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butterflydm · 2 years ago

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wot reread: the gathering storm (chapters 7-16)

spoilers for the gathering storm

1. So, the themes of the previous PoV chapters centered around duty, and what you need to be willing to sacrifice for your duty. I’m kinda curious if this theme continues!

2. Nynaeve is worried about the approaching storm and being reminded of Moiraine by the Aes Sedai who is currently with her (because the woman is wearing a kesiera). Ah-HA. We learn here that Cadsuane DID steal the male Choden Kal and is still keeping it herself. I wondered at the end of Winter’s Heart if she was planning on keeping it after she stole it from Rand, and am not surprised at the answer. Anyway, Nynaeve is practicing for the Aes Sedai test and she’s doing her best not to worry about Lan - she’s done everything that she can to help him on his self-imposed task, and there’s no good in dwelling.

3. Corele was the one who essentially talked Nynaeve into doing this (by arguing that it would be a favor for Daigan, the Aes Sedai teaching her, who is grieving over Eben dying during the cleansing) -- Corele has been doing ALL the heavy lifting in terms of actually being able to get through to Two Rivers’ people so far in this book. Literally has been SO much more useful than Cadsuane at this point (she’s one of Aes Sedai who Healed Rand after the Fain attack too) - at this point in the story, bringing Corele into Rand’s narrative is the most useful thing that Cadsuane has done.

4. Oh! Nynaeve is thinking about the wrongness of the Might Equals Right system of the White Tower hierarchy. Haha, I love her comparison here -- “She herself was so strong in the Power - one of the strongest alive - that she often took little thought for her ability. It was much as a very tall man rarely paid attention to other people’s heights; everyone else was shorter than he, and so their different heights didn’t matter” (lol, mildly shading her boy Rand). I love this because Nynaeve is, Power-wise, at the TOP of the hierarchy (or will be once she’s accepted as a full Sister by everyone) and she’s looking at Daigan and thinking, it’s not right that she has to show deference to everyone else simply because she’s so much weaker in the Power. So true! It’s a BAD system, Nynaeve. Okay, Nynaeve is feeling invested in Tower Reform. That’s good! I will tuck that information away.

5. Nynaeve thinks of Mat as “Matrim” here but I will allow it, because it’s in the context of remembering him as a youthful prankster. This “Matrim” is in character. Haha, though, Nynaeve remembering Mat and Rand pulling pranks together. Sorry, Third Friend Perrin, lol. But Nynaeve thinking here about how SHE will always think of Rand as the village boy that she once knew and not of the fearsome Dragon Reborn is very sweet (though this thought is heavily tested during the upcoming conversation). That said, worry about Mat! You left him behind in Ebou Dar, Nynaeve, and then NEVER TOLD RAND ABOUT IT. grumble, grumble. Technically, I think Rand vaguely implied last book in a big group of people that included Nynaeve that HE knew Mat was alive and well, but I’m still annoyed that NO ONE EVER actually TOLD Rand that Mat got abandoned at the end of A Crown of Swords. Communicate using words, people! (hilariously, not thinking of communicating with people using words is explicitly one of the things that Nynaeve is annoyed with Rand about in this section; Healer, heal thyself)

6. Anyway, the Aiel have officially arrived at the manor. lol, “Min was in the tent [with Rand], of course” yes, god forbid the umbilical cord be stretched too far, lol. Honestly, it was such a relief to get Rand without Min glommed onto him in his last chapter, but I guess it couldn’t last forever. Though, as is tradition, she is just here to be Rand’s therapy plushie and doesn’t actually contribute to the discussion. It’s so weird here that Nynaeve thinks about how Rand is being silly for refusing to marry Min and yet DOESN’T think about the love confession that she literally witnessed between Elayne, Aviendha, and Min towards Rand back in Winter’s Heart. ??? (tongue-in-cheek theory: Nynaeve used SO MUCH of the Power during the cleansing that it impacted her memory and she no longer remembers that Mat was left behind in Ebou Dar, that Aviendha, Elayne, & Min confessed their love to Rand in front of her, and has lost all knowledge of the sul’dam secret)

7. Nynaeve thinks that Semirhage should have been stilled as soon as she was captured. YES. Great way around Rand’s stupid “we don’t kill women even when they are among the most dangerous people in the world and we would have absolutely have killed a man if he’d done the same things that she’s done” policy and would have been a good way to try to create some HARM REDUCTION. And they can even heal stilling... if they want to... so it wouldn’t even be as permanent as Rand losing his hand, if they didn’t want it to be.

8. Rand is trying to figure out how to bring peace to Arad Doman. That is exactly the thing that Moridin has tasked Graendal with preventing him from doing. Ironically, this is actually the thing she was ALREADY doing before Moridin pulled her away to tell her that he’s her boss now. She was already creating chaos in Arad Doman.

9. *resigned sigh* honestly, so sad that Rand is approaching this situation in terms of “how can I STOP Ituralde from defending his homeland so that I can make nice with the invaders?”. Depressing! Ituralde is literally working WITH Dragonsworn right now! I wish that Rand had been able to approach him from a “let me help you defeat the Seanchan so that you can help me in the Last Battle” stance. And Rand is just so... idk, weirdly certain that the Daughter of the Nine Moons is a person that is open to compromise, given that his latest intel on the Seanchan is that his OFFICIAL ENVOY to their ‘capitol’ to request an official meeting ending up being answered by one of the Forsaken. Why would he assume that the Daughter of the Nine Moons is even still alive at this point?

10. Ah, Siuan. I do have complicated feelings about Siuan. Or, I guess they aren’t that complicated -- I dislike the romance with Gareth Bryne, and wish I could have the rest of Siuan’s storyline but have the romance snipped out. I am hoping that the show will grant my wish. *fingers crossed*

11. Siuan is very proud & pleased of Egwene’s progress as Amrylin (even as she worries over Egwene in captivity), particularly of all the novices that Egwene has brought into the Tower with her policy changes. Over a thousand! Another thing that will inevitably have an impact on the shape of the White Tower to come, no matter what. All that fresh blood, all those new ideas. Siuan thinks here about how the world & the White Tower needs Egwene to be Amrylin. Also: important world-building note here, I think, is that though many Aes Sedai WORRY that the ability to use the One Power is being culled out of the species, we can see that this is straight-up untrue as the series progressed. It was never that fewer people can channel; it’s that fewer channelers are ending up at the White Tower as Aes Sedai. As soon as Egwene relaxes the parameters of recruiting, the numbers step WAY up even just in this swatch of space in-between Salidar and Murandy before they Traveled to Tar Valon (the same with Taim being able to locate men with the potential).

12. Anyway, though I don’t like the Siuan and Gareth relationship overall, I appreciate this conversation here where they actually talk to each other like grownups. That’s something of a breath of fresh air. Sanderson often approaches romances as... things that sensible people work out in conversation, lol, which is also not always to my personal tastes (...I like messiness), but it’s much less frustrating than Jordan’s Women And Men Just Can’t Understand Each Other approach (I don’t like stubborn miscommunication and silence). Which tends to mean, overall, that I feel less passionately about Sanderson’s romances that I do like, but I also have a much lower amount of annoyed frustration with his romances. NEITHER of them are what I’d call romance writers though. (my favorite fictional romance in a non-romance book for me is probably... ah, I am fond of Aral and Cordelia’s romance from the Vorkosigan Saga.)

13. Hmm. Perrin. When last we spent time with Perrin, he’d decided that slavers were okay as long as they helped him get what he wanted. I wonder if he’ll decide he has time for morals again now that Faile is back in his life. Ah, Perrin is trying to focus on simple, straight-forward work not to think about ~unreliable men~ like himself. Okay, let’s see where this train of thought goes. The question I have now is what, exactly, Perrin is blaming himself for. Is it what I would be blaming him for or will be it something out of left field? Hmm. Perrin thinks about how he should be thrilled to have Faile back, since she’s literally EVERYTHING to him, but something still feels wrong.

14. Did I know before now that Berelain’s main commander was named Bertain? It’s almost the exact same name, this is so distracting. Is there a law in Mayene that everyone must be name Ber_ain? Apparently he was first mentioned back in A Crown of Swords, per the wiki.

15. Balwer tries to point out to Perrin his flaws in selling the Shaido Wise Ones into slavery, a decision that pissed off all the Aiel traveling with him. He points out that even in this brief time, he’s already learned that the Wise Ones had been at odds with each other in the Shaido camp and that they’d been in contact with a mysterious figure who’d offered them objects of Power from the Age of Legends, which might be information useful to people, such as, idk, the Dragon Reborn. Perrin... does not care. He thinks of the Wise Ones as “given over to the Seanchan while unconscious, to do with as they pleased”. Yikes, Perrin. Yikes. Sadly, in character per Knife of Dreams, but big yikes. Yeah, so Perrin has completely written off the, you know, two hundred women that he sold into slavery. So... that’s a ‘no’ on getting his morals back.

16. “He wasn’t stupid, he just liked to think about things.” Perrin Aybara, you have spent this entire chapter doing makework to AVOID thinking about things. “liked to think about things”. HA!

17. Anyway, Faile has returned from murdering Masema scouting. Perrin just kinda watches her from afar for a moment. Then Tam arrives to talk to him. Perrin was kinda a total asshole to him last book so, uh, let’s see how this conversation goes. lol, wow, Perrin is still a complete ASS to Tam when talking to him about his son. “[Rand] seems to like scooping up kingdoms. Like a child playing a game of wobbles”. wtf, Perrin. That’s his DAD. First he doesn’t ever bother to tell Tam that his son is the Dragon Reborn and then once Tam finds out from someone else, Perrin just uses him as a dumping ground to whine about Rand.

18. Ah, Perrin has finally figured out that he’s a bad leader (not in the “oh no please don’t call me lord” way but in the “abandoning everything else and throwing away his people to chase after a selfish goal” way). ...and immediately tries to distract himself from the thought by throwing himself into more carpentry work. lol.

19. ...Perrin is under the belief that his wolf nose can sniff out ~noble heritage~. lol, okay, bro. If I recall correctly, you didn’t pick up on Faile being noble until she flat-out told you, but okay. You still haven’t figured out that Morgase is a former queen, but, sure. You can sniff out nobility. That’s definitely something that you can smell. Anyway, he figures that it’s finally time to head to Rand. He doesn’t think about Masema, his actual reason for coming out here, a single time (except to note that Aram’s ~heart~ was poisoned by him, but he doesn’t think about him in the context of Masema being the WHOLE REASON that he’s in this country to begin with). He managed to distract himself so much from his purpose that he has completely forgotten it. Amazing. Good thing Faile was there to actually do something useful, I guess.

20. Rand makes Ituralde give up his noble fight against the slavers invading his homeland. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 Honestly, Ituralde was one of the very few high points for me during CoT & KoD, so this is extremely upsetting. Yes, Ituralde is working with very few resources and is stretched way too thin and every battle had the chance to be his last, but it just PAINS me to think of what he could have accomplished against the Seanchan if Rand were coming here to help him instead of divert him. Even now, he’s being clever by hiding in a stedding to blunt the possible attacks of damane against him. “The young Ituralde had often dreams of wars, of glory in battle. The old Ituralde knew there was no such thing as glory to be found in battle. But there was honor.” I’m feeling an emotion. Feeling kinda choked up tbh. I don’t blame Ituralde for taking Rand’s deal, but I wish that Rand were offering him a different one. Ituralde DOES get Rand’s guarantee that he won’t let the Seanchan have Arad Doman.

21. Oh, no, it’s so cute that Aviendha decides that complaining MUST actually be honorable among wetlanders because Elayne does it too, that’s adorable. This whole ‘doing make work for the Wise Ones and not having enough honor to even talk to the guy that she literally is mind-bonded to’ remains such a silly silly thing though. It makes Aviendha being in Arad Doman feel as pointless as the ‘useless’ work that she’s doing for the Wise Ones. Literally they have a one-sentence exchange here and then separate again. This is the first time Aviendha has so much as said ‘boo’ to Rand since she arrived, so I also find it very out of character that he just walks off (she was literally JUST IN DANGER from the literal Dark One’s touch turning someone into a lump of tar that radiates unnatural heat so “I have to stay away from her to protect her” seems like a very stupid excuse right now, especially if he’s stalking off to go have sex with Min, who he constantly puts in danger despite her actually being much more helpless than either Aviendha or Elayne). Just... I am enjoying Aviendha’s narrative voice here but am so frustrated at Aviendha and Rand being kept separate for literally zero reason or point. But Aviendha calling him “Rand” and not “Rand al’Thor” does affect my heart.

22. Merise flirts with Aviendha. Or hits her up for the Aes Sedai. I’m going go with ‘flirts with’, because that’s more fun. She eyes Aviendha ~appreciatively~ and admires how Aviendha ~handles~ her ~weaves~. I actually do really like Melaine and Aviendha’s conversation afterwards, where Melaine is trying to get Aviendha to realize that she IS thinking like a Wise One and needs to be able to admit this to herself, but I think the Aiel’s teaching methods here are somewhat counterproductive. But honestly, I’m annoyed at this random roadblock of “Aviendha has decided she can’t sleep with Rand again Honor Reasons”. It just feels arbitrary.

23. A month has now passed, as we go back to Egwene’s PoV. A WHOLE MONTH? That seems like... way too much time. I feel like it’s about logistics, maybe? Anyway. A Whole Month Later. One minor thing that is interesting to me is that Egwene shows here that she has learned how to channel THROUGH having mild doses of forkroot, so it’s not something that can be used to permanently incapacitate channelers even if they keep being forced to drink it. Did we already know that?

24. Fast-forwarding a month does mean that we can see that the seeds of Egwene’s planting have taken root, and more and more of the Sisters are treating her as an authority instead of a prisoner. Meidani (after having been taught Traveling) is able to lead Egwene to the room where the Black Ajah Hunters meet (since her Oath to them prevents her from telling Egwene what happened), and Egwene has a frank conversation with them which leads to a tentative alliance of sorts (once she gets them to admit that since Siuan was deposed by the bare minimum of Sitters and they know for a fact that at least one of them was Black Ajah, then Siuan was unlawfully deposed).

25. Hmm, the way Gawyn talks about the world ‘compressing’ during fights reminds me of Galad in the KoD prologue & reminds me of Rand... reminds me of men who are in a pre-channeling state, basically. Gawyn as a potential channeler? I also like this conversation between Gawyn and Sleete, getting a different perspective on the split in the Tower, from the Warder of an Aes Sedai who isn’t one of the big dogs. “Nobody made any good decisions that day. There weren’t any good decisions to be made.” Oh! We also learn here that Hattori (his Warder) is the one who reported back to the Greens about Elaida’s secret true orders about Rand (so that’s likely how the rumors got into the Tower), because she disapproved.

26. Gawyn giving me Trakand family feels: “Gawyn’s mother had always taught that the workers were the spine of a kingdom; break them, and you’d soon find that you could no longer move. This city’s people might not be his sister’s subjects, but he would not see them taken advantage of by his troops”. Gawyn continues to question where his loyalty lies -- he’d never actually CHOSEN to follow Elaida, he just hadn’t trusted Siuan or the way she’d treated Elayne or Egwene. And Gawyn finally finds out here that a. Egwene is the rebels’ Amrylin; b. she’s currently a captive in the White Tower; c. she’s being tortured daily; and d. the rebel Aes Sedai have Traveling. This is what finally breaks him from wanting to try to stand on both sides -- the knowledge that Egwene is potentially going to be executed (he has no way of knowing that this isn’t in Elaida’s plan) -- and he packs up and abandons the Younglings on the hour, heading off to find the rebel army and Gareth Bryne.

27. Genuinely still do not care even in the slightest about Semirhage’s interrogation. Gonna skim to see if there are any mentions of Merise and Narishma’s relationship tho. ...nah, no mention of them at all this time. It does sound like Team Jordan genuinely forgot about all the copies of the black a’dam that were mentioned at the end of Knife of Dreams tho, because there’s only one here in Cadsuane’s box of Shit She Stole From Rand.

28. I can’t believe that Rand seriously just passively allowed a whole month to pass where Aviendha was avoiding him while they were living in the same place and he was just... sleeping with Min every night when one of the other women he loves was sleeping outside and that he never actively sought her out.

29. Anyway, he’s in a dreamshard and has a conversation with Moridin/Ishamael. Knowing that Ishamael has been brought back to life as Moridin makes Rand wonder if any of the other Forsaken that have been killed were brought back as well. Moridin mentions (a deliberate slip?) that only those killed by balefire are beyond the Dark One’s ability to revive in a new body. So if Rand wants to ensure that a Forsaken STAYS dead, he needs to use balefire.

30. Rand notices that he feels more emotionally stable here in this dreamshard than he has in the waking world recently -- he talks of Lews Therin as “I” without getting the intrusive screaming and memories. “The pieces of himself fit together better”. This conversation between old friends who are also old enemies... I am liking this a lot as well. Moridin-Ishamael-Elan is just so TIRED during this talk. He is EXHAUSTED and just wants everything to stop. And that makes so much sense -- he’s the Forsaken who was closer to the surface of the world than the others. The other Forsaken are ‘technically’ thousands of years old but he’s the only one who actually LIVED for a significant portion of that time period. I am imagining this conversation happening with Rand in the show and just... if we get there, this conversation would just have so much great old friend-enemies vibes, kinda similar to Charles & Erik from X-Men.

31. Rand is having his nightmare and Min just holds her breath and watches from a chair. Man, the thing that gets to me the most about Min being Rand’s emotional support plushie is that she isn’t even good at it. But she doesn’t do anything else! She sucks at the one job that she has assigned herself! She then thinks about how she -- the person who has been selfishly hoarding Rand’s time for MONTHS -- is uncomfortable with sharing. Then don’t get involved with a man that you KNOW is also in love with other people. YOU are the one who chased after Rand, even knowing that he already loved Elayne and Aviendha! YOU are the one who seduced him when he was vulnerable. That was you! Making a choice and blaming it on prophecy! Mat and Min, with that hands shaking meme, and the agreement they’re shaking on is “creating their own romantic misery while blaming it on prophecy and constantly whining about the inevitable consequences of their own actions”.

32. “She wasn’t Aes Sedai -- Thank the Light.” Um. WTF, Min. Literally ALL THREE of the people that you are in a sorta relationship with can all channel. Yikes, girl. “somehow she had bonded him”. Min has edited Elayne’s SELFLESS ACT OF ROMANTIC GENEROSITY entirely out of her memory and is pretending that her bond with Rand ~appeared from the ether~. SOMEHOW. It was ELAYNE, you selfish and jealous child. It was ELAYNE who bonded you to Rand, you ungrateful pain in my ass. I note that Min is happy to reap the rewards of ‘sharing’ Rand, despite her ‘discomfort’ with the idea. Min is the oldest of Rand’s girlfriends, but ~somehow~ also the least mature.

33. SOMEHOW. 😠😠😠😠😠

34. “She’d never thought that she, of all people, would become a fool for some man.” Literally your entire plotline in this book series has been about being a fool for a man. That’s your entire plotline. That’s your entire character. lol, she ‘of all people’. omg, I think that @markantonys mentioned this line when she got to it in her first read of the books, but I literally did just double over laughing - “that didn’t mean she was his pet, regardless of what some of the people in the camp said”. I was wondering last book or so what Rand’s other allies (who know about his and Elayne’s romance) thought about Min and, um, I guess that’s our answer. lol, Min thinks again about how she will ~suffer~ sharing him with others because she just loves him oh! so much! Comedy hours with Min, the ~long-suffering martyr~ who has caused all of her own problems. At least the sex is good, I guess.

35. The contrast between Aviendha firmly thinking that it was HER choice to love Rand, not Min’s viewing, and Min’s thought here that it WASN’T her choice to love him, that was it literally anything BUT her choice (her ‘heart’, the Creator, the Pattern, etc).

36. Anyway, Rand wakes up and he and Min talk, and Min shares the ~news~ that Rand needs to break the seals on the Dark One’s prison. She’s figured out that’s what Herid Fel’s note meant! It’s also... literally what Rand himself said at the start of Lord of Chaos, before Min ever returned to his life. lol. I feel like this is an artifact of the series getting stretched out so long -- that we have to re-introduce this idea that Rand had back in book six.

37. I can’t believe that we cut from ever-jealous Min snuggling Rand in bed, like she’s gotten to do for MONTHS, to Aviendha standing outside the manor alone, and yet MIN is the one whining about her ~constant suffering~ over how she has to share Rand. The contrast is so glaring! Aviendha has to mute the bond so that she can avoid feeling Rand have sex with Min while she feels honor-bound to avoid him, but MIN is the one whining.

38. Man, I feel so much sympathy with Corana here: “These Seanchan have given [Rand] reason to declare a blood feud, but he simpers and panders to them. I feel like a trained dog, sent to lick the feet of a stranger.” That has been the EXACT mood I’ve had since the start of Crossroads of Twilight. She tells them that the Seanchan have leashed Wise Ones in their camp as damane. Aviendha and Amys agree that, for now, peace must be sought in order to fight the greater enemy, but that their spears should be turned on the Seanchan after the Last Battle.

39. Egwene has a conversation with three White Ajah Sisters over the issue of Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, and lays out what she would have done differently -- mostly pointing out Elaida and the Tower’s mistakes:

Trying to force someone who is both powerful and stubborn instead of trying to persuade him (aka the abduction)

Raising a Red Sister as their replacement Amyrlin, even though that seems very likely to come across as a threat to a man who can channel

Attempting to pretend that they had any high ground to tell him that they knew best when they were dealing with a divided White Tower themselves. “Can a cracked stone be a good foundation for a building?”

40. After Egwene gets assigned to permanent work detail (no more lessons with Sisters) to try to break her spirit, Laras tries to help her escape the White Tower but Egwene refuses to go, saying that her fight is inside the Tower.

41. Egwene is ordered to serve Elaida at dinner again, but this time there are several Sisters of various Ajahs there, including Sitters, and during the dinner, it feels to Egwene as if Elaida is deliberately insulting them and attempting to bully them to her will. “Prying the Ajahs even further apart”. When the subject of the Seanchan comes up, Elaida tells Egwene to tell the Sisters there that she has been spreading lies about them and that the Seanchan are working for “al’Thor”. Instead, after considering her options, Egwene tells the truth. She tells them that she has Dreamed that the Seanchan will attack the White Tower and that they are incredibly dangerous and their threat should not be ignored. Elaida really does set up an impossible situation for Egwene here -- back down, and she loses the respect that she’s built. Stand up, and she may get locked in a cell (or even executed) unable to continue her fight.

But, of course, pushed to the limit, Egwene does stand up for herself and for the White Tower against Elaida’s demands. “I dare the truth, Elaida.” Oh, I actually love this confrontation, exposing what Elaida has become in such full detail that none of the Sisters witnessing it can deny it (though I feel a pang of sorrow for who Elaida once was, before she was corrupted by Fain & the paranoia of Aridhol, which is on full display here as well). 100% want to see Madeleine give this speech.

Okay, that’s a good place to end. Very satisfying chapter!

#wot reread #the gathering storm #wheel of time #wot #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #egwene al'vere #nynaeve al'meara #perrin aybara #aviendha #rand al'thor #gawyn trakand

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cupcakecoterie · 5 years ago

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@true0neutral - Hazel, half-elf cleric

@fauxfire76 - Darvin, human bard

@miaaoi - Froseth, dragonborn monk

@hyperewok1 - Remi, human paladin

Marion - Ava, human ranger

Unfortunately, @noctumsolis couldn’t join us again last session, but soon! SOON! We carried on meantime, and ... yeah, talking talking talking.

Dawn, the little half-orc girl over at Hearthhome, decided to glom onto Ava. The kids generally speaking have their favourites of the New Big Siblings, and apparently Dawn has chosen Ava as hers. Which is kind of nice because of all of them, Dawn’s the one who’s not entirely sure what she wants to do with herself when she grows up.

They explained about Eryn to Twilly and Miranda. It went a little sideways due to awkward phrasing, leading to a very worried Twilly and Miranda. That got sorted out due to Hazel cutting through the word salad. This is what happens when you invoke the god of death in these sort of situations. Especially in front of all of the kids. Then again, the kids have been eavesdropping on both their foster parents and the mercenaries camping in their fields for days.

When Remi returned, they explained to Twilly and Miranda that they were going to lure the ancient green to the barony of Goldendale so they could at least try to kill it away from its lair, maybe with backup from the merc companies. Twilly and Miranda (Twilly in particular, who was in the dungeon designed by the ancient green, after all, as were a few of the kids) got rather upset at this, because green dragons are generally sneaky and manipulative and use the pain of others to their own ends and the ancient green was clearly going to begin any assault on the barony of Goldendale with the home of her foes. “You killed her son”, it was flagged up. “Why wouldn’t she go directly for your little ones?” It all got very, very quiet after that, and Twilly and Miranda asked for some time to themselves to consider what to do.

Back at Fort Cupcake, Alisaie was dissuaded from trying to lure the dragon on her own and everyone else’s guilt over the situation manifested in different ways. Hazel just went to have a stress-nap. Alisaie went for a walk, punched a tree for awhile and then, as per a reasonable Wisdom roll, came up with an idea - evacuate the kids to the Cathay farm, which is close but not too close, not known to anybody, and has reasonable amounts of space given the staff bunkhouse that’s empty at this time of year. They were banking on Twilly being able to prep the appropriate spell, but we’re talking about a level 20 wizard here.

For the others ... Darvin just went to lie down and ended up having something of a quiet lesson from the spark of Bahamut-divinity in his own soul. Rissi went and made friends with the mercenary scouts. Hazel, woken by Alisaie to give her parents the potentially good news, went to explain the new plan to the Hearthhearts so they could make preparations, and incidentally arrange for very temporary use of Ava’s rapier, Gleam, as a focus for a teleport to where the Cathay farm.

With everybody up, back, and somewhat more hopeful than they were, they prepared for Remi’s meeting with the merc company captains. They thought about bringing Ava, since she’s ‘the money’, but given that she’s not all of ‘the money’, and given that it would get confusing with the half-dragon half-sister being around, they decided to leave her back. In the end, it was Remi, Alisaie, and Froseth as the person who could lip-read and with the extensive insight.

During the meeting, Remi was fairly impressive, as these things went - she explained the situation succinctly, and while the mercenary captains weren’t entirely impressed with the idea of an ancient green dragon dropping on their heads, a comment from the cleric of Istus (fate goddess) sparked off a particularly good bit of insight for Froseth along with a vision from the elements themselves; they have the pieces they need to rekindle the heart of Star Coast - four divine-touched individuals, each a good representation of a classical element, and one who understands the Way of the elements to bind them - and Star Coast is entirely deserted. With the lure of a new, vulnerable, easy-to-obtain heart on ground where no one else could be harmed ... they could draw the ancient green away with no innocents to be harmed. The merc captains found that reassuring enough to allow them to offer bits of help, at least in terms of run of their quartermaster tent. Unfortunately, the mercs have been dealing with demons getting thrown at them from one source or another, and some of those have poison, so they might not be able to spare that much, but every little helps.

As per Froseth’s advice, Hazel and Ava went to see if they could get any magical help from Twilly for ... poison resistance, some way of keeping the ancient green from flying, anything. Darvin went to spend some time with Evan, maybe show him a few things about how to use thieves’ tools. Unfortunately Evan was rearranging the dollhouse furniture in Geloe’s house and annoyed Geloe so much she used Polymorph on him, turning him into a bunny. Darvin knew how to handle that. Twilly thought about what was asked of her and offered to spend the next few days before evacuation (which they’re doing anyway just to be on the safe side) trying to work out a variation on Scroll of Prismatic Wall that will keep an enemy in instead of out. Farideh is going to watch her do that; apparently Farideh’s very active mind is hard to keep appropriately entertained.

Everyone got together to pool their information, and then went to hang out with the mercenaries for awhile, Alisaie dancing stories of the Cupcake Coterie’s great deeds for the entertainment of the mercs and sharing some wine around.

Next time: probably checking in on Goldendale Town, which has been the site of a few skirmishes, and maybe see if Jenna’s finished Ava’s arrows and sword, and Hazel’s spear.

#cupcake coterie #full session #Write-up #Youtube Vid

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emptymanuscript · 5 years ago

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Pearling (A totally BS term for a totally real writing technique)

How is a pearl made?

There are actually two answers. Prior to 1902, so far as anyone knows anyway, there was one way to get pearls. You went out and you found a bivalve mollusk, you pried it open (almost always killing it by the way), and if you were lucky there was a pearl in there. If there wasn’t, you went and found another bivalve mollusk. You repeated until you found one. You finished it up, and tada, you had one of the most valuable pieces of jewlry available. And if you were poor, you sold it to someone rich so you wouldn’t be poor. Back in traditional times, you would get one pearl out of several hundred bivalve mollusks, thus the value. “Farming” pearls was long labor intensive work for very little reward.

The Mollusks themselves were also a bit reliant on luck. They sat around living their lives without pearls just fine. Then a dangerous irritant gets in to its delicate inner workings: the mantle, where it stores the parts that let it breathe, grow, and move. So it’s no joke. The bivalve mollusk generates an immune response to the irritant because it can’t risk harm to that area. Pearl making bivalve mollusks (of which there are very few) secrete nacre (also called mother of pearl - it’s a combination of calcium carbonate, argonite, possibly calcite, and conchlin which is kind of like horn or snail shell as a binding agent) the same compound that makes up their shells, to make a protective barrier between it and the irritant to hopefully smooth it out so it can’t tear up anything in there. If that doesn’t work satisfactorily, the mollusk secretes another layer, building it up to try and make it all better. The longer it takes for the mollusk to be satisfied, the bigger - and probably more valuable - the pearl.

And you can think of story ideas being much the same. A thought comes into your head and it stays with you. It keeps itching at you to do something with it. And as it sits and stews then other things, other ideas and tropes and desires attach to it, glom onto it, surround it, grow into a bigger better idea that carries more narrative weight and value.

Then, like the pearl farmer, it’s just waiting on all the pearls growing in there to be valuable enough to harvest and use, and picking up the biggest shiniest one. And that’s natural pearling. You wait for the inevitable to happen and you harvest when the moment is right.

But, from 1902 forward, the Pearl industry learned to cheat, and so can you. Now we have cultured pearls. Forget chance and waiting. Some methods even allow for multiple pearls to be seeded per oyster and because of the growth process of the now majority suriving oysters, for susequent harvests to be of larger pearls. While there are different technologies for how it is all done, in large part what happens is that a very small piece of oyster shell from a donor oyster is surgically embedded into the mantle of the Pearl growing oyster as a seed for the Pearl growth.

We can do this, too.

I would argue that the single most helpful essay ever written about creative writing for creative writers is Holly Lisle’s How To (Legally and Ethically) Steal Ideas. Because it’s the guide to doing this. What she’s really talking about is those sorts of donor seeds, an infinitessimally small donor piece to form the great big pearl of a story around.

The benefit is that you “Know” already that the donor piece provokes story and demands attention because it has already caught your attention. It’s good for pearling. It’s also most likely pretty jagged. Because if you really want to use that donor piece, you aren’t quite satisfied with how it was done. You have a call to make it better, to attach it to differnt layers that will make it sing better than it could in the original.

And you don’t have to wait. You don’t have to be in a position of obsessing over some story element that you can’t let go of. You can just try to think of story elements you want to play with as seeds. You can keep a list of seeds that you wish had lead somewhere else to be used on command.

Then it’s just pearling on the ideas. If my seed is: why are X and Y close when there isn’t any real good reason presented. Then X and Y are close. Why? Well maybe X and Y actually think of each other as family? But Y doesn’t treat X well... does that mean X feels betrayed? Is X spending the whole story in denial about Y mistreating them? How would X show that? What would X do to try and balance the situation? Maybe X would... but then Y would... ...what happens when Z finds out that X and Y have been more together than apart? Does Z blame X for Y’s actions? Etc.

It can be fanfic but it isn’t limited to that. Not at all. X1 can translate to X2. Or X1 and A1 can translate to X2. A LOT of how I make my MC James Rathbone work for myself is squishing together how I see both Professor Snape and Hermione Granger. Because I was really much more interested in them as main characters than Harry Potter (Seed to grow around). So James is an amalgam of them plus Sherlock Holmes. The insufferable know it all with a shady past who sees all but can actually maybe do something about it when no one else can and yet STILL annoys everyone because he has to be right and has to prove that he’s smart. His redeeming value being that at some level he does want to help fix the world. So the seeds can translate quite well as they pearl up, even if they are pretty directly stolen at first.

#creative writing #writing advice #writeblr #ideas #holly lisle #no seriously read that Holly Lisle essay

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition 7/31/20 – THE SHADOW OF VIOLENCE, SUMMERLAND, THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM, SHE DIES TOMORROW and More!

As I started to gather what’s left of my wits for this week’s column, there seemed to be fewer movies than usual, and I was quite thankful for that. Then, a few of the movies scheduled for some sort of theatrical release this weekend were delayed and I discovered a bunch of movies I didn’t have in my release calendar to begin with, so this is a little bit of an odd weekend but still one with 8 movies reviews! I went into most of the movies this weekend without much knowledge of what they were about, probably was the best way to go into many of them, since it allowed me to be somewhat open-minded about what I was watching.

The first surprise of the week is that we’re getting another decent film from the one and only Saban Films, so maybe the VOD distributor has been using the pandemic to step up its game as well. Directed by first-time feature director Nick Rowland, the Irish crime-drama THE SHADOW OF VIOLENCE (Saban Films), based on the book “Calm with Horses,” stars relative newcomer Cosmo Jarvis as Douglas Armstrong, known as “Arm,” the enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. Douglas also has a young toddler with local woman Ursula (Niamh Algar), but when his handler Dympna (Barry Keoghan) orders Arm to kill for the first time, he’s forced to rethink his career.

Much of the story revolves a member of the Devers family caught making a lurid pass at Dympha’s 16-year-old sister, leading to consequences, as Arm is sent to beat the crap out of him. For head of the family, that isn’t nearly enough and soon, Arm is ordered to kill the man. (This aspect of the story reminds me a little of Todd Field’s Little Children, particularly the Jackie Earle Haley subplot.)

As I mentioned above, I watched this film with zero expectations and was taken quite aback by how great it was, despite not having been that big a fan of Keoghan from some of his past work. On the other hand, Cosmo Jarvis, in his first major role, is absolutely outstanding, giving a performance on par with something we might see from Thomas Hardy or Matthias Schoenaerts, at least in their earlier work. Barely saying a word, Jarvis instills so many emotions into “Arm” as we see him playing with his young autistic son, Jack, trying to keep his jealousy over Ursula under control, while also being there when Dympna needs him. Even as you think you’re watching fairly innocuous day-to-day stuff, Rowland ratchets up the tension to an amazing degree right up until a climactic moment that drives the last act.

Despite the film’s title, The Shadow of Violence isn’t just about violence, as much as it is about a man trying to figure out how to change the trajectory of his life. If you like character-based films like The Rider, this movie is definitely going to be for you. Another surprise is that the movie will be available only in theaters this Friday, rather than the typical VOD approach Saban Films generally takes, so check your local theater if it’s playing near you.

The faith-based drama THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM (Lionsgate), starring Katie Holmes and Josh Lucas, is directed by Andy Tennant (Hitch, Sweet Home Alabama) and adapted from Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book, The Secret (which is based on a 2006 movie also called The Secret). Originally planned for a theatrical release, it’s now being released as PVOD, which seems to be the way that so many movies are going now. In it, Holmes plays Miranda Wells, a struggling widow living in New Orleans with three kids who on a stormy night meets a kind stranger (Lucas) who tries to pass on his philosophy of using positive thinking to get whatever you want in life.

Mini-Review: I don’t usually buy into some of the faith-based movies that are released every year, but that’s mainly because I rarely get a chance to see any of them, so why bother? I was ready to go into The Secret: Dare to Dream with a healthy amount of skepticism, because it seemed to be another movie about grand miracles… but in fact, it’s just a bland movie pimping Rhonda Byrne’s New Thought technique from her New Age-y self help book.

The idea is that positive thinking is all that it takes to get anything you want, something no less than Oprah quickly glommed onto. While the movie doesn’t hit you over the head with such a message, and “God” is only mentioned once, it also just doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of storytelling to maintain one’s interest.

Katie Holmes does a fine job playing an amiable single mother who meets Josh Lucas’ Bray Johnson as a huge storm is about to hit New Orleans, and he seems like a nice enough fellow as he helps her replace a broken bumper (after she rear-ended him, no less) and then fixing up the house after the storm. But Bray has a secret (hence the title) and it’s in an important envelope that he hesitates to give to Miranda.

The film’s biggest problem is that there never is much in terms of stake when it comes to the drama, because Bray seems to be there to fix everything and make everything better. Miranda’s only other real relation is an awkward one with Jerry O’Connell’s long-time (presumably platonic) friend Tucker, which only gets more awkward when he surprises her by popping the question. She says “Yes” without talking to her own kids first. The whole time while watching the film, I was expecting some sort of big Nicholas Spark level romance between Miranda and Bray, so when Tucker proposes, it throws a real spanner in the works, but only for a little while.

Incidentally, the “secret” of the title that Bray resists telling Miranda until pressured isn’t particularly groundbreaking either. I won’t ruin it. You’ll just be annoyed when it’s finally revealed.

The Secret: Dare to Dream is as generic and bland a tale you can possibly get, one that really doesn’t accomplish very much and feels more like a Lifetime movie than something particularly revelatory.

Rating: 6/10

Jessica Swale’s WW2-set SUMMERLAND (IFC Films) stars Gemma Arterton as fantasy author Alice Lamb, quietly living on the South of England in a small beachside town when she’s presented with a young London evacuee named Frank (Lucas Bond) for her to mind while his father’s at war. Alice lives alone but many years earlier, she had a friendship with a local woman named Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) that turned into something more, despite the taboo of their relationship during those times.

This was another nice surprise, and as I watched the movie, it was hard not to compare it to last week’s Radioactive, since they’re movies intended to appeal to a similar audience. This one seems to be more focused, and Arterton does a better job being likeable despite being as persnickety as Pike’s Marie Currie. Although this isn’t a biopic, it did remind me of films like Goodbye Christopher Robin and Tolkien, and possibly even Finding Neverland. (Incidentally, the Summerland of the title is a mythical place that Alice is writing about, which adds to the fairy tale angle to the film.)

As the film goes along, there’s a pretty major twist, of sorts, and it’s when the stakes in the film start to feel more dramatic as things continue to elevate into the third act. The movie actually opens in 1975 with Penelope Wilton playing the older Alice, although I’m not sure the framing sequence was particularly needed for the film to work the way Swale intended.

Summerland is generally just a nice and pleasant film that stirs the emotions and shows Swale to be a filmmaker on the rise.

Another really nice indie film that might involve a bit more searching is director Sergio Navaretta’s THE CUBAN (Brainstorm Media), written by Alessandra Piccione. It follows 19-year-old Mina (played by Ana Golja), a Canadian pre-med student who lives with her aunt, Bano (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who pushes her career in medicine, although Mina would rather be a singer. At her part-time job at a long-term care facility, Mina meets Luis (Louis Gossett Jr.), a quiet elderly patient who sits in his wheelchair never talking to anyone until Mina discovers his love for music, and the two bond over that, although Mina’s employers don’t think she’s helping Luis despite his obvious change in nature.

This was just a lovely film driven by Golja, who is just wonderful in the lead role with an equally terrific cast around her, and while it gets a little obvious, I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying this film that harks back to some of the great earlier work by Thomas McCarthy, as it follows a touching story that mixes a number of cultures in a surprisingly fluid way. It turned out to be quite a pleasant and unexpected film in the way it deals with subjects like dementia in such a unique and compelling away, especially if you enjoy Cuban music.

The Cuban already played at a couple Canadian theaters, but it will be available via Virtual Cinema and in some American theaters Friday, and you can find out where at the Official Site.

I was pretty excited to see Amy Seimetz’s new film, SHE DIES TOMORROW (NEON), since I was quite a fan of her previous film, Sun Don’t Shine. Besides having played quite a fantastic role in recent independent cinema through her varied associations, Seimetz also cast Kate Lyn Sheil, a fantastic actress, in the main role. It’s a little hard to explain the film’s plot, but essentially Sheil plays Amy, a woman convinced she’s going to die tomorrow, a feeling that starts spreading to others around her. I’m not sure if you would get this just from watching the film, because it’s pretty vague and even a little confusing about what is happening despite the high concept premise.

For the first 15 minutes or so, the camera spends the entire time watching Sheil as she cries and hugs a wall, while listening to the same opera record over and over. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams) comes over to check on her, she finds her vacuuming in a fancy dress. Amy tells her friend that she’s going to die tomorrow, and she wants to be turned into a leather jacket. Soon, after we’re watching Jane, a scientist, going down the same wormhole as Amy. That’s pretty much the running narrative, although the film opens up when we meet some of Jane’s family and friends, including Katie Aselton, Chris Messina, Tunde Adebimpe, Michelle Rodriguez and more. Soon after we meet them, they TOO are convinced that they’re going to die tomorrow. Incidentally (and spoiler!), no one actually dies in the movie. Heck, I’d hesitate even to call this a “horror” movie because it takes the idea of a pandemic that we’ve seen in movies like Bird Box, Contagion and others and sucks all the genre right out of it, but it still works as a character piece.

The thing is that the film looks great and also feels quite unique, which does make She Dies Tomorrow quite compelling, as well as a great vehicle for both Sheil and Seimetz. Even so, it’s also very much a downer and maybe not the best thing to watch if you aren’t in a good place, emotionally. You’ve been warned. It will open at select drive-ins this weekend, but it will then be available via VOD next Friday, August 7.

Next up, we have two fantastic and inspiring docs that premiered at Sundance earlier this year…

In recent years, Ron Howard has made a pretty amazing transition into respectable documentary filmmaker, and that continues with REBUILDING PARADISE (National Geographic), which takes a look at the horrible fires that struck Northern California in November 2018, literally wiping out the town of Paradise and leaving over 50,000 people homeless and killing roughly 85 people.

It’s really horrifying to see the amount of destruction caused when a spark from a faulty transmission line ignites the particularly dry forest surrounding the town of Paradise, destroying the hospital and elementary school and displacing the homeowners. This is obviously going to be a tough film to watch, not only seeing the fires actually raze the town to the ground but also watching these not particularly wealthy people having to contend with losing their homes. (It’s even tougher to watch now since you wonder how COVID may have affected the town as it’s in better shape now then it was last year.)

Using a cinema verité approach (for the first time possible?), Howard finds a small group of people to follow, including the town’s former mayor, the school superintendent, a local police officer, and others. It’s pretty impressive how much time this doc covers, and often, you may wonder if Ron Howard was there at all times, because it seems like he would have to have been embedded with the townspeople for an entire year to get some of the footage.

As I said, this is not an easy film to watch, especially as you watch these people dealing with so much tragedy – if you’ve seen any of the docs about Sandy Hook, you might have some idea how hard this movie may be to watch for you. But it is great, since it shows Howard achieving a new level as a documentary filmmaker with a particularly powerful piece.

Produced by Kerry Washington, THE FIGHT (Magnolia Pictures) is the latest doc from Weiner directors Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman, this time joined as director by that film’s editor, Eli B. Despres. The “fight” of the title is the one between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Trump administration that began shortly after his inauguration in 2017, his Muslim travel ban that quickly followed, and going up until mid-2019 when a lot of obvious civil rights violations were being perpetrated by the U.S. government.

This is a particularly interesting doc if you weren’t aware of how active the ACLU has been in helping to protect people’s rights on a variety of fronts. The doc covers four particular cases involving immigration, LGBTQ rights, voting rights and reproductive rights, and we watch the lawyers involved in four important cases, including a few that are taken right up to the Supreme Court. In following these four particular lawyers, the filmmakers do a great job helping the viewer understand how important the ACLU is in keeping the conservative right at bay from trying to repeal some previous laws made to protect Americans’ rights.

Of course, this film is particularly timely since it covers a lot of dramatic changes, including the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which ends up being ironic, since he was the judge presiding over an earlier ACLU case involving a pregnant teen immigrant who isn’t allowed to get an abortion. The movie doesn’t skirt the fact that often the ACLU is called upon to help the likes of white supremacists and potential terrorist factions, since they’re about protecting everyone’s rights. I would have loved to hear more about this, but it does cover the backlash to the ACLU after the Charlottesville protests went horribly wrong in 2017.

Be warned that there are moments in this film where the waterworks will start flowing since seeing the ACLU succeed against oppression is particularly moving. If you’ve been following the country’s shifting politics keenly and want to learn more about the ACLU, The Fight does a great job getting behind closed doors and humanizing the organization.

The Fight will be available on all digital and On Demand platforms starting Friday, and you can find out how to rent it at the Official Site.

Vinnie Jones (remember him?) stars in Scott Wiper’s crime-thriller THE BIG UGLY (Vertical) about a pair of British mobsters who travel to West Virginia to make an oil deal in order to launder money. Once there, they encounter some troubles with the locals, particularly the sadistic son of Ron Perlman’s Preston, the man with whom they’re dealing.

Sometimes, as a film critic, you wonder how a movie that has so much potential can turn into such an unmitigated disaster, but then you watch a movie like The Big Ugly, and you realize that some bad filmmakers are better at talking people into doing things than others.

That seems to be the case with this film in which Jones plays Leland, who comes to West Virginia with his boss Harris (McDowell) to make an oil deal with Ron Perlman’s Preston, only for the latter’s son “PJ” (Brandon Sklenar) causing trouble, including the potential murder of Leland’s girlfriend. Of course, one would expect to see tough guy Vinnie Jones out for revenge against the endless parade of sleaze-balls he encounters, and that may have been a better movie than what Wiper ended up making, which is all over the place in terms of tone. (It was only after I watched the film did I realize that Wiper wrote and directed the absolutely awful WWE Film, The Condemned, also starring Jones. If I only knew.)

Jones isn’t even the worst part of the cast, in terms of the acting, because both McDowell and Perlman, two great actors, struggle through the terrible material, though Perlman generally fares better than McDowell, who doesn’t seem to be giving it his all.

There’s a whole subplot involving one of PJ’s friends/co-workers (recent Emmy nominee Nicholas Braun from HBO’s Succession) and his relationship with a pretty local (Lenora Crichlow) that goes nowhere and adds nothing to the overall story. Once PJ is seemingly dealt with, there’s still almost 35 minutes more of movie, including a long monologue by Perlman telling a sorely wasted Bruce McGill how he met McDowell’s character. Not only does it kill any and all momentum leading up to that point, but it’s probably something that should have been part of the set-up earlier in the film.

The fact this movie is so bad is pretty much Wiper’s fault, becuase he wrote a script made up of so many ideas that never really fit together – kind of like Guy Ritchie doing a very bad Deliverance remake before deciding to turn it into a straight-up Western. Wiper then tries his hardest to salvage the movie by throwing in violence and explosions and leaning heavily on the soundtrack. (The fact that both this and the far superior The Shadow of Violence used a song from the Jam was not lost on this music enthusiast.) Regardless, The Big Ugly is a pretty detestable piece of trash that couldn’t end fast enough… and it didn’t. (It played in drive-ins and select theaters last Friday but will be available on digital and On Demand this Friday.)

Available through Virtual Cinemas (supporting Film Forum and the Laemmle in L.A) is Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni’s documentary, Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, about the Canadian singer-songwriter who changed people’s impressions of Canadian culture, covering Lightfoots’s greatest triumphs and failures.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will premiere Koji Fukada’s Japanese drama A Girl Missing (Film Movement) on Friday, while New York’s Metrograph Live Screening series continues this week with Manfred Kirchheimer’s Bridge High & Stations of the Elevated starting today through Friday, and then the premiere of Nan Goldin’s Sirens (with two other shorts) starting on Friday. You can subscribe to the series for $5 a month or $50 a year.

Premiering on Disney+ this Friday is Beyoncé’s Black is King, her new visual album inspired by the lessons from The Lion King, as well as the new original Muppets series, Muppets Now. Since I haven’t seen either Lion King movie, I’m definitely looking forward more to the Muppets returning to "television.”

Launching on Netflix today is Matias Mariani’s Shine Your Eyes about a Nigerian musician who travels to Sao Paulo to look for his estranged brother and bring him back to Nigeria, as well as Sue Kim’s doc short, The Speed Cubers, set in the world of competitive Rubik cube solving and the friendly rivalry between two young “speedcubers.” Also, Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy will premiere on Netflix this Friday.

Premiering on Shudder tomorrow (Thursday, July 30) is Rob Savage’s Host, the first horror movie made during the quarantine about a group of six friends who decide to hold a séance over Zoom.

Amazon’s drive-in series continues tonight with “Movies to Inspire Your Inner Child,” playing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Hook.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #SheDiesTomorrow #Summerland #TheCuban #Movies #Reviews #TheFight #RebuildingParadise #TheShadowOfViolence #VOD #Streaming #TheSecretDareToDream

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elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago

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Kinda fell off the grid with Crippling Arm Pain for a couple of days and watched Asylum, Scarecrow, Faith, Route 666 and the first half of Nightmare in a haze of "ow ow ow ow" and I don't have a whole lot to say about them and their individual moments that relates to season 12 that we haven't already said when anything relevant happened at the time IN season 12 while it was airing...

This whole section of season 1 though, makes a shift in Dean and Sam's dynamic which I think is where they drew most of the angst from for like, the rest of the show, and as usual I'm still obsessed with 12x22 and that very specific message of Sam leading and Dean stepping back and letting him do it. And very specifically where that came from and how as a reversal of season 1 in some ways back to the pilot, Sam gets walked back out of what he gets walked into over these episodes.

Sam perpetually comes back to the sort of "you have to let me grow up" thought like in season 5 & 8 ESPECIALLY off the top of my head before 12, although I think 3 was as well in response to knowing Dean would die, and tbh kicked off the entire arc from 3-5. So yeah, it's been a lot of Sam's lingering feeling about Dean and their dynamic and in 12x22 we see another gesture which I don't think (apart from the endless IMPLICIT trust of just working with Sam every friggin' NORMAL day of the week treating him like an equal when this ISN'T a plot thing) we've had aside from Swan Song, in terms of Big Symbolic Okay You Are An Adult Now Seriously How Are We Still Doing This Plot Oh Right Season 8 Needed Old Angst Warmed Up On All Fronts moments.

(Uh, sorry, I'll pick a fight with Carver about the laziness of season 8 character arcs on my own time because everyone else likes that season and generally it seems the show did well re: audience response to going back to basics and rehashing multiple seemingly resolved character arc things instead of going somewhere new :P Long post 99.9% not about that last thought AT ALL under the cut)

Anyway! In the first part of season 1, Sam is with Dean to find John. And he passes it off as a road trip to anyone who asks, and John is the thing keeping Sam from just meeting up with him and they charge off father & son guns blazing revenge mission - he's disappeared, and then sends them on another hunt when they catch up to where they lost him, also on a hunt he makes them take on his behalf.

For a few episodes Dean can fob Sam off about going to work cases while they look for John but he already kinda knows, then at the end of Phantom Traveller it's confirmed for them that John changed his answer phone to redirect to Dean, and the family business is now his. For Dean that's just like, welp, I'll shoulder THAT burden for my family too, no problem, already got a whole crushing weight there anyway hahaha.

For Sam that makes it a lot more complicated, that John doesn't WANT to be found and he's now effectively trapped with Dean working the job while trying to convince him John is more important, and Dean is convinced John’s orders are more important.

Bloody Mary doesn't have any real resistance to doing the case, and Sam's preoccupied with visions & Jess's death still, so I think his head is still spinning about what he's actually doing and the case doesn't help settle him AT ALL. In Skin, he's the one who makes them backtrack for a personal thing which turns into a case, and he learns the crappy lesson that he can't have normal friends and essentially sees that Dean feels like a friendless freak even if he pretends this is all cool and part of the job, but rather more focus on Sam as the rebellious child being dragged back into the awful family and his own sense of sacrificing normality for the job & revenge from his perspective (looking ahead to how this bubbles over). Hook Man, he offers token protests to doing the case while we start with him obsessing over finding John, and in Bugs it starts with Sam checking for cases in the newspaper while Dean hustles - we know from Bloody Mary Sam has Dean's money and he really is freeloading as a road trip not just in what he keeps telling everyone, but that Dean is allowing him to stay at a careful remove from feeling like he's actually just doing the job again.

Bugs also has all the good family stuff where we finally have Sam and Dean rehash the trauma of Sam leaving, as of course this is all open wounds to them because Sam left and they don't see each other again until the Pilot, so this is a needed and much-delayed conversation directly addressing for the first time not just on screen but ever, between them about Sam going to college and how HE felt in the family, like the outcast who wanted to be normal, and he gloms onto Matt who is having similar issues with his dad that baffles Dean about why Sam relates to it so much.

They're still going over early childhood > Sam leaving stuff in their dynamic and Sam really IS the kid brother on a road trip, and he is treated that way by the narrative in a lot of ways like this (also as in Sam sees this as a distraction and John and revenge is the real story/job/mission so hanging with Dean is as useful as road tripping :P I don’t think it’s just a cute excuse he uses over and over), probably up to Home, where it all starts getting more personal and real.

Sam gets to see Mary with his own eyes for the first time, and they have a bit more of a sense of being in it together and Sam being inducted into the family mythos, revisiting stuff that was very very abstract to him, and for a multitude of intents - writerly from the show and from Chuck and his "narrative symmetry" and the motives from the demons who conspired to kill Jess, that needed to happen to Sam to make it more real to him (in the same way Dean felt all along about Mary dying because that pain didn't go away just because it had been a long time. The point is NOT what Sam says that Dean doesn’t know how it feels - it’s that SAM didn’t but it’s fresh and awful and despite growing up surrounded by grief, fancy learning coping mechanisms from John? Hence, follows in his footsteps, revenge-obsessed).

Anyway! Asylum changes their dynamic now - Sam is beginning to be openly frustrated even before John sends them a case that Dean's dragging him around on the job when they should be getting revenge, and I think he's now still sort of road tripping until the end of the season because of his speech in Shadow about being a person again, and the flip only being demonstrated in 2x02 that he now is the one more dedicated to hunting and doing the job.

And during Asylum Sam vents to the psychiatrist under the guise of complaining about his road trip, presumably similar stuff but less murdery to what he yells at the end, and there's a whole thing with him being annoyed the kids think Dean is his boss. The fight continues in Scarecrow with Dean standing up for being a good soldier - I mean son - and Sam stomps off to find John. 2 episodes in a row he uses the road tripping excuse to vent about being stuck in close quarters with Dean bossing him around when he meets Meg and vents to her as well, but he has his realisation about family when Dean is in trouble and goes back.

After that he's immediately smacked with Faith, which is the first challenge one of them has of the other dying, and to which Sam has to save Dean at any close. His characterisation in this whole first chunk reminds me of season 10 Sam a great deal as I’ve recently rewatched it too (he has a "where's my brother!?" line in Skin which has like, the exact same delivery as 10x01's opening, among other little things which stood out to me) but this one episode in particular... Because he does save Dean, at a great cost, even having some very ominous-for-season 10 discussion about the evil black magic spell book and the desperation of Sue-Ann to bring Roy back, all of which made me laugh bitterly when I came through here on my post-season 10 rewatch, because it was pretty much word-for-word Sam's season 10 all in one episode, right down to the freakin pothole in Nebraska.

I think it's interesting Sam is the first one to make an ethically dubious/bad choice to save Dean (dubious since he didn't know it was bad, bad because he doubled down on it after - also looks much worse with at least 10 more years of canon rather than in the immediate moment it's just a bit edgy :P) while in season 2 Dean saves Sam selflessly and after a whole season of feeling brought back against the natural order (something I think is only exacerbating how he already felt since Faith and finding out what Sam did for him).

I think this is a way to tie Sam deeply into the family and make him prove he'd go so far for Dean after all his rebellion and anger at Dean, with Dean represented as the boss and the good son/older brother, that Sam isn't actually going to really stomp off any time soon. He takes several strong lessons in a row about family and reconciliation, starting with the mirror family in Bugs and like, every episode after that except in Asylum because it abuts Scarecrow and is an ongoing emotional arc one starts and the other resolves, again proving to Sam he was wrong and being with Dean and doing the job is more important than revenge. (For now - he still has this choice all season and makes a false analysis for easy conclusion to the story by the writers that Dean's all he has left and he doesn't know where John is, even though they only just talked to John for the first time to get solid proof he's alive, AND Sam thought he knew where he was for the first time as well and only didn't go there because of going back to help Dean).

That all shifts Sam's dynamic from a fairly equal partnership, where Sam was kind of along for the ride, but without being strictly tied into the family business because he was road tripping, he was basically like... a support hunter Dean took with him to not work alone, just, you know, the best hunter Dean knew for the job :P And that changes after the midseason to really make Sam ductaped firmly back into the family business. But once he's there, Dean goes from equal partner to older brother who is ALSO his boss in Sam's eyes (even though Dean's really just desperately following John's orders, and is the one fighting in general for the family business to continue, in an a-political way about Sam's role in it, just that Sam sees him deciding things and feels like it is Dean ordering him around... They have issues about it, basically :P), and once Sam reconciles with THAT he does ethically sketchy stuff to save Dean and doesn't regret it, which is more of a blood pact thing to reaffirm commitment and loyalty.

In Route 666 Dean calls the shots, and Sam plays a trust game with the church thing so they both get in a power play of sorts and Sam teases Dean the entire time about Cassie...

(But this is all Buckleming characterisation, which I tend to find completely backwards, and thanks to watching with my mum, I went from 1x13 to 10x03, and remembered I still want to write a tooth-grinding post about their characterisation because something about it really sets my teeth on edge specifically about Sam and it just occurred to me watching 10x03 that that was how they wrote him in 1x13 and it was vaguely justified there because specific scenario but like... is that just their impression of who Sam is? Anyway in 10x03 there's lines he could have said seriously or whatever but there's like, a Buckleming Face Sam has/Jared uses and it makes me massively intrigued to know wtf tone suggestions they put in their scripts because almost without fail Sam only acts like this in their episodes and the grimace Jared uses delivering their Sam dialogue, even relatively inoffensive lines, is like at least a full 30% of why their episodes make my teeth grind because wtf he never does it in any other episodes with any other writers, it's like he has a separate personality to play Buckleming!Sam?? This is all massively beside the point except to say on realising that I decided that I just cba to analyse that one for personal arc stuff :P)

And in Nightmare, Sam's back to a sort of subordinate role in the power dynamic because he has to prove to Dean his visions are real (I think Dean totally believes him he just really really badly doesn't WANT them to be real but it means Sam spends the first 10 minutes needlessly arguing his case wanting to be believed) and then at the end Dean coddles him with a protective you've got me you'll be fine speech, which again puts himself in the role of protector to Sam.

I feel like from here on out their dynamic is hashed out a bit more firmly with all these specific things having happened in relation to all the main arcs - Sam's powers, the family business, John, Sam n Dean, saving each other from death, the whole lot, which as I said up the top, OBVIOUSLY day-to-day they still act very equally and usually, unless plot reasons, have 100% equal trust on cases and work side by side very well. But long-term, I can see a LOT of character stuff settling on Sam that becomes his pattern of thinking (e.g. the stuff in Asylum & Scarecrow especially betraying how he feels as the younger brother being bossed around) that in the first handful of episodes at least up to Home wasn't an issue or a part of their dynamic and they were going for a brothers on a roadtrip vibe without a lot of these Dire Obligations or Life And Death Pacts and so on.

I think Sam hasn't really been able to get out of this because season 5 was supposed to resolve it, but season 6 and 7 have something constantly wrong with him until Cas fixes him for good, so Dean spends a great deal of Gamble era having to deal with each new thing that happens to Sam, frequently acting with power of attorney to fix him and get his soul back etc for his own good. Sam has a blissful free space in his life from 7x17-7x23 and got to work equally and fairly and without any massive interpersonal drama or whatever with Dean (though for most of season 7 after they reconcile say from 7x09 onwards they have one of their best dynamics with the least interpersonal drama once they let go the Amy fight), and then Carver takes over and gives Sam 1 more year or so of recovery off-screen only to smash it all up with a sledgehammer and regress him all the way back to how bad he was in 8x23... Which we’ve been recovering from for all the characters ever since.

Anywho I said I wasn't going to get all obsessed about that, but the point is that watching season 1 and knowing where Sam is going to be coming from in season 12 about his own personal growth and how HE views it, I can see some interesting stuff because a lot of season 1 is Sam VOICING how he feels about their dynamic, job and lives, because it's the exposition season to get us involved in their lives and there's a lot of telling and explaining hot they feel about this that and the other. Knowing how Sam says he didn't want to lead and so on, his original issues with leadership was that he felt he had a mind of his own and Dean didn't and he didn't WANT to be bossed around by Dean, and to do his own thing. And season 1 subsumes him into the family business, and it leaves me thinking about the ever-relevant 10x05, and how the line about John in "The Road So Far" was that he took away their free will.

I sort of feel like watching season 1, you can see Sam giving ground over and over again in these fights. I know there's more to come, but the important flip next is in 1x16 where it stops being Sam swinging against Dean's position in the family, and goes back to Sam vs John, where it stays for the rest of the season and of course ending in 2x01 with John leaving them on a fight and 2x02 Sam having given himself over to the job and not really getting a break from then on to even dream of something normal until he hit a dog...

So that's all totally different territory in season 1 because there wasn’t much/any Sam vs John stuff in season 12 that I can think of (idk if sharp-eyed Sam fans caught a narrative about it I didn’t see making its way onto my dash), so I think I've watched the parts now which exposition most clearly how Sam ends up essentially following Dean into the family business and in the main arc stuff seeing himself as still being the kid brother being bossed around and made to do it somewhat against his will to have a normal life even if as I say, in general unless this point is being made, Dean rarely if ever acts like this towards Sam and Sam seems to have all the freedom he likes to call the shots in their dynamic because Dean will totally trust him with all the normal parts of their job without being precious about taking his lil brother into fights...

Obviously there’s a hell of a lot more intervening trauma and I think Carver era does a LOT to Sam to beat him down from a relatively balanced, happy-with-himself-and-the-universe place so to actually trace WHY Sam felt like he did in 12x22 you’d start at 8x01 and begin counting THERE, but looking at season 12 through a season 1 lens is really interesting to me.

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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New Sci-Fi, Horror and Thriller VOD Movie Releases in August 2020

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With what was supposed to be the summer movie season now just another relic of this pandemic-blasted year, and the rest of 2020’s major film releases in a continuing state of flux, it’s important to note that there has still been a fairly steady stream of new films coming out, some in limited theatrical release but others largely available via video on demand and streaming services.

With that in mind, and with the customary “opening weekend” a rather fluid and ambiguous term as well, below is a rundown of films we’ve caught in the past month, along with information on where you can find and watch them. Some are good, some not so much, but your mileage may vary for each. The important thing to know is that movies are still coming out–just not always in the ways we expect.

She Dies Tomorrow

Although it was released back on Aug. 7, you can still track down this second feature from director-writer Amy Seimetz, who you may also know from her acting work in films like last year’s Pet Sematary remake, 2018’s Wild Nights with Emily, and 2017’s Alien: Covenant.

Kate Lyn Sheil (You’re Next) stars as Amy, a young woman and recovering alcoholic who is suddenly gripped with the conviction that she is going to die the next day. But what happens next is even more bizarre: Amy begins to pass her belief along to others, like an infection, with family members, friends, and casual acquaintances all afflicted with the debilitating conviction that they are going to pass away in short order.

Seimetz takes a formally experimental and hallucinatory approach to the proceedings, so viewers looking for a more traditional end-of-the-world thriller may not find much to hold onto here. But Seimetz’s film is a much more intimate kind of apocalypse, and very much tapped into the ongoing dread that we’ve been feeling since early this year (if not before). Like the movie’s infection of the soul, we haven’t been able to get it out of our mind.

She Dies Tomorrow is available on Amazon Prime, as well as Google Play, iTunes and YouTube.

Sputnik

There is a long, fine tradition of Russian science fiction cinema that stretches back to the silent era and almost the beginning of film history itself. Along the way, under both Communist and oligarchic regimes, the nation has produced masterpieces like Solaris and Stalker as well as strong recent efforts like Hard to Be a God and the Night Watch films.

Sputnik is not likely to be so well-remembered. A clear effort to match the level of Hollywood productions (as far as it can, anyway), the debut from director Egor Abramenko is a derivative tale in which a manned spaceship crashes back to Earth, with one of its two crew members dead and the other infested with an alien organism that extrudes itself from his body only at certain hours of the night.

The nature of the parasitic relationship between the alien and the cosmonaut (Pyotr Fyodorov) is complex, perhaps overly so, and much of the film focuses on the dynamic between the creature, the man, and the neuropsychologist (Oksana Akinshina) brought in by the government baddie (Fyodor Bondarchuk) to find a way to separate him and the alien so the latter can be weaponized. All three actors are quite good, and the alien is effectively gross, but Sputnik is weighed down with its own self-importance, even as it borrow liberally from The Quatermass Xperiment, Alien, Species, Lifeforce, and others.

Sputnik is available in limited theaters, on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and other on-demand platforms.

Spree

In Spree, wannabe social media king Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery from Stranger Things) decides on the one sure-fire way to elevate his standing online, rapidly expand his following (currently in the single digits), and become as massive a digital star as the kid he used to babysit, Bobby. He rigs his ride-hail car with cameras in order to livestream what he calls “The Lesson,” in which he’ll invite viewers to watch as he murders each of his rides via poisoned bottles of water or other means.

Keery provides a partially chilling, partially goofy mix of post-millennial entitlement and white incel grievance to his performance, and Sasheer Zamata is quite good as a stand-up comedian who Kurt picks up and begins obsessing over so he can glom onto her own substantial following. But like the makers of the newly released Unhinged–which also touches on What’s Ailing Our Society–director and co-writer Eugene Kotlyarenko wants it both ways with Spree. He pretends he’s making a satirical statement on social media culture while wallowing vicariously in the blood and violence of a slasher flick.

In the end, Spree says nothing we don’t already know about the empty, evanescent nature of social media, and its visual esthetic–the split screens, the narrow phone lens views, the constant stream of comments running up one side of the screen or the other from followers–is exhausting and annoying, like the movie as a whole.

Spree is available to stream on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, Fandango Now and others.

Centigrade

In director Brendan Walsh’s feature debut Centigrade, Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez) and Matthew (Vincent Piazza) are a young American couple on a trip to Norway where the eight-months-pregnant Naomi is doing a promotional tour for her new book. Driving at night in freezing rain, they pull over to get some rest–and wake up the next morning to find their car encased in ice and snow on the side of the road, a frozen tomb from which they can seemingly not escape.

Neither Rodriguez nor Piazza are particularly remarkable actors, but they both bring enough empathy and raw anguish to their performances, as Walsh wrings maximum dread and suspense out of their increasingly grim situation (which was inspired by several true stories). As both food and patience begin to run out, the couple’s relationship waxes and wanes in realistic fashion and, naturally, a few secrets are forcibly revealed.

A few late turns in the story strain credulity, and a few more delicate questions are left unanswered (where did they keep going to the bathroom?), and the film does stretch things out a bit even to make the 90-minute mark. But you will still find yourself caught up in Naomi and Matthew’s chilly plight, and even moved by it.

Centigrade opens Friday, Aug. 28 on VOD, digital platforms and in drive-in theaters.

The post New Sci-Fi, Horror and Thriller VOD Movie Releases in August 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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klon13-blog · 8 years ago

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Cats' 'mysterious power over humanity'

Nearly half of house cats have physically attacked their owners. Humans' relationship with cats is rife with paradox. There are an estimated 100 million pet cats in the U.S., and their ranks are only growing. "Cat culture" flourishes online. The cat-less can get their fix at "cat cafés" opening across Asia, Europe, and North America. Science of Us spoke with Tucker about the disturbing similarities between cats and lions, the reason cats failed to uphold the Rabbit Suppression Act of 1884, and the somewhat baffling question of why people put up with them. You write that cats are a rather unlikely house pet. Why is that? Cats are uniquely ill-suited for domestication. When people set out to domesticate the first animals, we targeted animals that were easy to keep in confined spaces, and animals that would eat a variety of things -- think of a pig or a goat, which will eat any old swill left over from your kitchen. Cats eat only fancy food, meat that we could eat ourselves. We also tended toward animals that had social hierarchies that we could dominate. Dogs and cattle have lead animals, and we can control them by acting the alpha dog or the lead steer. But cats are solitary animals that don't have social hierarchies. They're hard to physically control, and they don't tolerate confinement well. Usually, you don't have to write a 200-page book to figure out why we domesticated an animal. There's a purpose for the animal, and it's really clear: We want its meat or its milk or its fur or its labor. But what on earth did we want cats around for? As I talked to scientists, it dawned on me that we weren't necessarily the ones who were driving this relationship. House cats sidled up to our first settlements 10,000 years ago, because of big changes we started making to the environment. All of these animals crept into our settlement and were eating our trash -- animals like badgers and foxes, in addition to small wildcats. They got into this new niche and exploited it. So how did they trick us into feeding them and taking care of them? For a long time, it was probably just an accident. But there are reasons that cats made the transition, but we don't have badgers or foxes as pets today. One reason is that cats have a set of physical features that, for completely accidental reasons, remind us of human babies. Cats have big round eyes located right in the middle of their faces, because they're ambush predators and need good binocular vision. They have little noses, because they don't hunt by smell. They have round faces because they have short, powerful jaws. This set of features, which is actually just an expression of the way the cat hunts, looks to us like our infants. That gave them a leg up on the competition, and made them an intriguing and charming presence, rather than a straight-up nuisance, like a raccoon. One justification people give for keeping cats around is that they hunt rodents. I was surprised to learn that cats aren't even that good at killing rats. Cats are magnificent hunters, and they can hunt anything from butterflies to wallabies. They can kill rats but they have no reason to, in our cities. There's plenty of garbage for everybody. Cats and rats have been photographed sharing piles of trash. Why would these animals fight and risk their lives, when they could just comfortably graze together? People have tried it before -- letting a feral cat colony go within a certain area, with the goal of keeping rat populations down. While they might kill a few rats, the populations of rats are so big that there's no way the cats can ever repress them. In colonial Australia, there was this act called the Rabbit Suppression Act of 1884. The Australians released hordes of house cats, because they wanted them to kill off these invasive bunny rabbits, which the British had also released. They even built them little cat houses out in the wilderness, so they would have a place to live. But the cats didn't end up killing off the rabbits. Cats can kill a gazillion rabbits, and there are still more rabbits -- they breed like rabbits. What the cats ended up doing was killing off other more vulnerable, native animals. Cats don't do their assignments the way that dogs do. Pet owners like to say that caring for their dog or cat confers various health benefits -- mental as well as physical. But what do we really know about how having a cat affects our health? There have been all these studies about toxoplasmosis, the cat-borne parasite that can get into human brain tissue. Some scientists think that there's a link between this parasitic disease and mental-health problems, especially schizophrenia. Even if your cat doesn't give you toxoplasmosis, it may not be wonderful for your mental health. There are a few troubling studies that show that having a cat can decrease your likelihood of surviving a heart attack and increase high blood pressure. People who have cats are less likely to be outside in the world, walking their cats, meeting other people in cat parks. And cats may not be as good a substitute for human companionship as other kinds of pets. Dogs and their owners have this lovely synergy -- they gaze into each other's eyes, and both of them have this flow of oxytocin going. That doesn't happen so much with cats. In nature, cats don't live near other cats, and they don't have a good expressive repertoire. One way they communicate is by leaving pheromones and other smells around, which humans are completely oblivious to. We're really not built to communicate with each other. One of the fascinating things about cats is their adaptability. Even though they are fundamentally asocial animals, they've figured out how to manipulate their human hosts. Feral cats don't meow much, but in the presence of humans, cats learn how to communicate to get what they want. They purr in a manner that embeds this insistent, annoying, almost infantlike cry inside of a pleasant purr, to condition their owners to get them food. But is it possible to know if cat owners' mental-health problems are the result of having a cat? Might someone who is already lonely or antisocial be more likely to get a cat? I think it could be both. Somebody who is socially isolated to begin with, or unable to do the rigorous care that a dog needs, might be more likely to get a cat -- but having a cat can be isolating in and of itself. It's interesting that people persistently describe the internet as a digital cat park, where cat people can finally socialize via their pets. I have seen a lot of articles lately about the cat-borne parasite toxoplasmosis. [One researcher blames the rise of insanity in the 19th century on the rise of toxoplasmosis-infected house cats. Another study says that people with toxoplasmosis are twice as likely to be in a car crash, and suggests that infected drivers have been distracted and worn out by persistent low-level sickness. Toxoplasmosis-infected prey animals like chimps and rats, which are usually repulsed by the urine of predators like leopards and rats, are attracted to it instead.] A lot of these stories seem a little bit hysterical. Do you think the fear around toxoplasmosis is warranted? I do think a lot of them are overblown. Scientists agree that the parasite gets into our brain and can be very damaging to human fetuses and people with compromised immune systems, but there isn't a ton of support for the idea that cats are manipulating us via this parasite. I think that the fact that we have glommed onto this idea, and we write so many stories about it, speaks to the fact that cats do have some kind of mysterious power over humanity. These stories about toxoplasmosis remind me of stories that used to come out six or seven hundred years ago about cats and sorcery -- that cats have dark powers we don't understand, that they're witches in disguise. On that note, cat culture seems pretty female. Whether it's witches or "cat ladies," cats seem to always be associated with women -- what's that about? From my experience drifting around the cat world, it does seem to be more of a female-centric passion. The simple, slightly sexist explanation is that cats' infantile-looking features prey particularly on female instincts. There are some interesting ideas from evolutionary psychologists -- that a woman might use a cat to hone her parenting skills or, before having kids, to demonstrate her fitness as a mate. I think that people of both sexes could be guilty of that. It does seem like it's a good way for guys to meet women, to be a passionate public cat-man. Why are cats such an ecological disaster? How did they end up in isolated island environments like Australia? Cats are very good shipboard travelers. They don't need a lot of water; they don't need a lot of vitamin C, so they don't get scurvy. They've been able to endear themselves to sailors for the past 10,000 years and sail across the oceans, which are the major barrier to mammalian dispersal. It's usually hard for mammals to get to places like Australia. They have to ride on rafts or get blown in. A lot of islands don't have any mammals living on them at all, let alone apex predators that are hypercarnivores, like cats. With just a few tweaks, the house cat is basically the king of beasts. Cat species are very different in terms of size, but the feline blueprint -- their behaviors and the proportions of their bodies -- is really consistent across species. You let it go in any environment and it's going to be able to kill anything that's smaller than it, and even things that are a little bigger. It's like a meat-eating machine. You tell stories of house cats clawing and scratching their human owners, especially children. Why do cats so often turn on the people who feed them? Cats and humans haven't lived locked inside the same places, in such numbers, until the last few decades or so. We talked about the implications for our mental health, but this arrangement might not be so great for cats' mental health, either. They can get really stressed out in our houses. A lot of things that we consider normal -- everything from the volume of our voices, to our thermostats, to the way that a child is playing with a toy -- can stress cats out. There's evidence that to prevent cat-human violence, we need to go to more extreme lengths than I'd ever thought. Experts say that you need to give an entire room of your house for the cat's exclusive use. That you should make sure the cat has multiple litter boxes, one per floor, and extra ones for extra cats. That you should never rearrange your furniture. That you should try not to wear perfume. That houseguests are freaky for your cat. You're coming at this subject as a lifelong cat-lover. Did learning all of this -- that cats are bad for your health, bad for the environment -- change your relationship with your cat? Why would you still want to have a cat? I lost a lot of my sentimental regard for cats -- that "oh, my cute fur-baby" response. But I find that I marvel at them more. I can appreciate the backstory, how this little animal managed to carve out a place for itself in the world, and to become a dreaded invasive species and -- culturally speaking -- one of the most powerful animals on the planet. To me, it's about the wonder of life, and how this animal has gotten so far in the world without giving us much in return. I think that makes our relationship more pure. Humans are so good at extracting what they want from the environment. With cats, we're not necessarily holding the reins. We don't even know what we want, but we love it. The interview has been edited and condensed.

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