#the framing device was much more interesting than the story itself

[scary-grace]

blurbs on the back of a horror novel: scariest book ever! gave Stephen King nightmares! Gave Stephen King’s nightmares nightmares! omg so scary

me if I had to write a blurb after reading it: meh

[caw-oticdork]

Since my previous podcast recommendation list was pretty popular, I've decided to make another, with another bunch of excellent podcasts:

13 Minutes or Less - Short podcast with very short episodes, about a pizza chef who doesn't like dealing to people but has to do some deliveries due to short staffing. Very much not her thing, but she does her best. As it turns out, her clients are quite a bit stranger and spookier than expected...

Additional Postage Required - Sci-Fi adventure about a nonbinary courier who gains the ability (or curse...) to get visions about the contents, past, and sender of packages they touch. They get roped into a rebellion. There's hoverboard racing. It's awesome.

Among the Stars and Bones - A team of xenoarcheologists search a distant world for traces of a long-vanished aliens. It's been a while since I watched this one, so I don't remember it very well, but I know that I enjoyed it. Very good sci-fi horror.

Dark Ages - Fantasy workplace comedy about a supernatural museum. Quite a lot of fun.

Dragon Shanty - Fantasy story about two bards traveling the high seas. There's dragons aplenty. Very queer. Excellent songs.

Falling Forward - Hacker story loosely based on the myth of Icarus and the Labyrinth, about getting back at a terrible corporation. Kinda experimental, this one has the shortest episodes I've ever seen.

Hotel Daydream - Podcast about the goings-on at a supernatural hotel. Very inventive, with really interesting characters.

Jar of Rebuke - Mystery about a researcher at an ominous cryptozoological organization out in the rural US. He's got no memories of his past and keeps dying and coming back. A story about cryptids, identity, queerness, neurodivergence, and community.

Light Hearts - Slice of Life podcast about turning an old, haunted building into a cafe and queer community center. The ghosts lead to some very fun shenanigans.

Lost Terminal - Mentioned in the other list but not expanded on. This is a hopepunk story set on an Earth devestated by climate change. Told from the POV of an adorable AI who watches this Earth from a space station, observing how humanity re-builds itself and finds a brighter future.

Mayfair Watchers Society - You know Trevor Henderson? The guy who drew Sirenhead, Long Horse, and other such creepypasta creatures in his found footage style? Yeah, this is a horror anthology based on his works, directed by him. Set in the rural town of Mayfair, where strange creatures are a lot more common than elsewhere... Each episode has a slightly different framing device, with some being found footage audio, others meeting recordings, phone calls, etc.

Monstrous Agonies - An advice podcast for the british creature community. Many of the advice letters are sent in by listeners - there's two by myself, one from an ant that can hear and send radio and one from a fey who is looking for curse advice. Some letters are metaphors for queerness, clashing cultures, ableism, and minority communities, others just some urban fantasy fun. Has a little bit of plot, but most episodes have an anthology style. Fast approaching the finale!

Mx Bad Luck - Slice of Life about someone who is cursed with bad luck. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny. Can recommend.

Neighbourly - Neighbourly follows the residents of Little Street, house by house. What they do, how they interact with each other, and what skeletons are hiding in their closet. Starts out as a spooky urban fantasy thing that's almost an anthology, but weaves itself into quite a mysterious plot over time...

SINKHOLE - Short-form audio podcast presented as a collection of audio posts from a member of a community of data restoration hobbyists in a sometimes-unfamiliar future. Mystery about disability, internet communities, and how things change with time.

Second Star to the Left - Scout-explorer Gwen Hartley has five years to explore and prepare her planet for settlement. With no aid but her robots and the anxious voice of her long-distance scout-minder Bell Summers in her ear, she's hoping she's ready for anything.

Someone Dies In This Elevator - Anthology where every episode, someone dies in an elevator. You wouldn't believe how creative they get with that simple concept!

Tales from the Low City - By the maker of Mistholme Museum, this podcast explores the everyday lifes of the last people on an alien world, after the surface had become uninhabitable and everyone had fled down into the last city, the subterranean Low City. This one made me cry a lot!

Tartarus - In a secret facility deep beneath Antarctica, an anxious astrobiologist, a terse station manager, and an AI keep humanity safe from the monsters they imprison.

The Attic Monologues - Queer urban fantasy story about a university student who decides to record themself practicing monologues using a collection they found in their attic. Don't forget to listen to the post-credit scenes!

The Bridge - Surreal alternate universe horror story about the keepers of a bridge over the Atlantic. Gets pretty spooky.

The Green Horizon - Sci-Fi comedy about a na'er-do-well Irish space captain and his rag-tag crew traversing a war-torn galaxy in search of fame and fortune. Very fun podcast.

The Lavender Tavern - Anthology podcast with original gay fairytales. Most are quite memorable!

The Vesta Clinic - Sci-Fi story about a clinic that helps various interesting alien lifeforms with their medical issues. Excellent worldbuilding and characters!

Tides - The story of Dr. Winifred Eurus, a xenobiologist trapped on an unfamiliar planet with hostile tidal forces and a fascinating ecosystem. She must use her wits, sarcasm, and intellectual curiosity to survive long enough to be rescued. But there might be more to life on this planet than she expected...

Hope this list is as helpful as the last!

@boombox-fuckboy @marvelousmawn @sapphireclaw @ashes-in-a-jar @frogmomentsfrombeyondtime @time-is-restored @emmy-noethers-rings

You folk seemed the most interested in the other list, so I'm being bold and @ing you all.

[nanomooselet]

On Narrators

You know what, fuck it.

I've seen a lot of references to Trigun Stampede having an unreliable narrator, and unfortunately it's activated my media analyst trap card. While there's always a degree of interpretation to these things, there is a difference between interpretation and declaring a banana skin to be orange zest. It makes a difference, especially if you're trying to bake a cake.

That isn't at all what Trigun Stampede is doing. Among other things, it doesn't have a narrator.

Narration, loosely defined, is text (or spoken lines etc) that directly addresses an assumed audience, which may or may not be the actual audience (it depends on the needs of the story). Think voice-overs, think Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove, think the text panels in a comic or manga that list time and location, or describe the situation. The song of humanity continues to be sung is narration. A narrator is the character who performs narration; sometimes from with the story, sometimes from a position adjacent to it.

Honestly one of the most interesting things about Stampede, in my opinion, is that it makes a point of having neither.

There's no framing device, no presenter, no announcer, no chorus, no soliloquy, not even an internal monologue. There's no direct line to the writers, giving away their intentions. Indeed, the imposition of any text at all is almost entirely absent, save some pointed timing on the title cards, and no character's voice is objective. Zazie or Roberto, who come the closest, can definitely still be wrong - Roberto says Vash is "not long for this world" when Vash is longer for the world than almost anyone else; the man he says would kill with a smile was in fact coerced into becoming a killer. Zazie knows much and is always truthful, but isn't all-knowing, nor operating with complete understanding. And on the other end of the scale you have characters like Dr. Conrad or Knives, where the easiest way to tell they're mistaken or lying is if their mouths are moving. (Outside of brain fuckery. Then you're on your own.) Then there's Vash, who doesn't lie, necessarily, so much as he doesn't volunteer the truth, and tends to dodge giving answers when asked outright.

Now, an unreliable narrator is metafictional, taking advantage of the narrator being a character, and therefore capable of having an agenda.

What makes them unreliable is that they exert motivated influence over what we see - even accidental influence like distorted recollection or misconception. But before declaring such influence is occurring, we need a solid reason to doubt. You don't dismiss an account as unreliable just because it doesn't line up with your own expectations or desires - not without something like a clear contradiction, perhaps, or some conspicuous omission. *

We simply have no reason to believe what we see in Trigun Stampede is anything other than the truth (inasmuch as it's obviously fictional of course). We see some events from multiple viewpoints - here is what Vash experienced, here is what Knives saw, here is what other characters are doing - and what one character sees isn't different from what any other character sees when the perspectives swap. It's just from different distances and angles. The same words are said, the same events play out, and the same reactions are demonstrated by the characters, according to their established values and motivations.

The narrative itself is unadorned and unchanged by their viewpoints. Whether a character is being truthful is simply a judgement you're given to make as the events that occur and their actions reveal more about them.

The term for this isn't narration; it's focalisation, and it's hardly some avant-garde artistic statement. It's intrinsic to telling even the most simple story.

For instance, the way Knives evolves from his initial presentation. His introduction as an adult is as a wrathful would-be god and a merciless killer before his more nuanced motivations and origins are slowly revealed. It would have been different if he'd been introduced first, discovered Tesla and was then depicted destroying Jeneora Rock. He'd come across as more of a protagonist. Instead, because the central character is Vash, we see him first, the humanising struggles of Jeneora Rock's people and Vash's efforts to help them, his anguish when it's rendered moot, and all the ways he suffers as a result of Knives's actions. This is focalisation that makes Knives the antagonist, representing what Vash must overcome. A complex, compelling and perhaps tragic antagonist, but still - not the guy the story is about.

Oh, and that has nothing to do with their respective moral positions, good or evil. It's structural. A protagonist attempts to achieve while an antagonist obstructs, and both by nature will transgress.

Stampede isn't exactly free of ways to manipulate sympathy, and exerts strict control over the perspectives it presents. You could argue it misdirects, or lies by omission - but that's not the same as an unreliable narrator. A narrative is always going to impose some kind of order on events to produce a specific effect, and that does come with bias. But it's the nature of storytelling never to be entirely objective.

I'm not sure that I really have a point, honestly, except that Trigun Stampede is a show that's exceedingly careful to show the characters exactly as they are. It doesn't lie. Personally, I find that more interesting to contemplate than the alternative. We have everything we need to know why the characters do as they do. Certainly far more than some would rather have us know.

* There are two times I think something like this is happening. One is Wolfwood's flashbacks to the orphanage, which are coloured as memories of the softness the Eye ripped away from him. Hence the different art style, and the title of the episode they occur in: once upon a time. It's a fairy tale, more emotionally true than literal to highlight the harshness of his life since then by contrast. There's likely more to that story than Wolfwood is recalling at that moment.

The other, big surprise, is within the memory world. It has manipulative editing, clips taken out of context, video noise, ADR, everything. All you'd need to make it more obvious it can't be trusted is a disclaimer in the corner or inconsistent timestamps or something.

[the-meat-machine]

Hi. I'm rereading Playing House to refresh myself on it, and I decided to write some author's commentary as I go along, just for fun. This commentary will contain spoilers for the fic up to chapter 17 (the most recent chapter as of the time of writing).

So, yeah. Chapter 1 commentary, under the cut! (And for the record, I don't expect all the commentary to be as long as this one is; I just have a lot to say about the fic in general in this first one.)

CALIBORN: DIRK. WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY PANTS.

Ah, humble beginnings.

When I first started this fic, it was just supposed to be a silly, raunchy ovi fic that I was banging out for fun in between some of my more serious stories. It had a little plot right from the start, but the plot was pretty much entirely just "an egg happens." There wasn't nearly as much stuff about Dirk and Caliborn's relationship as a whole, and DEFINITELY none of the stuff about… well, whatever it is Caliborn is time traveling about in the most recent chapter.

But as I was writing it, I gradually started folding in ideas from a separate Dirkuu relationship study that I was considering writing, and within a few chapters I decided to just merge the two fics into one. Which I think was the right call, in retrospect. I really think the story is a lot more fun this way, and the egg has worked out as a surprisingly good framing device for everything else going on.

But at the time when I was writing this first chapter, I didn't know any of that. This was supposed to be nothing more than a horny egg fic, and the chapter reflects that. It's also much shorter than most of the following chapters. I kinda like how short and punchy it is, actually. I have perhaps become a little too long-winded in some of the later chapters. Actually, that happens almost immediately, as we'll see in the chapter 2 commentary.

Caliborn literally hisses at you. You assume it's supposed to be a threat, but the sight of his tongue winding out from between all those sharp, sharp fangs mostly just makes your dick go doki-doki.

The first appearance of Caliborn's tongue. Dirk's preoccupation with Caliborn's tongue and fangs surely does not mirror the author's.

DIRK: Face it, between your skeletal posterior and my own tragically concave rump, ours is a no-ass household. DIRK: When the ass famine comes, we'll be the first to perish.

This is still one of my favorite lines in the whole fic.

CALIBORN: MAYBE YOU USED THEM TO MANIPULATE THE JADE BITCH. INTO REMOTELY TAMPERING WITH MY TROUSERS. DIRK: Dude. DIRK: What did I tell you about calling my friends bitches? CALIBORN: … CALIBORN: ……….. CALIBORN: …………………………… CALIBORN: THAT EVERY TIME I DO IT. IT MEANS YOU GET TO PICK OUR NEXT MOVIE DURING DATE NIGHT.

Here we also get the first appearance of Dirk attempting to dog-train Caliborn into being a marginally less shitty person. This will come up again with absurdly long-reaching consequences in the Jane chapter.

This line also implies that Dirk considers Jade his friend. That would be a great dynamic to explore. Probably won't happen in this fic, though, alas. Maybe I'll post a deleted scene about it someday.

Also, it may be interesting to note the quantity of punctuation that Caliborn uses. Eleven is a thematic number for the cherubs, and Caliborn frequently repeats things in sets of eleven throughout both Homestuck itself and this fic.

DIRK: What's the magic word? CALIBORN: FUCK YOU! DIRK: Eh, close enough.

Dirk cares far more about Caliborn being rude to his friends than he does about him being rude to Dirk himself. Almost nothing Caliborn does really bothers Dirk on a personal level. This is part of why they're so compatible. It also gives Dirk yet another reason to doubt his own morality. What does it say about him that he's so emotionally unfazed by any of the awful shit this dude says and does? (It says that he has low affective empathy. That's all. Doesn't mean he's a bad person. Try convincing Dirk of that, though.)

CALIBORN: IF YOU DO NOT FIX THIS. YOUR POSITION IN OUR GAME OF "HOUSE" WILL BE IN JEOPARDY.

Ah, House.

My very earliest plans for this fic didn't involve the game of House. All I wanted was to write a silly story about Dirk and Caliborn laying an egg.

The problem with writing anything remotely fluffy about Caliborn, however, is that in canon, he truly and genuinely just wants to fucking kill everyone. He WILL kill Dirk. He WILL kill all of Dirk's friends. This is a core part of his goals. So… how do you get him into a place where he won't just slaughter everyone and be done with it?

In this fic, I've resolved this by giving Caliborn a different game that he's decided he's playing: House. Now he's constrained by a new set of rules--ones that say he has to try to play nice. That he needs to learn assorted domestic skills. And perhaps most importantly, that he can't just fucking murder all of his opponent/partner(?)'s friends--because if he does, he'll lose the game. And Caliborn cannot abide losing a game.

Someday we'll get more about why, exactly, Caliborn has decided to play this game. But for now, all that matters is that he is, and so he's bound by its rules. This turns out to be VERY narratively useful for me.

Not that that's why you've been playing along with his "game", no matter what certain friends of yours might believe. They always do want to think the best of you, and there is absolutely no fucking good explanation for why you would want to shackle yourself to the biggest asshole in Paradox Space. But regardless of your motivations...

Dirk trying really hard here to avoid directly admitting that he's in love with Caliborn, not even in the narration. This will be a running theme.

It occurs to you sometimes that what normal people would actually call this game is "marriage".

Damn, I really just came out and put this right in the first chapter, huh? I mean, it's true though.

CALIBORN: RUB MY BELLY, CUDDLESLUT.

Yeah, so. I started this fic with a scene of Caliborn growing out of his pants and then followed it up immediately with a belly rub scene. I was NOT attempting to be subtle about what kind of fic this is--which is to say, a belly fetish fic. I'm genuinely shocked it's grown to have this much of an audience outside of that community.

The fic HAS grown to encompass a lot more than just the fetish shit, though. I guess by now I'd consider it basically the equivalent of one of those fics that has plenty of plot and character development, but also fairly frequent sex scenes. Except here, half the time instead of sex scenes you just get weirdly lascivious descriptions of how much candy Caliborn is scarfing down. I promise this is hot to some portion of the audience.

DIRK: The fuck have you been eating, dude? CALIBORN: WHY. DIRK: There's like a lump in there. Right here.

And here's the first appearance of the egg! The entire raison d'etre of this fic. Really, what else is there to say about it? It's an egg. It's made of candy. It's inside of Caliborn. Presumably one day it will be outside of Caliborn. One can only hope.

[wordsandrobots]

This week I appear to be thinking about my motivation for writing.

Specifically, I should say, for writing fanfic, although there is crossover with my forays into original works. And I started by thinking about the various times I've lost motivation for various projects, because the negative is occasionally a useful way of gauging the positive.

My Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 series Life After Equivalence represents the longest-running stretch of fanfic writing I've engaged in. I started it during my second year at university, right after watching the anime for the first time. A continuation of that continuity post-Conqueror of Shambala, it started out with what in retrospect was a fairly clunky set of plot-devices, but I'm rather proud of where it went. While recognising what an excellent piece of story-telling the manga is, I've always found more to engage me in the anime's adaptation. I think Dante is a fascinatingly shallow villain and what it does with the homunculi is deliciously horrific (in the genre sense). I greatly enjoyed think about where everyone could go next, particularly the more world-weary anime!Ed, and inventing new supporting cast for them as well as bringing more manga characters into the mix (sometimes in quite twisted ways). So much so that I was writing new fics for it as recently as 2021.

The problem is, working on an idea for over a decade and a half means that you're not the same person you were when you started. I have learnt and grown a lot in that time, as a writer and in general. I gradually became increasingly at odds with the original concept for where that story was heading and as much as I tried to change direction and salvage the plot, I don't think I can. Not comfortably. The sense that what I'd started was riddled with conceptual mistakes has gotten stronger and stronger, making it very hard to pick up again. I think as an author, you have to have confidence in your ideas, to properly sell them, and with this, I've lost that.

With my most fully-formed Transformers epic, This Is How It All Began, the explanation has more to do with a gradual failure of interest in the source material. It's not that I was ever beholden to canon with that story; it was an attempt to retell things using the elements I really liked, my own personal 'G1' redux. But as the Transformers franchise has ossified around that first generation of characters to the exclusion of any real innovation, there doesn't seem much point continuing. I can't explore someone else's worlds without them engaging me and Transformers increasingly didn't.

Nor can I write from spite, when the source 'lets me down'. Untitled Alternative Episode Nine represents me grappling with where I wanted the Star Wars sequels to go. I love The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, as a story in which characters who think they know what their role is gradually learn better as the whole thing goes careering off the rails. There was tremendous potential in their tale, and sadly I knew at the time it would likely be squandered. But I didn't realise when I started working on this fic that The Rise of Skywalker would be such a sprawling shambles, about-facing on the promise of finally pushing Star Wars beyond rigidly defined stock arcs so hard, it felt like poor comedy. Increasingly, my story became framed by repudiating that re-enclosure, by the desire to get it right.

And while I still think my version -- where the First Order rips itself to bits in a power struggle between Kylo Ren and General Hux, where the Knights of Ren are actual characters, the remaining lost Jedi students, and Rey, Finn, Po and Rose all get the chance to work towards a future free of the endless, circular struggle set by the 'main characters' of the galaxy -- is a better story than the one we got, it doesn't change anything. I'm not really fixing anything and by defining my work as *not that*, I limit my own joy in it. I'm not in conversation with something I love but rather shouting into the void, to no great end. Once again, I couldn't see the point in continuing. Especially with the ongoing Star Wars media increasingly feeling like an exercise in box-ticking, as bad as anything the old Expanded Universe ever produced for sheer pointlessness. At least the older spin-offs occasionally got super weird. Live-action cartoons do not really offer space for that, sadly.

Then there are the times my motivation has been directly killed. Chris Chibnall's tenure as show-runner on Doctor Who, abruptly ending my longest-lasting fandom for me, as another promise of widening potential was squandered on dull, miserable, derivative ideas. That one Captain Harlock fic I was having a lot of fun with until someone came along to be extremely pedantic in the comments and struck a nerve so hard, I flat-out lost all the enthusiasm I had for the idea. Bad experiences that meant continuing or going back was too hard to contemplate. This is how it goes sometimes.

So. Invert all that:

Enthusiasm for an idea -- and more importantly, confidence in it.

Positive engagement, the feeling that I have something to say and that it is worth saying about this thing.

The sense I am not fighting the source material but playing with it, spinning it out in interesting ways, making merry with the rules of the canon.

And I can't count out the benefit of having good interactions over what I write; for all I am a fundamentally compulsive writer, I delight in knowing my work can touch others, in being told that it is good and a worthwhile expenditure of my effort.

All stuff I already knew, I think. But it's sometimes worth reflecting on what pushes you to create art and this -- this all makes sense.

Now if I could just leverage these things at will, I'd be unstoppable.

[hauntingofhouses]

Hi! What do you think about the usage of time in Blue Eye Samurai? And do you think Mizu is closer to 20 towards the ending of s1?

Hi there!

Hmm... This is an interesting question, and one I find a little difficult to answer if I'm being honest. "Usage of time" is kind of broad, and I'm afraid I'm not too sure of what you're asking, so I don't know if I can give a comprehensive response. But! I will try.

Time as a narrative device in the show is honestly something I haven't thought much of. Overall the story is quite linear, and the flashbacks are also rather linear.

The most notable usage of flashbacks is of course in The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride. The way it juxtaposes past and present, making us believe past Mizu is the Bride and present Mizu is the Ronin, only for both past and present Mizu to converge into the Onryo—it's masterful storytelling, and it's no wonder most viewers (including myself) consider Episode 5 to be the best in the season.

Also, now that I recall, the first episode of the show actually starts off by framing the whole story as a "legend of a swordsman, of a sword, of revenge." You could interpret this as the story being related to an audience by an unknown invisible narrator, which might come into play at the very end of series, or it could just be a stylistic choice, which is my personal take on it.

On the other hand, time as it unfolds in the present day makes more sense the less you think about it, and I say this mostly in a nitpicky CinemaSins type way (sorry) whereby the time it takes to travel from one place to another seems incredibly fast, rather than spanning days or weeks, considering Mizu mostly travels by foot. The time it takes for Mizu (and Taigen) to recover from their wounds is twice as fast. But again, these are details that are quite irrelevant to the story itself, and I just like to hand-wave them away by saying that the show follows video game logic in many regards, and the passing of time is one of them.

On a slight tangent though, while I'm on the subject of the show stretching the bounds of what's realistic or accurate, I'd also like to point out that the show seemingly takes place in an alternate timeline from our own, or at least just a completely fictionalised version of history. I say this because the Shogun im the show is from the Itoh clan, which is in fact a real clan (more commonly spelled as Itō) that ruled the Obi-han during the Edo period. However, they were not the ruling clan of the shogunate as they are in the show. Rather, the shogunate was led by the Tokugawa clan, who ruled Edo between 1603 to 1868. So! Yeah. Thought it'd be an interesting fact to mention.

Now, for the second half of your question, I actually think Mizu is a little older than 20.

I doubt that the show will give us a concrete answer to this, so this is all speculation, but hear me out. Japan closed its borders in 1633. The Great Fire of Edo takes place in the spring of 1657. In present day (assuming early 1657), Heiji Shindo and Fowler mention that they've known each other for 20 years, which could possibly allude to Fowler being in Japan for 20 years, or their partnership lasting 20 years. I took it to mean the latter, which means that Fowler must've been in Japan for at least 24 years. This gives us the maximum plausible age limit for Mizu. She cannot be any older than 24.

She also cannot be any younger than 19. This is because the character sheets tell us that she starts to look like herself as we see her today, at age 19. We can thus infer that this is the age when she first leaves Master Eiji's house (during winter), reunites with Mama (in the spring), and marries Mikio. Her marriage with Mikio, iirc, lasts less than a year, spanning from spring to autumn.

We can then roughly assume she's about 20 when she leaves the farm behind and resumes her revenge quest. Between then and the present, Mizu kills Violet. Assuming this gap of time is about a year long, that means Mizu is roughly 21 upon meeting Ringo in Ep1. So it's possible that at the end of the season she's either 21, or nearing 22, depending on if the season begins in early 1657, around January or February (the year of the Great Fire), or around December of 1656, the previous year. Personally, because I like my blorbos on the older end, I like to interpret her as the latter.

So yeah! I hope I answered your question anon, even if a little bit. These are fun little exercises for me to work my noggin, so I appreciate the ask! <3

[semper-legens]

97. One Hundred Nights of Hero, by Isabel Greenberg

Owned?: No, library Page count: Unknown/not numbered My summary: One night in the kingdom of Migdal Bavel, a man named Jerome makes a pact with a man named Manfred; if Manfred can seduce his wife Cherry in one hundred nights, he gets Jerome's estate…and Cherry. But Cherry's heart lies with her maid Hero, and together they come up with a plan. Distract Manfred with stories each night, and he can't force himself on her. But there's more at stake than just Cherry's marriage, and Hero has secrets of her own… My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

The third of three graphic novels that I picked up from another library. So far, they have been fine and disappointing respectively; how did this one fare? I am delighted to tell you that I absolutely loved it. It's weird, it's mythic, it immediately situates itself within its own mythologically-inspired universe, and I could not put it down. I picked it up because something about the dark, scribbly artstyle appealed to me - plus, leafing through a few pages, it seemed very much to be a story about stories, and those draw me in like a moth to a flame. Taking inspiration from Child Ballads and the Arabian Nights, this is a set of stories within the framing device of Hero's tales to Manfred, all of which reveal a part of Hero and Cherry's life together and Hero's place within this world. On Early Earth, women are not allowed to read; that, and other 'witchcrafts' lead to women being thrown from the tallest tower for their crimes, as decreed by the bird god. But as Hero and Cherry relate, there are women who want to keep stories alive. The League of Secret Story Tellers memorise and recite tales they have heard on their travels, and weave them into tapestries. Hero is a member of this League, having grown up the daughter of a League founder, and knows thousands of stories as a result. Enough, indeed, to fill one hundred nights…

Steeped in mythology and fairytale, it's clear that the author has done her research about the oral tradition and the kind of stories that get passed on from mother to daughter. Hero's tales are engaging and clever, the dialogue witty and sharp, to the point where (like Manfred) you also get swept up in the telling and lose track of time. The one thing I found the most interesting, however, was the overall point about the way stories affect people. Sisters in one tale learn to read and find that they cannot give it up despite the fact that it's illegal for women to learn to read; the League hold stories close to themselves, hiding them in the arts they are allowed to practice, and at the end, Hero and Cherry are bolstered by the people of the city who have heard Hero's stories via retellings from the guards listening in on her talking to Manfred, the people uniting underneath the stories. Sure, it's not enough to save Hero or Cherry from their sentences, but the message is clear - stories matter. Stories save lives, stories save people. Stories are a lifeline. And this story, brought through trial and fog and the tellings and retellings of a long line of speakers, through real-life folk and fairy stories reinvented and reimagined into new ideas, is just perfect for showing that.

Next, back to Outlander, as rebellion is stirring in the colonies.

[naranjapetrificada]

Academic excerpts as a framing device

So in the ask game I've been enjoying today, @piratecaptainscaptainpirates asked an interesting bonus question about the academic blurbs I've been including at the start of each chapter of From the Firmament that I started answering on that post, but things quickly go long enough to merit their own post so here it is! The question (as such) was:

(also, I was just re-reading From the Firmament and I will never be over the academic article excerpts. They're just such a neat and fun inclusion! I'd love to hear about your process while writing them, how you go about working them in with each chapter's themes, etc.)

Whatever specific idea that spawned the fic itself is now lost to the vicissitudes of ADHD memory, but it was born in the context of a lot of Thinking About Tropes in ways that were new to me at the time. In particular I was interested in a different first meeting, specifically one that involved Stede actually visiting the Queen Anne or being taken captive by the QAR crew, and Ed having to react to Stede under those circumstances.

I started playing with a draft in that vein that I'm going to come back to at some point, but the other trope I got really interested in (both as a reader of fic and also just like, intellectually) was arranged marriage. Basically every version of that I could imagine required an entirely different world than the canon one, and once I started casting about for the right circumstances I started thinking about history a lot.

The academic blurbs started as a worldbuilding crutch when I was first trying to get the fic together at the beginning, and it was easier to gather all that kind of information in a "just the facts" format when starting out. They started taking on a more concrete form when my thoughts about history intersected with 1) stuff I'd read before, 2) stuff I was reading at the time, and 3) a joke that got out away from me.

1) Two of my favorite novelists period are K.J. Parker (who I've mentioned at least once in the fic's notes) and Guy Gavriel Kay, both of whom are obsessed in their own ways with history in a way that come through in their fantasy work in interesting ways. Kay tends to straightforwardly mention in-world history and historians, without mentioning specific works but making a point to draw attention to the fact that he's speaking from outside of the characters' perspectives. Here is an example passage from Kay's Under Heaven, which is presented in its own separate section between character pov chapters:

It was said to be the case that the emperor's favourite wife, regarded by some later historians dangerously subtle and too influential, played a role in encouraging him to keep that agreement--with a view to securing Kitai's boundaries.

Meanwhile Parker, who includes the names of specific fictional works and specific fictional historians, is more likely to bring up history in the flow of the narrative, when at any time the next sentence could discuss history and/or in-world philosophy:

Saloninus, in the Exceptional Dialogues, speculates about the end of the world. Will it be a great sundering, the sky falling on the land, or a great inundation, the sea gradually rising until the last treetop is drowned, or a great fire, or—Wrong. The end of the world is like this, and a deaf man who couldn’t lipread wouldn’t even realise what had just happened.

I enjoy both of these approaches despite (or maybe because of) their differences, and when you've read as much of either author as I have this sticks with you.

2) at some point after I started playing with the idea that would become FtF and the draft of Chapter 1 coming together, I picked up Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend A Walled City. One thing I really appreciate about both Kay and Parker is that they almost never tell their stories from the perspectives of rulers (with the occasional exceptions of rulers who began as commoners and are usually, like canon Blackbeard, some combination of bored, overwhelmed, and made miserable by their position at the top). Kay tends to alternate between a few main characters, with individual one-off outsider POV sections, while Parker tends to have several characters whose alternating perspectives cover the whole story. In either case those characters usually span the middle 3/4 of their given society, neither prince nor pauper. People who aren't starving but aren't wealthy, mid-level bureaucrats, low-ranking government officials, generals who we met as lower officers, etc. This was true of that novel, and helped me arrive where I did with Ed and Stede in my WIP's world (yes they're both high ranking, but neither is a ruler as such because that didn't interest me). I think looking at them in the canon world and realizing where I wanted to put them in the world I was building led to point #3:

3) "Wouldn't it be funny if Stede was accidentally incredibly influential?"

In some ways that question is a central question (and joke) in the show itself. Like, this guy shows up and starts doing things differently because he can't help but be who he is, and his desire for the world to be a better place then spreads beyond anyone's wildest dreams? And yeah Stede isn't the catalyst for the end of traditional piracy in the world (that's the British Empire, their culpability as represented by the death of Izzy "The Avatar of Traditional Piracy" Hands), but he is the catalyst for it on board the Revenge. And the place he was able to influence intersects with the wider world after a series of accidents and unlikely events, and even without season 3 (😢) we can see the way the world is changing now.

And how that got out of hand was I started thinking about contexts where accidentally becoming important to history would be the most unexpected (and therefore the funniest) and ended up at republican-era Rome. Something about the pomp and circumstance and veneration of it all, and then here's my favorite little guy with his inherent kindness and autistic whimsy, ready to turn everything on its head.

And from there: the blurbs just became a means to an end and the best way to draw attention to that joke. I couldn't stop imagining people talking about Stede Bonnet the way they do about Rome and laughing about it, so here we are.

As for your process questions: I tend to write them on their own, whenever a given topic seems interesting or like something that could fit into the world. The blurb in chapter one kind of just sets the stage for things, but when I first wrote it it was significantly longer and was much more about the documents cache it mentions, because at the time I was thinking about historical document preservation. Since it needed to be much shorter and kick things off I just reshaped what I had to serve my purpose. I do still have plans to incorporate the rest of it later!

The second one came from thinking about Edward "Daddy Issues" Teach's relationship with violence and how having a father who is different from canon was still going to allow violence and daddy issues to still intersect. The idea for the arrows it describes is lovingly (if shamelessly) borrowed from the Parker book I mentioned above, in an attempt to create a situation where Ed could still have (misguided) ideas about the capacity for violence being something inherent about a person.

Lastly, I'll say that while I'm not intending the opening blurbs as obvious statements of purpose for the chapters that followed, they do fulfill a worldbuilding purpose relevant to where they show up in the story. So the first one is, by necessity, an introduction, and the second one is both meant to inform and remind everyone of the bad blood that exists between the parties trying to bridge the gap between them with the marriage. I won't say yet what the third one is but I will say that I've foundered way too long working on Chapter 3 because I didn't immediately establish which one I wanted to open the chapter with. So they're important scaffolding, important worldbuilding, and in the way of worldbuilding they'll be relevant to later things when those things come up.

Thank you so much for asking this question, it was super fun and helpful to nail all of this stuff down like this and get it out of my head!

[gracehosborn]

I would love to hear why you didn't necessarily like My Dear Hamilton!

Hi! Thank you for the ask! So so sorry it took me forever to answer this!

A disclaimer before I explain things: this isn’t an attack on the authors, I wish them the best, but rather this is just me discussing their novel as a piece of literature. It has also been awhile since I read this novel, so my memory may be fuzzy. I also have no ill-will against anyone who enjoys this novel—if it makes you happy, I am glad—these are just my personal opinions as a result of my experience reading the novel.

TL;DR is that I believe the authors poorly handled Eliza’s POV, Hamilton’s characterization, and the overall narrative per the story they set out to tell. A longer explanation of these issues is under the cut.

As I am a writer and aspiring author myself, I will be looking at this from that perspective.

My Dear Hamilton is framed as Elizabeth Hamilton meeting with James Monroe in her old age, and beginning to discuss forgiveness in relation to the Reynolds affair, whereupon the narrative shifts to give us the context of Eliza’s life from her childhood up until this point, then it shifts once more to conclude this moment. This itself is an interesting framework: telling the story through a lens of reflection by the protagonist, however there are pitfalls with this framing that this novel unfortunately falls into. Namely, (and at least in my opinion) there is an excess of telling the reader what is happening, rather than having the reader experience Eliza’s life alongside her. This isn’t to say that we should have to be shown every aspect of the story, but rather there should have been a better blend of these. To add to this, the past tense of this novel led to some very poorly done foreshadowing of events to come, and these moments felt very jarring and at times pulled me out of the story, or took away from the reaction that those later events had intended for me to have as a reader.

I would not have minded this excess if not for a stark fact that I realized while reading: Eliza isn’t the main character of her own story. That would be her husband, Alexander, as the book title itself implies. This arrangement is an interesting device, however it only works well if the protagonist (the person who you are experiencing the story from—in this case being Eliza) is directly beside the MC throughout the main character’s journey. Due to societal rules, Elizabeth did not get to experience what Alexander did right alongside him, therefore leaving the reader to be told again and again what was happening with Alexander (or people and things connected to him that Eliza couldn’t herself experience or talk to) as Eliza reacted—which isn’t super interesting in my opinion. And to this point, Eliza never established a goal for herself throughout the story that did not have some connection back to her husband, creating a narrative that was befallen by lots of repetition and telling versus showing. This in my opinion led to Eliza not feeling like her own character, and rather a vehicle for the audience to read second-hand what was going on in this world. There was nothing particular that stood out to me and made me want to care about Eliza, and I became more interested in what Alexander was doing off-page as the story went on.

A large focus of the book was of course the romance between Elizabeth and Alexander, and this in it of itself was alright, however I feel like the authors relied too much on physical aspects (notably adding a ton of sex scenes), and not giving a proper balance to our characters getting to know one another in conversation.

This was not helped by the fact that strangely, I hardly remeber there being any arguments between Alexander and Eliza. The only two that I remeber taking up a large portion of the story were in the aftermath of Alexander stepping down from the office of Treasury and challenging the entire Republican Party to a duel, and of course the “Reynolds Pamphlet”. When in reality, they very well may have had arguments and disagreements over all sorts of things—as this is only natural, and would have helped to make this romance more believable. For instance, they likely would have argued over the fact that upon the capital city being moved to Philadelphia, they would have to pack up their family of seven (Eliza and Alexander, plus their four biological children and Fraunces Antil, the little girl they took in) and move from New York City—their home of eight years. Furthermore, when we consider this from Eliza’s perspective, her biological family were only a few day’s travel away for that time. Having to move further away from them due to her husband’s work must have been hard on her, and could have certainly led to some anger. However, this is not acknowledged within the novel.

All of this isn’t to say that I think giving focus towards the experiences of women during historical time periods is bad. I actually think this should be done more, as we cannot fully understand a time period without understanding the perspectives and roles of every person involved. This said, the largest pitfall of My Dear Hamilton is that I belive the novel was set too early and therefore did not accomplish the goal the authors had set out. The large majority of the novel takes its time following the love story and marriage of Eliza and Alexander, and only the last hundred pages or so are truly focused on Eliza as the central figure—as these are set after Alexander’s duel with Aaron Burr. Having thought long and hard about this, I feel like there would be three ways to better tell Elizabeth’s story in this format:

Easy (for what is here):

Split this book into three sections. Take the romance (the current main plot as the novel is based around Eliza recalling her life with Alexander) and replace that status with something more internal to Eliza's character. Section one is a few chapters diving into her childhood, section two dealing with her relationship with Alexander, and section three is post duel.

Moderately Difficult:

Take this main plot and replace it with Eliza in her older age hunting down Hamilton's papers for publication. You can save all of these romantic moments in the form of relevant flashbacks. Side plots include: orphanage/other charity work, the actual writing of Hamilton's biography (Eliza struggling to keep lo one on the job, and she and her son John Church Hamilton, according to John’s daughter, had frequent fights due to creative differences).

Difficult:

Rewrite the current book from Alexander's perspective, since much of the novel is focused on him anyway. But really due to the fact that, in terms of character, he's more active whereas Eliza has done little in this regard and the plot is just falling in her lap. No timeline changes needed. You can still have the romance be the main plot, but it's helped by the fact that Alexander actively made later decisions in what he did within the fields of law and politics which would add both more depth and some subplots to the narrative.

The second option would in my opinion be best suited for telling Eliza’s story as relates to her impact on history. For without her efforts, we wouldn’t have such an interest in her husband’s historical impact or person. I would love to see a novel like that idea someday. I feel like it would be a very compelling narrative and with lots of care could provide us with a proper and in-depth look at Elizabeth which she deserves.

This got much longer than I thought it would, but I hope it is at least enjoyable to read. As I said at the tip of this post, you’re welcome of course to like or even love My Dear Hamilton, but these are just my personal thoughts from my own experience of reading the novel.

[unofficialadamtaurus]

What’re your full thoughts on season 9? I wasn’t going to watch it—especially after following along with you and other rwde blogs’ feelings on the content as the it aired—but I keep hearing this is the best written rwby season despite that. It’s a mixed bag right now, even within the more critical side of the fandom, and you always have nuanced takes, so, I figured I should ask you 🙂

You don't ask the easy questions, huh. (And I don’t reply to them in a timely manner, huh.)

I think "best written" is accurate from a certain point of view and when you keep in mind that it's being compared to other volumes of the same show. There’s a new framing device with the story, a twist villain that holds together on a second viewing, and emotional beats we’ve wanted to see hit for years. The animation itself is also good. Things are smooth and there’s even attempts at actual fight choreography. Even the voice acting is fairly consistently good.

If you can't tell already, I've said all of that with a massive disclaimer, and that disclaimer is that this volume falls apart when you look at it more closely. To me, this volume is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, frustrating. It's frustrating in a similar way to V8: you can kind of see what the writers are trying to do, but it's all executed in a way that makes you wonder what was going on in the writers' room. The plot beats, messages, and themes are not communicated well, are contradictory, or are otherwise damaging.

Heavy spoilers beyond this point if you managed to not watch it between sending this ask and me responding.

Atlas has fallen. Our heroes failed. This is the belly of the beast moment, the find-your-motivation moment, the break-the-geode-to-see-the-beauty-within moment.

And it falls so, so flat.

Penny’s death, this big moment from the previous volume, comes up a couple times but is never resolved. Jaune never states that he killed her. No one asks. Ruby is sad over her sword a couple times and that’s it.

Jaune is an old man! He’s a little bit out of his mind! Only no, he’s fine, here’s a magic knife that makes him young again.

There’s an interesting framing device! Only no, we’ll stop trying to follow it halfway through, and because the audience never knows how the story goes until the characters experience it or talk about it, there’s no interesting use of the framing device. It’s just there.

The Gods’ origin story! Only…why? Who was asking for this? Why did we need an origin myth for an origin myth? And why did it have to take up so much real estate in the final episode to boot?

To get to the main team:

Weiss’s kingdom, her home, was destroyed. She doesn’t even know the fate of her family beyond the portals. I would expect her to be the most affected by the events of the previous volume: quiet, grieving, grasping for a next step to avoid thinking about it. But no—she’s the comic relief for this volume. In addition to a mouse I personally found annoying most of the time who is also comic relief. Weiss’s trauma is almost entirely ignored except for when she talks about Penny’s death, her comment at the burning market, and one sad face in the Punderstorm. Every scene with her falling down or getting hit by a rock or cheerleading grated on me. It felt so divorced from what she should be feeling that it broke my immersion and was a significant source of frustration.

Blake is an empty character. Her whole role in this volume is two things: person who read fairy tales (that everyone else also read), and person who loves Yang. Her big hero moment is talking about a struggle to bridge humanity and Faunus that we have never seen on screen. If you’ve been bothered by Blake’s lack of agency and character in previous volumes, the former may get marginally better here at the start, but by the end they’ll both be worse than they ever were, and both a significant source of frustration.

Yang is a mess. She starts strong with the “You shouldn’t be here,” but by the end of the volume she’s turning on her sister, blaming her for her distress, and doing nothing while her sister kills herself. She puts Blake over Ruby, hell, she puts Jaune over Ruby. I couldn’t believe what she was doing, and the bees confession scene was cringe-inducing with how it made her love focus on incredibly broad or superficial things about Blake. No mention of shared trauma, or past hurt. Frustrating.

And Ruby. Poor Ruby. This was touted as Ruby's volume. She's going to be the focus, she's going to struggle. The OP hammers this point home with unsubtle imagery of Ruby crying and falling behind while her teammates carry on unbothered. That had me intrigued, because Ruby has been more or less a static character since the end of Volume 3. Her struggles have been momentary, situational, and without lasting impact, so I wanted to see her have that belly of the beast moment in her hero's journey and come out different and stronger for it.

Problems are, they went about her spiral in the most ham-fisted way possible. Ruby is obviously depressed because they have to let the audience know, but it’s to the point that I can’t believe her teammates just let things lie. As a result, her team come off as jerks. Where are the friends from the Beacon days, the ones whose reuniting was a huge moment in V5? Certainly not here, watching adult man Jaune yell at Ruby for a plan he helped create and enact. Certainly not there, slowly walking after a crying and upset Ruby who flew off in a direction Jaune should know is dangerous shortly after Neo attacked, while blaming Ruby for not talking to them when the time Ruby did, Yang brushed her off and compared her to Ironwood.

Her team dismisses her, Neo beats her to a pulp, and she commits suicide. She goes to a tree that’s been established to wipe memories and recreate people.

Is her team upset? No. Worried? No, at least until Yang sees Ruby encased in wood. But it’s all fine, because Ruby sees that her mom wasn’t perfect and that her mom thought she was perfect just the way she was as a child, and that fixes all the the trauma the entire volume hammered into your ears and eyeballs in the span of maybe two minutes.

I will pause briefly to say that Ruby’s brief fight scene is good. Genuine highlight there.

But the main villain who tortured Ruby then gets off without any resentment or frustration from the heroes. And the twist villain, whose motives are far more sympathetic to me than the main villains’, is brutally torn apart.

The dissonance between what the show seems to want its morals to be and what they actually are is staggering.

To sum up:

The status quo for the characters did not change. The status quo for the setting did not change. The status quo for the writing did not change.

If you like the show as it is, if you take it at face value, you’ll be fine, as you’ve been fine for the last several volumes. But if you try to sink your teeth in, you’ll be getting a mouthful of dust—and not even the magical kind. There is little past that other than more frustration.

[yvtro]

It’s me again. (The anon that just asked you a billion questions about Jason’s death.) Also wondering: what do you think of the Killing Joke and Babs’s role as Oracle, and how do you think her and Jason’s “rebirths” can be compared? (Sorry for all the English class ass questions. I’m just so interested by your post. I never thought about the classicism behind Jason’s return as Red Hood but now all the wheels are turning.)

it's so immensely curious to me, because there's this parallel of both babs and jason being essentially fridged (well. jason got boyfridged. sidekick-fridged. sonfridged. i'm aware this term is usually used in relation to women.) but barbara's trauma stops being a plot device for other characters. it becomes a set off for her own storyline about healing and reclaiming her life instead. and the thing is, she succeeds! her life might have been altered by the joker, sure; but she refuses to believe that he made her in any way that matters. she refuses to let her whole life be dictated by it, and she recognises that she's so much more. she lives up to her potential, no matter the constraints.

and then you have jason. jason who is relentlessly victim blamed through decades after his death. jason's death never stops being vital for how other characters are written. this creates a sort of tension in which jason's voice as a victim cannot be central to the story. he has to remain a ghost, even alive; bruce's reminder of his "biggest failure".

and so, jason's act of assuming the red hood identity might be intended as a reclamation of what he fears, but it ironically reduces him to his trauma. let's be honest; this is not some neat bruce being afraid of bats -> taking batman as his name parallel. and you see, maybe jason's action of reclamation could work if it was used for catharsis; if he could later abandon it and go on, reinvent himself, as barbara did. but it's been years and it doesn't happen (even with countdown attempting to kick this off). he never gets to really learn that he is more than what happened to him; he's stuck in a vicious cycle of trying to free himself from his trauma, failing to understand that what he's actually doing is centring his whole life around it.

the reason for which this is how it plays out is def influenced by classism. the whole 'rebirth' (as you called it) itself is already affected by it; to go back to our comparison, for barbara to make a comeback, there was no need to retcon and rewrite her whole character. for jason, some "fatal flaw" was needed – and winick did not even care to make any of his original personality traits into it (like his love. kindness. sensitivity. it would work, goddamit, jason crossing the line because he cares too much and can't stop caring and has to do everything in his power to try to fix the world, no matter the cost, no matter the blood on his hands). instead, we get jason being overly aggressive and quick to anger; something very conveniently consistent with framing poor people as inherently likely to become criminal and somehow evil.

so i'd say, barbara's invention of oracle is a rebirth, while jason's invention of red hood is more of a reburial.

[legionofpotatoes]

curious if you have seen (and if so what are your thoughts on) across the spider-verse what with it being such a love letter to illo/animation?

I have... a complicated relationship with that movie

Here are my thoughts on it straight out the cinema. It was all very heat-of-the-moment and I softened up a fair bit up since then, but I still have the same fundamental gripes with its story sense and tenacious excess in visual fidelity.

I know how dumb it sounds but it feels how it feels to me. Like watching it felt like playing a triple-A videogame. It was less intentional artistry and more kitchen sink clutter that had crunch written all over it. Definitely partially a me-problem but also the reports that followed kinda confirmed those suspicions and that sucked?

I know feature animation in hollywood pretty much universally sucks for every ground-level artist involved rn, but I definitely became privy to too much concrete bs to keep viewing this specific project as something championing the medium. The incessant fiddling from lord and miller, the firings and uncredited workers, the fact that much of their visual identity stems from alberto mielgo's work whom I just cannot stand. A lot of this is personal, and I can't ignore that.

But beyond all of my baggage, objectively speaking, I did love everything in the film that had to do with Gwen. Art direction included. That was a real flex both in audio-visual cues and a strong, dramatic character arc. But everything else felt like a mess. I said it before but walking out of this movie confused and bummed out was the first telltale sign for me, whereas ITSV left me elated and humming with joy. And it felt intentional. Question is, why?

And it's all tied up in taste and tone of course and I'm not here to police anyone's preferences in dramatic clarity or storytelling styles. But this type of half-a-movie that is all setups and cliffhangers pointing excitedly at a nebulous sequel is not my cup of tea at all. And I guess knowing how messy it was behind the scenes simply exacerbated that feeling.

ITSV had so much catharsis. So much progression of drama and payoff and big, sweeping moments that were visual, musical, and meaningful on a story level all at once. It was pure storytelling. ATSV had good stuff for Gwen, but otherwise was mostly just. Plot, it felt like. One thing after another and after another, leading to this weird, confusing, emotional rugpull of an ending that certainly had. Spice to it, but I wouldn't call it fulfilling.

Multiverse stuff is weird, right? but ITSV used that as just another tool in its storytelling bag. The other spiders came in with satellite arcs and enriched Miles' story in a very organic way. A story about fear and great expectations, executed to a T, ending with a triumph. Yet here we see ATSV using the multiverse as an entire framing device that its story optics are now beholden to. It feels wrong, somehow, and makes it harder to parse what all of this is about.

Bringing the concept of canon into the text, creating a story about storytelling itself, is always very very very tricky and difficult to pull off, and often even meaningless writ large. It makes the story they're telling here infinitely less interesting to me. and hey, I am curious to see what they do with Beyond, I'm not pretending to know more than I do here. I welcome being wrong! But it is what it is for now.

Thankfully Nimona came out soon after and was beautiful and elegant and meaningful and wholesome in all the ways I love, to the point that I decided everything was going to be okay after all :D Anyway I hope this answers your question and sorry I get so wordy!!!

[purpleheartskies]

For now, I'm going to include a note in some of my posts asking that people not reply or reblog with comments or tags that do things like:

insult the writers

claim "bad writing"

say things like "the show is dumb", or "we're not supposed to see it that way", or "it happened off-screen [even though we have no proof]" (if there's no proof that something happened off-screen, it's not canon)

say that s5 was rushed and not written properly and/or the s5 finale is the "real ending" because the writers thought that the show wasn't going to be renewed (which the writers have outright refuted and which is illogical given their decisions for the plot, characters, and characterizations in s5)

say that the writers are too afraid of the majority of the fans to have the story in s6 go any way that might upset these fans, or that Netflix is affecting the writers' decisions or forcing them to give fan service. (I know there's usually politics involved with networks and production companies wrt show runners having creative agency, but the consistency in the storytelling style and characterizations indicates that the writers still have the same level of the creative agency as in early seasons.)

any dismissive statement about the writing of the show

These types of comments and tags minimize the contents of a post and effectively shut down conversations about important topics related to the characters and their character journeys.

I enjoy healthy conversations and debates, and I'm used to certain CK fans dismissing my opinions and posts because I'm a "Robby fan". But, most of my interactions with fans after s5 just have me tired of not being able to talk about the story itself and the storytelling without people minimizing what I'm saying with their negativity and condescension towards the writers and the writing.

I know a lot of people are upset with how the story has gone so far. I'm also not happy with a lot of the narrative decisions. I've also mentioned before that I'm not happy with a lot of the messaging so far. However, the nuance in the storytelling is still there. It's been pretty consistent since the start. The characterizations have been consistent too. So when people say "bad writing", I disagree. I think of bad writing as gaping plot holes, inconsistent characterizations, incongruous timelines, etc. I don't think of narrative decisions that I don't like as bad writing. I recognize how the story is framed, but framing is just one aspect of the story and is a tool for storytelling. The context, subtext, and a lot of what we have in the story itself tells us so much that is in contrast to the framing. This show has some of the best indirect storytelling I've seen in a show. I find the storytelling and characterizations to be really interesting, and I hope to keep discussing Robby and his story without my posts being dismissed.

And tbh I wonder where people's imaginations are. This is a fictional story, and a lot of things can still happen. For example, I actually don't think the baby plotline is meant to continue. If you take the time to analyze the story, it's pretty obvious that the baby was used as nothing more than a plot device this season for a few negative reasons, and this new "family" itself isn't meant to be a/the "happy ending". That's all I'll say about this plotline in this post. I'll see how some of my new posts do before I share my full thoughts on this plotline in a later post about how and why I think things may go a certain way. In general, I want to keep talking about the story as if it's a story.

Robby and his journey represent certain people in society and the traumas and struggles they experience. So far, the story and other characters haven't been too kind or sympathetic towards Robby, and sadly, the world and society irl aren't too kind or sympathetic towards many people who have similar situations to Robby's. I think his story is important, and I want to keep talking about it. I want to keep the conversation going about the important topics being explored in Robby's story.

[blueiight]

hello! how are you?

for the series ask, could you do lotgh?

hi! this question is framed so politely… im hangover grumpy but other than that im doing well..

Favorite character

cheating a little by doing this in tiers so empire side i like reinhard, kircheis, oberstein, reuenthal & hilde… alliance side i like yang, jessica, schonkopf (u notice i like good ideological challenges to MCs in this series) & julian

Second favorite character

n on the next tier of faves is mittermeyer, dusty, dominique, elfriede (an enemy of reuenthal is a friend of mine), frederica (if only tanaka knew women had interiority amirite), and many more

Least favorite character

its not so much least favorite character so much as it is i feel like bc tanaka really is so harsh about religion (& i say this as a nonbeliever myself but u cant deny that religion is a powerful social force) the entire earth cult as a concept really suffers in the writing of canon... and ova designers what the fuck was they doing w machungo’s design

The character I’m most like

ummmm ..i think if i said it id be subject to fines and cancellations so... u can decide ^_^

Favorite pairing

reinhard/kircheis, mittermeyer/reuenthal, reinhard/reuenthal, everybody/yang .. getting into crack pairs here dominique/el & ferobe :3

Least favorite pairing

its not hate cuz i love their dynamic but framing reinhilde as a love match is hilarious .. i can buy yang/frederica cuz yang is need of mommy doms but reinhilde is a lavender marriage. also ry would also be a lavender marriage to me the appeal of reinyang is yang to reinhard is like the girl that got away .. reinhard’s one true ‘equal’ that he could never gain supremacy over or sublimate into his camp. and yang has a sort of abstract admiration for reinhard as a historical figure but also recognizes that hes his ideological foe/nightmare of sorts in the present lol

Favorite moment

the kunmel incident itself, when reuenthal is at his desk in the ova and is like ‘this is everything in my life that built up to this incident’ (literally have a drunken thinkpiece about it somewhere on this blog), hilde saving reinhard at vermillion, reinhard & yang meeting..the dishonor gaiden (ngl i need me some thyoxin)+ ‘dont be nice to anyone but me and my sister kircheis’ gaiden …oberstein’s REDACTED

Rating out of 10

7.5/10, to me history, mini odysseys n shit n mythmaking by characters in a narrative is something tanaka seems to have a consistent interest in if u take his other works into account and i feel like u can tell that lotgh was his first foray into space opera & milsf w/o even getting into his other works .. theres lingering plot threads that dont rly go anywhere or arent answered satisfactorily (the entire earth cult-fezzan-lang connection is rly weak in terms of writing. yang disavowing conspiracies & terrorism as ‘impacting the flow of history’ couldve been a cruel stroke of irony if the terrorist conspiracy was in anyway narratively coherent).& an overarching motif of the series being the idea of ‘might makes right’ not only attracts an unsavory crowd of fans to say it politely.. but it also weakens a good bit of the series as yang is physically ‘weak’ but mentally + strategically a genius , he has no real conflicting force in his camp outside of schonkopf at a certain point where reinhard has oberstein hilde + reuenthal who all have their own ideological deigns on him as hes the leader of his camp. yang being so cerebral + very easygoing/bereft of the desire to have power dynamics despite being a military leader (seeing his subordinates as friends, rather than lord and master) makes him a very fun character but in later arcs it lends him to being a bit of a device/ insert for meta ideals more than having internal conflicts as a character of his own right & it makes me so sad bc just when he has one of his biggest dilemmas he CENSORED. also if the story dealt w/ reinhard’s final arc more (namely the revelation he has of REDACTED considering how much of his identity is built around his militaristic might) id rly love it. im speaking vaguely bc my friends r watching & ion wanna spoil and i also feel like im being mean to this series but i rly do like this series TTvTT

[construingseacats]

Umireread - Legend of the Golden Witch: Epilogue: ????

The following contains spoilers for the entirety of Umineko. Please do not read if you are yet to finish it.

SHE’S HEREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Considering I had very few thoughts on Bernkastel during my first playthrough, I’m ecstatic to really delve deeper into her this time round. I cannot wait for Erika to show up in the Answer Arcs. There will be so much gushing over the gremlins then, mark my words.

I have terrible news about the Answer Arcs for you, Bern.

Bernkastel comes in quite strongly with Umineko’s relationship to fiction, which isn’t necessarily a new concept by this point, but shes does so from a more heartless angle. There is interest in the humans, but not the humanity - the characters in the tale are mere playthings, inhabitants of a doll house to be bent and broken until the one playing with them decides to abandon them. From that sense, Bern is clearly the antagonist of the story at this point, but it’s not framed that way in the text for those who have not dug deeper. Beatrice is about understanding the human, Bernkastel is about using them. Diametrically opposed from the get go - but without love, this cannot be seen.

Simultaneously building the point that Beatrice’s motive is inscrutable, an opponent who wants to be defeated, while reinforcing the point we just made about caring for the humans behind the characters versus simply being interested in them. If characters in a story are just vessels for your entertainment, puppets made to dance for your whims, of course you’re not going to be able to understand someone who is treating that puppet like a living, breathing person. I’d say it’s a one-to-one comparison of a child doing exactly that at a real life puppet show; while good adults wouldn’t necessarily discourage it, and hurt the feelings of the child, everyone would inherently think the care of the child is misplaced into the inanimate puppets they’re attending to. But of course, in this case, it’s the child who is right, and the adults who are wrong.

Very amusing to see Bern emerge from a 100 year time loop and immediately go “I survived that endurance test but if this story sucks then that’ll be the death of me”.

Beatrice sure isn’t “one individual woman”, indeed! There are only 16 people, after all.

I wanted to make this observation back in Chapter 15, but opted to save it for here, as it felt more appropriate to end Episode 1 on it rather than let it get buried a little further back.

Umineko drenches itself in chess metaphors - from the aesthetic to the technical, through and through, Umineko wants you to associate it with chess. Battler and Beatrice are playing chess on the gameboards. Umineko is about playing chess.

But of course, Umineko is littered with misdirection. You’ve seen all the ways it’s lied to you so far, right? You don’t honestly believe Umineko is about playing chess right?

Good - because Umineko isn’t about playing chess. It’s about playing Mao.

Bern’s interesting philosophy towards literature surfaces once more. Once you’ve grasped the meaning behind it - the intention; the golden truth - you are free to do whatever you want with it. But there is no care or love in Bern’s interpretation. Once it’s your story, you rip out its guts for your amusement. What else would you do with it, after all?

I think there’s something to be said about how cruel and merciless this is. We’ve already established several camps when it comes to the consumption of literature - the dilettantes, who care not for deeper meanings or even the real intentions behind a work, and are happy to repurpose it for their own devices. As a contemporary example, you can see this as the type of people who will write schlocky fanfiction about characters, careless to the canon and happy to put words into their mouths that they would never say, for baseless interpretations that they favour. You have Beatrice’s approach, to understand the humans behind the characters, to be able to reach golden truths behind the media itself. I suppose to continue the fanfiction metaphor (which is apt, considering the nature of forgeries), these would be written stories that feel lifted straight out of the source material. That perfectly complements it and would fit in as an actual part of the world it came from.

Bern’s camp is the most perverse - to reach the understanding required of the Beatrice camp, and then gleefully reject it for your amusement. This one doesn’t fit as nicely into the metaphor we’re developing, but if you’re willing to humour me for a moment, I’d say we can represent it as fanfiction that goes against the wishes of the canon. That, while far from amateur, deviates from the story; making main characters go down different paths, engage in different love interests, killing off characters like a curious god testing their powers.

Of course, this immediately feels like a disconnect - after all, how is that a bad thing? Isn’t it good that fans are engaging with the work and exploring alternate possibilities? Well, I’m absolutely not arguing that someone writing an unconventional ship for a series they like is somehow doing it out of malice. But the point here is that, when a story is written, the author has a specific intent. If they pour their heart and soul into these characters, they know what they want to happen with them; if the pen conjures up the human inside of the vessel, then the author is writing what has to happen with them. If you are able to see those very elements, and choose to defy them, you’re ripping apart the manuscript. You’re crushing it as you please. In an extreme case, such a thing could be quite upsetting for an author to see - to have their beloved characters defiled in such a way.

But, most importantly, we’re not talking about fanfiction of a popular anime or the like. In Umineko’s case, we’re talking about what was a real life event - with real life human beings. Reconsider this example not with a fanwork of shonen or a cartoon, but of fiction written about a tragedy. If modern examples are too evocative, you could consider how this applies to something like the Titanic. What is the morality of using that disaster as set dressing, without having thoroughly researched it yourself? What of the James Cameron film, and the love story contained within? What of the many other terrible Titanic films?

It’s kind of hard to come up with specific examples for Bern’s camp. For example, you could look at how YIIK used a real life tragedy irresponsibly as part of its plot, but you could just as easily argue that was a case of them being dilettantes rather than people who had actively cared for the incident they were using.

I don’t think I’ve conveyed all that in the optimal way, but I hope the point tracks. I suppose it boils down to “Beatrice’s philosophy on literature is good, the Dilettante philosophy is bad, Bern’s philosophy is the worst”.

Once again, it’s up to you how much you want to respect a story once you’ve uncovered the heart of it. Treat it with love, or scrap it for parts. Either option is valid in the greater scheme of the uncaring universe.

Bern really wants us to break Beato, huh?

Well, I suppose she’s not actually talking to us here. Unless I’m mistaken, this is Bern talking to Ange, right?

I suppose we should address the elephant in the room, and how the Witches’ Tea Party fits into the greater canon of Umineko. While we’ve stated that the meta scenes in Purgatory are a reflection of the mental struggle that Tohya is facing, there isn’t really an equivalent parallel to be made here.

I think it’s something of a fool's errand to try and explain this all away with reality. After all, we seem to be safe to say that Witches do “exist” in the greater When They Cry canon; Higurashi was inevitably coated in supernatural elements by the nature of the time loop, and Bernkastel referring to those events here does confirm that Umineko shares the same universe (unless it’s a significant misdirect on Ryukishi’s part, which is a non-zero possibility, but I’ll be discounting that for our purposes). Featherine existing in Higurashi Gou further ties the universe together, so I think we’re relatively safe to say that the Witches’ realm exists as a narrative tool to connect the Sea of Fragments that contains the gameboards of Higurashi, Umineko, and Ciconia.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that this is free of meaning, however. If Bernkastel is talking to Ange here, then we can’t discount the possibility of these scenes being representative of the mental struggles that Ange is facing. The gameboard layer of message bottles and forgeries, the meta layer of Tohya coming to terms with what transpired, and an additional layer of Ange attempting to do the same in her situation. Of course, we’re not going to properly be able to explore that until we’ve actually met Ange - but we’ll get to that in due time.

And that’s a wrap on Episode 1! For all the criticisms levied throughout, I do think Episode 1 is a good time - of course, it’s hindered by the fact that it’s effectively just a giant introduction to Umineko, and there is no piece of (quality) media where the pilot can exceed the highs that the show will go on to achieve. However, we’ve had a good establishment of themes, exemplary work on what to expect going forward, and is obviously very meticulously crafted in a way that I hope even new readers can see (even if they can’t quite comprehend exactly what is going on behind the scenes). Umineko is actually three stories layered on top of each other at all times - the mystery layer, of “truth” and “reality”, the fantasy layer, where the witches dance and false closed rooms are concocted; and the meta layer, of stories penned by broken people trying to understand themselves through what they have written. In this sense, Episode 1 has been nothing short of an artisanal lasagne - and the recipe is only improving as we go.

[thosearentcrimes]

Read The Committed, a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Yes, the sequel to the The Sympathizer, which I mentioned I was going to read in that review. I've read it and it's good. My concerns turned out to be incorrect, the author still has plenty of ideas.

I wasn't entirely wrong, I think. My premise was that the author had run out of ideas in The Sympathizer, and I suspect that was in fact the case. The new ideas Nguyen comes up with for The Committed are very different, but likewise interesting. Roughly speaking, as Nguyen leaves behind the setting he has researched most thoroughly (Nationalist Vietnam, Vietnamese exiles and refugees in the US) he replaces it with a character study of the protagonist, most of which is done pretty well (some parts are admittedly a bit implausible).

The sequel is a fair bit more literary, with a more introspective, philosophical character, and a significantly more stylized narration. It's mostly unobtrusive or pleasant, however. While the literary flourishes of The God of Small Things made me hesitant to recommend it to anyone not actively interested in a heavily literary text, I have no such concerns about The Committed. It's a relatively straightforward crime story. There's a bit of misdirection and some literary flourishes and references, but nothing that would impede the reader if they don't feel like dwelling on something.

One device that is incredibly effective the first time it shows up is the extremely long paragraph that closes out Part One. Unfortunately, when the device recurs it loses some of its strength (and in my opinion even robs the first appearance), not merely because it is no longer a novelty, but also because it doesn't seem as relevant most of the other times it shows up. This is of course an extremely minor quibble, and that itself tells you that there isn't very much wrong with the book.

In The Sympathizer, I found the framing device highly implausible. The text quite simply does not read as what it claims to be, which isn't a dealbreaker but is unfortunate. By contrast, the internal textual identification of The Committed is relatively consistent with its character, in my opinion.

I am praising the book a great deal, more than I did The Sympathizer. This isn't because I think it's a better novel, it's more that it holds up to my critical language and preoccupations better. They're very different novels and as such they aren't really possible to compare directly. I can only say that I recommend both, and that they certainly should be read in order.