#// I went with some book canon for the girlies sorry
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"Not some willowy creature who sits up in a tower, brushing her hair and waiting for some knight to rescue her." If you're currently taking prompts, I was wondering if you would take one that tackles the above quote from book-Jon's thoughts. While he thinks highly of atypical and unique females like Ayra or Val, his misogynistic views of women who adhered to the rules of his society (by choice or otherwise) need to go! Time period of your choice/doesn't have to be bookverse.
I'll be honest, anon - is Jon actually any more misogynistic than the rest of Westeros? Baseline everyone is, because the society they live in is.
This prompt came in back when I requested them (like half a year ago, oops) and I've come back to it every once in a while, but could never really think of a way to turn this into a story that wasn't just Jon sitting there and thinking the things I'm about to write. So instead, I'm just writing my thoughts lmao.
I'm gonna put it all under the cut, because I don't normally do this sort of thing (aka, give my thoughts on canon in a not-story way. I don't like discourse, so I'm placing this under the cut & not tagging it to hopefully avoid that.)
Now, I'm no book scholar, I haven't studied them and parsed through them, I don't read a lot of metas (sorry!) and I actually read the books years ago, so maybe I'm completely wrong here, but I always took that willowy creature line as Jon being a shitty teen boy and trying to pretend he doesn't want the thing he wants. Jon's other thought at this moment is "a warrior princess, he decided" - which is just him... coming up with Val’s whole personality despite not really knowing her. He’s thinking in generics & story tropes in this moment. Willowy creature. Warrior princess.
I also think Jon's admiration for "unique females" is less active misogyny and more him... sort of taking Arya's side? Because doesn't Arya 'hate' feminine girls, too? Arya doesn't fit into that role and because of that, she ends up resenting it (which, to me, is absolutely something a young girl would do. I did it. I went through my not like other girls faze). So of course Jon, who adores Arya and wants to protect her and feels a kinship with her as the two "outcast" Starks, would also take that on. Plus, if you think about it, the only real ladies he would have ever interacted with would be Catelyn (who didn't love him the way he wanted her to) and Sansa (who at some point, kept her distance). Every other reference point he'd have is either from a distance, or from stories. You also have his role model, good ol' Ned Stark, who is amused by Arya's "boyish" behaviors, then gives his "girly" daughter a doll because that's what girls like, right? No matter she's too old for it. And Robb "My Sisters Aren't Worth Trading For" Stark.
But Jon doesn't actually hate willowy creatures, if we're equating that with feminine women. He thinks of Sansa fondly enough, he wants to give Ygritte flowers from the glass gardens, he loves that Ygritte loves songs. When he thinks about his mother, he wants her to be a lady. He wants to be Lord of Winterfell. He wants a lady wife and children. I think that the willowy creatures line is based less in actual hatred for feminine women, and more a way for him to pretend it's not what he wants, because he thinks he can never have it.
I think we can also look at willowy creatures another way, in that Jon doesn't respect people who don't use their own agency, or are too cowardly to stand up for themselves/others. But that doesn't necessarily apply to feminine women? Look at Cat, who fought off an assassin and helped her son wage a war and 'saws through' a guy's throat when Robb was killed (thanks asoiaf wiki for that description). It doesn't even really apply to Sansa, who is one of the more passive characters, action-wise. But she stands up to and manipulates Joffrey into not killing Dontos, doesn't bend for Tyrion to cloak her, and runs away with Dontos despite not having a guarantee of her safety.
And the fact that he repeatedly denies Stannis because "Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa" tells me he doesn't actually think less of women who follow traditional roles. If he did, he could easily think Sansa wouldn't be able to handle it, or doesn't deserve it because she's a woman.
Now, like I said, I'm no book scholar, so maybe there's some other point where Jon's like "women are stupid and useless" but I'm not remembering them.
.
TL;DR: Jon is a teenage boy who grew up in a misogynistic society, who has one negative thought about a generic willowly creature, but when he actually knows women, seems to respect them well enough
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Sorry anon, I know this was supposed to be a writing prompt, I just couldn't make it into an actual story. But I still had thoughts about it. clearly lol
now, if anyone disagrees with me on any of this, that's fine! This is just my opinion and conclusions I've come to, all while having a very pro-Jon and pro-Jonsa bias (and as someone who spent most of their child/teen years resenting the color pink and pop music and girly girls, only to grow up and realize I like all of those things, along with my grunge music and horror movies and questionable taste in fashion)
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Since everyone is confessing- I started reading the books when I was 15 so my reading comprehension was... ok-ish. But I'd already decided to love Sansa because I was sick of books shitting on girly girls. I thought J*nerys was gonna be a thing but I didn't like it. I thought it was boring and bland. And S*nsan I had no idea what to think about- there was no way of getting around the age diff, he was a pretty useless guy and also too low-born. It was unrealistic.
Then somewhere bw ACOK and ASOS I decided to check out the spec on Tumblr....and you can guess the kind of shit I came across lol. I couldn't exactly refute them tho I thought the three headed dragon theory somehow went against the spirit of ASOIAF. BUT I guess S6 had just come out the year before (I wasn't paying attention to the show then) so I came across some Jonsa stuff. I liked the idea, but I was not convinced it would be canon.....but then I kept reading and I started seeing stuff. Jon fantasised about having a wife and kids and I thought hmm didn't I just see this somewhere?? Sansa could taste the snowflakes on her lips 👀👀👀👀👀and then she was "wildly in love with Waymar". I thought who tf is Waymar??? OH THAT GUY who...for some reason had the exact same physical description as Jon snow within like 20 pages of each other? I remembered because it had been so damn odd.
And then I reached ADOD and I read the chapter where D is hearing petitions. The petition with the lady who left her house only to come back and find it taken over by slaves stuck out to me, and when D gave her ruling on that- I knew. She's never gonna sit on the IT. I was already very dubious about J*nerys since D kept bashing on Starks and since I could NOT imagine a story where the North would not be independent by the end. Sorry but you don't introduce an independence plot and then end it with their continued subjugation. AND THEN. I read about Jon remembering Sansa brushing her hair and singing followed by you know nothing, Jon Snow. THAT was when I lost my shit.
Still I didn't get very into the fandom then. I was like yea Jonsa has a lot of potential to become canon and it's my preferred ship and the fics are great. Then few months back I thought how's the asoiaf fandom doing and I checked out Tumblr. First place I find- the university and it has no Jonsa. I'm like ???? So I searched around and found the pol!Jon theory. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna go see for myself. So I watched the show and here I am.
That is a LONG story 😬
I love your story. :) I'm impressed. When I was 15, I was struggling my way through The Catcher in the Rye, trying to retain anything.
It's so depressing knowing people find the university before anything else. You made it though!
And yes, what a game changer:
Of Sansa, brushing out Lady's coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow.
<3
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hi fellow Hazamada appreciator, may I have some hcs for him as a friend? I just think he’s neat 👉👈
Anon, marry me. /hj /p
OFC OFC OFC!! :D... a Hazamada request... thank you anon! I'll try my best. I don't know if you wanted head canons + scenarios and Idk how to FUCKING WRITE. But thats not important. I hope this suffices? If not thats my bad lol. (These are just personal head canons on how I view the character sorry if you disagree)
Warnings: Cursing, Hazamada
If you're his friend you probably like anime or manga. If not you're probably a fellow stand user or some other alternative.
If you don't like anime nor manga be prepared for him to either yell and hiss at you (/hj) or end up recommending a lot of shows. Probably wants to have a sleepover with you because "We're friends now!" and to not force you to watch anime
He's pretty much down to talk about whatever you want to but if you let him rant about manga he'll be so happy. He's sharing his theories with you and favorite characters.
Depending on how close the two of you are Hazamada likes to sneak out with reader to just hang out at a park and talk,, at like 3am while he's tired,,, (Sits on the swing while at the park while swinging, falls asleep sometimes and falls off)
(modern AU thingy) He likes looking at cosplays and fucking SPAMS THEM TO YOU.
it's unhealthy tbh. /j
If you make fun of his forehead I can't guarantee that you'll survive, or have two eyes. (/hj)
He might yell at you. or hiss
He's a little weird, well maybe not a little, we've all seen that mf. Anyways, don't be surprised if you walk into the room and see a cutesy and girly manga.
Doesn't know how respond to you venting.
Don't get me wrong, he'll comfort you and all but it makes him feel awkward. Like "Am I doing this righT-"
Is very polite to your parents.
Yk when your friend comes over and your parents are like "Yes my other son/daughter!" and see said friend as innocent even tho when your parents aren't looking they're just as chaotic and dumb as you? Thats Hazamada. And Okuyasu and Josuke and ya you get it
Refuses to explain the mannequin in his closet/room unless you have a stand of your own or bribe him.
If you're just as much as an incel and bitch as him you might fight a lot, BUT ITS ONLY ABOUT STUPID SHIT LIKE "COLORED MANGA IS BETTER THAN UNCOLORED MANGA DUMB BITCH"
After the whole not defeating Josuke and Rohan thing he probably complains about how sexualized Misty is.
brags about skipping tennis a lot /hj
Another shitty thing bc Im in a Hazamada mood lol
You had been waiting in front of your porch for Hazamada, you were wearing a T shirt, sweat pants, slippers and jacket around your waist. It was around 2:40AM.
You looked up from the ground to see Hazamada slightly smiling at you, "Uhm, are your parents asleep?" Hazamada queried looking at your house, "Don't know, don't care. Let's just go." Hazamada giggled silently after you said that gesturing for you to follow him.
Hazamada and you had been walking to a nearby park, the walk was a bit silent. The cold air of Morioh caused Hazamada to shiver.
Once you both arrived Hazamada booked it to the swings, "You still like Junko?" you asked lifting your eyebrows slightly, "Uhm, I haven't really been focusing on her." Hazamada answered as he went back and forth. "Can I push you?" "Hell no! You'll push off the fuckin' swing!" the small boy jokingly snapped at you. "I told you, I did that by accident." You defended yourself with a smile remembering when Hazamada fell face forward off the swing.
#hazamada x reader#hazamada toshikazu#hazamada toshikazu x reader#platonic x reader#platonic headcanons#platonic plot#jojo#jjba#jojos bizzare adventure fanart#diamond is unbreakable
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I feel like by now, if you didn't know that JKR made her books just a little misogynistic, you were hiding under a rock. Like yes, Hermione is a strong female character, but she said she made her as a sort of ugly duckling character that grew to be beautiful. WHY CANT SHE BE BEAUTIFUL FROM THE BEGINNING? Or WHY DOES SHE HAVE TO BE UGLY AT ALL?? Associating how much beauty one has with their intelligence is pure bullshit, and that right there is misogynistic. JKR is kinda misogynistic. I said it.
Also, to add to what I said about lavender and JKR and misogyny ect bc I have a character limit for some reason, was JKR just not loved enough by her partner or something? Like what is so wrong with just loving someone that you have to go and make one of your charcters get treated like trash bc of it? Hmm, nothing! You have internalized and fucked up issues bc of it. And that makes you a shitty person for doing that JKR. It really does. 2/2
I tried to keep my response short but it didn’t happen, I’m sorry. So if you want to hear me ramble on about Harry Potter and the internalised misogyny in it, please read :)
She is and I fucking hate it.
Like I really need to control myself because I could write a whole novel about this so I will try to keep this really short.
I know I said I never related to a character 100% but I simplified a really odd struggle I went through reading Harry Potter because I was 100% Hermione. Like down to the frizzy hair and the stubbornness and the fact that I took more classes than anyone at school, like I was all of her good and all of her bad.
But I hated it and I would get so upset whenever people said I was like Hermione and I think part of it had to do with the fact that they ‘perfectified’ her in the movies - which made her actually even more unlikeable and also made me think that I actually wasn’t Hermione because I wasn’t perfect - and the other part of it was that no one liked Hermione :(
Like everyone insulted her because she was a ‘know-it-all’ and she was only pretty when she tamed her frizzy hair and everything that she had that I saw in myself was made fun of or was annoying and when those things were gone she was liked.
And like you can have a character with flaws that other people don’t like without harming innocent young minds - it has been done!
Anyways I could go on and on about all the things I think are lowkey misogynistic and I will list them here because I want to share my opinions with people but none of my friends like Harry Potter
Literally what you said about Hermione and the ugly duckling trope which is so harmful to young girls who are positioned to look up to her as a heroine? (Make it make sense Joanne 😡)
The whole phlegm thing - I feel like this is a little out of character and like okay maybe Ginny didn’t like her because she didn’t want bill to leave (🥺) like he was the oldest, I get it, but the only reason they hate her is because she is pretty and trying to voice her opinions :(
Fleur in the tournament - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I know Fleur couldn’t save Gabrielle because Harry had to save her and I know she couldn’t actually get to the cup in the maze, but !! It also doesn’t sit right with me that she is the only competitor not to complete two tasks
Fleur and Hermione - even though I do not agree with the way Lavender and Hermione were pitted against each other I also feel like it is kinda in character for Hermione to react the way she did (even though I think any time two girls are pitted against each other for a boy is bad writing I can maybe like 5% understand this - but also take away that 5% because their is definitely a subtext that Lavender is annoying because she is ‘girly’ - so I understand it 0% and idk where I’m going with this anymore) but Hermione had no reason to not like Fleur. Like she did not like her even in their fourth year even though they had never spoken !!
The whole Lavender thing - and I’m sorry the way that Ron speaks about her as if she’s annoying and he tries to escape her, like you said, I’m sorry that she loves you?? Like I know it was a bit intense but if he wasn’t head over heels for her he should’ve broken up with her a lot earlier and not dragged it on and led her on!!
The way that Umbridge is described - I know that Umbridge is a horrible person and I am not trying to defend her at all !! But I find it very odd that one side of her personality is just being girly which is definitely used against her because Harry always comments on how ugly her things are are. Like I get pink isn’t for everyone and I know when you hate someone everything they do is annoying, but like this is how Umbridge is introduced - The witch spoke in a fluttery, girlish, high-pitched voice that took Harry aback; he had been expecting a croak. Like she is introduced as being girly and idk it just doesn’t sit right with me.
That stupid emotional range of a teaspoon comment - Sorry, I forgot, women are just really overdramatic and sensitive and boys don’t cry and therefore could not understand the female brain - not even when they are sharing the trauma of losing someone
Harry and Cho - do you really expect me to believe that Harry Potter - the boy who spent his summer holidays after his fourth year having nightmares and feeling horrible about Cedric’s death - witnessed Cho Change - the girl who was dating Cedric - crying at the mention of Cedric (not that long after he died!) and went ‘lol why tf this bitch crying?’ and also don’t get me started on their date in the book because that angered me on levels you don’t understand. Like Cho’s reaction is what positioned a lot of people to dislike her. After five years of harry Harry Potter and the other two fuck up your school year I feel like everyone in Hogwarts knows that Harry, Ron and Hermione are like the best of fucking friends and Cho’s reaction honestly just felt like it was put in for entertainment purposes but I was not entertained.
Snape and Lily - Yes I do think its reasonable that Snape got angry over never getting any pussy and decided to take it out on defenceless children. He is my hero.
Draco and Hermione - look, I have nothing against people who ship fanon dramione because in very simplified terms they do make for the perfect love/hate trope and sometimes things aren’t really serious and it is just a means of escapism. But canon dramione is a horrible concept and I cannot believe that she actually considered making them date. Like yes, that is a really nice message to send to young and impressionable minds - I’m sorry but if that was canon it would be no more better than a ‘I’m dating my bully’ wattpad story.
Anyways, I’m sorry I went on a massive but I’ve been holding this in for too long :( Basically the point of this is that I really do think pitting women against each other for very simple reasons and setting up a character as unlikeable because they like traditional girly things is really bad writing and you know what? I could honestly forgive that because it was quite a while ago - and even though I’m not trying to defend it or say that it was right- stuff like this was normal in media and entertainment and if she came out and said ‘yeah it was kinda shitty when I made everyone dislike the actual goddess Fleur Delacour because she was pretty’ I would be like ‘yeah, you’re right’ and move on with my life. But she didn’t and instead she showed us that she was transphobic and horrible and just plain misogynistic and now I (obviously) can’t move on.
#if you couldn't tell i really dont like jk rowling#my rants#im so sorry#i feel like i took this way too far but I wrote it all out and im not deleting it now
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Fanfic Friday #12
Welcome to Fanfic Friday! Each Friday I post a new here and on A03. Enjoy x
Read and save it on A03 here https://archiveofourown.org/works/34123603
{whatever it is a scar rememebers}
Ships: Sam Wilson/Bucky Barnes
Warnings: mentions of underage drinking, smoking, swearing, mentions of canon typical violence. it's a fluff piece tho :)
“She’s just a little girl. Come on Buck, we have to help her,” Sam said, cuddling into Bucky’s side.
“Sam, she’s, she’s our enemy.”
“That depends on how you view it.”
“Come on.”
“Buck, please. She is just trying to make a statement. She hasn’t done any real bad yet.”
“Yet, Sammy, see how you said yet. You know how much she is capable of.”
“Yes, without our help and guidance. She’s just, just lost.”
“I will always back you. Always. It’s not me you need to worry about.”
“This is our mission. We get to decide how it gets done, the other avengers have their own.”
“That’s directly ignorant of the fact we all need to sign off on mission plans. That’s the deal, that’s why we get to operate in our wide jurisdiction.”“Baby, step back. Look at this for real.”
“I know Sammy, I swear. She’s just a girl, and you’ve always had more compassion than me. So convince all the Avengers and I will follow you wherever.”
“I’m putting together the mission plan, and I will get it signed.”
“Good. Now, can we please go to sleep.”
“Yes. Love you.’
“Love you more.”The next morning when they awoke, Sam did not bother waking for Bucky to wake up. Naturally, when Bucky did wake he reached over for Sam and did not find him. Bucky panicked, they had fallen into an unbreakable routine. Sam would always wait up for him. What had happened to his boy?
“Friday, is Sam okay?” he asked, panicked.
“Yes, he is just on a run with steve. He asked me to inform you that he was planning to get Steve to sign first.”
“Oh, oh, thanks Fri,” he said, and then under his breath muttered, “I’m going to kill him.”
“Kill who?” Sam said, entering all sweaty.
“Samuel Thomas Wilson, how dare you?” Buck said, only half joking.
“What baby?”
“I woke up without you next to me.”
“Had things to do sweetheart,” Sam explained, changing into some sweatpants and a hoodie.
“More important than cuddling me.”
“Unfortunately so,” he said, putting deodorant on.
“You're supposed to say nothing is more important than you.”
“Buck, cut the melodramatics.”
“Sam, you stole my morning cuddles from me. That is a serious offense.”
Sam climbed back into bed and pulled bucky in.
“You okay now?”
“Yes.”
“Got all the Avengers signatures.”
Bucky just smiled. Sam and his determination.
“When do we leave?”
“Two days time. Flight out at 8 O’clock in the morning. We got intel Karli will be stationed in Latvia.”
“Okay, guess we’re going then.”
“Yes we are.”Somehow they ended up with Karli in custody, and as negotiated by Sam, she would be staying in the compound under his guidance, following a strict routine each day.
“So, in the morning you will be woken at 8 am sharp. Breakfast is from 8-8:30, then your school day starts. School is from 8:30 till 2 Monday through Friday. After that there will be therapy for an hour. After that you have training for 2 hours. Any additional activities you wish to take can be negotiated.”
“Sounds like hell,” she commented.
“Hey it’s either this or prison, pick your poison.”
“Oh how I wish it were poison. What does training mean?”
“Learning to fight with control and releasing your anger.”
“Sounds alright.”
“Good.”
“And I’m off the hook anytime after 5?”
“Yes. Free to do what you wish on the compound. You’ve been fitted with a GPS, that’s the bracelet, and so you can’t really leave.”
“Is this legal?”
“Yes, very. Oh and you’re required to be at dinner, whatever time that may take place.”
“Dinner?”
“Avengers are a family, and we have family dinners. Sort of.”
“That’s uncomfortable.”
“Get used to it.”
“No thanks.”
“You need help getting settled in?”
“Nope.”It was her third day and it was 8 in the morning and she was being woken up.
“JUST FUCK OFF YOU STUPID MACHINE,” she yelled.
Bucky almost instantly showed up at her door.
“Aren't you supposed to be awake right now?”
“Everyone needs to fuck the hell off before I beat the shit out of you.”
“Alright girlie, calm down. I’m a super soldier too ya know.”
“What the hell.”
“Take a chill pill.”
“Did you really just say that?”
“Yes. Now what is going on? Use your big girl words.”
“I swear to god.”
“What?”
“Everything is so goddamn structured
here. Family dinners are so awkward. Therapy is downright stupid, and school, school just sucks.”
“Fair enough. It’s your own fault though.”
“Huh?”
“Shouldn’t have gone for the whole terrorist vibe. Anyway, the more days you complete, the more freedom you get. We have some kids in the compound. Get to know them, they’re a good time. Especially Peter. They have their own thing, and they have a good time together.”
“Are you actually dumb? They don’t want to be my friend.”
“On the contrary. Most of them understand youth discussion and want to make the world a better place.”
“Everyone here is so nice, what the fuck. You’re supposed to hate me.”
“I’ve done enough hating for a lifetime. Plus, everyone here is supposed to hate me, too. Turns out that’s not how it works. I’ve become a big brother, a boyfriend, a friend. They make you better, just let them. Let Sam. He really does care about you kid, he put in a real shift to get you here. He gets it.”
“I-”
“Don’t worry about words. Get ready for school, see you at breakfast a bit, yeah?”
“Yeah.” she said hesitantly.Bucky went back into his and Sam’s room.
“To think you said you were bad with kids.”
“I- eavesdropper.”
“More like an attentive listener.”
“I just told her what she needed to hear.”
“You made yourself vulnerable to make her feel less vulnerable.”
“Sure, whatever.”
Sam leant into Bucky for a kiss, glad to have him backing his plays. Always.After some time, Karli was seemingly getting the hang of this whole new life. She was saying more than a word per day, actually doing the work assigned to her, and finally she was speaking to some people around the compound.
“Hey Karli, how’s the day?” Peter said, swinging round to the gym she was training at.
“Yeah alright. How ‘about you spiderboy?”
“Heyyyy it’s man.”
“Sure, sure.’
“It was fine, too. Pretty easy to be honest.”
“You’ve got to help me get this maths shit sorted.”
“Wanna head to the lab?”
“Gotta finish up two hours, almost done though.”
“Haven’t you got a trainer?”
“Yeah, used to. Prefer doing it alone, sparing with you and nat on occasion.”
“Makes sense. Never liked the guy to be fair.”
“See you in the lab in 20?”
“Sure thing. Bring your books.”
“Alright,” she said, and Peter began to leave.
“Hey Peter.”
“Yep?”
“Thanks, really. For all of this.”
“Course, your family now, aren't ya.”
Karli just smiled. Then, once Peter had left, she let the few tears that were welling up fall.“Dinner’s in 10,” Sam said, entering the lab.
“Fanks Sam.”
“Yup.”
“What do you think it is?”
“One can only hope Loki cooked.”
“Hmn. And that Doctor Banner didn’t.”
Peter laughed then agreed.
“We should go up and help with the set up,” Karli suggested.
“Yeah sounds good. I’ll meet you up there, just gotta finish this blueprint”
“See ya mate.”
“See ya.”So, Karli was settling into her new life with her new people. It was scary. She wasn’t used to being cared for and looked after. If she drank too much one night, no one would care. If she smokes, no one gives a crap. If she never did her homework, it didn’t matter. Those things took some getting used to.“No, it is a big deal.”
“It was a drunk night, come off of it Sam.”
“Come off of it? What do you think this is?”
“What? I’m legal in England, drunk all the time before.”
“This ain’t before anymore. Plus, you are not legal in England, you’re seventeen.”
“Yeah, I can get a drink at a pub with a parent's consent,” Karli muttered, fighting a meaningless battle.
“Well you don’t have that consent.”
“Good thing I don’t have a parent,” she rolled her eyes.
“Come on kid! It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a parent, you have a family. A family that cares a lot about you. They don’t want you to drink to be happy or smoke and get yourself cancer. How hard is that to understand?”
“We ain’t a family.”
“What are we then? Last time I check we qualify for a stupid, messed up, family.”
“Just fuck off about it,” she said, trying to end the conversation.
“Why? Why Karli? Because it’s so hard to imagine that we love you and value you in our lives.”
“Yes! All that shit!”
“Oh for fuck sake. Bucky, then Steve, fucking
Peter, you’re all the same.”
“What are you on about?”
“You don’t think you deserve it.”
“I-i-”
“You don’t think you are good enough for all this.”
“Cause I’m not! I’m not like you guys, I’m not good. I’m not a hero.”
“Why? Because you were a kid and you made some dumbass mistakes. Because you’re more a pessimist than an optimist. Last time I checked, that does not make you a bad person.”
“Whatever.”
“Not whatever Karli. You did and do want to help people, that makes you a hero.”
“Not how I did it.”
“Maybe not. But how you are doing and how you will do it. That does. And none of that shit matters anyway, you belong here, with us. In this family. And you, more than anyone, deserve it.”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yes, alright. Thank you,” Karli said, finally smiling, “Don’t get all sappy on me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, kid.”
“I love ya.”
“I love you, too,” he said, giving her a hug.
“We done with this self-hate thing?”
“Workin on it, alright?”
“Alright.”
So, Sam left with a smile and headed downstairs to get some actual work done.
Read and save it here on A03 https://archiveofourown.org/works/34123603.
*Also this was posted many days late and it's deffo not a friday, sorry :)
#sambucky#sam wilson#bucky barnes#sambucky fic#sam x bucky#found family#avengers fanfic#avengers family#fluff
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Stupid random theories, headcanons, and unpopular opinions of mine
Btw, these are all long so sit tight
My mangle theory :
I cant be the only one here who thinks that mangle was taken apart by little kids. It wouldn't make sense that little toddlers would be strong enough to pull apart a metal robot. That's because the kids didnt break her, william did. Mangle seems like he was an inspiration from funtime foxy because sister location happened before AND a lot of times, "toy foxy" is often referred to "funtime foxy". Due to this inspiration, mangle had the ability to record voices and things just like funtime foxy. Why am I pointing this out? Well, why would mangle randomly have static noises and a broken radio sound? It's her recorder, it's broken. He recorded many things and then recorded something that someone didnt want anyone to find out about. That someone would be William afton. William is always suspicious and doing evil things.Let's say that, oh idk, maybe William murdered someone, some person called the cops on him, (which explains the police messages n stuff in the radio) William killed that person and his the evidence of the murders. At least that's what he thought. Mangle was somehow recording the whole thing. William had no other choice but to take her apart and destroy him. But then William thought that it would to suspicious to have mangle be randomly broken the next day and so he fixed mangle up in way where it looks like shes fixed, but one tug hes broken and the kids are there to blame for. All of this might be a stretch I know, but apparently in one of the fnaf 2 minigames where theres a mangle Sprite, in the files or sources codes or WHATEVER IDK, there's a hidden message that says "he was here" or something like that. THAT CAN SUPPORT THIS THEORY errr headcanons? Idk I should go sleep lol
Micheal headcanon:
I always wanted to believe that Micheal was the older brother/Bully and that the bite victim was a different character. Why? Because I want more..character for Micheal. He went to sister location because he wants his torn apart family to be back together. He went to save Elizabeth and he never forgave himself for being the one to 'kill' his brother and all that failed. I wanted Michaels story to be exciting and emotional because of his past and the whole family thing
I also always liked to think that Micheal started working out to gain some strength before becoming a technician because he knows that the robots are strong and dangerous. That way things can be more action packed with Michael punching through pipes and walls, and holding back animatronics trying to grab him, and just...cool stuff
Fnaf headcanons:
Freddy has a nice deep voice and that's his real voice. When it comes to preforming during the day, he talks in his "family friendly" voice which is all goofy and fun (kinda like Patrick star's voice) The animatronics are a lot different on stage. It's as if they play as characters and they change their voices sometimes (like Freddy). Chica acts like this ditzy cute country gal, Bonnie is a laid back chill bon, foxy is just more ...pirate, and Freddy is a fun loving silly lead singer
Nightmarriones pupils change shape to Express his emotions. (Sad=tear drop pupils, sick=swirly pupils, angry=skull or fire pupils)
Lefty has his own voice instead of a whispery girly voice because he is his own character. He may look like the rockstars but he was made differently. The rockstars were built by some factory or company and they have advanced technology which gives em the ability to have emotions, personalities and to do tricks. Meanwhile lefty was built by henry in a shed or something. Henry only focused on programming him to find charlie and he had to make lefty look like the rockstars to blend in and not be suspicious. Other than that, lefty was a total rush job. Henry only wanted Charlie therefore, Henry didn't care to give lefty a personality, emotions, an EYE, or stablness.
In the afton family, the mother is sweet, kind, caring, and over protective while william is outgoing, silly, and isnt afraid to do anything (before he went insane). Usually kids have similar personalities to their parents soooo I like to think that Micheal is more like his mom but looks like his dad and that Elizabeth looks like her mom but acts like her dad. Why? Because I always saw Michael as a hero, he cares for others and he wants to save his family. He is sweet and protective like his mom. Elizabeth is rebellious and sassy. In the sister location mini cutscene with William and Elizabeth, she disobeys william to see baby and that's a rebellious move. Elizabeth likes adventure and crazy things so she wont follow the rules any time soon.
Funtime chica does all the rockstar's make up. When months pass by, the rockstar's paint would peel or chip and so ft. Chica would repaint their lipsticks, eye shadows, cheeks, etc. And they look fresh and new afterwards
Even though puppet and Goldie (and all the other animatronics) have been through so much shiz, they still try to keep their cool and enjoy life
In the rockstar crew r. Bonnie is the creepiest. Yeah, he seems chill and is self centered, he is the only rockstar who is most likely to murder someone if he's told to do so (this isn't counting ucn where they all kill). All on Bonnie's songs are so creepy and he sings about killing you in unique ways. Stuff like making slivers (or slippers) out of you, flaying your flesh, smashing your face into concrete, ending your life, and stabbing your heart with his guitar. He's definitely into gory stuff
Springtrap has two different personalities. Most of the time he's himself, spring bonnie. A kind fun loving bun who completely changed his personality after becoming springtrap. He is know constantly scared, upset, and afraid of Williams next move. He hates being an evil monster but it's not something he can control due to William still having control over him. When the slringbonnie side of springtrap gets mad or upset that's when hes weak and William takes control and becomes the evil side of springtrap. Springtrap is very aggressive and very strong. Slringbonnie tries to fight back Williams spirit, but as time went on and when the kids got sent free, spring bonnie got lonely and gave up which let William take full control over him. Sprjngbonnie is gone, its William now (which explains scraptrap)
Idk if this is a theory or headcanon but fnaf 1 bonnie is blue. Yes, he is known to be purple and everyone says and draws him purple but he's blue. Maybe it's the certain blue color he is but due to lightning it makes him look very purple. When he's in more darker areas, bonnie is very blue but when he's in the light areas, hes purple. Let's not forget how every single version on bonnie is blue (except for extras like spring springbon and bonnet etc.) Exept for fnaf 1 bonnie. That doesn't make sense if one of the originals would be purple but all the other versions are blue. One more thing, in the silver eyes, they mention that bonnie has blue fur ;) this was a dumb rant sorry
Shadow bon is evil and can shape shift cause hes a goopy shadow boy and shadow fred is his lil assistant
After fazbears fright burned down, William got to take control over springbonnie(trap) and roamed the streets at night. He roamed dark allies and probably killed whoever slighted him. It was a long walk but he was just trying to get to his destination, fred bears diner. Because of the fires, the springtrap suit was more ruined and unsturdy and so it was time for a change. Somehow William got out of the suit but he's weak without one so he picked an old spring bonnie suit, scraptrap. (According to the fnaf minigames there are multiple spring bonnie suits so that why spring trap looks different)
I got more headcanons but this post is already to long :p
My Unpopular opinions:
Am I the only one here who's not way into the whole Michael AI theory?? Like it kinda makes sense but at the same time, making a whole new robot son with advanced technology IN THE 80s does not give the fnaf-y feel?? Ya know what I mean? Like it doesn't fit the theme? Also the ai thing is in the books and the books are a different universe from the games sooo idk why matpat still connected them?? Hsjsbsjsjsn fnaf is just waaaaay to confusing. Also please dont get mad at me for this opinion cause matpats ai thing is just a theory, its not canon
Foxy isnt super great. Dont get me wrong, I love foxy and he's an amazing character but I don't get why he got so much attention and hype
Bonnet and lolbit should just be canon already. They're not canon characters but they're included in sooo many things in fnaf so might as well make em canon
Funko needs to make a fnaf 2 figure set where you collect t.chica,t.bonnie,t.freddy, puppet, one of the withereds or shadows and you collect them all to make a mangled mangle figure. I would DIE for a fully formed noodle fox figure, how cool would that be?
Scraptrap design is perfect. I know that we all make peanut and Jimmy neutron jokes but honestly I love his sharp teach, creepy eyes, AMazInG voice, and his stabby arm. Sometimes in some angles, he can look heck a creepy
SCRAP BABY LEGITIMATELY FREAKS ME OUT SHES SCARY
butter sock
#fnaf#five nights at freddy's#fnaf sister location#sister location#fnaf ucn#fnaf theories#fnaf headcanon#im sooooo tired#all of these are dumb but i just wanted to get em off my chest#not art#yay
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Les Mis London - 18/06/19
Just some notes from the performance last night! They’re a good cast, but the real knockout performance was Bradley Jaden as Javert - he’s the best Javert I’ve ever seen live, and damn - Stars brought the house down.
Enjolras & Grantaire
> Enjolras seemed much more book canon in this performance? Like had two modes - “I am speechifying” and “what are emotions I’m confused,” which was really evident in his interactions with Grantaire because Grantaire’s performance was so much more of the emotional heart of Les Amis (Adam Filipe was excellent and is kind of canon for me now), which makes sense considering the fact the others don’t really get characters per se in the stage show. Like R didn’t once pick up a gun at the barricade, he’s always the one hugging everyone, chivvying Gavroche around the stage etc. You definitely got a sense of Grantaire the cynic and the drunkard, but not Grantaire the obnoxious asshole which was interesting.
> Lots of longing looks (especially on R’s part at Enjolras). Like to a shipper, you could probably read Samuel Edwards’ Enjolras as “has feelings but has no idea what to do about them/ is super busy planning a revolution.” Especially in the bit in Drink With Me, and Grantaire like collapses against Enjolras, and Enjolras stands there for a moment and then hugs him and it’s like “oh, hugs, I know how to do those!” kind of went off in his brain. But apart from that it was a lot of “manly shoulder slaps” on E’s part, which again, could read as emotionally illiterate.
> Enjolras was also very sarcastic - when Marius is being a romantic dork, Enjolras just gives him this really sarcastic thumbs-up, like “are you done now” and that was hilarious. He also pulls this chair out really elegantly in the “Marius you are no longer a child,” bit and sits down just to get right on Marius’ level to deliver the “who cares about your lonely soul” line straight at his face and then is right back on his feet for the rest of the verse which was hilarious too.
Gavroche
> Was so tiny! So tiny! And a really good actor!
Javert & Valjean
> Bradley Jaden was incredible, and the tension between Javert and Valjean was so good, like this is the first performance I’ve watched where I’m like “yeah, that could *definitely* be something there.” There’s a moment in the Confrontation where they are leaning over opposite ends of Fantine’s bed, over her dead body, and man, you could just cut it with a knife!
> At the musical climax of Stars, Javert kneels and crosses himself - lovely touch!
> Javert’s Suicide was anguished and heartbreaking and his absolute disintegration is really obvious - other Javerts I’ve seen have been more stoic, but man this worked!
Marius
> Was so bemused and awkward, and really captured the innocence and naivete without being annoying - his Heart Full of Love was so perfect (and again more book-canon, I felt). His relationship with Eponine was also genuinely sweet.
The ladies!!!
> Eponine and Fantine were awesome, Cosette played very very girly, which is fine and can suit her but can be annoying at times (I prefer her a little more serious?)
> Eponine really fought people, especially her father’s gang in The Robbery, and Attack on the Rue Plumet.
> Carly Stenson as Fantine is a study in how to go from a very pretty I Dreamed a Dream to total and utter breakdown - people who’ve seen this cast, have they made Bamabatois more grim? Because it certainly felt like it - he was doing something weird with his tongue and urgh.
The Thenardiers
> Thenardier had a really strong Scottish accent, which I just kept forgetting in between his lines and then he’d open his mouth and I’d be like “huh” and it was fabulous.
> Madame Thenardier was played as cleverer, which was interesting - during the Waltz of Treachery, she kept coming out with her lines and Thenardier would look at her like “what the hell are you doing woman...okay, okay, I’ll go along with it!” which felt different.
So basically: very good cast, I’m sad about the end of the Turntable Era, but I’m looking forward to the new production and staging they’re doing after the refurbishment of the Queen’s Theatre!
EDIT: I wrote Raymond Walsh but I’ve just been watching videos on Youtube and I was mistaken - I saw Adam Filipe’s Grantaire, sorry for the mistake!
#les mis#les miserables#west end les miserables#review#enjoltaire#sam edwards#performance notes#javert#2019 west end cast#adam filipe
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Double Date Night
Read on AO3
Fandom: Persona 5
Ships: Shiann, Ryushima
Summary: Shiho, Ann, Yuuki, and Ryuji have a double date planned-but what do they do when Shiho’s still-recovering body has other plans for her?
Notes: Okay there’s a lot of reasons I wrote this fic, but it can basically be boiled down to wanting some gay shit, and wanting people to appreciated Shiho and Yuuki and their potential for friendship more (though the latter ended up…not showing as much as I would have liked). Canon sucks, I’m the writer now, and I will not be stopped.
I have the fic posted here, but please give it a look on AO3 as well, and maybe leave kudos and/or comments! It’d mean a lot to me.
Months had passed since Shiho’s release from the hospital, and things were going rather well. Her biggest problems were she still had to go to physical therapy weekly, and couldn’t walk on her own most days. At the very least, she needed a cane, which didn’t bother her too much. The cane was cool, Ann helped her paint it, and she got compliments on it all the time. On worse days she needed crutches, a little less enjoyable but still tolerable. Then there were wheelchair days. Shiho hated wheelchair days. Lots of places were very inaccessible, and she always got looks, or people trying to help when she didn’t need it. If she had to use the wheelchair, she would rather not go out at all. But overall, she made amazing progress in her recovery. Not just physically, but mentally.
She was never able to return to playing volleyball at her new school, even if she could have physically, but she found joy in watching her former teammates play and almost never missed a Shujin game. She always made sure to be the loudest, most excited fan she could be. She made more friends, and would hang out with those friends when she could. Yuuki became her closest friend. Neither of them really talked when they played together, but they found out they had so much in common from both being trans to having similar struggles in life, and their friendship just stuck. He even helped her with asking Ann out, in return for her helping him ask Ryuji out. The four of them actually had a double date planned, a fairly common occurrence for them. The plan for this one was a movie, shopping, and dinner. However, it seemed that Shiho’s body had other plans.
She woke up nearly paralyzed by pain, so much just pulling herself out of bed made her feel like she just ran 100 laps. Why today of all days? She sat back in bed and pulled out her phone to text Ann.
Shiho: Hey…I don’t think I’m going to be able to go out today.
Ann: Everything okay?
Shiho: Not really. I can barely move. I’d have to use the chair. I really don’t want to have to get around in it. Sorry. You three can still go without me.
Ann: I’ll let the guys know. I hope you feel better soon. <3
Shiho: <3
Ann sighed as she looked at the texts again. She hated having to see Shiho hurt so much. They were all looking so forward to today, too… Sure, Ann could just go with the Yuuki and Ryuji but that defeated the whole purpose of the day… She couldn’t just let their day be cut short like that. She had a plan. It wasn’t guaranteed to work, but it was worth a shot. She made a group chat for her and the guys and sent a text.
Ann: Shiho’s not doing well today. She cancelled our plans.
Ryuji: Damn. Pain again I’m guessing?
Ann: Yeah…
Yuuki: It feels wrong to go without her…should we just reschedule?
Ann: No, I have a plan. Meet me in the underground mall. Bring something fun to do.
Ryuji: Gotcha.
Yuuki: See you soon!
The three met up in the underground mall a little over an hour later, Yuuki with some puzzle books and board games, Ryuji with some video games and DVDs, and Ann with makeup, magazines, and flowers she just bought.
“So I guess the plan is we surprise Shiho with all of this?” Yuuki asked.
“Yep! I can’t say for sure if she’ll like it or not, but I want to try. I’d hate just leaving her out…” Ann’s voice faded a bit, but picked up as she smiled. “So we’re gonna bring the double date to her!”
“Hell yeah!” Ryuji cheered. “Let’s get going!” He started to run off, then stopped a few feet away. “Wait uh…where’s she live again?”
Ann sighed and shook her head. “You’re hopeless… Why did you run off if you don’t know? I’ll lead you guys there.”
There was a short train ride to the Suzui residence, during which the three excitedly talked about what they brought and their plans, and shared their hopes that Shiho would enjoy their day together. Before too long, they were in front of the house. Ann rang the doorbell, and an older woman, Shiho’s mother, answered the door. She smiled as soon as she saw the three.
“Oh, are you three here to see Shiho? She’ll be so happy…she’s in her room right now.” She welcomed the three in, they took off their shoes, and went over to Shiho’s room quietly.
Ann knocked gently on the door, and Shiho called back. “It’s open…” Her voice sounded rather gloomy and strained. It hurt all three of her guests to hear it. Still, they all three kept smiles on their faces as Ann opened the door.
“Surprise!” Ann said cheerfully. “Hope you don’t mind that we showed up.”
Shiho’s whole face lit up slowly when she saw the three. Her pained, grim expression turned into a wide smile, and small tears of joy formed in her eyes. “You three…I told Ann you could go on without me…”
“Well sure,” Ryuji said. “But it wouldn’t be much of a double date if half of one of the couples was gone, would it?”
“We all made sure to bring something to do.” Yuuki showed off the books and games he brought. “We want to make sure your day in is a fun one.“
"Thanks, guys…” Shiho sniffled.
Ann went over to the bed. “I got you these too,” She said as she placed the flowers on the end table and sat on the edge of the bed. “So what do you want to do? We have magazines, makeup, video games, movies, some puzzle books, board games…take your pick!”
Shiho thought for a second. “Oh! Let’s all do each other’s makeup!” She said excitedly.
“Ehhh, I think I’ll pass on that one,” Ryuji said. “That cutesy shit is more Yuuki’s thing.” He patted his boyfriend’s head, and got his hand swatted away in return.
“He’s terrible at makeup,” Yuuki added on. “He tried to do mine once and it was awful.”
“I didn’t even know what half that shit was!”
“It’s really not as hard as you’re acting like it is.”
“It is too! I don’t get how you keep up with all those brushes and colors and stuff…”
Shiho laughed softly at the little playful argument. “You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.”
“Yeah!” Ann agreed. “You can judge our looks instead.”
“Fine…” Ryuji grumbled softly. “But I’m warning you, I don’t know what’s good or bad…”
“Yuuki, can I do yours?” Shiho asked.
“And I wanna do yours, Shiho!” Ann said excitedly.
“I can do Ann’s then.” Yuuki said. “I actually have a look that’ll be perfect for you.”
The three took turns doing each other’s makeup, each person’s unique style showing up in the look of the person that did their makeup. Yuuki ended up with a simple, more natural look, Shiho with a very trendy girly look with lots of pink, and Ann with a more showy dramatic look.
“Alright, Ryuji. Who did best?” Ann asked with a confident grin. She was certain that she’d win.
Ryuji looked closely at the three, spending his time really studying each look and thinking long and hard about his decision. “Uh…they all look the same to me.” He finally said in defeat.
Ann and Yuuki both sighed. “They couldn’t be more different from each other!” Ann exclaimed.
Yuuki took a deep breath. “Ryuji…I say this with all the love I have in my heart…you are completely hopeless.”
Shiho laughed, a bit more than her previous laugh. “Okay, lay off him you two…let’s just call it a tie, okay? I think we all look amazing.”
“You’re way too nice to him, Shiho.” Ann said. “He’ll never learn if we lay off…but fine, if you insist.”
“How about instead, we let him pick what we do next!” Shiho smiled at Ryuji. “You brought some games right? How about we play something?”
“Hell yeah! I brought my full collection cause i wasn’t sure what you liked…” Ryuji brought a stack of games over to Shiho. “Go ahead, pick your favorite!”
Shiho looked at the games thoughtfully, and ultimately picked a co-op RPG they could play together with minimal competition. The four enjoyed their game together, to the point where Shiho’s mother had to come in and ask them to quiet down. They spent hours on the game, eventually coming to a stop when they realized how long it had been. “Wow…I usually don’t play that much,” Ann said with a soft laugh.
“Me either, I just got so caught up in working with everyone, I lost track of the time,” Shiho admitted.
“So…What’s next?” Yuuki asked. Before anyone could suggest their next activity, Shiho’s mother peeked in the room.
“Are you kids hungry? I’m making beef stew tonight!”
“Beef stew?!” Ryuji perked up excitedly. “I could go for some beef!”
“Where are your manners?!” Ann scolded. “Thank you, Mrs. Suzui. Food would be lovely. Do you need any help?”
Shiho’s mom shook her head. “No, no, I wouldn’t want to pull any of you away. I may need help bringing the food here, however. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
While dinner cooked, the four looked at some of Ann’s magazines. For all his griping about makeup, Ryuji was actually quite invested in the fashion (or maybe just the models) and was eager to point out some of his favorite looks, or outfits he thought would look good on others (mostly Yuuki, of course). Once Shiho’s mom called that dinner was ready, Ann went to the kitchen to help her carry the bowls into Shiho’s room. The four all sat and chatted about school, sports, and their other friends while they ate. Once they finished, Ann brought the bowls back to the kitchen, and the four spent some time playing some of the card games that Yuuki and brought.
“And a perfect match~!” Ann cheered, showing off her cards. “I win again!” She sung.
“Man, this is getting boring,” Ryuji whined. “How do you keep winning? You have to be cheating.”
“Or I’m just luckier than you,” Ann said, sticking her tongue out.
“I’m just not getting any matches!” Ryuji griped as he threw down his cards.
“Uh…Ryuji…sweetheart…” Yuuki looked over the cards on the ground. “You have 3 matches here.”
The others looked and sure enough, there were 3 matches scattered across Ryuji’s cards. “Wha…I…Damnit! It’s hard to tell when they’re all scattered like that!” Ryuji’s voice grew even more frustrated than it was over losing.
“You know if you sort them as you get them, that wouldn’t be a problem,” Shiho said. “That’s what I do.”
Ryuji looked at her in shock, completely dumbfounded by the fact that he hadn’t ever thought of that before. “That’s freakin’ genius!”
The four of them spent the rest of the night playing card games and board games, at some point also playing some movies and anime in the background. Before long, it was late into the night.
“We should probably get going,” Yuuki said, slowly rising to his feet. “Wouldn’t want to miss the train home.”
Ann got up and stretched. “I was actually going to stay the night if that’s okay with Shiho.”
“I can’t,” Ryuji said. “Gotta help my mom with chores tomorrow.”
“And I promised my sister we could play some games tonight,” Yuuki added on.
“Well, you two head back then. We don’t need you boys anyways,” Ann teased.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryuji grumbled before turning to Shiho. “Hope today helped you a bit.”
“Of course it did,” Shiho replied with a bright smile. She opened her arms for a hug. “Come over here.” Ryuji and Yuuki both accepted hugs before heading out and going home.
Once the boys were gone, Ann and Shiho spent the night cuddled up together talking for hours until they got tired.
“Hey Ann?” Shiho said softly as the two began to drift off. “Thanks for this.”
“Hey, it was the guys too,” Ann pointed out. “I can’t take all the credit.”
“But it was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“I mean yeah…but still, we all did our part because we wanted to see you happy.”
“I know you do…”
“I was kind of worried you might be mad to be honest. Like maybe we were being too intrusive or something.”
“Not at all! I’m…” Shiho found herself a bit choked up, but tried to fight back the tears. “I’m glad you all care so much. I felt so useless today but…you all made it a lot better.”
Ann smiled and kissed Shiho’s forehead. “I’m glad. That’s all I want to do for you, ever.”
“I love you so much, Ann. I don’t think I could ever thank you enough.”
“I love you too. Now let’s get some sleep, okay?”
The two fell asleep peacefully in each other’s arms, both so, so thankful for each other and all their friends
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Savin’s Answers from Twitter, Part 3!
Well, looks like it’s been nearly 2 years since the last SAfT post... sorry about that! Time really got away from me on this one. Due to the backlog, this post covers tweets from October 2017 through April 2018
As always, tweets are in order from most to least recent, and answers may not 100% true/canon since things may change during production of the sequel. Text is unedited save for formatting; in a few places I added [comments] for context.
Part 1 | Part 2
Also: If you’re going to ask Savin something, please be respectful and appropriate. He’s a person just like you and me.
@fictionjustis: Out of curiosity can a Nourasian and human have a child together? Also can humans conceive children with other humanoid species in the galaxy?
@EiffelSavin: I don't think any such birth have been recorded in the Oban universe, at least yet. But humans and Nourasians having a very similar DNA, it should be theoretically possible. There have been quite a few fanarts on that topics already 🙂
(x)
@PudgyDragonLair: Also how big is the Arrow in comparison to Molly like actually height and length?
@EiffelSavin: From my original notes:
Whizzing Arrow 1 - length 8m, height 7m, weight 10t
Whizzing Arrow 2 - length 10m, height 7m, weight 14t
to be compared with the final designs
(x)
@PudgyDragonLair: hey Savin I'm not sure if this would be considered a spoiler or not but how Long are Nourasian life spans in comparison to humans and other alien species?
@EiffelSavin: I'm not sure anymore. I'd have to find my old notes... But if Nourasians approximately live the same number of "years" as humans, they are "Nourasian years" which are much longer than our "Earth years" due to the longer distance between Nourasia and its sun. May be 2 or 3 times+
(x)
@JPLangley_: Something I've been wanting to ask is how was Eva able to get away with not following the gender-specific dress code at Stern? Did faculty just give up trying to discipline her since she nor Don didn't care?
@EiffelSavin: I think my justification for that was that Stern's school rules only stated that wearing the school uniform was compulsory, without specifically mentioning that the short dress was for girls and the long pants for boys. Also they had bigger issues with Eva than just her uniform.
(x)
@PudgyDragonLair: what was the Arrows original purpose before Don and the Goverment took it ? Me and my friend rewatched OSR and we noticed alot of things that would be atypical for a Star Racer (key among them a gun turrent ). Was the Arrow made to be some kind of stealth ship?
@PudgyDragonLair: It has capabilities to check Molly vitals and mental state while she s racing, as well as the hyperdldrives which I doubt would be allowed in racing circuits, and a remote access to the gun torrent, and hand off access shoukd the pilot be unable to man it.
@EiffelSavin: You got a point there. For better or worse army funding helps develop new technologies that are later reintroduced into civilian life/products. The "prototypes" Miguel had been working were not your typical star-racer and aimed at a different market...
(x)
[continued from thread below]
@Helloworld1012: And the fact that Eva was a beautiful young girl certainly didn’t hurt
@EiffelSavin: Yes but more than that the fact that she's not your typical girly girl beauty. A long haired bimbo would not have awoken Aikka's interest.
(x)
@ILOVE659709491: Is there any chance one of the reasons Eva was so quick to trust & befriend Aikka was because the prince’s personality was similar to her father’s personality before Maya’s death? Both were reserved,well cultured & gentlemanly but kind + both had a passion for racing
@EiffelSavin: Freud would like the implications no doubt, but I think the relationship with Aikka is more simple and direct. He's good looking, a prince, well mannered. She's feels rejected - especially by her dad - a bit of an "Ugly Duckling" and he takes an interest in her.
@ILOVE659709491: I’m curious though why was Aikka interested in Eva ?
@EiffelSavin: Just as he's the opposite of what she's known, she's a total opposite for him: tough, outspoken, pure - and touching. The noble girls he's met in Nourasia's palaces were not like that!
(x)
@JPLangley_: Also, unrelated question, but if the second season of Oban does ever make it to the public, will it explore what happened to Thunderbolt and Jordan after the events of OSR?
@EiffelSavin: Can't guarantee both...
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@JPLangley_: Did Spirit originally have wings, and him transforming into a bird was a second thought?
@EiffelSavin: The concept was always that he would transform into his own ship but judging by Thomas's drawing I guess we tried more classic wings first.
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@Helloworld1012: Stern boarding school prided itself on disciplining their students what did they mean by discipline? Also, considering DW’s personality before Maya’s death seems to have a anime rich kid with controlling parents background vibe to it, what social class was DW born to
@EiffelSavin: In my view, Don Wei comes from a modest background. Being a self made man he can be very demanding, expecting from others to obey the rules he's imposed on himself in order to succeed. Maya and young Eva soothed him up, but that went away after Maya's death
@Helloworld1012: Yeah but everything else about him doesn’t seem like he’s a self made man. Or just a selfmade man. It got to me, he’s still young when Maya died & also it’s possible that he could have grown up rich & still be a self made man because his parents gave up on him.
@EiffelSavin: That could also be possible yes
I put him out there, but you're totally untitled to make him yours now ! 🙂
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@ardaozcan98: Did you get any inspiration from B-2 Spirit aircraft while designing Spirit in OSR or is the resemblence just a coincidence?
@EiffelSavin: Interesting. I came up with the name without being aware of the connection & I don't think the plane was ever a reference for the design, but we should ask @thomasintokyo and @Brunetstanilas too. As you can see below (2002 rough by Thomas) Spirit went through a lot of phases
@Thomasintokyo: Never heard of this plane. That’s a coincidence!
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@emaf_CntCmnd: I wonder if you have known who works for BANDAI VISUAL and helps to release Japanese ver. of BD like Mr.Takanashi Minoru.
(I wish he were still alive.)
@EiffelSavin: Mr. Takanashi disappearance came as a terrible shock. But we're working on establishing new connections with Bandaï.
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@ardaozcan98: Do you consider producing comic books or novels instead or alongside with the sequel. There are lots of unknowns and potential for backstories of the galaxy and species i think. And books may be cheaper or easier to create. Loved the original art-book.
@EiffelSavin: That's not a bad idea. Any talented manga-comic book artists interested around here ? 🙂
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@Valeria_Lacava: Could you do something for the italian rights? Jetix closed and it's impossible to find online the episodes in italian
@EiffelSavin: STW doesn't own those rights but we'll try to negotiate them if Disney agrees and if this can be done within the bluray budget.
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@Helloworld1012: How was Don Wei able to pay the financial cost to form a race team with Maya and make her a champion? Race teams cost a fortune, but sponsorship was unlikely since DW stated & the timeline shows Maya was the first person he was a manager to, so he had no credibility.
@EiffelSavin: Mostly true but not completely true. If things were always so then I would never have been able to produce Oban Star-Racers, having no hard cash of my own, and having never produced nor directed an entire series before 🙂
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@dragbax: Do you have any idea how big of an impact this show had on me as a kid??? Plz don't disappoint me of backing down or handle it poorly... My heart can't handle that. Especially how Samurai Jack was treated with its last season. :(
@EiffelSavin: It may still be a long road ahead, especially since we don't intend to sell out, but I can promise we'll do our best!
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@Helloworld1012: I’m curious did Don Wei stop caring about Eva after Maya died? I mean he did abandon her just for resembling her mother & tried to forget she even existed for 10 years and would have CONTINUED to do so Had Eva not done anything about it, so did he stop caring?
@EiffelSavin: He tried to forget so well that he almost completely did
@Helloworld1012: Wait, doesn’t that basically mean that yes Don Wei did stop caring about Eva once her mother died?
@EiffelSavin: Yes basically (what an awful dad!). Seeing Eva reminded him too much of Maya and of his guilt. He couldn't bare it and walked away, at least until he was ready to face her again.
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@n0sichan: I hope subtitles for disabled peope will be available this time.
@EiffelSavin: If we have enough presales yes
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@MattGiusti: What is your thought process when it comes to animating characters speaking?Do you need to keep in mind how other languages will line up to the animation?Or do you do everything with one language in mind and alter the script accordingly later on?
@EiffelSavin: One concentrates on one main language. On Oban i wrote all scripts directly in English and the lip sink was based on those. But then i spent a whole month in front of an editing machine rewriting french dialogues that matched that lipsink
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@McKhendon: How do you accomplish 16:9 without losing parts of the picture?
@EiffelSavin: You're bound to loose part of the picture but if you address the process creatively you can produce new strong images by selecting shot by shot what u keep & what you discard
@SonicMrgame2017: The show was made on 16.9?
@EiffelSavin: No, in 4/3. It was still the transition period between the 2 formats at the time and our investors required 4/3. The remastered 16/9 version was done this year, reframing the original master shot by shot under my supervision.
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@ardaozcan98: All the dubs would be really nice especially for children.
@EiffelSavin: We'll see if something can be done but it sounds complicated. Sav The World doesn't own the rights of these other versions.
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@Wnika457: Is it possible that the online game wil be reopened? That would be awesome, I remember playing it when I was a kid :)
@EiffelSavin: That would be cool but we don't have the rights nor even a copy. But there'll be other games if we manage to pull through the sequel project
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@RadekFalhar: I just found out you are making Saya no Uta adaptation. I really hope you don't think the abortion that is the US manga is in any way related to the VN.
@EiffelSavin: The US comic probably had good intentions but turned Saya into smthng very different & sometimes opposite to what it is. The adaptation I work on also take liberties with the original material, but I try to remain very faithful to its spirit & to the mindset of the characters
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@lilacwondercat: Is there really a sequel in the works? I am such a huge fan, please say it's true!
@EiffelSavin: It's true but still a long to go. Creation takes time and the financing is the most pressing issue...
@lilacwondercat: Is there anything die hard fans can do to help?
@EiffelSavin: Most certainly though I can't think of anything precise right now. Helping spreading the word about the bluray is one though. The more people buy it, the stronger we can be when talking to potential financial partners.
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@Ekana_Stone: Does Blu-ray have the English dub, I would assume so
@EiffelSavin: Yes, French and English language are guaranteed. We would like to add Japanese too but there are question of rights we must try to sort out.
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@fictionjustis: Considering the fact that Oban star racers indeed had Japanese influence, I’m curious did u base Maya’s character design on a character from sailor moon, ( The 1990s version not the 2010s version) a well known anime & manga?
@EiffelSavin: Maya's character design clearly has anime influences but it was developed organically, drawing after drawing. It was not influenced by one show in particular.
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@Zeether77: Would love to see this on Blu-ray here, but not cropped to widescreen...does Shout Factory still have the rights?
@EiffelSavin: DVD & Bluray rights have reverted to us
@Zeether77: Would the BD release be a limited time thing? I just got a player but I don't think I could commit to a preorder sadly
@EiffelSavin: Can't confirm right now
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@ILOVE659709491: I’m trying to figure out what it is exactly because he [Savin] could be saying that the wei surname was meant to be Chinese or DW was Chinese but I just can’t figure out what it is, & unfortunately for some reason it has been driving me crazy yesterday so what is it in that question?
@EiffelSavin: Don Wei is of Chinese origin or at least his family is
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@sergeigaponov: #obanstarracers Could you write a list of countries in which you can send blu-ray Oban: Star Racers?
@EiffelSavin: Too early to confirm but my guess would be in all countries.
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@Nick_Kharin: How much can Blu-ray boxset will cost (approximately or the maximum price)?
I’m very excited about the news about the project.
@EiffelSavin: Still evaluating.
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@Adultito: Will the Blu Ray have the Japanese audio and the original OP+ED
@EiffelSavin: Japanese audio we'll try. There could be pbs of rights. French and English at the minimum.
@Adultito: speaking of Japanese audio, will there be the original OP "Chance to Shine" (shown in most international broadcasts) on the English dub because the US broadcast (as well as the Shout Factory DVDs) used "Never Say Never"
@EiffelSavin: We have the rights to all the original songs and tracks but not to "Never Say Never" which was produced by the US broadcaster of Oban. So we would use "Chance to Shine" for the opening.
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@Maj0r_Crisis: Will we ever see a release of the cancelled second volume of the Original Soundtrack?
@EiffelSavin: If we have enough preorders, one of our plans is to add most of or even all of Iwazaki Taku's 80 original tracks as a bonus to the bluray edition
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@delicatedowner: I wish you good fortune on making the blu-ray release a reality (will your company self-publish the BDs like with Ankama and their Wafku sets?).
@EiffelSavin: We may self publish too but could go the kickstaryer way. Unlike us Ankama is a rich company!
@delicatedowner: Even Ankama went the Kickstarter way. And it backfired on them. I hope you'll do a better job.
@EiffelSavin: We'll see. But if you meant "selfpublish" as in "creating the design packaging etc" ourselves, yes that would be the plan. We have some good people we can work with.
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@nothisiswindii: Do you think you guys should make a 4:3 aspect ratio version of the Blu-ray? A lot of studios tend to simply "zoom in" their old shows to fake a 16:9 ratio, and they end up losing a lot of detail on the top and bottom as a result.
@EiffelSavin: Probably but it's something we'll discuss with all those who register with the Oban Bluray project when the times comes. In all cases, I can guarantee the 16/9 remaster is not a "zoom in". We took care of things on a shot by shot basis (see the video on http://obanstarracers.com )
@docsane: I'm curious: why was Oban not originally shot 16:9? I thought it was unusual at the time to still see an animation being released 4:3.
@EiffelSavin: Oban was signed just at the time when productions were beginning to shift from 4/3 to 16/9. But our financial partners asked for 4/3 so we produced and delivered 4/3.
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@harpnote: The new site looks slick! I am sad the forums are no longer up. It was a good time there.
@EiffelSavin: We have the copies. We may put them back online but already have our hands full right now
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@MattGiusti: Will [OSR] HD be exclusively a blue ray release? Or can one buy a digital version online?
@EiffelSavin: The first goal is the bluray release.
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@ILOVE659709491: Considering Wei is a Chinese surname & with the exception of his temper DW’s manners and taste indicate a certain upbringing is there a possibilty that Don is the son of a high class family in Asia and he moved to America or Europe because of his passion for racing?
@EiffelSavin: In spite of the obvious connection with Japanese anime, Wei is a Chinese name indeed and it was meant that way.
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@sergeigaponov: There are no such scenes [dramatic scenes in children’s shows], because people are interested in toilet humor. The time has already passed when people cried over such scenes. There are few people who are crying. I hope in the #second #season of the drama will be more, because #Eva has matured.
@EiffelSavin: If it 's only up to me I'll say definitely yes and in all cases that what we want to aim for. This said, I have a feeling traditional broadcasters are targeting younger and younger audiences and aim even more for comedy than before.
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@ILOVE659709491: Considering Maya was DW's first champion, DW stated her charm was her recklessness, That Maya seemed to be more dominant in the relationship, & considering DW's and Maya's personalities in the past is it possible Maya introduced Don to the racing world?
@EiffelSavin: Interesting thought. But I'd say no. Don Wei was born to be a race manager.
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@lbigreyhound: Any idea when and where it [the HD remaster] will be available?
@EiffelSavin: The new HD master will be used in future broadcasts of OSR, at least one of whitch is planned for 2018. When we go ahead with our plans for a bluray relase, we may use it as well, or else chose to stick with the original 4/3 format.
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@ILOVE659709491: so I’m curious, what inspired the idea for OSR I’m super excited for the sequel but I am curious on what inspired the idea for OSR 2 Since it’s been over a decade since OSR?
@EiffelSavin: The 10 year anniversary of the first release brought the original artistic team together. We all thought it would be nice to look back at the world we created.
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[Not sure who he’s replying to here, but the question seems to be about Maya’s race with Spirit]
@EiffelSavin: If I remember correctly there just wasn't enough time and she gestured Spirit to stand out of arm's way.
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@RedVioletPanda: Why is the Holy of Dol, well, holy? In the artbook, there is a mention of elemental magic of the Nourasians, what is that exactly?
@EiffelSavin: Nourasian are close to nature. Magic and the use of natural ressources more than makes up for the lack of technology. As for elemental magic its source of power is nature itself.
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[Again, not sure who he’s replying to]
@EiffelSavin: We continue to work on dvlpmnt but it's a costly project & bringing the right financial partners together is the long and uncertain part...
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No worries 😂 But Ohhh, that sounds like a reason to party💃🏻💃🏻
...Well, if it helps, I've started to just consider PiaD the official canon and the show some fanon thingy, that usually helps with the harsh "reality"?🤷🏻♀️🤣
Naaaaaahhh, just reading has worked out perfectly in my favour for over a decade, not gonna change a winning team😉😉😂
WE DID NOT! AND NO, NO KOALAS WERE HARMED EITHER! Actually, maybe it's YOU who is murdering them🧐🧐🤔🤨
Juuup 😂 What we do for our ships/fandoms😅🤷🏻♀️😫🤦🏻♀️
Hey, not my fault you went and watched the naked ass🤷🏻♀️🤣🤣🤣 You COULD have just watched a lyric video😂😂
Ehh, depends on what exactly you categorize as a "fan"😅 I did watch it every year back in its "golden years" (aka when literally EVERYONE was watching it and there was really awesome music) but admittedly, I've barely kept up with it the past few years apart from belatedly hearing about who won and a song or two 🤷🏻♀️
😂😂😂
😫🤦🏻♀️ Are Mhm's your "secret" weapon or sth?🤔😅
Yeah, okay, good point, but hey, fanfics make everything better, you can just write or read your own version of what transpired and erase the memory of the show with that😉😁
Ehh, well, yes and no, I like the potential of Darklina, but I DON'T like what LB did with them in the books cause again, haven't fully read them but from what I know they were BS and Alina literally become little Ms. Wanna-Be-Mary-Sue who everybody loves and she rather denies herself and gives up her Power for the boy who didn't even "see" her until others wanted her and who only liked the meek, weak version of her.... Plus, the book version of the Darkling was made out to just be pure evil, so... The books basically screwed them both over😑😩 The Netflix show on the other hand was brilliant and Darklina's dynamics are awesome and show SO much potential, but after episode 5 Alina just seems like a naive, childish girlie to me, sooo... I'm just hoping the Season 2 will go differently from the books (I mean, there are already differences thanks to the Crows being there), so I still have hope for Darklina and Alina's character development🙈😖 (Tho seriously, what is it with YA Fiction's female main characters turning into BS?? Or do I just symphazise with the villains too much??😅🙈😂) (Oh, and nah, everybody suggests NOT reading the books, only the Six of Crows eBooks are good, but the Netflix show was pretty good til now and it's only one season...I really hope they focus more Ravka, pejudice against Grisha and all that stuff since lots of Alexander's reasons seem to stem from that)
Uh, Yeah, haven't seen a fic like that yet either, which is actually kinda sad😭🙈 Would be Fun to read sth like that
OHHHHHHHH, YOU JUST MADE MY WHOLE WEEK AWESOME😍😍😍💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻 24 PAGES?!?! OKAY, I'M HONESTLY HAPPY-DANCING NOW😍😍😍😍😍💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻🙈🙈😂😂😂
...The fact that you assure only no jealous!Mon but make no comment about it being angsty kinda frightens me...🧐🤨😰😰
Nope, it just means I watch way too much anime etc that people love to make angsty vids to😂😅 I mean, considering Tokyo Ghoul, Attack on Titan, Pandora Hearts, Tsubasa Chronicle, Charmed (S6) and S3!Karamel (just to name a few), you can't be surprised 98% of the videos are angsty 🤷🏻♀️😅🙈 (And well, ofc, there is still my "angst radar"😂😅😰)
...Uh, I think my brain's on holiday cause I don't get the "obvious reasons"...Sorry?🙈🙈😅🙈🙈🤦🏻♀️
Haha, again, no worries, don't feel pressured to rush to answer or anything! 🙈😰🙈
Thanks, I did, hope you did too and happy new week😁😉
XXX
Party or murdering the people responsible for the shit we got ...
Wish I could think like that....
Hmm, so let's say something like that. There will be less and less karamel fics, people will lose interest in writing for a dead fandom, so if you will post fics, more of them will appear and you will have things to read. As simple as that.
Sorry, but you and LW started to talk about murdering poor animals far before i got interested in the whole drama, so should I send Greenpeace after you?
A normal thing is to watch the first result of searching, like, I'm sorry I'm not anime fan vids sucker like some =='
Ooh, ok. I mean, i always watched but lately it became an European happy day on social media where we can confuse usamericans and it's beautiful XD and becasue of new technologies it became super fun and crazy, so yeah, Eurovision rules xD did you hear that usamericans are making their own version? XD
Mhm, maybe.
You know, sometimes I dream about someone else writing my ideas and me just reading it.... The pain of a person who writes in english while it is not her first language...
Yeah, I read some stuff about the whole drama and well, I'm kinda amazed how some authors love to destroy their own characters. Also, it seemed Alex really had a plan that could save them and make a difference but well...
I would not count on it, friend. Maybe just prepare for the worst and don't have too much hope...
Write it xD
I think you will like it. Some parts are really funny I think and well, I made a really not obvious PiaD connection and it's about Eve and her ideas xD
Well.... you will see. Last time I promised a big horrible stuff and you were not too affected, so xD
friend...it's the same thing that proves my points...
btw, can I ask about Tsubasa Chronicles? Did Sorata and Arashi from X appeared in it and had some happy ending? Please, say yes ;_;
Oh, because the lines look like Mon-El from ep 100 (long slicked back hair) and Kara in general (good girl faith and a tight little skirt). Also, now I imagined karamel Grease AU, where Mon-El walks with a comb in his backpocket and fixes his hair a lot xD
Anyway, that's for now. Keep fingers crossed for my posting in this week :D Stay safe ^^
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I know you have other prompts so please don’t feel obligated to do this, but what about the ghosts AU where they sit through their graduation? If you do the musical canon, you could even have Ram and Kurt in their class and with them. Thank you for all the writing and headcanon stuff you’ve been posting here! I’ve been meaning to send something in for a while now.
That I can do.
There are four seats meant to be left empty - two with lettermans draped over them, one with a red ribbon, and one with a blue book.
The only people who know the seats aren’t vacant are the ones sitting in them.
Veronica knows how hard Fleming fought for that fourth chair. She doesn’t really get why - maybe she believed there was good in her. That Veronica was just a girl too lovesick to notice what she was doing. As usual, Fleming is wrong. Veronica was just angry and stupid.
Nobody, dead or alive, is listening to Gowan’s introductory speech. Ram and Kurt are elbowing each other and pointing at various students, and Heather has a reassuring hand on Veronica’s thigh.
Gowan hasn’t mentioned them at all. That’s probably for the best. Let it be silent and sophisticated.
“God, they all look so girly in their little dresses,” Kurt says to Ram.
“They’re gowns, dude. They all proved they’re smart, so they get to wear wizard robes.”
Never mind.
“Wizards are nerds. Good thing we don’t have to wear ‘em. I kinda want the jacket, though.”
“Yeah, It’s cold.”
(It’s always cold.)
“Hey, ‘Ronica,” even in death Kurt’s trying to pick her up, “why’d you have to kill us in our briefs? You into that?”
Veronica sighs. “I didn’t know you were gonna die. If I did, I wouldn’t have agreed to the prank in the first place. Assholes you may have been, but you deserved some dignity.”
“You’re still mad about the skid marks, aren’t you?” Ram teases.
“Whatever, dude. I mean, it would have been a killer prank if it went like you said.”
Killer.
“Can you shut up for five minutes?” Chandler snaps, “This is supposed to be a formal event.”
Kurt hangs his head in shame, like a kid getting told off.
(That’s all he was. A dumb kid.)
“Sorry, Heather.”
“You’d better be.”
Veronica rests her head on Heather’s shoulder, a sign of her gratitude. Chandler offers an almost invisible smile in return.
They listen to the valedictorian’s speech, and Veronica’s so proud of Betty Finn for beating out Rodney in the fight for the top spot. The speech she gives is way better than anything he would have come up with, anyway. The guy was only good at taking tests. Betty talks about hope, the future, everything they can do now that they’re free from high school. Every so often, her eyes flick to those four seats in the front row.
Ram leans over, his voice a stage whisper. “Why does she keep looking at us?”
“She can’t see us. She’s talking about leaving high school, so she’s thinking about the ones that don’t get to.”
The former linebacker goes deathly silent, his eyes blank as he looks back up at Betty. As she finishes her address, Ram claps clumsily, like he’s forgotten how.
Then, Ripper.
“Ah, fuck,” Heather mutters.
Veronica’s not sure what it is about the pastor that triggers the effect. Maybe because he’s a holy man, and his mere presence makes ghosts suffer.
“Don’t stick your finger in it, Kurt,” Veronica says as a precaution. He probably won’t listen, but no-one can say she didn’t try.
“If he says anything about ‘the MTV video games’, I’m gonna puke.” Heather’s voice is already growing thick. Veronica hates this. Her temple has already gone ice-cold, and the vision in her left eye is going dark.
Father Ripper speaks of them. Of course he does, the ‘suicides’ have drastically boosted the numbers of his flock. How the dearly departed all supposedly found solace in the arms of the Lord, how, so long as the graduating class follows the straight and narrow path, everyone will find peace their former classmates lacked in their lives.
Bullshit. All of it.
Veronica hates the sensation she has to go through when she’s like this. It’s eerily familiar - like drinking a frozen drink too fast, but only on one side of her head. Hates it, hates it, hates it.
“Don’t cry,” Ram tries to say, his rasping voice accompanied by a faint, tuneless whistling.
Ah, hell. Is she crying? This is the last thing she needs. Salt in the bullet wound.
The hand that was on her thigh rises to her shoulder, pulling Veronica into a one-armed hug.
“He’ll stop with his preaching soon enough,” Heather reassures her, pausing to cough, “you’re okay. It’s okay.”
Ripper finishes with the sort of finality he’s used to by now, and the focus shifts to where it should be - the students who are still left. The pain in Veronica’s head fades a little, and she relaxes as the first students receive their diplomas.
She applauds nearly every student - The Country Club kids are the only exceptions. Kurt whoops and Chandler smiles when Heather McNamara receives her ticket out of this hellhole, and Ram claps politely for Martha and all his past friends (he’s getting the hang of it now).
Soon, it’s all over. Final congratulations are given, and everyone files out. The four are left alone among the empty chairs.
“Feeling a bit better?”
Veronica taps her now-present temple in response to Heather’s question.
“I’m happy for them,” she adds.
“Good. Good.” She pulls Veronica closer, pressing her lips to the top of her girlfriend’s head. “Some of them only passed ‘cause of you.”
“I just took some notes. Most of it was them.”
“You’re more help than you think. Remember that.”
Veronica leans into the embrace, sighing. She can see Kurt and Ram out of the corner of her eye again - apparently, awkward knuckle-punching is the only form of affection they know that cannot be construed as gay.
“Maybe we should do this again next year.”
Heather hums. “Maybe. Might not gets seats, though.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just… It’s a nice feeling, seeing everyone happy and ready to get on with their lives. Ready to grow up and be adults.”
And die. But maybe they’d die happy. That’d be something.
“I guess,” Heather concedes. “We should get going before they pull the chair out from under us.”
They do. All of them. The gym, where everything could have gone so wrong, is silent once more.
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Yooo for all intents and purposes I feel like cress is the most mature- does she have a lot of real life experience? No, but she grew up with the net, she explored *everything* she’s not a child, she was not completely isolated up there’s , she’s a GENIUS like my god, I was homeschooled in middle school and honestly I came out mature and not isolated because I was able to research things when I had questions, and cress has 16 full years of life whereas cinder only remembers five years and is (1)
(2) Essentially a child in that sense, it baffles me that people have infantilized cress this much it completely irks me and honestly the age gap is not that bad, it really isn’t, I mean it’s YA, you really can’t compare it to irl like you’ve said in the past
Oh anon, I’m so with you. Although I wouldn’t call Cress specifically the most mature because I think they’re all more or less comparable. In any case, it doesn’t make any sense to tie their maturity down to age. As you said, it’s YA which has its own rules. In YA, age isn’t the deciding factor when it comes to maturity.
Instead, you have to look how the character is treated in-verse. And no one in the crew - not Thorne, not Cinder, not Wolf, Scarlet or Jacin - ever babies Cress. No one treats her as a child but always as an important member of their crew. And if they don’t baby Cress, then I have no idea why the readers should?
I don’t want to repeat everything I said a few times already but I feel the double standards when it comes to Cresswell and the other characters is one of the biggest issue in this debate.
- Cinder has (suspension-induced learning aside) only the real-life experience of the last five years. And none of that included school, socialising and dates. And we still ascribe to the idea that she will be forever with Kai without taking a break to go to school and date a few other guys first. No, Cinder at 16, gets to be queen and engaged at 18 after seeing Kai once in the year prior to said engagement. I don’t like it but within the story, I judge it differently as in real-life. But people equate the snark and sarcasm Cinder displays with maturity and let me tell you, it doesn’t work that way.
- I know it’s always popular to compare the age gap in regards to Wolflet and making the point that Scarlet is experienced (although we never really have any canon confirmation of that) and she is of legal age. Good and true but I think if we talk about taking advantage, I would focus on Wolf in that context and not Scarlet. He is the one who has been a child-soldier for the last ten years. He didn’t have any bodily autonomy, he has no experience (sexual or otherwise) and he falls for the first girl he exchanges more than ten words with. Yes, he’s 23 but he might as well be 18 or younger because his life is just not comparable to real-life experiences. But no thinks he should be on his own for awhile and get to know more girls before he settles for Scarlet. They get their happily ever after without question.
- Most people know my thoughts about Jacinter but if there is any infantilisation going on between the TLC couples, it is between the two of them. Scarlet tries to break that to some degree but Jacin is Winter’s protector first and he always tries to keep Winter out of harm’s way. He doesn’t let her make any decision that could put her in danger. [Btw: Thorne, on the other hand, trusts Cress’s abilities and knows how important she is, so he never hold her back from helping in the revolution. That’s just not a thing.] Also, people complain a lot about taking advantage here and asking for consent that. Who kissed an unconscious Winter who had no way to give consent? Jacin. He kissed her and I’m not applying double standards because I don’t mind the kiss as much (by that time I was basically done with everything Jacinter) but sorry, nothing like that happened at any point with Cresswell but the Jacinter kiss gets a pass? Also, I think it’s not very healthy that Winter, when Jacin tells her he has to kill her (and she believes he will go through with it) basically says, “Oh well, as long as it’s you.” But in the context of the story, I still believe they are meant to be even if neither of them went to school or on dates with others first.
I’m just writing it down that while I don’t care all that much about the other couples and their flaws (minus Jacinter but you don’t see me posting about them every other week or attacking Jacinter shippers) but I just want to emphasise: I could criticise the other couples too. Easily. I could make the same points about Kaider, Wolflet and Jacinter that people make about Cresswell. Because they are all flawed. They story progresses very fast, so the same is true for the couples’ stories. But to pick out one couple out of four and make it seem like they’re the only problematic ones and the other three are flawless is just ignorant.
[And not to only compare the couples but no one so far has ever criticised Iko for the same things that people love to hate about Cress. Iko is a fangirl, she’s always swooning over her “celebrity crushes” Kai or Thorne, she often talks about girly things like shoes and dresses, often in situations where it’s not really called for (which Cress never does). She also has no real-life experience either (her memories date back only five years too); no school, no dates, no nothing. She just got her human body but no one treats her like a child her either. And no one, despite her fangirling and swooning and gushing, ever thinks of her as an immature child who should rather go to school and have a stable (human) life first. Kiko or not, no one thinks Iko has growing to do before she meets the love of her life. Iko is allowed to be a fully-realised person even though her age doesn’t match that. But Iko is praised and Cress criticised and told to grow up first. You don’t need to like Cress but it’s weird how Iko’s maturity is never challenged.]
…
That has gotten longer that I intended … again. :P In short, yes to everything you said. Either you criticise and point out the flaws of all the characters and ships equally or you accept that book characters can’t be compared to real-life people due to extraordinary circumstances and situations they faced. But you can’t cherry-pick one character and ship if the very same things apply to the others too.
#the lunar chronicles#kaider#wolflet#cresswell#jacinter#i have the feeling the reason why i get so few asks#is because everyone knows i'll just write a long-ass response :P#and no one wants to read yet ANOTHER long text post by me#i can't help it though :P
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Fic: Bashert (NSFW; Trigger Warning: rape, racism, homophobia, biphobia)
[I’m so sorry for taking this long, @definitelywicked! I hope it’s worth it.]
Fandom: Triple 9 (film)
Canon status: Post-movie timeline
Do you need to have seen/read it? No. A synopsis will do. You just need to know who the characters are.
Pairing: Elena Vlaslov/OBFC (Original Black Female Character)
Warnings: This story comes with a trigger warning for rape because a survivor talks about her experience later in the story. If you wanna skip it, stop at the part where the kids are at a pool party. There is also a “locker room talk” part where some people express a great deal of ignorance and bigotry against Black people, lesbians, and bisexuals. If you wanna skip it, pass by the section that begins with, “Hey, did you hear?”
When Elena Vlaslov walked into the bookstore with nosebleed-high heels and the most adorable little kid ever, sex was the furthest thing from DJ’s mind. She was a customer who wanted books about dolphins for her son, and being friendly and helpful was her job. Besides, high femmes weren’t DJ’s type. Not that she didn’t think they were pretty, not at all. It’s just that she found them more intimidating than attractive, and too many of them, especially the white ones, expected her to be an aggressive stud type just because she liked to wear comfortable shoes and pants with pockets on them only to be disappointed when she turned out to be as girly as they were and, as She Who Shall Not Be Named put it, terrible in bed.
The scent of vanilla and spices lingered in by the cash register after Elena and her son left. DJ didn’t expect to see her again, but she came back and bought more books for her son, whose name was Felix. Soon, without either of them quite realizing it, sporadic visits turned into a semi-regular schedule. Elena and Felix came by at least twice a week. They bought something every time and made small talk while DJ rung them up. Somehow, they started talking about each other’s lives, and before they knew it, hours had gone by. They only stopped because Felix got hungry.
Then, DJ did something she never thought she would, not in a million years: she invited Elena out for coffee. She ignored the way her heart fluttered when Elena said yes.
The coffee shop was a little hole-in-the-wall place with good wifi and prices way more reasonable than Starbucks. DJ almost didn’t recognize Elena when she arrived because she wore jeans and sneakers instead of skirts and heels. They exchanged greetings, ordered coffee, and sat at DJ’s favorite table by the window.
“Where’s Felix?” asked DJ.
“With my sister. It’s nice to see you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Not at work. Away from all those dusty books.”
“Hey, I like those dusty books.”
Elena smiled. DJ’s heart flipped over several times.
Their conversation breezed through the typical stuff about jobs (Elena helps with the family business, something about kosher food), family (DJ’s is scattered all over the South; Elena’s was here in Atlanta or somewhere in Russia or Israel), and life goals (DJ wanted to work at a college library; Elena wanted to be a good mom to Felix).
Then they started talking about music, hip-hop, and their favorite rappers. DJ was unapologetic about being old school, but Elena leaned toward newer artists. They got into a quite a debate about it. The more they argued, the less DJ cared about convincing Elena that old school hip hop was the best, bar none. She paid less attention to the holes in Elena’s arguments than in the way she talked with her hands and matched each facial expression with a mood or feeling. All of Elena’s opinions were filtered through the prism of her emotions. When DJ tried to use facts and figures, Elena’s face went blank, and she went straight to la-la land, but when DJ told her a story or talked about how certain things made her feel, her eyes lit up, and she leaned forward and paid attention. On anyone else, this would’ve been annoying, but something about Elena made this intriguing. It was like getting a glimpse of someone’s inner world and finding treasures they took for granted.
Then, it was almost closing time, much to their mutual disappointment.
“Can I get you another coffee?” asked Elena.
“You don’t have to. It’s no big deal.”
“No, no, don’t worry. We’re friends now.”
They met for coffee at least once a week. Then getting coffee together turned into grabbing lunch or dinner at some restaurant that DJ found out about on Yelp. Each time they met, she found out something new about Elena: she was raised in Israel and stayed in the army a year longer than required because, in her words, she had nothing better to do; she liked fast cars and motorcycles and was completely oblivious to how big a nerd she was on those subjects; her greatest achievement was being a mother, and her greatest fear Felix believing she didn’t love him. Eventually, it seemed perfectly natural for them to hang out at each other’s houses for no reason at all.
When DJ met Elena’s sister, Irina, she barely managed not to call her a rude bitch for giving her the cold shoulder without so much as a, “Go fuck yourself.”
Whatever her problem was, she and Elena quietly went back and forth about it in Russian. DJ couldn’t swear to it, but she thought she heard Irina mutter the words “jungle fever” at some point. She didn’t know Russian, so she couldn’t be sure.
“What the hell was that about?” asked DJ.
“Nothing,” said Elena, jaw twitching as she spoke, “She’s a bitter, nasty person. She's angry that she can’t control me anymore, so the only thing she can do is say mean things to people.”
There was a history there, but DJ didn’t push the subject.
A few weeks later, Elena showed up at her apartment with a small suitcase and a weeping Felix in tow. There had been a fight—an actual fistfight with black eyes and bloody noses, at least on Elena’s end—between the two sisters.
“I’m sorry for doing this,” said Elena, “we didn’t have anywhere else to go that’s not hers.”
“It’s OK.”
“I promise we’ll only be here a couple of days,” she said.
“Stay as long as you need.”
Elena put Felix to bed then helped herself to some of DJ’s cheap whiskey. She looked like she needed something stronger.
“Can you believe she used to be nice to me when I was little? I used to look up to her. My big sister. So strong, so smart. I wanted to be like her. But it went away after—will you think I’m crazy if I tell you I still love her?”
“No.”
Elena and Felix stayed for a week.
Something changed after that. It was so subtle that it took months of interacting with Elena to be able to see it. Before, there had been a tension Elena carried with her that DJ hadn’t noticed until it was gone. Now, Elena began to truly relax around her, touching DJ in small, affectionate ways: a hug to show appreciation or sympathy, a kiss on the cheek to say hello or goodbye, hooking an arm around her neck or waist just because, a stroke on the back just to let her know she’s there. From time to time, Elena would do a mom thing like fix the collar of DJ’s jacket or brush a stubborn crumb off her face while she ate. Sometimes, while playing with Felix, DJ would catch Elena looking at her with soft eyes and a Mona Lisa smile.
“What does DJ stand for?” Elena asked on a nondescript Netflix-and-chill evening.
“Uh, it’s my initials. For my legal name.”
“What is that?”
“Do I have to?”
"Pleeeease.”
“No.”
“Pretty please.”
“No.”
“Pretty, pretty please,” said Elena, pouting comically.
“Fine. It’s...Dorothea Jackson.”
“Dorothea? That’s very pretty.”
“No, it’s not. It makes me sound like an old lady.”
“If you’re very lucky you get to be an old lady.”
“When I get to be an old lady, then people can call me Dorothea, but until then, it’s DJ. Now that you know my deep, dark secret, you can’t ever tell anyone. I mean it. If you tell someone, and they call me Dorothea, I’ll tell them she’s your imaginary friend.”
“I promise not to use it. Unless you make me mad.”
“I’ll be good.”
DJ’s phone rang to the tune of “Boss Ass Bitch.” Elena had been in a prankish mood and changed her ringtone to the song. DJ had liked it so much that it had stuck.
“Hello?”
“DJ! DJ!” shouted Felix, “Guess what!”
“What?”
“We’re going to Israel!”
“Israel?”
“Uh-huh. After school lets out.”
“That’s really nice. Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah. And Mommy said you can come with us and swim with the dolphins!”
“Uhhhh, I’d love to come, Felix, but—”
Before DJ could back out, Felix was already shouting with excitement.
“Mommy! Mommy! She said yes!”
Elena picked up the phone, “You can come?”
“Felix made it hard to say no. He’s like his mother like that.”
Elena chuckled, “You can come?”
“Uh...yeah? I think. My credit card won’t thank me, but I think I can do it.”
“No, no, don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of everything. Just pack a few things and be ready. I’ll buy you anything you need.”
Who could say no to that?
Israel was hot. DJ thought Atlanta was hot. Oh, no. In Atlanta, people could still wear long sleeves without getting heatstroke. In Eilat, which was cooler because it’s closer to the ocean, people didn’t walk around half-naked on the beach to be sexy. They did that because it was too hot to wear pants. The first chance she got, DJ dipped inside a building with air conditioning. Her ecstatic, “OH GOD, YES!” made a couple of elderly American tourists say, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
After DJ got over the heat and jetlag, she had a blast. She went swimming in the sea with Felix and Elena, thrilled at the sight of dolphins in the wild. Sea World had nothing that compared to that. They ate out at a different restaurant every day. Elena bought her a few souvenirs to bring back to the States. DJ wished she could take some of the fruit back, but customs would never allow it.
The first couple of weeks had been a whirlwind of activity, so when they finally had a free weekend, DJ and Elena opted for a quiet night at Elena’s family home. Felix was at a sleepover with some of Elena’s old friends and their children, and the two of them had the jacuzzi all to themselves. They soaked in the bubbling water, gazing at the nocturnal lights of Eilat.
“Do you like Israel?” asked Elena.
“I love it. I kinda don’t wanna leave. Thanks for, uh, paying my way.”
“It’s nothing. I am glad you’re here.”
They sat together in silence. It was strange. DJ would normally feel compelled to talk because silence always felt awkward, but with Elena, it was comforting. DJ glanced at her. Elena had closed her eyes and stretched out her arms along the rim of the jacuzzi, relaxed as a house cat.
Not for the first time, she was struck by how naturally gorgeous Elena was, from her shining mane of thick, dark hair to her perfectly shaped toenails. Even her earlobes were beautiful. It would be easy to feel insecure around her. In high school, DJ would have hated Elena without knowing the first thing about her, and it would’ve been a shame because Elena was, aside from being a great mom, so sweet and generous and loyal and fun.
As if sensing DJ’s gaze upon her, she turned to her and gave her a faint grin. It made DJ feel...she wasn’t sure what.
“Come here,” said Elena, tilting her head in that way she did sometimes when something amused her or caught her interest.
“Why?”
Elena grinned, “Come here.”
DJ slid along the rim of the jacuzzi toward her. This was nice. Suddenly, Elena leaned toward her. She got closer, closer...
Warm, soft hands cupped her face. Wet, pliant lips pressed against hers. The kiss was so gentle that DJ almost thought it didn’t happen, but Elena was grazing her perfectly manicured thumb against her lips, eyes boring into her as if searching for—oh. Oh!
Something clicked, and all the feelings she’d been suppressing from the moment she met Elena came rushing to the surface, sending shockwaves pulsing through her entire body. A series of loud, sharp gasps tore through her. What was happening to her? Was she having a seizure? Was she dying? It was divine! Then, as suddenly as it came, it was gone.
DJ gripped the edge of the jacuzzi to keep standing. Elena was staring at her.
“What just happened?” asked DJ.
“I don’t know,” said Elena, “Can you do it again?”
After they dried off, Elena led DJ to her bedroom and laid her on the king-size bed. She looked into DJ’s eyes, gently awakening her skin with soft caresses.
“Is it like that every time?” Elena asked.
“I don’t know. That never happened before.”
“No? Never?”
DJ shook her head. Great. Now Elena would find out just how much experience she didn’t have. DJ pinched the blanket beneath her and looked away. She couldn’t bear to see Elena’s disappointment.
“Oh,” said Elena, her voice tinged with surprise, “you’re a virgin.”
DJ bit her lip. Was her utter hopelessness in the sack that obvious?
"I—I’ve had it—I mean, sex—before,” she stammered.
"No orgasm?”
“Um...kinda, almost? No.”
DJ cringed at what Elena must’ve thought of her. Cold. Prude. Dried up. Frigid.
“Can I take this off?” whispered Elena. DJ nodded before she could stop herself. Elena deftly unfastened the snap buttons holding her bathing suit up then slowly peeled it off. DJ tried to cross her arms over her imperfect breasts and cross her legs to hide her imperfect Down There, but Elena parted her legs and uncrossed her arms.
“So beautiful,” she whispered, “Like a painting I can touch.”
Elena grazed her fingers along DJ’s nakedness. With each pass of those slender fingers across her neck, breasts, and thighs, DJ’s nervousness melted away. Something inside her awakened from its hibernation. She no longer cared about not being pretty enough or skilled enough. She wanted to feel and taste and touch. She parted her lips for Elena’s tongue and spread her thighs for Elena’s slender, solid weight on top of her.
“I want to be your first,” Elena said between kisses, “Can I?”
DJ nodded. Elena cupped her between the legs, humming with satisfaction. DJ rolled her hips into her palm.
“So ready,” whispered Elena. She gently rubbed DJ’s aching bud. DJ was already so close, so close. Her legs spread wider. Elena’s tongue plunged deeper into her mouth as her fingers thrust inside, making her whole body shudder.
“Do you like that?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Do you want my mouth there?”
“Unnngh.”
“Be a good girl and come for me?”
The way Elena said it, both encouraging and demanding, struck a match that became a throbbing, white-hot flame that spread all through her, incinerating all thought of anything but the sound and taste and feel of Elena, who gently kissed and licked her way down her neck, paused to fondle and suck her breasts, continued her way down, down, down...
Then DJ remembered that she hadn’t shaved anything in a while. She must’ve looked and smelled like something dragged in from the woods. Elena’s eager mouth devoured her and silenced such thoughts. A low moan vibrated into DJ’s core. Elena liked doing this? To her? The realization sent tiny waves of pleasure rippling through her body, growing in intensity as Elena drank deeply between her thighs, until her body erupted in seismic tremors.
Elena held her close and peppered her face with kisses.
“What about you?” asked DJ.
“Hm?”
“Don’t you want me to, um, do you?”
Elena smiled, “Tonight is for you.”
“No, no, I want to. I just—I’m no good at it, but...I wanna be. I can try. I mean, if you show me.”
Elena quirked an eyebrow, “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.”
Elena stood on the edge of the bed and untied her bikini top. It fell to the floor, exposing glorious breasts. DJ had to look away to keep from pouncing on her.
“Go on. If you want to,” said Elena. No sooner had she said it that DJ grabbed her, pulled her close, and latched onto her breast, taking as much into her mouth as she could, swirling her tongue around one nipple then switching to the other and starting over again. Sucking just a bit harder and gently biting Elena’s breast earned DJ a gasp and a flinch followed by a groan. Was that good? She did it again.
“Is that OK?” asked DJ. Elena dug her fingers into her hair and guided her back to her breast. When she’d had enough, she bent forward and gave DJ a deep, sloppy kiss.
“How’d I do? Was I OK?”
“More than OK,” said Elena. She swayed slightly as if she was drunk and trying to hide it.
“What do I do now?”
“I think you know,” said Elena. Her eyes flicked down and back up again. What did she—oh. DJ reached for Elena’s waist and slowly unwrapped the sheer skirt. Only the bikini bottom remained. DJ hesitated. If she stopped now, Elena wouldn’t have to find out how horrible she was at this. She was about to, already imagining herself thanking Elena for her time and slinking back to her room to fantasize and berate herself for her stupidity. But what happened was something else.
Elena gently took DJ’s hand and placed it on the waistband of her bikini. DJ swallowed and closed her eyes as she slid the bikini down her legs with shaking hands. With each breath, she inhaled a scent like musky seawater.
“It will help if you look,” said Elena, a teasing lilt in her voice. DJ gathered her courage and peeked. God, even her pubic hair was perfect. How could she even hope to—
“You can touch me,” said Elena, cupping her face to reassure her. As softly as she could, DJ rubbed her fingers against wet, silky heat. Elena’s breath hitched. DJ was stunned. Had she really done that? She did it again, stroking and probing with a barely-there touch, cataloging every gasp, every moan, every hiss, every whimper, every yelp.
“Stop,” growled Elena, “No more teasing.”
She pushed DJ to the floor, almost a shove, and pulled her forward. DJ's mouth glided onto Elena’s arousal. She kissed, licked, and sucked the juicy, succulent flesh until she could not tell where she ended and Elena began. Meanwhile, Elena muttered the filthiest, most wonderful things. Most of it must have been Russian or Hebrew, but there were a few snippets in English that sounded like: that’s it...do you like that?...so beautiful like this...harder...feel so good...touch yourself...oh, shit...don’t stop, baby...fuck!
Elena let out a loud, feral cry, clenching her fists in DJ’s hair.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry,” said Elena, breathless. She massaged DJ’s scalp to ease the pain.
“Was I OK?” asked DJ.
“You said you were bad at this.”
“I was—I mean, I am.”
Elena shook her head, “Someone lied to you.”
They collapsed together on the bed and waited for their breathing to get back to normal. DJ made herself comfortable and snuggled next to Elena then fell asleep to the sound of Elena’s heartbeat.
It was hard to keep their hands off each other after that. Every moment they had alone, they had sex. They didn’t limit themselves to the bedroom, either. They had trysts in the shower, the living room, the car, and even the balcony. Every time Felix’s back was turned, they sneaked kisses and discreetly squeezed a buttock, a breast, or a crotch.
Of course, it was too good to last.
They were at a pool party with Felix and his playmates. Children splashed in the pool, laughing and squealing with delight while their mothers kept an eye on them.
Elena’s phone came alive with the theme from Psycho, which meant it was Irina. Elena answered with a sigh and an eyeroll worthy of the most sullen teeenager. She spoke in Russian about something or other that must have been very unpleasant. DJ didn’t understand the words, but she sensed Elena’s anger, fear, and rising panic coming off her in powerful waves. Then Elena hung up and hurled the phone into the wall, smashing it to bits.
“What was that ab—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
For the rest of the pool party, Elena was quiet, tense, and withdrawn. She perked up slightly when Felix hugged her on their way to the car. She went on autopilot once they got home, getting Felix one last snack and putting him to bed without her usual attentiveness. He seemed to pick up on her mood, so he didn’t make a fuss about not being tired as he usually would. DJ went to check on him to make sure he was alright.
“Is Mommy mad at me?” he asked.
“No. Mommy’s not mad at you.”
“Why is she mad?”
“Grownup stuff.”
“OK.”
“Goodnight.”
DJ found Elena on the balcony smoking a cigarette. When had she picked up that habit?
“You smoke?” she asked.
“Not for a long time,” Elena said. She blew out a long stream of smoke that curled and twisted then disappeared.
“Why now?”
“If you’re just gonna give me shit, don’t bother.”
“I’m not. Felix was worried about you.”
Elena flicked some ashes. She seemed to have calmed down.
“Is he OK?” she asked.
“Yeah, he’s fine.”
Elena flung the cigarette over the balcony and slouched into one of the chairs. That was odd. Elena never slouched.
“I don’t like for him to see me this way. I have to be strong for him. His father used to help, but he’s...not around anymore.”
DJ sat in the other chair and scooted closer to her.
“What happened?”
“Vasili—my sister’s husband is moving to Atlanta.”
“Bad news?”
Elena looked away.
“Why?”
“Are you sure you wanna hear this?” asked Elena.
“Of course. I wanna help.”
Elena scoffed, “No one can help me.”
It hurt to hear that. It wasn’t fair of Elena to blow her off like this, but the phone call from Irina obviously opened up a deep wound, so her lashing out wasn’t abnormal. For long moments, they just sat there. Then, Elena spoke.
“I was twelve or thirteen when Irina met Vasili. They fell in love, never apart, not for long, so I hated him. You have to understand. Irina and I are sisters, but she was more like a mother to me. My mother left my father—our father—after giving birth to me. So, Irina was the one to raise me. Then Vasili came, and my thinking was that he was stealing her from me. Irina wasn’t worried. She said I would get used to him, and I did. I got used to him being around.
“One night, there was this party. Vasili was there. It was very late, and I was tired, so I was going to bed, but Vasili—he grabbed me and said that he wasn’t going to let me go until I gave him a goodnight kiss. Back then, I thought he was doing it to treat me like a baby and make fun of me. I was tired, in a bad mood, so I told him to go fuck himself. His friends laughed at him. He didn’t like that. I didn’t care.
“I was asleep. I don’t know how long. But I wake up, and I feel someone come in my room. It was Vasili. I asked him if he wanted something. He didn’t say anything. Then he came into my bed on top of me, and he...um...he forced himself on me. While he was...doing it, he told me to be quiet, but he didn’t have to because I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I was a statue. And he was saying ugly things to me, calling me names.
“It hurt. It hurt so much. There was blood the next day. I was—I was a virgin when he did that to me. After he...finished, he told me, ‘You want to be a woman now? This is what women do.’ I was fifteen years old.
“All my problems started after that. I stopped caring about school. I didn’t want any friends. I started fooling around with boys. I felt dirty. Used. Like toilet paper. So it was my thinking that it didn’t matter what I did. I was already ruined. I thought about killing myself so many times, but I couldn’t try it because Irina would be the one to find me, and I couldn’t do that to her. I wanted to tell her what happened. I never lied to her, never kept secrets from her, and she always knew if I did something naughty anyway. So I was thinking: maybe she already knew, and that’s why she was always so disappointed in me.”
Elena wiped tears from her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she said. DJ rubbed her back and smooched her on the cheek.
“It’s OK. Did you tell Irina?”
Elena nodded, “I tried. She didn’t believe me. She said I was doing it for attention and that if Vasili really did come into my room, it was because I wanted it. That was when she really started to hate me.”
“Did you tell anyone else?”
Elena shook her head, “Only you. Do you believe me? You believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“You’re not disgusted with me? You’re disgusted. I can tell in your face.”
“No, no, not you. It’s him. Only him.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
DJ’s wanted to say something to make it better, but the words wouldn’t come. It was as if they had been weighed down by her insides, which felt like they were made of lead. She held Elena tight, hoping that her embrace said it for her: that what happened to her was not her fault; that her own sister should’ve believed her, protected her, fought for her; that she was not unclean because of what this man did to her; that she wasn’t weak or stupid because a bad person chose to do her harm; that she was ten times better than they were because she’d do for Felix in a heartbeat what no one did for her.
Elena calmed a little and said, “Now Irina tells me that Vasili is coming home and wants to see his family. He wants to see me and meet Felix. He will never come anywhere near my son. I will kill him if he touches him.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I have to go back to the States. It will go worse for everyone if I insult Vasili by not going.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” she asked.
“No!” said Elena, wincing at the sharpness of her tone.
She continued more softly, “No. You're—you’re nothing like my family. You’re a good person, and you make me a better person. I’d never forgive myself if they—if something happened to you.”
She stroked DJ’s cheek and said, “Stay here? Please? Stay and take care of Felix while I’m away. Will you do that for me?”
“Sure.”
That night, Elena made love to DJ with such tenderness that she wept. Elena held her and licked away her tears, raining kisses on her as if it was the last time she would ever get the chance. They lay together beneath the cool breeze that came in from the sea.
“Ahuvati?” asked Elena. She’d taken to calling her that since their first time together.
“Hm?”
“If I do something terrible, will you hate me forever?”
“Something terrible? Like what?”
Elena didn’t answer.
“What are you going to do?” asked DJ.
“What I have to.”
DJ woke up with the sunrise. Elena was gone.
As she promised, DJ took over for Elena and took care of Felix. After cooking and cleaning, washing and drying, shopping and playdates, sightseeing and napping, and bathing and putting Felix to bed, she was almost too tired to miss Elena. How she made it all look so effortless was a cosmic mystery.
Yet, there were moments that made DJ’s heart clench with longing: a sickeningly loving couple walking down the street holding hands; at the beach, a mother and child tossing a huge, light ball back and forth; lying on that big, empty bed by herself at night; Felix asking when his mommy was coming back.
When she had time to herself, Elena’s parting words haunted her. What had she meant by doing something terrible? What was it she felt she had to do? DJ could put two and two together. Elena’s family was probably involved in something illegal. Elena never gave any details about exactly what her family did to get all that money, and whenever DJ asked, her answers were evasive. She didn’t judge. No one could help where they came from, and Elena wasn’t deeply involved in whatever it was that they were doing. But...what if she was? Would she lie about that? Was it a mistake to trust Elena? Had she been too enchanted by Elena to think straight?
What if it was all true? What if the family business was being in the Russian mafia? What did they do? Was it drugs? Guns? Something even worse? What kind of person did it make her if, despite it all, she knew she wouldn’t leave? Whenever DJ watched movies about organized crime, she never understood why the wives and girlfriends didn’t drop their husbands and boyfriends like hot potatoes when they found out they were selling dope or killing people. Now it made sense. Those women stuck around because they knew that those men would do the same thing for them. Elena was the same way. DJ knew for a fact that there was nothing Elena wouldn’t do for her. She knew it the way she knew that water was wet and that the sun rose in the east. It was scary to know that. Scary, overwhelming, and a little exciting.
Her luggage was in the closet. All she had to do was pack the essentials and get back to Atlanta. Then she could go back to the life where the only place she came across the Russian mafia was in the movies. She could do that, but did she want to?
“Fuck me,” DJ said with a sigh.
DJ lounged on the balcony sipping the herbal tea she dug out of Elena’s cabinet. Sunset painted the sky the colors of the rainbow. DJ sipped and relished the soothing heat as it went down her throat.
Suddenly, she was blind, but she recognized a familiar vanilla-and-spice fragrance.
“Guess who?”
“Hold on. I know this one.”
DJ pulled Elena’s hands off her eyes and turned--holy shit. Elena was dressed to kill in a deep red dress and matching lipstick and stilettos. Smoky eyeshadow made her look exotic and inscrutable like a sphinx. DJ stood on her toes and kissed her, tasting wax and red. Elena brought her closer and deepened the kiss. One hand squeezed her ass.
“Be careful,” said Elena, “I can get used to saying hi like this.”
DJ parted from her. It was hard.
“Where’s Felix?” Elena asked.
“In his room, knocked out. He had a busy day. Um, what’s the occasion?”
Elena took DJ by the hand and slowly twirled her one, two, three times then pulled her flush against her. She hugged her from behind and smooched her neck and shoulders. It tickled. DJ laughed. Elena seemed so light, as if a huge burden had been lifted. She looked like she could dance on air if she wanted to.
“Vasili is gone for good,” said Elena.
“What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter. He will never bother us again. And that is the last time I will talk or think about him. I can live now.”
“I’m glad.”
“I have a present for you, ahuvati,” Elena said. She led DJ to the bedroom where a black plastic bag sat on the bed. Elena held it out to her. DJ slipped her hand inside. She touched cool, plastic, rubber, and...suede? No, leather. Her fingers closed around something, and arced an eyebrow at the bottle of lube in her hand. A lot of lube. She peeked at the other objects.
“You really like purple,” said DJ.
“Pick one.”
“Just one?”
“Or more.”
“Why?”
“So we can try it.”
“Try it? Right now?”
“Mm-hmmm. I have a lot of energy tonight.”
“Uh, I dunno. Which one do you like?”
Elena picked up a purple...thing shaped like a phallus on one end and a weird, curvy abstract sculpture on the other.
“I think you will like this. See, on this end, it goes inside, and it sits right next to your G-spot. And on this side, it feels like real skin. Touch it, you’ll see.”
“I haven’t touched a real penis since—oh! Wow. It does feel real.”
Caressing DJ’s face, Elena asked, “Can I fuck you with it?”
DJ’s libido awakened with a vengeance. How much she’d missed having sex with Elena! Now that she was back, they had all sorts of catching up to do. DJ’s vulva agreed and immediately ripened. Her clothes were off in the blink of an eye. Elena chuckled.
“What am I gonna do with you?”
“Fuck my brains out, I hope.”
Elena’s answer was to unzip her dress and let it slide to the floor. In another state of mind, DJ would think that that dress was far too lovely to be there, but her mouth was too busy watering at the lacy lingerie Elena had worn beneath it. DJ touched herself as she watched Elena slip on the harness and adjust the straps.
“Did you do that a lot while I was gone?”
“It wasn’t the same.”
“Awww, poor baby. It’s OK,” said Elena, crawling on top of her, “Mommy’s home.”
They held each other and kissed deeply, urgently touching breasts and buttocks, cupping vulvae and sucking the skin on each other’s necks, but it wasn’t enough. DJ needed more. She needed it now.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Hm?”
“Fuck me. Please fuck me.”
“I love how you beg. Turn around. I want you from behind.”
DJ obeyed, pushing aside the few toys that were in the way. She peeked at Elena. The purple dildo in its harness would’ve looked silly on anybody else, including her, but on Elena, it looked naughty and sexy. The bed dipped beneath Elena’s weight as she moved into position. Dexterous fingers stroked the wetness between DJ’s legs. The cap on the lube snapped open then shut. Something thick and bulbous brushed against her clit then slid inside and...oh, God!
“It’s OK?” asked Elena. It sounded like she was struggling to stay coherent. Did this feel good for her too?
“I’m OK.”
“How do you want it, baby? Slow and soft, like this?”
“Ooooh, ungh!”
“Or fast and hard, like this?”
“Ungh! Ungh! Ungh! Ungh! Ah! Fuck!”
“How you want it?”
“Slow and—ah! Hard.”
Elena drove into her, fucking her hard and steady. God, she was a machine. DJ fell into the rhythm and sensation. Her core quivered in time with each of Elena’s thrusts.
“Hurting you?” asked Elena, rough and guttural.
DJ shook her head, “Don’t stop.”
Some time later, when she would be capable of rational thought, DJ would muse that a big part of what excited her about Elena fucking her raw was witnessing someone who projected so put-together an image of womanhood being so overcome with raw animal passion (for her!) that she would toss aside all pretense of trying to be feminine, instead surrendering herself to erotic abandon. The grunts and groans coming out of DJ’s throats weren’t ladylike either.
“I—I have to stop,” panted Elena. DJ slid off the toy and looked at her. The skin on Elena’s face, neck, and chest was red as a tomato. Her makeup was a mess. Sweat shimmered all over her body. How long had they been at this?
“Let me help,” said DJ. She undid the harness. It and the glistening wet dildo plopped onto the bed. She helped Elena lie down and got her a glass of water and a cool, damp cloth. She wiped the sweat and makeup off Elena’s face.
“You OK?” asked DJ, petting her gently the way she’d seen Elena do for Felix countless times. Elena nodded.
“I just need rest. And a long shower.”
“OK. Rest now. Shower later. Sex again tomorrow.”
Elena smiled weakly.
DJ woke up to the smell of food. Still half-asleep, she staggered out of bed and followed the smell to the kitchen. Felix and Elena sat at the small table eating a breakfast of eggs, toast, and fruit. She waved to them both and plopped into the empty chair with a plate in front of it. With each bite of food, her sleepiness faded.
“What are we doing today?” she asked.
Elena shrugged, “Anything you want.”
“Even skydiving?”
Elena chuckled and rubbed DJ’s knee. She said, “Wasn’t there something we had to finish together?”
DJ almost choked on her orange juice. One of these days, Felix was going to figure it out or catch them in the act. Exactly how traumatizing would that be for him?
“Felix, Mommy and DJ have to talk about something. Why don’t you go play with your new toys?”
DJ blushed at the mention of toys. Felix happily hopped off his chair and ran to his room. DJ continued eating her breakfast.
“Let’s get married,” Elena said.
“Married? When?”
“When we get back to the States.”
“May I ask what brought this on?”
“I am in love with you, and I’m selfish, so I want to keep you in my life.”
“What about Felix?”
“He adores you.”
“What’s your sister gonna think?”
“Do you really care?”
“No, but I’m interested.”
“Well...the truth is it’s unlikely that she will ever come to accept you. She never accepted Michael either, and he was Felix’s father. She...doesn’t like black people very much. She doesn’t like gay people either.”
That explained everything about Irina’s shitty attitude when Elena brought DJ to meet her. What didn’t make sense was how she could be so crazy about Felix and spoil him rotten every chance she got.
“But she—” said DJ, lowering her voice, “how can someone hate black people and love a black nephew? And doesn’t she know you’re bisexual?”
Elena laughed and said, “Irina doesn’t believe in bisexuals.”
“How does that work?”
“She thinks that bisexuals are gay men who can’t admit it or straight women doing it for attention.”
“I don’t get it. Why is Felix the exception? What if he turns out to be gay or bi or whatever?”
“He’s family.”
DJ laughed. That was so messed up. It’s a miracle that Elena came away from that without being a bigot just like her. Then again, thought DJ, maybe she hadn’t seen it yet.
“What’s wrong?” Elena asked.
“I don’t know how to say this.”
“Don’t worry. You can tell me anything. Just say it.”
“Uh...people aren’t born racist. They learn it from the people around them. How can I be sure that none of that stuff in Irina rubbed off on you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean, what if one day down the road I do something you don’t like, and you bring my race into it or what if something racist happens to me, and I try to tell you about it, and you don’t believe me? Or you tell me I’m being paranoid or I’m blowing it all out of proportion or—or you just don’t wanna hear it! You have no idea how much that would—that would hurt me!”
When she finished talking, DJ was crying. How could she have been so stupid? They should’ve talked about this a long time ago. How did she forget something as huge as this? She felt Elena sit in her lap, wrap her arms around her, and stroke her hair.
“Shhh, shhh, don’t cry, neshama, don’t cry. I won’t do that to you.”
“You can’t know that—”
“I will listen. I will believe you,” cooed Elena, “I promise. OK? I promise”
DJ nodded into Elena’s bosom. She said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your special moment.”
“Don’t say that. Nothing was ruined. What do you need, neshama? Hm? What do you need?”
“I need...I need time.”
Elena held her tight.
Hey, did you hear? Elena Vlaslov’s getting married. Who? Elena Vlaslov. Irina’s sister. Irina has a sister? Yeah, remember? She’s the hot one. Ohhh, her!
Guess what? I heard she’s marrying a woman. What? Is she gay? That’s impossible; she’s way too pretty to be gay. She might be one of those sluts that call themselves bisexual. Bisexual, yeah right. She just needs a good, hard fuck is all. I’d be glad to help.
That’s not what I heard. I heard he was black. Didn’t she get knocked up by some black guy? Ugh, I can’t imagine. If it was me, I’d have given it up. What would a beautiful girl like that want with an abizyana anyway? C’mon, you know why. They’re ugly and stupid, and they smell, but they’ve got big dicks.
So are you going to the wedding? Yeah, why not? It’s free food.
For anyone who didn’t know her, it was the shock of the century that the gorgeous but elusive and temperamental Elena Vlaslov married some nobody. For those who did know her, this wedding was just another one of her childish whims, and they’d split up within a week. Irina, who knew her best out of all of them, didn’t say anything.
Whatever brought those two lovebirds together, it certainly wasn’t the other bride’s looks. When they saw her under the chuppah, they thought that she was alright but too chubby and too black to be anything more than cute. Yet, it was obvious to everyone they made each other happy. Once the wedding party started, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The wine and vodka flowed, but they barely touched any of it. They didn’t need to, for they were already drunk on one another. Not a moment passed by when they didn’t hug, kiss, hold hands, stare into each other’s eyes, or whisper secrets in one another’s ears. Elena’s eyes sparkled. She smiled and laughed and danced up a storm, pulling everyone into her cyclone of joyous energy. Some of the elderly people quipped that Elena should have been named Miriam.
The girl must have done something right.
In the bosom of the master bedroom of their new apartment, DJ and Elena slowly made love, tenderly exploring and worshiping every part of each other’s bodies as if for the very first time. Several orgasms later, DJ lay atop Elena and licked the sweat trickling down her neck while they stewed in the afterglow.
“I can’t believe someone told you you were bad at this,” Elena said.
DJ kissed her. She said, “Where do you wanna go for the honeymoon? Don’t say Israel.”
“You like Israel.”
“Yes, but—”
“Felix likes Israel.”
“Yeah, but you already know everything about Israel. I wanna go someplace neither of us has been before. I wanna...experience the process of discovery with you. Let’s...let’s go on a safari.”
“No way. I like air conditioning. Listen, neshama. Pick what you want. As long as we go together, I don’t care. I’ll go. But, if I go, we have to bring some of our plaything with us.”
DJ kissed her deeply and said, “You have a deal, Ms. Vlaslov. I was planning to bring that anyway.”
“Clever girl.”
They kissed lazily and held each other until dawn.
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The Wise Man's New Clothes
by Dan H
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Dan did not find the second volume of the Kingkiller Chronicles to be worth the wait~
I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.
My name is Kvothe.
You may have heard of me.
Thus begins the blurb on the back of the first volume of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, and it's repeated on the second.
This is partly because, like many Fantasy novels, the Kingkiller Chronicles is really just one massive, massive novel chopped roughly into three parts. I suspect, however, that it's also partly because the blurb on the back of a book is usually a summary of what happens in the book, and despite weighing in at just shy of one thousand pages of densely printed text, the Wise Man's Fear is actually rather short on the “things happening” front.
If I had to summarize the entire book in twenty-five words or less I would do it like this:
Kvothe is awesome. He meets people who tell him how awesome he is, and they teach him to be even more awesome. The end.
As I so often say at the start of these articles: I am almost tempted to leave it there.
I'm not going to break down the sequence of events in the book, explain how Kvothe goes from the University to Vintas to Faerie to Ademre back to Vintas and back to the University – it's not really what happens in the book (insofar as anything happens) that I'm concerned about, it's the way in which the whole book collapses into a godawful mess of juvenile wish-fulfilment which undermines any hope I might have had for the series.
Oh, I should also add that this wound up getting far longer and far angrier than I intended. Sorry.
A Little Context
The Name of the Wind was spectacularly well received. Like spectacularly well. It won awards, it was praised by the likes of Orson Scott Card and Ursula le Guinn, it was one of those books people admitted to disliking only with a note of shame in their voices.
The book has become something of a poster child for what is best in the Fantasy genre – rich worldbuilding, clever storytelling, intricate plotting and a knowing deconstruction of the tropes and assumptions on which it is based (although to be honest, even in 2007 I was a little bored of deconstruction – it's still worth doing, but people really need to stop pretending that it's a new idea, I mean hell Elric was a deconstruction of the tropes of the fantasy genre).
I was
sceptical but ultimately positive
about the first volume, ultimately concluding that it was doing a lot of interesting things with the medium, and cleverly analysing the intersection between reality and myth, people and legends.
I was disappointed, therefore, to find myself reading a book which, amongst other things, devotes eleven out of its hundred and fifty two chapters to describing how its sixteen year old protagonist spent three days having sex with a hot faery woman who by the way thought he was totally awesome at sex.
The Double Standard
This bit is going to be a bit high-horsey, for which I apologise in advance.
Ages ago I read Trudi Canavan's Age of the Five trilogy and
concluded
that when you put all of the protagonist's skills end to end they made her look like a godawful Mary-Sue. But ultimately this was forgiveable because when you get right down to it The Age of the Five was mostly an enjoyable bit of girly fluff which wasn't trying to do anything serious.
For the record, at the start of the book Kvothe is one of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen, fluent in several languages, a precocious magician, able to call upon magic of a kind few even believe exists, able to climb walls and pick locks, a master artificer, skilled in both arts and sciences, endlessly resourceful and never ever meets a woman who doesn't fancy him. By the end of the book he's all of that, plus he's even better at magic, has learned secret martial arts techniques that make him better at fighting than anybody he will ever meet except for the people who taught him, has gained the ear of several powerful people, and has been taught secret sex skills by a hot older woman who never the less thought that he was pretty amazing at doing sex even before she taught him to be more amazing at doing sex (I will come back to this a lot because I think it's probably the most stupid and juvenile part of what I now am convinced is a fundamentally stupid and juvenile text).
What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.
Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.
Imre
I know I said I wasn't going to go through the events of the book in detail, but I am going to discuss my irritation with the book in a broadly chronological sequence. This is simply because the book is so huge and so lacking in structure (beyond the obvious detail that some events happen after some other events) that it's far easier to think of it in terms of “The Imre Bit”, “The Vintas Bit”, “The Felurian Bit” and “The Ademre Bit”.
So the book starts off with Kvothe in Imre, where it's a straight continuation of Imre sections of the first volume. Kvothe is unable to pay his tuition again, which I wouldn't object to if it weren't for the fact that I've already read that plotline in book one (about the first quarter of the book, indeed, could be seen as the end of the first volume as much as the beginning of the second). We're thrown pretty much headfirst back into the setting, which was kind of jarring because dude, I read the original two years ago and I sure as hell won't be going back and rereading it to remind myself who Simmon and Kilvin and Exa Dal are (I did eventually remember, but I spent quite a while choking on name soup).
I'm afraid this article is going to be something of a list of Things That Annoyed Me. There were two Things That Annoyed Me about Imre.
The first was an issue that I remember having trouble with in the first book, which I have taken to referring to as the “poverty wanking”. Kvothe spends a lot of time being poor. He spends even more time telling the reader that if they have never been truly poor, they cannot understand what it is like to be poor. This is true, and I could almost accept this as a brave attempt to challenge the class privilege of his readership (and Lord knows I've got plenty of that – I've never had to deal with real shortage of money in my entire life, and I do absolutely take for granted the fact that food and housing and hot water and broadband internet access will be easily within my reach from now until the day I die) but there's just something about the whole thing that rings hollow.
I think mostly it's the fact that while Kvothe only has two shirts, and has to worry about finding the money to pay for his University tuition (something which, in his world, is itself a massive privilege, and one which Kvothe barely even needs given his precocious talent and secret route into the Archives) but he has several easy sources of income which, by the standards of his world, are very lucrative (he makes and sells magic artefacts for pity's sake; a profession for which only a handful of people in the world are qualified, and which he does better than pretty much anybody else out there), and he gets free room and board from a local tavern in return for his services as a musician (he also makes money performing at a local music venue, and while it's not much by the standards of the nobility it's certainly enough to live on). I'm annoyed by enforced poverty as a fictional trope at the best of times (why hello Season Six Buffy, fancy seeing you here) but Kvothe's constantly reminding us that “if you have never been truly poor, you will not understand” makes me want to throw something.
I know I'm on thin ice here, because frankly I'm as middle class as they come. I've never slept a night without a roof except that one time I went camping, I've never missed a meal except through laziness, I spent a year unemployed but I was well supported by my friends and relatives and live in a country with an adequate (if not generous) benefits system. I have, however, read a great many first-hand descriptions of real poverty from people who really haven't know where their next meal is coming from. Kvothe's life is nothing like the lives of those people, and barring the (extremely forced) homeless sequence in book one, it never has been. Kvothe does not read like a poor man who is forced to scrabble for every penny just to pay for life's necessities, he reads like a middle class kid who is jealous of the fact that his rich friends have better toys than he does. It wouldn't be a problem on its own, but the smug, sanctimonious insistence that I “cannot understand” his plight because I have “never known poverty” made me want to scream. No, I haven't known poverty, but Kvothe isn't poor, he's just not rich.
Sorry, that rant's been waiting for two years.
The second thing that annoyed me about the Imre sections was – well it wasn't really a feature of the Imre sections themselves, so much as the way they were resolved and led into the next bit of the plot. Kvothe's university shenanigans go on for a long time. Like I say, this is a long book. A long, long book. Again (I have mentioned this before, I will mention this again) the book spends eleven chapters describing how Kvothe totally got to score with a hot chick. It's long. It's wordy. The author bio on the inside back cover describes Patrick Rothfuss as somebody who “loves words, laughs often, and refuses to dance” and he seems to have chosen to demonstrate his love of words by including a great many superfluous ones.
The Imre section ends with Kvothe being put on trial for malfeasance (using magic for harm), and Kvothe pointedly refuses to discuss it despite the fact that (according to the Chronicler) it's a major part of his legend. This didn't bother me so much since I was pretty sure a long courtroom sequence would be deathly dull. Then, however, he gets an offer of patronage from the Maer of Vint, which requires him to take leave of the University and undergo a hazardous journey to a foreign kingdom. Here is how this journey is handled in the book:
Several unfortunate complications arose during the trip.
In brief there was a storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck, although not in that order. It also goes without saying that I did a great many things, some heroic, some ill-advised, some clever and audacious.
Over the course of my trip I was robbed, drowned, and left penniless on the streets of Junpui. In order to survive I begged for crusts, stole a man's shoes and recited poetry. The last should demonstrate more than all the rest how truly desperate my situation became.
However, as these events have little to with the heart of the story, I must pass them over in favour of more important things. Simply said, it took me sixteen days to reach Severen. A bit longer than I had planned, but at no point during my journey was I ever bored.
Now okay, I get it. I really do. Because this is a serious fantasy novel which deconstructs genre conventions and plays with your expectations Rothfuss is deliberately glossing over a segment in Kvothe's life which, in a lesser novel, would be highlighted. I get it. I even get that because Kvothe is narrating the whole novel in first person, his choice to skip over this section reveals something about his character, both his jaded unwillingness to revel in tales of adventure and his almost childlike delight in subverting the expectations of Bast and the Chronicler (which parallel Rothfus' delight in subverting the expectations of his intended audience oh do you see how many levels this works on).
But.
This section appears on page three hundred and sixty five. It comes at the end of three hundred and sixty four pages which have been taken up with scenes where Kvothe converses with infuriatingly quirky girls (all of whom are hot), or infuriatingly eccentric old men (none of whom are hot), or with sequences which rehash plot threads which were already covered in the first book, or with endless conversations in which Kvothe engages in self-indulgent wordplay with either a hot quirky girl or an eccentric old man. I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things) and then score points by not describing a sequence of events that might have actually included some incident.
Also: funnily enough, I have no idea why a sequence in which Kvothe escapes from pirates has “nothing to do with the heart of the story” when a sequence in which he talks to an annoying quirky girl, or one in which he wanders around the Archives for ages finding no interesting or useful information, or one in which invents a new machine for catching arrows, or a scene where a hot woman offers him sex and a fortune in return for access to the Archives and he refuses, or a scene where he shows how totally awesome at playing music he is, or yet more of his pointless back-and-forthing with Ambrose, or any of the other things which take up the first third of the book are somehow totally vital to it.
This is because I have no idea what the heart of the story is or is supposed to be, and I am pretty sure I will have no way of knowing what the heart of the story was supposed to be until the last page of the last volume. I mean as I understood it the story was supposed to be about Kvothe's pursuit of the Chandrian, and how his chasing legends ultimately led him to become a legend, but all I got in the first three hundred and sixty four pages of The Wise Man's Fear was minutiae and pointless worldbuilding. If Kvothe wanted to focus on the heart of the story, he could have summed up half of the first book and a third of the second as “I went to the University looking for information about the Chandrian, but I didn't find any.”
Vintas
After Kvothe arrives in Vintas, things actually get a lot better (at least for a while) and I found myself getting back into the swing of things. I could have done without his having arrived penniless, necessitating yet another sequence in which Kvothe tricks his way into the towers of the great with nothing but the clothes on his back and his native wit but it's all dealt with fairly quickly and Kvothe's interactions with the court of the Maer of Vint are relatively well done (although once again, it basically consists of Kvothe being amazing at everything, and all the people who matter deciding that they will immediately like, trust, and respect him because of his obvious natural superiority – sorry this was in fact the section I liked, I just really think it's important to remember that Kvothe's social interactions make Bella Swan look well articulated).
In Vintas, Kvothe does many great things for the Maer, including helping him win the heart of his intended bride, which he manages to do perfectly despite the fact that at this stage in his life one of Kvothe's vanishingly small number of weaknesses is a complete unfamiliarity with romance and an inability to deal with women.
Kvothe's final service for the Maer of Vint is to go north with a motley band of mercenaries and sort out some bandits. This they do, chiefly because Kvothe is able to call down lightning from the sky and kill a whole bunch of them. Now in the previous book Kvothe is remembered as calling down lightning from the sky, when what he really does is throw some flashpowder at some people. This provided a nice illustration of the book's central ideas about the difference between myth and reality and the way tales grow in the telling. In the bandit encounter in book two, Kvothe really does just blow them all up with a lightning bolt. Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.
On the way back from his victory over the bandits, Kvothe encounters Felurian.
Felurian
Oh Felurian. Where to begin.
Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She's the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you'll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.
Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he's awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.
Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you'd be mad or dead” and he's like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he's definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn't be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn't sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.
This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.
So yeah, Felurian.
I should repeat that apart from a few misgivings, the Vintas segments of The Wise Man's Fear did actually convince me that I'd misjudged the book, that pacing issues aside it was going to turn out okay. The Felurian section convinced me that what I was dealing with was the worst kind of third-rate wish-fulfilment crap.
Here is the exchange between Kvothe and Felurian after he finishes his half-finished song (a song, I should add, which is included in full in the text, and which both Kvothe and Felurian describe as having beautiful words – a claim I would hesitate to make about anything I had written myself, particularly if it was incidental music for my fantasy novel):
Some of the fire left her, but when she found her voice it was tight and dangerous. “my skills 'suffice'?” She hardly seemed able to force out the last word. Her mouth formed a thin, outraged line.
I exploded, my voice a roll of thunder. “How the hell am I supposed to know? It's not like I've ever done this sort of thing before!”
She reeled back at the vehemence of my words, some of the anger draining out of her. “what is it you mean?” she trailed off, confused.
“This!” I gestured awkwardly at myself, at her, at the cushions and the pavilion around us, as if that explained everything.
The last of the anger left her as I saw realization begin to dawn, “you...”
“No,” I looked down, my face growing hot. “I have never been with a woman.” Then I straightened and looked her in the eye as if challenging her to make an issue of it.”
Felurian was still for a moment, then let her mouth turn up into a wry smile. “you tell me a faerie story, my kvothe.”
I felt my face go grim. I don't mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvellous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the perfect truth.
Regardless of my motivation, my expression seemed to convince her. “but you were like a gentle summer storm.” She made a fluttering gesture with a hand. “you were a dancer fresh upon the field.” Her eyes glittered wickedly.
That's right, Kvothe was so amazing at doing sex that the ancient sex goddess of sex and death was actually unable to believe that he was a virgin because he was so amazing at doing sex.
Once again, I say this. The next time you hear anybody complain about the fact that – in certain popular novels targeted at young women – hundred year old vampires fall for sixteen year old schoolgirls, point out to them that in one of the most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the twenty-first century a faery creature of unbridled sexual potency, as ancient as time itself, who lures men to their deaths with her irresistible beauty and insatiable lovemaking has her mind blown by the sexual prowess of a sixteen year old virgin.
There is a part of me, a tiny part, which respects the sheer brass bollocks of this. Not only does Kvothe get to live out the adolescent fantasy of being taught how to be amazing at sex by a fantastically hot older woman (and I understand and appreciate this fantasy, and don't think there's anything wrong with it – adolescent fantasies are important, even for grownups, hell that's why I play RPGs and read genre fiction) but said hot older woman takes the time out at the start of the whole sequence to make it very clear both to him and to the reader that he was already amazing at sex and that all her tuition will be doing is making him even more amazing at sex.
Also what is up with her not using capitalization. What does that even sound like?
As part of the Felurian interlude Kvothe encounters a prophetic tree, which Bast interrupts the story to tell us is the most dangerous thing ever because it has absolute knowledge of the future and is utterly malicious, and therefore if you encounter it your every action will bring nothing but destruction (this is clearly a nonsensical idea, and is dropped into the middle of the text without ceremony or foreshadowing and I have no idea if we're even supposed to take it seriously). The whole faery interlude just came so totally out of left field and turned the story on its head in ways that felt annoying and unsatisfying. It introduced a whole bunch of concepts that didn't really have any buildup, and it transformed Kvothe's story from a story about a clever, resourceful man whose reputation grew far beyond the reality to the story of a man who really was just all that and a bag of chips. Suddenly he went from being somebody who did great things, and to whom legendary powers were attributed, to somebody who really did just have access to ancient powerful magic for no clear reason.
To put it another way, at the start of this review, I quoted the “I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings...” section from the first book. In The Name of the Wind we see that when Kvothe “burned down the town of Trebon” what really happened was that the town was burned down by a rampaging Draccus (a creature which itself was the mundane source of a fantastical rumour) while Kvothe was in the area for other reasons. This engaged cleverly with the novel's central themes.
In The Wise Man's Fear we deal with the “I have spent the night with Felurian” section of the speech. Unlike the town of Trebon, where the truth behind the story is both more mundane and more interesting than the version that is repeated in legend, the story of Kvothe's night with Felurian is just – well – exactly what it says on the tin. There's no clever twist or double meaning, no unexpected subversion of our expectations. He just really did do something which he totally shouldn't have been able to do, and looked awesome while doing it, and got to have loads of sex with a really really hot woman who by the way thought he was awesome at sex. It's not clever, it's not illuminating, it's just pathetic.
Ademre
I really do think that the Felurian sequence broke the book for me. Part of this is that my perception of Kvothe and the text in general shifted so fundamentally after the utterly facepalm-worthy faery sequence. Part of it is that once he's been initiated into the mysteries of womanhood by Felurian, Kvothe suddenly starts to have a whole lot of sex.
Once Kvothe has been taught to be awesome at sex by Felurian (but just so it's clear, he was already awesome at sex, this is very important) he then gets taught to be awesome at fighting. Thus becoming the best man ever.
In the world of the Kingkiller Chronicles there exists a kingdom (or an area of land at least) called Ademre. Ademre is one of those spurious fantasy cultures that seems to have a totally martial-arts based economy. They follow a philosophical thingy called “the Lethani” and study awesome martial arts that, of course, make them better at fighting than everybody else in the world. They then go into the world as mercenaries where they make a fortune being awesome at fighting, most of which they send back to their homeland, where it goes to support their otherwise extremely poor countrymen.
Kvothe travels with an Adem mercenary as part of his work for the Maer of Vint and, because everybody who meets Kvothe either takes an instant irrational dislike to him or treats him like he's the most important person in the universe, this mercenary initiates Kvothe into the secrets of the Lethani, and begins to instruct him in Adem martial techniques. It is worth pointing out at this point that doing either of these things is about the most horrific cultural taboo his society has, and is punishable by death or excommunication from the Adem (which the Adem, being the Noble Warrior Culture naturally consider to be a fate far worse than death).
The Adem discover that Kvothe has been taught their secrets, and he and his mercenary friend are summoned to Ademre to face judgement. They talk to Kvothe and he impresses them with how completely awesome he is and how he totally groks the Lethani even though he was only introduced to the concept about three weeks ago.
So because it's totally forbidden to share the secrets of the Lethani with people outside the Adem, but because Kvothe is apparently totally “of the Lethani” because he totally understands what this complicated philosophical concept is all about because of how awesome he is the only option that the Adem have open to them is to teach Kvothe to be totally awesome at fighting.
Of course.
The Adem, as it turns out, have a matriarchal society, for which Rothfuss scores precisely one point (he did not, at least, assume that it was impossible for women to have a prominent role in a warrior culture). He promptly loses that point for explaining that the reason the Adem have a matriarchal society is that their martial art is all about control and women are so much calmer and more sensible than men, because men are just so aggressive.
It also turns out that the Adem have no cultural taboos about nudity or sex. This of course leads to an intricate and profoundly well realised exploration of the ways in which our cultural notions of … oh who am I kidding. This is an excuse for Kvothe to have sex with a bunch of hot women who want to have sex with him because he is so awesome. Also there are no STDs in their culture because they all have sex with each other all the time, and obviously if your culture is based on rampant unprotected sex, it must be impossible for anybody in your culture to get an STD, because then STDs would spread around your population really fast, and obviously that couldn't happen, so they must all just be totally disease free. QED. Just to be clear, I'm not extrapolating here, this is exactly how it is explained as working in the book. At no point does Kvothe ever receive a sexual proposition from anybody he does not find attractive, and there is no engagement at all with the question of homosexuality.
So Kvothe gets taught to be awesome at fighting. To be fair, he does very clearly wind up being much less good at fighting than any of the actual Adem, there's a comedy sequence in which he gets his ass handed to him by a ten year old girl (although I kind of felt that this undermined the earlier point about how women in Ademre are better fighters than men – because we're clearly supposed to find the fact that Kvothe is beaten up by a girl funny and faintly emasculating, which makes the Adem's supposed respect for women warriors ring rather hollow). At the same time it's very clear that his two months of training in Ademre are going to make him better at fighting than anybody he is ever actually likely to get into a fight with, except for supernatural beings.
I think what bugged me most about the Ademre section was that it felt like this entire culture existed purely to provide an excuse for Kvothe to get good at fighting. These people who are utterly mistrustful of outsiders, incredibly paranoid about their secrets, and grounded in a social and philosophical ideals that Kvothe clearly finds completely alien never the less happily teach him their greatest secrets and formally initiate him into their society, and they do all of this despite the fact that he never shows even the slightest sign of having internalized (or even of remotely respecting) the ideals of the Adem. He never, for example, seems to get over his habit of assuming that women are inherently less capable fighters than men (he feels particularly embarrassed at being beaten up by a young girl and later on he massacres a group of bandits and feels particularly guilty about the fact that they had two women with them).
To put it another way, the overwhelming impression I got from The Name of the Wind was that while over the course of the novel, Kvothe acquired a great many skills, he didn't actually learn anything. He acquires awesome sex skills from Felurian, but doesn't learn anything about interacting with women except how to get what he wants out of them. He acquires awesome martial-arts skills from the Adem, but doesn't learn to really appreciate or understand their culture (except insofar as he comes to appreciate the benefits of being surrounded by hot women who treat sex as little more than a handshake). He doesn't really grow or change or develop in any meaningful way, he just gets more powerful – he's like the protagonist in a CRPG: he wanders around doing arbitrary-seeming quests and unlocking more powers. In every meaningful sense, the Kvothe who returns from Ademre at the end of The Wise Man's Fear is exactly the same as the Kvothe who was homeless on the streets of Tarbean in The Name of the Wind.
Denna
Something I've avoided talking about thus far is Denna. Denna is Kvothe's love interest.
I'm really not sure what to say about Denna. Kvothe meets her early in the first book, and then she's in and out of his life like the wind (oh do you see). Kvothe's love for Denna is pretty much his biggest drive in the book – even more so than his pursuit of the Chandrian, which is frankly lacklustre at times. Basically it's your traditional Nice Guy Protagonist in love with Mysterious High Class Prostitute story – it's sort of like Moulin Rouge or Mal/Inara in Firefly. They have lots of conversations in which she tells him how much she values him and how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control her and tie her down, and Kvothe spends a lot of time narrating to himself how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control Denna and tie her down. Meanwhile he spends the majority of his free time fantasising about how great it could be if he could control her and tie her down.
Okay, that's slightly unfair, but only slightly. In this type of narrative in general, the mistake writers wind up making is always in presenting the problem as strategic in nature. Try to tie the girl down, and she'll run away, so it's more practical to take a softly-softly approach so that you can get what you want. The notion that what the girl herself wants might enter into the equation is always rather a side issue. It is taken for granted that Kvothe will only be able to truly “be with” Denna if he can get her to stop running and stay with him – he never even considers the possibility that they could have a relationship in which she simply retains the independence she seems to value so highly.
I don't think the Denna thing would bother me if it weren't for the fact that Rothfuss' women are so uniformly … fneh. Pre-Felurian, they're basically all desexualised and childlike (like Auri, the quirky pixie girl who lives in the Underthing) or else Mysterious Gatekeepers Of The Mystic Lands of The Sex (like Fela, Devi, and all of the other hot women who fancy Kvothe without him realizing). Post-Felurian, the Mystery has gone out of the non-childlike women, but the Gatekeepers of the Lands of The Sex they remain.
I don't want to make too big a thing out of this (particularly since if I did this would apparently be evidence that I knew nothing about music, or love, or Patrick Rothfuss) The Kingkiller Chronicles is just generally not great for women. It has a fair few female characters in it who are interesting, but their interestingness is somewhat undermined by their total obsession with (which always includes sexual interest in) Kvothe.
In Conclusion: Follow Through
The Kingkiller Chronicles is a serious Fantasy series for serious Fantasy readers. I know it is, because it keeps telling me it is.
Each volume opens and closes with a section called A Silence of Three Parts, this chapter is always slightly different, but it always ends with the following line:
It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.
It's this line that sets my expectations for the series. It will be serious, it will be melancholy, it will chart the tragedy of a man who did great and terrible things.
But it has no follow through.
So he gets expelled from the university, but it in no way stops him accessing the university. He's poor, but never so poor that he can't afford everything he could possibly need. He's of low birth, but nobody who isn't clearly evil reacts badly to him because of it. He wanders blithely into faerie and is none the worse for wear. He encounters a society in which everybody has casual, unprotected sex with everybody else, and this apparently creates a society completely free of sexually transmitted diseases. He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.
The Wise Man's Fear is nine hundred and ninety four pages of setup, foreshadowing and copout. Kvothe wanders a world which exists only as a backdrop for him, and interacts with people who exist only to flatter him (either with their irrational hatred or their equally irrational adoration). It is a shallow, superficial text pandering to shallow, superficial fantasies. If it was three hundred pages shorter, and less portentously written, I'd recommend it unreservedly as a way to indulge your inner fourteen-year-old.
I have no doubt that The Wise Man's Fear will take its place alongside The Name of the Wind in the canon of modern Fantasy. I'll just sit here with my palm over my face.
Themes:
Books
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Sci-fi / Fantasy
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Wardog
at 19:27 on 2011-04-13I, wow, fail.
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Melissa G.
at 20:25 on 2011-04-13*facepalm*
No, really, that's kind of all I've got. I'm just sort of sitting here going, "I-what-but-it..." *throws up hands and walks away*
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Orion
at 20:48 on 2011-04-13My first reaction was to smugly proclaim that I've already written the story Name of the Wind evidently pretended to be--which is true. I was 14, so it was terrible for other reasons, but I like to think I stuck to the "myth is less than reality" thing pretty effectively.
My second was to realize, to my shame, that I also wrote most of the story Wise Man's Fear apparently is. This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?
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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/
at 20:52 on 2011-04-13Why does the cover appear to feature a Jedi?
I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things)
Oh my god
The God of Small Things.
A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.
See, I never read the first Kingkiller book because it sounded precisely like the stuff I'd hate, but people keep raving on and on about it and I don't get it. Even the backcover bit sounds incredibly obnoxious: "oho look how clever I am by LAMPSHADING my GARY STU qualities. SEE? SEEEEE."
Jesus that post-coital exchange. No one can convince me to read Rothfuss. Ever. Ever. This, this right here? This is shit writing. This is stupid writing. Anyone who praises Rothfuss as whatever can go take a leap.
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Dan H
at 22:20 on 2011-04-13
Oh my god The God of Small Things. A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.
Is that a "I hated God of Small Things" or an "I really liked God of Small Things"? I kind of can't tell.
See, I never read the first Kingkiller book because it sounded precisely like the stuff I'd hate, but people keep raving on and on about it and I don't get it. Even the backcover bit sounds incredibly obnoxious: "oho look how clever I am by LAMPSHADING my GARY STU qualities. SEE? SEEEEE."
It's very clever-clever, I thought that the first book just about got away with it, but the second just spiralled into a pit of stupid.
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Dan H
at 23:47 on 2011-04-13
This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?
The glib answer to "is wish fulfillment separable from sexism" is "only if you have sexist wishes."
To be more specific and hopefully more helpful, I think it depends on how your handle your character's charisma. Just because somebody is charismatic, that doesn't mean that women have to throw themselves at him (any more than it means men have to throw themselves at him - assuming your character isn't so supernaturally gorgeous that they overcome people's sexuality, it seems reasonable that they wouldn't overcome people's general preferences either). Writing charismatic characters in *general* is really hard, because they can easily come across as somebody people like for no particular reason (like John Sheridan or for that matter Kvothe).
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http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/
at 02:32 on 2011-04-14Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade
loved it.
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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/
at 07:10 on 2011-04-14I hated
The God of Small Things
like burning, random incest and all.
koboldwhisperer: hurrgh Gabe and Tycho. What a pair of toxic wads.
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Arthur B
at 10:02 on 2011-04-14
Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.
Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about
sympathetic magic
? Or is sympathy something different from that?
Either way: wow, this sounds shit. At least Moorcock (on his better days) had the decency to give his wish-fulfilment figures a hard time. Yes, Elric is teh sex and is good at fighting and magic and is really smart, but early on in his career he's really kind of a terrible person, later on he wants to change but is already too dependent on Stormbringer to rid himself of it, and eventually he's completely unable to protect anyone or anything he loves when it really counts. Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to
fail
at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?
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Dan H
at 10:24 on 2011-04-14
Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about sympathetic magic? Or is sympathy something different from that?
There's a little bit more to it than that - Rothfuss' "sympathy" is quasi-scientific in a way that's actually quite interesting (it obeys conservation of energy, involves calculus and is treated by the people who study it as a form of engineering which it sort of is). "Real" magic is Naming, which is the proper "do anything and blow anything up" type of magic.
Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade loved it.
To be fair, the actual cartoon looks more like it's mocking the book than praising it. I mean the title is "when Larry met Mary" which I sort of assume is implying that Kvothe comes out as a Mary Sue version of Leisure Suit Larry.
They might have *also* really liked it, but the cartoon is actually pretty spot on.
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Wardog
at 10:28 on 2011-04-14If you have sex with two ninjas have you come before you even knew they were there...*boom-tish*
Generally very much NOT a fan of PA but I did like the cartoon - even if they liked the book, at least they were vaguely aware of its absurdity.
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Dan H
at 10:37 on 2011-04-14Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.
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Arthur B
at 10:41 on 2011-04-14
>Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.
Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?
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Dan H
at 11:00 on 2011-04-14
Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?
One might almost have suspected it of being deliberate...
I'm rather pleased that Thomas Wagner over at SFReviews.net
shares many of my misgivings
- he also opens with a particularly cringeworthy list of quotes from other reviewers which would have been hilarious if it wasn't so indicative.
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Ash
at 11:09 on 2011-04-14I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called
skraelings
.
Seriously, how hard can it be to put your made-up and not-so-made-up names in a search engine and see what turns out?
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Dan H
at 16:09 on 2011-04-14
I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called skraelings.
Ooh dear, that isn't good at all.
Worse, I doubt that it was wholly accidental, Rothfuss is clearly interested in etymology, so it makes me think he *probably* did it at least semi-deliberately.
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Ash
at 18:45 on 2011-04-14How the hell do you do something like that accidentally on purpose? WHY the hell do you do something like that?
It just baffles me that no one called him out on his shit.
He's not getting a penny from me until he apologises. And maybe not eveen then.
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Dan H
at 18:48 on 2011-04-14I suspect the way you do it accidentally on purpose is you find out that there's a term that appears in Icelandic sagas which means roughly "thin, scrawny things" and is used in lines like: "After the first winter summer came, and they became aware of Skrælings, who came out of the forest in a large flock" (thanks Wiki) and you think "hey, that's a cool name for my thin, scrawny alien creatures that are going to come out of the forest in a large flock in the first book". You just forget that it's also basically a racial slur.
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Ash
at 19:58 on 2011-04-14I don't think the term itself is a racial slur (although I admit I only knew of the 'written skin' etymology), it's just its use in this context that's particularly wtf.
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Arthur B
at 21:36 on 2011-04-14To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.
Though it doesn't sound like it's worth reading through thousands of pages of that stuff to find out whether that's the case.
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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/
at 22:22 on 2011-04-14
To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.
Lord, even if there weren't--I'm guessing each book averages at over 900 pages each--nearly 3,000 pages between you and that reveal, I'd still be hard-pressed to imagine anything more asinine. It's not even a major part of the plot after all, is it?
Ash: heh, pennies. I've torrented books by terrible writers before for lulz, but when I actually loaded up the files to read, I discovered I had no interest in going past page two. There is such a thing as authors so off-putting that they aren't even worth reading for free. Also considering Rothfuss is currently a genre darling, the chances of anyone calling him out on either this thing or his female characters is slim to none. But hell, the latter happened to Joe Abercrombie, so maybe there's hope (and he even wrote slightly better female characters after the fact, though that's not saying much).
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Dan H
at 22:59 on 2011-04-14
To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.
Since the Skraelings are eight-legged and crablike, that would be quite the twist, particularly since they're a throwaway in book one.
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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/
at 01:05 on 2011-04-15I've always wondered about all the praise people heap on this series because to me it sounds just like another example of male wish-fulfillment in epic fantasy and epic fantasy suffers from no lack of it.
What gets me is when people rush to squeal and drool over male epic fantasy authors like Rothfuss for their originality and bravery and marginalize the women who write epic fantasy and dark medieval fantasy by refusing to discuss their books or dismissing them as "women's stories" which is so ignorant it makes me want to scream.
Carol Berg has three complete epic fantasy series to her name, but how many people have heard of her? K.J. Taylor has written a dark fantasy trilogy with a villain protagonist, a unique medieval setting, and successful deconstruction of the special animal companion/chosen human relationship so prevalent in fantasy (It benefits the griffins as much is does the humans, politics and class play an important role in who a griffin chooses as their human companion, they don't adore human beings unconditionally, etc.), but how many people even know that it exists? What about Michelle West and her Sun Sword series? I only found out about it by reading a blog post by the author herself linked by Carol Berg to her own blog.
All the series above have their flaws, but while most critics either play up the flaws and ignore the things that the author does right (Michelle West) or ignore them altogether (K.J. Taylor, Carol Berg for a long time), they rush to gloss over the flaws of male authors like Rothfuss and Martin and I'm just sick of it.
Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.
Sarah Micklem's books
Firethorn
and
Widlfire
are books about a red-headed peasant girl who manages to have a knight fall in love with her, has fire magic gifted to her by the gods and has an extensive knowledge of herbs and healing. It's also a dark medieval fantasy that isn't afraid to hurt its protagonist and make her and everyone around her suffer. it's well-regarded critically, but it's not nearly praised as Martin or Rothfuss's fantasy series. Just a warning, there is a rape early on the first book, but I thought that the author handled it well. It's one the few fantasy series that manages to tackle medieval misogyny without making me want to throw a cluebat at the author. YMMV though.
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http://cofax7.livejournal.com/
at 05:54 on 2011-04-15
What gets me is when people rush to squeal and drool over male epic fantasy authors like Rothfuss for their originality and bravery and marginalize the women who write epic fantasy and dark medieval fantasy by refusing to discuss their books or dismissing them as "women's stories" which is so ignorant it makes me want to scream.
Or like Sherwood Smith and Kate Elliott, both of whom are writing the kind of complex, meaty, plot-heavy stories with strong world-building that the fans and critics purport to love. Except neither of them get anywhere near the kind of press that people like Rothfuss and Martin do.
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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/
at 10:47 on 2011-04-15Since we're going there, what about NK Jemisin's
100K Kingdoms
? Yeine doesn't tick all the boxes: she only gets the "hot sex with creator god," "chosen for special destiny before she was born" and "chieftain of her tribe despite exhibiting no leadership skills whatsoever" down (can't recall her age but I think he's in her early twenties, tops? Nineteen maybe?), but by the end of her story she turns into an honest-to-goodness creator deity. Jemisin is taken pretty seriously by critics as well as sf/f fans, and was nominated for the Nebula. Popular opinion of her writing is overwhelmingly, absolutely positive; she's praised for amazing world-building and characterization and super-duper-clever framing narrative.
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Dan H
at 11:06 on 2011-04-15So we're rapidly coming to the conclusion that, in fact, the SF/F community will embrace silly Mary-Sue characters regardless of gender?
That's fairly positive, I suppose.
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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/
at 11:37 on 2011-04-15It's more progressive than "the SF/F community will embrace silly Sues when they're male but decry their female counterparts," I guess? Yeine's even black!
(Despite my low, low opinion of Jemisin's novels I didn't actually think Yeine was a Sue--my problems with those books lay elsewhere--but when you sit down and list all her characteristics...)
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Ash
at 12:57 on 2011-04-15I was under the impression that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was successful because it was a novel with a PoC protagonist written by a PoC author that came out just after RaceFail09.
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http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/
at 13:45 on 2011-04-15An alternative theory. The fan fiction community skews female, and it's the fan writers and critics who put the spotlight on Mary Sue. So it should not surprise us that Meyer's audience were quicker to identify and comment on the wish-fulfilment aspects of her work than Rothfuss's audience.
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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/
at 16:09 on 2011-04-15
Yeine definitely is not black
, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)
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Dan H
at 17:10 on 2011-04-15
Yeine definitely is not black, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)
I really can't get my head around the idea of an African-American fiction section *at all*. I mean maybe I'm hopelessly naive but I'm pretty sure we don't have anything like that in this country (although to be fair and less laurel-resty that might be because of a tendency to leave black writers and characters out of bookstores entirely, rather than as a result of a more enlightened view of race politics).
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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/
at 17:18 on 2011-04-15Once upon a time it was useful. Now it's just an excellent way to make sure that black writers only get read by black readers -- less than 12 percent of the U.S popluation -- and therefore have a drastically reduced shelf like, reinforcing the idea that "black books don't sell." It is THE main reason I'm not weeping over the closure of Borders here -- they seem to be the last bastion of such a section, where I live.
Barnes and Noble have an "African-American Interest" section, but it's in with all the other sociology and anthroplogy sections, like Native American History and Judaica. Their fiction is categorized by, y'know,
category,
not race of author.
At one point, my local Borders was lumping Zane's erotica and "urban fiction," James Baldwin's novels AND essays, Octavia Butler, and Barack Obama's memoir together on the same shelf. (One shelf that was very close to the register to keep Us Folk from stealin'. Sigh.)
I went to a manager about it, and she gave me the most crestfallen look ever and told me that they had all tried, but it was a decision of the higher-ups.
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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/
at 17:37 on 2011-04-15(Oh, and yeah, I never saw that kind of thing in the U.K. either, not even in Borders. Granted, I haven't made an exhaustive study of the U.K. or anything.)
The funny thing about Borders here, too? Black British authors -- and Afro Caribbean, if I remember correctly -- were shelved right in with the "normal" fiction. (As were South Asian authors, Korean authors, South American, et cetera...) I definitely found Mike Gayle and the novel "Small Island" in with the mainstream fiction.
But I'm betting the U.K. publishing industry has undergone an entirely different sort of evolution. You'll still find, here, that some of the loudest advocates of having an Af Am section are African Americans, who want to have a shelf that "our children can look at, and feel proud, and know that they can accomplish things."
Which
was
in fact useful when I was a kid in the '70s. But now it hits the writers in the pocket and stands in the way of some of the social advances we need -- a greater variety of people writing a greater variety of experience (rather than depending on white writers to "get it right" all the time). We touched on that in the "Demon's Covenant" discussion.
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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/
at 20:56 on 2011-04-15I remembered N.K. Jemisin after I posted my comment, but unfortunately I can't remember any other women writing epic fantasy who's been embraced by fans and critics to the same extent so for now she stands as an exception to the general rule. Whether she represents a new trend or whether the fans will just go back to praising white men epic fantasy remains to be seen.
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Robinson L
at 15:06 on 2011-05-25
He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.
The really depressing part is that even in the twenty-first century, such an attitude is still the exception rather than the rule.
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http://conquestsong.blogspot.com/
at 23:29 on 2011-07-01Excellent rant, you summed up everything I disliked about WMF and TNotW. I think Rothfuss has that gift where his writing is easy to read / easy to get sucked into -- thus, people rarely recognize or shrug away how shopworn and/or stupid the content actually is.
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Dan H
at 01:11 on 2011-07-02He's certainly very readable (he'd have to be given how *stupidly long* his work is) and I'd feel much, much more positive about his books if they weren't so critically acclaimed. Which I suppose boils down to a churlish sounding "I'd like this more if other people like it less" but - yeah, it's quite good for silly wish-fulfillment, but it's not the great work of lit-ter-at-ture that people are claiming it is.
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Steve Stirling at 07:47 on 2011-07-13Michelle West is definitely an awesome fantasy writer. Very cool person, too.
Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.
BTW, the really creepy thing about TWILIGHT is not that the sixteen-year-old girl can totally charm the centuries-old vampire.
It's that a guy centuries old is still hanging around high school. Christ, I shook the dust of secondary education from my feet just as fast as I could.
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Arthur B
at 11:42 on 2011-07-13
Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.
I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)
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Dan H
at 15:00 on 2011-07-13
Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf.
That's a fine soundbite, but I strongly suspect that it's also meaningless nonsense.
How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment? Unless you're defining "wish-fulfillment" as "any narrative in which the protagonist possesses admirable qualities". For that matter I'm not even sure if the Ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon mindset could even *accommodate* the concept of "wish fulfillment" as you or I understand it.
Whose wishes is Beowulf supposed to be fulfilling? Those of the Anglo-Saxons who originally told the story? Those of the monks who transcribed it and put in all the spurious Jesus references? Those of Ray Winstone?
I'd also point out that you're not really presenting an argument here. My complaint about the book is that it is NOTHING BUT juvenile wish-fulfillment. Even if we accept for the moment your assertion that Beowulf and the Odyssey contain ELEMENTS of wish-fulfilment that doesn't address the problem. If you make me a sandwich with no filling, and I complain that it contains nothing but bread, saying "all sandwiches contain bread" doesn't really address my complaint.
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Orion
at 18:21 on 2011-07-13Yeah, I can't get behind Odysseus as a wish fulfillment character either. He gets very little of what he wants over the course of his life, he solves only a handful of crises with his own talents, and frequently has to give up appealing things in the name of duty.
Okay, he does get to sex up a few supernatural women, but even those sex scenes are framed as disturbing and unpleasant experiences.
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Steve Stirling at 19:00 on 2011-07-13
I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at
all. :)
-- sure. Actually I agree with that; my point was that a Mary Sue isn't a bad thing -as such-.
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Steve Stirling at 19:04 on 2011-07-13
How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment?
-- "Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.
Of course, Achilles is wish-fulfillment too (Alexander the Great consciously modeled his life on him) but in a rather different sense. You might say that between them they encompassed different aspects of the Greek ideal man.
Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...
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Cammalot
at 19:32 on 2011-07-13Isn't the Mary Sue phenomenon a function of bad writing by definition? Competence or even superness isn't Sueness by default. The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.
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Wardog
at 19:58 on 2011-07-13
"Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.
You seem to be looking at fictional constructs, who perform symbolic and cultural functions as well as literal ones, as RPG characters. I'm not sure you can look at characters from other times through a modern day lens - although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them, ultimately it's neither a helpful nor a useful way to interpret ancient texts. They're not actually the superhero comics of their day.
Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...
The who? The what? For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone. And although I'm personally amused by the idea of a bunch of thanes sitting around the camp fire going "Hey, shaper, tell us the one about the guy who failed to kill a dragon like all the other mythic heroes, and who left no legacy whatsoever because in the face of time all men are futile and weak because we totally want to be that guy" I can't readily imagine it.
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Orion
at 20:20 on 2011-07-13I've always thought that the important part of a wish fulfillment character wasn't that they had astounding personal qualities, but rather that they were able to use those qualities to, well, fulfill wishes. In fact I'd go so far as to say that having the positive qualities is only a means to the end, because there are wish fulfillment characters with no discernible positive qualities who get to live the dream through luck or contrivance (Bella Swan).
So show me an omnicompetent person, and I'm not going to call them a wish-fulfillment character unless they also gets to live a good life. Now, I recognize that what counts as a good life is a little complicated. Plenty of wish-fulfillment heroes spend most of their time in dire circumstances having supposedly horrible things happen to them, but because it's fantasy violence and fantasy suffering we don't care overmuch. What matters is whether the scenes where they get to live the dream are there and how those scenes are presented.
So looking at whether the Odyssey would work as a wish-fulfillment story for a modern audience (setting aside the question of how the Greeks would have read it), the evidence breaks down something like this:
Pro: Rules a kingdom, wins a war, has a beautiful and devoted wife, has the favor of the gods.
Con: Separated from his home for 20 years, rather more cursed than blessed on the whole, doomed to leave home AGAIN after returning and die in a foreign land.
Pro: Sexes up goddesses, outwits monsters, wins archery contest through special gifts.
Con: Doesn't seem to be attracted to most of the women he meets, has to give up the one potentially appealing one (Nausicaa), and genereally feels harried and put upon more than triumphant and cocky.
Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.
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Steve Stirling at 20:40 on 2011-07-13
The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.
-- I see your point, but disagree.
What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?
You're valorizing the conventions of Modernist fiction; but those are just conventions.
They're not even particularly "realistic" in any real sense; just pinched, narrow and self-obsessed in a sort of pickle-up-the-ass way.
Take a look at the careers of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Cortez or Pizzaro. Leaving aside the supernatural element, they're every bit as fantastic and full of outrageous coincidences and victories against incredible odds and acts of insane daring and so forth as most fantasy fiction.
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Cammalot
at 20:45 on 2011-07-13
What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?
But you're leaving out the part where I *very deliberately* said "reasonable genre conventions." I'm not privileging anything -- Beowulf and the Odyssey very much follow the conventions of their art form/folkloric patterns, etc.
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Steve Stirling at 20:50 on 2011-07-13Kyra:
although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them,
-- when archaelogists dug the site of Mari, a city destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylon in around 1800 BCE, they found an unopened (clay envelope around a clay tablet) letter.
Breaking the envelope, they read the words that no human eye had seen for over 3000 years.
It began: "This is the third letter I have written you about the silver you owe me for the sheep..."
Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.
For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone.
-- certain -aspects- of it were archaic; it's obviously been de-paganized a bit.
(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)
But the basic social system was that with which a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon audience would have been familiar; the lord, his sworn companions, the hall, the symbolic exchange of gifts, and so forth. The dragons and trolls were just cool exciting stuff to make it more exotic and exciting.
Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending. Well, ancient Germanic poetry, natch.
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Steve Stirling at 20:57 on 2011-07-13Life Imitates Art division: when Cortez' men came over the pass and saw the Aztec cities below them, with their pyramids and canals and palaces and hummingbird-feather cloaks, the first thing they said to each other was:
"This is just like "Amadis of Gaul"!"
"Amadis" was a late-medieval romance full of valliant knights, wicked sorcerors, heroic quests, and beautiful princesses. The sort of thing your average penniless would-be hidalgo whiled away the hours with.
These guys were living out a heroic-fantasy, sword-and-sorcery adventure in their own heads (complete with evil priests). LARPing fanboys with Toledo swords shedding real blood.
Art Imitates Life: The Kull/Conan story that Howard wrote about the assassination attempt with the mad poet and so forth is taken, almost word for word (right down to the hastily-donned armor not laced up at the side) from the death of Pizzaro.
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Steve Stirling at 21:08 on 2011-07-13
Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.
-- well, there's where the target audience comes in.
I found the book this all started with a little boring; not because the hero was so super, but because he wasn't -tested- enough.
(Incidentally, this is the basic reason you have to be careful in what abilities you give your protagonist -- you have to have the appropriate kryptonite waiting. It's also a drawback when you finally make him/her the ruler or whatever; after that, life is mosty meetings and reports. Not that Aragorn exits stage right after Gandalf crowns him.)
In the case of Homer, the target audience would be people who'd fought with shield and spear to the death. (An ancient Greek proverb went: "Even Hercules can't fight two.")
To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.
Also, a lot of the wish-fulfillment element was the desire to BE a hero; and a hero had to do mighty deeds and overcome terrible trials. The Greeks were just as aware as us that "adventure" was "someone else in deep shit, far away".
Because the Man from Ithaka is a mythic hero, everything he does is heightened; he doesn't just fight Illyrian pirates, he fights a Cyclops, and so forth.
Reading through the book, I did get the very strong impression that the author had never had to actually fight, for example.
Again, I'm not saying this is a good book; I'm saying it's a badly written one in some respects but that the hero's abilities aren't necessarily one of them.
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Cammalot
at 21:11 on 2011-07-13Steve, I'm not following what you're actually criticizing about the original article at all anymore.
You seem to be saying that lots of literature across time and culture contained outsized exploits and larger-than-life heroes, and so the presence of these things... makes any book good? Because I do not see Dan arguing that the presence of these things automatically makes a book bad.
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Wardog
at 21:19 on 2011-07-13
Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.
You can argue this point if you like, it's neither provable nor disprovable, like most of the generic statements you have brought to this discussion. However, attempting to support it by a "one size fits all" application of historical texts strikes me as absurd.
(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)
The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.
Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending.
I would point out that the ending of a text has something on an impact of the general atmosphere. And actually it's doom-laden throughout. The ending is merely the culmination of all the futility that has gone before.
But the basic social system was that with which a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon audience would have been familiar; the lord, his sworn companions, the hall, the symbolic exchange of gifts, and so forth. The dragons and trolls were just cool exciting stuff to make it more exotic and exciting.
Well, yes, these are familiar tropes - but surely the way they are deployed in in the text supports my point, not yours? If you take all these elements - standard elements of heroic literature - and set about showing them to be hollow, I fail to see how this makes Beowulf the sort of dude any anglo-saxon would aspire to be? You'll be trying to tell me Brythnoth was a great king next.
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Orion
at 21:42 on 2011-07-13To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.
You seem to be conflating two types of story which, while often overlapping, ought to be conceptually separate.
Some stories get their punch from a structure that for lack of a better term I'll call redemption. (I don't mean that in a moral sense; I considered catharsis but that word has too much baggage.) In this kind of story, the protagonists main function is to suffer though a great deal of shit, which causes us to feel sympathetic towards them and be invested in finding out what happens to them. Only after the tension has been raised by setback after loss after betrayal are they allowed to win out, in an ending which the reader experiences as a euphoric relief/release.
Other stories are primarily about vicariously enjoying good things and experiences in the protagonist's life. They get to have and do the things the reader wants, and it's that pre-existing desire in the reader that makes the story compelling. This is what I would call a wish-fulfillment story.
Obviously it's possible to both in the same story. You can tell a story about someone suffering ignominously for 90% of the text and then getting a big house with a fast car and a hot spouse at the end. To some degree you can even mix techniques in the middle of a story, having your character take a quick break to shag a sex demon in between episodes of torture and failure. But I think to a certain degree they undermine each other because identifying with and sympathizing with a character are very different levels of distance.
Anyway, despite the frequent overlap, you can find examples of "pure" types if you look. Although I've never watched an entire James Bond film straight through, what I've seen leads to me think they are nearly pure wish-fulfillment stories. I've heard he gets captured and tortured occasionally, but whenever I've watched he's been confident and unfazed essentially the entire time, and he gets to enjoy fine drinks and casual sex throughout, not just at the end.
My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The main character is a bitter divorced leper who is thrown into a fantasy world where he spends most of his time being cursed or tortured, helplessly watching people die, or committing rape and then feeling bad about it. Watching him finally choose good, find his power, and defeat the big bad is satisfying because what went before was so horrible. But his reward for doing so is... going back to Earth to be a slightly less bitter but still ostracized leper. He never gets anything the typical reader wants.
I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.
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Wardog
at 22:06 on 2011-07-13
So looking at whether the Odyssey would work as a wish-fulfillment story for a modern audience (setting aside the question of how the Greeks would have read it), the evidence breaks down something like this:
I like this game! I was very amused - I come down on Team Con as well. I do not aspire to Odysseus despite his aparently decent starting stats. Let's do Jesus next!
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Cammalot
at 22:21 on 2011-07-13
Let's do Jesus next!
Depends on if you buy the deus ex machina ending. ;-)
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Steve Stirling at 22:23 on 2011-07-13Cammalot:
You seem to be saying that lots of literature across time and culture contained outsized exploits and larger-than-life heroes, and so the presence of these things... makes any book good? Because I do not see Dan arguing that the presence of these things automatically makes a book bad.
-- Well, I got the impression that Dan -was- saying that enough outsized exploits -did- make it automatically bad.
My slant wasn't complete disagreement; simply that the reason the book was bad was that the hero's trials and challenges weren't -in proportion- to his abilities.
Hence the wish fulfillment element failed on its own terms because (to my mind) it's the overcoming of serious obstacles which makes the hero's ultimate triumph (or heroic death) satisfying -as- wish fulfillment.
Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?
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Steve Stirling at 22:27 on 2011-07-13
The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.
-- Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.
The continuity over broad areas of time and space indicates that, "originally" (say in the Migration period, which is when Beowulf is "set" to the extent that it happens in the real world at all) we're looking at a single interacting culture sphere, with stories and storytellers moving from area to area.
Eg., the very late Icelandic poems contain persons and stories dating to the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries; Ermannaric the Ostrogoth, for example, or Theodoric. Or the Niebelungen legend and the breaking of the Burgund kingdom by the Huns, which originates in the Rhineland.
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Steve Stirling at 22:33 on 2011-07-13
I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.
-- I see your point, but I think you're missing the essence of the "heroic quest".
The hero doesn't just have bad shit happen to him, he has bad shit happen and deals with it -in a heroic way-.
Odysseus suffers shiprweck, etc., and meets each challenge with heroic courage, heroic cunning, etc.
That's what -makes- him a hero, and worthy of identification. That's why the audience would want to "be" him.
At the end, he gets a reward. But it isn't any the less a wish fulfillment/identification story if he dies a heroic death; because the wish is to BE a hero. And heroes die.
It is genuinely possible to ardently desire a heroic death; it just isn't as common in this culture, currently.
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Steve Stirling at 22:34 on 2011-07-13
My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
God, how I hated that book. DIE, ALREADY, YOU LOSER! was always my reaction to Covenant.
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Orion
at 22:45 on 2011-07-13I thought the article criticized the way Kvothe's abilities are presented and justified more than the fact that he has extraordinary abilities. Let's look at the two big example: fighting skills and faery interludes.
Kvothe and Achilles are both young men of mysterious origin with legendary fighting skills and powerful magic. But Achilles is the iconic hero of his culture. His fighting skills are something he would reasonably have the opportunity to learn, and his use of them (his behavior in general, in fact) is constrained by the customs and standards of his culture. Kvothe, on the other hand, somehow obtains skills which properly belong to another culture and thereafter wanders the world endowed with asskicking which his rivals have no access to and which does not come with any significant obligations.
Or look at the handling of the supernatural. The Homeric heroes may be extremely good at what they do, but when there's a god or curse or prophecy in play they have to abide by it. Achilles will die if he fights in this war, just as Kvothe will supposedly die is he sleeps with Felurian. One of them escapes their fate and the other doesn't. And when Odyseeus hooks up with Calypso, she uses him until he falls into a deep sleep and he only escapes due to divine intervention.
I don't know, maybe that's what you're getting at when you say Kvothe doesn't face big enough challenges? That Calypso is obviously "more powerful" than Felurian and Paris more skilled than anyone Kvothe fights? I guess that works, but I'd rather think of it not in terms of facing bigger challenges, but rather having to follow the rules while doing it.
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Wardog
at 22:47 on 2011-07-13
Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.
Yes, I know, but you specifically cited Beowulf as an example of historical wish-fulfillment fantasy. I have, I hope, explained why it isn't.
Eg., the very late Icelandic poems contain persons and stories dating to the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries; Ermannaric the Ostrogoth, for example, or Theodoric. Or the Niebelungen legend and the breaking of the Burgund kingdom by the Huns, which originates in the Rhineland
Indeed, these are examples of late Icelandic poems. Congratulations.
However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.
And a list of texts is not an argument as to why any of them may be interpreted as historical wish fulfillment fantasy either.
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Dan H
at 23:00 on 2011-07-13
Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?
Ah, I think this is the heart of our disagreement. To an extet I *was* criticising the book for not being a modernist, anti-heroic text, because I felt that the book was *setting itself up* to be a modernist, anti-heroic text and was being treated by the SF/F community as if it *was* a modernist, anti-heroic text. I felt that only by *being* a modernist, anti-heroic text could the book begin to deal with the themes it so promisingly raised in book one.
I have absolutely nothing against pure wish-fulfillment (although I prefer it to come in packages rather smaller than 997 pages) but I don't personally find it terribly interesting, or worthy of attention.
I'd also suggest that we might be using "wish fulfillment" slightly differently. A lot of what you call "wish fulfillment" is what I would simply call "myth" - it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.
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Steve Stirling at 23:12 on 2011-07-13Orion:
I don't know, maybe that's what you're getting at when you say Kvothe doesn't
face big enough challenges? That Calypso is obviously "more powerful" than
Felurian and Paris more skilled than anyone Kvothe fights? I guess that works,
but I'd rather think of it not in terms of facing bigger challenges, but rather
having to follow the rules while doing it.
-- I think we're saying pretty much the same thing here, just using different terminology.
Kvorthe's abilities are so out of proportion to the background that they break the narrative frame of the story.
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Steve Stirling at 23:19 on 2011-07-13
However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.
-- I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition.
Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar. Beowulf is, after all, set in what's now Sweden and from the internal evidence was hundreds of years old when the manuscript was written down, whenever that was.
This necessarily implies that at the time Beowulf was circulating in Anglo-Saxon England, a lot of -other- stories deriving from the same corpus were too, versions of the Niebelungen story or the tale of Wayland, and quasi-historical stuff like "Burnt Finnsburg". Doubtless there were versions of Beowulf circulating in Scandinavia.
We have a (fairly) complete text of Beowulf essentially by accident; we don't have most of the others, also essentially by accident.
Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.
And the others as well.
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Steve Stirling at 23:23 on 2011-07-13
it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with
whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.
-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here.
Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?
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Orion
at 08:14 on 2011-07-14Jesus:
Pros: foot rubs, vintage wine, and cheap seafood. Speak before adoring audiences and travel with a dozen groupies.
Cons: celibacy, poor fashion sense, and agonizing death.
I think I have to vote "con" again.
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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/
at 10:52 on 2011-07-14I think the discussion might be suffering from a confusion of terms used. Wish fulfillment as I understand it would refer to a more specific narrative ploy, which appeals directly to the reader's wish to insert themselves into the story through charecterization and titillation and whatnot. It might be a mistake to do, as Steve does to effortlessly widen wish fulfillment to mean any sense of recognition with a character in a story. Sure, if we allow this, Steve is right, because it seems clear that most(though perhaps not categorically all) stories depend on the audience's interest in the story and their recognizing the character as a person.
I don't think that such a wide use of the term is very useful or a strong argument though. If, for example we discuss the Odyssey, as somewhere above, it is surely a heroic epic where the hero is very resourceful and strong, but the very point of the story is its tragic tone in Aristotelian terms, that is a great person who is unable to escape their fate as gods or the worlds plaything. While the intended audience of Odysseia(or Ilium) are no doubt meant to be impressed by the hero and his prowess, it is very doubtful whether any one would wish to be like him. He tries to reac home after a ten year war which he was tricked into going to and because he manages to anger a godd takes ten years to reach it, while suffering horrible hardships and losing all his men and possessions besides, spending years on end as a plaything to one immortal or another. Meanwhile his son grows into a man and his wife is sieged in by suitors. Sure it has a happy ending, but the focus is not on how Odysseus is great, but rather on see how even the greatest of heroes is tossed around by the whims of powers beyond him.
And anyways as said, even if we allow that wish fulfillment is present in all stories, this just proves that it is a useless term to describe how some stories are more appealing than others. Because really if it is present in all stories, its presence is important like the words themselves, it has to be there, but it does not tell anything about the story.
I wouldn't treat the term with such a wide applicability though. Its use is more specific, as I said. In other news, the few extant germanic tales which differ from each other is hardly enough to claim such sweeping generalizations on what the audience though or expected from the stories.
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Wardog
at 10:57 on 2011-07-14
I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition
But "tradition" in this context is so broad as to be meaningless. Do you mean texts written in Anglo Saxon? Texts from an oral tradition? You might as well say Pride and Prejudice and The Blade Itself are from the same tradition because they're written in English and printed on paper. And, yes, it's arguably true but I don't see the value in asserting it? You can find superficial similarities between any texts you like but this doesn’t make Beowulf any more historical wish-fulfilment fantasy than it was previously. Which is not at all.
Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar
See above.
Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.
See above.
Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?
You seem pretty desperate to talk about Amandis of Gaul so here we go. The same argument applies here. I’ve already tried to explain why I think arbitrarily assigning 21st century perspectives to historical contexts is reductive and foolish. I mean, as Dan has stated, the very idea of wish-fulfilment, in the terms we understand it, is quite a modern idea. Not to get all philosophy of language about it but when you read historical texts – especially those written in other languages – we have accept a degree of distance between those texts and ideas of selfhood, self-expression and society that are so embedded in our thinking we take them for granted.
The thing is, as far as I’m concerned you can interpret texts however you like, and if you want to look at these a collection of complex historical texts in a reductive and tedious way ... well ... feel free.
In short: what Ruderetum said :)
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Dan H
at 15:13 on 2011-07-14
-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference
here.
Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from
the books we're talking about?
I haven't actually read Amadis of Gaul (were I feeling glib, I might suggest that I see no evidence that you have either) so I can't comment on the content but I can certainly comment on the context.
Amadis of Gaul, Wikipedia informs me, is an Iberian Knight-errantry tale of uncertain authorship and has its origins in the traditions of chivalric romance. It is not actually a novel *at all*.
The Wise Man's fear, by contrast is a work of twenty-first century genre fiction. It was written by a single author, and published for the mass market and targeted at a clearly defined demographic whose preferences and habits its publishers will have invested both time and money in researching.
They are fundamentally different *sorts* of text and people read them for fundamentally different reasons.
I'd also point out that I see no reason for the burden of proof to be on me to demonstrate that Amadis of Gaul *is* different to the Wise Man's Fear when you have made no effort to demonstrate that it *isn't*.
That said the other important difference between Amadis and Kvothe is this.
Yes, both Amadis and Kvothe are highly skilled at what they do, but the crucial difference is how the two characters are supposed to relate to their *target audience*.
Amadis the Gaul was a chivalric romance. Its target audience would have been very broad, since it was almost certainly based on an existing popular narrative, and while there may be a narrow section of people who heard or read the story who really were, or really aspired to be, knights, the vast marjority would not have been, and would not have ever thought they could be (the fourteenth century was not, after all, known for its vast social mobility). He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.
Kvothe, by contrast, has a variety of qualities which his target audience (teenage geeks) are *extremley* likely to possess, and which grant him amazing abilities with little or no effort on his part. For example:
* He is extremely clever and this makes him excellent at schoolwork
* He is particularly skilled at technical subjects
* His supernatural powers come largely from understanding concrete technical laws (many of which are specifically derived from real-world physics and engineering)
* He is awkward around women
* He has had a very small amount of martial arts training
* He was picked on as a child but came into his own at university
All of these are qualities which the book's target audience are *extremely likely* to identify with *specifically*. You don't look at Kvothe and admire him for his cleverness, you look at him and you recognise in him your *own* cleverness, all of his skills parallel skills which geeks have in the *real world*. He's not somebody to look up to, he's *you*. Even his flaws are really virtues (his awkwardness with women, for example, actually makes him *more* attractive to the opposite sex).
That's the difference between a mythic or an inspirational story and wish fulfilment. A mythic hero embodies virtues to which you aspire, but which you know that you do not truly possess. A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.
It is, in fact, an important and fundamental difference.
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Steve Stirling at 18:01 on 2011-07-15
A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but
they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work.
So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing
shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting,
and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.
-- well, you have a point there.
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Steve Stirling at 18:05 on 2011-07-15
He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have
recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to
be a stand-in for the reader.
-- well, no, but that's not quite the point of wish-fulfillment. You don't think you're Superman, you -wish- you're Superman, and for the duration of the story you -imagine- you're Superman, able to do these amazing things.
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Dan H
at 10:27 on 2011-07-19On Superman: The really, really important thing about Superman is Clark Kent. Superman works as wish-fulfilment because Superman actually *isn't* Superman most of the time, he's this mild-mannered nebbishy guy with glasses (again, much like the intended target audience).
And of course the other thing to remember is that wish-fulfilment isn't a binary - as Orion and others have pointed out above, a lot of stories have wish-fulfilment *elements*, whereas Kvothe comes across to me as *pure* wish-fulfilment.
(Sorry I know Steve's been banned, but I thought this discussion might have been getting somewhere)
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Orion
at 06:18 on 2011-07-20Dan,
I never really read/watched Superman, but I'm interested by your comment, because it doesn't really match up with my experience of other secret identity setups. As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.
I always assumed that the primary function of Clark Kent was as a narrative device. Superheroes generally and Superman in particular are just too effective when on stage in costume, so you have to give them human lives and duties to stretch out the plot and prevent them from solving everything immediately. Secondarily, I would imagine that Clark kent would actually pull the story toward the "redemption" end of my "redemption/wish fulfillment" spectrum by making the protagonist suffer.
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Dan H
at 12:13 on 2011-07-20
As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life
for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the
superhuman character directly.
I don't think I made my point clearly enough. It's not the fact that Superman has a secret identity that's the issue, it's the fact that despite his superpowers (and superpowers are really a red herring here) Superman is basically an ordinary guy with parents and a hometown and a job. (It is, I believe, often said in DC comics fandom that the difference between Batman and Superman is that Superman is really Clark Kent, whereas Bruce Wayne is really Batman).
Without Clark Kent, Superman would basically be Dr Manhattan, and while you can certainly imagine that it would be *cool* to be the Big Blue Guy, you aren't really invited to imagine that he *is* you, which I would argue is a necessary part of wish-fulfilment.
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Orion
at 15:40 on 2011-07-20That makes a lot of sense. In the general case, we could say that wish-fulfillment only works when the character basically thinks like the reader, so that they tend to do with their opportunities the kinds of things the reader would want to imagine doing.
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http://sprizouse.blogspot.com/
at 07:37 on 2011-08-21There was a
long comment thread
running over at Crooked Timber and I ended up bringing up this critique. Anyway, the post was about NPR's list of Top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels and I thought you should take a look at both the CT post (and comments thread) and the NPR list. Your input would probably be appreciated.
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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/
at 01:49 on 2011-09-01I had some fun running the Wikipedia entries for both books through Regender.com.
http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind
http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man%27s_Fear
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle compound words well, so it didn't manage to rename the series
The Queenkiller Chronicles
, but otherwise... very interesting!
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https://me.yahoo.com/a/EcqJaTxyotMBIWa7wHjFXrVfJz29#49b9a
at 02:24 on 2012-06-15
Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to fail at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?
You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?
Yes, there is a sign. Perhaps you could call it a hint. Or perhaps the biggest unanswered question in the entire story.
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Shim
at 08:13 on 2012-06-15
You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?
I haven't read the book, but those sound like pretty general, narrative losses rather than actual failures, if you see what I mean.
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James D
at 18:01 on 2012-06-15
Some of the fire left her, but when she found her voice it was tight and dangerous. “my skills 'suffice'?” She hardly seemed able to force out the last word. Her mouth formed a thin, outraged line.
I exploded, my voice a roll of thunder. “How the hell am I supposed
to know? It's not like I've ever done this sort of thing before!”
She reeled back at the vehemence of my words, some of the anger draining out of her. “what is it you mean?” she trailed off, confused.
“This!” I gestured awkwardly at myself, at her, at the cushions and the pavilion around us, as if that explained everything.
The last of the anger left her as I saw realization begin to dawn, “you...”
“No,” I looked down, my face growing hot. “I have never been with a woman.” Then I straightened and looked her in the eye as if challenging her to make an issue of it.”
Felurian was still for a moment, then let her mouth turn up into a wry smile. “you tell me a faerie story, my kvothe.”
I felt my face go grim. I don't mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvellous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the perfect truth.
Regardless of my motivation, my expression seemed to convince her. “but you were like a gentle summer storm.” She made a fluttering gesture with a hand. “you were a dancer fresh upon the field.” Her eyes glittered wickedly.
I haven't read the book, but this dialog is waayyyyy too over-narrated for my tastes. I was rather surprised, given the author apparently has a sterling reputation. Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone. Do we really have to be told he's exploding when the next words out of his mouth are "how the hell am I supposed to know?" That whole scene just seems to fall into the same "more is more" trap a lot of modern fantasy authors are in. More description, more worldbuilding, more detail, less left up to the imagination, less engagement of the reader in the storytelling process.
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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/
at 05:23 on 2012-06-16It doesn't help that the narrator sounds like a complete tool.
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valse de la lune
at 08:34 on 2012-06-17His voice a roll of thunder, no less. This is the brilliant writing all the fanboys praised?
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Dan H
at 14:29 on 2012-06-17
Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone.
There does seem to be a peculiar bit of received wisdom amongst a certain type of reader (and therefore a certain type of writer) that "just" dialogue isn't proper writing. I'm largely making this up, but I think it's born out of a prejudice against things which seem "simple" or possibly a desire to seem intellectual. It might also be a misplaced reaction against books which fail by trying to emulate films (or conversely, it may be that it appeals specifically to an audience accustomed to visual media, who expect every line of dialogue to be accompanied by some visual cue). It might also (I really am just guessing here) overlap with that nonsensical "use all the senses" advice you get in mediocre writing guides.
I don't like to be too smug about this sort of thing, but I do sometimes feel that a lot of Rothfuss' reputation for great writing stems from his adopting a style which overlaps with his audience's preconceptions about what good writing ought to look like. It's the kind of writing which makes you feel clever, and I suspect that his audience are particularly fond of feeling clever. Of course *criticizing* this sort of writing also makes you feel clever, so the audience kind of wins either way on this one.
I actually don't think Rothfuss' writing is that bad - The Wise Man's Fear wasn't hard to read because it was badly written, it was hard to read because it was nearly a thousand fucking pages and nothing fucking happens in it.
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Michal
at 18:20 on 2012-06-17Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.
From what I've read of
The Name of the Wind
(which admittedly isn't that much) I also didn't quite understand the praise Rothfuss's prose; I mean, there were some nice passages but there's quite a lot of space between them filled with not-so-great stuff. It's better than Paolini or Brooks or Goodkind but that's setting the bar really fucking low. I didn't quit reading because of the prose. I quit because I found Kvothe insufferable.
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Arthur B
at 18:29 on 2012-06-17
Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.
This. There's a world of stuff to howl at in that extract before you even begin to consider the prose.
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James D
at 20:05 on 2012-06-17
I actually don't think Rothfuss' writing is that bad - The Wise Man's Fear wasn't hard to read because it was badly written, it was hard to read because it was nearly a thousand fucking pages and nothing fucking happens in it.
As a reader, I tend to value a writer's style pretty highly, and given that his style is so often praised, I was just rather surprised at how overwrought the snippets you quoted were. If they're not representative of the whole book, well, you should've picked better ones!
Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good? It's just too absurd for me to believe that Rothfuss expected people to take it seriously. Not to say that simply using an unreliable narrator is an instant ticket to literary quality, but maybe the problem isn't so much that the stories are filled unbelievable self-aggrandizement, but that Rothfuss failed at making Kvothe egotistical and charming, so he ended up insufferable instead. I imagine the book might be pretty fun if it were clear that Kvothe was just a loser who made up absurdly flattering, highly improbable stories about himself. And if it were maybe 300 pages long.
Just as an aside, The Wise Man's Fear recently won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2011.
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Arthur B
at 20:41 on 2012-06-17
Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good?
I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary. Smarmy bullshit is smarmy bullshit, regardless of whether you're intended to believe it or not.
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Michal
at 20:52 on 2012-06-17
isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?
Well,
The Name of the Wind
certainly wasn't, since the frame story made it clear Kvothe really was just that awesome. Any cracks in the narrative this time around, Dan?
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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/
at 21:25 on 2012-06-17
I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary.
Yeah, I don't really see what other response there is. The kind of wish-fulfillment this book seems intended to provide seems like it would be better delivered through, say, a video game. Hearing some douchebag talk about fucking hot chicks doesn't quite make me feel like I'm in his place.
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James D
at 21:32 on 2012-06-17Maybe I am being too generous then. I'm just trying really hard to understand what people see in the books beyond typical fantasy wish-fulfillment+adventure, but maybe that's all it is, minus the benefit of a tight plot books in that style need.
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Dan H
at 23:21 on 2012-06-17
As a reader, I tend to value a writer's style pretty highly, and given that his style is so often praised, I was just rather surprised at how overwrought the snippets you quoted were. If they're not representative of the whole book, well, you should've picked better ones!
They're fairly representative (although Felurian speaks in a *particularly* flowery way) - it's just that I don't think the writing is particularly *bad*, just not especially *good*. Or perhaps to put it another way, what flaws there are in the writing are just a specific instance of the far more general problem of the book being smug, up itself, and nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is. I might also suggest that amongst fantasy readers "well written" is code for "overwritten" four times out of five.
Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?
Very much not. It's the autobiography of somebody *extremely self-deprecating*. As evidenced by the awful bits where Kvothe point blank refuses to narrate all of the bits where he actually does interesting stuff. Framing-story Kvothe is a broken man, and he is extremely reluctant to acknowledge his own triumphs - Bast actually has to explicitly instruct the Chronicler to encourage him to focus on them, because Kvothe's own sense of guilt over the Terrible Things That Happen In Book Three is such that he no longer trusts himself.
Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.
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James D
at 00:04 on 2012-06-18
Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.
Yech. Why the fuck do so many people like this book again?
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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/
at 02:03 on 2012-06-18Because nothing tops off a douche sandwich like a nice juicy glob of emo.
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http://omarsakr.wordpress.com/
at 08:23 on 2012-08-22Hey Dan,
I've recently stumbled across a few of your articles and I'm currently experiencing the giddy highs of a high-school girl's crush, or what I imagine that would feel like anyway. Still, I'll refrain from allowing that to develop further just yet because a) it's creepy as balls and b) the interwebs are full of disappointing traps and a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier (no matter how many times I write that or look it, it just seems wrong).
Anyway, I just wanted to comment to say thank you! I've felt like, for the longest time, I've been alone in my dismissal of Rothfuss and my dismay at the critical acclaim he's received. Don't get me wrong, he seems like a great guy and he's a passable writer, but he in no way deserves the absurd praise that's been heaped on him. I remember writing an article years ago about how overrated he and GRRM are as authors today (although the latter is certainly more deserving). So, it's been great to read your articles (albeit belatedly) and the comments that so accurately carve these books up.
In WMF you correctly pointed out a passage that utterly ruined the book for me. I was willing to overlook a lot of what you pointed out, due to its light entertainment factor, until I read the 'I was on my way to X when this and this and this happened to me but I don't have time to tell you about any of those exciting things because the story must go on'. What thoroughly pissed me off about the ensuing billion-page section was that NOTHING HAPPENED. There's a stupidly long section where Kyvothe and his band are sitting around the woods telling each other stories just so Rothfuss could indulge in meta-wankery, his constant wink-wink nudge-nude can you see that I'm telling a story about a guy telling a story about how he and some other guys told stories once and the way stories within stories are blah blah blah.
That section of the book filled me with rage. Goddamn.
Okay, just had to get that off my chest. He writes easy, simple prose that's really engaging and this could have been a much better series but for all the reasons you pointed out, he, the series itself, and his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang. Serious fantasy my ass.
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Arthur B
at 10:03 on 2012-08-22
a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier
If it's any reassurance, Dan's preferred coffee for about as long as I've known him.
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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/
at 17:07 on 2012-08-23
his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang
Well, the rabid Nice Guy geek contingent has tried every other personality flaw, so it's about time they tried pretentious literary snobbery.
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http://everstar3.livejournal.com/
at 03:17 on 2013-06-12I realize I am quite late to this discussion, but I write now to thank you for saving my Kindle, because if I'd read that speech of Felurian's on it, I most likely would have thrown it across the room.
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Robinson L
at 10:36 on 2013-07-19Found this via a friend of mine, who's a major fan of the books:
looks like the Kingkiller Chronicles is being adapted into a TV series
.
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Dan H
at 22:47 on 2013-07-19What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?
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Arthur B
at 22:54 on 2013-07-19
What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?
Because brick-sized open-ended novels with silly numbers of characters and no end in sight make for great soap operas?
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Melanie
at 06:37 on 2013-07-20
What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?
The more books the author writes
without
finishing it, the more the tv show can be dragged out?
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Jules V.O.
at 13:30 on 2013-07-20There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.
In that vein, I suspect the best part of the KC show would be the 'storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck' segment, where the lack of specificity would give them the freedom to fill in some conventional(ly satisfying) content.
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Arthur B
at 14:01 on 2013-07-20
There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.
I do love the fact that the
Breaking Dawn
director was like "Fuck it, I'm just going to do exactly what the text says rather than presenting whatever it is people think they see in the text", so lo and behold
an adult werewolf falls in love with a baby.
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