quickly becomes clear that Hagrid is not equipped to raise a baby dragon, though he tries to deny it to the very end. 

Harry and his friends are even roped into helping with the dangerous task of assisting Hagrid raise the dragon which leads to Ron being bitten, something Hagrid does nothing to help with and instead chastises him and implies it’s his own fault he was bitten. Hagrid’s behavior towards the dragon’s actions is highly reminiscent of pet owners who refuse to take responsibility for the damages they cause because they are firm in their belief that their precious baby can do no harm. It also brings to mind the sort of exotic pet owner who will insist that their large predator is fine living in a house.

And although it is highly assumed that Malfoy is aware of the dragon and waiting for the right moment to ruin Hagrid’s life, Hagrid still refuses to come clean to any responsible adult and instead, it is up to three first-year students to fix the dangerous mistakes of their 64 year old friend. The solution they come up with is taking the dragon to the tallest tower at midnight to hand it off to some friends of Ron’s brother. This plan gets complicated due to the fact that Ron’s bite leads to him being hospitalized, which inadvertently leads to Malfoy finding out the timeline and trying to sabotage it. But these children are too worried about their 64 year old friend getting into trouble so they show up at his hut at the assigned time (the fact that in the future, Hagrid will chastise them for being out after curfew is the height of hypocrisy), collect the dragon, bring it to the highest tower just in time, and promptly forget the invisibility cloak which causes them to be discovered.

Harry and Hermione, along with Neville who was caught out trying to warn them, get detention and lose 50 points each for Gryffindor, dropping the house into last place and causing 3/4 of the school to ostracize them for “ruining their chance at having someone other than Slytherin win the cup this year”. And still, Hagrid stays silent as these children are bullied for his refusal to be responsible. When their detention comes around, Malfoy is upset and reluctant to enter the Forbidden Forest because it could be dangerous and Hagrid has the nerve to tell him he deserved it for being out of bed, the exact same thing Harry and Hermione were punished for while trying to help him. Because it’s fine for kids to be out of bed to help a grown man old enough to be their grandfather smuggle a highly illegal dragon out of a castle but it’s not okay to try and expose said illegal activity. And of course, because this is a punishment, Hagrid has no problem sending Malfoy off into the woods alone with nothing but another first year and a cowardly dog for company. 

Twice.

In the same forest that students are banned from entering because it could be dangerous.

Hagrid is certainly a Nice and lovable character, but he is not actually Good.

Conversely, we can all agree that Snape is not Nice. Before we even meet him properly, Snape has the sort of reputation for being strict and unfair that could potentially be passed off as children thinking the worst of anyone who hands out punishment and expectations with a scowl on their face. He makes no attempt to soften himself for his students and his joy is most often described as being at the expense of others. Snape is clearly not a happy person and has no problems sharing this fact with anyone who comes across him. And while we never see how he interacts with his students in other classes, we know that he has no problem singling out students if he feels it is justified (or perhaps necessary).

During Harry’s first potions lesson, Snape calls attention to Harry’s celebrity status in a mocking way and then shortly after tries to put him on the spot by asking several potions questions that Harry is unable to answer. Snape relishes in his inability to answer, claiming that “fame clearly isn’t everything” and implying that Harry made no effort to read the material before attending class. Unless these quiz answers are all within the first few pages of the textbook, it is highly unfair of Snape to imply anything negative about Harry’s intelligence or diligence, especially as this is the first week of school and the first potions lesson.

His final cruelty of the scene comes when Neville and Dean’s potion explodes, causing Neville to need to go to the infirmary. Snape is quick to turn to Harry and accuse him of trying to make himself look better by letting others fail, hypocritical of course since in the future he will punish students for trying to help each other. And when Harry goes to defend himself and call Snape out on his unfair behavior, Ron immediately holds him back knowing it is futile because Snape is well known for being nasty.

We learn in the future that Snape’s animosity towards Harry largely stems from the fact that he is James Potter’s son. And while we eventually find out that much of this anger towards the elder Potter is justified, it doesn’t change the fact that he was nasty and mean to a child for something his father did.

However, while Snape’s attitude towards others shows that he is certainly not Nice, he does in fact show himself to be Good.

Despite being assumed to be the villain of book 1 for his unfair attitude, Snape is eventually discovered to be trying to save everyone throughout the year. When Quirrel runs in announcing the troll has invaded the school, Snape immediately runs to the third floor corridor, assuming the troll is a distraction to steal the precious Philosopher’s Stone. Unfortunately for Snape, he is met with Fluffy who then tries to take a bite out of his leg and leaves him injured enough to be seen limping several days later. Despite this pain, the sound of a commotion and students being in potential danger is enough motivation for Snape to run back fast enough to arrive at the girl’s loo just after McGonagall does. He even immediately stalks over to the troll to make sure the creature will not be getting up again any time soon.

This is also not the only time that Snape will find himself injured trying to protect others. During the first quidditch match, Harry finds that his broom is moving without his permission. This soon escalates to trying to buck him off entirely, a dangerous act considering how high up he is at the time. When Hermione takes the binoculars from Hagrid, she sees Snape staring directly at Harry while moving his lips and assumes he is the one responsible for the curse. She runs to the rescue by setting the bottom of his robes on fire in the hopes of breaking his concentration. Unfortunately for her, she was entirely wrong in her assumptions and instead ruined the concentration of the person who was actively trying to save Harry from the curse being inflicted on his broom. Lucky for her, she also happened to knock over Quirrel, who was the actual culprit, saving Harry from taking a spectacular dive.

Of course, his near miss at saving Harry’s life means that Snape decides to be more proactive next time, going so far as to be the referee in the next Gryffindor match. The Gryffindor team is so grateful that someone is looking out for their little first year seeker that George hits a bludger directly at Snape. 

Once the match is over with Gryffindor victorious, Harry spots Snape going into the forest and, assuming he’s doing something villainous, goes to spy on him. He catches bits and pieces of a conversation with Quirrel and assumes that Snape is threatening the poor, unassuming professor into helping him get the Philosopher’s Stone. However, while it turns out that Snape was indeed trying to intimidate and threaten Quirrell, it was not for Snape’s own gain but instead to protect the Stone. A brave act, considering the presumed culprit going after the Stone is supposedly doing it on Voldemort’s orders and his interference could have hindered his safety as a spy.

Beyond all this, Snape is regularly seen patrolling the halls after dark. And while this may seem like a negative to any who thinks wandering around after dark is great fun, Snape is actually spending a lot of time running around making sure no foolhardy child is dying in an empty corridor because they refused to understand that curfew rules are imposed as a safety measure. For a man who is so clearly unhappy with the world and the people around him, he sure does spend a lot of time and effort making sure everyone is safe. So while Snape is certainly not Nice, he is definitely Good.

[just-another-blog-of-fluff]

An Embarrassing Secret

Word count: 2150

I feel like some of these are sort of repetitive, but maybe that's because I've had to reread them to proofread so many times? In any case, you all seem to enjoy them! I hope you like this one as well.

* * *

“Ah! Y/N! Just the person I wanted to see!”

Loki flopped down on the couch beside you, jerking you from your thoughts as the couch cushion bounced under his weight. Your heart skipped a beat as you turned your gaze from the television to the Asgardian beside you, only inches of space between your leg and his.

“Me? What do you need from me? Trying to prank your brother again?” you snickered.

“Not this time, no. I just thought I should come find you and let you know about something interesting I learned this morning,” he replied, an impish lilt to his voice.

“Is this something I would find interesting? Or just you? Because the way you said that, I feel like I probably won’t find it nearly as interesting.”

“Oh, I believe you’ll find it very interesting,” he assured, a smirk tugging at his lips. Something about the way his gaze was fixated on you was unsettling. You paused the TV and turned your full attention to the god.

“What is it, then?” you questioned hesitantly.

“I learned quite an interesting secret about you earlier today.” There went your heart again, skipping another beat.

“You… did?”

“Oh, yes.” His smirk grew wider.

Your mind was racing. What on earth could he be talking about? Did he figure out you had a crush on him? What if that was the secret?? Was he disgusted by it? Did he reciprocate??

“That is interesting,” you noted, trying to keep your voice even to prevent him from seeing your anxiousness. “And… what was that, exactly?”

“Well…” he began, pulling out his cell phone from his pocket, “… this morning I happened to be perusing the library, trying to select a new novel to read. While I was wandering between shelves, I happened to notice something of yours sitting out unattended.”

You thought hard, trying to recall what it was you had been doing in the library. Had you even gone to the library this morning? You couldn’t even remember what you had for breakfast. Then again, it was difficult to concentrate with those blue-green eyes gleaming in front of you…

“And what was that Loki?”

“Your laptop.” Loki was now typing something into his phone, holding it in a way that you couldn’t see the screen.

“My laptop?” You rarely brought your laptop to the library with you, as you were typically reading books and had no need for electronics. You wracked your brain trying to remember when the last time you had even brought it with you to the library, looking away from the trickster so you could think straight.

Then you remembered. You’d brought it with you last night, hoping to get some peace and quiet away from the others, who were causing quite a ruckus in the common area playing one of Peter’s video games. You could still hear them through your bedroom door, so you packed up your laptop and brought it to the library with you to continue writing.

Writing. Oh. Oh no. No no no.

Your heart dropped into your stomach the moment you realized where this was going. Still, he hadn’t mentioned anything specific about what he’d seen yet, so you made every effort to keep a straight face. You weren’t about to give away a bigger secret if he had only learned something minorly embarrassing.

“At first, I was uncertain to whom the device belonged, and as it was already left open on the table, I decided to see if I could determine the owner so I could return it to them,” he continued, “and I found the screen to be unlocked when I turned the machine back on.”

Yep. You knew exactly where this was going now.

“You act like you were trying to do a good deed or something, but you were obviously just snooping around my stuff, weren’t you?” you muttered, trying to throw him off with your annoyance.

“Shh - I wasn’t finished with my recounting of the story yet,” he scolded facetiously. He had finally finished tapping buttons on his phone and was now scrolling through something on the screen. “When the screen unlocked, I saw quite a fascinating narrative typed out on the screen. Truly a masterpiece, really.”

“Y-you read it?” you squeaked, hiding your face in your hands.

“Oh, I did more than that darling. I also scrolled through and reviewed the rest of your little webpage.”

Your face was burning red hot against your palms now. If you could have just melted into the couch and disappeared, you wouldn’t have hesitated to do so. You felt your heart pounding in your chest with nervousness and embarrassment at the whole situation.

“Shall I read some aloud for you?” he asked.

“Nooooo Loki,” you moaned, your voice muffled by your hands. You lifted your feet up onto the couch, wrapping your arms around your knees and hiding your face behind them, trying to become as small as possible.

“Ah, here is a good part: ‘The dark-haired god suddenly tackled you to the floor, pinning your arms down at your sides under his knees as he dug his long, slender fingers into your sides.’” You pulled your knees even closer to your chest. If the floor could swallow you whole now, that would be fantastic. “Darling, you’re not paying attention.” A poke to your side caused you to jolt one arm down away from your face to protect the sensitive skin. You stole a quick glance at the god, your eyes wide.

“D-don’t!” you exclaimed.

“Isn’t this what you want?” he asked, prodding your side a few more times, causing you to jerk away each time he made contact with your thin T-shirt. “Let’s see… ah! Another great line: ‘He drilled his thumb into the front of your lowermost ribs, digging his fingers into the sides of your ribcage simultaneously. You supposed you should have known that someone with his mischievous title would be good at tickling, but the way his fingertips sought out every single one of your weak spots was causing you to slowly slip into madness.’”

You started getting up off the couch to try to make a quick exit then, hoping to hide in your room for the rest of eternity. Loki caught on before you got very far, though, and grabbed hold of your wrist to prevent you from leaving.

“Let go!” you begged, refusing to look at him as you pulled your arm hopelessly to try to escape his grasp. He tugged you closer, quickly wrapping both arms around you and tackling you to the floor. A thrill ran through your chest as you found yourself staring up at the god of mischief, your wrists pinned to the floor at your sides in his hands.

“Seem familiar?” he asked, smirking. He leaned off to the side, looking at his phone screen beside you on the floor. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes, I remember.” Loki’s fingers connected with your sides, scribbling and kneading in the best worst way. You shook your head rapidly, still too embarrassed by the whole situation to allow him to hear you laugh. “Your narrative appears to be inaccurate – according to this, you should have ‘giggles bubbling from your mouth’ but I hear nothing.”

“Loki! S-stop teasing!” you pleaded, covering your face with your hands once again now that your wrists were freed from his grasp.

“I’m simply pointing out there are some inconsistencies in your writing, y/n.” He moved his fingers to your belly, scratching maddeningly gently at the bare skin where your shirt had ridden up from squirming. You couldn’t hold back the giggles anymore, but you did manage to keep one hand pressed over your mouth to muffle your voice as you brought your other arm down to protect your torso.

A small part of you, buried deep underneath the raging embarrassment you still felt, was loving every second of this playful side of Loki. Clearly you had fantasized about this before, as evidenced by your writing. You just hadn’t anticipated he would actually find your fics, much less read them and use them against you.

“Let’s continue, shall we?” he goaded, interrupting your thoughts. He picked up his phone in one hand while continuing to dig into your belly with the other to keep you squirming while he thumbed through more of your posts. “Here’s another excellent excerpt: ‘he moved to flutter his fingers against the delicate skin behind your knee, squeezing just above your kneecap simultaneously with the other hand, making you snort.’ I would very much like to hear that, I think.” He moved down to mimic his fictitious self in your writing, making you laugh out loud and kick your leg frantically. “Y/n, I’m not hearing any snorting. So many discrepancies; I have to wonder if you’ve ever been properly tickled in the same way as your fictional likeness.”

“Stohohop… stop making fuhuhun of my writing!” you demanded, although it wasn’t very intimidating laced with your laughter.

“Oh, I don’t jest, dear – I’m merely pointing out facts. Maybe this will make you snort.” He reached down and grabbed your ankle in one hand, lightly tracing the sole of your socked foot with one finger. You, indeed, did snort. “Aha! Maybe you should have requested assistance before posting these inaccuracies.”

“LEAVE MY FEET ALOHOHONE!” you shrieked, yanking your leg to escape his grasp. He responded by simply tightening his grip, dragging four fingers up and down your foot, making sure to note which spots made you jerk. He settled on scratching gently just below the ball of your foot, laughing himself as you rolled side to side trying desperately (and ineffectively) to evade his fingers.

“You realize, darling, you’ve essentially written a map to every ticklish spot on your body. I know exactly how to exploit your unfortunate weakness.” You opened your mouth to protest but he cut you off by unexpectedly switching to digging his fingertips between your ribs. The suddenness of his movement made you squeal, batting weakly at his hands. “It’s adorable, really, how you are pretending to fight me, when we both know this is exactly what you want.”

“SHH! Shuhuhut up Loki!” you countered. He put a hand to his chest in mock offense.

“You wound me, darling,” he teased, smirking. “What did that one quote state? Ah, that’s right! Your ‘death spot’ as you’ve titled it?”

“Wait! Nohoho I’m sohohohorry!!” you panicked, planting your feet on the floor, and trying to scoot away from your assailant.

“I don’t think you are, actually.” His fingers were inching vexingly closer to your ‘death spot’ as he’d pointed out. He found humor in the fact that your laughter slowly began pitching up in octave the closer he got. “I’m pleased that you’ve written this down for me to find, y/n. I don’t believe I’d have found it otherwise – as I understand, it is not a conventional place to be so unbearably ticklish.”

“No! No no! Plehehease Loki!” you pleaded, albeit halfheartedly.

“Hmm… alright then,” he conceded, moving back down to tickle your right side, moving his other hand to scribble on the right side of your belly. It had exactly the effect he was hoping for, causing you to jolt and roll hard toward his hands. Quickly, he grabbed your left side and pushed you all the way over onto your stomach, pinning your hands down to the floor with his knees. “On second thought, I think I’m going to do it.”

“NoOAHAHAH!” you practically screamed in laughter as his fingers made contact with your back, just below your shoulder blades. Seemingly encouraged by your reaction, he applied more pressure, gently kneading between the backs of your ribs. Your nerves were on fire with ticklish electricity, and you tugged desperately to try to free your hands. It wasn’t long before your laughter became silent, your shoulders shaking as you laid there and just accepted your fate.

It seemed Loki had noticed the sudden silence, and he removed his torturous fingers from your back, releasing your hands so you could roll back over. You curled up on your side, knees close to your chest and arms wrapped around your torso rubbing the residual tingles off your sides. He hovered over you, leaning close to whisper in your ear.

“You know, darling – if you wanted me to tickle you, you simply had to ask. I find it quite adorable.”

“Oh my god, Loki…” you groaned, covering your face with your hands once again. A single finger scratched under your arm, making you pull your arms back down. “Stahahap!! Can’t you see I’m embarrassed??”

“Mm, I can see that. But was it worth it?” he asked teasingly, planting a kiss on your cheek. The flames ignited by his lips spread across your face, up to the tips of your ears.

You supposed that, just maybe, it was worth it.

Part 2: A Difficult Question

[demig00ddess]

Sleeping Beauty

Charlie Weasley x MC

A/N: The 5th day of the HPHM April Prompt Challenge 2021 by @stupendousbookworm !

I know I'm late, but from a small sketch it turned into a completely unplanned full chapter that perfectly fit into the storyline.

————————————————————

CHAPTER FIVE

AROMA OF AMORTENTIA

1989

End of the first semester.

The Potions classroom was in an unusual state of excitement. The girls whispered conspiratorially and occasionally giggled. This was due to the fact that for the third lesson in a row they studied love potions so that interest in the subject increased dramatically. Emma had even heard that the sixth-year girls who had not chosen the Potions for the NEWT were sighing and complaining in frustration. She wasn’t interested in this topic, there were many other ways to subjugate the will and mind of other people, and she didn’t want to discuss guys. Maybe another time Emma would have kept up funny conversations with her classmates, but she had been in a bad mood for a long time, so she sat alone at her desk, painting a piece of parchment.

“We’re finishing the topic of love drinks and potions.” With the appearance of Professor Snape, all conversations immediately died down. “Today we’ll turn to the most powerful and dangerous of love potions. Which one, Weasley?”

Emma had seen Charlie run into the dungeon a moment before Snape and sit on the Gryffindor side. Now he was hastily spreading his textbook and inkwell on his desk.

“Em… Amortentia, sir?” Snape nodded in displeasure.

“Amortentia is known for being the most powerful love potion in the world. It is forbidden in the magical community and its use is strictly punishable by law. Also, Amortentia is a very difficult potion to prepare and therefore is included in the list of required potions for passing the NEWT in my subject. Apparently, the Ministry thinks you’d rather learn how to brew it from a potion master than try to poison your victim yourself,” Snape curled his lips in a smirk. He waved his wand and instructions appeared on the blackboard, written in small, even handwriting. “Everything you need to know is indicated in the textbook, here are additional recommendations for brewing. I don’t expect anything worthwhile from you, but by the end of the lesson, your potion should at least show its basic properties. Who will list them?”

There was silence in the classroom, and the pages of books rustled. In Potions class, rarely did anyone dares to answer at will.

“Anderson,” Professor Snape was walking past her desk.

“The potion has a pearlescent colour, its steam rises in curls and it has a special smell,” Emma tried to remember, yesterday before going to bed she leafed through the textbook. “Amortentia smells for everyone of what they like best.”

“Five points to Slytherin, for the fact that at least someone bothered to open the book before class. The potion is complex and time is short, so today you work in pairs. You can get to work now.”

Emma cursed to herself, she could use some help. But she had sat down alone and now watched blankly as everyone split into pairs. A Gryffindor girl with a long braid, whose name Emma kept forgetting, came up to Charlie, who was also sitting alone. They started talking about something. Emma winced and turned away. Lately, she often watched Charlie from afar. If earlier the abundant attention of girls to him amused her and served as a reason for harmless teasing, now they began to annoy her.

Lost in thought, Emma set up the cauldron and began rereading the textbook, looking for instructions for the first step.

“Can I join?” Charlie sat down beside her, laying out the ingredients for the potion.

“But what about um…” she shook her head towards the girl with the braid, who was already sitting with another Gryffindor.

“Sarah?” Charlie was embarrassed. “I told her that we agreed to work together. You won’t chase me away, will you?”

He made a plaintive face, making Emma laugh.

“One more sound from your side, Anderson, and you can be free for today,” said Professor Snape.

“Let’s start,” Charlie whispered. “I’ll crush the claws, and you can cut the roots.”

They worked incredibly well together, understanding each other without words. Emma admired how he skillfully handled the knife, crumbling the ingredients.

“If you brew potions as well as you cook, then we already have an excellent mark in the bag.” Charlie chuckled at her words and poured pearl dust. Emma immediately stirred it three times, added the moonstone and put the lid on the potion.

Time passed very quickly. Snape was right, Amortentia was really hard to prepare, they couldn’t be distracted for a minute. By the end of the class, there was a cauldron of mother-of-pearl shining liquid in front of them, exuding a pleasant aroma.

“The colour is right, the steam rises in curls,” Charlie said, checking his textbook. “It remains to check the smell. Smell it. Do you feel anything? You have to distinguish between several smells that you like.”

Emma poked her nose into the cauldron, in which Amortentia was slowly bubbling. It smelled of freshly brewed coffee with hints of spice and tanned leather at the same time. She felt herself breathing very slowly, letting the heady scents fill her lungs. Emma tried to smell something else, but it was all drowned out by the familiar herby cinnamon-tinged scent of Charlie, who was bending down next to her.

“Coffee and leather,” she replied, forcing herself to move away from the cauldron.

“That’s all?”

“What do you mean 'that’s all' ?” Emma asked a little sharply. Charlie shrugged and glanced at the textbook.

“People usually can smell several things. About three or four. Maybe you didn’t scent it enough? Try once more.”

“I told you I smell. Maybe the potion is wrong?”

“No, it’s something with you,” Charlie said stubbornly. “The potion is correct, as described. We made it together. Take a good sniff.”

“I’m not even going to! If you want to, check it yourself.”

“I can’t,” Charlie was confused.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you today? Do you even care what we’re doing?”

“So maybe you should have work with Sarah back then. Or better with Penny! Then everything would have worked out for sure,” snapped Emma, ​​resentment seized inside her, making her want to cry or hit someone. It was not her fault that she could only smell a couple of smells. Or was it? Maybe she didn’t smell what she liked because she didn’t love anyone? Maybe it meant that she was generally incapable of loving someone since even the most powerful love potion did not work with her to the end?

“What does Penny have to do with it? You’re acting weird!” Charlie was indignant.

“Says the one who is interested in dragons more than people. I’ve always been weird. Or did you mean mad?” Emma blurted out the last sentence too loudly.

“I warned you, Anderson,” came Snape’s cold voice.

“I’m done now, Professor,” she said through clenched teeth. “This stupid potion doesn’t work anyway.

“Crazy girl,” Charlie muttered.

She filled a bottle of potion, signed it, and set it on Snape’s desk before storming out of the classroom.

~~~~~~~~~

Emma was sitting in her room and cleaning her bag and textbooks by magic. In the Potions class, she shoved the inkwell into the bag with such force that it shattered and poured emerald ink all over the contents of the bag. She was angry with herself and her outburst of gratuitous wrath. Over the past couple of months, she and Charlie have grown quite distant from each other. He didn't invite her for Christmas, although he and Bill had always invited her to the Burrow a month before the holidays. They stopped chatting and talking to each other about everything, and it depressed her. And then also this stupid fight.

Emma got to her feet, she didn’t want to go straight to Charlie, but there was another person she had been avoiding lately. She needed to talk to Penny.

Penny was sitting in the library, surrounded by books about the magical properties of West Wells herbs. She was so engrossed in her research, biting the tip of her quill, that she didn't notice Emma landing on the bench next to her.

“Emma?” Penny didn’t even try to hide her surprise; they practically didn’t communicate for a couple of months.

Emma hugged Penny and sighed heavily. She had to deal with everything she said and everything she thought.

“Hey, what happened, dear?” Penny stroked her back affectionately. Emma felt even nastier at heart. After avoiding Penny for a long time, her friend was still worried about her.

“Penny, I’m sorry,” Emma hid her face in an embrace.

“Emma, what’s wrong?”

“I… I’m just a terrible friend and a terrible person,” Penny looked at her in surprise but didn’t interrupt. “I really didn’t mean to avoid or hurt you. And I was being selfish with you. I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk to me anymore. But you’re my best friend, and Charlie’s my best friend. And all I want right now is for you to be happy together.” Emma was blinking frequently, not letting her tears come out.

“First of all, I’m not offended at all that you’ve been avoiding me. Sometimes we need to take a break from communication, I understand everything. And secondly, me and Charlie together?” Penny asked, startled by the tirade.

“You are a lovely couple,” Emma smiled, wiping her reddened eyes with her sleeve.

“But,” Penny giggled awkwardly. “We’re not a couple, Emma.”

“What?”

“I don’t like Charlie in this way, and indeed,” Penny threw a laughing glance at her friend. “He doesn’t like me either."

“But…” Emma felt a pleasant warmth spread over her chest, she felt a little easier and wanted to smile. “But you are constantly together. And Charlie said that you became very close. And… So you’re not a couple?”

Penny grinned and scratched her nose with the tip of her quill.

“Is that what Charlie said? Oh, he should be better at choosing his words. We really got close, but it was because of you.” Emma looked up at her in surprise. “After Rowan passed away, you were emm… in a terrible state. Avoided everyone, refused to talk, didn’t sleep or eat, and tormented yourself. I couldn’t bear it, and Charlie, generally went crazy, seeing you like this. Anyway, we tried to come up with something that would cheer you up, bring back our usual Emma. But you didn’t want to talk to Charlie, and was running away from me — ”

Emma interrupted Penny with an impetuous hug. She gasped with such pressure but responded to the hug. They sat for a long time, in silence, under the displeased glances of Madame Pince. Finally, Emma pulled away.

“And what about you two became close?”

“We didn’t really talk to him before, except when you were around. Not all your friends are friends with each other. And now we’re hanging out because he asked me to pull him up on potions.”

“Now I feel like an even more terrible person,” Emma sighed heavily and looked away. Penny smiled affectionately and tucked in a strand of hair that had strayed from Emma’s hair.

“Good people make as many mistakes as bad people. The difference is that they find a way to fix them. And since you came to talk to your best friend, then you are definitely not a bad person. You and Charlie had a fight, aren’t you?

Emma groaned (Madame Pince shushed her indignantly) and buried her nose in her friend’s shoulder, now their quarrel and her resentment looked even more stupid.

“We were brewing Amortentia on Potions.” Penny’s eyes widened excitedly. “And Charlie said I can’t smell only two smells.

“Usually people can smell at least three,” said Penny. She took thought and chuckled cheerfully. “Was Charlie around?”

“Yeah, he climbed into the cauldron with his instructions. You know, he smells like a little bit of grass and cinnamon, so he interrupted the whole smell of the potion!”

Penny giggled, unable to stop. Madame Pince shushed at them again and headed towards them.

“What?” Emma frowned uncomprehendingly, looking at her laughing friend.

“I just wonder what Amortenia smelled like for him.”

“I don’t know, we had a fight and I left,” she bit her lip. “I need to find him and apologize. What a fool I was!”

“Get out of the library if you don’t know how to behave properly!’ Madame Pince hissed at them. Emma apologized in a whisper, hugged Penny goodbye, and went in search of Charlie.

~~~~~~~~~

It took her a long time to find Charlie. He was flying alone over an empty Quidditch field. Emma waved her hand, attracting his attention, and, waiting for him to come down, ran to hug him. But something stopped her and she froze right in front of Charlie, gazing into the snow-covered field.

“Is everything all right?” there was concern in Charlie’s voice, but his tone remained cold.

“I wanted to apologize. I was out of sorts and lashed out at you, even though it wasn’t your fault. I couldn’t have done the potion without you. And anyway…” Emma wanted to say, ‘Anyway, I couldn’t have done it at all without you’, but the words stuck in her throat. She felt herself blushing, her face seemed to burn so that the snowflakes melted before they reached her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

“Apologies accepted,” Charlie replied dryly. Emma winced, it would be better if he yelled at her. But he lowered the broom and sat down directly on the snow. Emma without thinking twice sat down opposite. “I never thought you are mad.”

“I know,” Emma nodded, crushing the bitterly cold snow in her hand. “I like your fascination with dragons.”

“It seems only you,” Charlie grinned, Emma also smiled slightly.

“Maybe Hagrid, too,” Charlie laughed at her comment.

“Well, I’ll have to talk to someone about dragons when Hagrid’s busy. And you’re the only candidate.

“Best friends, then?” Emma asked timidly, letting out a sigh of relief.

“Of course best friends! Never stopped being them, snowflake!” Emma laughed, she always liked that nickname. Charlie frowned, noticing that she again walked in the cold without gloves. He took off his huge warm mittens and put them on her. “You’ll freeze your hands off someday!”

“Nah,” Emma smiled again. For the first time in a long time, she felt so light and good that she wanted to laugh and sing. Charlie was smiling too, noticing her good mood.

“Oh, I completely forgot to ask. Are you free for Christmas? I wanted to call you to us,” he offered embarrassedly. Emma shook herself off the snow.

“Mom will still be in America, so I’d love to! I can’t miss your mom’s Christmas pie!” They both laughed, dispelling the last drops of tension between them.

The two of them wandered through the snow for a long time, until they were chilled and hungry, and Emma felt that her feet were completely wet. Having rolled down the last time from a large ice slide, they went to bask.

“Have you smelled our Amortentia?” Emma asked as they reached the castle.

“Yeah, we did a good job. I checked, although I already knew what it would smell like.”

“What it was?” she asked, not hiding her curiosity.

“An extinct fire, a forest, a pumpkin pie, and,” Charlie paused a little, smiled at her and blew a snowflake from her eyelashes. “A frosty winter morning.”

“You certainly have taste,” Emma laughed.

“That’s for sure,” Charlie smiled again, not taking his eyes off her.

With these words, they entered the castle.

[lady-griffin]

My initial thoughts, while watching “Whatever the fuck this episode is called”(S8E02)

Update:  “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” If that’s not title, than they are wrong. That should be the title. 

 Spoilers Below

So, they’re starting up right at the beginning, no lead up. Just straight to the trial of Jaime. Interesting.

Jamie doesn’t look scared of Daenerys. Interesting.

Damn, that glare to Tyrion. Damn. 

Sansa agrees with Daenerys, not what I was expecting.

“The things we do for love” (ice ice baby)

Brienne standing up for Jamey and Brienne convincing Sansa. This just shows me how much Sansa loves and appreciates Brienne and all she has done for her.

Jon is just trying not to give away how freaked out he is.

Jon followed Sansa? Maybe?

I don’t think so, but maybe? It certainly looked like it.

Everyone follows their leader, I quite like that (or at least that appearance)

Daenerys angry at Tyrion, again…

Tyrion just seems like a hollow version of himself. It’s honestly depressing I was hoping Tyrion had been constructing some plot with Cersei, at least he be more Tyrion-like.

Gendry just giving the vaguest of answers.

It’s like darts at your local college bar.

Gendry is both impressed and horny.

Bran and Jaime!!

Is ghost there? I want Ghost

No Ghost ☹

I did not like that answer Bran, I did not like it at all.

I mean logically there’s going to be an after, but they actually did such a splendid job of building up that unease, of “will there be a tomorrow?”

It’s really well done. I have to say. I know there’s 3 episodes after the final battle. But still that uneasiness and I’m so worried everyone is going to die. It’s really well done. I’ll give them that.

Tyrion & Jaime (Jaime getting all the reunions)

How do they like their new queen? (Jaime asking the questions)

She is different. Are you sure about it? (Jaime is not convinced)

I do wonder, if the pregnancy is real. Or at least was once real. Or ever was.

Ha! Jaime just walks away from Tyrion…why? What did he see? Oh, it’s Brienne.

Seriously, Jaime getting all the reunions

Jaime and Bienne are a romcom couple, but with their own warrior twist

Jorah & Dany, interesting. Daenerys goes from harsh and fiery to soft and gentle in seconds.

Did he send her to make nice with Sansa?

I love these scenes with Royce. Him waiting for Sansa to give the go ahead (the second time too).

I like you Royce. And Sansa earning that respect.

Do you ever think Royce is like, I wish you were the Lady of The Vale and Robin wasn’t the Lord. I want it so bad. Damn you winterfell.

Who manipulated whom?

That is such an interesting question.

It’s so interesting to me that this is all framed as Jon’s war. Even though everyone’s life is at stake, even though there is not going to be a 7k if they fail. Humanity itself is at stake and yet Daenerys despite still being there, is blind to that fact. She views this as Jon’s war and her doing him this favor

Daenerys can be quite charming. See it’s these scenes with her that I quite like, you can see why people followed her. But that anger. 

Emilia Clarke is fantastic at that angry face. Just truly amazing. The people who say she can’t act, I just have to disagree.

That quick shift to anger, is just perfection.

And I like that sudden shift and this new (old) dynamic between Sansa and Daenerys.

The anger in Daenerys’ eyes, Sansa fighting for the North

Daenerys taking her hand back, once she didn’t get what she wanted. Just lovely (I mean that seriously).

I really like that scene

Theon!!!

Theon!!!

I love how he asks Sansa to fight for Winterfell, not Dany

I’m so happy these two are reunited

Me: *Watching Daenerys watching Theon and Sansa* Clearly she thinks these those two are in love

Me: *watches Theon and Sansa* wait…. are they in love?

Huh? I am not opposed to that as much as I thought I would be.

Gilly looks very nice

Baby girl. Oh no, she looks like Shireen, oh poor Davos

Sweet precious baby, “I’ll defend the crypt then”

Oh, please don’t die, oh please don’t die

TORMUND

He just slammed into Jon.

“My little crow”

I love the dynamic between Edd and Tormund now.

And Tormund and Jon

Tormund, I love him

“is the big woman still here?

See! I love the humor with Tormund, forget the talk of balls and dicks, just give me Tormund

War Council Meeting

Sam: Why?

Out of everyone who’s reacted to Bran, Sam has some of the best reactions. Hands down.

Also keep the Bran humor coming.

I think the plan might just be to have Brans stare at the Night King until he goes away…

That discussion of death…it’s all about the stories you become in then end (if you even do become one)

See that’s what interests me so much, what will be the final stories of these characters within this world? From a hundred years from now how will people remember Sansa? Arya? Brienne? Jon? Tyrion?

Will the be accurate or exaggerated fiction and simplified versions?

Jon avoiding Dany

Strange Journey, indeed. A vey nice way to describe Bran’s tale.

I really liked the scene with Tyrion and Bran

It oddly really humanized Bran and made me feel like we have Old Tyrion Back. Which is quite impressive, seeing as a few moments ago I was saying he was a hollow version of himself.

Aww Messandei ☹☹☹

Can the people of the North just be nice to Messandei? Just her okay. You can hate Daenerys, but just be nice to her. She’s so precious.

Greyworm & Messandei, my heart

GHOST!!!!!

GHOST!!!!!

GHOST!!!!!

GHOST!!!

GHOST!!!!

It’s my boy Ghost. GHOST!!!!

Night’s Watch Boys, singing their greatest hit

And now my watch begins

I am starting to get worried about those Crypts

“I wish father was here”

Jaime’s expression, omg I had to pause, I was laughing so hard.

Tormund, no

What? What? What? What? What?

What kind of story is that?

What?

Such an interesting group – Jaime, Tyrion, Podrick, Brienne, Davos and Tormund

Now Arya, Hound and Beric and hopefully Gendry will join too

Oh, I guess Ghost, Jon, Sam and Edd were the night’s watch group

I like this grouping theme

Is Sansa going to get a group? I hope so

Awww, Gendry and Arya got their own little group (as a pair)

Arya’s reaction to learning Gendry is a Baratheon – just amazing!!

Please don’t die, please don’t die

Now a sexy pair

A bit awkward, but get some Arya!

My baby has scars ☹

I mean it makes sense that she has scars, but no, not my baby Arya

But she’s finally getting that Stag

Ser Brienne of Tarth

Fuck Tradition (Tormund is just an angel)

Is Jaime going to knight Brienne?

HE IS!!! YAY!!!

All of you are going to die and I’m so sad, please don’t die

I really love this episode, for these character interactions and these moments

Its just nice, having these characters talk and just be together

See now I hope Brienne lives, the first Lady Knight

Aww Tormund, my heart - his standing ovation

Ser Brienne Tarth, my heart is yours. Please don’t tear up or you’ll make me cry

That smile. It’s not tears, just allergies.

This was such a great scene.

Old Bear and Little Bear, fighting.

That’s very fitting for the first we see them interact. Fighting. That seems very Mormont.

Right they are cousins…I guess since the age difference; I was thinking Uncle and Niece. 

But then again, we have Jon and Daenerys, so age doesn’t really matter when it comes to these relationships.

All those big men following Little Lady Mormont. Perfection. And her suit of armor. Perfection.

I wanted Sansa to have a group of her own ☹

Podrick singing

Sansa and Theon

Gendry and Arya

Messandei and Greyworm

This episode had some serious hints of Theonsa

Lyanna Stark

I really thought Jon was going to answer, “my mother”

Your brother and best friend – she doesn’t believe it. The second Jon started talking you can see the anger build up.

“Dany” – that’s interesting. He hasn’t called that her since the boat.

THE LAST MALE HEIR  - that’s where her mind went to first! That’s where her mind went!

Not that she slept with her nephew. Or that she isn’t that last of her family and she’s no longer “alone”. No, her mind went to the fact that he has more right to the Iron Throne. Wow…wow

I mean I’m not shocked, but still… wow. Not even confusion, but Anger. Just Anger.

Dark Dany isn’t coming. She’s already here.

 Also going back to the Podrick Singing

I don’t know if Sophie Turner can sing, but I would have loved if Sansa had walked into the room and sang. Or they heard her singing outside. Or that scene led to Sansa singing to Theon. Singing and songs are such a big part of Sansa in the books, it’s so disappointing to me that the show doesn’t go that way with her.

Particularly since it’s about Jenny of Oldstones who married the Dragonfly Prince. Who gave up his throne for her

Anyone else think Jon might be willing to give up his claim for a certain Jenny?

No longer be a Dragon Prince but a Dragonfly Prince, instead. And who wore several dragonflies in the earlier days? 

ALSO, FLORENCE + THE MACHINE

I am going to be listening nonstop to that song. 

 Back to the Library Sansa & Dany Scene

 When I was watching the episode, I thought it was pulling a bit away from Dark Dany. At least until the crypt scene. 

But rereading my notes, I have to say I don’t think they were pulling away at all.

For one thing I think those nice, gentle and charming scenes now that I’m thinking about them – remind me of what Maester Pycelle had said about her father. How great and kind, and charming he was. And madness being the worst plague from the gods.

It’s not about Daenerys being good or bad, she is quite capable of both. It’s what she chooses in the end.

But let’s get down to that one line, in particular.

Who is manipulating whom?

Great foreshadowing and such omnious subtext, to a seemingly “friendly joke”

Not a lot of evidence for Political Jon, overall in this episode. Except for that line.

It’s interesting though, that Sansa even states, “you know he loves you”

Which brings me to three conclusions

1. Jon told Sansa the truth and she manipulating Daenerys (Sansa went from ice cold to reminding me a bit of Margaery in that scene)

2. Jon told Sansa that he bent the knee because he loved Daenerys and she believes him and now being friendly for a few seconds and then back to ice ice baby, because of reasons... I guess 

3. Or Jon is really in love with Daenerys and that is how he acts when he’s in love now…. which if that’s the case, I’m okay with Theon and Sansa. Stay away from Sansa, jonathan, if that’s how you are when you’re in love. My girl deserves better.

But the real interesting thing about Political Jon, is whether or not it’s really true

Dany is starting to believe in Political Jon and she’s going to start seriously asking, who is manipulating whom?

I greatly enjoyed this episode. It was such a highlight. Taking those moments and time to sit with characters and see them talk and see how they handle their last night or what might be their last night.

[haechanhearts]

cliche love story: donghyuck

synopsis: childhood best friends turned lovers for lack of a better word, also you’re neighbors

genre: fluff

word count: 1.5k

masterlist

“do you want to hang out on friday? midterms will be over and honestly i need to have some fun. this week is super stressful.” you ask donghyuck over the phone as you lay down on your bed.

“y/n! look out your window!” you hear someone say outside. standing up you walk towards your window to see donghyuck holding his phone near his ear while peering at you through his own bedroom window.

“you know you could just yell and we can talk, right? you don’t need to call me,” donghyuck says while endings the call.

“well yeah, but i like being able to talk while laying in bed,” you say while leaning your arms against the windowsill.

“so, let’s hang out then! we can go wherever you want!” hyuck says after a few seconds of quiet.

“i’ve been meaning on buying this book for a while, maybe we can go to the bookstore.” you offer, already knowing what donghyuck will say. 

“boring! y/n, i thought you wanted to take a break from school! let’s do something fun instead!” he says while slowly climbing over the ledge of his window and walking across the small plank of wood that you both placed there years ago.

“hyuck, stop doing that! it’s dangerous!” you say once he almost slipped and fell. he climbed through your window and plopped down on your bed.

“since when has that ever stopped me?” he brought up. chuckling a bit, you push him slightly to the side of your bed, causing him to exaggerate and roll over to the small corner of your bed. you lay down next to him, both of you staring at your ceiling.

“we can get froyo after we go to the bookstore. i’ll even pay.” you tell him.

“pfft. when have i ever let you pay for my food. or your food, for that matter.” he says.

shrugging your shoulders, you say, “well this time i’ll pay.”

“go pay for jeno’s food, but i’m not letting you pay for me. and i guess the bookstore is fine. i can check out the records they have.” donghyuck rants before rolling over to face you. feeling his movement, you arch your neck to the side to look at him, too.

“then it’s settled! i’ll see you on friday,”

“can i stay here for a little bit? i’ll help you study.” hyuck offers.

“yes idiot, when do i not let you stay?” you respond while chuckling. sitting up, you walk to your desk to pull out some textbooks. you felt donghyuck’s gaze on you, but you didn’t think too much of it.

two days later, you were in class, with donghyuck sitting a few seats behind you. midterms were officially over and you were as happy as can be. you were doodling in your notebook when you felt a paper ball hit your head.

turning around, you see donghyuck sticking his tongue out at you.

“what are you, five?” you say before grabbing the piece of paper he threw and chucking it at his face

“wHaT aRe YoU, FiVe?” he mocks you afterwards. “you were supposed to read the paper, ugly” he tells you after he tossed it onto your table once more.

opening the crumpled paper, you read, who’s ready to have some fun later today?!

turning around to face him, you see that he’s smiling with this stupid smile that, for some reason, you love so much. smiling as well, you nod your head before turning forward to focus on the teacher. 

after school, you told hyuck to meet you at his house, but while you were walking home, you noticed him to be a few yards in front of you with his headphones in his ears. you run up to him and jump onto his back quickly. he let out a shriek and fell on the ground, bringing you along with him. he quickly look up to see you crouched down laughing your butt off. 

ripping off his headphones, he shouts, “what the hell, y/n? I thought I was going to DIE! you can’t do that to me!” 

still recovering from your laughter, you reach towards donghyuck and ruffle his hair, reaching out a hand for him to grab. 

“let’s just head straight to the book store! i’ll buy you a book if you want,” you say with a bright smile, after donghyuck finally stood up. you leaned into his arm and linked it with yours as your strides became larger to match his.

“ppft, i’ll pass.” he says with a little bit of attitude. he suddenly felt a blush creep on his cheeks, so he turned his head the opposite way so you wouldn’t see. donghyuck realized that this happened quite often when he spent time with you he was, at first completely oblivious to the fact that he, indeed had a crush on you. but a quick chat about the subject with jeno, they both came to the conclusion that hyuck most definitely, 100% had the biggest crush on you. the realization went kind of like this:

“dude, I don’t know why, but like every time y/n does something cute, my face feels hot and I have to hold in a squeal.” donghyuck says to jeno while sitting at the desk in his room. 

“ok, wow you definitely like her.” jeno blatantly says. 

“where did you get that idea from?” donghyuck asks, confused.

“well, we were literally talking about jellybeans two seconds ago, and then you switched the conversation to be about y/n. also you said that she does cute things. you also said that you blush around her. and you fight the urge to squeal. it’s pretty obvious to me.” jeno says while shrugging his shoulders.

“I see the way you look at her. you like y/n” 

ever since then, hyuck loved it when you would hug him or text him or call him or even sat next to him. he had a little plan to let you know about his feelings.

you both arrived at the book store, and you scurried to whatever aisle with donghyuck trailing behind you. he took a peek at the records they had and noted to visit this place again in the future. 

you had two books you wanted to buy, and you didn’t know what to choose. you also noticed donghyuck fidgeting with his fingers, but you didn’t think too much of it.

“which book should i get?” you ask hyuck while holding up the two books towards his direction.

“the one on the left, it has a nicer cover,” he responds. you jokingly roll your eyes at his method of elimination but ultimately decide to listen to him.

you take a look around the aisles, reading the synopsis of different books for about 10 more minutes.

“alright, hyuck! let’s go!” you tell him, thinking that he must be bored.

“i’ll pay for your book so you can look around more.” donghyuck offers.

“no thanks, i’ll pay!” you say.

“okay, you pay for my ice cream and i’ll pay for your book.” he says. you reluctantly agree, and hand him the book. you walk through the aisles once again, now looking at the art on the covers.

donghyuck walked to the cash register and quickly paid for the book.

“excuse me, do you have a pen that i can borrow for a second?” donghyuck asks the cashier. she handed him a pen to which he grabbed and opened to the inside of the cover of the book. 

taking a glance up, donghyuck noticed that you were coming down the stairs. he quickly scribbled something into the book and shut it closed, making sure that you didn't see his actions. you finally meet with donghyuck, and he hands you a bag with your book in it.

“and now I get to buy you ice cream!” you say while wrapping your arm around his waist. you felt him stiffen up just slightly, causing you to drop your hands. 

“um, yeah, sure. we’ll see about that” donghyuck says nervously after.

later on that night, you both walked home together. as you were ready to go to bed, you picked up your book from your nightstand for the first time that night. you open the book, but blue ink in the cover catches your eye. you turn your eyes to that to see a small message written in messy handwriting.

dear y/n, 

I like you. I like like you. just thought you should know. :)

-hyuck 

after reading it, and then rereading it about 10 more times, you finally processed what is happening in your head. you quickly scurry to your window, almost tripping on your backpack on the floor. you got ready to yell out donghyuck’s name, but as you peered out your window, you see donghyuck peeking through his own window. 

he slowly stood in front of his window while you did the same with yours. you both looked at each other for a few seconds before donghyuck lets out, “so you got my note?” 

you nod your head quickly. 

“I like you too.” before you even finished your sentence, donghyuck started to climb out of his window, once again, almost falling off. 

“donghyuck, I like you!” you tell him once again.

[ijustreallylovezebras]

The Smell Of Books Pt 5

Pairing: Loki Laufeyson x Reader

Summary: The reader works in a bookshop as a co-owner. Loki begins to frequent in the store after moving permanently to Midgard. They find love between the pages of second hand books

Requested: No

Prologue, One, Two, Three, Four

It felt weird to look Loki in the eye after that day in the shop, after the notes passed between us and after the kiss he gave me.

Or I thought it would, at least. 

As it turned out, I was far more concerned about the cut that was drawn down the left side of his face, from right below his eye down to his chin. The red stood out against his pale skin, despite it already having scabbed over. Almost involuntarily, my hand raised to my mouth in shock at his appearance.

“What happened?” I asked, eyes wide but Loki waved me off, shaking his head and showing me two books.

“I brought you-”

“No, Loki, seriously that looks bad, what happened?” I ask again, coming around the counter and moving the books out of the way. I’m not really thinking when I cup his face gently in my hands and tilt it so I can get a better look at the cut.

He tenses up under my touch but doesn’t move to get away so I keep my hand where they are, inspecting it.

“Did you clean this out?” I ask, worried about the man who nods.

“I have a good doctor,” there’s a smile on his face as he says it, allowing me to understand that there’s more to the story than what he’s going to tell me.

“But what happened?” I ask again and the God just shakes his head, stepping away from my hand and pulling the books out again, beaming at me.

“Nothing that you should concern your pretty self with, darling,” I blush at his words, and duck to hide it from him. “Here are some books for you,” he gives me back my copy of Peter Pan first. “I was careful with it, I saw the inscription on the front page,” I had forgotten about the words written there, words written long ago, and I looked away, not embarrassed exactly, more just sad.

“Thank you,” I get out, taking the book from his hands and hugging it tight to my chest, his words served as a reminder to me as to why I barely leant people my own books and chose instead to simply recommend them. Eva was the only person I ever really let touch my books.

“And I thought you would like this one?” He offers the second book to me almost shyly and I smile, wondering to myself whether or not it would contain a note. I take it and his hands immediately clasp behind his back and he looks at me, before his gaze drops to the floor, clearly unsure of what my reaction would be.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was a book I had already read - one of my favourite books at that. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. 

“Thank you, Loki,” I say quietly and then return his action from the last time I had seen him, reaching up and placing a quick kiss on his cheek. I turn around before he can see that mine are burning from embarrassment.

I start rereading the book later that day, after Loki has done a coffee run, bringing me my usual Chai Latte and then retreated to the reading garden for his lunch break. 

The copy of The Catcher in the Rye that Loki lent me is nicer than the one that I have for myself. It’s an anniversary copy as apposed to the one I own, which was passed down from my parent’s to me, I believe it belonged to my grandparents before them, as well.

The note falls out of the novel, near the back as I’m reading it. I pick it up from where it lies on the counter and a huge smile covers my face as I read it, finding myself thrilled beyond belief that he picked out one of my favourite quotes in the whole history of books that I’ve read.

And I’ve read a lot of books.

I understand the appeal of Peter Pan, I see why you like his story so much and it seems to me that you never did grow up all that much - and that is not meant as a criticism, a compliment rather - however, I find myself drawn much more to Holden, I relate to him much more. Perhaps you don’t understand why, but he’s lost and he’s sad and sometimes I feel the same. 

 - “I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it anyway,”

My heart hurts a little reading it, hearing my favourite quote coming from Loki in such a sad context. Of course it had to be in a sad context, Holden was sad, that was the point of the story. He was indeed sad and lost and it was what drew me to his story, too. It upsets me more than I could ever imagine to think that Loki appreciated his story for the same reasons I did.

I sit back at the desk, putting the book away, using his note as a bookmark as I consider what book I could recommend next. People had just come into the shop and it was rude to read while they were there. I called out a cheery greeting, offering them help as I pondered on which book I should give him.

 I didn’t want to lend him any that my relatives had given to me after he told me about finding the inscription, which narrowed me down to modern books. I had to give him a happy one, one to cheer him up or make him understand that life wasn’t too bad. I knew that I needed something of the sort as well, at one stage of my life.

I allowed my eyes to skim the titles that surrounded me. I wondered what he would appreciate the most. Did he want a laugh? Did he want to cry? What did he want from this book?

By the time that Loki had returned from his lunch break, I had figured out which book to lend him.

“Do you mind watching the store real quick while I eat?” I ask as he comes back in. Loki looks surprised and I realise it’s the first time I’ve asked him to watch it on his own. Normally, Eva and I try to ensure that he has at least one other person on the floor with him. 

There was reason behind it, it wasn’t that we didn’t trust him - well, at least I trusted him, Eva was a different matter there - it was just that he wasn’t exactly our most welcoming member of staff. Loki did tend to scare off more customers than he attracted, mostly it tended to be something to do with the fact that everyone still remembered him as the asshole who tried to rule Earth a few years back.

Honestly, a guy makes one mistake and it follows him for life.

“I don’t mind,” Loki answers and I smile at him.

“Thanks, I’ll be right back down, holler if you need anything,” I’m already up and out of my seat, heading to the stairs to mine and Eva’s apartment before I’ve finished talking.

I find the book I’m looking for almost straight away and bring it into my small kitchen. Eva’s washing up from the morning was still there. She was the messy one of the two of us. I tended to keep the flat clean while she dealt with all the business and shit like that. It was a good system.

I put some soup in the microwave and set about writing my next note.

While The Catcher In The Rye is arguably one of the best and important books ever written, this book will be good for your soul in other ways, trust me Loki. This book will make you laugh and cry and everything in between, just trust me :) and if it’s any consolation, I think we all have a little Holden inside of us, and it’s the Holden in us that proves that we’re real people, that we really feel things.

 - “Something must first be shattered for it to be put back together in a way that is more beautiful than before”

I eat my lunch and try to convince myself that lending Loki my copy of Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland is a good idea. I knew that he wouldn’t laugh at it, and I knew that he would read it and yet I wasn’t sure if he would enjoy it in the same way that Eva, MJ and I had.

I sighed and finished my soup, slipping the note between a couple of pages near the back and then heading back down to the store, ready to meet my fate.

To my surprise, there is another figure in the store, leaning on the counter. He’s tall and blond and unmistakeable in his identity, despite the baseball hat on his head that in reality does nothing to conceal his identity. 

Thor, as in the God of Thunder, was stood in my bookstore.

“Ah, here is said lady!” He booms as he sees me and I freeze, unsure whether or not I ought to finish walking into the store of if I should turn and run back to the safety of my flat.

“Hi?” I question unsurely, taking the last few stairs so that my feet are planted safely on the wooden floor of the store.

“I Loki for the rest of the day, if it is no trouble,”

“I told him I was working,” Loki argues, giving me a strained smile and glaring at his brother who shakes his head, letting out a booming laugh.

“The world needs you, brother!” He announces.

“If the world needs you, Loki, I’m sure I can spare you for the rest of the day,” Loki looks to me, his smile becoming more real as he looks at me. “Not that I’ll pay you or anything,” his smile widens again and Thor lets out another booming laugh, clapping his brother on the shoulder in delight. 

“I’ll meet you out in the car, brother, collect your things,” Thor insists and Loki sighs, nodding as Thor leaves the building.

“I’m sorry about this,”

“Don’t worry about it, Loki,” I laugh, really not minding. It had been a slow day in the store anyway, we didn’t really need two people working today. “This is for you, by the way,” I tell him, thrusting the book in his direction. Loki takes it, a more sincere smile on his face.

“Thank you, Y/N,” I refuse to look at him, well aware of the heat that was spreading across my cheeks.

“Go save the world or whatever,”

Part Six

I’M SORRY I MISSED SO MANY UPDATES AHH

TSOB TAGS

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PERMANENT TAGS

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[j-diamond]

An Eventful Spring Break (Edward x Reader)

  You watch as the clouds zoom by, finding that the only way to solve your boredom. You sigh inwardly as you look down at the packet of paper.   “Choose a city, with a crime-ridden status. Go to their police department, interview one of their top performing officers. Make sure to ask conflicting questions.” You say aloud rereading it for what you assume to be the twentieth time. You shake your head, but smile as you finally see the sign welcoming you to Gotham. It literally took forever to get to Gotham all the way from Virginia. You stretch as you quickly see Gotham Royal Hotel come into view. You smile as the car pulls to a stop. The door is opened for you and you get out, still stretching. You catch yourself from falling and smile at the person next to you,

  “Follow me.” he says as another person grabs your bags. You walk into the lobby still following the man as the other person follows you. You look around, for a such crime filled city, this hotel was very posh. A young boy followed by an older looking man runs past you knocking you down. You groan, looking at all your papers sprawled everywhere. You sigh as you pick all the papers up and hurriedly run not to loose the man. He shows you your room and the other guy puts your suitcases on the bed, and he hands you the key. They both leave and you flop onto the bed. You look at the ceiling and smile, noticing that it was a painting of a galaxy. You turn around and eye the papers,   “This is not how I expected to spend my spring break.” you say to yourself. You sit up as you notice a few papers that weren’t yours, “Case papers?” You scan them for anything that could tell you who they were for, “Ivy pepper and Selina Kyle?” You shake your head, You could probably give these to the officers once you get to the GCPD. You unpack your suitcases and pull out your favorite book and a lollipop. You lay in your pajamas as you read with the covers tightly over you.

  “Okay so I have to take the bus to the station and from there I’d be looking for I think Gordon?” You say to yourself as you walk down the sidewalk, “and the bus comes in…” You look at your phone, but after seeing the time, you realized you’d be late. So you ran. You ran as fast as you could without trying to bump into people. Sadly you failed, and you soon found yourself colliding with the pavement.   “Oh dear!” a masculine voice says, “Are you okay?” You feel hands lift you up, but you kept your eyes closed, the pain in stinging your face. You sigh, as you keep rubbing your face,   “I’m so sorry.” you say to him as you look at the pavement, “I was in a rush for the bus,” You see the bus drive by, and sigh, “Which i’ve now missed.” You look up at him, and inwardly gasp, he was kinda cute.   “Oh…” he says as he looks at you, “I could uh.. Treat that… If you want me too.” He says and you shake your head,   “It’s okay.” you say as you remember why you were here, “I have work to do. I need to go to the GCPD.” You think about where it is. You’ve never really looked at a map. You look in the direction that the bus was going, well might as walk in that direction.   “I-I know where the GCPD is.” a voice says as you begin walking. You turn around to see the guy you had bumped into. You look at him skeptically,   “Um… I don’t know.” You say as you think about an excuse to tell him, “I’m in a bit of a hurry.” he smiles,   “Oh it’s fine.” he says, “I used to work there, I know the fastest route.” He smiles as he holds out his hand, “You want to get there or not?” You shrug your shoulders, there was nothing left to lose,  “Okay.” you grab his hand, “Let’s go.”

 “What’s nowhere but everywhere, except where something is?” he asks as he begins to slow to a stop. You look at him, but then think about it.  “Oh..” you say as you remember having heard this one before, “Nothing.” He smiles at you,  “Which is exactly what my schedule is full of later today.” he eyes you, “Unless of course you’d help me change it.” You look at him confused. At least until you realized what he was saying,   “Are you asking me on a date?” you ask baffled,   “Yes I am.” he says, “I, Edward Nygma, am asking you, Y/f/n Y/l/n, out on a date.” he smiles at you, “What does, the lovely y/n say?” You smile at him,   “Yes.” you say to him, wanting to scream in joy, even though you had just met the man.   “Tomorrow at 7.” he says, as he gives you a paper with an address, and then he is gone. You smile to yourself, but the sound of clatter rips you from your daze.   “Right…” you say as you walk into the GCPD.   “Oh hi.” you say as you come face to face with the person who you had met your first day in Gotham. You look at him and he just stares at you,   “Hello?” he asks, clearly confused,   “You knocked me over when you were dashing out of the hotel.” you say as a look of remembrance flashed on his face.   “Oh! Right.” he says, “I am so sorry I did not mean to.” you shake your head,   “No it’s alright.” you say, “But…” you look through your bag, “I think you dropped this.” you say as you hand him the case files you found in your stack of papers. He smiles upon seeing them,   “Oh thank you!” he says, “ I was looking for these. I assume you would like something as compensation.” You shake your head,   “No it’s really not necessary.” You say to him and he looks at you surprised,   “You don’t want my money?” he asks,   “Why would I?” you ask, “Besides how am I supposed to know if you have money or not?” The look on his face was indescribable,   “You don’t know who I am?” he asks and you shake your head,   “Am I supposed to?” you ask, “Besides this is my first time visiting. So I don’t really know anyone here.” He looks at you and smiles,   “Bruce Wayne.” He says as he holds out his free hand, which you shake, “And this is my butler Alfred Pennyworth.” You shake his hand also,   “I’m Y/n.” you say, smiling knowing you now had potential friends,   “We could give you a tour today.” he says, “If you’re free that is.”   “Sure,” you say knowing you could put it off until tomorrow, “But could you point me to which officer is James Gordon.” He nods and points to him. You quick take a picture so you could reference it later,  “Sure. Let’s go.” 

  “Thanks Bruce!” You say after you guys hug, “That was a fun tour. You must really love this town.” He nods,   “Yeah.” he says distantly, “I want to be able to protect it.” You smile at him as he walks off with Alfred. He’s a nice guy.  “I’m glad I befriended him.” you say to yourself as you walk up to your room. Once inside you repeat your nightly routine, and soon enough you’re tucked under the covers, in your pajamas finishing another book.

  “According to the statistics and a few newspapers, Penguin seems to be the reason that the crime is at an all time low. I think it’s one of the lowest percentages the city has ever seen. Doesn’t this peg the question on whether or not your jobs are actually necessary?” You ask and he looks at you shocked. He opens his mouth but then closes it.   “Well you see-” He starts but then is immediately cut off,   “No comment.” Another voice says, and you both look up who you assume to be Harvey Bullock, “I’m Harvey Bullock, Captain of this here establishment.” You roll your eyes at his statement and smile,   “So you’re taking credit of this?” You ask, knowing that he would be baffled, and as you suspected he was. He stared down for a moment, then at Jim then at you,   “No comment.” he says yet again, and for an unknown reason all three of you laugh.

  “There are really great people here.” you say over the phone, “Surprisingly.” You both laugh and you smile to yourself,   “Where’d you choose to go?” You ask b/f/n. You could hear them sigh over the phone,   “Detroit.” B/f/n says, “It’s pretty dope here though.” then they pauses, which you knew was for dramatic effect, “Surprisingly.” you shake your head,   “Really?”   “Oh yeah.” B/f/n says, and you could hear them gasp, “Wait.”   “What?”   “Don’t you have a date tonight?” They ask and you sit up on your bed,   “Oh shoot.” you say to yourself, “You right! I gotta go.”   “You go glen coco.” b/f/n says before you hear a dial tone.

  “Sorry I’m late.” You say as you walk up to him and he smiles at you,   “It’s okay.” he says as he kisses your hand, “I didn’t wait that long.” He smiles at you, “Shall we?” You curtsey overdramatically,   “We shall.” you say as both of you walk to the top of the building where a candle light dinner stood in front of you.

  “What’s green and then red?” he asks, after you finished laughing,   “Ummmm…” you think about it, “i don’t know.”   “Frogs in a blender.” he says and you’re laughing again.   “Okay um…” you say thinking off a riddle that he wouldn’t know, but then you sigh, “I can’t think of any that you wouldn’t know the answer to.” he smiles at you,   “Well i am smart.” he says. And you shake your head,   “No.” you say smiling, “It’s ‘cause you were such thick framed glasses.” You say and he looks at you,   “But…” he says but stops after you take off his glasses. You close your eyes then put them on, and open them,   “Woaaahhh…” you say looking around, “Why didn’t you tell me you were blind.” You look around only able to see outlines. You reach your hand out to touch Edward’s face.   “What…?” he asks, you could tell he was trying to stop himself from laughing,   “How can you see anything in these?” you ask as you caress him face. You see, what you think is his hand reach out to you. Seeing as how the glasses were being pulled off you figured it was indeed his hand. You rub your eyes and blink a few times, “Yeah… you keep them.” he chuckles, “You look better in them anyway.” He smiles at you and you smile back.

  “I don’t know why you think it’s funny.” you say as he laughs at the fact that you had never really been kissed before. You sigh as you stand in front of the hotel with him still laughing. He stands straight up then looks into your eyes,   “I can change that if you want.” he says and before you can respond his lips are pressed against yours. Once realization hits it doesn’t take you long to melt into the kiss.

[comicteaparty]

March 14th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party chat that occurred on March 14th, 2019, from 5PM - 7PM PDT.  The chat focused on Sketch Dump by Aleks Stock.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- THURSDAY BOOK CLUB START!

Good evening, everyone~! This week’s Thursday Book Club is officially beginning! Today we are discussing Sketch Dump by Aleks Stock~! (https://sketchdump.org/)

Remember that Thursday discussions are completely freeform! However, every 30 minutes I will drop in OPTIONAL discussion questions in case you’d like a bit of a prompt. If you miss out on one of these prompts, you can find them pinned for the chat’s duration. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is fun and respectfully appreciating the comic. All that said, let’s begin!

QUESTION 1. What is your favorite scene in the comic so far and why?

one scene i particularly enjoyed was the scene where its revealed clear as day, no holds bar that Iladyl is a slave. https://sketchdump.org/post/179755402309/sketch-dump-c02p06-i-wanna-hug-iladyl-qaq the way its revealed is so straight forward but so simple really works i think. cause its just treated as a fact of life and that is indeed how it would be for the world.

i also loved the animated shattered screen effect because its both grounded in familiarity yet the way its illustrated kind of gives it that scifi fantasy tech feel that lets you know that nope, definitely not from earth

i also find the scene where Brogod meets Jen to be kind of fascinating. mostly cause i think Brogod is an interesting character since his first inclination is to make contact and help. meanwhile in the "real" world, cause i get the impression of simulation, his brain seems to be kind of exploding. but mostly i like it for the interactions cause its not the first reaction you really expect when meeting some crazy alien entity in a weirdo simulation world of sorts.

khkddn

im not done reading through the archive but i really like the scene in the beginning where the lights are flickering, it looks so cool

RebelVampire

yes i think the lighting effects are pretty cool. especially cause of how its animated because the animation kind of feels like the world is glitching. which fits with the whole world we see jenna in later

ezzy

i also like the beginning scene with the séance. just nice to see the characters fucking around. it really gives you the sense that they've known each other for a while

khkddn

it's a great artstyle overall, love it

ezzy

same!

khkddn

yeah i liked seeing the characters interacting too during the seance, some good moments there(edited)

ezzy

i love any sort of multimedia webcomic but the use of animations is rly good

it makes the world a little more vibrant

RebelVampire

yeah i agree it is really great to see the characters kind of just being them. no life threatening quest. no world to save. just a silly seance thing as an excuse to get together, hang out, maybe get some food later. i think it was a good way to introduce them since it gave more breather time to get to know them.

ezzy

i like the little hints that there's more to the characters, like that dudes scar

RebelVampire

yes or some of the subtle looks passed between certain individuals. it was interesting to see a little back history at play that we dont get to know about yet

ezzy

it really makes you want to read more

khkddn

all caught up now! definitely agree w @RebelVampire about the scene revealing Iladyl is a slave. a few pages prior to that i think lyral says something to the effect of "i stole you" which i didn't understand at first but once it got to that page i was like ohhhh

RebelVampire

haha i kind of suspected from that line but it was one of those lines that makes you go "hmm maybe not"

and then the story said nope, it was the worst thing you could expect

khkddn

harsh, harsh reality

RebelVampire

although im really curious about what gave it away. like i assume the horns or something, but im not sure what about them announced "slave over here everybody"

khkddn

i think it was the horns, since there is a panel focusing on them when those people say to leave the slave alone

maybe the hair color too but idk

RebelVampire

QUESTION 2. At the start of the comic, we’re introduced to a slew of colorful characters. Which of the characters shown so far caught your eye the most? What about that character in particular interests you? Further, which of the character dynamics intrigued you the most? From what has been shown so far, especially of the human cast, what do you make of everyone’s relationship with each other? How do you think this devil summoning ritual began, and why is everyone simultaneously showing up and being grumpy about showing up? What do you make of every character’s choice of sins, and in what ways do you think that might come into play later?

ezzy

i like jake and jen a lot, mostly based off their designs

RebelVampire

while brogod definitely interests me, i think the character who caught my eye the most was Jake. Of all the humans he seemed the most down to earth and cool. that and of all the characters jack couldve called at the beginning, he calls jake. and that really makes me want to know their past relationship history cause who you choose ot call first is pretty revealing.

ezzy

i think there's a lot of things being set up for the future and i'm rly interested in seeing where it's going

obviously these are characters who've known each other for a good while and have their own rituals and inter-relationships

the devil summoning is being done for the sake of ritual rather than anyone (besides jackson) caring about the results

so i guess it will be interesting to see why it worked this time and how it will shake up their relationships now that its worked

RebelVampire

yes, definitely. cause if this doesnt test their friendships, nothing will XD

there definitely is a lot of character stuff being set up though

i think from the opening scene the character im most worried about sin wise is allen. cause allen chose sloth and life and while jake played it off as him just being a millenial, umm, yeah. i mean you dont pick life as a sin for nothing

which since allen is the one with the scar

maybe hes got a serious case of survivors guilt

and survived something horrific

khkddn

im really curious about that scar, since it seems like he makes a bigger deal of it than anyone else

RebelVampire

yeah especially when it really isnt that bad of a scar

so theres gotta be emotional ties to it

and not just vanity

since vanity is a sin and was not the one he picked

ezzy

oooh i didn't make the connection between the scar and the sin he picked

khkddn

if there is a connection, it could go multiple ways. maybe it was a situation where he got the scar through inaction, or maybe something happened to him that made him a more passive person

RebelVampire

that could be too

that would combine it well with sloth

the character dynamic i think i want to know most about is blake and ana. cause of this page https://sketchdump.org/tagged/comic/chrono/page/13

there are so many ways to read that conversation and that look

khkddn

oh that's true, i didn't notice that the first time reading through

ezzy

(can i just say i really like the composition of that page)

RebelVampire

yes, i love the visual flow on this page, the slight animation, and all the shot choices. it was a really good build up for that look

ill also point out blake wrote love as his sin

so that is a blush

khkddn

the was blake is in the second panel vs the last panel are super different. if it's related to why he picked love, then i wonder why he and ana haven't haven't seen each other in a while (based on the "long time no see")

RebelVampire

ok wait. im rereading this and the papers are sin and sacrifice. so love isnt the implied sin but what blake wants to sacrifice

so is it like...ana is his ex hes still in love with but he wants to move on?

khkddn

hm that would explain them not seeing each other

RebelVampire

yes and the awkward response from blake

ezzy

oooh

RebelVampire

if life is allen's sacrifice, then thats even worse tho and stands to reason that hes probably guilty of inaction

QUESTION 3. Within the comic, an “innocent” devil summoning seems to go horrifically wrong. What do you think exactly happened to everyone involved? Why did this summoning go so awry, and why did none of the other attempts before have the same results? How does all this tie into what Brogod was doing regarding summoning and translating? Did Brogod somehow cause what happened to the human gang, or were both sides victims? Also, why was Brogod found unconscious and barely breathing after making contact with Jen? What’s even going on with Jen? Lastly, do you think Brogod is okay and, if so, will Brogod try to make contact again?

I do think Brogod was responsible for why everything went awry. Cause its like he was trying to summon the summoner which probably created an extreme magical paradox

ezzy

my guess is that the two "summonings" happening at the same time is what caused everything to go all whoopsy-fucky

khkddn

i think the previous seances never worked because each time, there wasn't someone like brogod on the other end doing their own seance

it's weird that brogod got all messed up but the humans didn't. maybe it's because there was one of him and seven of them?

RebelVampire

i assume brogod got messed up more from making contact with jen

rather than the seance itself causing it

like had he bailed and said "no lets not talk to this person" he mightve been fine?

ezzy

i think the thing with jen is like... either happenning in his head or he's like projecting his conscious to another plane and thats why he's fountaining blood

RebelVampire

yeah

i got the simulation impression

like brogod was tapping into another world

another world i would not be surprised was purgatory or something

whereas the humans got physically transported

simulation world also cause last i checked human eyes dont glow blue like that

unless jen was secretly a cyborg all along

khkddn

im trying to figure out what jen is saying in the non-translated parts.... too hard >_>

RebelVampire

by process of elimination i believe jen was the one who chose to sacrifice limb, so i hope that thing brogod put on her doesnt have long term consequences

khkddn

sacrificing limb sounds pretty straightforward in terms of making it literal, wouldn't want to pick that one

the only non-translated part i think i understand is the one on this page https://sketchdump.org/tagged/comic/chrono/page/32

p sure she's saying something about his tail

RebelVampire

makes sense

i can read "That's a

but the rest i cant figure out

im really curious why brogod seemed to have all those translation bug things as the thematic colors we keep seeing to represent each character

khkddn

they also flew away into the void (i think they did, he tried to catch them) so im wondering where those lil things went

RebelVampire

i mean the most likely conclusion is to the other characters

considering in the latest page we can confirm emily made contact

and clearly the language barrier would still apply without help

ezzy

yeah, it would be silly to have the characters run around without being able to speak the language

so thats a neat solution

RebelVampire

also interesting. cause magic shenanigans must be at work

i do think brogod is gonna be fine and be back again to figure out wtf is going on. cause i think after he wakes up he might realize he had something to do with it. or hell make contact with jen and gleam info about their situation and go "whoops"

ezzy

im really curious about what's gonna happen lmao

RebelVampire

QUESTION 4. As the comic has only gotten so far, there’s a lot of speculation to be had about the future. Do you think the human gang will ultimately get back to their homes? At the very least, do you think they’ll at least be able to find each other given they all seem to be quite separated? How do you think Iladyl will be involved with the plot considering his friend seemed to have located Emily? Why is the friend interested in involving Iladyl in the first place? Do you think everyone else has made contact with someone like Emily and Jen? On a different note, what about the world interests you the most right now? Finally, in general, what sorts of conflicts, events, or anything else are you hoping to see or think might happen?

so in line with the topic of sin and sacrifice earlier, im really concerned ana is gonna die. cause thats one way to sacrifice love

ezzy

i feel like they'll be separated for a long time and will have to deal with their relationships while being apart and thrust into a new and foreign situation

you know, like college

RebelVampire

yeah i dont think theyll find each other anytime soon. although the characters who know them may find them. like maybe brogod will find Iladyl's friend and they can chat about their alien friends. but i assume the humans are kind of like in pockets where they cant make contact with each other until theyre out in the actual physical world where there isnt a white void everywhere.

ezzy

they'll probably have to reevaluate their relationships under duress and will be different people by the time they see each other again

RebelVampire

yes, definitely. i mean not even their relationships. theyre gonna have to evaluate themselves cause they all seem to be early 20s or younger with exception to jake who seems to be working at a hospital

tho exception in the sense that im not sure what his job is there

ezzy

the description does say 2 teens and a number of young adults

i wanna say five but i cant fucking count

RebelVampire

i assume most of them are around jack's age

again minus jake

cause it really depends on what jake does

cause if hes a nurse or doctor or something hed be a lot older cause med school takes a long ass time

ezzy

if hes a nurse he might be younger i think(edited)

because nursing school doesnt take as long

RebelVampire

true. but tbf jake could also be some sort of genius and did the whole college thing at 10. hes mostly just the wildcard i wont put eggs into the basket

on a different topic, i bet the others are not having as great as time as jenna or emily. cause i will be surprised if they all manage to meet someone who legitimately wants to help them

ezzy

my guess is that theyre all within 4 years of each other

it will be interesting to see if they all have like... a demon counterpart to play off of

RebelVampire

i think thats plausible, just all their demon counterparts might not be the best of ppl. like knowing slaves are a thing in this world makes me think one of them is kind of destined for it

ezzy

yep

RebelVampire

the bit of world im most intrigued by is from this page https://sketchdump.org/post/174655505354/sketch-dump-c01p24-minor-seizure where brogod gets mad about almost damaging the most priceless artifact in the palace. cause i cant decide what hes talking about, although i assume its the lighter. and if so, wtf happened in the world that its the most priceless artifact

alternative could be talking about the computer, but considering technology seems rampant idk

khkddn

it does look like an ordinary lighter, but who knows

(ordinary lighter w blue fire, that is)

ezzy

hmm the computer says something about a gift and lyddal(?) also mentioned a soul gift

maybe its a soul lighter

lladyl lmao

RebelVampire

hmm that could be

but now that tells me why the friend probably wanted to get Iladyl involved

maybe Iladyl's soul gift is something that will help

with emily

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[preserving-ferretbrain]

The Wise Man's New Clothes

by Dan H

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Little Context

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

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

I was

sceptical but ultimately positive

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

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

The Double Standard

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

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

concluded

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

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

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

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

Imre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

Vintas

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

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

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

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

Felurian

Oh Felurian. Where to begin.

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

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

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

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

So yeah, Felurian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ademre

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

Denna

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

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion: Follow Through

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

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

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

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

But it has no follow through.

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

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

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

Themes:

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Wardog

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

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Melissa G.

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

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

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

Oh my god

The God of Small Things.

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

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

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

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Dan H

at 22:20 on 2011-04-13

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

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

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

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

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Dan H

at 23:47 on 2011-04-13

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

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

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

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http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/

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

loved it.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

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

The God of Small Things

like burning, random incest and all.

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

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Arthur B

at 10:02 on 2011-04-14

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

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

sympathetic magic

? Or is sympathy something different from that?

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

fail

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

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Dan H

at 10:24 on 2011-04-14

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

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

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

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

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

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Wardog

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

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

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Dan H

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

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Arthur B

at 10:41 on 2011-04-14

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

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

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Dan H

at 11:00 on 2011-04-14

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

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

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

shares many of my misgivings

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

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Ash

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

skraelings

.

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

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Dan H

at 16:09 on 2011-04-14

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

Ooh dear, that isn't good at all.

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

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Ash

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

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

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

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Dan H

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

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Ash

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

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Arthur B

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

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

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 22:22 on 2011-04-14

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

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

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

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Dan H

at 22:59 on 2011-04-14

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

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

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Micklem's books

Firethorn

and

Widlfire

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

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http://cofax7.livejournal.com/

at 05:54 on 2011-04-15

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

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

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

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

100K Kingdoms

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

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Dan H

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

That's fairly positive, I suppose.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

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

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

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Ash

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

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

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

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 16:09 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black

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

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Dan H

at 17:10 on 2011-04-15

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

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

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

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

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

category,

not race of author.

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

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

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

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

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

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

Which

was

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

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

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

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Robinson L

at 15:06 on 2011-05-25

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

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

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http://conquestsong.blogspot.com/

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

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Dan H

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

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

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

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

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

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Arthur B

at 11:42 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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Dan H

at 15:00 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cammalot

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

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Wardog

at 19:58 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- I see your point, but disagree.

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

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

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

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

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Cammalot

at 20:45 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cammalot

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

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

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Wardog

at 21:19 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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

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

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending.

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wardog

at 22:06 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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Cammalot

at 22:21 on 2011-07-13

Let's do Jesus next!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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

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

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Wardog

at 22:47 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dan H

at 23:00 on 2011-07-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the others as well.

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

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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

I think I have to vote "con" again.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

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

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

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

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

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Wardog

at 10:57 on 2011-07-14

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

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

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

See above.

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

See above.

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

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

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

In short: what Ruderetum said :)

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Dan H

at 15:13 on 2011-07-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* He is particularly skilled at technical subjects

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

* He is awkward around women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- well, you have a point there.

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

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

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

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Dan H

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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

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

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Dan H

at 12:13 on 2011-07-20

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

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

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

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Orion

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

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http://sprizouse.blogspot.com/

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

long comment thread

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

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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/

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

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

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

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

The Queenkiller Chronicles

, but otherwise... very interesting!

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

at 02:24 on 2012-06-15

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

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

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

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Shim

at 08:13 on 2012-06-15

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

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

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James D

at 18:01 on 2012-06-15

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

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

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

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

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valse de la lune

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

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Dan H

at 14:29 on 2012-06-17

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

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

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

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

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Michal

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

From what I've read of

The Name of the Wind

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

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Arthur B

at 18:29 on 2012-06-17

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

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

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James D

at 20:05 on 2012-06-17

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

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

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

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

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Arthur B

at 20:41 on 2012-06-17

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good?

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

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Michal

at 20:52 on 2012-06-17

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

Well,

The Name of the Wind

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

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 21:25 on 2012-06-17

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

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

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James D

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

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Dan H

at 23:21 on 2012-06-17

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

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

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

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

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

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James D

at 00:04 on 2012-06-18

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

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

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

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

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http://omarsakr.wordpress.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Arthur B

at 10:03 on 2012-08-22

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

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

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 17:07 on 2012-08-23

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

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

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http://everstar3.livejournal.com/

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

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Robinson L

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

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

.

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Dan H

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

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Arthur B

at 22:54 on 2013-07-19

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

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

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Melanie

at 06:37 on 2013-07-20

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

The more books the author writes

without

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

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Jules V.O.

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

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

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Arthur B

at 14:01 on 2013-07-20

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

I do love the fact that the

Breaking Dawn

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

an adult werewolf falls in love with a baby.

[avanneman]

John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican

John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.”

No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan.

John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan has the suit, haircut, and soul of a TV personality. Yet both ended their careers kissing Donald Trump’s ass. Strange! More than strange!

It could justly be said—and often was—that John McCain approached politics with the mindset of the fighter pilot he used to be, an adrenaline junkie who wanted to see every issue as a struggle of good against evil, or at least us against them, which, in his mind, constituted the same thing. He was always wanting to go to war, wars in which, he was sure, the good guys always won and everyone’s problems were settled once and for all. My most vivid memory of McCain is video showing him striding around Baghdad in an armored vest, surrounded by heavily armed troops, with assault helicopters circling overhead, and proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”.

McCain made himself a national figure in the 2000 Republican primaries by wowing the national press corps with his war stories, young men and women stunned to be in the presence of a man who’d seen and endured things they, with their pampered backgrounds, could not even begin to imagine. This was a man!

And so he was, but as a senator he wasn’t so much. McCain was furious—well beyond furious—at George Bush because he believed, with some reason, that he’d been done out of the Republican nomination by some seriously subterranean backstabbing during the South Carolina primary, which may well be true, but one can also wonder how deliberate noncombatant Georgie W. beat a war hero in what is often regarded as the most militaristic state in the union.

McCain continued to cultivate the press in defeat, playing the beloved role of “maverick”, charging like a bull at a variety of issues, but never really succeeding at anything. For McCain, the passionate display of “passion” was its own purpose and end. His was not to reason why, and he never did.

Yet however harshly one wishes to criticize McCain, his ultimate obsequiousness to Trump remains baffling. Trump publicly ridiculed McCain’s heroism. Why wasn’t McCain at the Democratic Convention, standing beside Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy views were almost identical to his own, and proclaiming her “America’s Choice”? What kept the proud maverick in such humiliating harness?

Well, as I say, I’m baffled. Perhaps he was intimidated by the Republican base, which had shifted so heavily against the “free trade, open borders” orthodoxy to which he had always subscribed.

But, in fact, there was always a bit of smoke and mirrors when it came to McCain’s “bipartisanship”. He had a knack for choosing issues, like campaign reform and immigration reform, that never, or rarely, managed to make it into law.1 On tax and spending issues, he almost always voted the straight party line, never giving an inch to either Clinton or Obama, though he did draw back a little from the “burn the house down” efforts of the newly elected Tea Party Republicans to drive the federal government into default—though probably more because he was worried about the possible impact on defense spending, which was the only fiscal issue he really cared about.2

But as for “leadership”, McCain was almost always absent. He voted in favor of removing President Clinton from office and, most infamously, brought Sarah Palin and her brand of “Americanism” into the national spotlight for the first time. And when the country really needed some bipartisan leadership, during the first onslaught of the Great Recession when Obama took office, McCain said, and did, nothing.

What’s remarkable about Paul Ryan is that, for a long time, he received press almost the equal of McCain’s, with far less substance. While McCain’s warrior ego was always front and center, deciphering Paulie’s slippery humility has always been a chore. He eagerly promoted—and the press eagerly bought—his Wisconsin Boy Scout demeanor. His incessantly repeated claim to be a “wonk” was, I think, deliberately designed to insulate him from the continuing bro-ha-ha3 over “social issues”—abortion, homosexuality, the “war against Christmas”, etc.—that so obsessed most ambitious Republicans. Paulie always looked east, towards Wall Street, but I’ve never been sure of his motivation. Was he gunning for the presidency? Then why stay in the House?

For many years, Ryan was sort of a hero—or perhaps fig-leaf—to many Republicans. In fact, to “recovering Republicans” like (former) conservative broadcaster Charles Sykes (author of How the Right Lost Its Mind), WashPost columnist and long-time Literature R Us whipping boy George F. Will, and former Republican strategist Rick Wilson (author of Everything Trump Touches Dies), who, unlike the first two, is deeply disappointed in the “new Paulie,” Ryan is (or was) a true hero. Nonpartisan centrists like Josh Barro are also deeply disappointed in the Ryan reinvention, which I will demonstrate—at length–is not new at all.

Sykes, in his book, gives us a taste of the true Paulie believer:

Whatever you might think of his policies, Paul Ryan is inarguably the most formidable intellectual leader the Republican Party has had for decades. For years, he was known for his dogged advocacy of budget and entitlement reform in opposition from his party’s establishment. His rise from conservative backbencher to Speaker could have been seen as one of the great success stories of the conservative movement. “I spent more time, I’d say, in the backbench than the leadership,” Ryan told me during a conversation on my last radio show. “The party really tried to isolate me a number of years ago and tried to explain to our members, ‘do not touch what Ryan is talking about, don’t deal with these fiscal issues, these entitlements, it’s political suicide.” And I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold,” he explained. “What happened, really, was the 2010 election, I think. The 2010 election brought all these, sort of Tea Party conservative Republicans into office.”

I suppose it’s possible to pack more self-serving nonsense into one paragraph than Paulie (and Sykes) just did there, but it isn’t easy. Ryan was always an eager self-promoter, though, as I say, it’s a bit of a mystery—again with the mystery! Republicans are mysterious!—exactly who Ryan was trying to sell himself to. Ryan has spent nearly all his adult life working in politics, either as a legislative aide or a congressman, and has claimed that all he wanted was to be chair of the House Budget Committee, but I don’t quite believe that. He has always appeared to me to have national aspirations, but for what? If you want to be president, you have to get out of the House, and, as far as I know, Ryan never showed interest in running either for governor or senator. If he wanted money, sure, a Budget Committee chair can retire after five or six years and make $2 or $3 million a year as a big-time lobbyist, but why bust your ass in your fifties for $2 or $3 million a year when you could have been making $20 or $30 million a year on Wall Street in your twenties?

So is Ryan telling the truth when he claims that he’s just a wonk, just wants to make the world a better place via free-market capitalism? No, he isn’t. To coin a phrase, he’s a big fat liar. Ryan lists the late Rep. Jack Kemp as his mentor and role model. Kemp was perhaps the most passionate advocate of the holy gospel of supply-side economics this side of George Gilder. Both men believed that the absolutely unfettered free market would solve all of mankind’s ills. Ryan was/is also a disciple of the legendary Ayn Rand, the Queen of Mean, saying that he frequently reread Ayn’s exercise in übermenschlichkeit, Atlas Shrugged, but, grudgingly aware that Ayn’s atheism and frequently expressed hostility to the Catholic Church (Ryan was raised a Catholic) didn’t sit well with the evangelical set, pulled in his horns just a bit, so to speak, and more recently pronounced himself a big fan of supposed big thinker Yuval Levin, who celebrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 2010, so hailed by Ryan as essentially his work (“I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold”), with a piece for the National Interest entitled “Beyond the Welfare State”.

According to Ryan, Levin “does a very good job of articulating why these are good ideas and the right way to go and how they’re philosophically connected with one another and consistent.” Indeed, Levin has made a career out of pretending to be a student of Edmund Burke, but back in 2011 he sounded a lot more like Herbert Hoover, making a multi-pronged assault on the welfare state: “The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.”

Despite his “the bottom line is the bottom line” pitch, Levin was not at all shy about making Randy/Hooverian generalizations about the welfare state as the source of modern-day moral collapse:

This is the second major failing of this vision of society [the first is that it is grossly inefficient] — a kind of spiritual failing. Under the rules of the modern welfare state, we give up a portion of the capacity to provide for ourselves and in return are freed from a portion of the obligation to discipline ourselves. Increasing economic collectivism enables increasing moral individualism, both of which leave us with less responsibility, and therefore with less grounded and meaningful lives.

Moreover, because all citizens — not only the poor — become recipients of benefits, people in the middle class come to approach their government as claimants, not as self-governing citizens, and to approach the social safety net not as a great majority of givers eager to make sure that a small minority of recipients are spared from devastating poverty but as a mass of dependents demanding what they are owed. It is hard to imagine an ethic better suited to undermining the moral basis of a free society.4

In other words, it is not only means-tested welfare programs that are morally corrupting—and it is these that the general public thinks of (and often resents) as “welfare”—but Social Security and Medicare as well. In fact, they’re the really bad ones!

Unsurprisingly (but predictably) Levin doesn’t have the courage to follow his own argument and simply eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Instead, he’d make them means-tested. Most people would still get some retirement assistance (but why wouldn’t this still be “bad”?), but most people—the middle class in particular—wouldn’t get as much. And everyone would have to buy their own health insurance, with some assistance from the federal government to cushion the blow: “This approach would seek to let people be active consumers, rather than passive recipients of benefits — which would be good both for the federal budget (since consumer pressure in a free market keeps costs down far better than price controls) and for the character of our nation.” Naturally, the less expensive social programs, such as Head Start, would be trimmed and, ultimately, one could hope, be eliminated, since they simply waste money and make us more dependent.

It’s “interesting” to look both backwards and forwards with regard to Levin’s manifesto, looking backwards first to Ryan’s own conduct in office when, as he pictured it, he was more or less howling in the wilderness, rejected by the Republican establishment and forced, basically, to take it to the streets. Because what did Ryan do? He voted for every budget-busting Bush proposal, starting with the massive, and massively unnecessary and counter-productive, Bush tax cuts, which turned a $172 billion surplus in 2001 into a $210 billion deficit in 2002 (using 2014 dollars), and continuing through all the “unnecessary” (not to mention morally corrupting) social programs like No Child Left Behind, which added billions in education spending, through the ultimate budget-buster, the disastrous invasion of Iraq (the bold Mr. Levin makes no mention of defense spending at all in his manifesto) plus the ultimate outrage, a new entitlement program, adding billions to the Medicare tab yearly to cover prescription drugs, with no provision for funding whatsoever! Mr. Ryan, one has to say, believes that words speak louder than actions.

Supposedly, the 2010 election brought “Paul Ryan” Republicans into Congress. This is nonsense. As Ryan and Levin surely noticed, the Republicans’ ace in the hole in the 2010 election was Barack Obama’s decision, via the Affordable Care Act, not to talk about cutting Medicare, but to actually cut it—something that, of course, neither Ryan nor Levin ever talked about. Over and over again, Republicans promised never to cut “a dime of Grandma’s Medicare”, and of course they never did. Ryan and Levin “proposed” to cut Medicare 10 years down the line, which is rather like promising to go on a diet in 10 years,5 but as for the present, hey, nothing’s too good for Grandma! And Social Security, presumably the most corrupting program of all, at least in Levin’s philosophy, would never have lost a dime under Ryan’s proposals.

The one entitlement Ryan was always willing to cut was, of course, Medicaid, cutting spending for the poor, not to balance the budget but rather to hand out tax cuts to the rich, which was always the first priority of all.6 Ryan produced a variety of budget plans that were supposed to produce a balanced budget in X number of years, but they were always phony, with the popular provisions, like reduced tax rates, spelled out, while the unpopular ones, like “base broadening” (elimination of tax exemptions and other “loopholes”) left for further discussion. Medicaid would be cut immediately (it was somehow “fair” to cut benefits for the poor immediately, but not to do the same to the middle class, i.e., “Grandma”), and further spending cuts would be made in “domestic discretionary spending”, which had expanded enormously under Bush from 2001 through 2008, under legislation for which Ryan had repeatedly voted. But these cuts, like the “base broadening”, were left unspecified, to be worked out in further negotiation. In other words, Ryan would spell out the popular provisions, which would, in fact, expand the deficit dramatically, and the leave it to the Democrats to repair all the damage he had created. It would be the Democrats who would have the responsibility for balancing the budget, not Paul Ryan.

It was all a shell game, as Paul Krugman and others repeatedly pointed out, a mere partisan hustle, but it made moderate Republicans like Sykes and Will and Wilson proud. We’re serious! We’re fiscally responsible! We’re still the party of ideas! We’re not like those crazy Democrats, who are turning us into Greece!

Well, that was then. When the era of Trump dawned, Ryan was clearly in a quandary. His Wall Street buddies, whose willing servant he had always been, had no use for Trump’s bad ass, xenophobic, race-baiting populism. But Trump had the votes, so Ryan caved. And once he started, the caving never stopped.

To be fair, Ryan caved to everybody, everybody with power. He finally got his chance to cut Medicaid in the course of overturning the Affordable Care Act, but in his eagerness to both help the rich, by eliminating one of those opprobrious Obamacare abominations that actually increased taxes on innocent millionaires/billionaires, and stick it to the poor by denying health insurance to millions, he overreached himself. “It’s curious,” Republican health care maven Avik Roy opined, “that extending tax cuts [to the rich] was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans.” Actually, it isn’t, but fortunately the naked hypocrisy of it all caused three Republican senators, including John McCain, greatly to his credit, to gag and Obamacare was granted another day.

Yes, Paulie was denied on that occasion, but he was not denied on his tax bill, where the hypocrisy was even greater, but with so much money on the table, well, what’s a little nudity among friends? I mean, this is the way God made us!

As originally crafted, Ryan’s tax bill was revenue neutral, thanks to a “controversial” provision, a “border tax adjustment” that would have brought in $1.5 trillion over 10 years, that was furiously opposed by most corporate outfits, including Koch Inc. Ryan could have said to them, “okay, guys, you don’t like my proposal. So how are we going to make this thing revenue neutral?” But he didn’t say that. Both Ryan and the Koch folks, who had been shouting, shouting, shouting “It’s the deficit, stupid!” for eight long years, turned around and added a cool $1.5 trillion to the deficit at a minimum7 and celebrated! And then followed that up with a budget-busting spending package with both massive and entirely unnecessary increases in defense spending and equally large increases for “domestic discretionary spending”, which Republicans supposedly hate!

Charles Wilson (remember him?) at least had the honesty to be openly ashamed. Writing in his book Everything Trump Touches Dies, Wilson wrote

The bill does nothing to reduce the complexity, expense, opacity, and general brain-frying shittiness of the tax code for ordinary Americans. So much for our “Do your taxes on a postcard!” rhetoric. The tax code, baroque and ludicrously convoluted before, is even more baffling unless you can afford a fleet of corporate tax attorneys and consultants.

A prominent tax lobbyist I know wrote, “This is almost too easy. Even I feel dirty.” This person literally sat in the majority leader’s office crafting parts of the tax bill, laughing all the way to the bank. The members of the House and Senate who voted for this 479-page bill had only a few hours to consider it. I asked this lobbyist at the time what the job-creation effect would be from the corporate tax cut, and he replied, “How the fuck do I know? Something? Maybe?”

This is the legislation Paul Ryan “crafted”, or at least put his name to, and this is the legislation that John McCain voted for, a massive change to the U.S. tax code to which the U.S. Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, had zero input. The bill was written for them by Paul Ryan and a gaggle of lobbyists, and they contributed nothing. Decades of lying and deceit came to their full fruition. This was Paul Ryan’s achievement, and John McCain’s submission made it possible.

For whatever reason, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 essentially drove the Republican Party mad. Both the elite and the base were seized by a compulsive need to destroy Clintonism by any means necessary. The base seethed with paranoid rage against blacks, Hispanics, feminists, homosexuals–“the other”–while the elite sought to manage the monster and perpetuate itself first with tax cuts and “culture war” then with the intoxicating self-righteousness of a real war in the Middle East.8 But the elite discredited itself with disasters both home and abroad, and the triumph of the Tea Party signaled the collapse of elite power. For eight long years during the Obama Administration Paul Ryan served as the mask of Republican corruption. But now we see–as if it were hidden before–that the mask is as corrupt as that which it concealed.

McCain first became an advocate of campaign reform perhaps as an ass-covering measure, when he was identified as one of the “Keating Five”—five senators who aggressively promoted the interests of savings and loan hustler Charles Keating. Later, after his defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain was widely, and accurately, suspected of wanting to “get” evangelical groups who helped Bush defeat him. On immigration reform, McCain, like both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and, pretty much, myself), was a strong advocate of the “open borders” approach favored by Wall Street. The same could be said of Paul Ryan as well, but Ryan did not dare cross the rabid Republican base—much stronger in the House than the Senate—on this one. ↩︎

In what was very likely a fit of pique rather than common sense, McCain voted against George Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. It was rare for McCain to care about deficits, unless a Democrat was in office. ↩︎

Word accepts this spelling, because it accepts “bro” as a word (as well as “ha”). I find it hard to believe that I typed “bro-ha-ha” but apparently I did, if only because Word will correct “brohaha” to “brouhaha” rather than “bro-ha-ha”. I guess I was really drunk. ↩︎

Levin, who is Jewish (he was born in Israel), titles his discussion of the shortcomings of the welfare state “The Passing of an Illusion”. In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a withering critique of Christianity under the title The Future of an Illusion. You don’t have to be a Freudian (cause I sure ain’t one) to suspect that Levin unconsciously—but not consciously—echoed Freud’s title. ↩︎

Back in the eighties, when Ronald Reagan introduced Americans to “modern deficits” (Reagan doubled the size of the entire national debt in eight years, in constant dollars, although an expanding economy meant that as a percentage of GNP the increase was only 43%), Congress enacted several elaborate deficit reduction packages. All of them employed the same strategy: cosmetic cuts to get Congress through the next election, followed by “real” cuts afterwards. Inevitably, after the next election, the new Congress would “discover” that the “real” cuts were in fact “crazy” ones, and rewrite the legislation to push the new “real” cuts to after the next election. The notion that the Congress elected in 2010 could “force” the Congress elected in 2020 to make massive, and massively unpopular, cuts in Medicare is ludicrous. ↩︎

Levin, in his paper, briefly explains that he wants a simplified federal tax policy, with low rates. Despite his supposed obsession with soaring deficits, he doesn’t even discuss the possibility of raising taxes to reduce them, probably because he knows that would work, as it did under Clinton, and he doesn’t want to balance the budget on the backs of the rich. ↩︎

The bill made tax cuts for the rich permanent but set the tax cuts for the middle class to expire in 10 years. Now Republicans are “proposing” to make them permanent. This is probably an election-year gambit, but if it works, what are they going to do? Say they were lying? ↩︎

For many evangelicals, the events in the contemporary Middle East are a direct continuation of the events of the Bible–God’s Will in action. ↩︎