#i'm feeling frustrated with this narrative today

[fiona-fififi]

Honest question: where is all this "bad" bisexual representation on network tv that people keep referring to? Like, I understand that there are stereotypes that people believe could be reinforced with particular representations, but I keep seeing the implication that bad rep already exists and is constantly reinforced on network tv. And just. I actually can only think of two single bisexual characters from network shows off the top of my head, and I don't believe either were represented poorly. Neither were constantly sleeping around, they weren't framed as indecisive, I believe both were generally shown as monogamous and interested in long-term relationships, regardless of the gender of their partners (as an aside, I don't think any of these things would have made them bad rep, but these are the "bad" stereotypes I see discussed most often).

So like, have I just missed a bunch of representation? (Totally possible, honestly.) Because this narrative that all bisexual rep has been bad is a weird one to me.

And I mean, I would generally argue that queer rep on network television is overly sanitized and kind of obnoxiously heteronormative in an attempt to make it "acceptable" for a general audience. But I don't think that's what people are referring to, and it's honestly a little disheartening to see fellow queer people arguing for these overly sanitized representations to appease non-queer audiences. Queer rep does not (and should not) mean all queer characters adhere to an acceptable heteronormative standard (one that heterosexual characters are NOT beholden to, by the way) in order to be considered worth of representation, and trying to pretend like all queer rep must uphold "good" moral standards to make it palatable so that bigoted people accept queerness if it's done the "right" way is not helpful to the community, actually.

[gothicpaperback]

THE WAY HE CARES | TEN

<<<PART NINE | MASTERLIST| PART ELEVEN >>>

wc: 4,2k | rating: 18+ for eventual smut | Joel Miller x You | Enemy Pregnancy

summary: Joel Miller has been my pain-in-the-ass neighbour for years. we argue more than we speak and when we do speak, it's usually through gritted teeth. but when my doctor tells me my fertility’s running out of time, panic sets in. I want a baby and I don’t have the luxury of waiting around for Mr. Right. Joel's a damn good father to his daughter, Sarah. that much, I can’t deny. so one night, fuelled by nerves and just the right amount of wine, I ask him the unthinkable: get me pregnant. no strings.no romance. just biology. i never planned on falling for him. but nothing about Joel Miller ever goes according to plan.

while the story is first person narrative, the OC female character is YOU. she is not named and barely physically described aside from being able bodied and having hair long enough to grab.

tags/warnings: neighbours, enemies to lovers, comedy, smut, sexual tension, mentions of fertility and reproductive issues, mentions of drugs and alcohol. i will add more tags as they become relevant.

chapter smut warnings: oral (F receiving), mentions of penetration, sexual fantasy, dirty talk.

taglist: @himboelover | @harrypotteranna23-blog | @isabella-rose-trastamara | @ro4nix | @sunndroppp | @harriedandharassed | @la-vie-est-une-fleur29 | @titlee78 | @olafsmiles2020 | @sophiagladiator | @sunnytuliptime | @6kaja9 | @magicxmiller | @redvelvettsunflower | @smvtwitchmiller |

THE WAY HE CARES | TEN

I'm trying very hard not to be frustrated right now, but I am. I was so ready to give into Joel, my hormones kicked into overdrive. 

And now I'm here on the couch in my pyjamas listening to the rain pattering down on the roof. Seems between the pipes and the weather the world is determined to keep me wet. 

I try watching television but it's so boring I give up and go on my phone. I'm scrolling when I decide to go to Sarah's Instagram. She's always posting cool stuff. 

But today is different. Today is an old photo of Joel. He can't be more than twenty five, arms muscled, body slimmer. He's still got that boyish look to his hair. He's sitting on a picnic blanket near a lake. 

He's wearing sunglasses and a huge smile as he faces the camera. A tiny Sarah is holding onto his fingers, using them to take a step forward. 

#throwbackthursday  To the best Dad then and the best Dad now. I miss you lots! 

I smile, eyes filling just a bit. I look at the photo for a long time thinking about how perfect a father Joel is. How natural fatherhood looks on him. 

How he was always the perfect choice. 

I must have fallen asleep shortly after because I wake to the sound of banging on the front door. 

The rain still hammers down on the roof as I pad towards the door. I open it, eyes blinking when I see Joel standing on the other side. 

Water drips down the end of his nose, his face shiny with rain. His shirt clings to him, similar to the one he was wearing in that Instagram photo. 

His eyes however are exposed and they are fiery. They burn into mine as he steps closer to me. 

"Joel, we can do this another t-"

He doesn't even give me a chance to speak. He lunges across the threshold, grabbing my face and pulling me in for a scorching kiss. 

And fuck can Joel kiss. 

Plump mouth, the tip of his tongue wetting my upper lip before devouring me. I cling to his soaked t-shirt, body pressed against his so tightly I can feel his erection pushing into my belly. 

He pulls back when I whimper, pupils blown so wide his eyes look black. I can see my awed face staring back at me. 

"We said no kissing," I say breathlessly even as my mouth chases his. 

"Fuck the rules." 

He crouches a moment to tuck one arm under my knees and the other around my back in a bridal carry, hefting me into his hold and kicking the front door closed. 

"I'm gonna fuck you now," he tells me as he carries me to the bedroom. "Gonna put a baby in you." 

Joel Miller and his filthy mouth where did you come from? My eyes are saucers and I'm trembling but not from cold, from anticipation-

-And then the doorbell rings. 

I wake up from my dream, drool at the corner of my mouth, eyes itchy. I rub at them, glancing at my digital clock. 

11:55 pm.  

The doorbell rings again and I glance out my bedroom window to see the sky is clear, The neighbour is quiet save for the cicadas heard in the distance. 

I stumble to the front door, yawning widely. 

"Were you asleep?"

Joel has changed into a Miller Brothers hoodie and a pair of grey sweatpants that leave nothing to the imagination. He also smells faintly of...

"Are you wearing cologne?"

His cheeks flush when he gives a half-hearted shrug, avoiding my eyes. "Spilled some on me when I was brushing my teeth." 

Sure, Joel. 

Still the thought delights me; that he went to an effort. It makes me cringe that I'm dressed in my ratty Bugs Bunny sleep shirt and that my hair is a mess. 

"You still wanna do this?" He asks me, eyes searching. 

The dream I just had comes back to me and I have to press my thighs together tightly.  "Yeah." 

We enter my bedroom both holding our breath, the moment charged. suddenly I am affronted with what we're about to do when we see my bed. It all becomes real. 

I made it with fresh sheets this morning, made it and plumped the pillows. I wanted it to be as nice as possible. But now it looks intimidating. 

Joel is standing stiffly beside me, dark eyes scanning the room. Only a bedside lamp is on, casting a sensual glow over the room. 

He breathes slowly, hands twitching at his sides and I realize I need to make the first move.  

I crawl to the centre of the bed, tugging the sleep shirt down my hips when it rides up, feeling self conscious.

"Make yourself comfortable," I say awkwardly motioning next to me on top of the mattress.  

Joel looks around the room, surveying it before he nods. With my breath held. I watch as he peels the Miller brothers hoodie from his body and drops it onto the chair by my mirror. . 

He's not a fitness model and he's not in his twenties anymore but Joel Miller is incredibly hot. Strong arms with biceps made not in a gym but on a work site. Broad chest, gold in the low light. His stomach is a bit soft, but still defined enough for my mouth to go dry. 

He gives me a look, brow raised. Keep going?

I nod back. Yes please. 

The moment feels weirdly tense as he walks to the other side of the bed, so I busy myself fluffing one of the pillows. 

"Everything okay with Tommy?" I ask. 

He makes a face. "Can we not talk about my brother right now? Doesn't really get me in the mood." 

I cringe. "Yes. Of course. Shit."

He's at the side of the bed now with a tiny smirk at my flustered reaction. I watch him settle onto the mattress, observing the dip of it, his knees brushing mine as he comes to sit next to me, long legs folded.  

It's so real so close so intimate. 

He stares at me, the kind of bold open stare the steals the breath from my lungs and forces me to look away. 

"Sorry there's no phone for you to peruse," I laugh breathlessly, attempting to lighten the mood. "Mine is on the couch so if you need material you have to use yours."

"Don't need it."

He replies so quickly I'm not sure I heard him correctly. 

"I'm not offended if that's what you're worried about," I scoff. "I'm under no delusional. I'm sure your fantasy woman doesn't have knotted hair, wearing a bugs Bunny T-shirt for sex."

He leans back on his hands, playfully cocking his head. 

"You don't know my fantasies." 

 I know he's joking by the twinkle in his eyes but that doesn't stop my voice from coming out a little shaky. 

"I'm pretty sure men like stilettos and strappy lingerie. Whipped cream and silk-'

"-or blue sundresses." 

My eyes go wide when he stops and his cheekbones go pink. Is he referring to my phone background? The one of me and a blue sundress at Lake Travis? 

No. It can't be. 

But it is. I know it is because the energy in the room has shifted. 

Joel's eyes are on me now and I know he knows that I know. There's no pretenses now, only honesty.  Joel swallows.

"What if I told you I used the background of your phone that first time?"

I laugh, breathy, nervous. “I'd call you a liar.”

His chin juts lightly, a silent dare for me to accuse him of lying again. I have a niggle of suspicion, like he's trying to fuck with me. My curiosity weighs out however. 

"What else?"

"Huh?"

"What else did you look at that day?" I ask him, weirdly intrigued. "I was curious about the sort of stuff you watch but you wiped the history." 

"Didn't wipe anythin'."

"There was nothing in the search history," I explain. "It's okay if you wiped it Joel, I just wanted to know what a guy like you watches to get off."

My face is burning as I admit this, but fuck it. We're about to have sex and I've been curious since the day it happened.  

"I told you. I didn't wipe anythin'." His eyes are weirdly intense. "Didn't need anythin' else." 

My pulse ticks, my nipples harden under my shirt as I remember his grunts that afternoon. 

Bossy thing. F-fucking take it then.

Be good. C'mon be good for me tonight and take it.

Yeah show me. Show me how much you want it, darlin'.

He was saying that about me? There's no fucking way. I stare at him in suspicion. He''s screwing with me. That's the only plausible explanation. 

"Shut the fuck up, Miller," I laugh, rolling my eyes and shoving his chest gently.

But he's not looking away from me. His eyes are swimming over my face, stuck on my lips before rising to my eyes once more. 

“I watched that other video too. The one of you touchin' yourself in bed.”

I feel my jaw hinge open, eyes wide. No way. No way he did. This doesn't feel like a joke, this feels very very real. But it can't be real right? This is Joel Miller, frenemy, neighbour.

There’s a tiny red flush climbing up his neck as he takes in my muted reaction. He watches my face bracing for the fallout. 

“Are you upset?" 

I should be but I'm not. I’m a little embarrassed, sure. But mostly I’m suddenly, acutely aware of how Joel watched me touch myself for the camera, the memory of his grunts and groans. 

So fucking good

Keep going darlin', just like that, you know just what I need. 

The thought does something strange to my spine. Even though he's beside me in bed this admission feels more intimate than anything.  

I finally shake my head slowly, eye contact not breaking. No. I'm not upset. I am confused though.

"Why are you bringing this up now?"

I watch him suck in a sharp breath, like he's trying to gather up the courage. He licks his lips and leans in slightly.

“If you’d seen what I saw, you’d bring it up too.”

What. 

The.

 Fuck. 

What is happening? How is Joel Miller, annoying neighbour, boring but dependable dad, block captain menace suddenly so suave that he has my stomach doing flips? 

All I can do is swallow thickly as my brain buffers. Joel seems emboldened by my response, the corner of his mouth curling slightly.

He leans even closer, knuckles pressing into the mattress, brushing against my thigh. My body breaks into goosebumps at his touch.

"I couldn't look away from your body arching and those sweet little faces you made when you were gettin' close."

His voice is pure honeyed sex. It drips between my legs and my ears. 

I'm convinced he can hear my heart pounding a staccato in my chest. It's so loud that I feel like it's the only thing I can hear aside from his voice. 

His face moves so close I can see the light that dances with the dark of his iris. His eyes are beautiful. I can feel the warm air of his breath buffet my parted lips.  I exhale shakily as Joel moves his mouth to my ear, lower lip catching my earlobe. 

"I wanted to know what faces you'd make if it was my hand between your legs instead." 

My heart literally skips a beat. I think I mutter something that may be his name or it might be gibberish. 

Whatever it is Joel grins gently against my ear at the response and keeps going. I stare down at his knuckles braced against the mattress, the coiled tension in his biceps, the thick outline of an erection beneath his sweatpants. 

"What if I wanted you to touch yourself like that again?" Joel murmurs all syrupy and low. "What if I want you to pretend I'm the guy you're making the video for?" 

Oh God oh God. 

Joel Miller is a dirty talking professional. And here I am just sitting with my mouth dropped open like an idiot. But it's just so unexpectedly sexy. And his suggestion is intimidating actually. The thought of performing in front of Joel makes me nervous. 

"M-maybe next time." 

Joel's smile is subtle but there. "Okay. Next time." 

Why does my belly flip at the thought of there being a next time? 

His hand brushes my arm before pulling back. He looks at me like he’s trying to memorize something, like he’s afraid if he blinks I’ll change my mind.

“You can go ahead, I won't break,” I say, voice barely above a whisper. 

“I know,” he murmurs, sounding relieved at the permission. "I know."

His hand grazes my arm, up to my shoulder, fingers trailing slowly down again like he’s learning the shape of me through memory.

He reaches out again and his touch is gentle, reverent even, as he guides me down to the mattress. The backs of my thighs press into the mattress. The cotton sheets are cool against my skin.

He lays alongside me on his side, one arm propping his head up and he just looks at me. A look of consideration, of interest, of lust.

"I was doing some reading of my own this week," Joel says and I feel his hand is coming to slide along the front of my thighs. It's gentle and teasing. 

"What d-did you read?" I ask, trying to keep my voice even. But all I can do is stare at his fingers brushing against my bare skin. 

"That we should be doing this daily, five days up to ovulation plus the day," he murmurs. "That i should be filling you up that entire week."

 Filling me up? Why is that hot to me right now? What the fuck is wrong with me? When I look over his eyes are on me, dark and shiny. 

"You want that?" Joel murmurs, thumbs tracing little circles on the soft skin of my inner thigh. "You want me to fuck you for a week straight next time?" 

Yes. 

"If you're not busy, sure." 

He grins, his chuckle warm. I like that it makes his face light up when he does that. That it makes me smile in response. His face lowers to mine and he brushes the side of his nose against my cheek, and something in me stutters. 

I feel the weight of him, the heat of his body as he leans in closer, and still, he moves slowly, taking his time. He’s close now. I can hear his breathing, quiet but uneven against my ear, like he’s holding it back.

When his mouth finally does meet the skin beneath my jaw I gasp out loud and it embarrasses me. He doesn’t comment. Just kisses me there again, softer this time, slower. He's technically not breaking the no kissing rule but intimate all the same. 

I should push him off, should wrench out of his touch and yet my head tilts to give him better access. I'm getting hazy on why I can't just give into Joel completely, why i shouldn't press my mouth to his. 

I feel his teeth scrape against my jugular, the warmth of his tongue coming to lap when his teeth move off. 

He's taking his time, working me into both a frenzy of desire and a puddle of lust. But he didn't need to.

I've been wet since I saw him. 

My fingers drift to his chest without thinking, needing to feel something grounded, something solid. And I can feel

His heart is beating rapidly too, a steady throb beneath his ribs. He breathes out through his nose, lips brushing the base of my throat. His stubble scrapes lightly, and I arch without meaning to.

Still, he doesn’t move faster. His hands stay gentle, mapping over my ribs, the dip of my waist, the soft curve of my stomach. 

There’s no teasing, no smugness in it. This is Joel gentle, this is Joel authentic. This is the Joel that made me ask him for his help in the first place.  

"Wait, one thing." 

When he suddenly jerks back I could cry. I want to strangle him for breaking this glorious momentum. My voice comes out in a hard snap.

"What?!"

"Do you always call men, Daddy?" Joel asks, grimacing a little. "Gotta say if you pull that out that'll get me softer than taffy on a hot summer day."

"Fuck no," I say with a groan and a laugh. "This guy asked me to do it on video for him and I did it. I hated it and never sent it, I was too mortified."

"So he never saw it?" 

"No one has." 

"Except me." 

My eyes find his trained on my face.

 "Except you." 

I watch his lower lip stick out in thought, fingers skirting the neckline of my shirt. He asks the next part casually. "Who was the guy? Ben?"

"Joel we're trying to fuck right now, can we chat about my bad tinder dates after?"

He gives me a breathless chuckle before nodding. "Yeah, we can do that."

His hand trails lower, skimming over the curve of my hip with aching slowness. Each pass of his fingers feels deliberate, like he’s memorizing, not just touching.

The momentum isn't lost, just derailed momentarily because I am already back to arching my back and whimpering.

I suck in a breath as his touch begins brushing the sensitive dip where skin grows thinner and nerves more alert. There’s a delay, a pause that makes me clench the sheet beneath me. 

When he reaches the edge of my underwear he pauses. Just rests his hand there, warm and still. Not pushing. Not asking, but waiting with his eyes on my face. 

"Heard it helps if the woman cums first," Joel drops at my cheek. 

The hush between us deepens, thick and expectant. My breath catches, and I know he feels it.

"Oh yeah?" I ask, trying to be casual. "Should we try it?" 

Joel grins, teeth gleaming in the low light of the moon out my window. "Couldn't hurt." 

The air between us is warm and quiet, except for the faint creak of the mattress beneath me and the soft rasp of Joel's breath which is slower now, more deliberate. 

His fingertips trail down with aching patience, skimming along the elastic of my underwear, stopping just shy of slipping beneath. 

The pads of his fingers are rough from years of work, but somehow that makes it better, like the contrast against the softness of my skin sharpens everything.

A faint sound escapes me, embarrassingly small and needy and I can feel him focus Like this is work to him. Intent, purposeful work.

It is work, I remind myself. Joel is not my boyfriend. He's not my husband. He's a man who has agreed to get me pregnant and that's it. He's a man trying to do a job. 

His fingers are exploring, teasing, taking his time like he's memorizing the way I respond. I feel them slipping beneath my panties, forefinger sliding up my drooling slit. His touch makes me break out into shivers everywhere. 

Like when he breaches me for the first time, with his second and third finger, slowly sinking them into me before working them to the knuckle. He doesn't look away as I breath out a huff of surprise, biting my lower lip to keep from gasping. 

The air smells like him now, like fresh laundry, a faint trace of soap and something deeper, more human. When he leans in closer, I can smell my own skin mixed with his.

"Bet you sound so pretty when you cum," he rasps against my ear. "Just as pretty as you look right now whimperin' up at me." 

I'm feral. I'm desperate. I'm so wet I can't stand it, the sound of my slick cunt almost vulgar in the quiet room as he fucks me with those thick digits. 

His fingers are getting me so close and I know the second I cum I want to feel him inside me. I don't want to wait because I can't be patient like him. 

I reach for the drawstring of his sweatpants, fumbling with untying them and shoving them down over his hips. I begin smiling when I feel him slide them off so quickly he grunts, kicking them to the side of the bed, his fingers never slowing inside me. 

His breath is warm against my collarbone. And I think he might be unravelling as fast as me because he starts groaning louder. 

"You know how hard you make me?" He mutters against my jaw. "How fucking hard it was not to moan your name when I knew you were out there on the other side of the door all those times?" 

He's making soft little groans every time I keen which is driving me even more insane. 

"Thought about fucking you in that sundress," Joel continues, fingers moving in and out of my slippery cunt faster and faster. "Thought about how you'd moan my name while you rode my cock." 

Is it true? 

Does it matter? 

Nope. It doesn't.

He could be lying through his teeth but I really don't give a shit. Between his voice and his fingers and the filthy things he's saying I'm already so close. 

"I think about you when I touch myself," I whine, unable to stop saying it. It's there in my head, burning.  

His fingers pick up the pace and I can feel his wet breath at my temple. "Tell me what you think about."  

"How you'd look going down on me," I keen, neck falling back. "How you'd tell me to cum."

"Jesus," Joel groans and his fingers curl in me, tapping and rubbing that inner wall that's making my thighs quake as his thumb plays with my slippery clit. 

"Joel-" I choke out, eyes slamming shut. "I'm... I'm so close." 

"Yeah? Good. But first I need those eyes," he whispers through pants. "I want you looking at the man who's making you cum."  

My eyes flutter open just in time to whine softly when I see Joel's fucked out expression, the hair damp at the temples, the half smirk of approval that quickly morphs into a pained look when my eyes roll back in my head. 

"Be loud, darlin'. Lemme hear how good it feels." 

My climax rises before I’m ready, slow at first, then all at once, tightening in my belly, coiling low and hot until I'm letting out broken cries. 

"Joel! Joel...I... Fuck don't stop!"

Joel doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even flinch. He just keeps going, steady and sure, like he knows what I need before I do and I think he does because... Because...

My fingers clutch the sheets, Joel murmurs my name, urging me to cum on his fingers and then I'm gone. 

I can hear his strangled groan as my thighs snap together, trapping his big hand between my thighs as I ride his fingers to completion. Tension snaps, and everything in my lower body spills over. It's warm wave after wave pulling me under.  

And then... Soothing silence. 

For a moment, I can’t think, can’t move. I just feel him there beside me, grounding me, his palm still resting against my thigh like he’s anchoring me to the world before he pulls back. 

I’m still catching my breath, chest rising and falling in shallow waves, when I reach for him.

I'm delirious with want, desperate to feel his cock in me. I can't wait to have him bury himself deeply, his body caging mine. 

I don’t open my eyes yet, I just stretch a hand toward where he’s sitting at the edge of the bed, expecting him to shift closer, to move over me and to finish what we started. 

“Joel,” I murmur, my voice hoarse from everything he just pulled out of me. My body is loose now, open and unguarded. “Joel, come here.”

There’s a beat of silence, a thick pause and then the faint rustle of fabric. I open my eyes just in time to see Joel turning away, tugging his sweatpants and shirt back on with jerky hands. 

His back is to me, his head bowed.

I blink, confused. "Hey, wait, what happened?”

He hesitates. His shoulders lift with a deep breath, like he's trying to calm something down. 

I sit up slowly, a chill beginning to creep in. “Joel are you okay?”

He won’t look at me.  

"We shouldn't have done all that... Extra stuff. I wasn’t trying to-” he cuts himself off, scrubbing a hand down his face. 

What the fuck is he talking about? What the hell happened? His posture is stiff, like he’s ruined something.

“Joel,” I start gently, trying to ease the tension winding through the room. “just tell me what's wrong. Please."

He finally glances over his shoulder, and his expression cuts me. His jaw is tight, and there’s something raw in his eyes that makes me flinch. 

I try to speak again, but he’s already moving. Already stepping into his shoes, already reaching for his jacket. His body is still flushed, his hair a mess and he looks like he wants to disappear.

“Joel, please," I start, sitting forward.

“I need to go,” he mutters, voice low and clipped. 

And before I can stop him or say anything that might make him stay the front door opens and closes with a soft, final click, and I’m alone again.

[nostalgebraist]

on exordia (a "rant"?)

Yesterday I said I'd write a longer post about Exordia. Here it is.

This will be... sort of review-shaped, but not quite a review? I dunno.

I'll try to avoid spoilers, although some amount of (largely minor or indirect) spoilage will be inevitable.

As I said in my earlier posts, there was a lot I liked about this book, but also a lot that frustrated me. This post will focus almost entirely on the latter; it will be a big long list of gripes, which I'm posting mostly to relieve a certain mental pressure that built up over the course of the reading experience.

I want to clarify at the outset that the negative angle here doesn't faithfully represent by overall stance toward the book.

Yes, I often found it extremely annoying, but it was a lot of fun, too – often it was both, at the same time. I am normally a pretty slow reader, but I sped through Exordia's 500+ pages very quickly; even when I was annoyed with this or that feature of the book, I was pleasantly engrossed, too. And I feel like writing out a bunch of thoughts about it, which has to mean something good, right? Even if those thoughts are critical in nature.

----

Why do I feel like writing so much about the book? And why do I care so much about the fact that it was "frustrating"? (There are lots of bad books out there; sometimes, I read them; in itself, this is just business as usual, and not worthy of note.)

I think it comes down to what I said in my first post (see link above). Because Exordia feels so much like something I would absolutely love, I feel more incensed about its flaws than I would be about the more thoroughgoing flaws of something that was simply, wholly, and straightforwardly bad. There's a tantalizing sense of unrealized potential, unfulfilled promises.

Exordia would be so good if it were good.

----

Talking about this book's flaws is difficult, because most of them are closely related to one another, and it's difficult to break down that big ball of tangled-up string into manageable chunks.

But there are a few things that are relatively self-contained, so I'll pick them off first. (The main course starts in section "3" below.)

Oh, also: this ended up extremely long. As in, just over 10,000 words. If you wanted to read 10,000 words of Exordia critique today then this is your lucky day I guess.

----

1. frontloading

Exordia has a very strong opening. When I was 30 pages in, I was almost certain that I would end up loving this book and recommending it to everyone I knew.

Ha! Little did I know!

----

The book is divided into five sections called "Acts."

Act One is very brief. It ends on page 38, less than 10% of the way into the book.

And it's very, very good. Or more precisely, it's very, very promising, as a way to begin a story.

Right off the bat, we get two instantly charming and intriguing characters, with an instantly charming and intriguing dynamic.

Then – starting barely five pages in – we are suddenly assailed by a rapid-fire barrage of incredibly cool sci-fi shit. Bizarre neologisms, alien biology and psychology, quasi-theological revelations about physics and the early universe! "Narrative prisons"! "Weapons that mark their victims for damnation"! An "observatory" that can see the afterlife!

All three of those examples I just quoted are from one single page (p. 21).

And Exordia is over 500 pages long.

I was like: holy shit. If this is what it's like now, what is the rest of it going it be like?

Well. Now I've read the rest of it, so I know. What was it like, then?

----

What it's like is this:

On page 38, Act One ends.

Act Two begins by switching over to a completely different set of characters.

In Act One, it seemed obvious that we were meeting the book's main characters. All the usual conventions of novelistic storytelling were practically screaming at us: behold, the protagonists! Better figure out how you feel about them in short order, reader, because you'll be strapped in with them for the long haul.

But – psych! Turns out that we are not strapped in with the Act One characters for the long haul. Eventually they do show up again, but they spend most of the book on the sidelines due to a succession of plot devices which seem designed specifically to keep them there.

The fast pace slows to a crawl.

We discover that we're in a completely different genre: not wild-eyed cosmic science fiction, but Tom Clancy military-techno-thriller. And so a large fraction of the text, by volume, is stuff like this:

"What's up?" Mike Jan asks, like they've just bumped into each other at the gym. "Something bad?" "Something undetermined," Erik says. "One of the EBADs broke. One more check, then we go in." So they do a final test on their MOPP protection, which is an absolute nightmare in the rising sun. Masks that fog up if the seal isn't perfect, baggy JSLIST oversuits, paper wraps that turn bad colors if they contact known agents (what good will that do?), gloves and booties over their boots. All perfect for poaching them in their own sweat. "Can't see shit in here," Ricardo says, without unhappiness: just the condition of things. "I know. Mike, bodyguard Anna. Skyler, get the drone up. Ricardo, load a mouse. All call signs, Zero-Six, now proceeding into the target area. Out." They walk straight toward Blackbird. Skyler flies a quadcopter drone ahead: a Teal Drones Golden Eagle with a fifty-minute charge. Ricardo Garcia follows its course, waving a ten-foot spear with a live mouse in a plastic lattice canister. The idea is that the mouse will die in time to warn the rest of them. "Pretty out here," Mike Jan remarks. "Looks like a Windows desktop." Of course Mike has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life.

I'm sure some people like this kind of thing – it's an established genre, after all, and it sells well. But it's not really my jam, and (more importantly) it's not what the opening led me to think I was getting myself into.

(Sidenote: the last two lines in that quote have nothing to do with the point I'm making, but I included them anyway, because they confuse me and I want to know whether I'm missing something that would make sense of them. "Has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life" is apparently meant to be some kind of telling character detail, and it's delivered as though we'd immediately grasp its significance. But what IS its significance? "Oh, we all know those guys – the ones who don't change their desktop wallpapers. You know what I'm talking about, wink wink." Huh???)

The new characters are mostly U.S. military/government/intelligence guys (at this stage anyway – later on there will be even more new characters, and then more, etc). The book tries its hardest to make us care about them, but it's fighting an uphill battle because it has to work against our frustration at the bait-and-switch that has been pulled on us.

Plus, frankly, they're just not all that interesting. Sorry.

Sooner or later, we realize that Act One was the odd one out. When Act Three arrives, it's just "Act Two: The Sequel" – and so on. Except in a few parts very close to the end, the book never recaptures the energy and wonder that it used as a hook in Act One.

It gets worse. Remember how I said that Act One rapidly reveals a bunch of sci-fi lore to the reader?

Well, a large fraction of Acts Two through Five are a mystery story in which the new, less-interesting characters study a classic BDO and try to figure out what its deal is, plus a bunch of related ancillary mysteries. And in some cases, the reader can guess the answers long before the characters get there, because the answer is something we were told back in Act One.

(This is only possible, by the way, due to the previously mentioned sidelining of the Act One characters. These characters re-appear, and the other protagonists get to know them, but for most of the book the two groups are unable or unwilling to communicate for some reason or another. If these communication blockers weren't there, the Acts Two+ guys could just ask the Act One guys what was going on... and the book would be several hundred pages shorter.)

This is a baffling structural choice.

I have no idea how one could possibly try to justify it; I simply can't think of any arguments in its favor, even bad ones.

2. the path, grant!

This isn't even a complaint, per se. Just something about my reading experience that seems like it should get mentioned in this post, somewhere.

In a lot of ways – big and small, important and trivial – this book feels weirdly close to the kind of thing that I would write myself.

Indeed, it feels weirdly close (in a lot of ways, big and small etc.) to some things that I did in fact write, myself.

Namely, Floornight and Almost Nowhere.

I'm not claiming that Seth Dickinson ripped me off, or anything. It seems very unlikely that he's read any of my work, or even heard of it. Like I said in my earlier post, it's probably all just a matter of shared influences and/or pure coincidence.

Still, I have to talk about it, because I couldn't stop noticing it.

In the first ten pages, I learned: this is a story about first contact with aliens. It involves a lot of exotic invented terminology, and the worldbuilding includes novel connections between fundamental physics, psychology, and ethics.

And I thought: wow, this sure is right up my alley. Nice!

On page 11, the book started talking about the Shahnameh.

Ten pages later: souls are real! But this is arguably bad, because it's been used as the basis for exploitative and dystopian technologies.

I dunno, it's not like I has a monopoly on that concept. (I stole part of it from Madoka, for one thing.)

Nor, as I happens, do I have a monopoly on the concept of "wacky eccentric scientists who live in a remote setting apart from most of humanity, studying Lovecraft-style mind-bending entities from the beyond." That's just taking well-worn, well-liked tropes and combining them in a natural, appealing way. (And what's more, I stole part of it from Annihilation.)

But in any case – monopoly or no – Exordia does in fact have those wacky scientists, and that remote zone, and those creepy, soul-physics-related objects of study.

It also has a character named "Anna" – with a sort-of-similar role in the story to Almost Nowhere's Anne.

And a character named "Rosamaria," who...

But I'm sure you can guess how that sentence ends.

Some of this stuff is hard to talk about without violating my rule about spoilers.

But, uh, that said – remember that big scene about 2/3 of the way through Floornight, the one with a raised platform that gets used as a stage? The one in which [HUGE FLOORNIGHT SPOILER] happens?

And then the chapter right after that, which has an unusual name, because it portrays things from an unusual point of view?

Oh, you haven't read Floornight. Well, then. Do you remember that scene near the end of Exordia...

Some of the "connections" I thought I saw are flimsier than this. Some aren't really much of anything, in retrospect. Early on we learn that the aliens have some technology called "the way of knives," and I thought: ah, just like AN's "knife-power"! But in fact the two things have nothing else in common. And surely I don't have a monopoly on the word "knife."

I dunno. How about this? Is this anything?

The Ubiet burbles away in her arms: clarification and amplification of aretaic event in self-like past, recursive self-caricature by protoprecosmic influence, WARNING WARNING WARNING pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! Until that word, pathology, starts to sound like path-ology, the study of paths. The discovery of the way.

3. the geeky badass hive mind

Okay, here begins the part I called "the main course" above, where I lay out the really big thing that irked me about Exordia.

Hmm... where to start...

There is a problem with the characterization in this book. There is also a problem with the narration in the book.

These two problems are sort of the same, and the fact that they are sort-of-the-same is itself a noteworthy symptom of the problem.

Whoa, whoa – too broad, too abstract! Let's start with something small and concrete. Something that anyone who's read the book will have noticed, and which I am definitely not the first person to complain about.

So: Exordia is full of geek culture references.

The characters make incessant references to specific sci-fi/fantasy books, anime series, video games, and popular movies and TV shows. The 3rd-person narration also does this frequently.

It gets pretty "cringe" at times.

Here's a very early (and hence memorable) example. Anna, our Act One pseudo-protagonist, is learning the deep secrets of the universe from a snake-headed alien. The alien tells her that souls exist.

And in response, Anna says:

"Souls? You mean immortal souls? Are those real? Is this some kind of, like, Evangelion thing?"

I was like: seriously? Seriously? Come the fuck on.

But a moment later, I got my balance. I thought: wait, I see what this is. This is a character trait. It's a feature of this person, not the book/world.

Anna is a person who makes these kinds of nerdy, "cringe" references at inappropriate times, just like (as we learn in the first few pages) she is a person who has been fired from multiple jobs for being too abrasive, too upfront with people. That tracks. There's a coherent person, here, and I'm getting to know her.

Ha! Little did I know!

Act One ends, and Act Two starts.

We are introduced to our first "Acts Two+ protagonist": Clayton Hunt, Deputy National Security Advisor in the book's alt-universe version of the Obama administration.

Clayton is a slick charmer, a skilled and versatile liar, a power-hungry schemer who deliberately orchestrated his rise through the ranks of the National Reconnaissance Office bureaucracy. He is – if we are to judge by his (disturbing) past deeds, which are recounted as crucial backstory – a cold-hearted psycho sonuvabitch who's way, way too eager to kill people "for the greater good." At first glance, he seems to have nothing at all in common with Anna (too honest for her own good, a basically normal person struggling to keep her basically normal life afloat, etc).

Does Clayton make nerdy, often "cringe" geek culture references – incessantly, come hell or high water? You bet he does.

We meet Clayton's once-and-future best friend and right-hand man, Major Erik Wygaunt: Rhodes Scholar, badass soldier, doctrinaire quasi-deontological moralist. Totally different guy from either of the forenamed – or so one would think.

But in practice, in what he actually does and says? Erik is exactly the same sort of argumentative, obscure-trivia-knowing, geek-culture-referencing dork as Clayton and Anna and – yes – virtually every other character in the book.

Here's a typical passage, from page 86. Clayton (dialogue in italics) is in conversation with Erik (no italics):

“My guess is that Blackbird is dispersing some kind of communication agent. It seeks out information-dense substrate and … interfaces with it. Tries to use it to grow a message or a system. It’s trying to talk to us by amplifying patterns it finds. Not how I’d go about first contact. But how I might do it if I were very, very strange.” Erik can’t help making a technical protest: like they’re both optimizing their colonies in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguing over the details of the science fictional technologies in play. “Then it should be bursting open every cell in our bodies. If it’s looking for information coding, then DNA would be the first thing it’d find. Seven hundred megabytes of digital data in each cell.”

By this point, I had long since discarded my "characterization for Anna" hypothesis. I'd gotten the hang of what was really going on.

And so I didn't even blink when, on page 103, a character is introduced as "Captain Davoud Qasemi of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force" – and he immediately begins rattling off the names of specific video games he liked as a kid, rambling about the homosexual overtones in Top Gun, and saying things like "It's marvelously ironic! It's so classically ironic that it's invented pederasty and gone to war with Sparta."

That's just how everyone in the world talks, apparently.

Everyone in the world. This book is about a Kurdish village that is suddenly crisscrossed with deployments from the U.S. and Russia and China etc., in what seem likely to be the last days of the human race; it is, in large part, about the culture clashes and strained attempts at international collaboration that result from this arrangement.

But the characters are helped along in their efforts by the fact that there is at least one culture to which they all belong.

They would all seem perfectly at home sitting on a big couch in a dorm common room at some nerdy liberal arts college, nominally watching a movie but in fact talking over most of the dialogue as they strive to out-do one another in the game of pointing out its scientific and historical inaccuracies.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a perfectly fine way to be.

But it is not the only one.

----

It is probably clear that I did not like this aspect of the book. But why?

Well, there is the thing I just mentioned, about how it undermines the attempt at portraying culture clashes. But that's not the only problem, and it's not really the main problem.

What else, then?

In his (in)famous essay about "hysterical realism," James Wood wrote (my emphasis):

By and large, these are not stories that could never happen (as, say, a thriller is often something that could never happen); rather, they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” (say, a man levitating) is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility” (say, the possibility that a fundamentalist group in London would continue to call itself KEVIN).

Exordia is not hysterical realism, and it contains plenty of events which deliberately contravene the (known) laws of physics. Nonetheless, while reading it, I kept thinking of that line about "defying the laws of persuasion."

In the case of any one character, the traits I'm pointing to would be perfectly acceptable. (We saw this with my reaction to Anna, above.)

What's more, they would be acceptable even if they went against the expectations set by other attributes of the same character. The world is huge, and contains billions; every oddball combination of traits you can imagine quite possibly does exist, at least in someone, somewhere.

And besides: as Wood says, the "laws of persuasion" are not the same as the "laws of physics." The requirements needed for something to "feel plausible," in a work of fiction, are not the same as the requirements needed for something to be plausible, in real life.

But there is a set of requirements in the case of fiction. It's just a different one.

Meet the terms of the contract, and the reader will happily "suspend their disbelief," even in the face of actions and dialogue that would be extraordinarily unlikely in the real world. But if you break the contract? Then piling on more "realism," more geeky period/setting detail and laws-of-physics plausibility, will only heighten the disconnect and slide things further into the uncanny valley.

It's like watching a 3D 60-fps movie, back when Hollywood was going through its simultaneous 3D and 60-fps fads.

Yes, yes, there is technically more information, it's technically closer to the signal your senses would receive from the real world. But you have broken the terms of the illusion, suspended the suspension of disbelief, and so I am no longer seeing your world and characters, anymore. I am seeing the remaining gaps in your inevitably flawed illusion.

On page 136 of Exordia, we meet a female Kurdish shepherd. She's an extremely minor character, really just a horror-movie extra who's there to get picked off (ambiguously, "off-screen") by the spooky powers at play, and thereby give the reader an (ambiguous, tantalizing) hint of what those powers can do.

But, as is the convention in such matters, Seth Dickinson gives her just a smidgen of characterization, to humanize her before she goes.

What kind of person is she, this poor doomed shepherdess?

You already know the answer, don't you?

Tonight she thinks only of her sheep. Oil smuggling paid for her phone and the rifle on her back, but this flock is part of the village’s common wealth, and she is responsible for it. Or so her mother is always reminding her. And even if she watches too much anime and spends too much time getting into fights on Facebook, she wants to do her mother proud.

She watches too much anime? Fine. Maybe she does. Maybe she does.

Maybe – if it were only her. If the seams in the illusion were not showing through so plainly.

I'm a fairly cooperative reader. The implausible and the impossible do not bother me. I am capable of believing just about anything.

But not like this.

----

The characters of Exordia are geeks. That much I've covered already.

They are also badasses, every one of them. Geeky badasses.

That's the phrase that came to mind, pretty early on, when I was trying to formulate what bothered me about these guys. "Every single character in this book is a geeky badass," I thought.

I'm sorry. It's a very, uh, "cringe" phrase. But that too is apposite.

What do I mean, "badasses"?

For one thing I mean that they are hypercompetent. They know all kinds of stuff – geek culture trivia, academic esoterica in seemingly every discipline, hands-on working knowledge of whichever military or scientific devices the plot needs them to use. They are quick on their feet, relentlessly thoughtful and logical, cool under pressure (or hot under pressure in an impressive and charismatic manner), capable of creative problem-solving.

They never fail.

Nothing fazes them. Or rather: when they are fazed, it is brief, and they look great doing it, and it doesn't matter in the end anyway.

Many of them have dark, traumatic personal histories (exciting! dramatic! potentially sexy!), but however bad their trauma, it does not dare disturb their hypercompetence when the latter is at work.

This book is about the cataclysmic end of the world-as-we-know-it. It contains a staggering quantity of violence and death: on-screen and off-screen, mass-scale and intimate, dealt out by a diverse range of human and inhuman actors and weapons. But no one ever just breaks down in the face of it all. Or rather: if they do "break down," they do so only briefly, and they look great doing it, and...

One of the main characters is, explicitly, an alcoholic with PTSD. But this doesn't really ever come up as a serious obstacle, either to her or to anyone else. Mostly, it just means that she jokes around with the other characters about being the town drunk, sometimes, in between one moment of epic badassery and the next.

One might argue that this is sort of... I don't know, "tasteless"? I don't know. I had some sort of problem with it, anyway, that or some other one.

For a book that is so thoroughly about nerds, it is remarkable how little it contains in the way of humiliation. Of straight-up, unalloyed uncoolness.

As always, things start off with uncharacteristic promise. In the first few pages, Anna loses her job, then breaks up with her boyfriend in a very awkward manner and instantly regrets it.

This, remember, is the same character who says that cringe line about souls and Evangelion. So far, so good! We've gone from zero to #relatable in record time. We have a confirmed blorbo, stable under laboratory conditions. Sources familiar with the situation report that she is "a hot mess" and "literally me."

But that's all in Act One (may it rest in peace). Soon enough, Anna is taken up into the geeky badass hive mind, and from then on she too is never seen to fail. Except in a cool way, sometimes.

Soon enough she is just like the rest of them. Quick-witted, effortlessly articulate, situationally aware, ready for anything, an endless font of witty geek banter.

Is this bad? Why?

I'm not sure. Maybe I just don't like it. Maybe there's nothing more than that.

But... okay, look. This is a book about the likely end of the human race, about humans trying to work together in the face of cultural differences and mutual mistrust. It wants you to hope. In its moments of triumph, it wants you to feel proud of your whole species.

And, in the name of these goals, it tries so very hard to humanize its characters. It tries, it tries! They have so many traits, so much specificity! They will tell you all about their home towns, their cultures, their hopes and dreams and fears! Look, look, the book says: surely these are people? Look at them, they're doing so much people stuff!

But at the moment where "being human" might entail "not being effortlessly cool and badass literally all of the time," the book suddenly relents. That cannot be allowed, of course. Every threshold can be crossed, except that one.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't relate. I'm not a badass. I do embarrassing shit all the time, and I'll probably just go on doing it until the day I die. I don't think I could hold my own with these demigods in the anime-referencing game, much less the high-pressure-military-operations game.

I guess "people" are like this, sometimes. But only because the world is big, and so for every X, there are some people who are X, somewhere.

This book is about the human race, except it isn't. To be human is (among other things) to kind of suck, and no one in this book kind of sucks, not even the military psychopaths, not even blorbo-candidate Anna.

On page 10, Anna asks her alien how she views humanity, and the alien's characterization is humorously blunt, underwhelming, and undignified:

“You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. [...] “You are wired for small social groups, so all human organization degenerates into power trading and gossip between a tractably sized elite, no matter the stakes. You have two sources of authority—dominance and prestige—which conflict in interesting ways. Something killed most of you, and so your survivors are very inbred. Very similar. Your meat smells the same.”

Act One really is so very different from the rest, isn't it?

Ah, those were the days!

4. differentiation of hive mind tissue

In the last section, I argued that the characters were overly similar. Possessed of the same "geeky badass" traits in a way that defied "the laws of persuasion."

That is true, but it's not to say the characters don't have distinguishing traits. They definitely have those.

But even here, in the realm of differences, something feels... off. To me, anyway.

It's sort of like this:

To a zeroth-order approximation, every character in Exordia is identical. Just another dollop of homogeneous geeky badass paste, scooped up from the same wellspring as all the rest.

That's only the zeroth-order approximation. Look closer, and you can see differences.

What kinds of differences?

Well, here's an example. There's a character named Chaya. Who is she? Besides a geeky badass, I mean?

She is [takes a deep breath] a Ugandan-Filipina Catholic butch lesbian plasma physicist!

That's a long list of traits, but it was very easy for me to recall them all from memory just now, even though Chaya is just one member of this book's long roster of protagonists. Why?

Because whenever Chaya appears in a scene – whenever she says anything, and whenever the narration is filtered through her perspective – these traits are mentioned over and over again.

Virtually everything that she says or thinks is:

A) Narrowly pragmatic, directly related to what's happening in the immediate plot, could have been said/thought by any one of the characters

B) Directly related to one or more of the traits listed above (e.g. she's Catholic, so she's praying or talking about God with one of the irreligious / differently religious characters)

C) Some mixture of the two (e.g. she is making some smart practical comment about a current dilemma in the plot, which any one of the characters might have said, except that where one of the other characters would have said "fuck!", she says "mama Mary!")

I almost feel kind of gross, dissecting a character in this way. Especially when it's a character like Chaya, who I kind of liked!

I almost feel that way, but then I remember it's not really me doing the dissection. The characters come this way, marked with convenient labels for ease of disassembly.

I said I "kind of liked" Chaya, and I did. When I was reading the book quickly, swept along by the story – when I sort of defocused my brain, and didn't pay too much attention – I felt that she was a likable character. She had the general shape of a "likable character." My brain could match her against familiar templates, and accept the match, if I let my brain work without too much conscious deliberation.

When I focused harder, though, the joints began to show.

When I focused harder, I could watch (well-crafted, clever) lines of dialogue and narration flow past, and see through the Matrix to the calculated flecks of trait-relevance which adhered to each and every one of those lines.

This is a Chaya section, so I am getting told over and over again about God and rosary beads and plasma physics and what Uganda is like and what the Philippines is like and the woman Chaya has a crush on and how Chaya has a crush on that woman and how these two have a vaguely butch/femme dynamic.

(Sidenote: although this book seems like it's taking great pains to be culturally sensitive – or, perhaps, because of that fact – I kept noticing that the American characters are not constantly thinking and talking about what America is like. Only the people from places presumptively unfamiliar to the reader do that kind of thing. And it almost feels like the American characters are given more "slots" in which to fit distinct character traits, because they don't have to spend any slots just to establish their national origins.)

These are the Chaya topics. I am being told about them, and I will be told about them later, in other Chaya sections. Except for "the plot," these are the only topics I will ever be told about in Chaya sections.

If this were a Clayton section, I would be hearing for the 50th time about how Clayton is manipulative and conflicted about his manipulativeness. Or, hearing about one of the other Clayton topics. There's a list of those, with maybe five or six items, just as there was with Chaya. In Clayton sections, you hear about these things, and only these things.

It reminds me of the kind of improv where you're handed a brief description of your character, and have to immediately start acting as that character, with no time to prep. There's no way you could invent a whole fleshed-out human being in under a second, of course. So you lean hard on the traits listed on your character sheet. You find ways to weave one or more of them into each and every line. See: I'm doing it right! I'm playing my character!

----

Exordia's characters have no small traits. Only big ones, like "being Catholic" or "being Chinese." They do not act whimsically or inexplicably, ever; they do not play against their fixed types, ever.

Real people are microscopically detailed, incompressible, differentiated from one another by millions of little quirks that are essentially arbitrary and cannot be satisfactorily "explained" except by narrating huge segments of their life histories ("see, that's where it came from," one might say, after relating years of experience in unsparing detail).

In fiction, this stuff can't possibly be conveyed in full, and so a faithful portrayal of its consequences tends to just look like "noise," arbitrary behavior, the whimsical, the inexplicable.

Which is fine. Good fictional characters often come with such halos of static around them. It's a part of making a fictional world feel real, rough-edged, lived-in.

And on the other hand, sometimes it's fine for a fictional character to just be a type, and play out that type. A lot of science fiction is this way: it simply isn't much interested in character, which is okay, because it has other interests with which to keep your attention.

But Exordia is trying to have it both ways.

It's not just a standard hard SF story where the characters are types, and are clearly and only those types, and that's okay. Compared to that sort of story, Exordia spends way more time lingering on its characters, "zooming in" on them. Inviting you to consider them, study them, love them.

But this causes a feeling of intuitive wrongness, an uncanny valley effect. We should be zoomed in far enough to see the details, the noise-haloes. So where are they?

You can zoom in and in, but all you see is a magnified version of the stuff you'd already seen at lower resolution. A surface of unreal smoothness, unmarred by dust or fuzz.

4b. so meta

It's annoying (I keep using that word...) to talk about these aspects of Exordia, because the book involves a sci-fi conceit that could potentially explain its unusual flatness of character.

Explain it in-universe, I mean. As a "real" thing that causes these people to be this way, for a specific reason, in a specific place and time. Leaving everyone outside of the frame potentially intact, with dust and fuzz still in place.

(Wait, that was in Floornight too! Huh. I literally didn't realize that until just now.)

I'm not going to say anything more about this due to the spoiler rule, except that I don't think it really works when you think about it. The stated causes don't actually match up with the effects: the former are too narrow in scope, the latter too pervasive. The characters are flat even when the sci-fi flat-causing mechanisms aren't supposed to be in effect.

At most, I guess you could say the flatness is "thematically appropriate." Connected to other stuff that the book talks about, elsewhere. But... I dunno. Who cares? What's the point?

4c. the voice of the hive

Like a lot of modern fiction, Exordia is mostly written in studiously maintained free indirect speech.

If you don't know (or don't remember) what that is, the Wikipedia page I just linked has a nice example, which I'll reproduce here.

Quoted or direct speech or narrator's voice: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked. Reported or normal indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world. Free indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?

It's third person. But the third-person narration is commingled with the perspective of one of the characters (where this focal character can vary over the course of the text). Often the "narrator" just says stuff as though it's objective reportage, when in fact it is (and the reader knows it is) what this specific character thinks or believes.

The use of free indirect speech accidentally provides a useful way to "directly measure" the characterization problems described above.

Consider: although the book is written this way almost all of the way through – and you can discern that fact if you pay attention – it is easy to forget in the moment that it is written this way.

Why? Because, although the narration follows the thoughts of one character and then another, the characters are too similar to one another for this to make much of a difference.

Mostly, the narration just describes things the way you'd imagine a "geeky badass" might describe them, with lots of flashy clever phrasing, and lots of arguably pedantic detail about science / engineering / military matters / etc.

Free indirect speech already blurs the distinction between the authorial voice and the character voices, by design, but here the blurring is taken to its limit, and the distinction collapses entirely. Is "the author" describing events this way? Or, is one of the characters describing it in that way? Or not them, but a different character? We can't tell, because all of these people would say precisely the same string of words.

Of course, we can usually tell who the focal character is, because the items listed on their character card are getting sprayed all over the place. If every other sentence of the narration mentions a Clayton topic, then Clayton must be the focal character, and likewise for the others.

Even here, though, there's a curious departure from the way free indirect speech works in most other books. Note that referencing the "Clayton topics" is not the same thing as conveying Clayton's moment-to-moment thoughts: the former is a fixed list of 5 or 6 items, while the latter presumably roves all over the place as time passes.

I say "presumably" because if the characters' thoughts do rove around in this way, we mostly don't see it. All we hear about is their "topics," again and again.

Maybe these are Clayton's thoughts; maybe Clayton is an obsessive monomaniac who just thinks endlessly about the fact that he's manipulative and so on. Maybe they are all like that. Who knows? It's impossible for me to tell, because the narration is ambiguous in this odd, specific way.

One section, late in the book, begins as follows:

An awful light from the sky finds Anna. She’s, barely, smart enough not to look straight at it.

I was briefly startled by this. I interpreted that "barely smart enough" remark as something said by the omniscient third-person observer. I was like: dude, that's kinda harsh, isn't it?

But a few sentences later, I realized: oh, the focal character in this scene is Anna's mom. It's Anna's mom who's judging her like this. That makes sense.

This particular example is just sort of a narration glitch. I'm not sure it'd be possible to avoid the effect I'm describing, here, without rewriting the scene so it's clear who the focal character is before the "barely smart enough" judgment occurs.

But this case stuck out to me when I encountered it, because that feeling of disorienting perspective-realignment – although it's just kind of awkward, here – is what good multi-character free indirect speech usually feels like, all the time.

"The book should have more of this," I thought. "It should be constantly calling the characters stupid, or whatever, from the perspective of other characters."

(It's not like that doesn't happen at all, mind you. It just happens way less than usual, and way less than it ought to, IMO.)

"With this much perspective-shifting, I should be getting vertigo," I thought. "So where is it? Why is everything so smooth?"

5. the forbidden word

My division into sections is sort of breaking down, here. There's a thing I want to mention that doesn't really deserve its own section, but doesn't quite fit anywhere else. Whatever.

It's yet another annoying quality of Exordia's characters. ("Wait," you're saying. "You said you enjoyed this book?")

Basically everyone in this book is so...

Look, guys, I really don't want to say "woke," okay? If no one ever used the word "woke" again, we would live in a better world. I have said it twice already in this paragraph, and thus made our shared world worse, twice. Sorry.

I'm just not sure what else to call it.

They're feminists. They're against racism, and it's not the kind of hollow and unreflective "opposition to racism" that (e.g.) most Americans will assent to if you poke them about it – no, these people have subtle, thought-through ideas about racism, and its causes.

And so on, w/r/t other forms of bigotry, and the like.

And it's not just that the characters hold these views, themselves. These views are a fluid in which they swim, in a mostly invisible fashion. Everyone assumes without asking that everyone else is like this, and acts accordingly.

Or, more precisely, all the main characters are like this. There are a few bit players who are vaguely suggested to have more right-wing attitudes: the "Mike Jan" who we briefly met above, he of the unchanging desktop background, seems like the type of guy who'd watch Alex Jones, for instance. And on really rare occasions – like maybe 2 or 3 times total – some barely characterized nonentity will actually say something racist or sexist, but nothing much comes of it (remember, our mains are emotionally impregnable badasses), and then the guy who made the comment gets beheaded by an alien laser on the same page or something.

Meanwhile, all the Important Characters are (I guess) invisibly equipped with Important Character Detectors that let them hone in on each other, ignore the hapless maybe-bigoted redshirts around them, and proceed immediately into sophisticated conversations about social justice with one another. No need to feel out the other party's general point of view beforehand: this guy's a protagonist. He's cool, he's one of us.

Is this bad?

I mean, if it is, it's not really a big deal, I guess? Not compared to the other issues I talked about earlier, the deeper ones that plague the fundamental ingredients of the work (character, plot, structure).

But I did find it kind of offputting. Especially at first, before I'd accepted that the Exordia world is just like this.

I remember specifically being startled by an early scene, during the part where the Act One characters are getting introduced to the Acts Two+ characters, in which Anna and Erik suddenly – without warning or preface – launch into a discussion of Kurdish feminism, and potentially distorted/simplified/problematic Western views of Kurdish feminism, and whether Kurdish feminism really matters at all in light of the dire geopolitical position of the Kurds, and that sort of thing.

Again: the problem is not that this is "implausible," in itself. We barely know Erik at this point, and insofar as we know him it's mostly as some hardcore soldier type of dude, but – sure, whatever. There are plenty of feminist men in the military, I'm sure. The military is big, it's got all kinds of people in it.

Again: the violation is not against the laws of physics, but against the laws of persuasion. It's not that this couldn't happen. It could!

And yet.

"Yes, this could happen. I guess it could. But like, come on. Really?"

Sometimes the reader is a harsher master than reality.

And beyond that, this just seems like... I don't know. Like a half-assed, cowardly way to make your book "about" social justice in some sense, without ever really confronting the topic head-on?

A book in which everyone verbally agrees with one another about their enlightened views is not a book about the content of those views. It's just a book in which some characters happen to agree with one another about some things, and also some other stuff happens.

(I'm being at least sort of unfair here: the book really is "about" the Kurds and the Anfal campaign, for instance.)

For a book about culture clashes and genocide and the struggle for international collaboration under tense circumstances, Exordia has a remarkable lack of ideological tension. Or even non-ideological international tension, depicted "on-screen."

Mostly, people in the book... just kind of instantly get along with each other? And then immediately start exchanging packets of nerd banter and/or trenchant commentary on the evils of U.S. imperialism. Members of the geeky badass hive mind, recognizing one another on sight, conversing in the native language of the hive.

Once again: is this bad? Even if so, how bad is it, really?

I think, maybe, that if your book is about the sorts of things that Exordia is about, then sometimes your characters should very much not get along immediately. That they should be riven apart, and driven to extremes, by identity and ideology – if not forever, then at least for a time.

Maybe.

6. proof by intimidation

Man, this post is long!

And somehow I haven't really touched upon what Exordia's prose actually feels like, most of the time, word by word.

That's what this last section is about.

I don't mean the prose style, exactly. Actually, the prose style per se is... really good, mostly! I don't have that much to say about the ways in which it is good, but for the sake of balance and accuracy, I ought to make it clear that they exist.

Seth Dickinson is clearly a very good writer. In the "writes high-quality prose" sense, at least, and – despite all that I've said – in plenty of other ways too. (I'm told that his other books are better than this one; I will probably read them sometime. And I look forward, warily but with a considerable measure of hope, to his future work.)

But. You know what's coming. This post is negative-only. I've got something bad to say about the prose, it seems. Not about the style, but about... something else?

What, then?

Well, let me show you some examples.

He [i.e. Clayton] has seen enough satellite timelines of mass graves to know exactly which stage the corpses have reached. Their skin and bone cells are still alive. Their suits are bloating with gases now. Death signals the beginning of a final uprising, when the three pounds and 60 percent (by count) of your cells that are bacterial clients claim their last meal. They eat you so greedily and so well.

Sixty percent, huh. TIL!

I didn't know that, but Clayton did, apparently. (Free indirect speech in action.)

Of course he did. Clayton is a geeky badass, and like all of his kind, he knows every gee-whiz fact (and factoid) in existence.

And like all geeky badasses – like the book itself – he is not shy about letting you know that he knows.

What else does the book know? Here's some chemistry:

Their X-ray frequency gun isn’t working. Maggie Gaboury breaks out the breakdown spectrometer. A neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet laser attacks the hull; the plume of excited vapor releases a rainbow of light that the spectrometer can read like a bloody fingerprint.

"Breakdown spectrometer"? I've never heard of those. Am I supposed to know this? Is it important?

Two pages later:

The US Radar 110XLS is designed to survey down to two hundred feet below ground, seeking out oil deposits and land mines. Emme didn’t expect the radar to work—after all, their radios are burned out, and radars are giant radios. But radio doesn’t go through metal. The radar’s storage unit protected it. So now they’re aiming it at this alien hull, which Joel says isn’t metal. It’s some kind of stable excimer, or Rydberg matter.

"Ah, the US Radar 110XLS, huh?" I say, smiling and nodding.

Just keep smiling and nodding, I tell myself. Keep your mouth shut. Or else Seth might catch on that you're a fucking moron who doesn't even know what a "breakdown spectrometer" is.

Later, here's some physics:

She knows how matter behaves around black holes. This thing is not behaving like a black hole should: it ought to be pulling in nearby air, forming a friction fireball. It’s not. But even if it isn’t actively pulling, some air is going to move into it anyway. Air molecules at room temperature move shockingly fast—about 350 meters per second.

350 meters per second. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.

God, I'm dumb. All the fucking things I don't KNOW.

The areas which the book knows all about, and which I know virtually nothing about, are too numerous to name. Does it know aeronautical engineering? And astronautical engineering? You bet:

Volume around 12,000 cubic meters. Assuming the same density as a 747, this implies a mass of 5,400 metric tons, just short of two fully fueled Saturn V rockets. Blackbird has wings, but they’re too thick to produce much lift. The fuselage shows no sign of area ruling for efficient transonic flight. It’s not a plane. As a spacecraft design, Blackbird almost makes sense. The entire fuselage could serve as a lifting body while Blackbird glides down to a water landing. In space, the wings and their jagged trailing edges could act as radiators. There are no visible engines, but maybe the tail stuck in the mountainside is the exhaust.

That all sounds logical enough, I guess. But then again, if it wasn't, how would I know? Man, I don't even know what the phrase "area ruling" means.

Perhaps, despite my pretensions, I am not in fact cut out to disparage this book at all. It's above my pay grade. It's smarter than me.

You want more? Here's, um, a "BLEVE":

The blast tips the nearest helicopter on its side, snapping rotors, the fueling hose lashing like hell’s elephant. The helicopter carries a tank of helium cryogen for food storage and magnetic resonance systems. The heat of the fireball envelops the tank and pushes the helium above its boiling point. It tries to revert to a gas but it can’t: no room in here! For an instant the tank holds back tons of super-pressurized liquid helium trying to boil off into gas. Then a seam fails, and every molecule inside flashes to steam. The result is a BLEVE: a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion. It ruptures the kerosene fire and kills the luckier men instantly. The inert helium snuffs the fire and replaces it with a zone of asphyxiation and paradoxical cold. The blast wave slaps the lab complex’s tunnels taut and snaps the laundry lines in Tawakul.

Maybe you knew what that was already. Not me!

Is... is that what the blast wave resulting from a BLEVE would do, under those circumstances? Look, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm not casting doubt. I'm just saying, I have no clue.

Did Seth Dickinson do some sort of calculation, here, to make sure this made sense? How much research did he do, how much homework? Did he run simulations?

This stuff reads like he did. It reads like he was so careful, so laboriously conscientious about the science and engineering details, that he just has to tell you everything he learned along the way, or else it would all be for naught.

The book knows about military hardware. Oh god does it know about military hardware. The following excerpt is merely a drop from an ocean:

A column of Spetsnaz BMD-4s roll south down the riverside road, bristling with hundred-millimeter rifles and thirty-millimeter autocannon and anti-tank missiles and active hard-kill defenses. Spetsnaz riding atop their transports watch every incremental tick of the compass. Brand new Azart-P1 radio sets squall with static, still picking up the aurorae hidden behind the low gray sky.

Seth, is there anything you don't know?

I'm not even touching on the learned, labored excursions into history and geopolitics, here – just focusing on the science-y parts for brevity (ha ha, "brevity," I'll be here all night).

But even then, there are plenty more domains of science and engineering left to cover! Behold:

The copper tracks that connect components on the board have been duplicated, as if the etching process was performed twice before the final UV burn. Some of the pin connectors have dwarf copies. The CPU socket is crusted in a dark mass, like over-applied thermal paste.

The world is vast, nearly as vast as my own ignorance of it. Would you believe I have no idea what "over-applied thermal paste" looks like on a circuit board?

Like Seth, I do an arguably excessive quantity of research. Look, I spent a while this morning finding all those quotes, and there's no way I'm going to leave them un-quoted after all that work, okay? Here they come:

The KingFisher can read DNA sequences at targeted locations, but it can’t physically examine the structure of DNA. For that, she needs to get purified DNA extract from the KingFisher machine, then mount the DNA on slides of mica and put them under an atomic force microscope.

But of course. (Smile and nod.)

Did you know that certain ways of getting killed cause you to ejaculate as you die? Clayton does!

"Gunshot trauma to the cerebellum causes post-mortem erection and discharge," Clayton says.

More physics, and some speculative engineering:

The engine that forms the “quill” is a sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion rocket. This is a fancy way to say that it turns spin-polarized heavy hydrogen and light helium into a continuous thermonuclear explosion. This is itself a fancy way to say that it runs on a rolling nuclear fireball. The magnetically confined tailpipe puts out about 100 grams of helium-4, protons, loose neutrons, and unburnt hydrogen-helium fuel every second. Add gamma and X-rays for taste, and, in situations where you need extra thrust at the cost of efficiency, dump some extra mass into the beam as a kind of afterburner. The resulting exhaust plasma moves at 3,500 kilometers per second: Mach 10,000, or about 1 percent of lightspeed.

Even more:

Some of the atoms take direct gamma-ray hits to their nuclei, breaking apart the strong-force bonds that tie protons to neutrons: a process called photodisintegration.

Did we really need to be told, after having this phenomenon explained to us, that it was called "photodisintegration"?

I mean, maybe we did. Or at least, maybe I did.

Since, you know.

Since I didn't know that, before.

Of course I didn't.

----

One last time: Is this bad? If so, why?

Maybe the problem is that I've written too much fiction, myself. (And SF, even, sometimes.)

And so, I can no longer look at this stuff and just think, "ooh, cool science facts, described in a flashy way. Fun!"

Instead, I just feel an immediate, intimate sense of exhaustion.

"God, how much work this must have been. How long it must have taken to gather all this info, and double-check it, and integrate it with the story in the right places."

(The fact that it has to actually suit the story means that a lot of this kind of "homework" never even makes it to the page, because the plot points that might once have required it get edited out or modified! Ugh, I'm feeling drained just typing this.)

Exhaustion – and self-doubt.

"God, so many things to potentially get wrong in an embarrassing way. So many fields that I'm an amateur-at-best in. And since I'm writing fiction, I'm taking those fields 'out of distribution,' taking them places that have never been studied by their real-world practitioners! Fuck, I have to make novel predictions! I'm screwed. Everyone is going to know exactly how much of an idiot I am."

This isn't just about science, mind you. It's about everything. Writing fiction inherently requires one to assume a posture of staggering arrogance, or what would be staggering arrogance in any other context.

"Here's what happened, to these people who are not like me, in all these places I've only visited, at most. Here is exactly what they did and said and even thought, inside their heads, where no one else could see. How the hell would I know, you ask? It's simple: I know everything. I know all the things there are to know, about all the things that exist. (And the ones that don't exist, for that matter.)"

I do manage to assume the posture, at least for long enough to get the words written when I want them written. But outside of that trance-like state, I start to doubt myself.

Who am I to do this thing? My ignorance is vast, nearly as vast as the world of which I'm ignorant.

And it's there, in that world, that they live. The readers. Aren't they going to notice how badly I'm getting it all wrong? They will, won't they?

This is neurotic, I know.

And so, perhaps the only thing that we're learning here is the following:

A) I am a writer who is very intellectually insecure, and

B) Exordia is a novel with a majestic stock of implicit intellectual self-confidence.

Is that bad? Could it be bad, "objectively," apart from my issues? I mean, surely not, right?

Nonetheless, I notice that reading Exordia filled me with this kind of tetchy, defensive intellectual competitiveness – which is a thing that most books do not do to me, though "my issues" remain a constant.

Perhaps – to psychologize myself further – this objection is downstream from the others, and has no life of its own. Perhaps I just felt annoyed with the book for other reasons, and at the same time felt like the book was asserting itself to be superior to me in some sense, and so I felt a need to say:

"No, all of this is bad somehow, because if it were good it would mean this whole book is good – and that would have dire implications for my own work, given how similar-and-yet-maybe-inferior it is to the incredibly-annoying-and-yet-objectively-superior novel Exordia."

Which is... extremely neurotic, and self-regarding, and also barely even makes sense. I don't want it it just be that, but maybe it is.

(The legitimately high-quality prose did not help, in this respect. It really is good! Five hundred and twenty-nine small-print pages of good. It's so fucking polished, way moreso than anything I could ever imagine putting out. And so fucking clever, so fucking smart...)

(Jeez. Get it together, man.)

----

However, there is one more thing that I notice.

There are works of fiction that make me feel smart, and works of fiction that make me feel dumb.

And I think, all else being equal, it is preferable to make the reader feel smart. Not by cheating, not by lowering your intellectual standards to what you imagine the reader can handle. But by trusting them, and then giving them something hard in a way you trust them to digest themselves.

Rather than... I don't know, bludgeoning them into cowed reverence through sheer force of accumulated, exhaustive, exhausting showing-off?

I don't know how objective this quality is, this feel-smart/feel-dumb thing. I'm sure it's reader-relative to some extent, maybe a huge extent. Maybe it varies so much that it's not even worth talking about in the abstract; you just gotta hope the right reader finds your stuff, and feels smart.

Still, here I am, talking about it.

What defines the works that "make me feel smart"?

Mainly that they are complicated and difficult by virtue of the complicated and difficult novelties they create, as part of the creative act that they are. They involve things which are equally hard for anyone to wrap their mind around, because no one had ever needed to wrap their mind around such things at all, before the work existed.

That, and the fact that these works – despite being inherently complicated and difficult – do not talk down to you, or hold your hand too much.

They act kind of like you already know what their deal is – which you don't, but then again, no one does. (The playing field is level.)

They say:

"Congratulations. You have passed the entrance exam. Welcome to the class. It will be hard, but I trust you to do your best. If you aren't smart enough now, perhaps you will become so, by your own efforts, by the end. Good luck."

They expect the reader to be a genius, but they know, deep down, that the reader is not really the right sort of genius – not yet, anyway. That is the point of presenting the challenge: so that you will rise to it, and see a new kind of thing, beyond what you had believed to be the horizon.

This is how I feel about Homestuck, say, or The Quincunx.

Or The Lymond Chronicles, or The Recognitions, or Ulysses.

Some of these are extremely dense with learned and carefully prepared authorial research. And, where this is the case, they are certainly not shy about showing it to you.

And yet, these works make me feel smart.

And then, there are works like Exordia, which make me feel dumb as fuck.

The end!

[didalexiabreakupwitholgaisback]

some general thoughts, or what NOT to do in a crisis*:

we can all acknowledge that the last 24 hours have been a clusterfuck in many ways, and i think we can all agree that everything that happened today should have been handled differently.

first and foremost, we can acknowledge the pain that daniela caracas has and is experiencing. it's not easy being a person of colour in spain, let alone a black woman and a female footballer at that. there is already coded language in how we speak about black players in our league and any type of harassment or abuse towards her is wrong. daniela felt violated and that deserves recognition. period.

we can acknowledge that mapi acted physically in a manner that was wrong. i'm not going to sit here and argue with internet lip readers as to what was or was not said. but whether the touching was incidental or not, the fact was that it happened. period.

we can acknowledge that there are right wing elements who are using this incident to further their own agenda. they are spinning narratives and putting out messaging to further their own agendas. that's wrong. period.

we can acknowledge that mapi is a person who may face criminal liability and thus her statement was directed under legal advisement. but we can also acknowledge that tone and messaging matters. you can protect your legal rights but still put out a statement that doesn't feed into anger or defensiveness.

we can acknowledge that our favourite players are human and will fuck up in life. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call them out or demand that they learn and grow from their mistakes.

we can acknowledge that barça waited too long to put out any sort of statement. the club should have turned off its scheduled social media because those posts came off as flippant and oblivious. my personal feelings are that the club should have put out a separate statement first, and not relied on a statement through the player involved in the incident. again, you can put out a statement of concern without waiving any legal rights.

we can acknowledge that this team is at a crossroads and that no matter how frustrated you are in a match, your players need to be disciplined enough not to loss their cool or react in such a manner. and we can acknowledge that there needs to be concrete steps at the club level to address this behaviour collectively as a unit and not to hide it away.

and finally, we can acknowledge that the club has let many of us down today, and we should demand that it do better. period. more to come. 🙏

*i'm writing this from the perspective of someone who works in legal and compliance and deals with investigations all the time. i understand the potential legal ramifications here, but there are much better ways to have handled the situation.

[wardensantoineandevka]

Yeah, I think at the end of it. I get, understand, and agree that the narrative moment we're at is "Bells Hells, feeling they don't have the resources to fight Ludinus a second time today and still uncertain about the central question of what is to be done about the gods in Exandria, move toward Predathos in an attempt to control a situation they feel is inevitable. Imogen feels she has to make the choice to accept it into herself because Predathos is still moving toward her and the Ruidusborn, tragically boxing her into this because she feels she has no other meaningful choices." Great, amazing, I totally understand this, and it is a natural beat and one that coheres as a culmination of the campaign. It's actually a pretty great beat in summary.

The frustrating thing ultimately feels to be the execution, because it constantly feels like the story is meandering from beat to beat after an incredibly long series of meanderings over the course of the campaign. It's ultimately fine the characters feel uncertain, but the storytelling itself feels uncertain as well about what it is doing and that is less fine. Every decision is made with a sort of timid "I suppose that's the thing to do, I don't really know" at the table level without a very clear sense of what they're moving toward narratively, and that's really more of the problem. It's undercutting what is otherwise a really great direction.

Decisions don't feel like they have teeth because the storytelling is so hesitant about whether it's the right direction to take, so the needed feeling of stakes, inevitability, tragedy, suffocating circumstance don't exist in the way they should to give what's happening the needed sense of clarity. It feels like we're all moving through a bog in a not fun way because the story itself isn't sure what it's moving toward even in a sense of vibes or structurally. moving confidently and toward a tragedy in a sense of trapping the characters and cornering them would've done wonders, but instead it kinda has the feeling of trying to unroll a carpet dramatically and it just kinda slowly stops. Like, it's a slow drift down a lazy river instead of feeling dragged out with the tide.

It is a really great beat to have Imogen accepting Predathos because she feels she doesn't have any other choice in the series of pressures occurring right now. But, the pressure doesn't really feel like it exists because it all feels disconnected from the moment or too gently / abstractly applied or too slow to be framed, and the inevitability aspect doesn't feel like it's quite standing because narrative inevitability comes from momentum and strong storytelling intent and purpose, and it's never felt like this campaign has had that. The storytelling is hesitant and uncertain, so the tragedy doesn't quite come through on experience of the moment, even when it does come through in summary.

And that's more the frustrating thing. It's a good beat executed a little too uncertainly. The choice itself for the character is a good one, but it — like much of the campaign — feels like it lacks a storyteller trust in the narrative or trust in the choice itself to make it really feel satisfying as an execution. I genuinely wonder if that's ultimately what I'm bouncing off of, the fact that it doesn't feel like the table is trusting in the narrative or trusting the choices they're making for the story or trusting in themselves and each other to carry through the story they’re telling, so the intentionality and purpose feel off and it's stripping a great beat of its power by making it feel hesitant at a narrative mechanics level.

[elix8r]

PRADA SHOES + I LOVE YOUS TEASER

PAIRING: heeseung x fem!reader 

GENRE: smut, angst, crack, (some?) fluff, college!au, exes to lovers!au, enemies to lovers!au, socialite/richkid!au

SUMMARY: Life as a socialite wasn’t all champagnes and designer labels, especially not with the turn your reputation took due to a simple misunderstanding. Now, you were being painted by everyone as a big fat cheater who shattered her sweet boyfriend’s heart—a narrative that couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, it was him who had betrayed your trust. Frustrated and feeling deeply wronged, you returned to society and the new school year after a summer of cutting off contact with everyone and the drama. But just when you thought you were ready to face the world again, you were blindsided by something unexpected: the lingering effect Heeseung had on you. And who could blame you? Heeseung was way too hot for you to get over in just three short months and now, seeing him with the girl he once told you not to worry about all over him? Oh, it was on. 

You refused to be replaced, labeled as a crazy ex, or forgotten. No, you were going to make Lee Heeseung realize that you were the best motherfucking thing to had ever happened to him. 

WC: 1.3K for teaser (i'm thinking 20k+ for the actual fic)

WARNINGS (FOR THE TEASER): profanity + mentions of infidelity

RELEASE DATE: Unknown but I am aiming for before summer ends

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey everyone!! lt's been so long since I've posted one of these so I decided to give you a really long teaser and also cause this is going to be a long one to write so you'll have to be a little more patient! But I hope you guys enjoy this and is excited for this fic cause I love writing it! Everyone is so messy (and lowkey kinda terrible) but it'll be a fun one so pls look forward to it!! Lmk if you wanna be on the taglist ☺️

Heeseung was going to fucking kill Jake Sim. 

When he woke up this morning, you were the last thing on his mind, something he seemed to have finally freed himself from. However, all the hard work he put into casting you away from his mind seemed to have been in vain, as now all he could think about was you and how you had returned after three months of radio silence with the guy you cheated on him with.

Livid didn’t even cover what he was feeling, and it was evident in the way he swung his club. Each hit seemed to be driven by a surge of pent-up frustration.

“What the hell, man? That’s the third time today you’ve been way off course. What’s going on?” Jay shot him an incredulous look as he tried to locate where the golf ball had landed.

Heeseung let out a frustrated groan as he ripped off his glove and shoved his driver back into his bag. “Y/N’s fucking back.”

That was all Jay needed to hear to understand what was going on with his friend. "Shit, I saw. I’m sorry dude, it’s fucked up."

Heeseung was in no mindset to be playing golf right now. All he wanted was to go back home and wallow miserably in his bed. Unfortunately, they were only on hole ten of eighteen, and judging by his performance today, Heeseung knew it was going to take awhile.

"Did you know?" Heeseung couldn't help but blurt out, his frustration evident in his voice as he watched Jay effortlessly swing a shot miles better than his own.

Confusion flickered across Jay's face as he turned to face his friend. "What do you mean?"

“Did you know that she was coming back with Jake?” Heeseung felt his jaw tense as he mentioned his ex-friend.

“I didn’t even know he was with her until today. Honestly, I thought he’d just fucked off somewhere and didn’t bother telling any of us, considering how things went down. You know me, I would’ve told you straight up if I had found out earlier.” Heeseung trusted Jay implicitly. He was as loyal as they came, but unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for everyone in their friend group.

"Do you think Sunghoon knew?" Heeseung's question elicited an audible groan from Jay.

If anyone in their friend group knew how Jake spent his summer, it would undoubtedly be Sunghoon. However, Sunghoon was notoriously tight-lipped, especially when it came to sensitive matters. Since the breakup, the entire friend group had undergone an incredibly awkward shift. It seemed that everyone had more or less chosen a side, and allegiances were clear.

"You know he wouldn't tell us anything if he did. It's getting ridiculous. The other day, I saw Gaeul and him having brunch or something at the clubhouse, and the moment she spotted me, she practically sprinted over to explain herself. She claimed she's still 'Switzerland' in the whole situation and hasn't chosen a side," Jay recounted, frustration evident in his voice. 

Heeseung almost snorted at the absurdity of it all. Their friend group had never been one to keep secrets or tiptoe around each other, but the last few months had been nothing but that. The betrayal by you and Jake had not only affected Heeseung's relationship with you but had also tainted the dynamic of their entire friend group.

“Literally, what is there to be ‘Switzerland’ about? I mean, this whole thing isn’t even complicated. Everyone saw them go into the bathroom together and come out literally holding hands. Trust me, I know what she looks like after giving head, and that's literally what she looked like in that video Beomgyu sent. Plus, Karina literally heard them.” Heeseung angrily got into the golf cart as Jay fished the keys out to start driving.

“Okay, well, no offense, but in all honesty, Karina’s probably not the most reliable source, cause she’s in an extremely biased position, but I guess that’s beside the point.” Jay’s words seemed to instantly bring a frown upon Heeseung’s face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Heeseung’s tone sharply switched up in an almost defensive manner.

Jay, feeling this shift, nervously cleared his throat as he stammered, trying his best not to offend his already sensitive friend regarding an even more fragile situation. “I mean, uh, well. You know…”

“What?” The grip he had on the seat of the golf cart seemed to get tighter as he waited for his friend to elaborate.

“Dude, you can't be serious? You know Karina’s been trying to ride your dick for the past, what, give or take ten years? I mean, we all know that she’s never had a good relationship with Y/N, and I’m pretty sure most of that resentment stemmed from the fact that you’ve always been head over heels for Y/N.” Jay slowly parked the cart and turned off the engine as he explained.

Still not understanding Jay’s point, Heeseung furrowed his brows, shooting his friend another annoyed look before getting out of the golf cart. “What are you trying to get at?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, you’re dense. I mean, the last couple of months before Y/N cheated on you was the closest you seemed to have gotten with Karina because of that final project that you guys had or whatever. I mean, you were with her more times than you were with your own girlfriend, and knowing Karina, she seems like she could be delusional enough to have maybe taken that as a sign that you were interested in her? I mean, this is all speculation, but I’m just letting you know what we all saw.”

Jay cautiously treaded this topic. Heeseung was his best friend since they were babies, and he would always be on his side, but Karina was never anyone’s favorite with her extremely polarizing personality. He had no allegiance towards her, not to mention that she wasn’t actually even in their friend group and always only ever found lingering around wherever Heeseung was, so it was much easier for Jay to actually see through her. In fact, it seemed that all of their friends could pretty much catch on to Karina’s end goal except Heeseung.

“So you think it’s my fault that Y/N cheated on me?” The air got tense as Heeseung snapped at Jay while snatching his 7-iron out of the bag. “Just because I spent some time doing a stupid fucking school project with Karina doesn’t mean it gives her reason to go and suck off one of my best friends.”

Jay shook his head even before Heeseung was done with his sentence. Heeseung seemed to not be getting the point. “Fuck no, dude, that’s not what I’m saying. Karina has an incentive: you. If she gets rid of Y/N, then it means you’re up for grabs. Of course, Karina didn’t force Y/N to get on her knees for Sim, but she was the first one to come running, telling us what happened even before Beomgyu sent that video.” Heeseung was trying hard to focus on trying to get his ball on the green as he geared up to swing while listening to Jay.

“So you don’t think she should’ve warned me of what she heard?” He swung precisely, but it seemed that this whole course, to be precise, wasn’t going easy on him. He’d be lucky to get even a double bogey on the par-4.

Jay slightly grimaced at Heeseung’s shot. “No, it’s not that,” he let out a sigh as he walked over to Heeseung. “Look, you’ve been my best friend for as long as I can remember, and I know the past few months have been fucking hard because of what Y/N put you through, and I just want you to be careful. Karina’s always been kind of a conniving, spoiled bitch who finds a way to get what she wants. Just because she’s been warming your bed every night since Y/N fell off the fucking Earth doesn’t mean she should be someone you start trusting.”

There was nothing he could say back to his friend’s words and it seemed that what Jay had said clung on deep to Heeseung's thoughts throughout the day, casting a lingering shadow and leaving a bitter aftertaste in his mind.

[max1461]

I think that the average internet Marxist is actually not much of a materialist at all, in fact in their behavior and rhetoric they seem very concerned with moral purity, the redemptive power of suffering, and the ability of narrative to shape the actual world. As myriad as the senses of the word "materialist" have come to be, none of this would seem to comport well with any of them. This all feels very Christian.

In some cases I really do think there is a latent Christianity in it, but I think the stronger source of this trend is simply the leftist emphasis on sloganeering. Somewhere along the line, maybe with the Bolshevik policy of democratic centralism or maybe somewhere else, the importance of the slogan, the party line, the supreme power of the speech act seems to have been elevated for many leftists above all other concerns. From this follows the kind of disingenuous, obviously fallacious argument you so often see from the online ML left. The point is to say the magic words that have been carefully agreed upon, the magic incantation that will defeat all opposition.

Whether it's "I don't want to vote for a candidate who supports any amount of genocide" or "The Is-not-rael Zionist entity is on the edge of collapse!" or whatever else, a rational person can recognize the impotence of these words. They don't do anything. They're just words. But the feeling seems to be that once the perfect incantation is crafted—the incantation that makes your opponent sound maximally like a Nazi without engaging with their position in good faith, or the incantation which brushes aside all thoughts of defeat, or whatever else—once the perfect incantation is crafted, all that is left to do is say it and say it and say it, and make sure everyone else is saying it too.

This is not a materialist way of approaching politics. This is a mystical way of approaching politics.

I think it's also worth saying that this tendency in Marxism seems old, it certainly predates the internet. Lots of Marxists today are vocal critics of identity politics, of what they see as the liberal, insubstantive, and idealist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework. I share this criticism to a significant degree, but I'm not very eager to let Marxists off the hook here. The modern DEI framework evolved directly out of a liberal/capitalist appropriation of earlier academic ideas about social justice from such sources as Queer Studies, Black Studies, academic Feminism and so on. I say this as a neutral, factual description of its history which I believe to be essentially accurate. In turn, disciplines like Queer Studies, Black Studies, and academic Feminism each owe a great intellectual dept to academic Marxism, and likewise to the social movements of the 1960s (here in the Anglosphere), which themselves were strongly influenced by Marxism.

Obviously as the place of these fields in the academy was cemented, they lost much (most) of their radical character in practice. To a significant degree however, I think their rhetorical or performative radicalism was retained, and was further fostered by the cloistered environment of academia. In this environment the already-extant Marxist tendency to sloganeering seems in my impression to have metastasized greatly. And so I think the political right is not actually wrong, or not wholly wrong, when they attribute the speech-act-centrism of modern American (and therefore, online) politics, its obsession with saying things right above doing things right and its constantly shifting maze of appropriate forms of expression, at least in part to Marxism.

Now I should say that I don't think the right is correct about much else in this critique, and I also don't think this is wholly attributable to Marxism. But I think there's plainly an intellectual dept there.

More than anything else, this is my genuine frustration with both Marxism as it exists today and with its intellectual legacy as a whole. I fundamentally do not believe in the great transformative power of speech acts, I do not believe in the importance of holding the correct line, I do not believe that the specifics of what you say or how you say it matter nearly as much as what you do. I do not think there is much to be gained from playing the kind of language games that Marxists often like to play, and I do not think that playing language games and calling it "materialist analysis" is a very compelling means of argument.

[tommycorriander]

Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, And Disability

I am disabled. This is something I've talked about a handful of times on this blog and on my Twitter, and anyone who knows me knows I am a disabled man. As a result, while I do enjoy dissecting media and politics, the need to be an advocate for disability issues would have fallen on me to some extent regardless. Disabled folks are often left out of conversations regarding diversity in media, in a continued oversight from able bodied peers.

What does this have to do with the Hellaverse?

Both shows contain at least some small amount of disability representation; specifically, they both have characters that are physically disabled. In Hazbin Hotel this is Vaggie, as she is missing an eye and prior to the finale had lost her wings. In Helluva Boss, the characters would be Fizzarolli, a quad amputee, and the unnamed deaf child in the special. The only character I ever see talked about in regards to their disability by the wider fanbase is the unnamed child, and on a smaller scale in critical spaces I occasionally see remarks on Fizzarolli's disability.

This is a problem.

For as much as fans of one or both shows would love to claim diversity in their shows, the lack of disability representation and the lackluster portrayal of the minimal representation is poor. And I haven't seen any of my fellow critics discuss this, which I feel is an oversight, though I don't fault them for this as there are many problems with both shows and they tend to have their hands full. However, this angle of viewing the shows has been overlooked, which is why I wish to discuss it today.

Firstly, I'd like to specify what I mean when I discuss disability. While the conversation regarding the Hellaverse is primarily centered around physical disability as this is the only form of disability portrayed in the shows, coded or otherwise, disability comes in many different forms. Intellectual disabilities and mental disabilities are just as important for representation in the media as physical disabilities. Among physical disabilities, there's also a difference in visible and invisible disabilities, the latter of which is hardly ever shown in media compared to the former. Ideally all forms of disability would be portrayed equally and with respect, but unfortunately this isn't the case. I also don't expect every show to tackle every demographic at once; this isn't a reasonable request, and to be very clear, my issue with the representation in HH/HB does not come from every single unique experience with disability not being covered, but rather with the narrative the creatives behind the show and the show's fans continue to push: that both shows are diverse and are, in some way, more progressive than other shows.

This isn't the case for many reasons. Fellow critics have gone into depth about the show's lack of representation of women in nuanced roles, the lack of queer women, the racist ways in which the very few characters of colour are presented, the lack of trans representation, and even the way sex and sexuality is presented being rather conservative at times. That isn't the focus of this essay, but I would implore anyone who is reading this who is somehow unaware of the previous issues to seek out essays that talk about those points; Cassidy Whiskey on YouTube has a three-part series that covers a multitude of topics, not just issues of representation, and I would have recommended helluvareceipts on Twitter, but her account has sadly been deactivated. I'm sure there are others, but I'll lose focus if I try to name every single person to go to. If you're willing to trawl through general pettiness in the critical tag (which, let's be real, that is probably how you found this post) you'll find well-worded critiques as well.

Back to the topic at hand. The lack of representation of people with disabilities is already frustrating, but there isn't a complete drought: Vaggie, Fizzarolli, and the unnamed imp child do exist, after all. However, their representation is not just flawed, but even exploitative in some ways.

First we have Vaggie. Aside from the visual of her missing eye and seeing the incident in which she lost that eye, nothing comes of it. She never has to contend with the difficulties that come with impaired sight, and it's never brought up by other characters. In the training scene between her and Carmilla, it's not a factor: instead, her greater flaw in the physical realm when it comes to combat is having longer hair. This is an extreme oversight, which I believe shows that Vivienne and the various writers for the show never actually take into consideration what should be a major element of a character, that being her impaired vision. Furthermore, the loss of her wings isn't even considered at all, with her somehow gaining them back at the end of her training montage with Carmilla. This could have been an excellent vector to discuss physical disability in a coded form, with her wings being a stand in for more traditional forms of limb loss. Still not ideal, as I believe it's better to have forthright depictions of disability over metaphors, but it would have been something. Instead, it's never a factor, and worse, it's effectively cured. As far as representation goes, Vaggie might as well not even count.

That's all that exists for Hazbin Hotel. In Helluva Boss, we have two characters, and I will save the unnamed child for last, because that is where the real issue with the representation is on full display.

So, Fizzarolli. He is a quad amputee and potentially hearing impaired, though the latter is speculated on due to a single scene which I discuss later. Since that scene is the only time it ever comes up, I will focus on his amputee status. He lost his limbs in a fire, something we see on screen. I will disagree with some of my fellow critics in that this scene should have been more detailed; I feel that had the scene shown more of the damage dealt to Fizz's body it would have come across in poor taste, and focusing on the tragic aspect of disability usually ends up feeling like trauma porn in the hands of poor writers, which Vivienne most certainly is. I do not trust her to handle a more detailed scene with grace, especially given her track record (more on that later). It is ultimately for the best that the scene is mostly brushed over, even if it would have been better in the hands of someone with the maturity and sensitivity to cover such a topic for more to be shown in regards to his injuries.

Otherwise, Fizzarolli is mostly fine. He's shown not just surviving but thriving, he has a loving partner (criticisms of the portrayal of said relationship not withstanding) and generally sees success in his life while still having to grapple with the realities of his disability when it comes to his prosthetics being prone to damage and potentially shutting down. I would, in the hands of anyone else, like to see more of this character and what his daily routine looks like as a disabled man.

Unfortunately all the good will built with Fizz comes crashing down when we get to the unnamed imp child in the Fizzarolli special episode. This child is the poster child for virtue signalling. Frankly, it's disgusting how a majority of the fandom seemed to ignore how fetishistic this portrayal was. This is where the real meat of the essay comes in to play.

This unnamed child is given a single scene, and is then promptly forgotten about and never mentioned again. They are introduced as being a fan of Fizz here to view the competition, there is a brief exchange between the two, and then we all move on. And yet this scene was championed as somehow revolutionary or a sign of the top-tier diversity and progressiveness in Helluva, when in reality this type of scene has been done to death. This is tokenism.

One major stumbling block many of the people championing this scene seem to get tripped up on is a very simple question: why was this child a child to begin with? Really, this seems like a simple question, it shouldn't have much thought. Sometimes characters are kids. But within the episode it's clearly shown through multiple different avenues that this is an adult show. The performances are dripping with sexuality, several of the fans of Fizzarolli are there because Mammon sells sex robots of the guy, there is no mistaking that this is something no child should be at, let alone by themselves.

So why was this child a child? Simple: brownie points.

It's a lot more difficult for people to share clips of a wholesome moment from your show if the person Fizz was interacting with was an adult. People are ableist, this is pretty par for the course; as a disabled person I find it generally safer to assume people are ableist before proven otherwise. I can guarantee if this scene were to be between Fizzarolli and a deaf adult fan as opposed to a young child, it would not have been championed as this amazing representation by mostly able bodied fans. And that is by design: if Vivienne genuinely cared about representation, if she truly wanted to show something meaningful to her adult fans in her adult show, she would have had the interaction be with an adult. But that doesn't get her clip shared around on social media. That doesn't get her brownie points for inclusion. It's safe, it's palatable, it's sickeningly wholesome, and it's insulting for that. This is a show for adults, something Vivienne and company is adamant on, and yet they treat their audience like children. As a fan, you should be insulted to have this key-jingling one minute clip presented to you. You should demand more, demand better.

Unfortunately I do not see ever getting better from Vivienne. She has made it very clear she truly does not care about creating art, she really only stumbled into being championed as a paragon for animation because her majority white and able bodied fans saw the inclusion of primarily gay men and thought that was good enough. She does not give a damn about disabled people, and she never will. To expect good disabled representation from her is like expecting good queer representation from a Marvel movie; she is in it for the money, and it just so happens that the inclusion of that scene makes money.

Addendum thoughts that were too long to put into the tags: I would like to make it clear that disability, because it presents very differently, is experienced very differently by many different people. If you felt seen or represented by the disability representation in either show, that's fine, and I don't want you to feel bad for feeling seen. Ultimately disabled people are largely given scraps; I have not once seen someone with my particular physical disability portrayed in media. Sometimes we latch onto things that are subpar or lacking; my criticism of reception to this scene is targeted primarily at able bodied audience members who may be lacking in this perspective and to also champion fellow disabled people to rightfully demand and expect better. Thank you for your time.

[creatingblackcharacters]

a lot of people asking for advice on Black characters or tropes regarding them and your responses noting that context and nuance is required for a Lot of stuff really remind me of that post "people be saying saying things so definitively. idk man i think it depends"

🤣🤣🤣 because it do! I think I frustrate people when I can't give them a "yes or no" answer, but it's like... I can't! I'm sorry! Rather, I feel that it would be lazy of me to do that, and it doesn't serve y'all educationally. I don't like saying things "aren't possible" or "shouldn't be done", because I feel like that takes weight off of people's shoulders to have to actually think things through.

Since it came up today, as an example: "Oh if this prompt is racist, then I won't be racist if I don't write it" WRONG, this prompt might not be racist if you didn't write it that way! So, are you willing to do what it takes to avoid that and to deliver on your premise, or would you rather do something else instead? An example of this is Juice (I talked about this in a lesson). Juice, off the description, sounds like a narrative Fox News would love to sell to its viewers as racist fearmongering. And YET, it's great cinema (not perfect, but great) that cares about the narrative it's telling with these four different Black boys.

I just like to make people think about the whys of stuff. Why might this be a problem, what would make it an issue. Because if you know that, you can then figure out how to do what you want. Or, if you think about all that and say "nah, I don't want that, it sounds bad" okay! That's fine!

[kirkwallguy]

Idk if you've posted about it before and I missed it, but I saw ur tag mentioning you have a critique on datv's treatment of transness and I'd genuinely be interested in hearing about it :)

hi, yes i have but it's been a while since i last talked about it! i've been meaning to write a long essay on my issues for a while but it would require actually playing the game and i don't want to do that. here's a long rant that got away from me though:

i've complained sometimes about various stereotypes or missteps in the way specific trans characters are represented, but i'd be able to ignore that if it weren't for my main issue, which is that trans characters just aren't properly woven into the world, leaving them feeling alienated in a way queer characters in previous games never were.

it's very clear that the writers haven't broken down their own perceptions of gender and the various cultures surrounding it enough to say something insightful, which is fine because most people haven't, but when people defend the game on the sole basis that its depiction of transness is revolutionary i do have to take some issue. there are books from the 60s that take a more interesting approach to deconstructing gender lol. veilguard may feel progressive in the landscape of aaa video games but i don't think that means it should pass without critique and i don't think that we should have to settle for this when it's possible to do so much better.

the easiest and most frequently discussed example of not properly incorporating transness into thedas is the use of language in the game. you've probably seen the endless arguments about whether taash calling themself nonbinary is an anachronism, and though i'm sure some of the arguments are in bad faith i think people overestimate how many people (on here specifically) are arguing from that perspective. it's been extremely frustrating to be called transphobic by cis people over this when i'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who has actually studied shit like this.

this is a problem throughout the game but it's easier to examine codex entries for this post than go through entire scenes. i've talked about hating the language in this codex entry before, but it really annoys me so let me complain about it again lol.

acknowleding that trans as a prefix means "change" is actually a good start here and if wasn't for how this codex entry continues i'd just shrug and move on, but i really hate the absolutist way it uses the very modern "affirming" and "was always" narrative and language as though it's universally agreed upon. you can argue that this is subjective and what taash was told (though which shadow dragon is talking to them like a GIC psychologist lol?), but when the entire codex entry feels like an educational pamphlet for clueless cis people it just comes across as very odd.

and then the rest of the codex entry just abandons any attempt at making the words "work" etymologically and gives extremely bare-bones descriptions of them. some of these words are younger than me, i saw them being coined on various forums and corners of the internet. is it representation if you say the word and put absolutely no effort into representing or even discussing the agender/bigender/demigender/others experience? in another post i compared this to being like if they did a lord of the rings remake and confirmed legolas as being bisexual by making him wear a bi flag pin with no extra context - of course people TODAY use that flag to signal their experience with bisexuality and there's nothing wrong with that, but to link modern language/signals with an experience that has clearly existed since before either of those things were invented comes right back around to being oddly invalidating, as though these experiences wouldn't exist without modern english speaking understanding of them.

as for the argument about whether or not it's anachronistic: i don't personally think you need to adhere to a binary of modern / historically accurate language and culture to make queerness work in a medieval-ish fantasy setting. the previous games (for all their faults) managed a pretty established status quo where they didn't aim to portray a utopia with a widespread queer culture while also not being gratuitous with their homophobia. and as much as queer x-topias can be interesting when done well, i think this is a good thing for a big budget fantasy game - unless you're EXTREMELY in the know about gender roles and queer theory etc, how can you hope to portray a queer utopia? some people write books whose sole point is to portray a world without gender roles or homophobia and they still misstep, i don't think it's the casual inclusive background thing a lot of fantasy authors believe it to be. it would have gone the same way as origins' claim that men and women are treated the same; maybe you make queer people hold hands in the street without being questioned and nobody makes negative comments about your romance option, but do you subconsciously assign gender roles to jobs? do you portray the majority of npcs adhering to western cishet gender norms? what is the ratio of monogamous f/m relationships portrayed compared to other relationships? these are all things people just straight up don't think about when designing a world and they will accidentally create a society that is welcoming of queerness in THEORY while actually replicating our own cishet patriarchal values.

i don't think veilguard is attempting to be a utopia, i don't think it's attempting to be anything but a finished game, but i see people defending it on the BASIS of it being a utopia fairly often.

taash's arc is another pretty big example of this struggle to examine gender in real life beyond the writers' experiences, namely white canadian. it's a deeply racist attempt at a multucultural narrative where one culture (which has already been demonised throughout the series, including in veilguard) is portrayed as less welcoming of queer people while the other culture, which is still a society with binary gender roles despite being a matriarchy, is portrayed as being instantly and unquestionably accepting.

there's a LOT of potential in an arc for a character like taash if they'd been written by someone with actual interest (and probably experience) writing about the queer experience of existing within two very different cultures. the qunari ARE a culture who are fairly big on binaries but they have an established acceptance of transition that would make their understanding of gender fairly fluid, meanwhile the lords of fortune seem ideal on the surface but human/(our) culture has so many hidden binaries that you don't notice in everyday life unless you're the one being alienated by them.

this could have been a chance to slightly turn the racist Othering of the qunari on its head by showing our own society from the perspective of perhaps some aqun-athlok characters taash befriends, a codex entry about an aqun-athlok character from the past that taash finds and takes inspiration from (maybe they start out aqun-athlok then reject the gender binary entirely?), or even from shathann, perhaps as a character who has explored her gender in the past or decides to explore it as a result of taash. (imagine if shathann was actually aqun-athlok herself, having adopted taash, and some of her complicated feelings about the qun involved the fact that her identity was more accepted there. just SOMETHING to balance the scales a little.)

then again, not even rivain gets to be the fully "progressive" society and taash has to go to the shadow dragons for their gender education. i think it's funny that someone seemed to be projecting an ultra-progressive modern activist group image onto the shadow dragons, i think i've said before that they remind me of all the modern au fanfiction about les amis from les mis that i used to read as a teenager, when they're supposed to be a ruthless abolitionist group. i think this choice was largely to facilitate interaction between the factions but it does feel a little odd given the other racist elements in taash's arc.

there's also the issue of the actual topic of medical transition being avoided. we have tarquin and mae, two characters who have seemingly undergone some kind of medical transition. we have top surgery scars in cc. but there's no discussion of how this transition happens - is hrt magical as krem suggests and is that the only option? is surgery affordable? do different countries and cultures have different levels of advancement in medical transition? these are things i'd want to see written about in codex entries, not lists of various identities that anyone can find by googling a list of genders.

i'm a little disquieted by the avoidance of medical transition given everything happening irl, but it's maybe the issue i understand the thought process behind the most. it feels like a very safe attempt at not veering too far into what happened with krem / the decades of weird fascination with trans bodies. my feelings on this entirely hinge on whether or not the dragon king does actually have top surgery scars lol, for my sanity i'll say he doesn't.

anyway, this all sucks because i've seen SO many fans do better for casual oc posting or fanfic. i've seen so many amazing ways trans culture and hrt and surgery could work in thedas and it's depressing that the writers couldn't even attempt to do something interesting with it. i know there was a lot of crunch that impacted the quality of the writing but i do also think some of these issues would have persisted if they'd had all the time in the world.

[eliotquillon]

NO YOU’RE RIGHT. YOU’RE SO RIGHT. i love hilson as much as the next guy but the fandom tendency to completely devalue the lives of female characters is unbearable. killing amber off in the first place was a pretty egregious example of fridging but the fandom almost celebrating it for the hilson potential is just like. come on guys.

on another note, i would’ve loved to see an AU where amber lived and we got to see more of her and house’s dynamic when they were social equals (eg. when she was dating wilson and not employed at PPTH). do you think they ever could’ve been friends?

yeah this is the thing. on the one hand, it’s hard to give the fandom too much shit for this when so much of amber’s writing in canon is just straight up misogynistic anyway—the fridging, everyone calling her ‘cutthroat bitch’ (which, come on, is not being used in the funny ‘lol slay queen’ reclaimed sense that it might be today and that i think a lot of the 2025 fandom interprets it as; it’s a derogatory nickname coined by a man that is clearly meant to put her down), being punished by the narrative for pulling the exact same shit as house and other male characters, etc. on the other hand…try harder, lol.

and like: we find out a lot of fascinating things about amber. i think there's probably a kernel of truth in her frustrated 'mommy didn't love me enough, daddy expected too much from me' explanation as to why she loves to win so much in games, given her later claim that before wilson she thought she had to choose between love and respect. if there is, that's a massive parallel to chase--who explicitly tells house to hire her and who she openly schemes with in 97 seconds, why does nobody talk about that--but even if there isn't, it's still fascinating that THAT'S where her mind goes to for an explanation that'll get house off her back, right? she goes through this whole off-screen character arc--she leaves games 'trying not to care', and returns relatively well-adjusted as wilson's new girlfriend a few episode later--and nobody seems interested in what happened there, what drew her to wilson specifically. part of the whole perversion of her hallucination form in s5 is that even at her worst, amber was never that cruel. there is so much to go off of here. i guarantee if she were a man she'd be a top 5 fandom character. can anyone fucking hear me. hello....

anyway: could amber and house ever have been friends? i'm gonna say something controversial: i think by the time amber died, they already sort of were. something nobody talks about AGAIN is that house's head specifically really...toys with this idea that house was attracted to amber. the woman who takes her place in his hallucinations is objectively very attractive. there's that whole eroticised tying-the-scarf-around-the-leg lap sequence. house fumbles and gets flustered when she pops up during the hypnosis session, and doesn't refute wilson when he points out that this is because house genuinely respects her. even that night at the bar: he doesn't shove her away. he goads her to stay for a drink. he sits and talks with her on the bus. this is what i mean when i say i think house wanted amber to live for her own sake: by the time she died, he'd stopped seeing her solely as a reflection of himself. he liked her. in that dream-vision on the bus after her death, he confides in her as an equal: wilson is going to hate me. i've often wondered if what might have driven the wedge between house and wilson in an alternate s4 ending where amber lived is house liking her too much, as a flipside to the whole 'mom said it's my turn on the xbox wilson' custody dispute he has going on with her in s4; we never do find out why house got so drunk that night in the first place, and i suspect in a longer s4 it might've been more heavily hinted that he had feelings for her with zero intent of acting on them. all this to say: yeah, i think they would have been friends.

[genericpuff]

Wait, if Hera hated nymphs, does that mean she had beef with Poseidon's wife???

Who knows, but it does shed a whole new light on this scene from Episode 1:

Like, in the context of the scene, it's clear the point of this interaction is to highlight how "lonely" Hades is that he's the only one at the party without a date. Though I do think it's funny that Hades is frustrated / shocked at the revelation that Poseidon brought his wife to a party that she would presumably be invited to attend, like... of course Poseidon is here with his wife, that makes Amphitrite royalty by extension and so at the very least she'd likely be obligated to attend even if she, for some reason, didn't want to go.

So Hades being like "GOD you mean I'm the ONLY UNMARRIED GUY without a DATE???" like yeah man that's what it means to not be married LOL

But in hindsight, knowing what we know now about Hera being cruel to satyrs and nymphs who are canonically lower class (making it a double whammy of racism AND classism) that interaction of Hades asking Hera if Poseidon brought Amphitrite right after Hera called Minthe "nymph trash" almost feels like Hades calling her out, to which she responds sheepishly, "... Yes."

Again, I know that's not the intention of this scene, but it does come with deeper implications now that the series is over and we know that Hera has a history of racism and classism which largely goes unaddressed.

And those implications kind of read like this:

Hera: "I, for one, am grateful! I don't have to spend the evening with that nymph trash :)"

Hades: "Did Poseidon bring his (oceanid) wife?"

Hera: "(・_・;)... yes, okay, Poseidon brought his wife, Amphritite, but she's not nymph trash or anything, she's one of the good ones!"

Again though, just food for thought that's kinda messed up and kinda funny to think about on re-reads. There's so much classism and racism baked into LO even from the very beginning and it's wild that it wound up going unnoticed for years. Even I didn't really notice it as much as I ought to have when I first started reading. To anyone who's new to the series, LO does a good job at bombarding you with colors, characters, Greek myth references, and feel good fluff moments between H x P to distract you from the often biased and outdated viewpoints in its narrative.

TBH, none of that is to say that Rachel herself is some massive racist for writing a story like this, but I do think she didn't really spend enough time analyzing the works that clearly inspired her and/or challenging her own inspirations to ensure she wasn't continuing the cycle of casual racism. It's really easy to be blissfully aware of your own biases if you never learn to address them, especially when it comes to writing fantasy stories which we tend to "disconnect" from real life, never once realizing that the messages and undertones we might accidentally be sending are often still realities for many people in real life today. Fiction isn't real life, sure, but it can still perpetuate some really dog shit thought patterns and subconscious beliefs if left unchecked, which LO is frankly full of especially upon re-reads with a more critical eye when you're not as likely to get distracted or swept away by the pretty colors and whirlwind romance.

[lunamond]

It finally hit me today why I find SJM’s use of sexual violence so off: because she’s doing what a lot male authors do, where her first thought as to what could traumatize a female character is sexual.

I have thought about it a lot, and I can’t find a compelling reason for Nesta to have been potentially assault by Thomas. SJM in general has a strange distaste for humans in her fantasy—a topic for another day—but I really don’t see what it does for Nesta’s development. It doesn’t change her, really. All it does is, I guess, give her more similarities to Emerie and Gwyn? But why is THAT something they have to share.

Of the female characters, most of them have some kind of sexual trauma, and medieval times were bad for everyone but the average person had never been, y’know, that monstrous. Why did Rhysand have to sexually assault abs drug Feyre? All it did in the end was serve to set up their “romance” by having it be consensual the next time, which, to put a kind word to it, is in poor taste.

Thoughts?

Definitely agree on how Feyre‘s abuse is handled. No matter what came after, Sjm shot herself in the foot with the Feysand romance the moment she wrote the SA in book 1.

With specifically Nesta, the use of SA is almost acceptable. Which honestly makes it feel worse to me than how those male authors write sexual violence .

Her initial SA by Tomas and the allegorical SA through the Cauldron could both have been defensible to me. I would even argue that both work well together. Tomas happens completely off page, and the Cauldron gives the reader/character a concrete event to explore this topic while still having level of separation through its symbolic nature. Combine that with her friendship with Gwyn and Emerie, who both experienced various forms of gendered violence, and it's a pretty decent recipe for a story about a woman healing from the trauma of SA.

But, where Sjm then completely loses me again is by adding unnecessary gratuitous SA via the Kelpie and the completely unacknowledged sexual exploitation by Cassian and the IC.

It just leads to a complete thematic incoherence in Aosf, ruining what could have been a pretty solid story about finding healing, love, and acceptance. Instead, Nesta is caged and beaten into submission by her family and love interest, all while the narrative presents this to the reader as sth to cheer for. It retroactively makes the Tomas and Cauldron SA seem gratuitous and unnecessary as well.

However, as frustrating as the writing of SA for the female characters is, it's infinitly worse for the male characters. So many of them have experienced some form of SA, Rhysand, Lucien, Tamlin, and even in her other series Crescent City, I'm pretty sure Hunt has as well. All of the perpetrators, of course, are powerful, scheming, promiscuous women. And none of their resulting traumas are explored in any meaningful way.

Tamlin‘s is completely ignored. Neither his trauma of being preyed on as a child nor whatever Amarantha potentially did to him utm gets any mention at all.

Rhys' trauma is only referenced insofar that it gives him enough sympathy for both the reader and Feyre to forget about his own wrongdoings. Otherwise, his trauma has almost zero effect on his relationship with the IC, his romance with Feyre nor his rulership over the NC.

And Lucien‘s trauma is only used to further prove how bad Tamlin and the SC are, how trustworthy Rhys is, and mark Ianthe as completely irredeemable. Lucien himself gets no focus afterwards, other than having to grovel to Feyre for his perceived moral failings.

[lukolabrainrot]

Calm theory anon here 🩷

Like my fav Lukolabrainrot I'm tooo not worried in the least by anything we have seen. When you're in love with someone you wanna show them off you wanna shout to the rooftops that you're with that person. You would talk about them nonstop. They would be in conversations that you have with other people. It's hard to keep it in when you truly love someone. That's a natural reaction to being in love with someone. The narratives that we see online Isn't always based on facts. It's based on peoples opinions. The facts are when you go on Luke or Nicola page who do you see besides themselves? On Nicola page you see Luke on Luke's page you see Nicola. You don't hide someone you love. You would talk about them in interviews randomly. You would post cute things they do. And you would definitely acknowledge they exist. Liking photo is a bare minimum that you do for people who are good friends. Hate is always going to come no one can stop it. If anything the more silent a star remains the more intense the hate gets. Again what are the facts? Nic post Luke and Luke post Nicola. Luke talked about Nic at jimmy Fallon and Nic talked Luke in time magazine. That my dears is the biggest signs of all. Those signs are what matter. One last thing I want to share my first lesson I learned in college. The Internet is a phenomenal tool for information. But you have to understand that anybody can put anything online. And people can manipulate photos. Photos can be taken out of context. My professors used to say if you're quoting something that you've seen online, you have to make sure that the source is a legitimate source. The source is credible. You can't site something as fact when the source isn't credible. Gossip sites. Aren't incredible source. In this situation the source would be Luke or Nic. The rest of the information isn't credible. So listen to what they're saying.

I know we are all having a lot of feelings about everything with JD and A this week. I've sat on everything this week and this is what I will say (and know that my feelings have not changed this week regarding Lukola). And these are just my thoughts and SPECULATION (but I feel pretty confident with them):

We don't know these people. They don't owe us anything. It is alright to feel frustrated (I know I have recently), but it is also important to use our critical thinking skills when consuming information that isn't coming DIRECTLY from L OR N.

We got an AMAZING WT from L/N, where a lot of us just fell in love with them and their connection. However, these are both grown adults in their 30s. IF they are with other people and there is NOTHING personal going on with L/N that they were/are trying to keep private, we wouldn't be seeing all these games. L and or N would have officially shut down rumors and come out with their respective partners at some point before now. They haven't. And therefore there is a reason everything has looked so weird since papgate...

And I believe one of the largest reasons is because of NDAs that are at play with A. Which leads us to her Spain carousel from today. Y'all, she has been sitting on these for a while. There is ZERO way for us to confirm when she was here, or if she was even there with L. Yes, that is probably the same balcony from the one he shared from his stories. Not denying that. But if she was REALLY with him as his "girlfriend" on this trip, you damn well know she would have shown that somehow. He's NOWHERE to be seen. Just like A was NOWHERE to be seen in his post or stories about the trip. She plays games and likes to stir the pot. THIS IS NOT NEW. We will most likely never be able to know who exactly was with L on this Spain trip and when he was there... But girlie pop has been sitting on these pics for a while, 100%. Why? Because I am almost certain this is her last direct tie to L, she saw that there was a lot of attention on N rn because of the JD stuff, and this was her bomb. I think L's NDA SM obligations are coming to an end this month, and she was trying to go out with a bang for the engagement (I don't think that is exactly what it did, but I am sure that was her goal). But if you still think L/A are super happy and serious from everything you've observed since papgate, then I don't know what to tell you. But NONE of this is a good indicator of a happy and healthy relationship when it comes to L/A.

Lastly, remember the rings everyone before you spiral. The Claddagh ring (which has now moved to N's left hand) is something she ordered in early MAYYYY. And she has been publicly wearing since early JUNE. So... for MONTHS. And we can argue all we want about that ring, but that ring is about her relationship with L. Period. And y'all, she grew up in the town where these rings ORIGINATED FROM. I highly doubt she skirts all tradition when it comes to these rings, and likely takes the orientation of them pretty seriously. Therefore, it appears that her and L are in a very serious and committed relationship. So, let's all take a deep breath, remember the rings, and let's carry on.

[laura1633]

sorry to like, bring the mood down, and you don't even have to publish this, I just feel like I need to vent and you've shown to be a safe person to do that with.

I'm just...so sad today in the aftermath of everything yesterday and max's post today. like, it was really fun seeing people start to come around and get over their blind hatred of him, just to renege on it immediately and claim that they always knew that "this is who max is at heart." all it's doing is doubling down on the narrative that max is violent/dangerous when (if I'm being honest) the contact was rather tame, even if it had intent. then, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't when he makes his ig post with everyone calling it "not a real apology" (one that we aren't owed btw imo) and that he was forced into it. not to mention that even if max DID put the word sorry in the caption, people still wouldn't be happy. if nothing he does in earnest pleases people, then why are they surprised that he approaches everything with an "i'm not here to please people" attitude? we put people in high stress situations then get angry when lash out in frustration? pick a lane. idk, calling him an attempted murderer and citing this as evidence as how he can be a domestic abuser (which THAT was...certainly a take) is so.....I don't even know.

there's actual things to be angry about in the world, actual injustice that deserves this type of energy but it's being funneled into, what's at the end of the day, entertainment. these men are millionaires participating in a sport that's been corrupt from the very beginning. but sure, max is "the fia's little darling who can do no wrong" when max gets penalized more than any other driver.

sorry, I'm just so fucking frustrated and can't enjoy this sport and fan content the way I want if we're just going to keep dogpiling on one driver who has hardly ever been shown empathy by media/fans 💔

That's okay anon, it's certainly safe here to share frustration. I know it's really difficult but I have found it easier to just not read social media comments.

Some people are so fickle because in a few races time when Max does something outstanding they will be calling him one of the best of all time and forget all about this. Then there are the people who will hate him no matter what he does and nothing he will do will change that so I guess there is no point thinking about those people at all.

The contact was minimal and we have seen drivers do the same thing previously. Also, lets be honest here, there have been occasions where there have been collisions that might not be deemed ‘intentional’ but were over the limit and the drivers went in knowing (or should have known) what the consequences would be. We’ve also seen incidents such as drivers being in a collision and then storming over to the other driver and slapping them on the head which is also really dangerous, intentional and surely not “role model” behaviour. 

As for the IG caption I don’t think it was necessary for him to say anything at all to be honest but clearly either himself or someone on his team decided that it was best for him to say something.  In my opinion he doesn’t say sorry because it was never meant to be an apology and why should it be, he doesn’t owe the public an apology in any way, shape or form. We very rarely see drivers being called to publicly apologise for incidents in the race. 

I’ve not read any of the responses on IG and I haven’t been on twitter at all so I haven’t see what people are saying and I find that is the best way to approach it because people say the most idiotic things imaginable and they don’t speak for the majority of people. I am starting to think that being hated on twitter is actually a compliment given the type of content on there!

It actually makes me laugh when people say the FIA favour him because they must be watching a different sport lol!! 

Max has never really been treated how he should be treated, the way people reacted to him as a teenager was a disgrace and its continued ever since. 

The Max hate is the reason I don’t enjoy the sport in the way I used to, you are absolutely right that it feels like everyone dogpiling on one person (a person who cares a lot about the sport). I will hang around until Max retires and then run away as fast as possible from the toxicity. 

F1 and certain fans don't deserve Max and they never had done.

[abunnsburrow]

Scrambles in

is this the right? Yeah? Okay-

I'm here again, back with my deranged ramblings!

Today I wanna talk about Nya, not a surprise but I wanna talk about a specific timeframe of her's which is Season 3.

I find early seasons Nya both frustrating and fun because of her general lack of characterization. It's aggravating in the sense that she doesn't really get treated as a character because of being the Girl but it's also fun to take all the little details and try and build a narrative out of that.

That being said let's talk about the infamous Love Triangle!

So this thing is a mess. That's obvious and Nya is a big part of that. We've never seen her interact with Cole before this so her feelings very much feel out of the blue. Why is that? Well there's actually a simple answer to that: she doesn't actually have feelings for him.

We see early in the season that the relationship between Jaya is kinda iffy. While it isn't big there's clearly at least some troubles and it isn't perfect. It seems relatively standard but it is setup for the start of why Nya ends up acting the way she does.

Jay: Hi, Miss Nya. I saved you some pudding. Nya: What did we talk about? Jay: Oh, right. Boundaries.

I do want to state that I fully believe they are together in a semi-official sense. When others talk about them it's as if they're boyfriend and girlfriend, and they talk about each other like they are. It's also important that Nya does like Jay back, the prime example I can think of is the expression she makes when one of the students mentions the idea of Jay being her "Perfect Match".

Like- come on it couldn't be more obvious.

Back on topic: if she does like Jay and I just said that she doesn't like Cole then why does she have so much conflict about it? The answer is that Jay is probably her first relationship.

Nya is a curious person and considering there have been some issues in her relationship, and this is most likely the only romantic relationship she's been in, she probably has doubts. So when she's straight up told Cole is her "perfect match" that probably makes her start to wonder and idealize the idea of what being with other people could be like. This becomes especially obvious when one of the main reasons she lists for liking Cole is that he "isn't Jay". In fact, this is repeated within the season itself!

Nya: Am I that obvious? What do I do? Jay's the only one who makes me laugh, but Cole...Cole's not Jay.

S3 Episode 2

Nya: Seriously? A blue or black wire. I have to cut one of these wires to shut it down, but cut the wrong one and it may crush you guys instantly! Jay: Ooh, choose blue, Nya! You know blue! You're comfortable with blue! Cole: Choose black! Black is not blue!

S3 Episode 3

(These are just off the top of my head there might be more examples but I can't remember them atm)

So this makes me believe that her feelings of Cole are more so a projection of her curiosity and craving for something different and new. Especially since Cole seems like the opposite of Jay in a lot of ways so naturally she would fully lean into that idea.

All of this is subconscious meaning Nya doesn't know this which is why she has such a hard time with it. She hates this entire situation and definitely would prefer it to be over sooner rather than later. Visually Nya constantly looks stressed and avoids talking about it because she doesn't know how to solve it and Nya isn't the best in terms of handling her own feelings.

There we go, my little analysis as to the how and the why of the S3 love triangle on Nya's side!!

I will be making a sequel to this talking about Season 4 so stay tuned for that but for now, enjoy my thoughts as someone way too invested in a little lego gal! Adios!