Ana Mardoll's Ramblings

Metapost: Sad Trombone

2013-06-18T14:32:00.000-05:00

Folks, an electrical storm hit here last night and fried my desktop computer such that when I woke up this morning, there was no internet connection. Husband diagnosed the problem to be unfixable, before then hooking up a jury-rigged solution which is much slower and very sad. So not only has this eaten up my entire morning, it has also left me feeling very much like this picture of a sad cat:

Sad Cat @ ghcorps.org

I'm not sure how this will affect posting for the next few weeks (months? please god, not months), but there it is. In the meantime, I'm kind of in mourning because I have a tendency to get emotionally attached to my gadgets -- I've been with this desktop for almost as long as I've been with Husband, and had planned to hold on to it for at least another 3-4 years. So.

Narnia: Marginalized Characters vs. Marginalized People

2013-06-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Body Transformation, Genocide, Racism]

Narnia Recap: In which Eustace is turned back into a boy.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 7: How The Adventure Ended

Chapter 7 has a very peculiar sub-title: How The Adventure Ended, even though the book has sixteen chapters total and we're nowhere near the end. What Lewis means, I suppose, is how the-adventure-in-which-Eustace-was-turned-into-a-dragon ended, and indeed this directly references the sub-title of Chapter 6, which was The Adventures of Eustace.

I find this wording rather interesting, because framing Eustace's time as a dragon as the adventures he experiences -- that is, with a definite article instead of an indefinite one -- almost seems to suggest that these are the only adventures of Eustace and that, after they are "ended", his job in this story ceases to exist.

This was certainly true for our first child in need of redemption; you will all recall that after Edmund was saved in the middle of LWW, he pretty much never spoke again in that book. (And when he appeared in Prince Caspian, he spoke like an entirely different person -- not in the sense of "better now that he's redeemed" so much as in the sense of "who is this person and what did he do with Edmund".) At the time I speculated that perhaps Lewis wasn't comfortable trying to write a reformed sinner in such a way that it would be clear he had reformed and yet was still the same character.

Eustace fares somewhat better than Edmund: after Chapter 7 and the "end" of his adventures, Eustace is allowed to speak 268 words of the remaining 25,786 words. (I counted the former; Microsoft Word counted the latter.) My calculator tells me that means Eustace gets to utter 1% of the remaining novel, which isn't bad for a Lewisian Reformed Sinner but isn't terribly good by any other metric, especially considering that the book opened with a whole chapter on Eustace Clarence Scrubb, whom I'm tempted to dub Sir Not Appearing In The [Remainder] Of This Novel.

I suspect it is this sparsity of spoken words which (partly) determines how a lot of people view Eustace post-conversion: some people view him as having essentially the same personality as before, but with a Christian twist (i.e., "not perfect, just redeemed"); others feel like he's herded into the same party line as Lucy and Edmund to serve as the awed Greek chorus to Caspian the Protagonist. I haven't decided how I feel about post-conversion Eustace yet, but I will note that when he is allowed to speak, he is now suddenly allowed to be the resident semi-expert on flora and fauna. Which is what we've been saying he should have been all along, but he's apparently not allowed to be right about things until after he's been inducted into the Church of Aslan. I think that's a real shame.

But now I'm jumping ahead.

   “Look at the device on the gold,” said Caspian.
   “A little hammer with a diamond above it like a star,” said Drinian. “Why, I’ve seen that before.”
   “Seen it!” said Caspian. “Why, of course you have. It is the sign of a great Narnian house. This is the Lord Octesian’s arm-ring.”

We know absolutely nothing about Drinian, except that he's a Telmarine Lord. But we don't know if he's from a long and established line of lords or if Caspian lorded him as a lordly-come-lately after the Coronation Day Massacre carried off the flower of Telmarine youth. Who can say? NOT US. So I choose to believe that Drinian is a newly-created lord who is at this moment giving Caspian the stink-eye for forgetting that Drinian's childhood didn't consist entirely of memorizing the crests of defunct Telmarine lineages.

Additionally, since the Telmarines came into Narnia as pirates and (presumably) did not have their own noble crests at the time, then we must assume that they created their crests later after invading Narnia and genociding the inhabitants. Octesian's crest of a hammer and diamond evoke mining to my mind, which is a reminder that whether his family did so peaceably or not, they were very likely responsible for the encroachment on the dwarven homes in the Narnian mountains which caused Nikabrik and Trumpkin to flee to the forests. And since they adopted the hammer-and-diamond motif for their house crest and since interbreeding with Narnians was a crime punishable by death in Telmarine society, I'm guessing the takeover of the mines was not due to peaceable intermarrying and cultural exchange since you really don't want to advertise "peaceful relations with the natives" in your publicly-viewable crest in the middle of a totalitarian dystopia.

And all that reminds me that, if Caspian is successful, he plans to bring back home seven Lost Lords whose family lineages were complicit in the horrific marginalization of the Narnian natives and whose family possessions are no doubt already hotly disputed on the grounds that the lands were stolen from the Natives and encompass their natural habitats from whence they can't just simply pick up and move, nor should they be expected to. Caspian seems completely unaware of how potentially alienating his quest is, nor how deeply it favors the privileged Telmarines over the marginalized Narnians.

Once again, we are entitled to ask why Lewis wrote it this way, instead of (for example) having Caspian search for Narnian natives who fled the Telmarine oppression in order to let them know that they are welcome back in Narnia should they choose to return? But of course, the reason Caspian is searching for Unfairly Displaced Ruler Class people and not Unfairly Displaced Native Inhabitants people might have something to do with the time period during which this book was written:

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was published in 1952. In 1945, Canada joined the United Nations as an independent member, separate from the United Kingdom. In 1947, India and Pakistan were officially recognized as independent countries by the United Kingdom; King George VI officially abandoned the title of Emperor of India in 1948. In 1949, Ireland declared itself a republic and officially completed the process of separation from the British Empire. In 1960, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech to the Parliament of South Africa, in which he signaled that the British government intended to grant independence to many of its territories; most of the British possessions in Africa became independent nations in the 1960s.

[...] it is notable to me that King Caspian ... renewed his birthright claim of Emperor of the Lone Islands at about the same time as King George was abandoning his own title as Emperor of India.

Moving on, when we last left our heroes, Reepicheep was demanding that the crying dragon (who may or may not have just lost its mate or parent very recently to unknown causes which may or may not be related to our heroes' invasion of the island) swear friendship to them before they can engage in communication together. Now Reepicheep accuses the dragon of murder and villainy, despite the fact that Reepicheep would (one might suspect) have reason to believe that a Sentient Animal might have a good reason to kill a Telmarine Lord. What with all the genociding they tend to do.

“Villain,” said Reepicheep to the dragon, “have you devoured a Narnian lord?” But the dragon shook his head violently.

So it's really great how Lewis' token minority on the ship completely takes the side of the human invaders who (at best, in the case of Caspian) claim ownership over everything they see and (at worst, in the case of Caspian's peers and ancestors) murder the native inhabitants willy-nilly for the crime of existing on "their" (the Telmarines') property. Stellar. (And it's worth pointing out that when Aslan devours people, nobody says boo.)

But hang on a minute, because I want to harp on this point a little deeper.

It is not coincidental that Lewis uses the token Sentient Animal (Reepicheep) to chastise the foreign Sentient Animal (the dragon) for defending its territory from invading humans. Lewis is using this framing to deflect criticism; if Caspian or Drinian or Edmund called the dragon a villain for protecting itself and its territory from a genocidal Telmarine lord -- or even just a lord who leaped to wrong conclusions based on racial prejudices, as Caspian has already done by intending to battle the dragon rather than communicate with it -- then we might be more inclined to see the gulf of privilege between the community of white human aristocratic armed men versus the solitary dragon who recently died (of age or disease, we don't know) alone and unmourned in the valley above. (And Reepicheep is chastising that old dragon, though he doesn't realize it. We know that this young dragon, Eustace, didn't devour Lord Octesian, but we don't know that the elderly dragon didn't.)

Much later, on the Isle of Dufflepuds -- and I have FULLY ONE BILLION THINGS to say about the Isle of Dufflepuds -- Lewis will deliberately use Lucy to contradict the local inhabitants about their concern over their appearance and their own unwanted bodily transformation, and Lewis will have her do so immediately after Lucy herself was tempted to change her own body into a form more socially accepted as beautiful and thereby improve the ways in which people treat her. So, you see? It's okay for her to lecture the Dufflepuds about vanity and marginalization, because Lucy experiences those things too! (NO.)

There is a pattern here, and it is a pattern in which Lewis uses a marginalized character to criticize marginalized people for bucking against what Lewis sees as the established order. So Reepicheep, a survivor of centuries of genocide, chastises another Sentient Animal slash Native Inhabitant for proactively trying to protect itself and its territory when it should have submitted humbly to the human ruler class who sailed up to its shore. And Lucy, a girl who lives with the marginalization that is heaped on girls for being insufficiently beautiful, chastises an island of indentured servants whose "vanity" leads them to complain about the body transformation that was imposed on them against their consent by the local Aslan-appointed magician overlord -- they should have submitted quietly to whatever ugly or unwanted form their man-ruler chose to impose on their inferior dwarven bodies.

Will Wildman notes in his Ender's Game analysis -- which you should totally read the whole thing because it is awesome -- how deeply problematic it is to try to portray a post-racial future where all the "now harmless" racial slurs are still directed only at marginalized people and it's up to the White Kid to teach the Token Minorities how to sing along with each other in Perfect Harmony:

[...] I don't know what Card thought was going on here, but--is it supposed to be reclamatory usage indicating that this generation of children is truly 'postracial' but not so far advanced that they've forgotten racism used to be a thing? Did it occur to Card that there's a problem when 'postracial' is largely defined by PoC not complaining about racism? [...]

Does it not seem like a problem to anyone in this postracial situation when the now-'harmless' racial slurs are still only directed at the black kid and the Chinese kid? Battle School is supposed to be super-international and its slang borrows from languages all over the world and no one's got a choice epithet for whitey? Gwailo? Yaku? Alai could easily know 'firanji'* at least? If you're going to argue that equality comes about when everyone's not upset about racial slurs anymore, take your own goddamn medicine, Card.

And I believe what we are seeing with Narnia is a similar problem.

This is not a whoops thing that just accidentally happens, this convenient appropriation of marginalized identities into marginalized characters who then expound on how marginalized people (in the case of Narnia) should know their place and stop being so damn uppity about their marginalization and take centuries of horrific persecution like a champ, or (in the case of Ender's Game) have learned their place and stopped being so damn uppity about their marginalization and take centuries of horrific persecution like a champ.

There's a trap that a lot of readers fall into, particularly readers with privilege, in letting a Watsonian mindset override a Doylist remembrance of the author's own privileges. So we think, well, if Alai wasn't offended by Ender's use of the n-word, then I guess that's his prerogative, while forgetting that Alai is not really a black person; he is a black character written by a white person, and that this is a very important distinction. Or we think, well, the Dufflepuds don't seem to be too bothered by their indentured servitude to a powerful magician, and thereby forget that the Dufflepuds are fictional characters written by a privileged person who was never in his life on the receiving end of that kind of marginalization.

It is important -- deeply, powerfully, crucially important -- for privileged writers to include more marginalized characters in their work; the Science Fiction / Fantasy genres in particular are overwhelmed with a majority of white cis straight able male characters, and diversity is needed in desperate measure. Yet at the same time, it is the author's responsibility to include marginalized characters as realistic three-dimensional characters in their own right and not as one-dimensional tokens intended to represent how Those People really are or should be or need to be. And it is absolutely inappropriate to deliberately appropriate a marginalized identity solely for the sake of creating a marginalized character to lecture marginalized people (explicitly, other characters in the book; but implicitly, the people in the audience) about how You People should act.

And it is the reader's responsibility to remember that when an author does appropriate an identity in this harmful manner, the resulting token characters do not represent real people of that identity merely because the author announced that they supposedly have that identity. It is in those cases that a Watsonian analysis can be actively harmful, when we accept a privileged authors' quote-unquote marginalized characters have a valid say in the issues marginalized people face simply because the privileged author claims that they do.

Open Thread: Vacation

2013-06-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

Hosted by a hat and flip-flops on the beach

So, since I took a bit of an unplanned mini-vacation last week (sorry), I thought this was an appropriate topic!

The time of year is upon us, when tourists from all around the world flock to my home state of Florida, convinced that the Sunshine State is the best place to spend a nice, relaxing summer vacation, lounging on a beach and basking in the sun's gentle rays.

And we laugh, and we laugh...

Because what they don't realize, you see, is that Florida weather in the summer has exactly two settings:

1) broilingly, swelteringly, oppressively hot; or
2) tropical storm.

Often both in the same day, if you're lucky! (Fun fact: this morning, I intended to get up early and walk, rather than drive, my daughter to daycare. At 6 am, I was awoken by a thunderclap that no joke, went on for a full minute before finally losing steam and fading away. And I said "Nnnnnope!", rolled over, and went back to sleep.) Not very conducive to lounging on a beach, or even spending all day outside in a theme park, is what I'm saying here.

Which is why Floridians, when we go on vacation, tend to go away from Florida.

Open thread! When's the last time you went on a vacation? Any funny stories about vacations interrupted by unfriendly weather or other unpredictable factors? What's your dream vacation - do you fantasize about relaxing in a tropical locale, roughing it camping out in the mountains somewhere, exploring the nightlife in a faraway and glamourous city, hiking through ancient ruins, etc.? Do you live in an area that attracts a lot of tourists, and if so, what do the tourists rarely realize about your home town until they get there?

Monday Reminder! While I have fun coming up with pretty pictures and/or interesting “prompt” questions for open threads, you aren’t limited to those! These threads are open - go wild, talk about whatever moves you! (Just remember that this is still a safe space, please!)

And, like on all threads: please remember to use the "post new comment" feature rather than the "reply" feature, even when directly replying to someone else!

eReader: Companion eBooks at Manning

2013-06-16T08:45:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Ads, Disability]

Husband bought a couple of paper programming books this week, and is finding (surprise!) that they're kind of heavy to lug around with him. So we were heartily shocked and more than a little pleased to learn that the publishers of these particular books -- Manning Publications Co. -- had included inserts in their paper books such that you could register an account with them and download ebook versions of the paper book you already owned. Sweet!

And they don't just limit you to one version: you can get mobi (Kindle), epub, and pdf versions, as well as a zip file download of code examples. Which means that he can read the epub version on his secondhand Nook, and later mark up the PDF version with a stylus on our Galaxy Note. And this is obviously freaking awesome. Best of all, the Manning downloads appear to be DRM-free. (They may have social DRM or watermarking; I haven't checked. Note that those do carry privacy issues.)

This isn't just a nice bonus for everyone. For many people, being able to switch between a print version and an electronic version is a disability issue. If your wrist breaks or you hurt your back or you develop a hernia or your arthritis starts flaring up or any number of other ailments suddenly drop in like they do, you are still able to enjoy your hobbies and/or perform your work without knowing that you're going to have to shell out thousands just to replicate your library into a format that's compatible with your disability. I cannot describe how psychologically important that is.

So here's a shout out to Manning Publications Co. for being awesome.

Review: Skinomi TechSkin for Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0

2013-06-15T17:16:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Ads]

Skinomi TechSkin for Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 / B00C9HYTVS

Normally I like the Skinomi skins; they aren't good for eInk devices (as I belatedly learned with my Kindle), but they work well with tablets and phones. And I love that the wet application method reduces bubbles and fingerprints and all the other little hassles which accompany putting on tablet skins.

However, I have sadly learned that the Skinomi skins simply do not agree with the S-Pen that comes with the Samsung Note. The Skinomi skin has a pleasant "give" to it that makes it spongy, and the pen presses down into the spongy skin and leaves a permanent impression. After the Skinomi skin was applied, I drew a dinosaur later that night with the Sketch 'Em app, and the dinosaur was permanently etched into the skin to be seen forevermore. I ended up having to peel the skin off and toss it; a complete waste.

I have attached pictures which I hope illustrate the problem.

~ Ana Mardoll

Film Corner: Will Graham is a Raging Asshole

2013-06-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Murder, Rape, Animal Cruelty, Misogynistic Language, Red Dragon spoilers]

@ rockmnation.com

I wanted to like Will Graham.

No. Stop. Wait. Let me first back up and give everyone a little view into the super-happy-unicorn-fun of pop-culture blogging in our corporate dystopia wasteland:

I wanted to head this post with a screenshot from the Red Dragon movie. I figured that would be easy.

First, I googled for the screen capture that I wanted: a picture of Will Graham as played by Ed Norton sitting cozily next to his wife Molly Graham as played by Mary-Louise Parker. I needed this very specific screenshot in order to make a point that I very much wish to make. It wasn't available on Google. Not terribly surprisingly, this one was [cn: gun violence] as was this one, neither of which I wanted. The first one has a tendency to focus on Will Graham's manpain over Molly's pain (this is made more explicit in the book) and the second one is more of an evaluatory image of Molly being attractive and reticent. I wanted an image which represented communion. I couldn't find it.

But that was no problem: I had purchased a used copy of the Red Dragon movie on blu-ray after I wrote about The Silence of the Lambs. (I could feel this post coming on, I suppose.) I don't usually buy movies on blu-ray, but the price was right and I knew I'd want a good picture quality for the blog. So I got up from my desk, popped the movie into my computer, lined up to the scene I wanted, played the pause-play-rewind-play-pause game until I had precisely the shot I wanted, and pressed the PRINT SCREEN button on my keyboard.

Some of you know what's coming next.

Apparently, enough people in Hollywood have managed to make enough of a fuss about piracy that they've convinced every major blu-ray computer program company to disable the print screen functionality of the computer on which the blu-ray is playing: if you try to take a screenshot from a blu-ray movie, you receive a black screen instead. HA HA THAT IS JUST GREAT. Even though I've paid for this movie. Even though it would be utterly ludicrous for someone to screen capture every frame in order to "pirate" the movie. Even though there are numerous much easier ways out there to pirate movies. Even though all these things, because corporate dystopia wasteland.

What I have learned from this then, is that if I ever want to video blog anything ever again, I have to either buy the damn thing in DVD format or I have to buy (or rent) from Amazon Instant Video because Amazon (so far) hasn't disabled the print screen capabilities there. (And which I have so far only dabbled in with television shows only because I'm not sure how I feel yet about not owning a physical copy of my movies.) And in the meantime, if I want to get the screenshot I need for my post, I need to shell out even more money for one or more workarounds. Lovely.

I mention all this not because I want solutions posted in the comments (please don't post any solutions in the comments for various legal reasons which should be obvious) but because (a) I like to help other bloggers avoid the pitfalls I fall into and (b) absolutely none of this ridiculous waste of my time and my money helped to endear Will Graham to me.

But I digress.

Oh, look! Pictures! (Thank you, Amazon Instant Video rental!)

I wanted to like Will Graham.

Special FBI investigator Will Graham is theoretically my kind of investigator: he is both blessed and cursed with "pure empathy" and he solves cases with the Power of Feelings. How can I not like that, when it's one of the things I like most about Joan Watson on Elementary?

And, in fact, I do like Will Graham when he is played by Ed Norton. (Note: I haven't seen the movie Manhunter nor the show Hannibal, and currently have no intention of watching either.) And perhaps this shouldn't be surprising -- Ed Norton frequently brings a wonderfully wounded vulnerability to so many of his roles that it seems very natural to me in retrospect that he should play a purely empathic character -- the more I think on it, Ed Norton should be playing all the empathic characters, in everything. Yet reading Red Dragon this week has thoroughly convinced me that Thomas Harris should not be writing them.

Will Graham, as written by Thomas Harris, is a fictional character who is super-amazingly-special and the-absolute-bestest at catching serial killers because he has "pure empathy" that he can't turn off, because of his special empathic brain. He doesn't really like his super power and wishes he could turn it off; our first description of him comes from his former boss (FBI agent Jack Crawford because no one in these books is ever called Hyman or Lynn or Leslie, unless of course they're a serial killer) who notes how Will effortlessly slips into conversational rhythms, mimicking the speech patterns of whoever he is talking with because of his amazing empathy, while simultaneously noting how much this talent bothers Will:

Jack Crawford heard the rhythm and syntax of his own speech in Graham’s voice. He had heard Graham do that before, with other people. Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person’s speech patterns. At first, Crawford had thought he was doing it deliberately, that it was a gimmick to get the back-and-forth rhythm going.
Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tried to stop and couldn’t.

And later:

“What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine—and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him.

Already my interest is piqued because this speech thing is a thing that I do. (We had a discussion thread on this once somewhere, and as I recall it's not terribly rare. It may or may not be a subconscious defense mechanism: people are less likely to hurt you if they think you're similar to them in meaningful ways.) But it's all a horrible lie because Will Graham doesn't actually empathize with "people"; he empathizes with white adult men who are near him in age without being elderly. Or, in other words, Will Graham empathizes with people who have social privilege and/or fit the usual serial killer demographic.

Fine. Okay? Fine. If you want to have a fictional character whose super-power is empathizing with the privileged, the powerful, and serial killers, then fine. But do not keep lying to me and telling me that this person is doing it with Pure Empathy. Because every page in this book, every word on each page, drives home the point that Will Graham doesn't empathize with women or children or the elderly or those less powerful than he because they aren't real people to him.

Graham doesn't empathize with other police officers who are frustrated with dealing with the secretive and heavy-handed FBI; every time there's any jurisdiction friction between the groups, it's Crawford who steps in and smooths the feathers. (With a strong implication that Graham is too special to be wasted on petty little things like group coordination. Pure Empathy must be employed only for profiling.)

Graham doesn't empathize with the female victims of the serial killer (Francis Dolarhyde, aka the "Red Dragon"): the individual women he murders and rapes. The Red Dragon technically has more victims than just these women -- his m.o. is to murder the entire family -- but his focus is on the women, and the women are why he picks those particular families. But instead of getting right down to understanding the women in order to understand why the Red Dragon focused on them -- which is, you know, his job -- Graham farts around getting to know the husbands because they are the ones who own the women, and Graham doesn't want to transgress on that ownership:

Graham followed him through the house out of an odd sense of obligation. Learning about him first was a way of asking permission to look at his wife. Graham felt that it was she who drew the monster, as surely as a singing cricket attracts death from the red-eyed fly.

Clear as day, Graham is empathizing with the husband, who owns the wife, rather than empathizing with the wife first and foremost. Much later in the book he will wonder if the women are responsible for their deaths, proving that he will never at any point in this novel seriously consider empathizing with these women as actual people:

Graham wondered if Mrs. Leeds and Mrs. Jacobi ever did their marketing in tennis clothes. That was a fashionable thing to do in some areas. It was a dumb thing to do in some areas because it was doubly provocative—arousing class resentment and lust at the same time. Graham imagined them pushing grocery carts, short pleated skirts brushing the brown thighs, the little balls on their sweat socks winking—passing the husky man with the barracuda eyes who was buying cold lunch meat to gnaw in his car.

This is doubly infuriating because Graham's empathy is supposed to be compulsive and uncontrollable: he's supposed to pop into peoples' heads without meaning to, yet any time there's a head to pop into, he invariably dives into a point of view that preys on women and blames them for it. Even if that point of view is only hypothetical. Even if the victims are real people. Will Graham would rather compulsively empathize with a hypothetical man who may or may not exist to watch woman shop than to understand the women who presumably did shop but may or may not have shopped "provocatively". That's not empathizing; that's judging. And, in this case, victim-blaming. Yuck.

Graham doesn't empathize with his step-son, a young boy who seems to care about Graham very much at the beginning of the book. When a gossip rag maliciously reports that Graham was institutionalized for depression (and falsely implies that he was institutionalized because he is dangerous to others), the young boy asks Graham tentatively about it. Everything about this makes sense: the boy loves Graham and is worried about him; the boy also loves his mother and is worried about her. He's trying to keep everyone safe, and he's trying to be as diplomatic as the average eleven-year-old can be. But Graham resents him for asking, and resents the Tattler for creating the situation, as opposed to resenting the Tattler for unduly worrying a child he (supposedly) loves:

Resentment raised a minute blister in Graham. He had justified himself to an eleven-year-old.

HA HA THAT IS JUST PERFECT.

Graham doesn't empathize with his wife. Here is where I really start to see red, because this book is so misogynistic in its handling of Molly Graham? Remember when I thought that maybe Harris was attempting to be some kind of feminist ally (and largely failing) when he tried to show the sexism that Clarice Starling encounters in the FBI? Well, I take it all back and chalk it up to my PURE EMPATHY AND PROJECTION (ha) because this book is misogynistic as fuck.

Let me set the scene for you. Jack Crawford rolls up into town and tells Will Graham that he needs Will to drop everything and jet off to work on a serial killer task force, when oh-by-the-way the last case Graham worked ended with him being nearly stabbed to death. Graham decides that he must go (compulsion! instant guilt-free!) because if he doesn't and if the killer strikes again, he'll feel like it was somehow his fault and his home and family will be tainted for him forever. Graham asks Molly if she thinks he should go, and she points out that he's already made up his mind. And this is an interesting point we'll come back to: Molly empathizes with Graham. Molly doesn't have Pure Empathy. She isn't employed by the FBI as a super-special profiler. But she empathizes with Graham more than he does with her, despite that being supposedly his unique talent.

This is realistic. Marginalized people often learn how to empathize with privileged people as a form of protection. I'm not in the least bit surprised that Molly can empathize with her husband, nor that she can recognize and point out times when he's only pretending to ask for her opinion as opposed to really asking for it. But because the book is written this way, we have an interesting situation where empathy only flows up the chain of privilege. Women (Molly and others) empathize with Graham because they are worth less than him. They empathize up to him, just as young Willy empathizes up to his mother Molly. And Graham, the bestest character evah on the protagonist side, empathizes up to serial killers like Hannibal Lector and Francis Dolarhyde. This is a problem, and more on why in a minute.

Without Molly's freely-given permission or her blessing, Will jets off with nary a backward glance behind him. Calls are exchanged in which Molly tries to be kind and understanding and loving; she playfully offers him phone sex at one point, though he turns her down. Then Will makes a series of poor choices and his nemesis Hannibal Lector ends up sending the Red Dragon a message that includes the Graham family address and instructions to kill Molly and Willy. The FBI is forced to uproot Molly and Willy from their home to a safe house -- Willy has to leave his home and his friends; Molly loses her job, and laments the loss of all the hard work she'd invested in her work. Their dogs are given to the shelter where they hope they will be adopted out rather than put to sleep, but it's been established that they keep the dogs because they're "ugly" and no one wants to adopt them, so.

Shortly after this, Crawford decides that the best way to catch the Red Dragon is to agitate him to go after Graham individually, who can be monitored by FBI surveillance and who can wear kevlar at all times -- though that won't protect him, they note, if the Red Dragon goes for a headshot. There's a long drawn-out conversation between Crawford and a colleague about how immoral it would be to put Graham in a trap without informing him first (which is true), yet they never once consider informing Molly, despite the fact that, safe-house or not, she's also in danger the more the Red Dragon focuses on the Graham family. They already know he targets women, not men. And yet Molly doesn't get to know even though Graham does, because Molly isn't a person. Graham is, and as her husband he owns her.

   [CRAWFORD] Will you help us stir up the Tooth Fairy, Doctor? A lot of people are dead.”
   [BLOOM] “Only if Graham knows the entire risk ahead of time and assumes it voluntarily. I have to hear him say that.”
   [CRAWFORD] “I’m like you, Doctor. I never bullshit him.

Later, after the trap has gone badly and ended with someone other than Graham dead (no shit):

   He made a third martini and called Molly. She had seen the television news at six and ten o’clock and she had seen a Tattler. She knew that Graham had been the bait in a trap.
   “You should have told me, Will.”
   “Maybe. I don’t think so.”

RIGHT. His trap got his "pet" (a man he was working with) killed because the serial killer murders the pets first. Graham knows that now. He also knows that the killer focuses on the wives. But Graham still thinks he shouldn't tell Molly about these things. And she's supposed to fall the fuck into line.

And so after the Red Dragon has targeted not-Graham but someone he considers close to Graham (i.e., the "pet"), Molly decides -- without putting it into these words, mind you; she's nothing but kind and polite throughout this entire novel -- that the FBI is fucking around with matches and she can't trust them to keep her informed. She takes Willy up to his paternal grandparents, who haven't seen him in a while. (It's implied they've not seen him since his father, Molly's previous husband, died.)

Graham isn't happy about this decision to live with Willy's grandparents and repeatedly sulks about this arrangement without ever really airing out that he's pissed off because Molly isn't waiting on a widow's walk somewhere for him to decide to come back home. She's taking care of herself and Willy while cheerfully reminding Graham that there's a place open for him when he's done with his work, but she's not sitting around in limbo. And that burns him up, Pure Empathy notwithstanding.

When the case is finally over, Graham immediately demands that his return into their lives and his sexytimes be done on his schedule at his insistence. I'm just going to quote the entire phone conversation because it is PERFECT. And by "perfect", I mean "gut-wrenching and horrible".

   [MOLLY] “Hello.”
   [GRAHAM] “Hi, hotshot.”
   “Good news, huh?”
   “Looks like it.”
   “I was out in the garden. Mamamma came out and told me when she saw it on TV. When did you find out?”
   “Late last night.”
   “Why didn’t you call me?”
   “Mamamma was probably asleep.”
   “No, she was watching Johnny Carson. I can’t tell you, Will. I’m so glad you didn’t have to catch him.”
   “I’ll be here a little longer.”
   “Four or five days?”
   “I’m not sure. Maybe not that long. I want to see you, kid.”
   “I want to see you too, when you get through with everything you need to do.”
   “Today’s Wednesday. By Friday I ought to—”
   “Will, Mamamma has all Willy’s uncles and aunts coming down from Seattle next week, and—”
   “Fuck Mamamma. What is this ‘Mamamma’ anyway?”
   “When Willy was real little, he couldn’t say—”
   “Come home with me.”
   “Will, I’ve waited for you. They never get to see Willy and a few more days—”
   “Come yourself. Leave Willy there, and your ex-mother-in-law can stick him on a plane next week. Tell you what— let’s stop in New Orleans. There’s a place called—”
   “I don’t think so. I’ve been working— just part-time— at this western store in town, and I have to give them a little notice.”
   “What’s wrong, Molly?”
   “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. . . . I got so sad, Will. You know I came up here after Willy’s father died.” She always said “Willy’s father” as though it were an office. She never used his name. “And we were all together— I got myself together, I got calm. I’ve gotten myself together now too, and I—”
   “Small difference: I’m not dead.”
   “Don’t be that way.”
   “What way? Don’t be what way?”
   “You’re mad.”
   Graham closed his eyes for a moment.
   “Hello.”
   “I’m not mad, Molly. You do what you want to. I’ll call you when things wind up here.”
   “You could come up here.”
   “I don’t think so.”
   “Why not? There’s plenty of room. Mamamma would—”
   “Molly, they don’t like me and you know why. Every time they look at me, I remind them.”
   “That’s not fair and it’s not true either.”
   Graham was very tired.
   “Okay. They’re full of shit and they make me sick— try that one.”
   “Don’t say that.”
   “They want the boy. Maybe they like you all right, probably they do, if they ever think about it. But they want the boy and they’ll take you. They don’t want me and I couldn’t care less. I want you. In Florida. Willy too, when he gets tired of his pony.”
   “You’ll feel better when you get some sleep.”
   “I doubt it. Look, I’ll call you when I know something here.”
   “Sure.” She hung up.

HAHAHA ISN'T THAT PERFECT? So, just to recap, Will Graham left his family without hardly even a notice, endangered their lives once without meaning to but in a way that completely uprooted them from their safe space and lost them their livelihood, then endangered their lives a second time without warning them, then got in a huff over them finding a safe space with people who aren't genetically-related to him and his magic sperm, then demanded that they uproot themselves entirely with barely a thank you to their hosts or a notice at their workplace, then aggressively interrupted Molly when she tried to explain, then undermined her sense of worth by saying that the people who have been taking care of her don't actually like her, and then insulted them when Molly wouldn't accept his crap. THAT IS SOME PURE EMPATHY RIGHT THERE.

When Graham goes home again, he immediately decides that any new distance between him and Molly has less to do with his series of bad decisions and treating her like furniture in his life and more to do with the fact that she's a horrible person for staying with her dead husband's parents rather than in a safe house that could be compromised by a leak (accidental or deliberate, since they've demonstrated total unwillingness to warn her about traps) at the FBI at any time:

   Graham and Molly wanted very much for it to be the same again between them, to go on as they had before.
   When they saw that it was not the same, the unspoken knowledge lived with them like unwanted company in the house. [...]
   She tried to be good to him, but she had been to Oregon and she had raised the dead.
   Willy felt it and he was cool to Graham, maddeningly polite.

Right. She is being cool to him because seeing Willy's grandparents reminded her that she has a dead husband which she had hitherto previously forgot. She is certainly not being cool to him because he's a raging asshole who might put her through this ALL OVER AGAIN next week if Crawford shows up on the doorstep with a new case file. Ditto for Willy, who is "maddeningly" polite because fuck that little shit. Who does he think he is, protecting himself emotionally from future abandonment?

Rather than reassure Molly that he isn't going to leave her again and/or get her killed by any more serial killers, he rubs her nose in the fact that everyone else thinks he's a Big Damn Hero (so why doesn't she?):

   “These people were probably on his itinerary,” Crawford wrote. “Safe now. Thought you’d like to know.”
   Graham showed it to Molly. “See? That’s why,” he said. “That’s why it was worth it.”
   “I know,” she said. “I understand that, really I do.”
   The bluefish were running under the moon. Molly packed suppers and they fished and they built fires, and none of it was any good.

COOKIES! GET IN THE KITCHEN AND BAKE THEM! NOW.

Graham decides that the best thing to do to resolve all this is to sit Molly and Willy down and lecture them about how they are his property and need to start acting like it: politeness isn't going to cut it in this household when he deserves unadulterated admiration. PURE EMPATHY!

   Graham had decided to talk to both of them together.
   The expedition did not begin well. Willy pointedly put aside the rod Graham had rigged for him and brought the new surf-casting rod his grandfather sent home with him. They fished for three hours in silence. Graham opened his mouth to speak several times, but it didn’t seem right.
   He was tired of being disliked.

Oh, Graham. You're not going to be very happy with me then, are you?

   When Molly had gone, Graham was tempted to talk to the boy by himself. No. Willy would feel whatever his mother felt. He’d wait and get them both together when she came back. He’d do it this time.
   She wasn’t gone long and she came back without the sandwiches, walking swiftly on the packed sand above the surf.
   “Jack Crawford’s on the phone. I told him you’d call him back, but he said it’s urgent,” she said, examining a fingernail. “Better hurry.”

Sure. Because eleven-year-old boys aren't autonomously separate from their mothers, in much the same way that wives shouldn't be autonomously separate from their husbands. And lest you think I'm exaggerating, the serial killer will pick this moment to turn out to be Not Dead After All and leap out from the bushes and stab Graham in the face. Graham lives, but he is badly scarred for life and it's very heavily implied that Molly leaves him either because she's a shallow bitch who thinks he's ugly now or because she's a shallow bitch who can't handle being targeted by serial killers once a week. But either way, it's very important that we all recognize that Molly is a shallow bitch.

*deep breath*

This book is long. The mass market paperback is 480 pages. The audiobook is 12 hours long. This is possibly the first book I've ever listened to where I longed for an abridged version -- usually I abhor abridged versions because they leave out important information. Here it seemed like there was an unusual surplus of stuff that not only wasn't necessary but actively undermined the entire conceit of the book. Will Graham is nothing but Pure Empathy, yet he treats everyone around him like pure shit: he either ignores their feelings or aggresses against them.

And in 480 pages, despite hearing from multiple different points of view, we never once hear from Molly.

In Chapter 15, when Graham teaches Molly how to shoot in case the Red Dragon comes after her, the point of view character is a nameless "rangemaster" who watches Molly and Graham from afar, a man who is more interested in the guns they are using than he is in the woman who is terrified for herself and her baby. And when the rangemaster does tear his eyes away from the gun porn, he -- like Graham and like Harris and like (Harris hopes) the reader -- focuses on the only important person in the room: Graham.

The man was very gentle with her and encouraging, but he seemed sad about something.
[...] The rangemaster thought he should be pleased with her, and told him so. She had come a long way in one day. Graham thanked him absently. His expression puzzled the rangemaster. He looked like a man who had witnessed an irrevocable loss.

FEEL HIS MANPAIN. But don't feel Molly's pain because Molly isn't a person. She's a woman. She's a possession. She's a bitch who doesn't do what Graham wants her to do and who leaves him when he's most injured. She may have consistently empathized up to Graham, but she refused to accept that he could never be expected to empathize down to her level, and she refused to give him the adoration that was his due.

Other women admire Graham; topless-bar-owner Wendy ("Wendy of Wendy City", Graham repeatedly calls her, because he doesn't care to learn her last name) reassures him that it's not his fault when the trap designed to bait the Red Dragon ends with her boyfriend being killed rather than Graham. During the funeral, she mournfully tells Graham to come see her for a drink sometime; Graham watches her leave and then longs abstractedly for sex because "funerals often make us want sex— it’s one in the eye for death." Empathic Graham doesn't consider that maybe not everyone wants sex at a funeral, that maybe there are other points of view than his, because those points of view don't matter. They're not worth empathizing with.

Men admire Graham most of all. There's a huge and totally-unnecessary conversation about how incredibly special Graham is and how incredibly worthy of study his amazing mind is. (Emapthy! It's so RARE! Only ONE WHITE MAN has mastered it in the history of humankind!) When Crawford and Bloom segue to talking about the trap and how it would be So Very Wrong to use Graham without his consent (though it's alright to use Molly without her consent), Bloom explains what a burden it is to be Graham:

   “It’s fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.”
   “Because he got hurt?”
   “No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

That last sentence has been highlighted 83 times by kindle users. In contrast, the sentence where Bloom says Graham has Pure Empathy (which might reasonably be highlighted as a valuable point re: protagonist characterization) has only been highlighted 32 times. I can only hope that the other users, like myself, highlighted this last sentence in order to blog about what shit writing it is. It is shit writing because it directs the focus, always and completely, to super-special Will Graham. Does Molly feel fear, in the days when she is told nothing and her imagination is left to run wild? No one cares, really. It's Graham who is the star of the story.

And the thought occurs, somewhere in the middle of the book, that not only is Graham an obvious fantasy insert persona for the white male reader -- constantly being talked up by his colleagues as well as by newspapers across the nation as amazingly talented -- he's a very peculiar sort of power fantasy. He "compulsively empathizes", but not with the sorts of people that the reader doesn't care about: marginalized women and children and elderly people and people of color. No, he compulsively empathizes with powerful and interesting men: his empathy library is almost entirely limited to Jack Crawford, Hannibal Lector, and Francis Dolarhyde.

Will Graham empathizes with monsters while ignoring their victims. And he does it compulsively, without choice or consent, so that there's no shame attached in his empathy, no suggestion that perhaps his focus might be better directed elsewhere. Yet isn't that what society does already, writ large and without the compulsion?

Most of us know who Hannibal Lector is. Yet I was only barely able to find another last name for Molly: Foster. Is it her maiden name or her name from her previous marriage? (I note that Willy has the same last names as she, Foster Graham, meaning that he has taken Will Graham's last name. That's relativity rare nowadays, changing a step-son's name to the step-father's surname. Did he do that because he loved Will? Or did Will insist upon it? We don't know.) The Red Dragon's victims are almost invariably referenced by surname in the book; there's only a handful of mentions I could find of Mrs. Leeds being Valerie, as Graham usually refers to her as Mrs. Leeds. If the first victim, Mrs. Jacobi, has a first name, I can't recall it. (She's not even credited on IMDB, though her husband and children are.)

Names indicate importance and focus, and these things direct empathy.

We empathize with Hannibal Lector: as far as I can tell from reading up on the series, the next two books (Hannibal and Hannibal Rising) both feature Hannibal as an anti-hero protagonist, someone we're supposed to empathize with and possibly even root for. And we empathize with Francis Dolarhyde: there's SO VERY MANY LONG CHAPTERS in this book about his genuinely terrible childhood and the abuse he suffered.

Yet this approach is not unusual or surprising or particularly creative; we empathize with killers in fiction all the time. Look at Edward Cullen. Look at Spike in Angel. Look at Ender Wiggins. Look at Dexter. Look at Sweeney Todd. None of this is new, although in fairness much of it is newer than this particular book. Still, I'm sure we could easily come up with older examples of celebrated anti-heroes if we plumbed the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek mythology, the Bible. And yet Will Graham is considered amazing, radical, and revolutionary for being able to empathize with killers, and there's a strong undercurrent throughout the novel that no one else ever does this:

“Mrs. Leeds was a good-looking woman,” Graham said. “You’ve seen the family pictures, right? I’d want to touch her skin in an intimate situation, wouldn’t you?”
“Intimate?” Distaste sounded in Crawford’s voice before he could stop it.

Graham is the only person on earth who can think like a serial killer, who can empathize with one to the point where he can twist rape into romance. (But he empathizes compulsively and tries to stop, so it's not his fault!) Everyone else on earth is horrified and disgusted by such an idea, because everyone else on earth recognizes that Rape Is Terrible, to the point where they can't even imagine how to think otherwise, even if it would save lives. No exceptions. In fact, Graham's ability to view rape as romance is so unique that his brain should be studied. He should be published in psychology journals. It's that rare, the ability to mentally objectify women into sex objects against their consent.

Yes, really.

The funny thing is? Reading the reviews of the Red Dragon movie (which I actually liked just fine because Ed Norton fixed ALL THE THINGS), I'm struck by how many people complain about the ending being different -- the book is darker, ending with Graham disfigured and alone and broken; the movie is brighter, ending with Graham recovering from his wounds with Molly and Willy by his side. Yet it seems obvious to me, and I expect it was obvious to everyone involved in the production of the movie, that Norton's Graham can't end that way.

Whether Harris knew it or not, Molly left Graham because Graham refused to see things from her point of view -- that impression can't help but bubble up from between the pages. The Molly that stuck with him this far doesn't feel like she would then go no further because of what happened at the eleventh hour, not if Graham were as willing to work with her as she demonstrably has been willing to work with him throughout. Book-Graham isn't willing to work with her, so when she leaves him it seems to us (because we think of women as people and not possessions) entirely reasonable for her to leave because of that. Cause and effect.

But Norton's Graham really is empathic and really does see Molly as a person. He empathizes as strongly with her and Willy as he does with Crawford and Dolarhyde, maybe even more so because it doesn't hurt to be in their heads. He likes empathizing with them. And that fundamental change in Graham's character -- playing him as he should be played, based on his core characterization, rather than treating that core characterization as nothing more than a guilt-free card to sympathize with serial killers because it can be fun and interesting to do so -- creates an equally fundamental change in his relationship with Molly: she doesn't leave him because he doesn't drive her away.

I don't see that as a cheery ending for a cheery ending's sake; I see it as fixing a fundamental flaw in this rottenly misogynistic turd of a book.

Fat Acceptance: Drawing Anime

2013-06-15T09:15:00.001-05:00

[Content Note: Fat Hatred]

I've been having fun lately with a stylus and the Sketch 'Em app on the Google Market, which is supposed to be a drawing tutorial for the "artistically aspiring". It's really just a tracing program, but with the pieces of the sketch appearing little by little as you fill in the lines. But I've been disappointed with the content, which is entirely divided between Dinosaurs (yawn) and Anime, specifically the kind of anime that I would prefer not to draw because it replicates harmfully unrealistic views of human bodies.

So I've been trying to replicate the anime drawings but with redraws that seem a little more appropriate. And it's soooooooo much harder than tracing the lines, but feels a lot more satisfying when I'm done. So there's that. Below is an anime warrior; I shortened her hair, widened her arms to be more muscular, reduced her breast size, and shortened (and thickened) her extended leg.

Feminism: The Cycle of Fauxgress

2013-06-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Misogyny, WWII Appropriation, Racism]
[Note: This post was previously published at Shakesville.]

See Tony Jones blog. He is a professional Christian author, blogger, and social media consultant.

See Tony Jones ask why there aren't more women in his blog comments and social media communities.

See Tony Jones tell a woman (who says that his usual methods of interaction with others online set off her abuse triggers as his behavior reminds her uncomfortably of abusive Christian men from her past) that her suggestions effectively compare him to Hitler and that there is no possible lower insult in society for a man than to be told that his behavior touches off a woman's abuse triggers:

Karla, remember that the next time someone tells you that you remind them of an abuser. For a man in today's society, that is akin to being compared to Hitler. There is no lower blow.

(I'm sure that this will be revisited again the next time someone tells Tony Jones that he has unexamined white privilege. The best thing about the No Lower Blow tactic is that no one ever holds you to the last time you said it!)

See Tony Jones invite Christian feminists to guest post on his blog, while explicitly warning them that the comment sections to their posts will not be moderated. See Tony Jones scoff at the suggestion that this could be seen as a means of using womens' work to drive pageviews over progress, and that this may be a less-than-stellar deal for any women who choose to accept.

Here is a pattern:

1. Ostensibly Progressive Blogger (often, but not limited to, white and male) notices (or has it brought to his attention) that his community is looking a little more homogenous than might be expected, were he actually fostering the community of inclusion and intersectionality that he likes to believe he embraces. Blogger publicly asks how he can Do Better and make his blog more welcoming for women, people of color, trans people, etc.

2. People in the targeted demographic who already follow (or are notified by other people who follow) the blogger tentatively point out why they are feeling unwelcome in the blogger's space. Frequently this comes down to the blogger's failure to check his privileges when writing, his failure to proactively include intersectional viewpoints in both his own writing and in guest/co-blogger posts, and/or the unsafe space of the unmoderated or poorly-moderated commenting section.

3. Ostensibly Progressive Blogger blows off the suggestions from the people in the targeted demographic. This can be done in a variety of ways: the blogger can state that the suggestions are invalid and/or would not work; the blogger can state that the suggestions are already applicable to everyone and should be more broadly applied to society at large (thereby deflecting discussion on the specific failings in his writing and in his community space); the blogger can insist that the suggestions are personal attacks.

4. Ostensibly Progressive Blogger will also attempt to silence his critics via various methods: asking or encouraging or simply silently condoning followers who pile criticism on the people responding to the solicitation with suggestions; allowing or encouraging the conversation to move away from genuine suggestions to blanket praise of the blogger; refusing to address personal attacks on the people offering suggestions or acknowledge that these attacks are part of the problem; choosing not to moderate the threads as a safe space and leaving up hateful and triggering material directed at the people giving the suggestions and/or against the whole targeted demographic.

5. Ostensibly Progressive Blogger ultimately changes not a damn thing. The blog stats receive the anticipated drama-spike, the ad money rolls, the blogger basks in the praise of the followers who were already comfortable in their space, and the people who were already in the "feeling kind of unsafe here" target audience can quietly slink away, more deeply hurt than before their suggestions and experiences were solicited, because now they've been told their suggestions for inclusion were actively harmful to others.

This is not something that happens in a vacuum.

Nor is it limited to a specific subset of religious bloggers.

Nor is it necessarily limited to male bloggers.

Part of being an actual progressive means actually listening to marginalized people. Checking one's privilege doesn't begin and end at an abstract recognition that you have it, and then doing whatever the hell you felt like in the first place but this time with a satisfied sense of Allyship Achieved! for merely saying that privilege is something you have.

Really allyship, the kind that takes place daily, means continual reflection and self-examination. It means understanding why your priorities are what they are, and changing them to whatever they should be. It means listening to marginalized people when they have been hurt, and not asking them to feel bad for making you aware of your privilege. It means being able to take criticism on board without filtering their feelings through a validity prism, and without insisting loudly and longly that no really, I'm not like that.

And being an ally means that a solicitation for suggestions on how to improve shouldn't be a trap designed to harm the marginalized communities you claim to wish to reach.

Metapost: Irregularly Scheduled Poll

2013-06-14T14:34:00.000-05:00

I'm experiencing some bandwidth issues on my end which boil down to possibly making some changes, especially based on what we've seen on the blog recently. But before I start unilaterally making changes, I'd like to poll everyone here first because I generally want to maximize community happiness.

Proposed Comment Policy Change #1: Disqus Replies
A lot of people are genuinely having trouble remembering to not nest comments. Honestly, I blame Disqus for suckery. But we have to figure out how to go from here. Our current rule is adding overhead for all the moderators (who have to monitor new replies and ask them to be reposted as non-replies) and for the readers (who have to remember not to reply) and it's not buying me much because (a) the rule isn't easy to remember and (b) I can't read the old threads anyway because the Disqus switchover has nested everything into unreadability.

More and more, I've just been following conversations by email and the comment widget and bypassing my own visual processing disorder that way. Given that we're seeing low returns and high frustration with the reply rule, should we revoke enforcement of the reply rule (i.e., asking people to delete and repost) and just try to be individually mindful of visual processing disabilities moving forward?

Proposed Comment Policy Change #2: On Topic-ness
When we instituted the seriously-please-stay-on-topic-people rule, we were facing a situation where the second or third comment on, say, a Twilight thread would spin into a completely off-topic discussion of, say, Star Trek. This was frustrating for the author (usually me) because it felt like the activism was being sidelined in favor of the community needs, yet we recognized that community needs were still important. We solved this, I think, extremely well by creating the regular open threads and asking that blatantly off-topic conversations be moved there. Everyone has been extremely good about this, and I thank you all.

Now that we have that paradigm in place, I think we would be fine to relax the off-topic rule a bit -- things which relate to the topic of, say, abuse can go into a Twilight thread without (I think) having someone pick up and run a full nine yards on how Gredo shot first, dammit, for example. Do others here agree that we've reached a good rhythm with the open threads and that we can loosen the off-topic restrictions a bit now that we understand what is "loosely related" (and therefore fine) versus "totally off-topic" (and therefore more appropriately located in the open thread)?

Proposed Content Additions
I've been trailing off on "fluff posts" lately because of some intersectional issues regarding activism and trolls (tl;dr: it's easier to be hurt by emails complaining about liking, for example, a Kindle as opposed to emails complaining about my Twilight activism, because liking exposes a vulnerability in a way that criticism does not), yet I would like to find a way to make "fluff posts" work in this space. I thought long and hard about a spin-off site with lighter themes and a "safe space lite" policy might work, but I'm not sure that I want to split my efforts that way -- and I'm not sure that the readership would be willing to split across two sites.

I'm considering, instead, adding a Community tag to future fluff posts and revamping the review tagging system to be a little more simplistic. The community tag would indicate that fluff posts are "safe space lite" and aren't really activism related so much as community related. I would probably also back-fill an Activism tag to the deconstructions, in order to split the two. Thoughts, about this concept as well as about content?

In addition to this, I may attempt to add content-generated advertising to individual community posts in an attempt to make ends meet financially due to ongoing job concerns. In which case, the ads would be contained under a cut and would be warned for in-post. Thoughts?

Proposed Change of Pace
Several of you have commented to me about Twilight-fatigue: you enjoy the deconstructions, but you're running out of things to say. The blog stats indicate that we're still getting tons of eyeballs on the Twilight threads, but the feedback I'm receiving is that I'm either not going fast enough and/or the weekly pace is too much and needs to be spaced out more. I'm not sure which would be best, and I'm hesitant to change without understanding the larger community feelings. Thoughts?

Fat Acceptance: Regency Romance

2013-06-14T12:40:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Fat Hatred, Disordered Eating]
[Cross-posted from a comment on Shakesville.]

The other day on Twitter, I asked for a Regency romance with a fat model on the cover -- not just a fat character, but a corresponding fat cover model. Not one person could find me one, even though we really did look.

And the thought occurred that this is a major reason why I never got into romance novels, because I felt like the covers were a hurdle to clear, in the same way that you have to meet physical requirements at the fair to ride the rides. "You must be this thin to experience True Love."

I will note that there is Big Beautiful Women erotica, and that is a good thing, but romance novels are harder to find, and "historical" romance novels are even harder. And it frustrates me that every cover and every internal illustration of, for example, every Jane Austen re-published book has the women all stick-thin forever *unless* the character is comedic and borderline unlikable like Charlotte Palmer*.

These are public domain books! There are versions that have ZOMBIES in them. But ones with fat cover models and fat illustrations, with no need to change but maybe a couple of lines of text, tops? NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.

Fucking frustrating, is what it is.

Is there a Regency romance novel where consent is treated as paramount and the lady model on the front is appreciably fat? #wondering
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013

(TW) I imagine I could get into romance movies/books more if the cover models didn't trigger my memories of E.D. like whoa.
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013

"You must be this slender to ride the True Love ride." ~ every Romance novel cover ever, apparently.
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013

You must also be white, cis, and straight if you want to have a fighting chance in a Regency setting. Because historical accuracy!
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013

(Even though historical accuracy will be treated to every sex technique known to mankind, and only result in babies when the plot demands.)
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013

As if everything ELSE in most "historical" novels were deeply and thoroughly accurate. #ConvenientPrejudice @colorlessblue
— Ana Mardoll (@anamardoll) May 25, 2013

* Tru Fax: Husband and I are totally Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. I showed him the 1995 version with Hugh Laurie as Mr. Palmer and he completely agreed.

Twilight: Abuse and Attention

2013-06-13T06:30:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Abusive Relationships]

Twilight Summary: In Chapter 14, Edward and Bella spend the night together.

Twilight, Chapter 14: Mind Over Matter

Last week, Chris beautifully highlighted some of the ways in which Twilight is a novel about an abusive person. (If you haven't commented because you can't think of anything to add, do at least take a moment to compliment Chris on his fine work!) This week, I would like to talk about some of the ways in which Twilight is about an abusive relationship, and the reason why this is bad (which may not be the reason you expect!).

The thing is, if you're here reading this deconstruction, I probably don't have to sell you on the idea that Twilight is about an abusive relationship. In fact, one of the more frustrating things about deconstructing Twilight (for me, at least) is that a lot of people who don't care about abusive relationships in any other media suddenly care very strongly when we're talking about abusive relationships in a novel written by a woman, for women. I have previously illustrated these so-called allies with the following Venn diagram:

And here is the thing: Twilight has problems with misogyny and with abusive relationships. I don't want to sugar-coat that. But if you, dear reader, are going around saying that Twilight is proof that girls are all stupid-heads who want a brooding vampire to stalk and abuse them, then you are being misogynistic.

In all my years of life, I have never heard anyone seriously speculate that the popularity of femme fatales in fiction means that all men secretly yearn for an abusive relationship; yet in the time since Twilight was released, I have heard the meme that all girls wish to be abused more times than I can count. This is a failure of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality, and it is a "failure" that conveniently props up existing misogynistic narratives about how women who stay with abusers stay because they secretly want to be abused rather than because they are groomed (by both their abuser and the larger society) to stay with their abuser, and because society does not empower them to leave. This is a comforting lie we tell ourselves because it's easier to blame abuse victims than acknowledge that we are failing them.

For example: When I lived with my abusive husband, he once slapped me hard enough that I fell down to the floor while two married couples who were our friends watched without saying a word. I picked myself up and went to the bedroom and cried my eyes out, loudly, while my husband and our four friends sat down to eat a dinner I had cooked. None of our friends ever asked me, either that night or later, if I were alright. None of them (to my knowledge) expressed concern to my husband or anyone else about his behavior. All of them broke off their friendship with me after I divorced my husband; not one of them offered to help me in any way through the divorce. These were not bad people; I would even describe them as good people, very normal people. But they had been trained by society to perpetuate a cycle of victim-blaming which told them, simultaneously, that if I stayed with an abusive partner then I wanted to be abused, and that if I left an abusive partner then I wasn't trying hard enough to fix my marriage. Heads he wins, tails I lose.

Bella Swan is in an abusive relationship. The problem with that abusive relationship portrayed in these hugely popular books isn't that the female readership all secretly want to be in an abusive relationship; the problem is that the popularity of these books demonstrates something very broken about the ways in which we treat women in our society, and that the abusive relationships within these books illustrates just how deeply our culture normalizes symptoms of abuse not only as a sign of love, but also as frequently the most acceptable attention than women can command from men.

   He reached the door ahead of me and opened it for me. I paused halfway through the frame.
   “The door was unlocked?”
   “No, I used the key from under the eave.”
   I stepped inside, flicked on the porch light, and turned to look at him with my eyebrows raised. I was sure I’d never used that key in front of him.
   “I was curious about you.”
   “You spied on me?” But somehow I couldn’t infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered.

We've talked before (and, in fact, there's a good conversation going on right now in Chris' thread from last week) about how the first-person narrative surrounding the dialogue in Twilight constantly seeks to override our own internal framing for the scene in order to explain and justify Edward's abusive behavior. Here is another good example of that: if we extracted that final sentence and just left the dialogue as-is without it, we wouldn't know how Bella feels about this situation and we might reasonably supply our own interpretation of her feelings based on our own personalities and experiences.

For me, this situation and these words would be accompanied firstly by fear, then supplemented by anger, and never followed by flattery. But the narrative is swift to contradict this in an attempt to keep us from considering the situation too closely; it briefly invokes anger in order to distract us from the fact that it struck out entirely any mention of fear, and then immediately segues into how flattering and attractive this behavior is. Edward spying on Bella is meant to be taken by the reader as romantic, and so the narrative makes Bella take it that way in an attempt to coax the reader to follow suit.

Before we're allowed to really grapple with this, Bella and Edward plunge ahead:

   He was unrepentant. “What else is there to do at night?” [...]
   “How often?” I asked casually.
   “Hmmm?” He sounded as if I had pulled him from some other train of thought.
   I still didn’t turn around. “How often did you come here?”
   “I come here almost every night.”

In real life, of course, this would be the terrifying behavior of a stalker who enjoys disrespecting boundaries. Yet Twilight wants us to take this behavior as romantic. Why? The popular explanation -- an explanation which I would argue is highly problematic -- is that S. Meyer just doesn't understand how dangerous and terrifying this is, and that she is damaged in some way such that she craves this kind of negative attention.

One of the many problems with this explanation, though, is that centering all this on a failure of S. Meyer means invisibling all the many hands who worked on this book during publication, as well as forgetting the fact that these books would not be so ridiculously popular if they didn't resonate with the readership in some way. When reminded of these facts, the people who believe that S. Meyer inexplicably wants and romanticizes abuse tend to fall back on two equally problematic explanations: either the fans weren't able to see the abuse between the pages, or they all secretly wish to be abused as well.

Yet I think this passage contains a clue as to why so many readers (including, perhaps, the author herself) interprets Edward Cullen's behavior not as abusive but as attentive.

Edward justifies his stalking behavior by asking Bella what else there is to do at night. On the face of it, this is a remarkably callous remark: he's justifying a major invasion of her privacy by instantly centering the situation on himself and on his needs. Being bored isn't just a completely inadequate reason to spy on someone; it's also as assertion that Bella's needs and boundaries aren't even worthy of consideration. This is a mentality that lies at the root of much abuse, a mentality that the abuser is the only real person in the room and all others are objects for hir use.

Yet Bella takes this assertion that he was bored and found her interesting to be a compliment: this magical creature with all the time and money in the world found her the most interesting thing on the planet. Out of an infinite universe of choices, Edward ranked "watching Bella sleep" to be more interesting than jetting to exotic locales, learning exciting new skills, seducing beautiful women, conversing with the greatest minds on the planet, climbing Mount Everest, or anything else he could do in his copious free time with his obscene wealth.

The reader doesn't have to view this as the compliment that Bella does, of course. If the reader doesn't find this plausible because the reader doesn't find Bella likable, then Edward's insistence that she is the most interesting thing in the world will ring false. Or if the reader is sufficiently educated as to the ways in which abuse can manifest as interest and/or love, then Edward's insistence that he follows Bella because she is interesting to him may not assuage their discomfort with this passage because they recognize that interest is not incompatible with abuse. (In fact, despite social narratives to the contrary which falsely claim that most abusers would rather their victims weren't there, abuse is almost always accompanied by intense interest, which is why it is so frequently difficult and dangerous for a victim to leave hir abuser.)

Then too, there is the curious verbiage: Bella asks how often did Edward come in the past tense, and Edwards replies in the present tense that he comes every night. This framing suggests that Edward intends to keep coming, presumably regardless of Bella's wishes (since he hasn't cared about her consent up till this point). Again, this can be viewed as abusive: Edward is flatly stating that he is going to continue spying on Bella whether she wants him to or not. Or it can be viewed as intensely attentive since Edward still finds Bella irresistibly interesting even after the initial mystery has past and they are now an established couple. Edward wasn't drawn to Bella over a misogynistic view of romance, where his interest is piqued not by the person but by the process -- the "chase" or "bagging another one" for his "record". Instead, he continues to attend to her (rather than ignoring her) even after obtaining her confession of love.

More of this continues as it comes out that Edward doesn't just watch, he listens:

   I whirled, stunned. “Why?”
   “You’re interesting when you sleep.” He spoke matter-of-factly. “You talk.”
   “No!” I gasped, heat flooding my face all the way to my hairline. I gripped the kitchen counter for support. I knew I talked in my sleep, of course; my mother teased me about it. I hadn’t thought it was something I needed to worry about here, though.
   His expression shifted instantly to chagrin. “Are you very angry with me?”
   “That depends!” I felt and sounded like I’d had the breath knocked out of me.
   He waited.
   “On?” he urged.
   “What you heard!” I wailed.
   Instantly, silently, he was at my side, taking my hands carefully in his.
   “Don’t be upset!” he pleaded. He dropped his face to the level of my eyes, holding my gaze. I was embarrassed. I tried to look away.
   “You miss your mother,” he whispered. “You worry about her. And when it rains, the sound makes you restless. You used to talk about home a lot, but it’s less often now. Once you said, ‘It’s too green.’” He laughed softly, hoping, I could see, not to offend me further.
   “Anything else?” I demanded.
   He knew what I was getting at. “You did say my name,” he admitted.
   I sighed in defeat. “A lot?”
   “How much do you mean by ‘a lot,’ exactly?”
   “Oh no!” I hung my head.
   He pulled me against his chest, softly, naturally.
   “Don’t be self-conscious,” he whispered in my ear. “If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I’m not ashamed of it.”

This is important because it establishes that Edward's interest is, once again, with Bella's thoughts and her mind. He's not staring at her nightly because he enjoys the view of her body, or at least not just because of that. He's not propelled by pornographic fantasies which might erase Bella as a person and render her into nothing more than an empty body. Instead, he's spying on her in order to get into her head, in order to understand her, and in order to know her better. He's interested in what she says in her sleep for the same reason that he longs to read Bella's mind: because he cares about her and wants to know her as intimately as possible.

This is deeply and intensely problematic, but it's important to parse through the problems in the right ways.

Edward Cullen is a fantasy. The reader is never once invited to consider him to be really real: in addition to being an immortal vampire with eyes that change color like mood rings hardwired to his stomach, the text continually reiterates his unearthly appearance: Greek god. Marble statue. Sparkling splendor. Perfect face. Even his breath smells like the best perfume sprayed on the finest roses and dipped in the richest chocolate and then set on fire with the most awesome matches ever created. There is never, ever any concern in the text that a real-life Edward Cullen might break into your bedroom some night and watch you while you sleep because Edward Cullen is repeatedly and constantly emphasized to be an unreal fantasy.

As we generally reckon fantasies (and with various special case caveats set to the side), a fantasy cannot harm us. The fantasy I project in my head cannot hurt or kill me; I control the fantasy completely. Even if the fantasy could somehow gain autonomy, it would have no motivation to kill me, because the fantasy would die along with me -- without me, my fantasy cannot exist. And we instinctively understand that fantasies cannot harm us, nor are they about being genuinely harmed by them: when we fantastize about being Han Solo, we are not fantasizing about the pain of being frozen in carbonite; instead, we are fantastizing about vulnerability or about rescue or about failure (to be followed, of course, by ultimate success), or about any number of fantasies, many of them escapist and/or empowering.

Similarly, when many women fantasize about Edward Cullen, I don't think the majority of them are fantastizing about an abusive relationship and how wonderful that would be -- nor do I think the majority of them are ignorant as to the realities of abusive relationships. (Indeed, considering the large Twilight fan base alongside NOW's estimate that women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year, it would be extremely problematic to assume that all or most Twilight fans are unfamiliar with partner abuse.) Instead, I think that those fans which find Edward Cullen's behavior attractive as opposed to abusive are adept at parsing out the difference between fantasy and reality. In fantasy, Edward can act out over-the-top displays of intense obsession without a threat of danger to the reader because he is so thoroughly unreal.

Yet for all this, I said at the opening of the post that the abusive relationship in Twilight is problematic. And here is why.

A major problem with the abusive relationships in Twilight is the ways in which unhealthy disinterest (Charlie, Mike, etc.) is countered with unhealthy interest (Edward, Jacob, etc.) as opposed to trading the whole kit-and-kaboodle for genuinely healthy interest. I think that the popularity of these books indicates how deeply women in our society feel their marginalization as uninteresting/non-valuable members of society and how deeply we are socialized to not pay attention to women as people as opposed to bodies or concepts*. And I think that the choice to provide unhealthy interest is less of symptom of something wrong with S. Meyer (and the editors and publishers), and more an indication of how thoroughly our culture correlates abuse as the most acceptable form of intensely attentive love.

* Think about TV Tropes like Blonde, Brunette, Redhead and The [Lone] Chick and how they identify women in fiction entirely by bodily features or by concepts as opposed to people. Note how rarely these tropes are applied to male characters.

Bella Swan lives a life of silent marginalization, convinced that she is uninteresting to those around her. She made a completely uncharacteristic decision to leave the mother and home she loves to move in with a father she barely knows in a town she hates and not one person -- except Edward! -- seriously questioned why she would do that, or if she's okay, or how she's holding up through this emotional upheaval. (Even many critics don't understand why she 'keeps whining' about moving to Washington.) When people warm to her as friends and lovers, their interest appears (to Bella) to be entire superficial and based on her "newness" as opposed to her value as a person; even her father alternates between avoiding her and awkwardly acting out a Good Dad script as opposed to simply talking to and listening to her. When her disability isn't being actively mocked or pitied, it's forgotten about: friends and family and would-be lovers all pressure her to attend a dance as part of a Good Girl script without care to the fact that the event would probably end in a broken ankle for her.

None of this ignoring of Bella as a person as opposed to a concept is terribly unusual, in my experience. And I believe that much of this is usual to the experience of many of the readers who appreciate this series. But then in walks Edward Cullen, who finds Bella irresistibly and intensely interesting. He wants to know her every thought, and he wants this so badly that he'll do anything, breach any boundary in order to understand her. Because he's a fantasy and because Bella is an insert for the fantasizer, he is literally powerless to hurt her -- he would be effectively harming his own maker -- and so his breach of boundaries comes off not as abusive (for he is powerless to abuse) but as attention. Loving attention, more attention than Bella has ever received before. And soon the rest of the supernatural world will follow suit: Jacob will spend much of New Moon showering Bella with attention; two entire armies will be raised (one to attack and one to defend) to focus on Bella in Eclipse; and two more armies will be raised for another assault on Mt. Bella in Breaking Dawn.

These armies aren't intended to be frightening to the reader any more than Edward is intended to be frightening to the reader, because the armies are there to affirm, not to harm. Most girls don't secretly wish to be attacked by an army any more than they secretly wish to be abused by a lover; but many girls do secretly wish someone would listen to them and pay attention without having some kind of ulterior motive -- or, if they must have an ulterior motivation (as with Edward's blood-lust), that this someone acknowledge that motivation openly and make a good faith effort to overcome it. And thus it is okay that Edward wants to ~~murder~~ ~~rape~~ fuck Bella, because he honestly acknowledges those desires between them and works to overcome those urges in order to treat Bella like a person instead of like an object to be used for his gratification.

That this series appeals so widely speaks to my own belief, based on my own experiences, that girls aren't empowered to openly desire these things -- attention, respect, humanization -- and that our culture works to insist that girls aren't worthy of them. And this is one of the ways in which Twilight is vaguely "feminist lite", as it affirms that women are worthy of these things and do deserve to be treated like people.

Yet the message falls flat, because the same socialization which says that women are not worthy of attention also says that the only kind of acceptable attention they might be allowed is abusive attention. So when the authors and editors and publicists of Twilight decided to undermine the idea that women don't deserve attention, they failed and reached for the most acceptable attention available -- which, not coincidentally, is harmful attention Because Patriarchy -- and ended up with an abusive relationship. So Edward pays attention to Bella, but in the most abusive ways possible: by spying on her without her consent; by lurking in her room while he wrestles with ~~rapey~~ murderous impulses; by hauling her backward across parking lots; by haranguing her about her thoughts to the point where she has no mental privacy and develops a siege mentality, actively censoring her own thoughts lest he read them on her face; and so forth.

The fantasy of abusive interest works (for some) when the abusive nature of Edward's interest doesn't ping the individual reader's triggers too closely, and when the narrative is able to assure the reader that Edward isn't real and is therefore powerless to cause genuine harm. With the abuse removed from the equation, the reader is left with the interest -- and that interest may still satisfy her in a world where the alternative is persistent, dehumanizing inattention.

But that doesn't therefore mean the reader wants to be abused. It means she wants the attention that she deserves, as a fellow human being. The failure isn't in the reader; the failure is in the book (which itself was shaped by patriarchal social values) for providing only unhealthy attention instead of genuinely healthy attention. And the failure is in our culture for normalizing both unhealthy inattention and unhealthy attention as the only options women are allowed to have; as well as always, always, making sure that women are blamed for whichever unhealthy interactions are heaped on them.

Twilight is about an abusive relationship. But instead of pointing fingers at women authors and women fans, we need to point the finger at our own abusive culture which treats women as objects to be ignored, abused, and blamed.

Narnia: Swearing Friendship with Invaders

2013-06-11T08:30:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Body Transformation, Racism]

Narnia Recap: In which Eustace is turned into a dragon.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 6: The Adventures of Eustace

When we last saw Caspian and Company, they were standing about on the beach fruitlessly shouting for Eustace before deciding that they might actually in fact have to search for the missing nine-year-old boy.

   Lucy was sleeping very soundly for she had sat up till the return of the search party in hope of good news about Eustace. It had been led by Caspian and had come back late and weary. Their news was disquieting. They had found no trace of Eustace but had seen a dead dragon in a valley. They tried to make the best of it and everyone assured everyone else that there were not likely to be more dragons about, and that one which was dead at about three o’clock that afternoon (which was when they had seen it) would hardly have been killing people a very few hours before.
   “Unless it ate the little brat and died of him: he’d poison anything,” said Rhince. But he said this under his breath and no one heard it.

Once again we see that it's perfectly acceptable in this atmosphere to hate Eustace, it's just considered very gauche to say so in front of The Queen, His Cousin (said with capital letters because Lucy isn't a person or a friend so much as she is a concept to these men). Unless this is supposed to be taken as gallows humor by Rhince who really does miss Eustace but doesn't dare say so lest he burst into uncontrollable tears thus slowing down the search efforts, but I rather doubt that on the grounds that no one has been shown to actually care one iota for Eustace so it seems unlikely to me that this is just putting a brave face on the situation.

Strangely, if I read the narrative and timing correctly, Caspian and Company saw the dead dragon while Eustace was sleeping inside the cave. I suppose I don't blame them for not wishing to scale a sheer cliff just to check the valley, its pool, and the nearby cave for the missing boy if they had no sure means for getting back up (Do they even have rope with them? They almost have to have rope with them if they're planning to cut down a tree for a new mast and haul it back to the ship and hoist it up, right?), but wouldn't it be entirely possible for Eustace to have fallen into the valley and hurt himself? Or to have sought shelter in the cave from the rain?

It sounds like the search party didn't actually search for Eustace or shout for him or anything; they just sort of glanced into the valley and called it a day when they didn't immediately see anything moving. Apparently Caspian is as competent at searches as he is at ruling kingdoms and planning ocean voyages.

   But later in the night Lucy was wakened, very softly, and found the whole company gathered close together and talking in whispers.
   “What is it?” said Lucy.
   “We must all show great constancy,” Caspian was saying. “A dragon has just flown over the tree-tops and lighted on the beach. Yes, I am afraid it is between us and the ship. And arrows are no use against dragons. And they’re not at all afraid of fire.”

"Constancy" is not quite the same thing as "steadiness" or "courage", but rather than bust Lewis on a Twain violation, I'd sooner point out (once again) that flowery speech is Bad when people of color use it and Good when white people use it. Just so we're all clear on the rules here.

What is also interesting about this passage is that Caspian is "afraid" (feeling fear or anxiety; anxious) that the dragon is between their selves and the ship: if I were forced to confront a hungry flying monster that breathes fire, I think I'd rather do it on land than on the sea contained in a very small and very fragile wooden boat. Caspian seems to see the ship as a possible-but-unreachable means of escape; does this mean that Caspian believes his storm-battered ship -- you know, the one missing a mast? -- could outrun a young dragon? And given that the dragon is immune to arrows and fire and fiery arrows, that means their only hopes are to reason with the dragon or to fight it with swords; in either case, I'd think that meeting him on the ground is the safer course of action.

   “Perhaps it will go away,” said Lucy.
   “It’ll be worse if it does,” said Edmund, “because then we shan’t know where it is. If there’s a wasp in the room I like to be able to see it.”

I still don't know if the experiences of the children from their time as adults in Narnia are supposed to stick with them. Lucy and Edmund seem to remember an awful lot about their reign in Narnia, as seen in the earlier conversation in which they talked about the Lone Islands and what was beyond them and how they came to be owned by Narnia. Yet for all that King Edmund was supposed to be renowned for his wisdom and justness and King Solomon-esque qualities, he's been persistently stupider than a stump in both Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, seeming always to serve as a secondary stringer to either High King Peter or King Caspian.

This dragon should not be here. It's already been established by the narrator that dragons rarely cohabitate together because they naturally prey on each other. It's already been established that Caspian and Company are aware of this fact and are aware of the existence of a dead dragon on the island, as well as its likely nest: they found a lovely valley, inaccessible except from the air, with a cave and a pool and a dead dragon. Furthermore, knowledge of dragons can't be exactly rare in these parts, considering how much they apparently get out and about in order to gather crowns. All of this is just as much known to the kings and crew as to the reader.

Here is where Edmund The ~~Not Monumentally Stupid~~ Wise has a chance to point out that because of the rarity of two unrelated dragons sharing overlapping hunting regions, it is therefore very likely that the dragon before them almost certainly has to be either the dead dragon's child, mate, or enemy. Therefore if the dragon leaves the beach, it is very likely to return to the dead dragon in the valley, either because it nests there or because it has recently taken it over and needs to take inventory and eat the previous owner. And if the dragon doesn't leave the beach, the first and foremost thing that needs to be established before they "give it battle" in the morning (which is Caspian's plan), is that Caspian and Company may have washed up on the beach yesterday morning and the dead dragon in the valley may have died a few hours thereafter, but that the two events were entirely unrelated and also the crew is terribly sorry for the dragon's loss. Because if the dragon is not Eustace and is not responsible for the dead dragon's death, then it's probably looking to find out who is.

Of course, absolutely none of this is explored because (a) the very idea of empathizing with another living being (rather than trying to eradicate it) is utterly foreign to everyone in this novel who isn't named Lucy or Eustace, and (b) Lewis didn't actually intend that "dragons are rare because they eat each other" factoid to be part of the world-building and hence used to propel the narrative; he just wanted to punish Eustace some more by forcing him to eat a dead dragon. Klassy!

   “With your Majesty’s leave—” began Reepicheep.
   “No, Reepicheep,” said the King very firmly, “you are not to attempt a single combat with it. And unless you promise to obey me in this matter I’ll have you tied up.

*that face*

I noted way back at the beginning of this book why we have so few Animals on the ship and why the Animals in the series are persistently silly and stupid rather than reasonable and respected:

The other oppressed Animals in LWW are no less uniformly silly and childish when they open their mouths to speak. The Stoned Lion is monumentally silly, more interested in toadying up to Aslan and bragging about his racial superiority than in the dangerous civil war at hand. The Animals at the Christmas banquet table may not be able to lie to the Witch -- since it is Not Okay To Lie To Satan -- but theirs is a "terrified", not a dignified, silence and they do not receive the benefit of a stately and moving speech of defiance to the Witch. Instead, their defiance takes the form of a young squirrel throwing a temper tantrum (“He has—he has—he has!” it squeaked, beating its little spoon on the table.).

Prince Caspian expands the Animal cast by introducing Trufflehunter the Badger (whose sole purpose in life is to reassure Caspian that being a Telmarine prince doesn't mean living with crushing guilt for the crimes of your people), Pattertwig the Squirrel (who is only barely less flighty and more dependable than the other, even more silly, squirrels), the Bulgy Bears (who suck their paws during important duels), and Reepicheep the Mouse (who is vain and self-obsessed). The rest of the nameless Animals are foolish and short-sighted and single-minded, as we see in the first War Council meeting where they are all bound and determined to derail the meeting from the get-go in their own particular idioms.

The Animals have to be overruled by the humanoids -- the Men and the Centaurs and the Dwarfs -- because the Animals are stupid and silly. It's as simple as that. And by the time we come around to Dawn Treader, the only remaining Animal in the novel-world will be Reepicheep, who will be as silly and vainglorious as ever.

Here we have the little mouse Reepicheep bound and determined to fight a dragon in single-combat, and it's up to King Caspian to restrain him with bodily force.

This didn't have to be written this way. If Lewis had just wanted the honor-before-reason of Don Quixote tilting at giant windmills, Reepicheep could have offered and Caspian could have turned him down and Reepicheep could have dutifully obeyed his sovereign and Caspian could have trusted him to do that because he could know that Reepicheep values his service to Caspian and takes his oath of allegiance and obedience seriously.

We didn't need this threat of physical restraint, as though Reepicheep is so mindless and silly that he must be physically forced not to throw his life away, and as though Reepicheep is so poorly in command of his own faculties that he can't be relied upon to keep his oath to the king. And yet it's here, despite how unnecessary and distasteful it is, to establish that Reepicheep is less than his companions. He may be honorable, but his is an honor that is false and foolish since he's willing to follow that Honor to his death rather than serve his king honorably as an obedient subject.

And he may be intelligent enough to wield a sword, but he's so mindless and impulsive that he can't really be treated like a human member of the crew -- instead, Caspian has to be ready and willing to muzzle and leash him like the animal that Reepicheep really is. Indeed, Caspian didn't even have to wait for Reepicheep to ask his request or state an intention; that's how predictable Reepicheep is, according to the narrative.

Possibly Lewis was trying to be cute and reference Odysseus lashed to the mast, but it doesn't work here. Odysseus lashed himself to the mast, willingly and with his consent; Reepicheep is having this threatened fate imposed on him by others with significantly more power over him. And Odysseus was tempted magically, by a song which no-one could resist; Reepicheep is not a victim of magical circumstance and no other member of the party is volunteering for a meaningless suicide mission. In pretty much every way that matters, this situation is not like that classic one -- if Lewis failed to notice that when crafting his allusion, then that failure is part of the problem here.

And this is not something that is unimportant because Lewis didn't try or didn't care or just felt like goofing off whenever he wrote about the Animals in his work. The Animals in Narnia are the only real glimpses we receive of marginalized people. They are the victims, the ones who suffer war and genocide and prejudice and injustice. The protagonists represent the privileged: they are the humans, who are literally born to rule, and these humans additionally form a powerful priest class, since Aslan will (mostly) only appear when they are present and in order to interact with them.

In light of that reality, making the Animals silly second-class citizens who cannot be trusted with power and cannot be allowed to have self-determination and who must be literally tied and gagged and leashed and muzzled for their own good is highly problematic. At best, the repeated reinforcement suggests to the children reading along that people Not Like Them are even more childish and less-than than they; at worst, the failure to flesh out the Animals from silly stereotypes to real characters fosters privileged and imperialistic attitudes.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was published in 1952. In 1945, Canada joined the United Nations as an independent member, separate from the United Kingdom. In 1947, India and Pakistan were officially recognized as independent countries by the United Kingdom; King George VI officially abandoned the title of Emperor of India in 1948. In 1949, Ireland declared itself a republic and officially completed the process of separation from the British Empire. In 1960, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech to the Parliament of South Africa, in which he signaled that the British government intended to grant independence to many of its territories; most of the British possessions in Africa became independent nations in the 1960s.

Whatever Lewis' intentions may have been, it cannot and should not be seen as harmless when literature which extols the existence and rulership by a privileged class, also paints a picture of their marginalized subjects as inherently -- by birth and by nature -- silly, stupid, suicidal, foolish, untrustworthy, and otherwise requiring that their wills and bodily autonomy be overridden for their own good because, if they were left to self-determination, they would ultimately destroy themselves. Nor do I think that this characterization should be viewed as entirely coincidental in the time period in which it was written; it is notable to me that King Caspian excoriated the idea of progress and development (“I have seen them both in an egg,” said Caspian. “We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia.) and renewed his birthright claim of Emperor of the Lone Islands at about the same time as King George was abandoning his own title as Emperor of India.

   But when it saw them, instead of rising up and blowing fire and smoke, the dragon retreated—you could almost say it waddled—back into the shallows of the bay.
   “Oh, can’t you see,” said Lucy. “It’s crying. Those are tears.”
   “I shouldn’t trust to that, Ma’am,” said Drinian. “That’s what crocodiles do, to put you off your guard.” [...]
   Reepicheep slipped off Lucy’s shoulder and stepped to the front.
   “Dragon,” came his shrill voice, “can you understand speech?”
   The dragon nodded.
   “Can you speak?”
   It shook its head.
   “Then,” said Reepicheep, “it is idle to ask you your business. But if you will swear friendship with us raise your left foreleg above your head.”

...and once again, we see that Caspian and Company are only focused on themselves, to the detriment of understanding all others. Yesterday they saw an old dragon, recently dead. Today they see a young dragon, weeping profusely and trying to communicate with them in a peaceable fashion. But instead of trying to understand things from the dragon's point of view -- Does it miss the dead dragon, who was perhaps a mate or a parent? Does it require help now that its parent dragon is dead? Does it fear that Caspian and Company killed the dragon and wishes to know why? Is it ill with some affliction that carried off the older dragon? Is it ill with some affliction that Caspian and crew brought with them?? -- they refuse to interact with it in the slightest until it first swears friendship with the strangers it doesn't know, and doesn't know didn't kill a dear member of its family.

OF COURSE.

We're not supposed to notice or think of this. We're not supposed to view Caspian and Company as invaders on this island, people who came without invitation, took what they saw, and left dead bodies in their wake. We're not supposed to consider that perhaps Caspian and Company are the cause of the dragon's death, that maybe they brought some illness with them, like the Europeans brought to the Americas. We're not supposed to see the dragon as living quietly in its own home, and we're not supposed to think the dragon might legitimately hate or fear the invaders. We're not supposed to consider that perhaps the dragon has heard of the Telmarines who wiped out all non-human life in Narnia and are here to do the same to it; we're not supposed to consider that this dragon might be a refugee from Telmarine-ruled Narnia. We are instead supposed to identify 100% with Caspian and crew, and IT is supposed to swear friendship to US.

In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen notes the power of perspective and the way point-of-view privileges one narrative over the other:

If we cast off our American-ness and imagine we come from, say, Botswana, this typical sentence (from The American Journey) appears quite jarring: “In 1637 war broke out in Connecticut between settlers and the Pequot people.” Surely the Pequots, having lived in villages in Connecticut probably for thousands of years, are “settlers.”The English were newcomers, having been there for at most three years; traders set up camp in Windsor in 1634. Replacing settlers by whites makes for a more accurate but “unsettling” sentence. Invaders is more accurate still, and still more unsettling.

And later in the same book:

Let us try a right-side-up view. “After King Philip’s War, there was continuous conflict at the edge of New England. In Vermont the settlers worried about savages scalping them.” This description is accurate, provided the reader understands that the settlers were Native American, the scalpers white. Even the best of our American history books fail to show the climate of white actions within which Native Americans on the border of white control had to live. It was so bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the Catawbas in North Carolina “fled in every direction” in 1786 when a solitary white man rode into their village unannounced. And the Catawbas were a friendly tribe! [emphasis mine]

The dragon is crying because the dragon is Eustace and Eustace misses being human. But it isn't supposed to occur to us that the dragon could be crying because it's young or sick or frightened or misses its family. And it's certainly not supposed to occur to us that Caspian and Company treat both Reepicheep and the dragon with the same othering disdain simply because they are not human. Caspian threatens to bodily restrain Reepicheep without even bothering to listen to what he has to say or reason with him in any way; Caspian threatens to murder the dragon without even bothering to find out the source of its motivations and its apparent sorrow. In both cases, the narrative asks us to accept that Reepicheep and non-formerly-human dragons are less thoughtful, less real, less-than the privileged people who rule them.

   It did so, but clumsily because that leg was sore and swollen with the golden bracelet.
   “Oh look,” said Lucy, “there’s something wrong with its leg. The poor thing—that’s probably what it was crying about. Perhaps it came to us to be cured like in Androcles and the lion.” [...]
   Everyone had now crowded round to watch the treatment, and Caspian suddenly exclaimed, “Look!” He was staring at the bracelet.

And that's where Chapter 6 ends.

Open Thread: Sleepy Times

2013-06-11T07:59:00.000-05:00

Hosted by a lovely hotel bed.

Hotel by Tim Emerich

How did you sleep last night? How do you usually sleep?

Metapost: Sleep

2013-06-11T07:55:00.002-05:00

Just posting this to note that this is now my fifth consecutive day with little or no sleep due to pain management issues. So I'm a little off-focus right now. There will be a belated open thread up in a few minutes and with my apologies for not having one yesterday. Thank you.

Deals: Flannery O'Connor Collection

2013-06-09T15:43:00.004-05:00

Today's Kindle Daily Deal is a Flannery O'Connor collection. Get it while it's hot, is my advice.

Feminism: I am Texan, and I am Angry

2013-06-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

[Content Note: Rape culture; gun violence; death; devaluing of sex workers.]
[Note: This piece was previously published at Shakesville.]

Via San Antonio news -- Jury acquits escort shooter:

A Bexar County jury on Wednesday acquitted Ezekiel Gilbert of murder in the death of a 23-year-old Craigslist escort. [...]

Had he been convicted, he could have faced up to life in prison for the slaying of Lenora Ivie Frago who died about seven months after she was shot in the neck and paralyzed on Christmas Eve 2009. Gilbert admitted shooting Frago.

“I sincerely regret the loss of the life of Ms. Frago,” Gilbert said Wednesday. “I've been in a mental prison the past four years of my life. I have nightmares. If I see guns on TV where people are getting killed, I change the channel.”

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days. The trial began May 17 but had a long hiatus after a juror unexpectedly had to leave town for a funeral.

During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert's defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn't to kill. Gilbert's actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.

Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago's escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee. But instead, Frago walked around his apartment and after about 20 minutes left, saying she had to give the money to her driver, he said.

That driver, the defense contended, was Frago's pimp and her partner in the theft scheme.

The Texas law that allows people to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft was put in place for “law-abiding” citizens, prosecutors Matt Lovell and Jessica Schulze countered. It's not intended for someone trying to force another person into an illegal act such as prostitution, they argued.

I don't know how to begin to express how horrified I am by this acquittal and the laws surrounding this case.

I am horrified that I live in a state where there is a law that allows people to use deadly force to recover stolen property, as if a television or a car or $150 is worth the cost of a human life. I am horrified that this law is being used (and of course it is being used) to justify homicides over what essentially amounts to business transaction disputes, as though someone taking money and then failing to provide an agreed-upon service is the same type of "theft" that was invoked in order to sell this law, which I can almost guarantee was instead marketed as a home invasion deterrent.

I am horrified that I live in a state where (apparently) the prostitution laws are written such that being a sex worker is illegal and profiting from sex work is illegal, but actually paying for sex work is either legal or of such dubious illegality that the prosecution in this case either couldn't or wouldn't or chose not to charge this murderer with soliciting prostitution even though his entire defense rested on the fact that he was paying his victim for sex and she was refusing to provide it. I am horrified to live in a state where sex workers -- who are routinely victimized by members of our society and by our laws -- are criminalized, but their clients are not, even when those clients commit crimes against them.

I am horrified that I live in a world where "he said, she said" is frequently invoked as a flippant defense for why rape cases should never be prosecuted because how can we ever really know, yano? but a man can be acquitted for murdering a woman simply by claiming that she wasn't providing the service he paid for in a timely fashion. I am horrified that apparently no one on the jury felt that a man who admitted to shooting a defenseless woman in the neck might not be motivated to tell the whole truth of the matter, or that it might be entirely plausible that this man judged the situation incorrectly and that the woman really was going to pay her driver and come back up, or that there was a whole other side to the altercation that we can never know because the victim is dead.

I am horrified that the jury took only eleven hours to acquit. I am horrified because I recognize it is not incidental that the victim in this case was (or is claimed to be) a sex worker, that she appears to be a woman of color, that her murderer appears to be a white man. I am horrified because no one on this jury or in this case apparently cared that Ezekiel Gilbert shot Lenora Ivie Frago with a gun because she didn't have sex with him in the time and manner that he demanded. For all that this is being spun as a case about theft or property or stolen goods or burglary, this case boils down to a man shooting a woman because he wasn't getting the sex he felt he was owed at the moment and in the manner that he wanted it. And now that woman is dead.

And because she was a sex worker, and because she was marginalized and he is privileged, a jury has ruled that it's okay. No harm. No foul. It's not like anyone important was killed today, it's not like anyone important was hurt by her death, it's not like anyone important will be terrorized in the wake of this blatant ruling that men can murder women and after the fact with no living witnesses to contradict them claim that they were sex workers who weren't performing according to expectations and thus get off free and clear. No, the important thing is that Ezekiel Gilbert will be able to move on from this terrible tragedy and begin to heal and maybe be able to watch television again someday.

Today, I'm ashamed of my state and afraid for the women in it.

Film Corner: An Observation About Whitewashing

2013-06-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Every time Hollywood takes a role that is a character of color (like Tonto in the Lone Ranger) or is traditionally played by a person of color (like Khan in Star Trek) and awards that role to a white actor, defenders of whitewashing point out that the white actor is very talented, did/will do a great job with the role, and will insist that this isn't an act of systemic racism which denies rare roles to actors of color but is rather only about letting the Best Possible Actor play the part.

And that actor just so happens to be white this time. Coincidence!

Yet every time a role is gender-bent (like Joan Watson in Elementary) or race-bent (like Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) or just plain played-straight but in a way that a large portion of the fanbase didn't pick up on in the original literature (like Rue in Hunger Games) then THE WORLD IS ENDING because a white and/or male role went to a woman or a person of color and what about CANON and AUTHENTICITY and TRADITION. And, NO, it doesn't matter if the bending makes the canon character more interesting or if it injects some much-needed diversity into an otherwise white and/or male cast because obviously that's just politically correct drivel and it's ridiculously silly to suggest that audience members might like to see more people on-screen than white men, and NO, it doesn't matter how good the actor is because this isn't about letting the best possible actor play the part if that means bending the character's privileged race or gender, dammit.

Huh.

It's almost like the people who defend the whitewashing of roles really aren't all about letting the best actor act and are instead motivated by something else.

Related: Johnny Depp’s Tonto is Based on a White Man’s Painting of an Imaginary Native American
Related: 25 Minority Characters that Hollywood Whitewashed
Related: Hollywood Whitewashing (Yes, It Really Hurts)
Related: I Guess Whitewashing is Okay Again
Related: It Matters If You’re Black or White: The Racism of YA Book Covers

Random Poetry Saturday!

2013-06-08T13:00:00.000-05:00

Last one before we go back to a normal schedule! (Probably!)

...Everything in this poem is 100% true :P

My lumpy bumpy nose.

No one in my family has one like it.

It’s all mine.

It starts out normal, then flattens out about a quarter of the way down.

Then after that it bends down at an angle.

Twice.

It’s not too obvious from the front.

From the side it looks like a jagged rock.

Or a cliff face.

Or a bent tree.

My mother thinks maybe I ran into a tree, or a wall or a shelf, once when I was really little and smushed it.

Maybe when I was too young to remember.

Maybe they thought I was crying about something else.

My dad says it’s a witch nose and it makes me look like a witch.

He says I need a cat and a cauldron and a broom.

He says he’ll let me know if the local theatre ever does Macbeth.

(It’s ok. He only says it to make me laugh. And my laugh sounds like a witch’s cackle, so it all works out.)

My husband’s nose isn’t bumpy at all.

It’s straight and strong and handsome and it looks really good on his face.

Except that sometimes he can’t breathe too good through it.

And he snores really loud at night.

(I don’t snore.)

Sometimes I imagine that it was broken once and now the lumpiness is a battle scar.

Like maybe I used to be a street samurai in an all-girls biker gang.

Or a world-famous gladiator adored by the crowds.

Or a pirate brave and bold.

Or a mercenary, and maybe I was hired to protect a city from the vicious barbarians invaders.

Maybe they offered us a hundred thousand gold pieces to keep them safe, because they were so scared,

but we said “There’s women and children in that city! We’ll fight for half-price!”

And we drove off the barbarians, but during the final battle their chieftain bashed me in the face with his shield while I was protecting our captain.

And that’s how I got my nose.

My lumpy bumpy nose.

...I swear I DO usually write poetry that rhymes and has scansion, I just couldn't find any on my computer this week!

Once again! Share! If you write poetry, show some off - any kind, sonnets, haiku, dirty limericks (just mind the safe space!)... heck, clean limericks, if you know any! Or even if you just know a cool poem, post it or link to it (but please cite the poet!)

~ Kristycat

Open Thread: Nighttime

2013-06-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

Hosted by moonrise

Summons

Keep me from going to sleep too soon

Or if I go to sleep too soon

Come wake me up. Come any hour

Of night. Come whistling up the road.

Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.

Make me get out of bed and come

And let you in and light a light.

Tell me the northern lights are on

And make me look. Or tell me clouds

Are doing something to the moon

They never did before, and show me.

See that I see. Talk to me till

I'm half as wide awake as you

And start to dress wondering why

I ever went to bed at all.

Tell me the walking is superb.

Not only tell me but persuade me.

You know I'm not too hard persuaded.

- Robert Francis

Friday Recommendations! What have you been reading/writing/listening to/playing/watching lately? Shamelessly self-promote or boost the signal on something you think we should know about - the weekend’s coming up, give us something new to explore! (Note: don’t forget to post new comments rather than replying to other comments!)

~Kristycat

Random Creative Writing Thursday!

2013-06-06T13:00:00.000-05:00

Back in the day, I used to play in a Vampire: the Requiem LARP. Make whatever jokes you feel you need to; it was actually a ton of fun.

When the Shadows Over Mexico book came out, giving setting and background information, my friend (whose family, at least on his father's side, hails from Mexico) was ecstatic. Mexican vampires! Cool, nifty-flavored powers! New myths to incorporate into vampiric history! Ancient enmities translated into a supernatural setting!

So of course, we had to create characters to play with it. And those characters needed a backstory.

So we created one. An ancient family, one that knew of the existence of vampires but considered them "god-touched," who incorporated vampires seamlessly into the ancient Aztec rituals. One that adapted, as it had to, when the Spanish arrived, but which still clung to older ways in secret. (No joke. I memorized a poem in Nahuatl for this character.)

And we hit a snag. See, I wanted to play a Nosferatu - the "ugly", scary vampires. (Mostly because I had recently come into a treasure trove of stage makeup and wanted to play with it.) But according to the book, the Nosferatu - the "Xolotli" - were damned, according to Aztec vampiric myth, and had been virtually wiped out until the Spanish arrived. So how had our ancient family come to have any?

This is how.

(Cut for length. CN: racism, imperialism, violence, torture, denial of agency.)

How the Nosferatu Became Part of La Familia Ispano

The year was 1638. The warm evening breeze carried the scent of jungle flowers to Yaxotl as he peered through the vines at the large ship with the white sails.

Over the last 150 years, he had learned to fear, then to hate, the tall ships and the invaders they carried. Hate them for the temples they desecrated. Hate them for the wasted blood, spilled carelessly and disrespectfully, lives ended not to feed the gods nor their priests, but out of convenience. Hate them for what they did to Micuantli, for her defiant screams calling down the vengeance of Huitzilopoctli even as her beautiful skin crackled and burned in the moments before her ashes scattered to the winds. Hate them for the humiliation of his family, for the compromises they made to survive, the new names they took to appease their conquerors. For his great-great-granddaughters, who used what Micuantli had taught them to catch the cold pale eyes of the invaders, to take their names and bear their children. They chose their fate to secure safety for the family and the hope of future strength, but for the white savages in their beds, for the light skin of the children of the last two generations – for these reasons and more, Yaxotl watched these ships with hate. Until now.

Now, something new had been brought on the ships. He had seen it, every night for the last two weeks. Seen it stalk, seen it hunt, seen it kill. It was god-touched, like he was, that much he could tell even without going close enough to sense it, but not like any he had seen before. Hideously deformed, with a strength to match his own, and the ability, so it seemed, to not only inspire fear – as any can do, given the proper training – but to actually wield terror itself like a blade. He had never seen such a thing… but he could give a name to it. Xolotli.

And so the hate fell back to fear, and the fear, in turn, fell back to curiosity, the same curiosity that had gripped him when he was but newly god-touched and the ships had first appeared, mistaken in his youth and ignorance for messengers from the gods themselves, so tall they were and so white their sails. And over the last two weeks, the curiosity gave way to desire.

He left the shore, retreating further into the jungle, and went to find his brothers.

* * * * *

Tlamicaxni, who had witnessed the death of all of his descendants save one young boy whom he guarded zealously said, "If it is a Xolotli, we should take the family from this area. Avoid it at all costs and do not risk the touch of its curse."

Teozotl, the pious, who still regretted that he did not fall at Micuantli's side defending the sacred alter, said, "If it is a Xolotli, it is damned, and a taint on our land. We should destroy it at once. The gods themselves reject them, and through their weakness we are all polluted."

Xipaque, the youngest, who did not remember a time before the Spaniards but who still visibly chafed at their rule, said, "If it is a Xolotli, we can use this! We could have driven the metal men from our shores long ago, had we, the god-touched, the noble priests, but banded together! Surely, the news that horrors from myth walk the night once more will be the catalyst needed to unite us. Surely, this time, with this incentive, we can succeed!"

And Ixcintec, as usual, watched and listened in silence, her dark eyes opaque in the shadows.

Finally, Yaxotl held up a hand, and the rest fell silent. "My brothers," he began. "You speak as those who have not thought." He glared around the small circle, and watched as their eyes dropped. All except Ixintec. "Do you truly think that this is the only one there is? That if we leave it alone, those who come after it won't follow us? That if we kill it, there will be no more?" He looked at sullen Xipanque, and though his words brooked no argument, his tone was kind. "If we had united when they first came, yes, we might have won. If we had the same numbers now that we had then, yes, we might still win. But we didn't, and we don't. And if we fight again now, we lose the footholds we have gained, and with them all hope of future triumph and vengeance."

Xipaque said nothing, because whether he liked it or not, he knew his eldest brother spoke the truth. But Teozotl, made bold by despair, questioned him. "What do you propose, then, brother? Should we simply accept the monsters in our midst again?"

"If it is a Xolotli," he began, calmly, "then I want him."

Three voices rose at once, and it took several seconds for Yaxotl to regain command. "We decided years ago," he reminded them. "The individual is nothing. The family must grow strong. Only then can we ever have a chance to take back what is ours. We will fight them fair, we will fight them dirty, we will fight them on their ground and our ground and everywhere in between. We will strike at a moment's notice or we will wait decades or centuries to find the right moment. And though it cost us our lives, our pride, or our honor, we will never allow the enemy to possess an advantage that we do not have."

He paused. "Xolotli or not, the new god-touched is powerful. It has abilities I have never seen before. And, deformed as it is, it is still clearly one of them. Do you want them to retain that advantage?" He looked, hard, at his siblings. "We will take it from them, and we will make it our own. After all these years, the dread power of the Xolotli will again be used in the service of the gods, and not in their mockery. Our family will be made stronger. And in the end, we will prevail."

His eyes met theirs. Xipaque, as changeable as he was passionate, looked ready to go bring the creature in himself, right then. Tlamicaxni looked thoughtful. Teozotl's eyes were truculent, and Yaxotl suspected he was about to voice a complaint, when another voice spoke.

It was soft, hollow and reedy like smoke through a flute. "This is wisdom," Ixcintec said quietly, leaning forward into the light. "This is wisdom."

Yaxotl paused, waiting for anything else, but nothing more was forthcoming. Their sister's tool was silence; when she spoke, even Teozotl would not argue. Finally he turned back to the warriors. "Alright, then," he said. "Here's the plan."

* * * * *

The five of them gathered around the tree; five, and one more. Beatriz stood there too. Lovely Beatriz, first of the first generation of children of Spanish blood. Neither encroaching age nor light skin dimmed her beauty. Her mother had raised her to smile prettily, first for her Spanish father, later for her Spanish husband, but in her heart, Beatriz was Mexica, and she knew it – and so did her children.

Yaxotl met their eyes and nodded. Without a word, he stepped forward, and in one smooth movement tore the feathered spear from the heart of the thing bound before them.

As it began to stir, Beatriz spoke. Her voice was low and melodic. "Know this, creature: you are outside. We have seen you use fear as your weapon; if you use it on us, we will surely run. And in the morning, you will surely die."

Yaxotl couldn't see the creature's eyes, hidden behind a cloth, but its face contorted as it snarled in rage. It writhed, testing the strength of the bindings that held it. Yaxotl was not concerned. Anything that could hold him could hold anything. Finally it stopped fighting, and spit furiously at them, "What do you want from me?"

"Your blood," she said softly. "Your gift. And your curse."

For a moment, there was silence; then, incredibly, it began to laugh. The stream of Spanish that followed was too rapid for Yaxotl to follow, but Beatriz, who had grown up speaking the language, listened calmly and merely nodded. At the end, she said simply, "Yes."

"And then what," the creature said, once it had slowed enough to be again comprehensible. "I do this for you, and what? You let me go? I get a reward?"

Yaxotl could feel Xipaque's eyes on him, though he did not turn to look. His youngest brother had been put off by the necessity of lying to the Xolotli. Yaxotl didn't like it much himself. The Spanish do not fight honorably, he reminded himself. For the family, we will do whatever it takes.

"Yes, to the first. You will be released. As for the second…" She paused, as if considering it. "Perhaps. Perhaps if you were to teach the boy to use your gifts, a reward could be arranged. After."

It snarled something more, and then subsided. "Fine," it said, sounding suddenly weary. "Bring your person here."

Tlamicaxni raised a small bone whistle to his lips and blew, three sharp, shrill notes. A minute passed, and then Jose Carlos Yax de Ispano, Beatriz's youngest son, stepped into the clearing.

At Tlamicaxni's urging, they had allowed Beatriz to make the drink for him, to dull the pain, but both Yaxotl and Teozotl had taken the youth aside and advised him not to drink too much. "You will be made a living sacrifice. You will be touched by a god," Teozotl explained. "It is good to feel some pain." Evidently he had listened. His movements seemed dreamlike and langorous, but he was steady enough on his feet, and his eyes were not drugged enough to hide the small flicker of fear behind his stoic expression. He knew what this meant, knew what the legends said about the Xolotl, first of the god-touched and first to betray the gods, barred even from the afterlife. He was given a chance to refuse. To our own, we can still show honor. His mother watched him approach, pride and grief mingling in the tears that streamed down her face.

Jose approached the makeshift altar and stretched out upon it without waiting for instruction. Yaxotl, Tlamicaxni, Xipaque and Ixcintec took hold of his arms and legs, though Yaxotl privately felt that this would be unnecessary. Jose looked up at them, his eyes full of courage and fear and wonder, and nodded.

Teozotl's knife was sharp and his movements sure. In moments the youth's veins were opened, red blood spilling down runnels carved into the altar to pool in large depressions near the bottom. Later they, the priests, would drink, sending the energy of the blood to the hungry gods, but not now. Now, Teozotl watched with a practiced eye as Jose gasped his last breaths, struggling not to make a sound or show pain, waiting for the moment just before death.

The moment came. Swiftly, Teozotl pulled the bound creature to the boy, slicing into his flesh and allowing the blood to drip down into Jose’s waiting mouth. The boy swallowed, and Yaxotl watched, waiting for the moment when the change would happen and vitality would return to the dying body before them.

Nothing happened.

The creature laughed, the sound like a harsh bark in the silence. “You fools,” it sneered. “You think you can force me to –“ and here he used a word Yaxotl did not know – “against my will? Kill me and have done with it, and bury your dead.” His voice dripped with hate.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then laughter – quiet, gasping laughter, laughter racked with pain, but laughter none the less – issued. From Jose. The creature’s mouth dropped in sudden shock, and a moment later, Ixcintec’s low, rasping chuckle joined in. “Bury our dead?” Her Spanish was rough, and heavily accented. She shook her head. “You misunderstand. We can keep him alive as long as we need to. How long do you think I can keep you alive, Xolotli, long past the point where your body should disintegrate?” She smiled. It was not comforting. “Long before the sun rises, you will want to make this boy like you. You will want many, many things, Xolotli, before I let you die.” She turned to look at Beatriz, once, as she reached to take Teozotl’s ritual knife from him, and her eyes were almost pitying. “You should go.”

Far above, an eagle took flight into the night, as the scent of flowers and blood and the sounds of screams were carried by the warm Mexican breeze.

**********

Please share some creative writing efforts in the comments!

Open Thread: A Question of Pronouns

2013-06-06T10:23:00.001-05:00

[Content Note: Dystopias, Misgendering]

I am currently in the process of slowly revising my old Claymore posts for compilation in a larger project. I have run into a problem with pronouns with I am embarrassed to have not contemplated before because Ally-Fail.

As many of you already know, the Claymore warriors are bought by the Organization when they are children, and they are bought according to their assigned-gender-at-birth: children the Organization deems to be "girls" are inducted as Claymore and children the Organization deems to be "boys" are not.

Whether the series acknowledges it or not, the adult Claymore warriors are not all going to be women. Some of them will be cis women. Some of them will be trans men. Some of them will be genderqueer. Some of them will be agender. Etc. Nevertheless, I failed to recognize this during the Claymore run of 2011-2012, and for that I apologize deeply.

There are currently 34 instances of the words "woman" and "women" in my old Claymore deconstruction series; there is 1 instance of the word "female"; there are approximately 70 instances of "girl" or "girls". Some of these refer to individuals, but they refer to individuals whom (to my knowledge and/or recollection) have not stated a gender identity. Claymore isn't a third-person novel (he/she/they) where we can assume the author knows the characters' identities; it's a first-person graphic novel (I/me/mine) where any instances of "she" or "he" could be assumptions by the other characters.

I'm struggling to understand how to address this issue of pronouns in analytical writing. The problem is that in a mandatory selection process which assumes a binary gender and where gender is assigned according to external forces rather than according to individual identity, there are going to be people in the "Girl Group" who are not girls. Regardless of whether or not the author realizes this, the Evil Authority has misgendered people already and I would prefer not to misgender them further. Yet there will be times when it is necessary to talk about the "Girl Group" as distinct from the "Boy Group".

So, to use The Hunger Games for example, Katniss isn't the First Female Victor for District 12, because we don't know about the gender identities of previous victors (and, indeed, we could make an interesting post about whether people in THG have room to safely to express gender identity since they've been shoved into assigned gender groups as potential Tributes for years), but she is the First Assigned-Female-By-The-State Victor for District 12.

I have asked some friends, and asked on Twitter, and so far I have received the following opinions:

1. I can continue to use misgendering words when deemed necessary but with an asterisk/footnote and a separate/opening discussion on this problem. (e.g., "First Female* Victor")

2. I could use new/recycled words to mean "assigned-female/male-by-the-state". The Latin terms Horum and Illorum were brought up, which can (apparently?) refer to This and That in a plural, non-specifically gendered sense (with the caveat that they also refer to groups of masculine things and groups of mixed things with masculine things in them because of the way Romance languages work).

I am now throwing this open for discussion because I know we have a lot of trans* and genderqueer readers, and I would appreciate any input they would be willing to give on this. I will also say that input from cis gendered readers is welcome here, because I don't want anyone to feel like commenting on this issue will necessarily out them -- essentially, if you have thoughts on this issue, you are welcome to share them here as long as you do them respectfully and honor the safe space guidelines here. Thank you in advance.

Twilight: My Touchstone

2013-06-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

by chris the cynic, a writer, a classicist and mathematician studying at the University of Southern Maine, author of Stealing Commas.

There is a saying about missing the forest for the trees, the point being that you can get so caught up in the minutia that you miss the bigger picture. It somewhat bothers me that people don't talk about missing the trees for the forest because an attempt to focus exclusively on the bigger picture tends to make you miss a lot.

The person who looks at the forest will see a grove of giant deciduous trees, someone who looks at the trees will tap the first person on the shoulder and say, "You do realize that Dutch elm disease is endemic here and unless we do something this grove is not going to stay on this earth much longer," well before the person looking at the forest notices something is wrong.

Deconstructions are things where we look at the trees. We take it a little at a time and see what others would have breezed by. In so doing we collect points of data that can be put together into a beautiful line that will allow us to understand the whole better than someone who didn't stop to look at the trees.

The down side is that it's slow. When Edward completely contradicts what he said ten pages ago we might not remember, it was how many weeks ago? And so we do run the risk of failing to see how things fit together, of missing the forest while we examine the trees and wonder how the forest can be unchanging when there's a freshly fallen tree right fracking there. (And if you have any idea what I'm talking about, good memory. That was over a year ago.)

The point here is that the entire dichotomy between forest and trees is one that doesn't work well. You need both. You need to be able to see the specific while still remembering the context.

There are multiple ways to do this. In classics, where reading in the original language (Latin or ancient Greek) often forces people into a deconstruction-like pace, a solution often employed is to have a translation in your native tongue on hand so that you can use it to get context before diving into the specifics again. The equivalent thing here would be to reread a large chunk of Twilight before reading the latest installment in the deconstruction series. That's probably not going to happen.

Another thing to do is to have a touchstone. Something you can go back to to remind you what the bigger picture is. And this has all been a roundabout way to introduce the fact that I'm about to take you back to the parking lot scene.

For context this is just after Edward talks Bella into pretending to be sick when she's not in order to skip gym. How much is she not sick? This much:

I was still fine. [...] I walked out into the cold fine mist that had just begun to fall. It felt nice -- the first time I enjoyed the constant moisture falling out of the sky

She is very specifically fine, but she's actually better than fine. She's feeling so good that she's taking joy in things she's spent the entire book, in fact her entire life, hating. She is up, and anyone with a passing familiarity with Bella Swan knows that this is extremely unusual for her. The next chapter is the one where the sun pokes out and she'll get a shot of joy out of that, meaning that this is the absolute best we've seen her in the book so far.

By Bella standards she's stellar.

Keep that in mind.

We were near the parking lot now. I veered left, toward my truck. Something caught my jacket, yanking me back.

On a personal note this is an important passage for me because if she'd veered right the Tardis Truck might never have come into being. But on a touchstone-to-remind-you-what-Twilight-is-about level what's important here is "yanking me back." Bella doesn't even know that Edward has a hold of her yet and he's already yanking. Not a less loaded word like pulling, instead a word that denotes a fast, violent motion. And he's not just yanking her to a standstill, he's pulling on her hard enough to pull her back.

Why is he doing this? We don't know. Seriously, this is what we get by way of explanation:

   "Where do you think you're going?" he asked, outraged. He was gripping a fistful of my jacket in one hand.
    I was confused. "I'm going home."
   "Didn't you hear me promise to take you safely home? Do you think I'm going to let you drive in your condition?" His voice was still indignant.
    "What condition?"

I've cut Bella off in the middle of a quote because there's a need for emphasis, also the rest of it is just logistics of getting her truck home. Anyway, emphasis. "What condition?" indeed. Bella is currently the best we've ever seen her. She's fine, she was happy until someone grabbed hold of her and started yanking on her with enough force to reverse her direction. But more than that Edward knows she's fine. Edward is the one who faked her condition in the first place. It was his idea to have her pretend to be sick when she wasn't in order to get out of gym class and he did most of the work.

He absolutely positively knows that she has no condition and she is fully capable of driving herself safely home. Whatever his reason for overpowering her and forcing her into his car, it isn't what he said it is. He's lying to her.

He's lying to her, he's violating her space and her person (and her jacket), he's handling her dangerously roughly, and yet he's the one who is outraged and indignant. Bella, for her part, is merely "complaining". You'll have to take my word for that because I'm not going to quote every single word and that's in the middle of the truck logistics.

Also note the use of "fistful" instead of "handful." This is written in such a way to make sure there is no mistaking that what we're being told about is violent action.

So what does he do after grabbing the fistful, yanking her and lying to her?

He was towing me toward his car now, pulling me by my jacket. It was all I could do to keep from falling backward. He'd probably just drag me along anyway if I did.

Once again, note the word choice. Towing. He's not guiding or bringing or anything that could possibly have positive connotations. He's doing something that indicates he is in total control and Bella has none. Towing is something you do to wagons, boats to be tugged, broken down cars, and people whose consent and self determination you don't give a damn about.

Dragging is a step down from that because it still leaves Edward with all the control and Bella with none but it is uncomfortable and likely damaging. This scene takes place in the parking lot and on the sidewalk. Neither is something you really want abrading your skin, even if it is through clothing as it probably would be in Bella's case. Edward will later confirm that he is perfectly willing to drag Bella.

And there's still more to unpack from those three sentences. I skipped the middle one. Bella is still traveling backward. She can't see her destination, can't see where she's putting her feet. She hasn't just lost complete control over her own body, she's lost any illusion of control. If he had grabbed her by the arm and pulled her forward she could at least tell herself that she was willingly going along with him because the position wouldn't be that different than if she were. It's a largely meaningless lie, but when you've got nothing, as Bella does in this situation, you take what you can get.

But she can't even get that. She hasn't just been stripped of anything resembling bodily autonomy, she's been stripped of any way to maintain the illusion she still has some control. Instead all she has left to do is to make sure things don't get worse. If Bella the perpetually clumsy can keep her feet under her as she is forced backward toward Edward's car she can at least save herself the pain, injury, and indignity of being dragged across the ground. That's all she has control over. Whether or not she falls over backward. Everything else has been stripped away.

"Let go!" I insisted. He ignored me.

In case there was any doubt, Bella emphatically does not consent to this treatment and Edward emphatically doesn't give a damn.

Bella does manage to improve her situation somewhat. Instead of going backwards the whole way she manages to "stagger along sideways" which tells us a couple of things. One is that even though she tries to turn to face her destination Edward doesn't let her. There's no reason he couldn't. With his vampire speed (faster than a falling van) he could release her and grab on to a different part of her jacket before she had time to respond to being released. Even without his vampire speed he could have adjusted his position and mode of forcing Bella toward his car. A fistful of jacket can be used to push as well as pull.

He chooses not to do these things. Even as Bella is trying to spin to face her destination he's making it impossible.

The second thing it tells us is that Edward is pulling Bella faster than she can safely go. She isn't walking along sideways, she's staggering. This is decidedly not a safe thing to be doing for an extended period and it's not comfortable. Edward is demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't care about Bella's safety or comfort.

Then he finally freed me -- I stumbled against the passenger door.

The exact details of how he freed her are not given. He couldn't have simply let her go, then her momentum would carry her into him, not the car. The implication is that he turned pull to push at the last moment so that she would end up at the passenger door without him needing to preform the physically impossible feat of walking through the car while dragging.

Regardless, she's not stable. First it was all she could do to stop from falling backwards, then she staggered sideways, now she's stumbling. She's being forced beyond her limits by Edward in ways that are clearly unsafe. His powers, it should be noted, are useless here. Alice might be able to tell that forcing Bella beyond her limits won't result in her getting hurt, but mind reading, even if Bella didn't have a mental shield, isn't up to the task.

His admission, in the form of a threat, that he has no problem dragging her is coming up. That tells us all we need to know about how much he cares about Bella's safety (not in the least) but the truth is we don't need to skip ahead to get that. The only thing that could possibly make Bella safe in this ordeal is if he was going to use his vampire reflexes to steady her if she appeared to be about to fall. She stumbled against the passenger door. Edward can't see the future, Edward can't sense her feelings, Edward can't read her mind. He doesn't know if that stumble will end in a fall or not. He doesn't know whether she's relieved she caught herself or in total panic because she's about to fall.

If Edward were planning on doing anything to keep Bella from falling he would do it now. This is where he would steady her, or catch her, or something her. He doesn't do anything until she speaks, which is to ignore her statement and tell her the door is unlocked. If he were concerned about her safety he wouldn't, he couldn't, wait that long to act. As she stumbled against the door there was a point where it would be unclear whether she'd stand or fall. Edward did nothing in this time.

I can't quote a line in the text because there's no line there. It goes straight from, "I stumbled against the passenger door," to Bella speaking which given her words ("You are so pushy") she wouldn't have done until she was sure she was stable. So the entire time from letting her go, through her stumbling, until she was steady enough to start talking about things other than, "Oh, crap! I'm falling!" Edward did nothing at all.

I cannot emphasize this enough: He does not care about Bella's safety.

   "Get in, Bella."
   I didn't answer. I was mentally calculating my chances of reaching the truck before he could catch me. I had to admit, they weren't good.
  "I'll just drag you back," he threatened. Guessing my plan.

Some people consider the way that Edward acted sexy, Bella Swan is not one of those people. She wants to get away. She's trying to work out if she can. If she breaks into a sprint can she make it to safety before Edward runs her down. Magic 8 Ball says, "My sources say no." She's plotting her escape, she realizes she doesn't stand much of a chance.

She isn't turned on, she's afraid. She wants to run away but is worried that he'll catch her if she does.

And she's right to be afraid.

Edward says he will drag her back. Drag. The thing she'd been worried about when being towed. Dragged across the asphalt of the parking lot from her truck to his Volvo. He's already done violence to her, but violence that didn't cause physical harm. Now he's threatening more violence and the kind he's threatening will hurt her. She will be injured. Almost certainly not huge injuries, but being dragged across a parking lot, especially at the pace Edward seems to prefer, will damage a person. That's the threat. "I've already mistreated you, get in the car or I'll injure you."

This is not part of an established relationship, it must be remembered. They don't have one of those until Port Angles at the earliest. That's three chapters away. An argument can be made for it not really starting for another five chapters. That's as much book as there has been up to this point.

This is how Edward treats Bella when they're just schoolmates and nothing more. He has no special permission to do things to her, he has no claim that he's somehow exempt from normal standards of how you treat others in her case because that would require some established relationship with ground rules outside of the norm. There's nothing wrong with those but they don't have one.

Edward and Bella are almost strangers. Whenever she's tried to learn about him he's been evasive, he's even tried to gaslight her. Only earlier in this same day did Edward end his campaign of shunning her. It was at lunch that he floated the idea of taking her from her friends never to have her return. It was mere minutes ago that he discussed her death (thinking Mike had killed her) and the murder he'd commit as a result (because he'd "have to avenge [her] murder.")

All that Bella knows about Edward is that he saved her once, he seems to regret doing so, he's quick to talk about kidnapping her and her death, and he's really, really mean to her.

That's the context for the above.

And that, for me, places Twilight in context. That's the foundation on which the relationship is eventually (three or five or more chapters from now depending on where you place its start) built, that's the beginning from which they start. After the incident with the van Edward lied to Bella, tried to gaslight her, and then went dark. This is the day he started talking to her again. This is where they start to interact. And the above is that interaction.

This tells you what you need to know about how Edward treats Bella and how much he cares about her (not a lot.)

If you find yourself so deep in the details that you've forgotten what the story is about, remember this scene. It's told with unusual detail, it's exceptionally vivid, and it shows you what the relationship is like right from the moment it started. Edward has been talking to Bella for less than one full school day at this point.

It's not the best for telling you who Bella is. I'm not sure there's a good "This is Bella" scene to keep in mind because I don't think she has a clear idea on who she is. What it is very good at is reminding you who Edward is and what the relationship between Bella and him is like. The book is about the relationship. This is the bigger picture, encapsulated in one scene.

Open Thread: Scooter

2013-06-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Hosted by an absolutely gorgeous red scooter

So, as some of you may recall, I just got a job - after over a year of unemployment, punctuated by a brief bout in sales (which lasted long enough to get us through the holidays, but not much longer.

Among other things, what that means is that I can finally resume payments on the beautiful scooter that's been languishing in layaway for far too long. I am practically drooling in anticipation. It is lovely and shiny and classic-style and MUCH better quality than my old one. And I wants it, precious.

Open thread! Does anyone else own/ride a scooter (or its cooler big brother, a motorcycle?) Would you? Why or why not? Does anyone have any fun or interesting scooter/motorcycle stories?

~ Kristycat

Wednesday Reminder! Open threads are meant to be fun, chatty places to discuss anything that doesn’t “fit” into a deconstruction or other regular thread. This can be something totally off-the-wall and random, or it can be something interesting that a deconstruction prompted you to think of, but which would be derailing to get into in the deconstruction thread. When in doubt, move it over here - that’s what it’s for!

And as always, please post new comments, rather than replying to other comments!

Random Creative Writing Tuesday!

2013-06-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

Happy Tuesday! So, in going through my saved writing snippets, I found this.

If you've ever played a tabletop roleplaying game - and even if you haven't - you're probably familiar with the concept of alignments. Character traits that define a character's morality and ethical system. They're the source of approximately 99.99% of all arguments in the gaming community.

Anyway, there are definite stereotypes associated with various alignments. Chaotic Neutral, for instance, is often played as the sort of person who might kill you, might give you 100 gold, might slap you with a fish - it's completely random. Whereas Lawful Good - and especially the Lawful Good Paladin class - is widely seen as the "Honor Before Reason" class, crusaders out to reform the world at the point of a sword.

Well. Challenge accepted.

(Setting: Eberron)

(Cut for length. CN: fantastical racism.)

(Also, yeah, fair warning - all my creative writing is pretty much based on characters from RPGs. Sorry. It's what I got.)

Hakar

The barmaid brings me my tankard with a smile. The smile broadens when I hand her coins, but it seemed genuine from the first, and I am glad I gave her too much money. She has kind eyes. The smile brightens her face, and for a moment she is beautiful. I smile back, though I know she cannot see it, and nod my head in thanks.

Almost out of instinct, I splash a little bit out into the fire near our table. Over the hissing, I murmur quiet thanks to Olladra for the gift of beer to make us joyful. Leaning back into the shadows then, I cautiously raise my visor and take a sip. It is good. Humans do not brew as well as dwarves do, but they appreciate the finer things in life.

Treestrider leans over to me, lightly touching the raised visor. “Why are you keeping your helmet on at all? Isn’t that uncomfortable?” There is frank curiosity in his voice; I am pleased that I can hear it. Three months ago I would not have been able to. I wonder briefly whether this is because he has become more at ease with me, and therefore more expressive, or whether I have simply learned to listen better. “A few people are staring at you.”

“That may be.” I raise an eyebrow at him. “Do you imagine they would stare less if they could see my face?” I peer at him from beneath my raised helm.

His wooden head tilts slightly to one side, the glowing fire in his eyes flickering briefly. “Are you afraid of them?”

I smile then, unable to help it. “My friend, there is very little that I fear.” With my tankard, I indicate the rest of the room. “But look at these people. They are happy. Enjoying the evening. As am I, despite any discomfort from my helmet.” I take another sip of beer. “If I were to remove my helmet, many of these people would become afraid of me. And I would be unhappy, because I find it unpleasant to be feared. Some of them might even try to hurt me, and I would have to do violence to prevent that – which I do not want.”

He sits back. Like all Warforged, he is an enigma – an old soul in a young body. In some ways, Treestrider knows more of life than I do; in others, he is still a child. I do not know how much he truly understands about the differences between the fleshy races, or why a hobgoblin like myself would not get a warm welcome in a human tavern no matter whose symbol he wears around his neck. To illustrate the point, I wave a hand at our newfound companions, at their own table a little ways away. “Do you see how they react to Phut?”

In truth, reaction to him is mixed. For every human who stares suspiciously at him, another laughs despite himself. The feisty woman he’s currently engaging in banter might have something to do with that. They are a mismatched pair, Phut and Tuph – a large barbarian orc and his pint-sized halfling partner, born on opposite sides of the continent but so close they could have been raised together. That novelty alone would be enough to make him a curiosity rather than a threat in some people’s eyes. Mostly, though, I suspect it is simply Phut himself. For all his size and ferocity, for all his lack of social graces and distinctly un-human features, there is something about his guileless grin and booming laugh that makes people like him. It is something I never learned, how to be easy with people and put them at ease in return. Even with that, though, there are still some who are clearly not comfortable with him in their tavern. Their mutters and glares are not subtle. He doesn’t seem to notice – although, to judge from his posture, the remaining member of their trio, Meloria, does. The half-elf appears to be reading a book and ignoring them, but his pose is too casual and his shoulders are stiff.

“They did rescue us from that cavern,” I say quietly, answering a question Treestrider never asked. “It would be gracious of us to assist them in their endeavors for a time.” He grunts. Glancing over, I see he is drawing again, filling his leather-bound book with sketches and blueprints for weapons and armor modifications that I know he’ll never make. I continue. “And we will need their help if we ever hope to go back and face that thing in the deeps. It needs to be destroyed. I do not think we can do so on our own.” He grunts again. It might be agreement or disagreement, or it may simply be an acknowledgement that I have spoken.

I sit back as well, enjoying my beer and taking pleasure in the companionable silence. Treestrider is good to travel with. I know he likes the idea of traveling further into the humans’ settled lands as little as I do, but I hope he will decide, like me, to accompany this group. I would be sad to part ways with him.

Long minutes go by in which neither of us speaks. After our long captivity in the caves, I savor the simple joy of sitting in a tavern with a friend, hearing the laughter around us. After a while I finish my beer and lower my visor again; the barmaid graces me with another room-brightening smile as she picks up the empty mug.

As she leaves, Treestrider stirs. Without lifting his head, he says, “If any of the humans here tried to hurt you, they would have to go through me.” His voice is very quiet and very implacable, and despite his muted inflections I can hear the anger under his words. It is a deep anger, an old anger, and I realize anew that the desire to avenge old wrongs is still in him. There is a part of him that would not mind a fight tonight.

Something stirs in my soul in response. The old thing, the red thing, the fire that still burns. In the back of my mind, a sweetly reasonable whisper wonders if he might be right. After all, to harm the innocent is an evil act. If these humans picked a fight with me, knowing nothing of me and when I had done them no harm, wouldn’t it then be my duty to punish their wickedness? As one who has sworn to eradicate evil, would it not be proper to allow these men to expose whatever evil might be in their hearts, so that it does not go unchastised? And behind and beneath these arguments, the voice of the Fury growls. The faded marks on my shoulders tingle, and I feel the old lust for blood and violence rise.

It is a feeling as tiresome as it is familiar. Reaching up, I touch the crude wooden pendant, not much bigger than a coin, that hangs from my neck. As my fingers trace the symbol carved onto it, I silently offer a prayer to the Bright Lady, Dol Arrah, noblest of the Sovereign Host and my personal patron. As if in response, a feeling of peace and joy washes over me, like stepping out of darkness into sunlight, and I push my darker urges aside as I have done so many times.

“Of that, I have no doubt,” I say, after a pause. “But who would be helped by it? To interrupt peace and happiness with anger and violence would ruin these people’s nights as well as my own. They are not my enemy.” Nor yours. I lay a hand on his arm, the smooth wood warm to my touch. “I am grateful for your concern, but it is misplaced. I am happy tonight. Leave it be.” He meets my gaze, and I smile, hoping he can read the sincerity behind it. After a moment, he nods, and his eyes brighten in what I have come to realize is an answering smile of his own. Clapping him on the shoulder, I lean forward and beckon the barmaid to bring another round.

Thank you, my Lady. As the merriment around us continues, I thank Dol Arrah once again for calming my mind and showing me, in a hundred small ways every day, how to walk the path of virtue and honor.

For that is the duty of a paladin.

**********

Please share some creative writing efforts in the comments!

Narnia: Privilege and Passive Voice

2013-06-04T07:30:00.000-05:00

[Content Note: Body Transformation, Racism]

Narnia Recap: In which Eustace is turned into a dragon.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 6: The Adventures of Eustace

Eustace has just been turned into a dragon, but he's not aware of it yet. And meanwhile, back at the beach, everyone is stomping their feet and hollering in the hopes that they won't have to do any more work than that to rescue a nine-year-old they never should have lost in the first place.

   Meanwhile Eustace slept and slept—and slept. What woke him was a pain in his arm. The moon was shining in at the mouth of the cave, and the bed of treasures seemed to have grown much more comfortable: in fact he could hardly feel it at all. He was puzzled by the pain in his arm at first, but presently it occurred to him that the bracelet which he had shoved up above his elbow had become strangely tight. His arm must have swollen while he was asleep (it was his left arm).

It's a small point, but this is why it's worth investing in an editor who won't just yes-man hir way through your manuscript. There were lots of places before this passage, and will be lots of places after this passage, and indeed are lots of places in this very passage where the information that the bracelet is on Eustace's left arm could be worked in naturally as part of the narrative. Just slapping it into a parenthetical fragment is jarring and should have been caught in the editing process. (Along with everything that is contradictory and/or morally abhorrent in this series, I suppose, but we have to start somewhere.)

   He moved his right arm in order to feel his left...

YOU COULD HAVE PUT IT RIGHT THERE, EVEN. JUST SAYING: "He moved his right arm in order to feel his swollen left arm..." One word! ONE.

There's actually a reason I bring this up, beyond nit-picky grammar-policing. (Which I am generally not in favor of because bullying, but that's another post.) No, I bring this up because I would like to point out that there is a persistent mentality among a lot of people that Tradition and Gatekeepers confer legitimacy, without ever really acknowledging that Tradition and Gatekeepers have historically been stacked (usually deliberately) against various marginalized groups.

So, for example, science isn't Science when a young black girl does it. And literature isn't Literature when it's self-publishing or marketed to Young Adult audiences or (god help you) self-published YA literature. And exploration and discovery isn't Exploration or Discovery when it's not done by white men. And so on. People who are the "wrong" sorts of people are denied legitimacy in ways that people who are the "right" sorts of people with the stamp of approval from the "right" gatekeepers are granted social legitimacy because of their privilege.

These attitudes, when they exist in ourselves, can reveal our privileges and biases: it takes checking of privilege to see that not all young black girls have access to "formal" science and that not all authors are going to be accepted by traditional publishers (especially authors who either identify themselves or have characters who identify as black, trans*, queer, or various other marginalized groups) and that privileging the accomplishments of white men over other marginalized groups is a systemic problem in our society and not just the natural Way Things Are And Should Be.

The Chronicles of Narnia are regarded by much of our society as "classics". Partly because they are old, and partly because of nostalgia, but also partly because they are written by a privileged man about privileged people. When our contemporaries criticize YA literature as being universally unserious and unworthy of treatment as real Literature, they generally aren't talking about Narnia, even though the books are undoubtedly aimed at children and young adults, because while Narnia may be filed under YA it is a Classic written by a Serious Christian White Man. It is YA written by the "right" kind of person, and therefore legitimate in a way that YA written by the "wrong" kinds of people is not.

And when people dismiss self-publishing out of hand as nothing more than the refuge of narcissists who churn out unrelentingly Bad Writing -- while entirely ignoring that the bypassing of traditional gatekeepers allows marginalized people a voice they might otherwise be denied -- they are implicitly conferring a status of Good Writing onto the writings of those who were embraced by traditional publishing. In this way, Narnia is presumed to be good because it passed through the hands of the gatekeepers, rather than presumed to have passed because of privilege.

I don't want to get into a fan-fight about how well Narnia is or isn't written because ultimately a lot of that is going to come down to personal subjective taste. What I want, instead, to do is to point out how privilege influences the ways in which we approach literature. For many of us, when we see jarring, haphazard parenthetical statements inserted unnecessarily in ways that disrupt the flow of reading in self-published novels, our confirmation bias tends to make those incidents stand out. Ah, yes, the brain says. Unpolished self-published work, as expected. Yet when we see those same things in Classics produced by Serious Christian White Men, we tend to file those same mistakes under different headings. Ground-breaking classic, the brain rationalizes. Have to expect some rough edges for visionary literature. We know better now. And then we tend to move on, pass extended.

Part of checking privilege involves recognizing why and when we give the passes we do. This isn't a call to grammar-police all literature, classics or otherwise, nor is it a call to just stop giving a shit about any and all editing in our literature. What it is a call to do, however, is to examine our responses to things and think about how we might have responded differently to a stimulus (like Bad Writing) if the author or time period or medium were different, and whether those reasons are marginalizing ones.

   He moved his right arm in order to feel his left, but stopped before he had moved it an inch and bit his lip in terror. For just in front of him, and a little on his right, where the moonlight fell clear on the floor of the cave, he saw a hideous shape moving. He knew that shape: it was a dragon’s claw. It had moved as he moved his hand and became still when he stopped moving his hand.
   “Oh, what a fool I’ve been,” thought Eustace. “Of course, the brute had a mate and it’s lying beside me.”

Anyway, moving on, and speaking of writing, there's a whole thing here where Eustace thinks the dragon evidence that is over and around and under him -- claws, steamy breath, etc. -- must be another dragon instead of himself. It's the sort of thing that struck me as amusing and well-written as a child and yet now seems cruel and taunting as an adult. I can't imagine why Eustace would immediately grok on to a body transformation -- it's rare enough in Narnia that it takes Lucy et. al. to come around to it, so I can only imagine how Doesn't-Read-Fantasy Eustace was supposed to come to this conclusion immediately -- and he's additionally barely awake and in an extremely dark cave. Oh, and he was also dying of dehydration yesterday. So I can't really join in with the "joke" that "even yet he had no idea of the truth." Whatever, Lewis.

   No one will blame Eustace if at this moment he shed tears. He was surprised at the size of his own tears as he saw them splashing on to the treasure in front of him. They also seemed strangely hot; steam went up from them.

And here we have more gender-and-age policing about when it is an is not appropriate to cry. For the record, I don't blame Eustace for shedding tears at any time or under any circumstances. I find it utterly frustrating to see (male) crying demonized on more than one occasion in this series, given how the Christian source material for these books has no qualms about Jesus weeping when moved by emotion.

Cutting to the chase, Eustace scrambles out of the cave and runs to the pool. He's certain that he's being pursued by dragons, so he hopes that he can escape notice and/or capture by jumping into the water, which I suppose is actually fairly proactive thinking on his part (since there's not much else he can do to escape the authorially-steep valley) so good for him.

   But just as he reached the edge of the pool two things happened. First of all, it came over him like a thunder-clap that he had been running on all fours—and why on earth had he been doing that? And secondly, as he bent toward the water, he thought for a second that yet another dragon was staring up at him out of the pool. But in an instant he realized the truth. [...]
   He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
   That explained everything. [...] As for the pain in his left arm (or what had been his left arm) he could now see what had happened by squinting with his left eye. The bracelet which had fitted very nicely on the upper arm of a boy was far too small for the thick, stumpy foreleg of a dragon. It had sunk deeply into his scaly flesh and there was a throbbing bulge on each side of it. He tore at the place with his dragon’s teeth but could not get it off.

And now we have The Bracelet.

I don't claim to understand anything about the physiology of mythical creatures, but the first thought that popped into my mind was to wonder why no one ever tries to melt the bracelet off. Maybe dragon skin and dragon scale can't bear that level of heat (or the resulting molten gold), or maybe dragon-fire can't be generated that hot. Who knows. What is more interesting to me is that no one ever really tries to relieve the pain of The Bracelet (which, if left unchecked for long, would be seriously threatening rather than just painful and inconvenient) beyond a token splash of Lucy's cordial. No slippery salves are applied to ease the bracelet off. No judicious cutting with swords or treating with flame is attempted.

Nor does anyone assume that The Bracelet -- which Eustace put on immediately before his transformation -- may have caused the transformation. When Alice grew or shrank after eating foods in Wonderland, she recognized the associated cause-and-effect and didn't presume (at least, not after the initial shock) that she was just thinking "growing thoughts". Eustace doesn't have repeated points of reference like Alice did, but he's also more scientifically-minded and less prone to magical thinking. We know that The Bracelet isn't the source of Eustace's transformation because the narrator told us, but what's the excuse for everyone else involved in this story?

These alternatives are left unexplored, I presume, because The Bracelet is meant to be read for its metaphorical meaning only. What, precisely, it is a metaphor for -- the painful knowledge of sin? a painful god-shaped hole in Eustace's heart? the pain of being hated by the narrator? -- I don't choose to hazard a guess. The larger point is that there is Something Wrong with Eustace and only Aslan can fix it. There's no point in the narrative trying to fix it some other way, because that other way simply wouldn't work. Instead, we gotta call ~~Ghostbusters~~ Aslan.

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, Lewis is free to tell whatever religious metaphor he feels moved to tell in his novel. (Very generous of me, I know. LOL.) But on the other hand, I'm not a One True Wayist, which means that I think there are lots of valid ways to ease spiritual pain and suffering. These multiple ways may not be equally valid for every person, of course, and there may be only One True Way for a specific person, but that doesn't mean (in my opinion) that there's One True Way that is the same for all people.

Aslan, for example, is not a deity who brings me spiritual joy and healing, yet it would appear that he's being hyped in this novel as THE source of spiritual joy and healing for everyone, including Eustace, even if he doesn't realize it. We'll deal with this more when we get there, but it's worth noting that not only does Eustace not ask Aslan for help, he doesn't even know Aslan is Aslan until after Edmund interprets his conversion experience for him. So whatever religious pain we're dealing with here -- symbolized by The Bracelet and the overall transformation experience -- it isn't satisfied by one method (Aslan) chosen by Eustace from a variety of equally-valid methods. Instead, the solution is foisted on him as the One True Way solution from a god who knows best what Eustace needs. I have issues with that portrayal.

For now, let's move on:

   In spite of the pain, his first feeling was one of relief. There was nothing to be afraid of any more. He was a terror himself now and nothing in the world but a knight (and not all of those) would dare to attack him. He could get even with Caspian and Edmund now—

Wait, what? Eustace doesn't know what a dragon is. Later he will tell Edmund that he didn't even know the word "dragon" until they call him that. How the heck does he know that he's invulnerable to everything except knights? HOW DOES HE KNOW ABOUT KNIGHTS? He doesn't read the Right Books for that. (Yes, knights are historical real things. No, a non-fiction book about knights would not leave Eustace with the impression of the Fantasy Knight being invoked here.) Oh, and also he has extremely brief thoughts of revenge which would have been better placed prior to his transformation when he got "greedy" and "dragonish". Theologies!

   But the moment he thought this he realized that he didn’t want to. He wanted to be friends. He wanted to get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things. He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed. He longed for their voices. He would have been grateful for a kind word even from Reepicheep.
   When he thought of this the poor dragon that had been Eustace lifted up its voice and wept. A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.
   At last he decided he would try to find his way back to the shore. He realized now that Caspian would never have sailed away and left him. And he felt sure that somehow or other he would be able to make people understand who he was.

OK, seriously, this makes no sense. (Editors, people! See above, re: privilege. Etc.) Eustace shouldn't realize he's invulnerable. He shouldn't realize he's only in danger from knights (which also makes no logical sense and is magical thinking that is entirely atypical of Eustace if only because it requires the invocation of a trope he knows nothing about). He shouldn't think he's completely cut off from humanity -- there is, after all, a talking mouse on the ship, and at this moment Eustace believes he is an exotic sentient lizard. Eustace shouldn't think he's completely alone; there could be a huge community of sentient lizards on the island. These are not things Eustace should be thinking.

Eustace can think that he's not in the shape he prefers and that he was transformed against his will, and he can realistically be deeply upset about that. That would make sense. But I'm also not entirely sure that Lewis can go down that road, since it runs the risk of pointing out that his Theologies have mandated body-transmogrifying a boy for no real reason that I can see. If Lewis focuses not on Eustace's interpersonal relationships and instead focuses on Eustace's body and his unhappiness at being changed, then we have to reasonably ask Who changed him and Why. And those answers are then available for us to judge and potentially find wanting, which is not something I think Lewis wants us doing. We're not supposed to question Aslan and his methods. But if Lewis instead focuses on Eustace's human relationships -- which Lewis wants to blame entirely on Eustace for not having had the right attitude all along -- then we can victim-blame Eustace for his prior unpleasantness which has culminated in this final form of dragony unpleasantness Because Karma.

Which means that this entire episode is treated with an extremely passive voice. Like the "Deep Magic" which mandated that 10-year-old Edmund die in LWW, we're not really given the space or encouragement to question why the rules are what they are. Traitors are turned over to the White Witch to be stabbed to death on an altar. Greedy people are turned into dragons while they sleep. It's all presented as "just the way things are", without acknowledgement that someone -- Lewis and/or the Emperor-God -- actively made things that way. And actively made things that way knowing the rules would ensnare extremely young children.

If this passivity were removed, we might be allowed to notice -- and to then be forgiven for pointing out -- that a story about a sadist making up strange and unpredictable rules to be followed to the letter of the law even while knowing that those "rules" will result in the death and/or body-transformation of unaware young children is the setup for a horror movie, and probably not so much for a benevolent religion. But because of the power of passive framing, the choices that an Omniscient God/Author made to get us to this juncture are obscured, while the "choices" that a railroaded nine-year-old boy made along the way here are hauled out for the reader to judge and condemn.

And because the situation is horrible and warrants an explanation and the parceling out of blame, many of us do judge him, because (as children) we aren't given the tools to take the spotlight away from the narrator and say, "no, I want to look over there." We are Dorothy gazing on the Wizard of Oz, but without our trusty Toto to pull back the curtain.

   He took a long drink and then (I know this sounds shocking, but it isn’t if you think it over) he ate nearly all the dead dragon. He was half-way through it before he realized what he was doing; for, you see, though his mind was the mind of Eustace, his tastes and his digestion were dragonish. And there is nothing a dragon likes so well as fresh dragon. That is why you so seldom find more than one dragon in the same country.

Cat Thinks She's A Jaguar by Lucy Toner
Caption: whut.

whut. WHUT. WHUT. WHUT.

Does... did C.S. Lewis actually know anything about animals? Like... at all? This reads like he once heard that some animals eat their own dead and/or eat each other under stressful circumstances and therefore assumed that this clearly only applied to solitary species and that the reason they stay solitary is because they eat each other at a moment's notice. Indeed, that they are each other's favorite prey. I... just... why in the name of fuck would a species evolve to hunt itself more than anything else? It's no wonder there aren't many dragons in Narnia! It's a wonder they manage to reproduce at all! Maybe their only method of reproduction is nine-year-old boys sleeping on their gold piles! Maybe that's why they collect gold: it's their one shot at reproducing!! I just don't even. O.o

WHY IS THIS DETAIL EVEN HERE, OH MY GOD.

It doesn't advance the plot. It doesn't develop character. It will never be returned to again because, aside from eating raw animals for din-dins, Eustace emphatically does not act "dragonish" from here on out, unless "dragonish" means "helping Caspian et. al. repair the ship and serving as a living hot water bottle for their feet at night". (Literally.) There is NO REASON to put this here except to punish Eustace with the gross and horrifying consumption of a dead dragon that has been sitting out in the rain for hours while he slept.

WHUT.

Then he turned to climb out of the valley. He began the climb with a jump and as soon as he jumped he found that he was flying. [...] He could see the bay like a silver slab and the Dawn Treader lying at anchor and camp fires twinkling in the woods beside the beach. From a great height he launched himself down toward them in a single glide.

Sadly, he does not "dragonishly" eat everyone in the goddam novel so that we can leave. I bet if they'd been dragons he would've, though. Whut.

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