#on the wikipedia page for ‘it’s been a long long time’ there is a section saying how the song is used for both bucky and peggy

[cap10wilson]

sometimes letterboxd reviews are beautiful

[yourfavoritehouseplant]

I watched James Somerton's final video, and all I got was this 6 page document

As soon as I learned his final unreleased video was on Revolutionary Girl Utena, I knew I had to hate watch it. I didn't know that I'd spend the following 4 hours making a comprehensive doc on everything I hated about it. But here we are.

The TLDR (is this too long to be a TLDR?)

The intro section, as well as Part 2, are directly plagiarized from wikipedia. The rest is unclear.

He makes a “haha this show is so weird right guys” joke 10 different times

He reads Anthy as so emotionally stunted she literally has to be taught how to think for herself, and believes that being the rose bride makes her feel good

He says that his reading is ‘vastly different” from the rest of the community, before boldly stating that this is because he sees it as a “deeply allegorical and symbolic story”

He sees the sexual abuse as “not to be taken literally”

Insists that the show be separated into parts that are strictly literal and strictly allegorical for the entirety of parts 3 and 4, before making the contradictory move of analyzing characters as allegories during part 5

The only characters that get dedicated sections are Akio and Dios, who he doesn’t believe are the same person. 

He says Dios gets his powers by “deflowering women”

He calls Akio, known child predator, a chaotic bisexual

Uses 14 year old SA survivor Anthy’s passive personality to make a joke about her being a bottom

His final point is that Utena was the real prince all along

There are no citations

Anyway, full version for people who hate themselves under the cut. With time codes, because I cite my sources.

Part 1: Intro

This entire section is almost exclusively quoted from the Wikipedia article for Revolutionary Girl Utena. Words have been changed, but the order at which certain topics come up is not. Highlights include:

0:56 In his introduction of Be-Papas, lists the founding members in literally the exact same order as Wikipedia.

1:40-2:00 His list of Be-Papas previous works is lifted entirely from wikipedia, only with the words changed. This leads to a strange moment at 1:52 where he claims Be-papas ‘lent their talents to’ Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show which started production at least a year before Be-papas was founded. On the wikipedia article for Utena, this is instead referring to the previous work of Shinya Hasegawa and Yōji Enokido

4:23 he uses a quote by Yūichirō Oguro describing the production as a “tug of war”. He seems to have lifted this in its entirety from Wikipedia, as he does not cite the actual source it is from (the box set companion book, btw)

As for James Somerton originals, at 0:44 he claims that out of all magical girl series,”none to my knowledge have been more discussed and dissected than the 1997 series Revolutionary Girl Utena” He will go back on this at 5:05, where he states that “Sailor Moon takes the lion’s share of discussion” in regard to influential magical girl anime

Part 2: Part 1

(At least I know I’m not funny, unlike James Somerton)

Speaking of which. Here is every single time he makes a “wow this show is sooooo weird you guys” joke: 6:00, 8:50, 10:40, 10:58, 13:46, 17:07, 24:16, 30:34, 41:19, 48:01

Here’s every time the punchline to the joke is the existence of Nanami, a character who he otherwise completely disregards: 10:56, 12:05, 16:22, 42:40

6:16 Claims that the “Apocalypse saga” and “Akio Ohtori saga’ are two names for the same several episodes, depending on the release. This is untrue. Instead, different releases either only have the Apocalypse saga, or split the episodes into an Akio Ohtori saga and then the Apocalypse saga. 

7:58 Claims Utena intervening on Anthy’s behalf begins the first duel. While this happens in the movie, Touga intervenes in the scene he uses clips from (like literally right after the shot he uses in the video). Utena only gets drawn into the duels when Wakaba’s love note to Saionji is posted. Youtuber Noralities’ Utena video also gets this wrong, which makes me wonder if this was copied.

9:09 Claims Akio’s “End of the World” moniker is actually more closely translated to “Apocalypse”. In reality, the translation moves away from a more apocalyptic reading, with 世界の果て (Sekai no hate) apparently translating closer to “the furthest reach of a known world” or “edge of the world”. (Love the implications of this translation, but I digress)

9:10 As can be assumed from the previous point, this means I can’t find any sources that point to them not using the title “apocalypse” for religious reasons

10:10 Uses Anthy’s extreme passivity under her Rose bride persona to make a top/bottom joke. I’m gonna repeat this in case you’re just skimming. He uses a trait that likely stems from years of abuse, (possibly exaggerated by the persona Anthy uses to manipulate people), and uses it to call her a bottom. 

He also just doesn’t seem to understand how the whole point of Utena constantly telling Anthy that she's just a normal girl who should make more friends is framed as Utena imposing her will on Anthy, just as much as the previous Engaged have done. 

11:54 Apologies in advance for my most “um, actually!” point yet, but technically his statement that Anthy stops being host to the Sword of Dios is wrong. Akio literally pulls a sword out of her chest in the final duel. It's a more evil-looking sword of Dios, granted.

13:02 !!! CANTARELLA SCENE ALERT !!! He interprets it as them fighting over Akio?? Which like. I will allow people to have their own interpretations of vague and symbolic scenes. I will. I swear. This is not technically incorrect. It just makes me want to eat my own intestines.

14:44 Bad Anthy take #1: He states Anthy “is emotionally stunted to the point where she needs people to make decisions for her because she does not know how to think for herself” This ignores several moments of Anthy clearly making her own choices throughout the show, including the suicide attempt Somerton mentions about a minute prior. This also strips Anthy of what little agency she has throughout the story, usually exerted through messing with Utena or Nanami. (The fact that she repeatedly makes choices that contribute to her own abuse is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of her character, and it's a shame that Summerton’s ‘reading’ of the story completely disregards that)

Additionally, he once again reads Utena ‘urging Anthy to think for herself” in the first arc as an unambiguously good move, and not as something critiqued in the show.

14:52 Summerton reads the Swords of hatred as symbolizing men’s hatred specifically. Again, I’m trying not to completely disregard differing interpretations to a show like Utena, but this feels very simplistic, especially considering the harm we see aimed towards Anthy by other women

16:42 Here he claims that his reading of the story seems to be “vastly different” from the bulk of Utena discourse. What is this reading? That the show shouldn’t be read literally. Or, in his words, “[we can interpret] Revolutionary Girl Utena as a deeply allegorical and symbolic story about the struggles of coming of age amidst widespread institutional corruption in a high school and which describes a passive culture of inaction in regard to brazen instances of domestic exploitation in which there is not only a question about the caporeality of the events transpiring but also which events can be taken for granted and which events are meant to signify abstract sociological institutions.” The idea that he believes this is in any way a new reading of the material honestly baffles me.

Part 3: Part 2

17:48 through 18:50 differently quotes the Wikipedia article for postmodernism. He even makes a joke at 17:55 about Wikipedia. Please kill me. 

The first three themes he lists at 19:11 are just the three main themes listed on the Revolutionary Girl Utena Wikipedia page. What was that about a “vastly different” reading, James?

You’re gonna have to take my word for it, but this section is so short because it's just him talking about the various ways the story can’t be taken literally. He does, ironically, call this a hot take.

Part 4: Part 3

Here’s where the reading falls apart folks

At 23:15, he states that some things in Utena are allegorically coded, while others are to be taken literally. This is true. However, he seems to take this to mean that some parts of the show are Strictly Literal, while others are Strictly Allegorical for things going on in the Literal World. 

This is apparently why he prefers the Anime to the Movie, where there basically is no separation between the Literal and Allegorical

This take is bizarre to me for several reasons, but here is my favorite. At several points, he mentions how Revolutionary Girl Utena is a work of Magical Realism. Magical Realism is literally defined by its blending of the “literal” and “allegorical”, the mix of fantastical elements in a mundane, realistic setting. This idea of the impossibility of a blurred line, that Utena must either have lore where the magic is all real and means nothing, or dedicated allegory segments quarantined from the rest of the story, is contrary to the very idea of Magical Realism.

I can’t help but wonder if Somerton took his mentions of Magical realism from a previous work, due to how little it is consistent with his final argument. Either way, this section suggests a great lack of creativity in his analysis, a shame for such a creative work.

24:36: Shiori slander, for those who care

After this he gets really worked up about people assuming symbolism in everything, even when the author ‘doesn’t make it clear something is symbolic’. He shuts down a reading of a shot in the Lord of the Rings. Miley Cyrus is there? Very The Curtains Were Blue of him. 

28:22 Claims that Wakaba is the key to telling where the Strictly Literal segments end and the Strictly Allegorical segments begin. He states that, under this lens, deeply personal moments of character suffering such as all of the sexual abuse and Anthy’s suicide attempt (which he literally cites) should be read as symbolic and be “approached with uncertainty rather than confusion”. (28:24-29:13)

This also somewhat falls apart when you consider Wakaba is the jeep in the movie's car chase

And then he rants about people not liking his Attack on Titan video for a bit. Since its potential symbolism also doesn't follow hard enough rules to be symbolism. Once again, the separation of “fact vs allegory” I haven’t watched AOT, so that's all I’ll say.

Part 5: Part 4

Thank god this part is short. Much like Dios’ on-screen presence.

32:55 Makes the extremely bold claim that Dios is not Akio. As in, never even became Akio. because Dios is Strictly Allegorical.

Just to be a pedant, this is pretty explicitly disproven in the show

Confusingly, both earlier and later he will address these two as the same character. 

33:04 he also explains the root of Akio’s name in a tone that suggests this is supplemental information and not like. Literally something he explains out loud in the show?

Part 6: Part 5

This section is nearly entirely about Akio Ohtori. I would like to note that him and Dios are the only characters with dedicated segments.

38:30 The part where he states that Dios gets his powers from deflowering women.

38:46 Claims, once again, that Akio’s abuse of Anthy “may not be literal”. 

38:59 “the instance of exploitation here is used because assault has deep roots as indicating that akio's gender is the source of his imbalance”  THE ASSAULT IS ABOUT AKIO NOW???

39:45 Bad Anthy take #2: “Anthy’s conformity to the Rose bride is based around the fact that she feels good being subservient because this is the only thing in her life that has ever brought her any kind of positive reward”. This is a direct quote. Anyway, I can’t think of any instances in the show where Anthy’s subservience gives her a positive reward, except maybe when she’s intentionally using it to manipulate others. As for her feeling good being the rose bride. She tries to commit suicide. Dude.

Side tangent, but isn’t this exactly what Akio says during the final 2 episodes? That Anthy enjoys being a witch? Is the main villain, who consistently says things during that very episode that are blatantly false, our source of information for this take? I guess so, since this is the dedicated Akio section.

At 40:20 he decides to introduce the concept of Anthy, Akio, and Utena as stand-ins for wider concepts, which is antithetical to his approach in analysis beforehand

Part 7: Part 6

42:40 he finally acknowledges that he’s been spending too much time talking about Akio, and literally no time on characters like Nanami

46:10 states that Utena’s exclusive motivation “is to protect Anthy from the predatorial intentions of the other dualists”, which disregards the fact, which she states herself, that she was largely participating in the duels and protecting Anthy to feel like a prince

48:04 The part where he says that Akio has ‘chaotic Bi vibes’ in regards to him sleeping with Touga, who is 17 and implied to be a long-term victim

Part 8: Part 7

54:01: His concluding point is that Utena was the real prince all along. 

In true Somerton fashion, the video then ends over a scrolling wall of patrons, with not a single citation in sight.

[frustratedasatruar]

@indecisiveavocado asked me for a citation yesterday. (This is a good thing to ask for! Especially since I don't have it yet!)

Right, so, I didn't find my original source, but I've found some solid leads on what-I-suspect-to-be their sources, so whatever. I am not done looking through them, and indeed I think I've exhausted no more than a tenth of my most promising leads.

Wikipedia is obviously not to be trusted on this subject given their institutional antisemitism, but I reasoned that I could safely presume that they were unlikely to lie in my favor here, so I could use their sources for a measure of how far the truth can be stretched the other way.

Wikipedia cites this 1994 novel by a Professor Mark Tessler for the Arabic language becoming lingua franca in the region by the ninth century.

Which would be all well and good, I'd certainly be more than willing to admit my error if I'd found a source citing the ninth century when I thought it was the tenth... Except, Tessler is manifestly full of shit. He does make that claim on the top of page 70, but literally the page before he lies and claims that modern Palestinians are descended from the long extinct hellenic Philistines, which they can't be because of the aforementioned being-extinct thing, as well as the Canaanites. The later is sort of true, in that while most Palestinians are descended from immigrants post 1800 (especially from Egypt), a minority of Palestinians can credibly trace their lineage back to the aforementioned Samaritans, with some Samaritan surnames even being quite common in some areas.

Tessler also goes on about how the Israelites wiped out the Canaanites, which they didn't; they were the Canaanites. Tessler rewrites the history to cast the Palestinians as surviving Canaanite pagans who converted directly from paganism to Islam starting in the seventh century.

This is insane.

Its also grotesque to completely rewrite Samaritan history, especially in this way. The history of the Samaritans since the rise of Islam has been one of persecution, oppression, and eradication. There were hundreds of thousands of Samaritans at least prior to their genocide at Roman hands in the fifth century, tens of thousands still when the region was conquered by the first Caliphate. They were massacred repeatedly over the next thousand years, and by the beginning of the Ottoman period in the 16th century there were only 54 families of them. Total. In the world. Only seventy years later the number was down to 33 families.

These are the people Mark Tessler is lying about to justify his claim of the primordial nature of the communities that wiped the Samaritans out for the crime of predating them. And to do it, he's parroting a nineteenth century accusation (that Samaritans were basically just pagans) muslims in Nablus (site of Mount Gerizim, the most holy site in Samaritanism) levied against Samaritans to advocate their murders.

There are no Samaritans left in Nablus, by the way. The last of them fled from their most holy city around 1990 in order to escape the bloodshed of the First Intifada. They'd been living in that city continuously since the beginning of the fucking Iron Age.

Obviously I had to read this section before I could determine that the source was unreliable, and- I could chew glass, I'm so pissed off.

Anyway, assuming that Professor Tessler wasn't entirely making up numbers (a BIG assumption) we can place the ninth century as the earliest point when Arabic may have replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in Eretz Yisrael. That does, at least, correspond with some of the other numbers I've seen. Considering that the Samaritans themselves were a some point pressured by their Muslim rulers to abandon their ancestral Aramaic in favor of Arabic, the point when Arabic replaced Aramaic in the region does not likely post date, and could predate, the point when Islam overtook the local religions.

I do not, at this time, yet have a solid citation for or against my original statement. I am cautiously suspecting that I may have misremembered the date by a century or so, but do not yet know.

Indecisive Avacado, I promise that I will either find you a proper citation for my statement or a proper citation against it.

I need to take a break now.

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Dolores del Río (Flying Down to Rio, Flor silvestre)—to begin with, dolores is so RADIANTLY BEAUTIFUL, even more so in action then in images, its like she emits a literal glow. marlene dietrich (a close friend and rumored lover) considered her "the most beautiful woman who ever set foot in hollywood". she was the first mexican actress to become a major success in hollywood, rising to fame in the silent era and becoming an influential icon of beauty and glamor in the art deco age, though she was not thrilled with the exoticizing parts often pushed on her. in the mid 1940s having tired of the controlling hollywood studio system she returned to mexico, saying "I wish to choose my own stories, my own director and cameraman. I can accomplish this better in mexico", and proceeded to become a pivotal figure in the golden age of mexican cinema, making a string of masterpieces with directir emilio fernández and cinematographer gabriel figueroa. i love this anecdote about the insane art deco mansion she and her then-husband cedric gibbons lived in in the 30s, as related by david niven: "Dolores had a large sunny room on the first floor containing a huge and inviting bed. Gibbons lived in comparative squalor in a small room immediately below. The only connection between these rooms was by way of a stepladder, which could be lowered only when a trapdoor in the floor of Dolores room had been raised. There was a long stick with which, we conjectured, he signaled his intention or hopes by rapping out signals on the floor of his wife’s bedchamber." heres a pinterest album with a billion hot pictures of her

Fay Wray (King Kong)— the original scream queen!! she started acting in silent comedies as a teenager and got her first big break when erich von stroheim cast her as the lead in the wedding march. her career started to take off starring in silent movies at paramount, and she survived the transition to sound smoothly - josef von sternberg’s weird proto-noir thunderbolt was one of her first sound films. she began to make horror movies in the early 1930s, such as doctor x and mystery of the wax museum, both filmed in beautiful two-strip technicolor (which looked like this if you're curious. i just think it's neat!), as well as the vampire bat, the most dangerous game, and of course the boy himself, king kong. a little on how she worked with her most famous costar: “Although Kong appeared huge, the full figure was a model covered with rabbit hair, standing only 18 inches tall, that was filmed one frame at a time by stop-motion photography artist Willis O'Brien and his crew. The 5ft 3in Wray only knew one part of the ape's body when she was grasped in an articulated 8ft long hand. Hence the title of her 1989 autobiography, On The Other Hand. ‘I would stand on the floor,’ she recalled, ‘and they would bring this arm down and cinch it around my waist, then pull me up in the air. Every time I moved, one of the fingers would loosen, so it would look like I was trying to get away. Actually, I was trying not to slip through his hand.’” (link)

This is round 2 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Dolores del Rio:

There's so much! She started in Silent films and successfully transitioned to sound, She is the first woman to wear a two piece swimsuit on screen & popularized the bikini!, She transitioned back to Mexican Cinema in the late 1940s and was a leading lady of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema including staring in Maria Candelaria--the first Mexican film to win the palm d'Or at Cannes. She was literally studied for her beauty & was considered a beauty ideal in both the USA & Mexico--there's a whole section on her Wikipedia page about how beautiful everyone thinks she was. She never actually had a feud with any of the female stars she was rumored to feud with despite the fact that press & Hollywood culture attempted to pain them in competition... She remained a leader in Mexican theater & Cinema through her own production company. Mexican painter Diego Rivera: "The most beautiful, the most gorgeous of the west, east, north and south. I'm in love with her as 40 million Mexicans and 120 million Americans who can't be wrong" (quote source: Wikipedia)

*fan self* Leading actress in silents and early Hollywood. Lover of Orson Welles until she got fed up with him, friend of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. When she got tired of Hollywood executives typecasting her as a stereotypical spitfire (and trying to force her to feud with Lupe Velez as a publicity stunt), she ditched Hollywood and became a major star of Mexican cinema, where she got to play rounded characters

Had a career in American cinema in the 20s and 30s and considered one of the most important figures in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (30s to 50s).

Marlene Dietrich said Dolores was the most beautiful woman to set foot in Hollywood

Joan Crawford: "Dolores became, and remains, as one of the most beautiful stars in the world."

One of the few Latin American women working in the Hollywood industry to make it big not just in hre home country but internationally. In 1931, Photoplay magazine declared that Mexican film actress Dolores del Rio had the "best figure in Hollywood." (which I know not necessarily a good barometer) but! it shows that many people looked at her for her beauty and sought to emulate her. Famous for her years-long love affair with actor and director Orson Welles, who was 10 years her junior if that's anything.

We need more hispanic representation in this!! Del Río is one of the most important actresses of her time as she was one of the first Mexican movie stars to break through to Hollywood! She’s unbelievably sexy and an absolute icon. Thank you :)

Fay Wray:

Actress prominently known for starring in horror, she was one of cinema's original "scream queens". She knocks it out of the park whenever she's with the horror genre, bringing a depth and likability to characters that would other be flat and boring characters.

An early scream queen, name me another woman who could look so beautiful while so disheveled and scared for her life

She was name-dropped not once but TWICE in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She's arguably the original Scream Queen.

[librarylexicon]

hi! i'm one of those insane people who got into dc via seeing tumblr posts and going "huh these tropes seem like they are tailor made to get me obsessed" but was too intimidated by the volume of comics, and instead read the wikipedia pages of like 20 characters and dove right into fanfiction after. but i've been finding myself getting more and more frustrated with fanfics that are of the "i ignore canon entirely" variety and more and more curious about aspects of canon that are only brushed upon in fanfic. i kinda want to get into the comics but the amount is just. overwhelming. i don't really know where to start, both in regards to the timeline and where to actually find the comics to read. can i ask you for recommendations? if you don't have the time or inclination, no pressure, just delete this ask XD. thank you!

Hi! I'm glad you asked! I've had this ask sitting in my box for a little while because I've been working on redoing a Batfamily comics reading guide I made for my sister back in 2019 to get her into reading comics (it worked). Here is the reading guide, which is currently complete up to the No Man's Land section:

There's a lot of info in the guide to get you started (especially regarding your second point of where to actually find the comics to read), so I'll just address your first point (the timeline) here under the cut by providing an extended summary of events. There are spoilers ahead, but it's a useful read if you're the kind of person who likes to see the big picture before delving in. Warning: it's long!

The Timeline

(Most of the comics mentioned below have been bolded in the reading guide, so should be easy to find and read.)

Batman and Batfamily comics are old. Batman and Robin have both been around for over 80 years. Does this mean you need to read every comic since 1940? Absolutely not! For comic book reasons, there have been several mainstream continuities throughout the years, one after the other, but the best place to start is directly after the universe-rebooting event called Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, which established a new continuity known as Post-Crisis. Don't try to read that comic, just trust that it happened. You don't have to read every single one of the comics listed here, especially if you already know some context from fandom (like who's who), but these are the ones most important to the Batfamily mythos.

Origin and early years

Start your Batman reading journey with Batman: Year One, which documents the origin and first year of Batman, establishes his working relationship with Jim Gordon and introduces Selina Kyle (Catwoman). There are many stories capturing Batman's earliest years, the best of which are Batman: The Man Who Laughs (where he meets the Joker for the first time), Batman: The Long Halloween and its sequel Batman: Dark Victory.

Dick as Robin

Dick Grayson, a young acrobat, is introduced in Batman: Dark Victory when Haly's Circus comes to Gotham and his parents fall to their deaths before his (and Bruce's) eyes during their trapeze act, and he comes into his own as the first Robin in the superb one-shot Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet. You should also read Batman: Ego for an excellent dissection of both Bruce and Batman. Other high quality Dick!Robin stories that flesh out this period and establish Bruce and Dick's relationship are Robin: Year One, Batman: Grimm (Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #149-153) and Year One: Batman/Scarecrow. Also a good read around this time are the three Halloween stories by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (who created The Long Halloween and Dark Victory) collected in Batman: Haunted Knight. Lastly, a natural companion to Robin: Year One is Batgirl: Year One, starring Barbara Gordon, Jim's daughter-slash-adopted-niece.

Jason as Robin

Bit of a timeskip here. By now, Dick's been Robin for six years or so (sources vary), and Jason Todd is introduced in Batman (1940) #408-409 and faces Two-Face in #410-411. There are some fun Jason stories in Detective Comics (1937) #569-574. To see what Dick's up to at this time, read Nightwing: Year One, and also check out Batman #416 for an alternate story of how Dick and Jason meet.

A new Gotham vigilante, Huntress (Helena Bertinelli) is introduced right around here in Huntress: Year One, and Barbara Gordon (who by now has retired from being Batgirl) is shot by the Joker and left paralysed from the waist down in Batman: The Killing Joke. A good Jason!Robin story that slots in here is Batman: The Cult, before the tension between Bruce and Jason is raised in Batman #425-426. Finally, Jason's life and short-lived career as Robin are permanently ended by the Joker in Batman: A Death in the Family.

Aftermath

Bruce is straight up not having a good time right now. He's mourning his kid, the Joker is still at large, he's sans both a Robin and a Batgirl, and he's accused of treason in the character study comic Batman: Blind Justice (Detective Comics #598-600). Sometime later, Dick Grayson (who is sort of estranged from Bruce and has been hanging out with his Titans friends for years) returns to Gotham in the fantastic Batman: Year Three (Batman #436-439), which retells Dick's origin (with some contradictions to other stories listed here, because that's just the nature of comics) and deals with Dick's parents' killer, Tony Zucco, possibly getting parole. Look out for a cute cameo in this one, but don't worry if you miss it – it'll come up again.

Noticing Batman's increased brutality in the wake of Robin's death, a precocious thirteen-year-old named Tim Drake bursts into the narrative when he hunts down Dick at Haly's Circus in the seminal Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying. Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City (Batman #452-454) is a good solo Batman story from around this period, and Batman: Rite of Passage (Detective Comics #618-621) and Batman: Identity Crisis (Batman #455-457) are defining stories for Tim's pre-Robin period as he explores who he is and who he wants to be. (Specifically, Tim's mother is killed and his father is left paralysed.)

Tim as Robin

(Note: Tim is Robin up until Damian is, but I've split Tim's Robin tenure into multiple sections so that it's easier to follow.)

Now that Tim has officially taken up the mantle, Bruce sends him to train in Paris, where he makes enemies of his own and chooses the bo staff for his weapon in the 1991 Robin miniseries. Around this time, Barbara Gordon reinvents herself as Oracle in Oracle: Year One (The Batman Chronicles #5). Tim debuts as Robin with Batman in Gotham in Batman #465, works cases with Bruce in stories like Batman: Shadow Box (Batman #467-469), and even tackles the Joker when Batman is out of town in Robin II: The Joker's Wild.

Other good stories from this period are Batman: Electric City (Detective Comics #644-646), a character study of Tim's relationship with his dad in Batman #480, and a Batfamily teamup and Nightwing cameo in Batman: The Last Arkham (Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1-4). Stephanie Brown dubs herself the Spoiler to spoil the plans of her father, third-rate villain Cluemaster, in Detective Comics #647-649, and Huntress returns with her unorthodox methods in Detective Comics #652-653.

Next up, the sprawling epic that is the Knightfall Saga. Jean-Paul Valley, a graduate student with a family legacy causing him to be beholden to a lifetime of conditioning known as "the System", debuts in Batman: Sword of Azrael. Batman, who has been overworking himself due to increasing pressures from all sides, finds himself increasingly worn out in the stories collected in Batman: Prelude to Knightfall. (Around this time, Robin also forges an unlikely friendship with Huntress in Robin III: Cry of the Huntress.)

In Batman: Knightfall, a huge Arkham Asylum breakout pushes Batman to his limits, and when he finally returns home, mentally and physically depleted, he finds a new enemy waiting to destroy him. It's not pretty. While Bruce recovers, he appoints Jean-Paul Valley to be Batman to Tim's Robin in Batman: Knightquest. Unfortunately, with the System still active, Tim finds himself increasingly sidelined and Jim Gordon breaks ties with this new, inappropriately ruthless Batman. A lot of things happen, but Bruce eventually returns (and so does Nightwing, yay!) in Batman: KnightsEnd.

Right after KnightsEnd but before the next story, there's a DC-wide event called Zero Hour, in which the universe is destroyed and remade. From a Doylist perspective, this is an opportunity for DC to smooth out some oddities with their Post-Crisis timeline and eliminate any plot elements they were dissatisfied with. Among other things, the murderer of Bruce's parents, who had previously been established as a random mugger named Joe Chill, is retconned to be unconfirmed (naturally, this changed later). You don't have to read the main Zero Hour comic, which is a five-issue limited series numbered in reverse order, but there are interesting crossover issues in the various Batfamily comics that are ongoing at this time, including Tim!Robin solving a case with Dick!Robin in Robin (1993) #10. The main reason I mention Zero Hour is because it explains why there are key differences between early Post-Crisis comics like most of Jason's run and post-Zero Hour comics like Nightwing: Year One. The answer is retconning, and it'll come up again and again. Such is the nature of trying to maintain longevity and internal consistency for comics that never end.

Okay, back to the main events! In what is my favourite comic of all time, Bruce rights wrongs by asking Dick to temporarily be Batman instead of Jean-Paul (yay!), and Dick and Tim grow close as Batman and Robin and as honorary brothers before Dick and Bruce finally see eye to eye in Batman: Prodigal. When Bruce is ready to be Batman again, he dons a new, darker suit (which is very close to the suit in the Tim Burton movies that were popular at the time) in Batman: Troika. Alfred, who voluntarily left Bruce's employ in Knightquest, is persuaded to return to Gotham by his best friend, none other than Dick Grayson, in Nightwing: Alfred's Return. Later, Dick does some soul-searching of his own (and gains a new costume!) in the 1995 Nightwing miniseries, and three concurrent stories in Batman: Shadow of the Bat #46-47, Batman #527-528 and Detective Comics #693-694 lay the groundwork for the dramatic next stage of Gotham history.

No Man's Land

What's up next for Gotham? It's a plague! Dubbed the Apocalypse Virus and otherwise known as the Clench, this plague ravages Gotham in the Batfamily crossover Batman: Contagion, which is followed by a resurgence in Batman: Legacy. It's dramatic, it's whumpy, it's mesmerising and it's pretty great.

By this point, you'll be familiar with the regular cast of characters and can read more of their solo comics at your leisure. There's Batman for Bruce and Detective Comics and Batman: Shadow of the Bat for higher chances of him teaming up with others. Tim's solo comic, Robin (1993), has been going since Knightfall, and Dick's excellent long-running comic Nightwing (1996) begins here. Read Robin for Tim's teenage adventures (skateboarding, making friends in school), family ups and downs (his dad is mercurial, but at least he has a cool stepmother, Dana) and love life (he starts dating Steph) and read Nightwing for Dick striking out on his own in the neighbouring city of Blüdhaven, where he eventually joins the police academy to fight crime from a different angle. (There's also the Azrael comic, which may appeal if you find yourself liking Jean-Paul Valley, but as I haven't read much of it, I make no promises about its quality.)

Continuing the notable Batfamily crossover events, Nightwing has a dalliance with Huntress in Nightwing/Huntress, and a massive earthquake devastates Gotham in Batman: Cataclysm. The consequences of this spin into Batman: Aftershock, Batman: Road to No Man's Land and the sprawling, ambitious epic that is Batman: No Man's Land, in which Gotham is declared no longer part of the United States. Within this year of danger, chaos and political limbo, we are introduced to a silent young woman, daughter of the assassin David Cain. With Barbara's blessing, she comes to live at Oracle's base (the Clock Tower) and becomes the second Batgirl. (Also during this period, Steph gives birth to a baby from a former boyfriend, and Tim – in disguise – gets himself stuck in No Man's Land to help her. It's complicated.)

New Gotham

This, along with the previous section, is one of my favourite periods in Batfamily comics. Many of the solo comics just mentioned are at their peak in terms of storytelling, characterisation and plot development, and several more excellent series begin here, including the family-focused Batman: Gotham Knights and the first ever perpetual Batgirl series for the new Batgirl, who would come to be known as Cassandra Cain. Both series are well worth reading!

Batman: Evolution (Detective Comics #742-750) touches on the fallout of the No Man's Land and rebuilding "New Gotham", and Bruce unwillingly gains a personal bodyguard named Sasha Bordeaux in Batman: A Walk in the Park (Detective Comics #751-752), which of course complicates his nocturnal activities as Batman. Soon after, Jim Gordon is shot in Batman: Offcer Down, and (unrelatedly) Dick and Barbara, who have been having off-the-chart levels of UST for years, finally call their flirting what it is: dating. Also at this time, Bruce has been rekindling his relationship with his pre-No Man's Land girlfriend, Vesper Fairchild.

In Joker: Last Laugh, the Joker decides to go out with a bang in when he finds out he's apparently suffering from terminal brain cancer. The theme of family is explored in Batman: Gotham Knights, with Bruce offering to adopt Dick (at long last) in Batman: Matatoa (Batman: Gotham Knights #16-17). And then a secret threatens to tear the Batfamily apart when Bruce is accused of murdering Vesper Fairchild in Bruce Wayne: Murderer?, eventually prompting him to drop the Bruce Wayne identity completely (this made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move) and become Batman full-time as he goes on the run in Bruce Wayne: Fugitive. Eventually the murder is solved and the murderer is accounted for, and these two stories are probably my favourite Batfamily crossovers ever. They're so juicy and get to the heart of everything I love about each member!

The excellent Bruce & Dick comic Batman/Nightwing: Bloodborne fits somewhere around here, as well as Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's beautifully drawn and critically acclaimed Batman: Hush, which touches on Bruce's on-again, off-again relationship with Selina Kyle. Around this time in the Nightwing comic, Dick's life has been on a downward spiral for months because of a multitude of factors, including losing his girlfriend, his day job, his circus family, his apartment building and more. This is also where the villains Blockbuster and Tarantula are prominent.

Over in Robin, Tim's father discovers that Tim is Robin and demands that Tim give up the mantle, which he reluctantly does. This results in Bruce offering the job to Steph, driving a wedge between her and Tim. Her tenure as Robin is short-lived for several reasons, and all this leads into the mega-crossover Batman: War Games, in which a massive gang war breaks out in Gotham and Tim's sort-of girlfriend, Darla Aquista, is killed. By the time the dust settles, Steph is (believed) dead, Dick temporarily gives up his Nightwing mantle to work for the mafia (yup), Barbara and Jim leave Gotham and Tim's father is murdered in the DC-wide crossover Identity Crisis, resulting in Tim and Cassandra relocating to Blüdhaven, effectively sealing the breakup of the Batfamily. War Games is followed up by Batman: War Crimes, which is included here for timeline reasons and not much else.

Batman's pretty much all alone in Gotham again, right? Time for somebody else to return. Someone who's been haunting the narrative all these years. Yup, in the wake of the gang war, when rival mob bosses are vying to wrest control of the city, a new crime lord emerges in Batman: Under the Hood: the Red Hood, who turns out to be Jason Todd, back from the dead, and no longer a boy in a yellow cape but instead a ruthless, hypocritical murderer with a chip on his shoulder and no qualms about stabbing Batman's allies. (For more about Jason between his death and return to Gotham, read Red Hood: Lost Days.)

Lastly, there's a DC-wide event called Infinite Crisis, which shakes up the whole DC Universe and leads to Batman, Nightwing and Robin taking a trip around the world for a whole year. (Infinite Crisis also kills off Tim's best friend, Conner Kent/Superboy. Tim's really going through it at this time, poor guy.) Oh, and Blüdhaven is razed by a bomb during Infinite Crisis as well. Yup.

One Year Later

(Disclaimer: it's been a while since I read this period and this one beyond it.) After a year away from Gotham, Batman, Nightwing and Robin return, and Bruce adopts Tim (at long last) in Batman: Face the Face. I'm sure this happy-ish period is going to last, right? Well, the very next story is Batman and Son, in which Bruce learns he has a young son named Damian, who is the child of Talia, daughter of Ra's al Ghul (Batman's currently dead, formerly immortal nemesis of League of Assassins fame). Damian and Tim instantly don't hit it off – rather, Tim is friendly until the bratty and hostile Damian reveals himself to be a murderer and attempts to kill Tim. Of course, Bruce doesn't take kindly to this, and Damian eventually goes back to live with his mother.

Also, during the year the others were away, Cassandra was brainwashed and became evil because of Deathstroke and DC Editorial (this made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move). Later, Bruce adopts her in the otherwise mediocre 2008 Batgirl miniseries. There's a lot of complicated stuff around this time, such as Steph being retconned as Alive All Along and returning to Gotham in Robin: Violent Tendencies (Robin #170-175, Robin/Spoiler Special), Dick relocating to New York and having a mediocre run in Nightwing, Tim having a new black and red Robin suit to honour Superboy's death, Tim struggling mentally and trying to clone Conner(!) and revive Steph, his dad and Conner, Ra's al Ghul coming back from the dead (again) and trying to use a younger body (Damian or Tim) to stabilise his form in Batman: The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul, and Bruce tackling the criminal organisation known as the Black Glove in Grant Morrison's Batman R.I.P.

DC-wide events once again have consequences (hooray) in Final Crisis, in which Batman dies. Is he dead for good? Well, this is comic book land, so probably not, but in the meantime, the public can't know that either Batman or Bruce Wayne have died. Hush masquerades as Bruce Wayne (long story) and the Robins battle it out for the mantle in Batman: Battle for the Cowl. Despite Tim's pleas, Dick refuses to become Batman, resulting in an imposter Batman who shoots to kill taking centre stage. This impostor turns out to be Jason, who fights first Tim, then Dick, the latter of whom defeats him. Against Bruce's wishes in his will, Dick becomes the new Batman, and Damian becomes Robin at his side.

Damian as Robin

This new status quo, also known as Batman: Reborn, marks the start of several new series, including Red Robin and Batgirl (2009). Red Robin stars Tim as a deeply unreliable narrator in his new title of Red Robin in his grief-fuelled efforts to gather evidence that Bruce is not dead, while Batgirl follows Stephanie Brown as she becomes the third Batgirl under Oracle's tutelage, the pair of them working out of the Batcave.

Dick, Damian and Alfred have relocated to the penthouse in Wayne Tower and operate out of the underground bunker. Dick and Damian's rocky partnership develops into an unlikely yet compelling and heartfelt bond in Batman and Robin (2009) as they tackle a plethora of villains, including Professor Pyg and Red Hood (again). And where is Cassandra Cain? Sidelined again! She gave up Batgirl for Steph, on Bruce's request, and now goes by Black Bat, though we don't see much of her for Editorial Reasons (sigh).

This being comics, Bruce doesn't stay dead for long, and with both Tim and Dick (separately) discovering evidence that Bruce is not dead, just lost in time (yup), they work together to bring him back alive. I don't pretend to remember all the intricacies of how this works, but you can read about Bruce's journey in Batman: Time and the Batman (Batman #700-703), Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne and Bruce Wayne: The Road Home. It's long and complex and honestly reading Grant Morrison's writing tends to do my head in.

There are a handful more stories after Bruce's return, including some hugs and heartfelt reunions (yes, really!) and the excellent Batman: The Black Mirror story starring Dick as Batman, but even though this is a really cool new status quo with a bunch of interesting implications going forward, the universe doesn't really stabilise, because we're up to 2011 by now, and the world gets hit by another DC-wide crossover called Flashpoint. Except, this is the biggest one since Crisis on Infinite Earths that I mentioned way back at the beginning, and so everything gets rebooted. EVERYTHING.

Batman and Detective Comics and other long-running comics are cancelled and their number restarted from #1, and many series are cancelled and just never reinstated. This new universe, known as the New 52, sets a new status quo that worked in some aspects but not so much in others. Many changes from the universe we just came from are just jumps that happen without explanation, such as Dick's return to being Nightwing (except now he's red instead of blue), Jason being an anti-hero with a bat on his chest instead of a villain, everyone being younger and closer in age, Steph and Cass being minimised and essentially replaced, and many more frustrating retcons that are confusing and/or illogical. But hey, at least the new Batman and Robin comic (starring Bruce and Damian) and Scott Snyder's Batman run (introducing the Court of Owls) are good! Note: the New 52 was soft rebooted in 2016 to become the current continuity, known at its inception as DC Rebirth, which reintroduced many Post-Crisis elements to mainstream canon.

Duke Thomas? He wasn't introduced until the New 52. Harper and Cullen Row? New 52. Tim being bisexual and dating Bernard? Rebirth, though Bernard was inspired by a very minor character of the same name from Tim's long-running Robin comic. Forever Evil, Spyral and the Grayson comic? New 52. Kate Kane (Batwoman)? She appeared during Batman: Reborn, but she wasn't established as Bruce's cousin until the New 52. Many such cases.

And so, right before Flashpoint is where the Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity ends after twenty-five years, with Bruce as Batman and running a worldwide initiative called Batman Incorporated in Batman Incorporated (2010), Dick as Batman in Gotham, Damian as Robin, Tim as Red Robin, Steph as Batgirl, Cassandra as Black Bat, Barbara as Oracle and Jason as Red Hood (and full villain, not reformed in any way, shape or form). In this continuity, Bruce adopted (in order) Jason, Dick, Tim and Cassandra, and of course Damian is his biological son. It's my favourite continuity, and I hope you enjoy it too.

...And I apologise belatedly for the wall of text.

[interstellarsystem]

The Anatomy Of: An Ol

This is another installment in our Anatomy Of series, focusing on a fictional being from the Deltora Quest novel series called an Ol. An Ol is a shapeshifting being, created by an entity known as the Shadow Lord. Their true form resembles white smoke or flames, but they can shapeshift into almost anything. Of course, this page will contain spoilers for both the Deltora Quest novel (only Deltora Quest 1) and the Deltora Quest anime. This page is co-written by the three that are in this system, and on occasion our writing may be separated where our experiences differ–just like it is below as an example.

Dain (He/It) - [I’m Dain, a fictive of… Well, Dain! From Deltora Quest of course. I was an Ol created specifically to be a spy and infiltrator for the Shadow Lord. My storyline is fairly close to canon, though it leans more toward the anime canon as opposed to the novel. I’ve actually been in this system for around 15-16 years at the time of writing this, but I’ve also had a long period of dormancy in here. I’m a grade 3 Ol.]

Del (He/Him) - [I’m another fictive of Dain, though I have some differences between myself and the other within this system. Like canon, I was created by the Shadow Lord to be a false heir to the throne in order to keep the true heir away and keep the Shadow Lord in power. I’m also a grade 3 Ol.]

Ether (He/Him) - [I am Ether Mir, a non-canon Ol who was stationed in the city of Rithmere to keep eyes on activity there. I decided I disliked the Shadow Lord and secretly refused to follow his orders. Instead, I mostly chose to blend into the society within that city and became a professional charmcrafter and jeweler. I am grade 2.]

Unless specifically stated, or defined in the “differences from source media” section, information here may be purely canon to our identity as opposed to the source material. This is not a wikipedia page and is mainly about our experience as Ols, not a document on every canon fact or appearance.

Word Count: 5,794 Warnings: Mentions of murder and death. Discussion of species dysphoria. Spoilers for Deltora Quest 1 (novel) and the Deltora Quest anime. Archive: On our website!

Basic Anatomy

Ols are shapeshifting entities, with a “true” form that’s more of a shifting mass than anything tangible. You could hardly call it a body. Their true form resembles floating white smoke, boiling liquid, or flames–a barely tangible, flickering white substance. Whether ones true form more resembles flames or smoke or liquid depends on the Ol itself. 

They tend to have some vague semblance of shape–like something that could be described as a head or maybe some arms–but these attributes can move and flicker in and out or shift around on the body, so aren’t reliably definable. They have eyes in this form, which can either be glowing red lights or holes where eyes “should” be. Some might have what resembles a mouth, but like with most other features, these shift in and out of existence. Watching an Ol’s true form and trying to define its shape and parts is similar to looking at a cloud and deciding if it’s actually a cat or a shoe, there isn’t really much of anything definite about it.

One definite thing about an Ol is that when shifted, its heart will always be on the right side of its body, as opposed to the left. This is crucial knowledge for defeating one, because in order to do so, it’s a requirement to pierce their heart. When an Ol is killed, its form falls apart back into something closer to its true form state, but wavers with flashes of the forms its previously taken.

The only other definite thing about the true form of an Ol is its mark. The Shadow Lord leaves his mark on all things he has created or things he deems belonging to him, and that includes an Ol. It’s the shape of a hand with a black ring around it, and a glowing light in the palm. The mark on an Ol is held at the core of its body in its true form–and in that form, the mark doubles as its “heart”.

(The mark of the Shadow Lord as it appears in the novel. Image via Deltora Quest Wiki.)

A mark is separate from its heart in most cases of an Ol that’s shifted into something other than its true form. The mark is an external brand, while its heart is internal and in a way is its “true” mark.

As for the shapeshifted forms, depending on the grade of an Ol, it can look like almost anything. Ols will always have their mark displayed on their body somewhere, however. They can sometimes disguise it–strangely coloured areas, moles, scars and more can actually be hidden marks–but it will be there somewhere, even if under clothing. There’s types of Ols, grade 1-3, and their shapeshifting abilities differ.

Grade 1 Ols

The weakest type of Ol, and due to this almost exclusively travel in pairs. They can take the shape of any person they’ve personally seen and looked at enough to know what they look like in detail–if they don’t study, they will get details wrong and may look uncanny.

Their mark is usually easier to spot, and they can’t pretend to eat/drink, nor can they make their body have any body heat or other regular functions. They feel cold to the touch, lack the ability to sweat, and their skin may feel like it lacks texture overall. They might forget to blink, or might struggle to talk, walk, or do other things in their shapeshifted form that would out them as being an Ol. 

They cannot hold their form forever, and must take a break at least every 3 days or ~72 hours, where their form wavers and flickers back to its true state for a moment. This is called the Tremor.

Grade 2 Ols

Stronger than grade 1s, and therefore able to travel alone. They still need to take a break every 3 days and experience the Tremor, but their forms are more reliably realistic and overall they don’t need to focus as much to retain their forms.

They can usually feign eating and drinking, and they tend to be able to produce body heat and have the correct texture. They’re also much better at hiding their marks overall. There still may be some mistakes that are made, but overall they’re largely much more reliable in their abilities.

Grade 3 Ols 

The strongest type of Ol. They’re able to shapeshift near flawlessly into both people they have seen, people they made up, animals, or even objects. They’re almost always flawless in the realism of their forms, and their marks are usually very well hidden.

They also don’t experience the Tremor and can hold their form for as long as they’d like, but this comes at a price. Due to just how realistic ones form is, if a grade 3 Ol is shifted into the form of a person or an animal, it is able to be injured or die just as easily as its form would.

They require a large amount of energy form the Shadow Lord to create, so there’s less of them than other types of Ols.

The Tremor

Ether is the only one of us to experience it and there’s no canon information that goes super in-depth about this process to confirm or deny here, so Ether will take this one.

Ether (He/Him) - [The Tremor is when an Ol (grade 1 or 2) loses its shape temporarily due to being shifted into a form for around 72 hours. 72 hours is considered the upper limit for an Ol of these grades to hold their form, though some may waver sooner, usually between 55-72 hours. Weaker grade 1s may only make it to around 48, especially if they are inexperienced.

Around the 48 hour mark of holding a form, you start to feel “off”. A creeping sense of what could be called dread, and the feeling of intense exhaustion starts to form. Holding your shape takes effort, and doing it for so long is very very taxing. As the hours drag on from this point, you may feel disoriented, shaky, out of breath, too hot or too cold, dizzy, anxious, sick, experience aches and pains, find it hard to walk or talk, feel like your body is trying to escape you, and more. The longer you hold your form, the worse, more intense, and more numerous the symptoms get.

Eventually, you are so disoriented that you cannot focus mentally on holding onto your shape anymore–and for just a moment, you let it go. This results in your form wobbling, wavering, flickering or fading for a moment–which is more than enough to reveal that you are an Ol, so if the need to Tremor arises, finding somewhere secluded and private is important.

The time leading up to the Tremor is incredibly uncomfortable and painful to experience. Letting go, however, feels like bursting a cyst or something similar. All the built up pressure, pain, disorientation, anxiety and general discomfort melt away in an instant–it is one of the biggest reliefs to possibly feel.

You are able to voluntarily shift into your true form to avoid experiencing Tremor symptoms before they arise, but this is not always reliable as you do need to be absolutely alone in order to not be discovered. Voluntarily entering your true form at any time resets the “timer” and relieves any Tremor symptoms you may be experiencing.]

Reproduction and Sexes

Ols have no reason to have a sex as they’re manually created by the Shadow Lord, and largely lack what would traditionally be considered a “gender”. Some Ols have preference in what shapes they’d prefer to take, but beyond that, there’s no purpose of these concepts to an Ol, other than methods to blend in. Pairs of grade 1s are known to pretend to be a husband and wife, for example of a relevant usage of the knowledge.

More on our relation to gender and body sex in the dysphoria section under “in this world”.

Social Life

Language

Ols were inherently able to speak the main language in Deltora upon creation, and could learn to speak in other ways too if necessary. They had no set linguistic differences, but grade 1s and 2s sometimes struggled a little more with sounding organic with their speech and their flow of words. Sometimes they used uncommon words, or sounded clunky–but these things weren’t really a sign that they were an Ol, seeing as regular people also had differences in their speech.

Place in Society

Ols were created by the Shadow Lord to do his bidding. Considering the Shadow Lord was always trying to take over Deltora and harm the people of the country, Ols weren’t an accepted part of society nor were they recognised as any form of tribe or people, and were killed if seen or discovered. Not everyone knew about the Ols existence, and the fact that they weren’t largely known helped grade 1s with their slip-ups, and made it even harder for 2s and 3s to ever be detected. But certain resistance groups who were in-the-know of their tells and the Tremor made a point to hunt and kill as many as they could.

Dain (He/It) - [Which is so funny because guess who doubled as a resistance member…. (Spoiler, it’s me!)]

Del (He/Him) - [(Me too.)]

Ols were known to attack people, though, so the fear and reaction to discovering one wasn’t largely unwarranted. Ols were loyal to the Shadow Lord and would carry out his (and only his) bidding. They were tortured or otherwise killed by him at the first hint of betrayal or after a failed task–or a few failed tasks, if he liked you or thought you were useful enough–so most were desperate to do their absolute best to please him.

They often closely mimicked the styles of clothing, appearance, and any extra cultural details of the people they were attempting to appear as with their forms. Some Ols spent time around cities and similar spaces with lots of people, hidden as general nobody-looking people or small animals to get an idea of what they needed to mimic to fit in.

Ether (He/Him) - [I personally quietly went against the Shadow Lord and stopped following his orders while he was not checking on me at my station in Rithmere. I was never tasked with much aside from reporting my findings to him, so I had time to integrate myself into society. I killed and took the shape of a man, and integrated myself into his life he lived before, including taking over his workplace. I considered myself more a part of the Mere people–those who lived there–than I did an Ol, from that point on. I did not want to do what was asked of me any longer.

I was a grade 2, so I experienced the Tremor. There were plenty of times I had to slip away to go through it, but I was never caught. I opened my charm + jewellery shop on 3 days of the week, so I would have the other 4 as open slots for me to take a break from my form in a private space–which was usually the back room of my workshop. I loved the job and loved providing charms to people who wanted to purchase them.

I came to love the city of Rithmere and its people more than anything. I have never in my time–here nor before–met another Ol who ever dared question the Shadow Lord, let alone lived as a member of society in any genuine way, but I decided that the people of Deltora were beautiful and his plan to destroy them was disgusting. I wanted no part in it, so I lied about my “findings” to him and seeing as Rithmere was not a large focus of his, I got away with it.]

Social Relationships

Ols largely got along amongst themselves on a professional basis–all sharing the common goal of pleasing the Shadow Lord. Grade 1s were known to travel in pairs for their own personal safety, and often developed strong bonds between their pairs–possibly similar to some form of what people might consider a “partner”, but not entirely.

Other than that, Ols didn’t tend to develop any sort of relationship with each other and largely kept to their assigned tasks. Friends were an understood concept but largely considered irrelevant, and lifelong partners were out of the question–there wasn’t a need for doing anything or desiring anything other than carrying out orders.

Dain (He/It) - [I understood human emotion enough to toy with people about it. I feigned friendships after watching others interact, and feigned a crush on a girl both to get my way and for fun. I have different morals now and even have two QPPs, but before it was such a foreign concept to even think I could be connected to anyone other than the Shadow Lord. It’s like… For lack of better phrasing, connection to others wasn’t a programmed-in feature, it had to be added once I got here. I still struggle with empathy to this day, honestly–I’m a bit slow on some social things.]

Del (He/Him) - [I was a pretty weird case because I ended up with what I think is a romantic crush on a human of the Del tribe. I didn’t know what that was or why I felt so attached to him, but he was–aside from the Shadow Lord–the only person I ever felt any genuine connection to. Ols had no need for romance or anything that comes with it, so I’m not sure if what I felt was a crush or if it was friendship, or maybe respect? But I felt some connection to that man that I still can’t place even today. I am very apathetic toward people in general, even here, so it was definitely a strange occurrence.]

Naming

This is a section where all three of us differ in some way, so we’ll write mostly separately for this part.

Dain (He/It) - [Ols were rarely given names, but some that were particularly liked by the Shadow Lord received names–I believe Fallow and Prandine, being two in a line of the Shadow Lord’s right-hand men, received their names as gifts. I chose mine myself to reflect the task I had been assigned, and it doubled as being a helpful alibi and point towards me being the “true” heir to the throne (which I absolutely wasn’t) because it’s an anagram of the first king’s name.]

Del (He/Him) - [Ols weren’t really given names. I actually picked the name “Dain” in my exomemories because it was an anagram of Adin, the first king of Deltora. The Shadow Lord couldn’t be bothered to name us so we had to fend for ourselves on that front, and picking a name was one of the main steps to being successful at integrating into society as a spy. If you picked a bad name like, I don’t know, “breadstick” or “plank of wood”, you were absolutely more likely to be outed as an Ol and killed.]

Ether (He/Him) - [I was assigned my full name, Ether Mir (ˈiːθə mɪ�� – seeing as I have been asked how to pronounce it multiple times) by the Shadow Lord. Other Ols were also named in this way. He chose named based on our assigned task or station. I was assigned to the city of Rithmere as a pair of eyes on the city for him, so my name is an anagram of Rithmere. Most other Ols were named in this way by him–Dain being an example of an Ol named not after location, but task. He was tasked with stopping the operation of sending the heir to the throne to restore Deltora, and the first king of Deltora was named Adin.]

Diet

Ols have no desire to eat and no way to actually consume anything tangible. While shapeshifted, grade 2 and 3 Ols can pretend to eat, but the food is just stored as-is inside of their form for them to throw out later–the same goes for anything else ingested.

However, they do still need energy to live and sustain themselves. The amount of energy the Shadow Lord uses to create Ols will greatly influence their grade, and after creation they’re tied almost inseparably to him. They just by the act of existing as a portion of his energy are both separate and a part of him. If the Shadow Lord were to die, all of the Ols would too, as their source of life would have been depleted. They don’t need to do anything to consume the energy, but if it were to be depleted they would fade into nothing.

Del (He/Him) - [Ols in my canon while not required to eat, could have the ability to taste things they “ingested” if they were a particularly skilled grade 2 or a grade 3. This made reactions to tastes more realistic and put less guesswork on us.

For instance… If we accidentally ate spoiled food, we wouldn’t need to rely on not-always-accurate appearances of “this looks fine”, and could tell by the actual taste to then react accordingly. After all, offering someone a bite to eat and not knowing you’re offering them spoiled food that tastes horrible can pretty easily raise suspicion if you’re happily eating the same thing. It also helped us to be able to develop a sense of “liked” and “disliked” foods, because it gets a little weird if you get asked what your favourite food is and you have to find a way to say “I don’t care about food” without sounding a little off. 

I didn’t get to speak to many Ols about little things like their taste preferences so I’m not sure if our tastes tended to differ or if we had the same sort of “template” for what we were supposed to enjoy. Regardless, I personally preferred meat–any I could get my hands on, really. I also liked very sweet things, like honey. There was a particular brand of honey I really liked, actually, which had the added benefit of having medicinal properties. While being shifted into a humanoid form I was able to be injured and got injured often enough, so it definitely helped to carry some with me.]

As an added note, seeing as Ols don’t need any energy aside from the Shadow Lord’s, they also don’t need to sleep.

Habitat

Ols come from the Shadowlands, the domain of the Shadow lord, but they’re often sent into Deltora to aid in his plan to take over the country. Deltora is a country bordered by ocean to the south and mountains to the north, acting as a barrier between it and the Shadowlands. There’s 7 territories in Deltora, most with greatly differing terrain, biomes, and people who live there. They are the Diamond, Emerald, Lapis, Topaz, Opal, Ruby and Amethyst territories–and yes, that does actually spell Deltora.

There’s mountains with thick, dense forests… A vast desert with red sand, constantly changing shape due to violent winds… Wide rivers that lead to churning seas… Grasslands that stretch far into the horizon… Caverns and caves… Deltora has a lot going for it in terms of different terrain types, and if we were to talk about all the different tribes, cities, cultures and species of flora and fauna alike, we’d be here all week.

Ols are able to move freely throughout Deltora and don’t have any environmental limitations to what habitats they can traverse. Their shapeshifting abilities tend to make travelling even easier, sometimes shifting into birds or other species to fly to other locations without being detected. They’re more common closer to the barrier mountains and to the west of the country, as well as around one of the major rivers–the river Tor–but can be found anywhere.

Dain (He/It) - [One of my least favourite areas to traverse was anything with water. While I could keep my form pretty easily, I had to put conscious effort into getting my body to react perfectly to water. Fingertips wrinkling at the right time, the right amount of water my hair held after being splashed, etc. I’m not sure why I struggled with it personally! I know I hated the texture in general so maybe it was something to do with my mental state being more distressed when forced to interact with it that made it harder to keep my form perfectly accurate.

I’m not sure if any other Ols had issues that were similar! It really just seemed to be a me issue. Oops!]

Ether (He/Him) - [In my timeline, Ols were generally stationed at specific areas. We could wander, and there were some wanderers for certain, but the majority of Ols who were grade 2 or above had a designated task which usually revolved around a place like a city. I was stationed at a city called Rithmere, to keep an eye on the people there and keep watch for certain people the Shadow Lord wanted to be killed or captured.

I could move from my station if required and/or desired–nothing physical bound me to it, I simply stayed due to my loyalty to the Shadow Lord, and then continued to live there after I decided to act against him for my love of the people and the culture I had become a part of.]

In This World

In-Body Euphoria

We’re overall pretty satisfied that this body is human. It’s a useful shape to be–hands that are useful, for one! We’re also fairly tall so we don’t feel the need to shapeshift and grow taller–most things are accessible to us this way.

We get euphoria from coming off as visually “strange” in any way, too. If there’s something we can do to give of an uncanny sort of feeling, we absolutely will do it. Here, being “weird” poses no threat to revealing ourselves as Ols, so we’re a lot more lax on how we act. We can’t shapeshift, so being “off” is the next best thing to making us feel like ourselves. We don’t really have a reliable way to do this unfortunately! But always a treat when someone comments on anything similar.

In-Body Dysphoria

Shapeshifting

We’re all so dysphoric about being unable to shapeshift. It’s our collective #1 issue with this body. We feel confined to one shape that we don’t even like. It’s sad, disorienting, and overall wildly unnatural.

Dain (He/It) - [I have on multiple occasions, lost balance while walking in-body and reflexively went to shapeshift an extra limb or tendril or extend my arm to balance myself without falling, but… That only results in a phantom shift and losing balance even more. Horrible, especially when the phantom shifts feel so realistic!]

Ether (He/Him) - [I still feel the need to Tremor here, both in front and in headspace. If I front for 2 days, I start feeling uneasy and begin feeling the symptoms, until I get close to the 72 hour mark and I become incredibly, horribly uncomfortable. However, instead of experiencing the Tremor, my body does nothing. It cannot change shape, of course. So the feeling does not go away while I front, and only gets worse. I need to fully leave the front and enter headspace to properly experience the Tremor.

I do not know if it is some sort of disconnect between my mind and body, but if I do not feel my physical body waver while I am in front, the need for the Tremor does not go away. It would be much easier if I could shapeshift at all. It upsets me that I still have this limit even here, yet it is somehow worse because my instincts and limits cannot comprehend that I am not holding this physical form.]

Sex and Gender

We’re also largely dysphoric about the body’s sex. While Ols don’t have sexes, a reproductive cycle or even genders, we know now that the three of us are either masculine or androgynous-leaning in how we like to present, and that doesn’t line up with our body (yet!). In some ways, we’re dysphoric we even have a sex at all–we’re not meant to have one, these parts and shapes are simply meant to be a part of a disguise, not literally a part of us!

Del (He/Him) - [I’m agender for the purpose of.. Well, yeah, of course I am. I like the aesthetics of the form I chose in-source and kept that here, but regardless of pandering my disguise as a man and using he/him as pronouns? I’m not a man, woman, or any gender–I’m an Ol. I still find it hard to grasp what gender even is. Or why people care so much about it.]

Ether (He/Him) - [I decided I am male when I chose the body I wanted to appear as. I fit in with the other men in Rithmere, and liked it that way. I feel similar about it here. I do not think I thought about gender as a concept much, if at all, I just decided “yes, I am this one, I want to look like this one”, and went with it. It does not mean much to me, it is just a part of what my body I chose is, that’s about it. This body here is not what I have chosen.]

Phantom Shifts

Our phantom shifts largely reflect what we’re currently shaped like in-headspace, though not always. Since joining the system and enabling ourselves to shapeshift more, our instincts tend to shapeshift us on command where beneficial, and so when fronting, we get phantom shifts of relevant things pretty easily.

Our experiences differ to some degree though, because our chosen forms are all at least a little different from each other. So… Below, we’re going to document our experiences separately (as we’ve already been doing in a lot of places).

Del (He/Him) - [I don’t really get phantom shifts of my body unless it’s something instinctual, so I won’t be making a phantom shift map. I think I’ve gotten maybe one or two phantom shifts of my cloak hood resting against my neck, or my belt around my waist–but that’s about as shifty as I get, phantom-wise.]

Dain (He/It) - [I personally get phantom shifts of my chosen form, which includes horns, a spiked tail, and my cloak. My cloak and other clothing are actually a part of my shifted form, they’re not literal clothes!]

Dain (He/It) - Notes:

[My phantom shifts feel pretty physical–especially my claws and tail. Sometimes they feel a little weird or off, but they tend to feel similar to my physical body parts, just faded.

My tail feels more realistic closer to the base where it connects to my body. Nearer the tip, it feels more faded and… I guess I could describe it as see-through in a way? The actual barb on the tip though is more realistic in how it feels.

My cloak doesn’t have feeling in it itself, the phantom shift feels more like weight on my back or as if I was actually wearing a cloak with it brushing up against me.]

Ether (He/Him) - [I do not shift often, but I do sometimes.]

Ether (He/Him) - Notes:

[My braids do not have sensation in them themselves, nor do any of the clothing items on this image. They feel like a presence of weight.

I believe I feel phantom boots because mine were very, very heavy with charms, other decoration, and being steel-toe boots. They feel more like weight on my feet than actual shoes.]

In-Headspace

We don’t live too differently in-system than we normally would anyway–well, the way we’d live if we didn’t have the Shadow Lord before, anyway. We kept our previous forms as we’ve all grown attached to them and how they look, though we do shapeshift for fun or other purposes pretty often.

Del and Dain both still feel a pull to please the Shadow Lord, but he’s no longer here, so that leaves us both feeling a little lost.

Del (He/Him) - [I have chosen to treat another headmate of ours in a similar way I would the Shadow Lord, though our relationship is closer to that of a caregiver and the person they’re caring for than it is an evil overlord and his servant. It’s complicated to describe, but it’s been good for both of us. It’s especially been immensely healing to me to be able to act on my instincts to be commanded and to serve an authority, with someone who is safe and there to support me and my wishes at the same time. He doesn’t command me to kill people or really “command” me at all. I guess he’s more of a form of guidance. I need that, though, because it’s ingrained into me to follow someone elses lead on a species-level.

Ether still experiences the Tremor as he mentioned, but other than that and the fact we can be more open and have some things to navigate, we don’t really do anything too differently.]

We have some images of our headspace forms we’ll share below.

The above image is of Del, drawn by us (he doesn’t have a proper ref yet, oops).

Image above is of Dain, using a base by Bakawasemi, edited by us.

Dain (He/It) - [Some of the details on the above reference are outdated (such as the cloak design on the collar and its length), but it’s largely accurate. My hair is also a lot more similar to Del’s hair, the one on the reference is just what was available to me on the base and I didn’t end up drawing it myself. This image might end up getting updated later with a better reference, but for now this works well enough.

Little side-note: My clothes are also a part of my form I shifted into. They’re not actual clothes. And the dagger pictured is generally what I choose to look like when shapeshifted to look like a dagger.]

Image above is of Ether, drawn by us.

Ether (He/Him) - [Unlike the other Ols in my system, my clothes are not a part of my body, they were actual items of clothing I had in my exomemories. I chose to wear clothes like other people, instead of pretending to wear them by shapeshifting them onto myself.]

Differences from Source Media

The anime and the novel have some differences in Ols between them, as well as storyline plots for Dain as a character. Nothing is hugely different between us and one or the other (or both!) variations of source, though, aside from smaller personal details that aren’t elaborated on in-canon.

Canon facts that differ from our experiences:

Ols have no desire to eat. (Some of us liked certain foods for the taste!)

Ols have defined arms used to strangle their victims in their true form. (Whereas we can, but this isn’t a definite trait.)

Ols have toothless mouths in their true forms. (Novel canon mainly, but once again–no definite traits of true forms here.)

In Conclusion

This sums us up fairly well–albeit in a pretty long winded way. We’ll likely update this in the future if we make big revelations about ourselves or our functioning, but if we gain more Ols in the system and they’re motivated enough, they’ll likely make a part 2 document separate from this one instead. We’ll see!

We’ve never seen anyone else who has an alterhuman identity related to our source before, so lately we’re absolutely trying to put out some experiences and resources about ourselves. Maybe someone down the line will see this and feel less alone about being from such an obscure source, or maybe this will end up being some sort of awakening for someone. You never really know. We wanted to get this out anyway–our memories of Deltora and our lives are fairly in-depth compared to a lot of our systemmates and their exomemories, so we’re really happy to be able to share some of it. We have more things to muse about and more things to detail, but those are less Anatomy Of and more primed for individual posts. Hopefully motivation strikes again and we can write some more about our exomemories and noemata.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: LGB Courage Coalition

Published: Apr 23, 2025

Wikipedia, the world’s leading crowd-sourced encyclopedia, operates on an open-editing model where anyone can contribute. Article pages display information to readers, while talk pages host debates about content. In theory, principles like neutrality, verifiability, and consensus guide edits — but in practice, these rules can be manipulated. Youth gender medicine exemplifies how motivated activists can skew articles to reflect a particular perspective, gatekeeping against challenges to their framing.

Tactics of Control

Activist editors on Wikipedia employ a range of tactics to control content and maintain biased narratives, as outlined in the Wikipedia:Activist page. They often revert unwelcome edits with brief, dismissive explanations, challenge reliable sources listed on WP:RSPLIST as unsuitable for the topic, or dismiss solid sources as WP:UNDUE, claiming they’re reliable but not significant enough. Mainstream views covered by major newspapers may be mislabeled as WP:FRINGE, while self-published sources or opinions are presented as facts, violating policy. By selectively invoking Wikipedia’s rules, these editors wear down those attempting to improve blatantly biased pages, creating a formidable barrier to achieving a neutral point of view.

To see these tactics in action for youth gender medicine, follow the “talk history” of pages such as WPATH, Cass Review, and SEGM. There you’ll find fierce battlegrounds where editors attempt to instill a NPOV—Wikipedia’s core policy of a neutral point of view — only to be stonewalled by those intent on preserving an ideological stronghold. Or at least, you would if the discussions hadn’t been quietly archived out of easy view (altering archive settings to bury debate is just one of the lesser-known tactics used to maintain the illusion of consensus).

A Damning Example

The 2024 WPATH evidence suppression scandal involving Johns Hopkins University was a controversy that was covered by The Economist and The British Medical Journal, and also discussed in op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. When an editor attempted to add this well-sourced criticism to the section on SOC8, it was instantly reverted by an activist editor. The original editor consequently opened a talk page thread titled “Reversion of objective edit,” asking for an explanation. This marked the beginning of a prolonged discussion spanning four months and involving over 20 distinct participants.

The reverting activist argued “...it may be a concerted smear campaign effort by transphobic groups, which is why it appears not have been picked up by more neutral news organizations and thus is WP:UNDUE...” Another argued: “The Economist has a long history of false reporting on trans issues. I don't think it's appropriate to cite them as a source.” To which the original editor reminded everyone that a Wikipedia Noticeboard already says there is overwhelming consensus that The Economist is reliable for trans topics.

As more editors joined the discussion to support the inclusion of the edit, activist arguments for exclusion began to show a convenient disregard for Wikipedia policy. Claims included the Economist made a mistake and the BMJ author is an activist.

After three months of debate following the original edit, a veteran editor weighed in: “The continued coverage of this, including now in a peer-reviewed journal, makes it untenable not to include any mention at all.” At that point, the discussion shifted from whether to include the information to how it should be included. Eventually, a compromise was reached, and the original editor announced: “In line with the prevailing consensus reached above, I have incorporated the agreed-upon compromise wording regarding the aforementioned developments.” Almost immediately, however, the activist rewrote it entirely—without consulting the talk page. The activist editor was reported to Arbitration Enforcement and, based on this and other behavior, was “warned against edit-warring and treating Wikipedia as a battleground.” A slap on the wrist.

Coincidentally, just as this sanctioned activist backed down, another showed up to take the stonewalling reins — this time belligerently obstinate. When asked for sources to support the case that The Economist's reporting was flawed, this activist retorted “Wikipedia is not the place to publish baseless speculation, which this is if you don't have proof. I don't need to have proof, because I'm not looking to put my personal opinion in the article, I'm looking to keep yours out.” In the weeks that followed, the broader pattern—of circular debate, stalled consensus, and procedural maneuvering — played out again, while requests to reinstate the compromise wording seemingly landed on deaf ears.

As it stands today, both the Economist and the BMJ source are included, but the information has been masterfully cherry-picked, its original intent distorted to further legitimize WPATH and SOC 8. The activists have won, but the public has lost.

Brazen Activist

This isn’t a hidden campaign — it’s a public one, hiding in plain sight. Activist-editors have been celebrated in media profiles or have openly boasted about using Wikipedia to discredit dissent. One of the most striking examples is “Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist” (YFNS), formerly known as “TheTranarchist.” YFNS was recently profiled in an article on Wikipedia trans editing, published by Assigned Media, a transgender news outlet. The author — YFNS’s friend and colleague—noted that “she is determined to continue her volunteer work on trans-focused articles, which she started over three years ago,” and added that “it was YFNS who helped rally editors in the LGBTQ+ studies WikiProject.” YFNS says “Wikipedia is not in the business of pretending the views of WP:QUACKS are more supported than they are.”

What Assigned Media didn’t tell you is that YFNS was topic-banned in 2023 from editing articles on Gender and Sexuality (GENSEX). According to the administrator notice board, YFNS (going by TheTranarchist at the time) is “trying to mold the topic area to fit her worldview. That is incompatible with Wikipedia. She has become a WP:TENDITIOUS editor. Given all the factors discussed, there is rough consensus for an indefinite GENSEX topic ban. She may appeal it in no sooner than 6 months.”

After six months, YFNS successfully appealed the topic ban and, despite having openly admitted to creating articles with the premeditated intent to tarnish organizations and boost negative coverage in search rankings, remains highly active on the Wikipedia pages of those very organizations. This is best showcased with the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), where YFNS employs the full range of tactics with impunity. As a result, while the BMJ describes SEGM as “a group of researchers and clinicians that has pushed for systematic reviews and an evidence-based approach,” SEGM’s Wikipedia page opens with the vague assertion that it is “known for transgender health care misinformation” — linked, of course, to the latest article created by YFNS.

A Fixed Outcome?

The Wikipedia page on Transgender health care misinformation appears to be YFNS’s magnum opus. YFNS created it, extensively contributed to it, and then nominated it for “Good Article” (GA) status. While GA is supposed to reward quality, in some contexts — especially controversial ones — it can be strategically used to protect an activist-controlled article. To earn GA status, an article must meet six criteria, including neutrality: “represent viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.”

During the GA review, editors raised concerns about neutrality — one pointedly argued, “This is a field where both activist sides have indulged in misinformation. I'd expect a Wikipedia article to state that clearly and give examples of both.” But perhaps the most telling moment came before when the reviewer who posted on YFNS’s personal talk page offering to help, wrote: “If it comes to this, feel free to tag me or leave a message on my talkpage to get my attention as I wouldn’t be shocked if someone takes the nomination with the intent of failing it.” With that preemptive defense, it was no surprise the review ended in a Pass.

The Price We Pay

All told, the ironically titled “Good Article” on Transgender health care misinformation may be the finest example yet of how activist editors can freeze their wishful version of reality in place — even as the world continues to evolve. Experts know not to trust Wikipedia—but the average person may not. As more people engage with this topic, society would benefit from access to honest, balanced pages. When the encyclopedia is rigged, it doesn’t just distort the record — it misguides the conversations we have with our neighbors, our children, and our leaders.

==

Wikipedia has been captured.

[creativitycache]

Ok so according to the news articles Anonymous Sudan isn’t actually Sudanese but actually Russian agents pretending to be Sudanese Muslims to start shit with the goal of aligning Russia as “on our side”. Astroturfing a culture war.

Tbh idk why bother since -gestures broadly at American foreign politics for decades- but sure. Yeah. Let’s go with that.

And Russia has been aiming at AO3 for months apparently since AO3 didn’t remove teenage nsfw fics in Russian.

Ok. So. Um. Apparently Roskomnadzor/The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media has a long history of doing that, including targeting Russian Wikipedia because of their cannabis page.

Alright. Let’s keep rolling I guess.

So the end goal of Roskomnadzor is to censor the internet because they want control over what information can spread. And to do that they try to gain legitimacy/legality over “think of the children” pages. If they can censor Wikipedia for weed they can censor it for how to make Molotov Cocktails.

Ok…makes sense I guess…

So just looking at the “enforcement” section of Wikipedia it looks like to do that they block and if they can’t block they throttle and if they can’t throttle they fine and if they can’t fine they sue.

So what the fuck happened; some Russian office worker saw their squick & went full anti but thought it would be more politic to pretend to be Extremist Sudanese Muslim Hackers? Some 30 year old office Harry Potter stan said “Shit we can’t take on Ukraine & AO3 at the same time”?

[idontknowreallywhy]

WIP-what-on-earth-have-I-got-myself-into-here…

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Ash had had access to both of their files for a long while… the visible parts anyway. The extensive redactions? Not so much. Well… now his new GDF rank meant he could get past those too but he hadn’t dared. Partly because he wasn’t sure it was a can of worms he was ready to face. Not now he had Scott back after so long.

The other big reason he’d resisted was because they’d know. The decryption keys were personalised… they’d know both who and when. And three weeks into the new job was a little early to risk getting fired.

Or worse. Knowing them… probably worse.

Tonight though, hours of the puffed up, clueless idiots squabbling about the new outbreak had forced him to relive so many parts of his experience ten years before that the phantom pain was almost unbearable. He rubbed at his lower leg, trying to fool his mind into thinking he was comforting the missing arm, soothing the nerves that tormented him but that he could never reach.

Scott hadn’t lost anything visible. But Ash knew they’d stolen a no less crippling part of him too. He’d watched his friend from a distance, scratching at a a similar untouchable itch in so many subtle ways. How much of his friend’s confident, controlled outward demeanour was as synthetic as the fingertips Ash realised he was rapping against the desktop? He flattened his hand, grimacing at the supposedly-unnoticeable delay between thought and movement that had rewritten his future.

Ash knew what his friend had lost. And he couldn’t help feel responsible - he should have been there. He’d spent countless sleepless nights trying to figure out how he could have prevented it all, if he’d spotted the clumsy sabotage as he should have, swapped with another jet… maybe he could have got there in time. Got him out.

Instead he’d just sat there shaking and bleeding and sobbing and helpless as first Scott and then Val’s radios had cut out. If Ash hadn’t passed out from the shock of his injury perhaps he could have got her out at least…

No. They’d got it right in her jet. She wouldn’t have known a thing.

EHZ007 was all over Scott’s file. And each time the reference was used, the following sections were blacked out. If he knew why, maybe he might get closer to finding out what had happened and why.

At the very least he might be able to reach out to his friend, to help him find closure. If he knew better what had occurred between that last desperate shout over the radio and the day that the gaunt face of his best friend had asked him to leave the ranch and never return.

It would look highly suspicious if the first Top-Secret graded file he accessed post-promotion was that of his old wingman. They were clueless in some ways, but not in all of them.

Giles, though. He looked at a lot of the TS material just for fun and bragging rights, if his boasting was to be believed. And this evening Ash had watched the man unlock his work phone with 1234. Someone that uncreative with passcodes might just have used the same one for everything…

Officer ID, rank code, personal pin, age in days. The man’s date of birth was on his Wikipedia page and so… Ash now had everything he needed.

Except the courage. He’d been staring at the encryption alert box for over an hour. His shoulder ached.

He disconnected his prosthetic and dumped it on the table before snatching up the scotch bottle and refilling his glass.

He typed in the number.

PASSCODE ERROR.

He swore and retyped it.

No! The man had clearly used another pin. Damn.

He drained the glass and dropped his head to the desk. It was probably just as well.

Out in the hallway his great grandmother’s clock chimed once.

It was later than he thought.

It was… tomorrow.

He sat up, cursing his own idiocy and typed the code again, increasing the last digit by one. The screen refreshed and the blacked out sections disappeared.

He was in.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, 000-012

Or, what if that mural was the heart of a web serial.

I'm reading The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of @azdoine and @lukore on my dash over the last few months.

This is absolutely not gonna be a liveblog in the level of detail of the great Umineko liveblog project. Rather I'm gonna be aiming at something like the comics comints series or those occasional posts on anime. Or indeed what I wrote about Worth The Candle last year. I must create a robot whose purpose is to watch to see if I start writing detailed plot summaries and hit me with a stick labelled 'remember you have a job now'.

That outta the way, let's talk flower!

No, not that flower!

I will start with an anecdote. When I was at university, I ended up attending a talk by court alchemist senescence researcher Aubrey de Grey, who at that time did not yet have a 'sexual harassment allegations' section on his Wikipedia page. The main thing that struck me at the time was his rather spectacularly long beard. But I did listen to his talk about ending aging.

de Grey's schtick is that he, like many people in the transhumanist milieu, believes that medical technology is on the cusp of being able to prevent aging sufficiently well to prolong human lifespans more or less indefinitely. He believes that the different processes of aging can be understood in terms of various forms of accumulating cellular 'damage', and that these will begin to be addressed within present human lifespans, buying time for further advancements - so that (paraphrasing from memory) 'the first immortals have already been born'. He has some pretty graphs to demonstrate this point.

At that talk, one of the audience members asked de Grey the (in my view) very obvious question about whether access to this technology would be distributed unevenly, creating in effect an immortal ruling class. de Grey scoffed at this, saying he always gets this question, and basically he didn't think it would be a big deal. I forget his exact words, but he seemed to assume the tech would trickle down sooner or later, and this was no reason not to pursue it.

I'm sure de Grey is just as tired of being reminded of how unbalanced access to medical technology is in our current world, or the differences in average life expectancy between countries.

So, I was very strongly reminded of de Grey as The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere laid out its major thematic concerns and characters. I was also put in mind of many online arguments in the transhumanist milieu about whether it would be a good thing, in principle, to end death.

In particular, of course, comes to mind transhumanist Nick Bostrom's short story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, in which death is likened to a huge dragon that demands to be fed trains full of humans every day. In the story, humanity's scientists secretly build a giant gun to kill the dragon. Naturally, despite all the doubters and naysayers who foolishly feel obliged to justify the existence of the dragon, the gun works. Bostrom's imagery is incredibly heavy-handed (particularly the trains à la Auschwitz), but just in case you didn't get it, he also spells out the moral explicit at the end: basically, every day not spent putting resources to abolishing death is adding up more and more bodies to the pile of people who don't get to be immortal.

So far, Flower seems to be shaping up to be a critical intervention into that milieu, with a much more grounded view of death and a much stronger model of society - admittedly not a high bar but it's going good so far!

At the time of writing this commentary, I have read the prologue and first two six-chapter arcs, namely Mankind's Shining Future (1-6) and Pilgrimage to the Deep (7-12).

the general shape of things

We are introduced - from the perspective of sardonic, introverted Su, who is going to be the protagonist of our time loop - to a group of brilliant young medical wizards, who have just been invited to visit the headquarters of a secret society whose mission is precisely to abolish death. Su's grandfather was some kind of controversial luminary who was expelled this organisation, and he also did something to her, which is giving her some kind of ulterior motive to find her way into this society.

We know pretty much from the outset that this is a time loop scenario: Su has been explicitly given the opportunity to replay the scenario in the hopes of find an alternative outcome, by some kind of presently mysterious parties. This first part is the 'control' loop, i.e. probably more or less how things went down 'originally'.

I believe Umineko is an explicit inspiration for this story, and the influence is pretty evident. But parallels with the Locked Tomb series, especially Gideon the Ninth, are also quite noticeable. @lukore spoke of it as the STEM to Locked Tomb's humanities, and I can already kinda see it, although we haven't got into the real meat of the scenario yet. This story began serialisation four years ago, making the two works roughly contemporary. The latest chapter was published in the last couple of weeks - no idea if I've arrived just in time for the ending!

Stylistically, it's generally pretty heavy on dialogue and long asides. The characters are a bunch of mega nerds who love to have big philosophical and political discussions, but their dynamics are well enough realised and their dynamics clear enough that it can double up as naturalistic characterisation. So far, the discussions have been interesting to read.

Below I'm going to make some notes and comments on various elements of the setting and story. In a followup post (because it got too long) I'm going to talk a lot about entropy. Perhaps you will find this interesting!

the world

The first few chapters are dedicated pretty hard to exposition. We find ourselves in a distant-future setting - one in which it seems reality has totally collapsed and then been rebuilt using magic, creating a somewhat oddball universe which lacks things like the element iron, and also electromagnetism. This seems like it would have pretty severe implications for just about everything!

However, the 'ironworkers' have, after producing a series of trial and error 'lower planes' that didn't quite get it right, landed on a fairly close approximation of how things used to be on the old world. Though by 'fairly close approximation' I mean like... it's a bowl-shaped world and the sun and stars are artificial lanterns. But still, there are humans, and they seem to work more or less like we're used to humans working, apart from the whole 'magic' thing.

So, an alt-physics setting. Praise Aealacreatrananda, I love that shit.

While electromagnetism might be out, the more abstract physical principles like thermodynamics still apply, and the humans of this universe have managed to find analogues to a number of things in our world. Instead of computers, they have 'logic engines' which run on magic. Horses seem to have made it in, so we get delightful blends of historical and futuristic concepts like a self-driving computer-controlled horse-drawn carriage taxi.

The biggest difference is of course that in this setting, magic - more on that in a bit - has solved most medical problems and humans routinely live to around 500. The setting is ostensibly a semi-post-scarcity one, although a form of money exists in 'luxury debt', which can be exchanged for things like taxi rides, café food and trips on the space elevator.

Politically, we are told that the world has enjoyed a few hundred years of general peace, broken in living memory by a revolution which put an end to a regime of magical secrecy. There are lots of countries, and an alliance overseeing them.

There's a few other oddities in this world. Something called a 'prosognostic event' can happen if you see someone who has the same face as you, and whatever this is, it's bad enough news that everyone is constantly reminded to veil their faces in public and there's some kind of infant 'distinction treatment' to mitigate the risk. Given that, in the regular world, nothing particularly bad would happen if you ran into a long-lost identical twin, it suggest there is probably something a little fucky about how humans work in this world!

There's evidently a fair bit of effort put into the worldbuilding of fictional countries and historical periods. The important elements seem to be roughly along the lines of:

our world is currently in what they call the 'old kingdoms' period, which is poorly remembered;

next up comes an 'imperial' period of high transhumanist shenanigans in which society was ruled by 'gerontocrats' who got exclusive access to the longevity treatment, but this all somehow led to a huge disaster which destroyed og earth;

the survivors built the Mimikos where humanity currently lives using magic and created some kind of huge iron spike that holds the universe together; there was subsequently a 'fundamentalist' period in which a strict cutoff point was put on human lifespans and a lot of the wackier magic was banned;

now we're onto a new era of openness following a small revolution, while the major political structures remain largely intact.

Writing a far-future setting is hard, because trying to deal with the weight of history without the story getting bogged down with worldbuilding details is a fiddly line to walk. The Dying Earth series of Jack Vance might be a relevant point of comparison. Vance leaves the historical details vague - there are endless old kingdoms and strange artefacts and micro-societies for Cugel and co. to stumble on. Far more important than the specifics of history is establishing the vibe of a world that's seen an unimaginable amount of events layered on top of each other and is honestly a bit tired.

Flower makes things a bit more concrete and generally manages to make this work decently well. I do appreciate the asides where Su talks about, for example, the different architectural styles that layer up to make a place, or the way a technique has been refined. It establishes both that Su is the kind of person to notice this sort of thing, and also helps the world feel lived-in.

the names

The story doesn't do a lot with language. The story is written in English, and the narration will occasionally make reference to how things are phrased (e.g. how divination predates the suffix -mancy). We can probably make the standard assumption that this is all translated from $future_language, with the notional translator making a suitable substitution of whatever linguistic forms exist in that language.

The characters are named in a variety of languages. Our main character's full name is Utsushikome of Fusai. We're told that this is "an old name from Kutuy, and means something like 'mysterious child'" - so Kutuyan is one of the languages spoken in this world. It's blatantly got the same phonotactics as Japanese, and indeed if I search up 'Utsushikome', I find an obscure historical figure called Utsushikome-no-Mikoto, wife of the Emperor Kōgen; she has no article on English Wikipedia, but she does have a brief one on Japanese wiki. Just as Su says about Kutuyan, 'Utsushikome' is written 欝色謎 in Japanese, but it relies on archaic readings of those characters and wouldn't read that way in modern Japanese. We could perhaps assume a good old translation convention is in effect where Kutuyan is replaced with Japanese.

A lot of characters have Greek names, as do various setting elements. One exception is Kamrusepa, or Kam, who is named for an ancient goddess of medicine worshipped by the Hittites and Luwians. I know basically fuck all about Hittites and Luwians but it's a cool little nod to mythology, and it won't be the only one!

I'll run down a list of characters and my comments about them in a bit. But many are named after gods or other mythological figures.

the magic

Most of the divergences come from magic existing. Certain humans are 'arcanists', who are able to use the 'Power', which is a magic system with a highly computational flavour. Thanks to Su's expositional asides, we know that an incantation is something like a short program written in cuneiform with the ability to gather information, perform maths, and manipulate particles. An example we are given is a spell called "entropy-denying", which is the following string of cuneiform:

"…(𒌍𒌷𒀭)(𒌍𒁁𒀭)𒅥𒌈𒆜𒈣𒂠, 𒋢𒀀𒅆𒌫𒃶,𒈬𒊹."

We're told that spells always start with phrases ending in 𒀭, and end in 𒊹. Beyond that, I'm not sure how far the author has actually worked out the syntax of this magic system - probably not in too much detail! Seems like the kind of thing it's better to leave vague, but also she seems like kind of nerd who would (positive). It's conceptually a reasonable magic system for a world where more or less realistic physics applies.

The use of unusual scripts for a magic system isn't that unusual - the old European occultists who wrote the [Lesser] Key of Solomon loved to write on their magic circles in Hebrew, and in modern times we could mention Yoko Taro's signature use of the Celestial Alphabet for example - but the specific use of cuneiform here seems like it might be a little more significant, because a little later in the story the characters encounter a mural depicting The Epic of Gilgamesh, which of course was recorded on cuneiform tablets. Remains to be seen exactly what these allusions will mean!

The magic system is divided into various disciplines defined by the different ways they approach doing magic, with the disciplines breaking down broadly along the same lines as the modern scientific disciplines. For example, our protagonist is a thanatomancer ("necromancer" having become unfashionable), which is the discipline dealing with death; she's specifically an entropic thanatomancer, distinguished by their framework viewing death as the cessation of processes.

Magic relies on an energy that they refer to as 'eris' (unknown relation to the Greek goddess of strife and discord). We are told that eris must be carefully apportioned across the elements of a spell or shit blows up, that it can be stored, and it accumulates gradually enough that you don't want to be wasteful with it, but so far given little information about where it comes from.

Magic in this story generally seems to act as a kind of 'sufficiently advanced technology'. It's very rules-based, and used for a lot of mundane ends like operating computers or transport. Advancement in magic is something like a combination of basic research and software development. But the thing that makes it a magic system and not merely alt-physics is that it's at least a little bit personal: it must be invoked by an individual, and only certain people can operate the magic. We're told a little about how wizards are privileged in some societies, indoctrinated in social utility in others, and expected to be inconspicuous in the present setting. It's not clear yet if you need some kind of special innate capacity to do the magic, or if it's just a matter of skill issue.

With one exception, our main characters are a gaggle of wizards, and exceptionally skilled students at that. They're at an elite institution, carrying high expectations, even if they are themselves fairly dismissive of the pomp and ceremony. They have grandiose plans: Kamrusepa in particular is the main voice of the 'death should be abolished' current.

the cast

We're entering a cloistered environment with high political stakes hanging off of it. Even if I hadn't already heard it described as a murder mystery, it would feel like someone will probably be murdered at some point, so lets round up our future suspects.

Su (Utsushikome) is our protagonist and first-person POV. She's telling this story in the first past tense, with a style calling to mind verbal narration; she'll occasionally allude to future events so we know for sure narrator!Su knows more than present!Su. She's got a sardonic streak and she likes long depressing antijokes, especially if the punchline is suicide. She will happily tell us she's a liar - so maybe her narration isn't entirely reliable, huh.

Su is more than a little judgemental; she doesn't particularly like a lot of her classmates, or people in general, and generally the first thing she'll tell you about a character is how well she gets on with them. She introduces the theme of 'wow death sucks' in the first paragraph, but she is, at least at this point, pessimistic that anyone will manage to do anything about it for good.

Her magical specialisation is entropic thanatomancy, roughly making processes go again after they working coherently.

Her name is a reference to an obscure Japanese empress, as discussed above.

Ran is Su's bestie from the same home country. She is generally pretty on the level. She likes romance novels and she is pretty sharp at analysing them. She will cheerfully team up with Su to do a bit or bait someone else when an argument gets going.

Her magical specialisation is Divination, which is sort of a more fundamental layer of magic, about gathering information by any means. In medicine it's super advanced diagnostics.

Her name is too short to pin down to a specific allusion. Could be one of a couple of disciple of Confucius such as Ran Geng, or a Norse goddess of the sea.

Kam (Kamrusepa) is the de facto class prez and spotlight lover. She's hardcore ideological, the story's main voice of the de Grey/Bostrom death-abolishing concept so far - I think she straight up calls someone a 'deathist' at some point. She loves to tell everyone what she thinks about everything, and getting the last word.

Her magical specialisation is Chronomancy, so time magic. It's described as secretive and byzantine, but also it can do stuff like (locally?) rewind time for about five minutes. No doubt it has something to do with the time loop.

As mentioned above, she's named after a fairly obscure ancient deity of healing and magic.

Theo (Theodoros) is a fairly minor character. He's scatterbrained and easily flustered, he has a similar background to our protagonist, and he's not great with people. His name is shared with a number of ancient Greek figures, so it's hard to narrow it down to one allusion. I don't think his magic school has been mentioned.

Ptolema is a cheery outgoing one, someone who Su dismisses as an airhead. And she is at least easy to bait into saying something ill-considered. Her specialisation is applying magic to surgery. As a character, she tends to act as a bit of a foil to the others. Bit of a valley girl thing going on.

'Ptolema' is presumably a feminised version of the renowned Greek philosopher Ptolemy.

Seth is the jock to Ptolema's prep, and our goth protag Su doesn't particularly like him either. ...lol maybe that's too flippant, I may be misapplying these US high school stereotypes. To be a little more precise then, he's pretty casual in demeanour, flirty, likes to play the clown. He specialises in Assistive Biomancy, which revolves around accelerating natural healing processes.

Seth is named for either the Egyptian god (domain: deserts, violence and foreigners) or an Abrahamic figure, the third son of Adam and Eve granted by God after the whole Caim killing Abel thing.

Ophelia is someone Su describes as 'traditionally feminine' - soft-spoken, demure etc. (Gender in this world appears to be constructed along broadly similar lines to ours). Indeed we get a fairly extended description of her appearance. Her specialisation is Alienist Biomancy, which means introducing foreign elements to healing (not entirely sure how that differs from the Golemancy mentioned later).

Ophelia is of course a major character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, best known for going mad and dying in a river.

Fang is the only nonbinary member of the class, noted as the most academically successful. They're not on the expedition, but the characters discuss them a little in their absence, so maybe they'll show up later. It seems like they have a bit of a rebellious streak. Their magical specialisation is not mentioned.

Fang is a regular ol' English word, but I gave it a search all the same and found there's an ancient Chinese alchemist of that name. She is the oldest recorded woman to do an alchemy in China, said to know how to turn mercury into silver.

Lilith is the teenaged prodigy in computers logic engines, and Mehit is her mother who accompanies her on the trip. They've got a big Maria and Rosa (of Umineko) dynamic going on, with Mehit constantly scolding Lilith and trying to get her to obey social norms, though in contrast to Maria, Lilith is a lot more standoffish and condescending to the rest of the gang. Lilith specialises in 'Golemancy', which means basically medical robotics - prosthetic limbs and such. She spends most of her time fiddling with her phone logic engine, and will generally tell anyone who talks to her that they're an idiot. Sort of a zoomer stereotype.

Lilith is named for the Abrahamic figure, the disobedient first wife of Adam who was banished and, according to some Jewish traditions, subsequently became a demon who attacks women at night. There may be some connection between Lilith and the lioness-headed Mesopotamian chimeric monster Lamashtu, which I mention because Mehit is an Egyptian and Nubian lion goddess.

'Golemancy' is probably playing on the popular fantasy idea of a 'golem' as a kind of magic robot, but given the Jewish allusion in Lilith's name here, I do wonder a little bit if it's going to touch on the Jewish stories of the Golem which inspired it - a protective figure with a specific religious dimension.

There are some other characters but they're not part of the main party on their way to the function, so I won't say much about them just yet. Also it's entirely possible I went and forgot an entire classmate or something, big whoops if so.

the events

In true Umineko tradition, the beginning of the story narrates in great detail how the protagonists make their way to the place where the plot is going to happen.

To be fair, there's a lot of groundwork to be laid here, and the characters' discussions do a lot to lay out the concerns of the story and sketch out the setting, not to mention establish the major character relations. A murder mystery takes a certain amount of setup after all! There's plenty of sci-fi colour to be had in the 'aetherbridge', which is a kind of space elevator that lifts you up to a high altitude teleporter network. (It's technically not teleportation but 'transposition', since teleportation magic also exists in the story, with different restrictions! But close enough for government work.)

They go to a huge space citadel, which is kind of a transport hub; some cloak and dagger shit happens to hide the route they must take to the mysterious secret organisation. They find a strange room with a missing floor and a mural of the Epic of Gilgamesh, albeit modified to render it cyclic. What does it meeaaaan?

The idea of a secret society of rationalists is one that dates back to the dawn of ratfic, in HPMOR. It was kinda dumb then, but it works a lot better here, where we're approaching the wizard circle from outside. The phrase 'Great Work' has already been dropped. I love that kind of alchemical shit so I'm well into finding out what these wizards are plotting.

the dying

A lot of the discussions revolve around the mechanics of death. Essentially the big problem for living forever is information decay. Simple cancers can be thwarted fairly easily with the magic techniques available, but more subtle genetic slippages start to emerge after the first few hundred years; later, after roughly the 500 year mark, a form of dementia becomes inevitable. It's this dementia in particular that the characters set their sights on curing.

One thing that is interesting to me is that, contra a lot of fantasy that deals with necromancy (notably the Locked Tomb series), there appears to be no notion of a soul in this world whatsoever. The body is all that there is. Indeed, despite all the occult allusions in the character names, there is very little in the way of religion for that matter. Even the 'fundamentalism' is about an idea of human biological continuity that shouldn't be messed with too much.

Su distinguishes three schools of thought on death, namely 'traditional', 'transformative' and 'entropic'. The 'traditional' form attempts to restore limited function - classic skeleton shit. 'Transformative' sees death as a process and uses dead tissues together with living in healing. Su's 'entropic' school broadens this 'process' view to consider death as any kind of loss of order - a flame going out as much as an organism dying. At the outset of the story, Su has discovered a 'negentropic' means to restore life to an organism, which she considers promising, even if for now it only works for fifteen minutes.

This is an interesting perspective, but the devil is in the details. Because processes such as life or flames, necessarily, result in a continuous increase in the thermodynamic entropy of the universe. And yet this idea of death-as-loss-of-order does make a kind of sense, at a certain level of abstraction.

Elaborating on this got rather too long for this post, and I think it can stand alone, so I'm going to extract it to a followup post.

the comments

As is probably evident by the length of this post, I am very intrigued by The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere. The setting is compelling, and it seems like it's got the willingness to bite at the chewy questions it raises instead of acting like it has all the answers, which is I think one of the most crucial elements for this kind of scifi. I like how unabashed it is at having its characters straight-up debate shit.

Of course, this all depends where they go with it. There's so many ways it could be headed at this point. I hear where it's going is 'dark yuri' and 'Umineko-inspired murder mystery', so that should be really juicy fun, but I do end up wondering what space that will leave to address the core theme it's laid out in these first few chapters.

Overall, if this and Worth the Candle are what modern ratfic is like, the genre is honestly in pretty good shape! Of course, I am reading very selectively. But this is scratching the itch of 'the thing I want out of science fiction', so I'm excited to see where the next 133 chapters will take me.

Though all that said, I ended up writing this post all day instead of reading any other chapters or working, so I may need to rein it in a bit.

[ryin-silverfish]

Went and made a rudimentary fix to Nezha's Wikipedia page, which has been irking me for a long, long time.

Since it's my first time editing, I'm probably messing up the citations, but at least the "Story" section is now a summary of Nezha's origin story in FSYY proper instead of the Nezha Conquers the Dragon King version.

If I had time to get a proper grasp on the editor, I'll probably add in some more stuff from his entry in SJSSDQ. For now, this will do.

[bookmuseum]

[REVIEW] War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4/5 stars (★★★★)

DISCLAIMER: I will compare W&P a lot to Anna Karenina because it’s Tolstoy’s other masterpiece and my favorite book. Also oh my God, this review is so long and disorganized. I tried my best to break it apart into digestible sections, but that’s what happens when I take over a month to read a Russian brick with a girth the size of Napoleon’s fat French ego.

“I was happy and free and in such a good mood. I didn’t realize how happy I was. When did that end, and when did this ghastly business begin?”

General Overview and W&P as a “Book”

It took me seven years to finally read this book. I got this beautiful clothbound Penguin edition in my last year of high school from my best friend. Another girl in my class (who I didn’t like because she said Dostoyevsky wasn’t good, the bitch) was reading it too to show off that she could do it, and the petty side of me wanted to immediately start it (I had already read Anna Karenina and loved it, how hard can it be?) but I also knew there was absolutely no way an eighteen year old going into Biology for university would even survive the first 100 pages of W&P. And I was right. I am so glad I chose to wait until I was a little older (and transferred to English, leaving my cursed STEM days behind) to finally read it. I am not eager to re-read it any time soon though. 

Before I actually started W&P, I watched a few documentary videos and did a modest Wikipedia dive into the Napoleonic Wars, particularly the Battle of Borodino and the French invasion of Russia in 1812 that I knew the novel’s climax would lead up to. I did this partly because I’m insane, but mostly because I knew virtually nothing about this point in time beyond what I learned in high school (most of my Russian historical knowledge starts around the late 19th to early 20th century). I was so, so glad that I did some research beforehand because I would’ve been so lost if I didn’t! I knew this edition translated and edited by Anthony Briggs was lacking in the supplementary reading department just from skimming the Introduction (the book gradually decreased its footnote quality and quantity as the book progressed), so I had to find my context elsewhere. I had fun researching, though I know not many would have found it all that entertaining. I also looked a little more into Tolstoy’s life and read the book’s chronology of him. Despite being one of my favorite authors, I feel like as a person he’s very distant and far away to me, which makes it even more hard-hitting during the moments when he says stuff that’s all too real like, “The countess was repeating the delusion of so many parents, who imagine their children have no secrets from them.” Damn, Leo. You’re right. 

I spent a week on the preliminary stuff. W&P is one of those epic classic tomes that everyone says they’ll read, but never do. I totally get it. I honestly almost died and/or accidentally gave myself a concussion trying to haul this book around while I was reading it. This shit takes dedication. Even though I had some background set up, it was still difficult to know where to start because it’s so, so long. Yes, I love Russian literature, but I’d be lying if I said W&P’s >1400+ pages didn’t intimidate me. It also didn’t help that the book itself was awkward and heavy to carry; it made me realize how I do a lot of reading on-the-go because the book was so huge and unportable that I was forced to leave it at home whenever I went out, which significantly slowed down my reading pace. (W&P isn’t exactly a light cafe read that I can just tote around all day). That being said, I was surprised at how straightforward and easy to read the actual prose was, especially in the beginning when Tolstoy focused more on exposition and introducing the plot. I was so grateful that the chapters were so short; I think that alone kept me reading and significantly interested for a good chunk because I’d suddenly find myself having read 100 pages without getting too tired with the story. The writing is modern and simple enough to follow for the most part, although Briggs did say in his Introduction that one of his biggest aims was to make the book more accessible. For anyone who wants to read W&P but is scared to do it, I would say that, at least, this is one of its few consolations. 

I Hate Men But Specifically Andrey Bolkonsky

My first impression when I actually got into the thick of things was that I really, really disliked the main male characters. When I met Prince Andrey and Pierre, I immediately hated the former and was extremely wary of the latter for appearing to be such a weak-willed person. I think Tolstoy succeeded a little too well in establishing Pierre as a rakish, deplorable character at the start of the book. His initial slutty, drunken forays at Kuragin’s were boring to read. I thought the bear tied to the police episode was funny, but when it was actually happening I was more disgusted by the careless animal torture done by these rich upper-class men than the cop harrassment. So much male stupidity in those beginning parts; I found it hard to sympathize with Pierre and even got to a point where I was frustrated he was one of the main characters. Like big whoop, you’re a bastard and don’t know your father very well but you’re also his favorite so you’re not like other girls wah wah what happened to “No one has ever complained of being too much loved“? Get real and grow up, Pierre. (I’d eventually grow fond of him, but not for another hundred or so pages).

Andrey was even worse because he had the audacity to stay horrible the entire time. His mistreatment of his young pregnant wife Princess Lise really unsettled me, especially that scene when she tries to call him out on his cruelty for leaving her all alone with his family even though she’s scared to give birth to his child amongst strangers and Andrey essentially throws a manchild tantrum, making her feel guilty for worrying about the future. Pierre was also in that scene and he just stood by and did nothing, even when the “little princess” was violently sobbing, which is so typical. I think Lise’s character was well written, albeit one-dimensional. She was a complete victim. Tolstoy illustrates very well how men enable and excuse one another’s misogyny and violence. I never forgave Andrey for what he did to her. When she says, “I loved all of you, I never hurt anybody, and look what you have done to me, just look what you have done to me,” it broke my heart and I relished in how it made Andrey feel so guilty. 

He grew more infuriating when he got on the battlefield. He seemed so indifferent to all the carnage around him, spending most of his energy glorifying the war and not caring about anyone but himself. Even when he does change and start to reflect more on who he is as a person, he always fell short from truly realizing the immensity of his assholeism. More on him later.

I did like some male characters though, like Denisov and his odd way of talking. I also liked old Count Ilya Rostov, Kutuzov, Platon Karatayev, and little prince Nikolay. I knew Petya was going to die so I forced myself not to like him much, which wasn’t very hard since he was kind of a dithering idiot.

Thoughts on the Rostovs and Russian Aristocracy

I liked reading about the Rostovs consistently; I think out of the four main families in the book (although can I really count the Drubetskoys as a fourth?), I enjoyed their sections the best. Interestingly enough, out of the Rostovs, I found the eldest daughter Vera the most fascinating, so I was kind of disappointed when Tolstoy married her off and she didn’t show up in the text anymore after that little housewarming party. He established her as a Lady Macbeth-like figure and I thought she had so much potential being the “black sheep” of the Rostov clan. I know the book is already long as it is, but I wouldn’t have minded more exploration of Vera, but oh well.

With the Rostovs, I also met another male character I never learned to like much, which is Nikolay. He was entertaining at first in Volume I, but quickly turned extremely dull and like a spoiled brat in my eyes, especially when he goes to war. More on him later, but for now all I can say is there’s no way Tolstoy didn’t know he was making Nikolay into a queer coded character. There is no heterosexual explanation for how homeboy was practically ecstatic and pissing himself whenever he saw the tsar.

I hated the wolf hunting section. I hate hunting scenes in general, but this one is one of the most extravagantly bullshit ones I’ve ever read. So many people were involved just to go chase after a wolf and her cubs; I found it all extremely stupid and diabolically gauche. Amongst many things, the hunt and how excited everyone was for it reminded me how radically different life was back then, especially in regards to the painful disparity between the classes. That part, more than any other in W&P, was so unnecessarily drawn out and lugubriously artificial in its useless aristocratic camaraderie and performative civility to me. Like with the rest of the novel, I was struck by the fact that the characters are very human, yes, but I found them very hard to relate to here because their nobility made them more cringe-worthy and idiotic than usual. I liked that line: “He looked on life as one long party that someone was bound to arrange for him.” I thought that encapsulated the Russian aristocrats perfectly. Their gross wealth and frivolous “problems” painted them in pathetic, unworthy colors to me. When they said stuff like, “But then, I am used to suffering,” and “I shall remember there are no rewards in this world, that in this world there is no honour or justice. In this world you need to be clever and wicked,” I found myself rolling my eyes with the melodrama of it all, rather than actually feeling bad for them. Call me heartless, call me vain. So much rich white people nonsense. Tolstoy unintentionally made it worse by meticulously mentioning the lower classes, valets, peasantry, serfs, servants, and subordinates that attended to all these people. 

Thankfully, after the Rostov hunting episode came one of my favorite sections in the book: Tolstoy’s writing turned magical when he described the Rostovs’ Christmastime in the country. Natasha’s character became more fleshed out here and, to me, she started to be more like a human being that breathes and thinks and feels. That section reminded me a lot of the lyricism and romantic aspects I love so much from AK. It reminded me why I love Tolstoy’s writing; it made me feel so nostalgic and happy just like the characters were, though even when I read it I kept shaking my head because Tolstoy loves romanticizing the poor and “simple” life whilst at the same time never seeing the peasant and serf characters as equals worthy of contemplation.

W&P goes on to have a lot of great lines on truth, the human condition, and the cosmos like, “Nothing has been discovered . . . and nothing has been invented. The only thing we can know is that we don’t know anything. And that is the summit of human wisdom,” and “I feel I can never disappear because nothing disappears in the whole universe, and more than that, I always shall be and always have been in existence. I feel that other spirits exist, far above me, and it’s in their world that you will find truth.” A lot of these quotes were delivered by the Rostovs. I wrote down a lot of them because I appreciated their existential quality, kind of like some of the scenes when Pip was looking up at the sky in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. (Of course, the scene that parallels that one best of all is the great comet of 1812 one with Pierre at the end of Volume II). There were a handful of amazing parts, which is to be expected of a classic, but of course it’s impossible to list and talk about them all in the detail that I would want to. 

War (Eugh)

“Once you allow that human life is subject to reason you extinguish any possibility of life.”

I won’t lie: Unlike with AK, which was at least consistent in how it centered around the Russian nobility and high society, I found W&P to be quite a slog a good chunk of the time, especially once we went to war and Tolstoy started going off about shit like, “Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to to get what he wants, and he feels with every fibre of his being that at any particular time he is free to perform an action or refrain from doing so, but the moment any action is taken it becomes an irrevocable piece of history, with a significance which has more to do with predetermination than freedom.” Like okay, that’s somewhat touching and novel, but then he goes on with the long, long passages like:

“We, their descendants — those of us who are not historians seduced by the pleasures of research and can therefore review events with unclouded common sense — find ourselves faced with an incalculable multiplicity of causes. The more deeply we go into the causes, the more of them there are, and each individual cause, or group of causes, seems as justifiable as all the rest, and as false as all the rest in its worthlessness compared with the enormity of the actual events, and it’s further worthlessness (unless you combine it with all the other associated causes) in validating the events that followed . . . If any one of these causes had been missing, nothing could have happened. It follows therefore that all of these causes, billions of them, came together to bring about subsequent events, and these events had no single cause, being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen. Millions of men, abandoning all human feelings and common sense, were bound to march from west to east and slay their fellows, just as a few centuries ago hordes of men had marched from east to west slaying their fellows.”

Initially my reaction to these tangents was, “That’s all well and fine, Leo. You go, you funky little man,” but my bemusement didn’t last. Maybe because I’m not Russian. After Volume III especially, Tolstoy suddenly decides his yapping about historiographic theory is much better than the hundreds of pages of plot he’d set up and gotten me invested in. Every couple chapters, he’d interrupt the narrative to sprinkle in something groundbreaking like, “‘The hearts of kings are in the hands of God.’ . . . Kings are the slaves of history. . . . History — the amorphous, unconscious life within the swarm of humanity — exploits every minute in the lives of kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends.” Very witty, very wise, but there is a reason why this book is so long and it’s partly unjustified. 

While I enjoyed some of these ruminations, I had hoped, like a fool, that the philosophizing would tone down, but it gradually increased. There are entire series of chapters of just Tolstoy presenting his ideas on war, history, freedom, morality, greatness, etc. He made sure you knew he was clever and everyone else was his inferior: “And it never enters anybody’s head that to acknowledge greatness as something existing beyond the rule of right and wrong is to acknowledge one’s own nothingness and infinite smallness . . . And greatness cannot exist without simplicity, goodness and truth.” Though I didn’t necessarily disagree with what he was saying, it was genuinely so aggravating, his Tolstoyian high-horse. (I know what you’ve done Leo, I know the things you did and how messy you were in real life). I fell asleep during these parts the most. I thought I’d enjoy reading about the war sections since I knew Tolstoy drew from his own personal military and war experience, but I found the battlefield to be as boring as it was unoriginal. True, Tolstoy mentions dead men, blood, explosions, gunfire, and chaos, but he does it so casually and without much emotional weight, which is effective in showing just how mind-numbing war is, but it was also somewhat narratively dull: “He was looking at faces and bodies, but they all seemed equally meaningless.” Tolstoy ironically made me all the more sure that, despite all the fanfare and loud noise, war is very boring -- more so than I think he intended. It’s true I was impressed by the book’s extremely vivid details at the start, but over time it grew unbearable and overwhelming. There’s only so much genius you can admire in a man like Tolstoy until you get exhausted with his vanity. He loves the sound of his own voice.

When he did go into his characters’ minds though, I really liked it. I liked when Nikolay had his arm blown off by a cannon exploding and that part when he’s being chased after by two French soldiers but all he can think about is how they don’t really want to kill him, surely, because “everybody loves me!” That made me laugh. Ah, human folly. I liked the moments when characters were just in complete shock with what was happening to them: “It was beyond belief: they were the only ones who knew what life meant to them, so they couldn’t understand, or believe, that it could be taken away.” Tolstoy demonstrated a very intimate yet detached outlook on the battlefield and war. Through the characters, W&P elegantly depicted the anxiety, painful waiting, and standstill of war right before a big fight happens, and then suddenly everything’s unrecognizable chaos:

“One step across that dividing line, so like the one between the living and the dead, and you enter an unknown world of suffering and death. What will you find there? Who will be there? There, just beyond that field, that tree, that sunlit roof? No one knows, and yet you want to know. You dread crossing that line, and yet you still want to cross it. You know sooner or later you will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably find out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all around you just the same — strong, excited, and full of life.”

Even though I hate Andrey, I really liked his thoughts during the Schöngrabern engagement and the night leading up to Battle of Austerlitz: 

“Tomorrow, oh yes, tomorrow! . . . Maybe tomorrow will see the last of me, and there will be no more memories — all these memories will have no more meaning for me. Maybe tomorrow — yes, it must be tomorrow — I can feel it coming — for the first time I shall have to show what I’m made of. . . I don’t know what happens next, I can’t possibly know, I don’t wish to know, but if that’s what I want, if I want glory, if I want to be famous and loved by everyone, it’s not my fault that I want this, that this is all I care for, the only thing I live for. Yes, only this! I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone, but, my God!, what can I do, if I care for nothing but glory and the love of men?”

All of that made Andrey’s wake up-call at the end of Volume I all the more satisfying to read: “Looking Napoleon straight in the eye, Prince Andrey mused on the insignificance of greatness, on the insignificance of human life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and most of all the insignificance of death, which no living person could make sense of or explain . . . No, nothing is certain, nothing but the nothingness of all that we can understand, and the splendour of something we can’t understand, but we know to be infinitely important!”

Unfortunately he only half gets it because it's after this that Andrey turns really cynical and broods more than usual, which is so unattractive and irritating: “Who’s right and who’s wrong? No one is. Just live for the day . . . tomorrow you die . . . I could have died an hour ago. And why worry when you’ve only got a second to live on the scale of eternity?” He really thought he had discovered something new about the universe and that made him special, when really he just came to one of the laziest conclusions there is. 

Princess Marya Best Girl

It’s safe to say that I much preferred the “peace” sections in the book. I don’t have enough time or patience to discuss every part that struck me, but I just wanted to mention that scene in Bald Hills when Princess Marya tries to prepare herself and look pretty to meet Anatole while her friends fussed over her in vain. It was really relatable. Her body dysmorphia broke my heart, I knew exactly how she felt. And Princy Vasily and Anatole’s thinly veiled misogyny and complete indifference to all her efforts were all too cruel and realistic. Ugh. Men! It’s always the men!

I think Marya was one of the most strikingly humane characters, which was unexpected because Tolstoy usually doesn’t imbibe his female characters with that much soul (or when he does, he kills them off eventually like Anna Karenina). His scathing depiction of the Bolkonsky’s family gender dynamics were eerily brilliant. It was so obvious that Andrey and the old prince expected Marya to do all of the emotional labor and caretaking for them, but they never once acknowledge even to themselves that what they're doing is cruel. I found their relationships and interactions with one another to be viscerally realistic. It’s clear the old prince’s mounting torture of Marya stems from the fact that he emotionally and physically relies on her to a degree that he can't intellectually handle, so he compensates for his feeling emasculated by his own daughter by bullying her severely. Despite appearances, Marya is the head of the family. She’s the nucleus of the household yet also the one with the least appreciation and authority — a classic conundrum of being a woman, particularly the eldest (or only) daughter in a male-dominated household. Even with Mademoiselle Bourienne (who also puts her through a lot of emotional labor that she doesn’t seem to reciprocate), Marya acts more like an elder sister than an equal friend: “I love you more than ever . . . and I shall try to do everything in my power to make you happy.” And the worst part is that Bourienne betrays her over and over again, first with Anatole then her father! It was so upsetting. To add, when Lise was alive, Marya was at her beck and call more than anyone to the point of exhaustion; it’s almost like she symbolically took on the emotional burden of pregnancy, whilst Lise handled the physical and literal aspects of it (not to downgrade either of those, of course). Marya perfectly embodies what countless women are forced to go through every day for little to no reward; it was all so pathetically spot-on and tragic. 

I was even more impressed because Tolstoy emphasizes how Andrey also contributes to Marya’s suffering, but he doesn’t even see it because he’s too caught up with patting himself on the back for being such a good brother and son. Marya literally raises his baby for him and he never once expresses anything like gratitude throughout the entire book, as if her being Nikolay’s surrogate mother after Lise died was always a given. It made his supposed “remorse” for losing his wife seem even more disgustingly inauthentic because he didn’t learn anything from her death, as evidenced by how he continues to mistreat his sister -- the woman who selflessly tries to be both the mother Nikolay never had and the emotional support to Andrey that he’s been deprived of when Lise died. It’s so horrible too because, even though there is that one small part at Bald Hills when they “co-parent” the baby while he’s sick, it’s overwhelmingly clear that Marya does the day-to-day childcare and Andrey just fucks off whenever he feels like it. When he does come back, he almost always complains about how she’s raising his son by disagreeing with the decisions she is so clearly more qualified to make for him. In general, he’s so condescending to her in a way that annoyingly echoes his father’s sadism; for example, there's that one scene where Andrey and Pierre find Marya hanging out with some pilgrims, and Andrey the asshole’s immediate reaction is to belittle and make fun of her to the point that even Pierre gets a little freaked out by it and apologizes to her for him. His weaponized incompetence and total cognitive dissonance to reality coupled with his laughable attempts to prove himself a “good man” throughout the book made him a joke of a character to me. That’s why I really liked that small jab Tolstoy includes when Andrey is being sassy towards his sister, claiming to have his own private epiphanies that she couldn’t possibly understand. The text says, “It was at times like this that Princess Marya thought how desiccated men’s minds become with all that intellectual activity.” Get his ass, Marya! Eviscerate him! He isn’t smart or deep, he’s just a complete tool! I was so glad when he died, I don’t care.

Tolstoy also kept bringing up how, to the very end, Marya always managed to make excuses and forgive her family, especially her father, but the reader really can’t help but feel absolutely infuriated for her. Even if he didn’t intend to show it, it’s obvious Tolstoy based a lot of Marya’s character on his own wife, who did the majority of his emotional and domestic labor for him in real life. It’s very typical that Tolstoy subtly admires and narratively allies himself with Marya because he likes and is attracted to her nobility in theory but in actuality he fails to appreciate or even help his wife with her own work and the life they supposedly share together. Ugh! Men! Always men!

Pierre, Dear Bewildered And Awkward Pierre 

I hope all that ranting has proven that Marya is my favorite character and the one I relate to the most. Pierre is a relatively close second. Even though we had a rough start, I did eventually come around to liking him and his awkwardness. I laughed when Julie Karagin calls him “a miserable specimen of manhood.” That’s when I knew I was dealing with an ideal Russian novel protagonist. By the end of the novel, Pierre is even a little self-aware of his own mysteriously intriguing essence, which I found quite funny: “I’ve come to the conclusion it’s an easy life being an interesting person. (I am now an interesting person.) People invite me over, and they do the talking.”

Tolstoy took great care defining Pierre and fleshing him out not just as the stereotypical “good man,” but a man trying to be good and usually failing: “He had the unfortunate capacity that many men have . . . for seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, yet seeing the evil and falsehood in life too clearly to be capable of taking any serious part in it.” He reminded me a lot of Kostya from AK, of course, but he felt more flawed and malleable than Konstanin because he just kept messing up over and over again. (True, Kostya also screwed up a lot, but Pierre is on a whole different level). And, most endearingly, he kept coming back for more, which was as admirable as it was ridiculously foolish. I love how Tolstoy lowkey suggested he reached the pinnacle of human suffering: “He had learnt that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and those limits are never far away; that a man who has felt discomfort from a crumpled petal in his bed of roses has suffered just as much as he was suffering now, sleeping on the bare, damp earth, with one side freezing while the other side warmed up . . .” Basically, he went through so much bullshit that he reached the last boss level of agony and found enlightenment. Huzzah.

Yes, I felt for Pierre’s seemingly never-ending struggle trying to find his purpose in life, which I found to be more noble than any other character’s quest for meaning (Andrey’s was just pretentious). Pierre went through rollercoaster after rollercoaster of emotions throughout the entire book -- arguably, he experiences the entire spectrum of human emotions, which is what makes him so grand to me. Even when he started growing cynical after he got arrested and put into prison, I never blamed him for being pessimistic like I did with Andrey: “But now he felt he wasn’t to blame for the world collapsing before his eyes and leaving nothing but meaningless ruins behind. He felt powerless; there was no way back to his old faith in life.” I know it’s not exactly fair to compare both their sufferings or claim one got hurt more than the other (although Andrey did die, so I guess he wins in that department), but Pierre’s internal struggles matched his external grievances much more poetically to me than anyone else’s did. I was fascinated with how he went back and forth from aristocratic balls, futile trips to manage his different estates, underground clubs with gambling and debauchery, visits to his relatives and loved ones, the battlefield, the freemasons’ secret hideouts and meetings, the soulless social functions, the Moscow streets on fire, the different towns on the home front being ravaged by the French, etc. He was compelling. He was a conqueror. Every step he took moved the book forward for me. His character development made his epiphanic moments near the end all the more satisfying:

“And out beyond the forests and fields lay all the shimmering, beckoning distance of infinity. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the play of the stars receding into the depths. ‘And it’s all mine, and it’s all within me, and it all adds up to me!’ thought Pierre. ‘And they caught all that, shut it up in a shed and boarded it in!’”

Pierre had his pathetic loverboy romantic moments too, which always helps. He was both Kostya and Count Vronsky, but better. The line, “If I was somebody else, the handsomest, the cleverest, the best man in the world, and if I were free, I’d be down on my knees right now begging for your hand and your love” will forever be iconic. I honestly didn’t warm up to Pierre and Natasha as a couple until the epilogue since they both seemed so unlikely, albeit good friends, for each other, but when Pierre said that line after gallantly rescuing her from the crafty Kuragin siblings marked a shift in my shipping journey with them. And of course no W&P review is complete without mentioning this absolutely gorgeous line said by him:

“Every single thing I understand, I understand only because of love. Everything is — everything exists — only because I love."

Oh, he’s such a dreamer! “The whole meaning of life, for him and the whole world, seemed to be contained in his love and the possibility of being loved in return.” Oh, how our hearts bleed for him! “With his heart overflowing with love he loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving.” You are too wholesome for this world, Pierre. Too soft, too emotional, too impressionable and well-intentioned! 

I will say though that Pierre Bezukhov has got to be one of the most unhinged characters I’ve ever come across in classic literature, and that’s saying something. (Yes, I’d even say he’s more unhinged than Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and Henry Jekyll). He was so unnerving and off his rocker the entire time. Tolstoy consistently portrays him as big and strong too, so I kept imagining this gentle giant who felt things too much and didn’t know how to handle it. One screw was always a little too loose with this guy. Even when he’d say poetic stuff like “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything is in flux and movement, and this movement is God . . . To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blessed thing is to love this life even in suffering, innocent suffering,” you’d smile and nod politely because yes, I agree, but you have genuinely lost your marbles, dude. There were parts when he would just burst out laughing randomly for no reason or stumble his way around town in a daze, like he wasn’t even aware of what he was doing. A lot of the time he genuinely was totally out of it. I could feel him physically vibrating with anxiety and angst, especially when he lost his temper (like when he challenges Dolokhov, that made my jaw drop) or when he confronts Anatole after he finds his wife and brother-in-law had conspired to abduct Natasha Rostov for their own selfish amusement. That entire interaction was insane, by the way. He was so right for banishing Anatole and rebuking him like that, but imagine your brother-in-law, who everyone makes fun of for being a corpulent cuckold, starts berating you about this girl you like and threatens to kill you if you don’t stay away from her. And that’s not all, because Pierre goes ahead and adds Anatole should instead fuck his sister, who is also his wife. Holy shit? I was cheering for him that entire scene; I loved how he threw those hands.

Also so hilarious that Pierre started off the book praising Napoleon to the point where he alienates himself from Russian high society but then later on he literally makes the “logical” conclusion that he needs to assassinate him because God chose him to do so apparently. That sequence of him just tweaking out and maniacally overanalyzing the Bible to justify why he needs to kill Napoleon immediately was peak. He’s insane and I cannot help but stan.

Natasha

When I first met the iconic Natasha I was a bit surprised she starts off as practically a child in the book because I knew her so well as the charming woman that Audrey Hepburn played in the 1956 adaptation. Despite being a child when the story starts, Tolstoy made sure you knew she was first and foremost a horny teenager, which was honestly so real of her. I was both amused and a little uncomfortable with how sexual Natasha was at all times. The “love scenes” between Natasha and Boris, as well as Sonya and Nikolay, were uncomfortable to read for me. 

Natasha is a favorite character for many, which I can understand. She was easily the most charismatic and enchanting character, especially when she was happy and doing her utmost to be the center of attention: “She was at the very peak of happiness, when a person is transformed into someone completely good and kind, and rejects the slightest possibility of evil, misery, and grief.” Her more contemplative, sensitive side was stunning too. I really love the conversation when Natasha says, “‘Do you ever get the feeling . . . that nothing’s ever going to happen to you again, nothing at all, and anything good is in the past? And you don’t feel bored exactly, but very, very sad?’” and her brother responds, “‘I’ll say! It’s happened to me. Everything’s fine, everyone’s happy, and suddenly you get this feeling of being fed up with everything, and realizing everybody’s going to die.’” How perfectly Tolstoy captures the feeling of restlessness and depression that comes with the humdrum of life! 

Yet, Natasha’s character was most relatable and tender to me when she was painfully pining away for that one year for Andrey. Her brief period of happiness slowly turning into mounting dread, anxiety, and doubt for whether or not she really loved him was splendidly done. Tolstoy affords her a lot of vulnerability and very authentic introspection: “She kept worrying about no one ever being able to understand everything that she understood, everything deep inside her.” Unlike her childhood dalliance with Boris (AKA Mr. Irrelevant), this was the first time she had been in love, and Tolstoy masterfully illustrated the struggles of budding female sexuality clashing with social propriety and courtship conventions. You could feel the potent frustration growing inside her that entire time Natasha was lovesick and helpless to do anything about it. As a woman, she can only wait for letters that gave her no answers or updates to a war she wasn’t allowed to understand. She had this burning passion within her and desperately wanted an outlet to express her love, but Andrey and everyone else (even her own family) cruelly kept her away from it because nobody imagined she as a young girl could feel that strongly, or suffer that deeply. Natasha’s problem really resonated with me as someone who’s had to spend a lot of time away from the people I most care about: “She felt sorry for herself, sorry that all this time was being wasted, passing by uselessly, no good to anyone, while she felt so eager to love and be loved.” I know what it’s like to just have so much love to give and have it amount to nothing. That’s why I wasn’t even that mad at her when she recklessly cancelled her engagement to get with fuckboi Anatole. She had spent months in a suffocating limbo of horniness and yearning so of course it made sense that she’d latch onto the first handsome guy who paid attention to her, even though anyone with a brain could see that Anatole is a rat. Whatever. She’s just a girl!

Natasha’s character development after the Anatole incident was also so brilliant, especially after she reunites with Andrey during the French invasion and nurses him on his deathbed. When he passes away, Tolstoy’s description of her raw grief in the aftermath was breathtaking (pun intended): “She was looking out towards the place in the other side of life where she knew he had gone to. And that other side of life, which she had never given a thought to in days gone by because it had always seemed so remote and unbelievable, was now closer, more natural to her and more understandable than this side of life, where there was nothing but emptiness and desolation or pain and humiliation.” The regret she feels when she says, “If I had told him what I was thinking about I would have said, ‘Even if he stayed like that, dying, dying, dying away before my eyes, I’d have been much happier than I am now.’ Now I have nothing . . . nobody . . . Did he know? No, he didn’t, and he never will. And now it will never, never be possible to put things right” felt so much more real and genuine than Andrey’s so-called remorse over never truly appreciating his dead wife while alive. Andrey wishes he was as deep as Natasha is. I was almost sick with jealousy when I read the line, “You must know that without you there is nothing left in my life, and suffering with you is the greatest possible happiness” because, girl, I know you were the one who screwed up the engagement and were disloyal, but he does not deserve you, get back up.

Fluffy Epilogue Straight Out of AO3

“I would never have believed it, never,’ she murmured to herself, ‘that anyone could be as happy as this.’ Her face glowed with a happy smile, but at the same moment she gave a sigh, and a gentle sadness showed in the depths of her eyes. It was as if there was a different kind of happiness, not like the happiness she was feeling here and now, a form of happiness beyond human experience, and it had come to her in an involuntary memory just at that moment.”

Really happy for Tolstoy that he gave himself an extra >200ish pages to wrap up everything in the same tooth-rotting, happy manner that fanfic writers on AO3 do. The entire first part of the epilogue was so shamelessly self-indulgent and gushy that it made the whole book worth it, no question. Seeing Natasha and Pierre’s married life, as well as learning how much becoming a wife, mother, and mistress of the house has changed Natasha for the better was truly a treat to read. It didn’t even feel like a forced “angel of the house” situation, which would’ve been annoying, because it genuinely made sense that Natasha made that transformation, and Tolstoy did point out that, even though she isn’t as “beautiful” as she was in her youth, she is definitely so much more vibrant and happier, which is what matters. I smiled so wide when Natasha cried out in joy and ran up to embrace Pierre after his long trip, only to do a complete 180 and start scolding him for being away for so long. Her nagging was spot-on and perfect. I loved the scenes where they were just chatting about everyday things, their children, the people they knew, gossip, etc. Tolstoy really depicted their love and marriage so beautifully: “You talk about what it’s like when we’re apart, but you wouldn’t believe what I feel for you when we’re back together again.” Even though I spent the majority of W&P uninterested in their love story, I realized by the epilogue’s conclusion that I adore this couple together and I am happy they are happy. Their love is based on mutual friendship and admiration.

I wish I could say the same for Princess Marya and Nikolay. My best girl ended up with a bare minimum man with anger issues who didn’t even like the nephew she dedicated so much of her life and energy raising all on her own. Plus, even though the epilogue was sweet, I couldn't help but feel utterly terrible for Sonya. I feel like she got one of the shittiest deals throughout the entire book, with Nikolay promising her, “I do love you. I think I love you more than anyone in the world . . . I’ve been in love thousands of times, and I shall be again and again, though I could never feel the same kind of warmth and trust and love that I do towards you” in the beginning, only to grow irritable and tired of her because she’s “too perfect”; then, after years of cheating on her with prostitutes while he was off at war, he marries someone else and she’s forced to live with them as a “sterile flower.” Even fouler that Sonya was the name of Tolstoy’s actual wife. For shame, Leo.

[zoanzon]

Someone on a discord I'm in asked us older-uns who were adults during the 2016 election what to do. I have no fucking clue, but I still managed to dig up some thoughts. It's long as shit, barely edited, and you don't know me from Bob in terms of 'credibility', but it's my few cents.

TLDR:

Back up content you want or need off the web now, before FOSTA-SESTA or related 'authoritarian censorship' stuff rolls out. This can be that your favorite fic you'd be heartbroken to see purged for being marked as pornographic content; this is also downloading family photos from Google Drive.

Learn how to garden, or learn how you can learn to garden in a pinch of you lose money and/or supply chains get fucked.

Have you heard of OPSEC and INFOSEC? Good, that's a start. Learn more. If you haven't heard of them, learn quick. This is 'loose lips sink ships' and 'do not take phones to protests (or anything else that might get judicial crackback)' as much as its 'get a VPN and make sure its reputable'.

And the original rambling post, for anyone interested:

Is more an abstract 'thing to do', but as a historian and amateur archivist who knows history of censorship, etc: Think about what you want to back-up. What you need saved, or think needs to be saved, and what you can save. If you've got stuff online on sites you think might not survive FOSTA-SESTA or Musk and Peter Thiel types getting carte blanch, back it up. If you go through a webpage you think should be saved to look back on for 'here is how things became what they are', save it. Looking back at 2016 when 'grab em by the pussy' was the most egregious shit - when the original Unite the Right rally happened and we were aghast - compared to now, its night and day. We got here day by day. This time it might be a bit more abrupt. Still. What are the posts, the pages, the tweets you think need to be saved, for yourself or for history? Save it.

(For example: SingleFile is a firefox addon that allows you to save, Wayback-style, webpages to your personal files and keeps all embedded media from the page! If you SingleFile a wikipedia page, you have it downloaded; if you hit a reddit page, you'll have it with intact formatting; and it'll even capture stills of tumblr pages with all posts on said pages. If you are looking at this Read More? If I ever get deactivated, this Read More is lost. The first part of the post can be reblogged, but no one can get into Read More sections of posts whose OP has seen deactivated. SingleFile the page you have this post opened in, and you have it on-hand forever. Wayback also exists, but that's contingent on the Internet Archive - Wayback's parent - surviving things. If it does, it does; but if you think your personal files will survive longer (or want to access osmething sans internet), SingleFile is there for you.)

Hell, between 'what if this gets censored off the web?' and 'what if I want to have a copy of this on-hand even without internet?' is a possible approach here. What fanfics would you like to have on hand, and to not loose to a site-purge? What Youtube videos bring you joy, and which ones are records you want kept from this time? What media do you want to pirate in case a company deletes old product, and how might that get worse under a second Trump reign? Start there, and figure out what else to back up next.

Otherwise, if you don't think you're going to be able to make it out of the country and you want to prepare for if things truly do go to shit, some things to look into include:

Do you know how to grow food? Otherwise, figure out if you have easy access to ways to learn (library, downloaded how-to PDFs, your gardener friend, etc). There's been intermittent episodes about food-growing (and community gardening) on It Could Happen Here

Maybe listen to It Could Happen Here, or at least put it on your watchlist. Robert (a long-time political-extremism journalist) originally started it in 2019 as a 'here is how a second american civil war could start' thing, and transitioned it into daily discussion of how to survive 'it' happening here...such as what's happening right now. Listen to ICHH; it might be depressing, but him and his cohosts know what they're talking about.

Learn what info-security and operations-security is. Any sort of activism is likely to be more dangerous than protests in the last few years, and those have still been a shitshot. Whether its 'do not take your phone to protests' to 'download a VPN' to 'loose lips sink ships': learn about the concepts, make sure you know how you can learn more. This is especially true if you wait to do this, as the more time any theoretical authoritarian govts have time to prepare, the more they might notice what info you are searching for. Paranoid? Not pessimistic enough? I'd rather you be thinking of this now than to realize its far too late.

Beyond that, yeah: if you can get out, that's not a bad idea. You're asking us for advice on how to survive, and the horrid fact is: this time is going to be so much worse. There's been more time for things to fester, more time for the fascists to gather power, more time for them to grow bloodthirsty. Again. History major. This is going to be really fucking bad.

Whether you get out or not, people need to come together more. Last time, the fascism rippled out: Trump got in, and a lot of similar cases went masks-off (or won elections) elsewhere. The same is likely true this time. In America or not, people need to come together; and it's the only way we'll survive or hold our own.

And in the meantime: figure out what you can save, or need to save. Save it. Figure out how to garden, or how to do maintenance on stuff that might start crumbling as shit gets bad, or figure out the basics of infosec and opsec. Do multiple if you can; do individual ones if you can't, or can reasonably work with others to cover each other's weaknesses.

It's still going to suck. There's no way this doesn't suck. Frankly, there's no way there's not going to be at least some horrific atrocities; it's just a question of how many, and how quick they start up. That's the best thing I can recommend, honestly, is: it's good to hope things somehow work out, but don't stick your head in the sand. If you hope the leopards don't eat your face because you stay still and don't move, maybe you'll live? But maybe not, and maybe you'll just see someone else get eaten. Preparing won't necessarily save you anyways. But, it'll buy you better odds, and it'll make the fascists a bit more annoyed, and enough annoyances might fuck them still. Hopefully this helps in some way.

[codenamesazanka]

OH apropos of not meme, just remembered this attempt at making an absurd ‘mundane’ AU that follows the canon storyline (no quirks, tho heteromorphs still exists):

AFO is a 60-year old hospital chairman in *excellent* shape, although recent brain tumor surgery did leave him blind. He is also co-author of some obscure sci-fi books in his youth, but he’s much more known for being an influential community leader… though his wikipedia page would have a looooong ‘controversies’ section.

All Might is a 58-year old local celebrity as a retired bodybuilder and actor, who now runs a local community service center. Also an influential community leader, with much higher public approval.

AFO and All Might have been at each other’s throat for years for various reasons, among them a long, drawn out custody battle over shared distant nephew Tomura. Tomura’s 20 years old now and a legal adult, but the feud lives on.

Meanwhile, Tomura has now grown up to be a lackluster truant college student with a penchant for stirring up trouble with his eclectic gang of friends he made from hanging out at an arcade and the dive bar next door (henceforth dubbed ‘the League’).

But the drama really starts when AFO and All Might get in a fight one night at a local high school charity event. Just really going at it. All Might threw the first punch, but All For One revealed his custom cane to have a hidden blade and was a bit too reckless with it.

So AFO is arrested; thanks to his lawyer, he avoids jail but only because the lawyer has been able to convince the courts that AFO is mildly senile. So he is entered into a nursing home. (I don’t know how courts work and I don’t care.)

Ujiko - AFO’s life partner, hospital’s chief medical director, and Tomura’s foster stepdad - takes this opportunity to cut off Tomura’s allowance to force Tomura to grow up a little (and to start attending his classes.)

This does not work. While trying to scrounge up cash, Tomura and his gang make enemies with the local shogi club (an open secret among everyone that it’s a front for growing weed). Conflict ends with a police raid and the League running over the club president/leader with a car. Don’t worry - Chisaki is alive, but both his arms are broken. Along with his spirit.

(Around this time, Kurogiri - AFO’s driver and Tomura’s old babysitter - is discovered to be a man with amnesia whose family has been looking for him for years, so he has to leave for a while.)

Hoping to instill some discipline in the boy, AFO’s friend and personal trainer Machia drags Tomura (and friends) on an extended mountain camping trip. During a hike, they become lost, end up trespassing on a cult intentional community’s property, and get hunted down (the intentional community is a survivalist group). However, Tomura’s newfound wilderness skills impress the survivalists leader so much that ReDestro decides to welcome them as guest fellow preppers. The League freeloads off them for the rest of winter.

Come early spring, Tomura wants to make good with Ujiko again, so he and everyone goes to a fundraising event Ujiko is hosting at the park…

…Unfortunately, someone messed up the scheduling, and booked a high school community service field trip at the same time and place. One thing leads to another and the day ends with:

several arrests and minor hospitalizations due to multiple brawls;

things set on fire;

one of the police chief’s sons exposed as an arsonist;

the park’s prized butterfly garden trampled beyond repair;

several people pushed into the lake and getting hypothermia;

the high school’s home ec teacher choked a local magician, who is hospitalized but for entirely different complications (accidentally stabbing himself);

Tomura’s friend Jin arrested after being tazed by a cop;

the intentional community banned from the park;

phone videos going viral;

high school students traumatized;

teachers under disciplinary review;

and Tomura sent to the emergency room for minor injuries and a concussion with overnight stay for observance.

Also Ujiko is now under investigation for embezzling charity funds for his and AFO’s side Neapolitan Mastiffs breeding business.

After being notified by his lawyer of the incident, AFO breaks out of the nursing home that night to kidnap Tomura from hospital and retreat to his beach house. His foster son is grounded. An American private tutor is also hired to force Tomura to make up his missed semester of classwork.

This now gives AFO the opportunity to spend some quality time getting to know Tomura’s awkwardly cute friend Spinner. For Spinner, this consists of guiding his friend’s 60-but-looks-40 blind foster dad who’s really into tactile communication, and having to read drafts of weird sci-fi because AFO has recently gotten back into writing. Meanwhile, AFO is making a dinner reservation for two at a beachside bistro.

[wordsandrobots]

Apropos of half-awake thoughts this morning, I've been considering the perennial subject of people coming into fan-works and making demands of the writer or artist in regards to their creative choices. You know, 'this is wrong', 'you should change this', 'make more!!!' etc. It's been quite some years since I had to deal with that kind of behaviour but I've seen it happen to other people and it always sucks. Today my brain has decided to connect it to Humphrey Smith.

Story time: the town I come from has three breweries. The reason for this is that the limestone we're built atop filters the local water, making it 1) good and hard and 2) easy to access. Technically we're a market town but brewing is the foundation of our modern economy.

Two of these breweries, John Smith's and Sam Smith's, are the remnants of the brewing empire started by John Smith, a Victorian gentleman endowed with truly spectacular mutton-chops and also money, who bought an existing brewery in the town before building a new, much more impressive one further up the street. After his death, the business was left to his brothers, one of whom would go on to leave the old brewery to his nephew Samuel. Thus, the empire split into two. Both halves are still operating and have been successful enough that the current owner of Sam Smith's -- Humphrey -- is the biggest land-owner in the town.

Here is where the problems begin. You see Humphrey is, to put it gently, crackers. He suffers from being exceptionally wealthy and, despite some motions towards investing in local amenities, largely exists on a moral crusade against the changing social mores of the 20th Century. He won't countenance any businesses that does not contribute to the atmosphere of a sleepy market town (read: basically anything), refuses to maintain or sell off his properties, leaving the place full of the rotting shells of buildings, and he's been at war with the town council so long, they're currently planning to build on a flood plane that does indeed routinely get swamped by the river just to have somewhere to put new houses.

The man is not well-liked, is what I'm saying. And among his 'charming eccentricities' are the strict requirements he enforces on the pubs he owns. Any Sam Smith's pub must be run by people of good moral character (preferably a married man and woman), there must be no music and no phones, no swearing, no motorcyclists, no kissing, etc, etc. Basically imagine the dourest stereotype of Yorkshire grimness and that's what he's actively aiming for (no I am not kidding, just check out the 'controversies' section of the Sam Smith's wikipedia page).

Anyway, the point of all this is that there's a lovely tale shared around the town about how, one day, our Humphrey walked into a local pub and said to the bar-tender something to the effect of, 'Switch off that music, throw those people out, take down those fixtures and fittings, this is not the Victorian traditionalism I pay you for.'

Only, the bar-tender leant over the bar and replied, 'well that's nice, Mr Smith, but this isn't one of your pubs.'

Should you find yourself in the position of having some dipstick with fixed opinions swan into your work and start telling you everything you've gotten wrong, I think you could do worse than bear this heroic chap's words in mind. Your work is not their pub. They have no claim on what you make and no grounds for enforcing their vision over yours. They aren't paying you, you aren't working for them, and frankly, they have profoundly misunderstood the situation if they think they're entitled to tell you want to do.

This is true even in the face of widely accepted fanon or when you're cutting against general expectations. In fandom, every piece of art is the result of our own personal reactions to a piece of media. We can decorate our individual pubs however we want and if other people don't like it, well, they can lump it. Go forth and do what you like, music and kissing and all!

[This post brought to you by the belated 11 year anniversary of that berk on dA who spent ages arguing with my attempt at redesigning the Quarks from Doctor Who. The *bloody Quarks*, man! Sheesh.]

[mumblingsage]

I've talked about Amanda Ripley's disaster survival book The Unthinkable before, and it turns out there's a new edition for 2024, if that's additional incentive to check it out. Today I'm remembering her chapter about Robert Olian, a bystander who attempted to rescue the survivors of Air Florida Flight 90 after the crash in the Potomac in 1982.

Olian saw the crash, and he and a few other witnesses stood on the shore of the freezing river, tied together a makeshift lifeline of scarves and jumper cables, and he set off with it to try to reach the survivors.

He was only a tiny portion of the way there when he realized he had bitten off way more than he could chew. As Ripley puts it:

At that point, Olian was just halfway there. He'd been in the water for about fifteen minutes. If it took another fifteen minutes to get to them, and it would probably take more since he was exhausted now, what would he do next? If he somehow summoned the strength to carry every one of them back across the football-filed length of water, it would take yet another thirty minutes at least. Realistically, there was no way his body--or the survivors--could last another forty-five minutes in that water. He remembers staring at the tail section of the plane and noticing how smooth it was. Even if he made it out there, there might be nothing to hold on to, he thought. "I was pretty sure I was gonna die," Olian says. "But that was OK. I had an internal calm and good feeling about that. I was not going to turn my back on those folks."

As you can tell from the bits of present tense, Olian did survive--a helicopter arrived and headed for him, thinking he was one of the plane passengers. He waved it toward the actual passengers to rescue them, while his fellow bystanders-turned-rescuers hauled him back to shore by the rope that was still tied to him.

Looking back, he said his motivation was a mix of overconfidence - at the time he jumped in, he truly believed he'd be strong enough to reach the survivors and help them, underestimating the depth of the water - and insecurity: he would have felt like a coward if he hadn't tried to help. And "If rational thought had entered my head at any point, I wouldn't have done it."

He didn't take off his steel-toed boots or remove the five pounds of keys in his pockets. He just jumped in. He needed to let those people know someone was trying to save them, he said later. That was all. "They had to see someone right now. If I was ever confident of anything in my life, it was this," he says in his slow, methodical way. "Worst-case scenario, I would be totally ineffective in saving them, but at least I would give them hope."

And in the end, according to the survivors, he did. Watching a guy try to swim to you with a rope is at least something to do while you cling to the wreckage of your plane; the hope he might make it also gave them the motivation to keep clinging on and keep their heads above the freezing water. They survived long enough for the helicopter to arrive (one of the six surviving passengers, Arland D. Williams Jr., was caught on the wreckage and rather than spend time trying to work himself free, passed the rescue lines the helicopter dropped to the other five. Tragically, by the time rescuers returned to get him, he had drowned. He received a number of posthumous honors including a stretch of the repaired 14th Street bridge being named for him. Ripley gives Williams short shrift in her book and highlights examples of heroism from the other five passengers, but his Wikipedia page has links to other accounts in his honor.)

I guess some of this could be turned into an object lesson somehow. The importance of hope, observations about selflessness and heroism, the advice to, if you must attempt to swim across a frozen river, at least make sure someone's tied a cable to you so they can haul you back. Olian's always stuck with me as an example of a hero who failed in his rescue attempt and, if you were to be highly cynical, made a bit of a fool of himself - and yet he's inspiring all the same.