the-elderly-are-evolving

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

this is so interesting actually...

"and there will always be a younger, weaker man, boy, boy-man; all flushed and pretty, there for the taking. if there isn’t, a man will try to find the next very best thing, whatever he decides it is."

^ this quote here, and the discussion of the spectrum this exists on where there are all different levels of "healthiness and abusiveness or whateverness" to the dynamic ...

I don't want to make any firm claims or anything since it's been a while since I read it and I am not a scholar anywhere near this field, BUT by this analysis, obviously we can see the power dynamic the Regent is using to exploit and abuse isn't unique to him. But rather it's a dynamic found in the world of the work at large, and all/ nearly all the other romantic/ sexual relationships in the series feature it, to different degrees. The Regent has simply taken it to its extreme.

I guess what I'm getting at is we react pretty viscerally to the actions of the Regent and can recognize him immediately as an obvious antagonist-- I would argue not only due to all the heinous, brutal shit he does in order to stay in power/ prevent Laurent from ascending, but also due to his particular sexual inclinations. Even toward the beginning of the 1st book when we don't have a great lay of the land yet-- it isn't yet clear the Regent is trying usurp Laurent, nor is there an abundance of evidence as to the Regent's abuse of Laurent (although there are probably hints, it's been a while since I read)-- just Laurent's reveal that Nicaise is the Regent's pet is enough to signal to the reader that the Regent is, for lack of a better term right now, bad news. And yet all the other couples in the series are also engaged in this dynamic-- granted, to a less severe degree-- even the protagonist couple.

Anyways, this probably didn't make any sense, and I'm 1000% simplifying and generalizing a LOT, but it's just an interesting analysis of a phenomenon in the books that I also noticed and I want to think about it more

Oh and also obviously then the connection bxt the "to be a man is to mount" argument and the toxic masculinity / hypermasculinity present in all the characters, especially Damen (although he potentially gets a little better toward the end of kr? I'd have to re-read...)

The Captive Prince trilogy in general is very male-centric, but it never struck me as overtly misogynistic, and I’m just speculating but I think that was the intention on Pacat’s part. I think she wanted to give her (majority female) audience a feeling of escapism. So she made a world almost entirely of men, a world that included compulsory homosexuality, and I feel like she kind of explored it in a gendered sort of way? Like the top/bottom dynamics were pretty rigid in that world, the younger, “prettier” characters were all depicted as bottoms. And in the same vein, unlike in the real world, in Pacat’s there was an almost complete absence of violence against women. The stronger men assaulted the weaker “prettier” men (govart and Erasmus), and the Regent had a strict preference for boys rather than girls. So I feel like escapism was a big part of why the trilogy was like that, and also why most of the few women in the story belonged to a matriarchal society and were “warrior queens” but were relatively unimportant. Pacat didn’t want the women mistreated but she also wanted to take the gendered roles in our society and project it onto specific types of men in her world.

okay but i have so many thoughts on this, and yet when i sat down to write a reply they wouldn't cooperate with me. i agree hard that it reads like escapism and based on things pacat has said about her own work (she always says she didn't start it as a book series) i guess it makes sense that she wrote what she wanted to read and all that perhaps lead to very indulgent and self-indulgent narrative choices.

a world that included compulsory homosexuality, and I feel like she kind of explored it in a gendered sort of way? Like the top/bottom dynamics were pretty rigid in that world, the younger, “prettier” characters were all depicted as bottoms.

i can't decide if I agree with this or not : ( I feel like you're right and it def felt "gendered" to me when I read it, especially some of the sex/rape scenes in pg and kr. maybe I've officially lost my marbles but I can't remember if there are characters that are vers? like, on screen both bottoming and topping? (I'm not making any claims, I literally don't remember?) and I think most of the slaves and pets are meant to be bottoms (ONCE AGAIN A QUESTION?). there are some quotes in kr that suggest damen might be open to bottoming in the future but... i do agree HARD on the youth part of your ask. i think it was def a trope/theme that was ongoing—every couple had some sort of age gap that was very present.

why most of the few women in the story belonged to a matriarchal society and were “warrior queens” but were relatively unimportant. Pacat didn’t want the women mistreated but she also wanted to take the gendered roles in our society and project it onto specific types of men in her world.

i agree that they were relatively unimportant haha. i kept asking myself why it was that I could like a character that was never present (auguste) but couldn't really get interested in the female cast. taste and misogyny aside, I think it's bc they're just sort of irrelevant to the plot and the main characters themselves. laurent's life would not change if halvik was there or not (A BRUTISH EXAMPLE BUT YEAH). they feel very background-y to me.

however... i was talking to a friend the other day and she sort of showed me that although it's not explicit, pacat does write her female characters as... i don't want to say victims, but rather like... they do seem to experience disadvantages/hardships/sometimes have to "bend over" for the men in their lives? like loyse is married to guion, who we know is awful (their marriage is like ???). to get to power, jokaste does have to sleep with kastor and damen. vannes, like kass showed me in her quote (the regent talking about women) is not very liked or THAT respected. damen's slave in book 1 (i can never spell her name, don't hate me...) is killed off. there's that woman laurent pays in pg to suck govart off.

i think like you said pacat was very careful of writing explicit violence against women, but if you take a closer look most of the women in the trilogy are written in a "traditional fantasy setting" way? which is not to say they're weak or useless or that they're poorly written, just that i can't decide if there is implicit violence there or if I'm reading too much into things. so yeah, if we think of rape, non-con, csa... women in the trilogy are not the focus of these issues. I'm curious if anyone disagrees? for once (lol) i don't have a solid opinion on this issue.

also i found what you said super interesting—she basically projected gendered roles and issues into male characters? do you think that's why there seems to always be, in fandom, so many discussions about some characters (laurent, erasmus, aimeric, ancel) being depicted as feminine?

thank you so much for this ask!! it really made me think hard about stuff <3

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

Get your shit together peppered moth

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

something genuinely insane about going somewhere and getting to feel “i had some of the worst years of my life here” and “i was loved here, once” simultaneously.

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

Web weaving about the untold story in you !

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

Humans entering space and realizing we are so small. We are mice compared to these giant races with their advanced machinery and technologies and experiences beyond us- except that we're humans. And our engineers dive into the new tech and once we learn the principles we also soon realize how Inefficient everything is. Their "microchips" are the size of cars, their storage drives are basically buildings, and they somehow store less data than ours. So, human companies take advantage, and tech starts rolling out. Massive and there's a lot of wasted space so that it can be managed with larger hands/pincers/claws/tentacles, but also so much more efficient than anything the galaxy has seen before.

Human technicians start hopping ships and upkeeping the general maintenance, the stuff that most aliens put off or don't notice because they never access the crevices of their ships. As human companies become more popular and lead the tech world in everything from warp cores to game stations ("it's so compact! How are the graphics so good?" Says a 60' tall grimbleback, holding a new VR headset that has all of its components included because it's so BIG by our tech standards), soon many things have accessibility ports for humans to be able to use as well. This means that these shiprats hoping ship to ship cause such a huge improvement in everything running smoothly, and there's a huge downtick in pests on ships because those "pests" are not only big enough and aggressive enough to bite a pitbull or a person in half, they're invasive to so many planets and humans hate nothing more than dog killing planet overrunning monsters.

All the while, from the Aliens perspective, humans are an elusive race that don't fraternize much with them. You almost never see a human as most places aren't exactly safe for the little things to run around in. They do export so much stuff though, and the custodial staff at the Central Galactic Outpost insists that there's more humans around than any other race if you just know where to look.

And sure it's somewhat known that some of the little daredevils hop ships and help out in exchange for room and board, usually without permission, but that can't be that common, can it?

Maybe your ship is running better this cycle ever since you stopped at the last station, that just means that tuneup was better than you thought. And maybe for some reason that program you were working on last night is finished when you wake up, but you're so tired maybe you finished it before you passed out. Somehow that faulty light in the galley has fixed itself as well, which is odd, but maybe the Engineer finally got to it. You'd know if there was someone else on your ship.

Right?

... You leave a little bowl of berries out as a thank you, just in case. You're not sure what humans like but you've heard they have a sweet tooth.

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

References to “the Seven Seas” are found throughout history, but the exact list varies by time and culture. Here are three of the most popular lists

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

dipping a large body of bread into hot stew and tearing off a chunk with your bared teeth is respectful and good. it shows the Earth we want to be here, and will fight to remain. our ancestors understood

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

this is what english teachers mean by poetry appreciation right?

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

So I tend to put on a youtube video most nights to fall asleep to (laptop on a shutdown timer.) And lately, my recommendations are a lot of videogame speedruns or videogame hidden facts.

Last night I pulled up youtube and got a "I played the 10 worst wii games ever" kind of video. ~30 minutes long. Fair enough! Show me the terrible wii games.

I'm paying attention for the beginning, since hey I'm still awake. And maybe like, 6 minutes into the video the guy starts going into heavy detail about how to pirate and copy wii games.

And I'm like, shit, bold, considering this video has 500,000 views. Bravo and all that.

The terrible wii games go on. I fall asleep.

I wake up to the sound of like... mechanical grinding?

Look at the laptop. There's a guy in a hazmat suit mixing dangerous chemicals, going "hey don't mix these dangerous chemicals."

I'm like, "Oh, the video ended. And the algorithm put me on... chemical mixing Youtube I guess."

I look at the video Title. "I Played The Worst Wii Games Ever Made"

....Oh.

It's still the video.

So surely he is... mixing chemicals to clean off an unplayable wii disk? Trying to touch up the lone copy of some forgotten game bought off ebay?

No...

He's just.

Mixing chemicals.

I hover over the video sections.

The 10 worst wii game sections have ended. He played them all.

The last 10 minutes is just dedicated to... him in a hazmat suit mixing dangerous chemicals.

....????

I fall back asleep.

....

I need to go back and check this video to make sure I did not imagine this all in a half-asleep stupor

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

not raised catholic but my mom was exposed in childhood so i inherited the antibodies (generational catholic guilt)

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

i'm in your walls, meth pipe

loving my new awesome nickname.

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

people complain about c.s. pacat’s writing in capri being sparse and impersonal, often claiming there isn’t enough access into damen’s head. i have many thoughts on this, but there are two that i need to put into words because they keep just swirling around in my brain.

one being that i think the writing style is simply true to damen’s characterization. the trilogy is almost exclusively from damen’s pov. damen, who is straightforward and blunt. damen, who does not allow himself to sit in his feelings because then he would not be able to take the action he needs to. damen, who, when he does give way to his feelings, often ends up with a sword in his hand and blood spattered on his face. things he cannot risk if he wants freedom, if he wants to protect himself and his kingdom and, eventually, laurent. would it not feel so strange if the writing waxed poetic from damen’s militaristic, straightforward, assessing mind? like really the only times the prose is more fanciful is when it comes to him loving/admiring laurent or him loving/admiring akielos, which just shows the way the writing style accords to the character we’re in the head of. even when he does begin to process his trauma in the epilogue, it’s largely unspoken, just now beginning to wash over him because to engage with it is to be overcome by it. so of course we aren’t wallowing in his emotional state; damen himself can’t even reckon with it.

two being that this style also just puts trust in the reader, which many authors don’t. in my recent experience, i feel like i’m being spoonfed obvious things in a lot of books, which detracts from my experience putting things together while reading. but the thing is, even with the writing being more pared down, you’re never uncertain how damen feels, despite it not being explicitly stated. you’re never feeling gaps in what’s going on because you’re given all that you need to understand the stakes, the world, the connections. there are layers to every word that is written, and there is weight to the ones that aren’t.

i just really love this trilogy so much and think it was so masterfully written and it hurts my heart to see ppl dog on the writing style

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

Damen 🤝 Neil Josten 🤝 Will Kempen