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nostalgebraist · 2 years

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Here are some spoiler-ful thoughts on CxC. This will be kinda scattered, just trying to make sure I get everything noted down

Most of this is negative, so I should say at the outset that I liked a lot of stuff about CxC. It certainly gives you “much to think about,” as the kids say . . .

It’s hard for me to assess CxC’s overall quality without using Modern Cannibals as the bar for comparison.

This is frustrating, because “is CxC better or worse than MC?” is not a very interesting question. What matters is how good CxC is on its own. But the two novels share so much in common that it’s hard for me to escape this frame.

I liked CxC a lot on the micro level of individual scenes and chapters, but it failed for me as a whole. Maybe this is why the MC comparison feels so relevant. The two use a lot of the same building blocks, and feel very similar at close range. Zoomed out, CxC lacks the larger-scale structures I liked in MC, and doesn’t have its own suitable replacements for them.

What am I talking about? Stuff like

- Motion, change, momentum.

MC is one thing at the start, and another very different thing by the end, and there’s an engrossing trajectory from point A to point B. It builds and builds. There’s a continually rising sense of tension. Innocence turns into experience. Illusions are dispelled (or reified, depending on your reading).

Like . . . the odd, very specific brand of ambiguously-real half-nightmare-half-Looney-Tunes action that typifies the very end of MC is not there all the way through. The MC world isn’t just “like that” half the time for no particular reason; that stuff is thoughtfully coupled to specific events, themes, beats and characters (specifically Graves).

Whereas in CxC, we start out with one foot in the nightmare waters, right from the very first chapter, with Harper’s emptiness and amnesia. (”Emptiness and amnesia” are traits a person could simply have in a realistic novel, of course -- but that novel would look very different from the Harper-POV chapters of CxC. They ask to be read as symbol, metaphor, dream. She reads like a Kafka character, not a Final Fantasy sci-fi amnesiac, or a real victim of head trauma or something.)

Likewise, the CxC story moves in halts and jerks. It has a careful formal structure (the three parts, Mimmy’s death at the center, rise/fall of Soviet Union, etc), but while this pattern exists, it’s a pattern made out of not much happening for a while, some laborious foreshadowing (Letters to Mark, Dogshit’s literal Chekhov’s gun), then the foreshadowed thing abruptly happening, then some more not-much . . .

- Conflict that gets set up and then goes somewhere. The MC characters want things, and these wants conflict, and things happen as a result. In CxC, what conflicts exist between the characters are static and basically toothless, and when things happen it is for other, peripheral reasons.

(I realize this is all thematic and deliberate, so I’m not sure this one is really a criticism . . . insofar as it is, I guess I’m saying that the human story felt sort of lifeless even as a story about ennui? More on this below)

I agree with the related parts of this comment, which says it better than I have here.

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Earlier, I talked about how CxC is mottled over with “ambiguously-real nightmare stuff” from beginning to end, unlike MC where that stuff grew over time.

For me, this significantly dulled the effect of both sides -- of the parts that came close to realism (with Bavitz one never comes more than “close to” realism), and the parts that did not.

Consider the Harper-POV chapters as against the VdG-POV chapters.

VdG’s squalid existence in his freezing Detroit mansion is portrayed in a way that’s arguably over the top but essentially realistic. The bantering roommates huddling around a furnace are easy to read as just that, actual people in an actual house having the exchanges we see on the page; one could read the house, the furnace, the holster, the figure collection as symbol/metaphor, but this takes some mental effort and feels like going against the grain of the text. (This is reinforced by the fact that, when we first enter this setting, it’s framed as “the ugly, mundane reality of VdG and Sister’s real lives” in contrast with the dream/fantasy of the Consortium.)

Harper’s setting, when we first enter it, is the other way around. We could read her as a real-life amnesiac and, say, speculate about the neurology of her affliction -- but that feels like going against the grain, like writing a fanwiki about the legal system depicted in The Trial.

But Harper and VdG come into contact. And when this happens, VdG reacts to Harper by reading her “literally,” marveling over all the specific things she doesn’t know -- as anyone would, if they met such a person in real life.

This crossing of wires makes it increasingly difficult to wrest meaning out of either character’s situation. It’s a meeting between two immiscible levels of description, a crossover romance between Josef K and Sister Carrie. Reading Harper on her own, we might see her as a non-literal evocation of a “bored office worker.” But when VdG meets Harper, he doesn’t meet an aimless white-collar everywoman; he meets a bizarre, presumably somehow very sick woman who does not know how old she is, who has never heard of Covid-19.

And now we have to take her that way too, as a sci-fi amnesiac or an Oliver Sacks case study. But read that way, what exactly is Harper’s amnesia/emptiness doing, thematically? By the end, it felt like the book itself didn’t know what to do with it anymore.

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History has not ended. Did anyone think it had?

Royce did.

And are meant to think that VdG did, too. The words “history is ended” are associated with VdG from the start, and recur in his musings on art. But this is asserted, not really evoked or made real.

This post clarified some things for me, about Bavitz’s intent with the “history is ended” motif. But I don’t think the novel succeeded at realizing that intent.

Specifically, there is supposed to be a divide between the central pair, cocooned away from time / history / politics / the scraping of the cane, and everyone else, whose existence is inevitably political. Bavitz writes:

This passage, placed early on, introduces the specter of political and racial violence that affects most of the supporting characters of the story and that does not at all affect the two main characters of the story. Papimon cannot return to Thailand due to the 2014 coup, Sister had to flee Switzerland for an unspecified legal reason, Mimmy is desperate not to get sent back to New Zealand where her abusive mother is waiting, and even Mark, who seems like the whitest, most traditional status quo embodiment in the story, is a Rhodesian who would have been forced to leave the country he was born in when he was a child. The political violence these characters face is often sidelined, mentioned only in passing, because the perspective of the two main characters is myopic and displaced from any sense of time or place, any sense of political reality. Over the course of the story, that myopic viewpoint is challenged, culminating in Gramme’s participation in the George Floyd protests/riots that finally shatter his illusions. (Harper’s illusion, at least in this regard, is not shattered. In the final chapter she plans at length for an idyllic, timeless future even as wildfires encroach upon her.)

This totally makes sense; one can imagine a novel fitting this description; it is not, however, a description of the characters I remember from CxC.

Is Harper’s perspective myopic? Well, yes, extremely so -- but only via a sort of fantasy illness imposed upon her. She ignores politics only as a special case of ignoring everything, including simple, brute facts about her surroundings which she has no emotional reason to shield herself from. She does not flee from the political to the personal -- she doesn’t know the personal either! She does not know who she is; she lacks ambitions, even myopic or sheltered ones.

Is VdG’s perspective myopic? In a sense, yes? We mostly see him working, and thinking about his work. Either about the actual work itself, the lines and shapes, the hours spent on them -- or about the social and intellectual context of his vocation.

Is he sheltering himself from politics and history here? The diagnosis feels both too cruel, and simply off. He lives an economically marginal existence, thinks a lot about how he’ll scrape together the money he needs in the short term, and then thinks a lot about the labor he’ll have to do to make that happen.

When I look at VdG, shivering in squalor with Fletch and Dogshit and El-Marghichi (all of them politically marginal), spending most of his time working to make ends meet -- am I meant to see him as fundamentally like Harper (with her well-paid office job), and fundamentally unlike those shivering next to him? One could make this case! But the text of CxC does not, actually, make it.

And like, he’s a porn artist. By choice, sure, I guess, but he does not seem like a guy who could switch careers safely on a moment’s notice. The winds of politics, the ebb and flow of puritanism, the evolving public discourse over sex and gender -- surely these affect him, or could? As with Fletch, he may not think himself interested in politics, but politics is interested in him.

Back to VdG and “history is ended.” Is this an ideological belief of VdG’s? A stable idyll, after politics, after history -- does VdG want this, care about it?

Again, this is asserted, but not really shown. We’re occasionally reminded that VdG makes “videos,” and that he goes on (psuedo-)intellectual monologues in these videos, a la Royce. But we never see the videos, the way we see so much else. When they’re mentioned, they feel like tape hastily applied to the novel’s structure, a doomed attempt to secure the teetering “VdG - end of history” association in place.

Like, contrast VdG with Royce! Royce absolutely does go on psuedo-intellectual monologues, safe in masturbatory (!) isolation from any outside force, even the people he’s ostensibly conversing with. Cocooned away from any real knowledge of the subjects he opines on.

When we see Royce indifferent to police brutality, we believe it (and laugh, because a wonderful brick joke has just landed). When we see VdG indifferent to political repression . . . wait, do we even see that?

What we see is, uh . . . VdG helping Mimmy and El-Marghichi escape from it . . . VdG keeping real-life company with people whose existence is political, 100% of his real-life associates fitting this description . . . VdG hearing there are protests outside and racing out to join them . . . okay, yeah, and then there’s the whole bit where he imagines himself a detached observer and then gets beat up. But by this point, this feels like a long-planned story beat meant for a different character, one that VdG didn’t end up being.

This is weird, but I can’t un-see it: VdG and Royce feel like two halves of a single, thematically consistent character.

On his own, what exactly is Royce doing in the story? Like, he’s hilarious, but you could excise him entirely and not much would have to change.

But Royce really is the sheltered man -- in whom politics takes no interest -- that the book wants us to think VdG is. As if the full, ugly brunt of this trait was somehow displaced from VdG onto the harmless surface of a comedic, disposable side character.

When VdG says “history is ended,” he mostly means it in the context of his thoughts about art history. And can you really blame the guy for having some opinions about the thing he does all day to get by? While, elsewhere, Royce is having opinions about literally everything, informed by experience about approximately nothing.

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Another instance where the novel feels like it wants to have an MC-like dynamic arc, and doesn’t, and suffers from it: the Consortium.

The Consortium is meant to feel empty at the end, when it’s just Sister and Car circling one another, deserving one another.

But it feels just as empty at the start! It’s supposed to be an online community, but as far as I can remember, the only people we ever see in it are VdG, Sister, Car, and Alchemist. (Are there ever any other speaking roles in there? I’m not counting the receptionist, who I assumed was a bot.)

Mimmy used to be there, but isn’t now. Alchemist/Harper is a newcomer, viewed with intermittent wariness. So the Consortium community on the page is really just three people, talking to each other.

When one of these people temporarily leaves, the other two start complaining that it’s empty. But there was never anyone else there -- no one important enough to get a name, anyway, much less dialogue.

Maybe this was deliberate? Anyway, it confused me.

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Other misc. stuff:

- This is pedantic, but the book almost never uses the vocative comma, which I found distracting. Kept wondering if it was on purpose or not. (I thought that “almost never” was going to be a “never,” but then in Ch 38 we get “Enjoy it, Mark” a few times, right next to e.g. “But something will always be scraping at your back Mark.”)

- The RP scenes were really good!! I liked how the emotions of the roleplayers would subtly bleed through, which could easily have been overdone, but wasn’t. And how the scenes were actually hot. Not as in “I personally found them hot” (I didn’t . . . well, okay, I admit the Xenosaga riff one got me, a bit). But they felt like authentic depictions of something that someone would actually like, where another author might just have gone for gawking and/or comedy alone.

- There were some really fun bits of foreshadowing, or of information being conveyed first and then cast in a very different light later. I’m thinking of Mimmy’s offhand comment about “that drafty decrepit Detroit mansion with its upper floors commandeered by homeless people,” after the strange earlier description of (what VdG views as) “creatures.” (On that note, the weird literal-zombie-squatters thing deserves more comment, but this is already long.) Also, the guy Mimmy repeatedly notices outside her apartment turning out to be the author of the Letters to Mark.

- Stuff I’m still wondering about:

-- The falling chandelier. It apparently fell some time before the first mansion scene, but then its fall occurs in the fantasy-RP version of the mansion (transmuted into Villa Diodati), suggesting it had some symbolic importance to El-Marghichi. What really happened? Probably unknowable, unless I missed it.

-- The association between office-Mark and Mimmy (names, canes). Why? It’s very noticeable, but I have no idea what to make of it.

-- The red text when Royce quotes Jesus. This is a reference to the Biblical printing tradition where Christ’s words would be in red, but what’s it doing in the book? I assumed this was important at first, which set me off on this whole thing about Harper being an angel (”Harper Praise”). I felt clever about this idea but in the end there’s not much else in the book it can make sparks with.

#cockatiel x chameleon #modern cannibals

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fipindustries · 2 years

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Did you finish 'Chameleon x Cockatiel' yet?

Havent even started it yet. I dont know how closely you follow my blog but ive been kind of busy lately working in an animation proyect.

Dont worry ill let you know once i read it

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ifsomeoneasksiwasnothere · 5 years

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What would their spirit animal be?

Slenderman Owl

Splendorman Hummingbird

Trenderman Peacock

Offenderman Shark

Jeff Hodek Bengal Tiger

Liu Hodek Dog

Jane Arkensaw Raven

Clockwork Squirrel

Ticci Toby Coyote

Ben Drowned Hedgehog

Eyeless Jack Maned Wolf

Laughing Jack Hyena

The Puppeteer Spider

Emra Chameleon

Zachary Gibson Grey Wolf

Jason the Toymaker Cat

Candy Pop Cockatiel

Dr. Smiley Lynx

The X Ferret

Photography Capybara

The Rake (Doesn’t have one. Is basically an “animal”/creature himself).

Bloody Painter Bat

Judge Angels Dove

—

Masky/Tim Otter

Hoodie/Brian Guinea Pig

Skully/Jay Mouse

Jessica Panda

Alex Kralie Bee

#creepypasta #creepypasta headcanon #them all

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weaselandfriends · 11 months

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just wanted to say that i’ve been enjoying the latest updates of cleveland quixotic a ton. obviously you set out to confront and subvert plenty of the tropes that show up in isekai, though the gradual annihilation of the main character’s love interests was pretty shocking :<

i had honestly hoped that viviendre and lalum would come to accept their differences and embrace their similarities, then realize that they weren’t truly opponents and help each other despite the grimness of their circumstances. despite my misplaced optimism, their deaths were really affecting, and the writing during that scene was a stand-out. the earlier dialogue of mammon/ashtoreth/rimmon where they lament their lost pasts really elevated the plight of viviendre and lalum, and the “cursed” natures they never deserved.

anyway, here’s a doodle of perfidia and kedeshah. as an aside, my friend who’s starting cq is also a fan of helluva boss, and she commented that perfidia had “blitzo energy.” i believe that’s high praise lol

i hope you have a good day or night!

Thank you so much for the wonderful fan art and comments!

Since you brought up Helluva Boss, here's a little anecdote:

A friend of mine collaborated with Vivziepop prior to Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss, back when she was mainly doing web comics and short animations. This collaboration apparently didn't go well and my friend harbored a lot of resentment toward Vivziepop. So when Hazbin Hotel came out, my friend made me (hate-)watch it with her. She seethed about Vivziepop the entire time before grumblingly and reluctantly admitting at the end that the episode was pretty good. This incident became the initial inspiration for Mimmy Wowzers in Cockatiel x Chameleon and Van Der Gramme's complicated feelings about her.

#cleveland quixotic #cq #bavitz #fan art #cockatiel x chameleon #cxc

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xenostalgic · 2 years

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As an Asian American, I actually hated the potrayal of Papimon and found her death horribly distasteful. I'm curious, what did you like about this fanfic?

fundamentally I think I enjoyed how for me it inspired and then rewarded a mindset focused on a sort of puzzley analysis, though admittedly on a fairly shallow level.

there are lots of motifs to track, there are lots of hooks to allow the reader to assemble all sorts of patterns (is it significant that Harper and Van Der Gramme roleplay x.Nihilo, referencing the phrase "ex nihilo nihil fit", when Harper is so insistently referred to as "nothing"? clearly. is it also significant that it's the sequel to x.Machina, referencing "deus ex machina," when Harper is in some ways a successor to Mimmy, who has "always wanted to be a god"? more tenuous, but plausible, and fun to consider regardless).

but there was plenty that I didn't understand. I had a hard time understanding Papimon in particular, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there was something important to her character that I missed. I'm not sure what could be particularly distasteful about her death, though; it happens offscreen, we don't know anything about the circumstances, and there are so many possible causes set up (car crash, suicide, whatever illness keeps giving her nosebleeds, the recent expenditure of all her life energy on a single glorious work of art) that it seems pretty thoroughly and intentionally ambiguous.

#cockatiel x chameleon #cockatiel x chameleon spoilers

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stinkybreath · 5 months

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hello

do you trust me to recommend you some books

I read ~170 this year and here’s reviews of my top ten, written for fb and crossposted under the cut in case you’re interested

1: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch

-I know it’s not obvious from the way I conduct myself here, but I have a very large vocabulary. I was a kid who read the dictionary and also any thesaurus I had access to. So, that said, consider how much it means to me personally that this book taught me 30-50 new words. This isn’t a huge part of the reason I loved this book, but it is a very impressive fact about it that I think will grab the attention of people who might otherwise not read it. This book changed the way I read, the way I think about literature, and the way I evaluate what I have previously read. It’s offensive to me that I lived 30 years as an avid reader and culture sponge without hearing about this book. I cannot recommend it enough. I give it top spot on this list for a very good reason. I’d like to avoid spoiling any of the plot because while I called the twist easily, discovery of each point was so delightful that I want you to have that same experience.

2: Cockatiel x Chameleon by Bavitz

-You all have plenty of experience with me recommending works of fiction published online in formats that deter most readers. This is a normal Najwa activity. I know how it sounds and I know, therefore, that this plea will go more or less unheard, but I BEG you. Look past the fact this was published on AO3. This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read, period. I mentioned in my worst of how much it bothers me that most writers can’t plausibly write about the internet. This book is the FUCKING ZENITH of writing about being online. It is the absolute peak and I will be shocked if I ever encounter another work that overtakes it. This is a book about people who are so strange they are barely human, but in ways that will be instantly familiar, intimately true, to those of us who grew up on the internet. There is violence and abuse and love and beauty and Chatroulette. There is art and gore and exploration of identity and apocalypse. There is fucking POSTING.

3: Serious Weakness by Porpentine

-Charity Heartscape Porpentine is one of our greatest living authors, opinions of snide Twitter users notwithstanding. I am an evangelist for her Twine game poetry because it is so singular and so affecting. Even a decade on, I can play through Their Angelical Understanding and feel freshly stabbed in the gut. Imagine the thrill I felt when she posted about her completed novel. I would (strongly) recommend this even to people who (somehow) bounced off her games, because her prose style is very distinct from the voice those are in (yet still recognizable). This is an incredibly violent, sick, stomach-turning, difficult, ugly, terrifying book. It’s also ultimately asking the reader a question about love and compassion. If you are sensitive to any trigger in written word about any violent action one person can do to another, skip this book, but if you feel like you have the strength, give her the nine bucks or whatever that she’s asking and devour it like I did. A hook for you: our protagonist has a chance meeting with an embodiment of pain. What follows includes torture, gender, climate disaster, and Columbine. Gorgeous. This book almost convinced me to start doing video essays so I could explain to people the incredible factors at play in it.

4: Negative Space by BR Yeager

-I have been trying to read this book for free for so long that I broke my streak and paid actual money for it. It was one of the better purchases I made all year. Thanks to finally reading some Stephen King this year I now have the requisite foundation to see how heavily his style inspired Yeager in this book, but I would die on the hill defending my position that Yeager does King better than King ever did. There is evil seeping out between the lines of this book. Have you ever had a nightmare that made you feel doomed the entire next day? Have you ever felt you were trapped in your shitty, dying home town? Have you ever been seduced by the excitement of activities that you know might actually kill you? Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and looked at your own dark reflection? Go back to the deepest point of your teenage depression here.

5: We Who Are About to by Joanna Russ

-One of the shortest entries on this list and so one of the easiest sells, but it is just as full of meaning as any other that made the cut. There is so much implied and unsaid about this protagonist. She feels whole, like this is the last chunk of chapters in a series centered on her, but she represents something universal. She is one member of a group from a crash-landed spaceship, a group small enough in numbers that there’s no way for humanity to last on this planet more than one more generation. Any attempts to do even that are so plainly cruel and self-deluding that she wants no part of them, but the others with her don’t see it the same way. Her story is womanhood under patriarchy, it is life and death, it is self-determination. Brutal. I read this at the airport and cried in public.

6: Carrie by Stephen King

-As much as I hate to say it, I gotta hand it to Uncle Steve (or really to Tabitha). This book very nearly justifies the rest of his career on its own. I thought had picked up most of it from cultural osmosis, but there was a truly shocking depth that I couldn’t have found without experiencing it firsthand. Maybe it’s funny to use this word here, but this book is humanist and compassionate and sincere in a way that King never finds again, particularly with the women he writes. Carrie is so vivid that I felt a protective instinct for her throughout the book even though I knew she was about to discover her own power. She reflects parts of me about as well as Lindqvist did in Little Star, which is the work of art that is THE most personal to me. A classic for a fucking reason.

7: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

-This year, lots of the books that I read had strange echoes of each other. In this, I can pick out shades of Carrie, of Camp Concentration, of We Who Are About To, and even of Serious Weakness. Rarely if ever are these references by each author, but it has enriched my experience by having unofficial interlocking intertexts for all of them. This book has been very divisive with reviewers, and I understand why, because it is cruel and the prose is extremely stylistic. This is somewhat experimental and fully literary and sincerely philosophical. I get it. Not for everyone. But it was for me. A clan of inbreds at the end of the world with their eyes on their scapegoat, nonverbal and disabled Dolores. It shocked me and it challenged me and I loved it.

8: The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories by Sam Pink

-These short stories did the exact opposite of the thing that pissed me off about The Florida Project. These are about people who are varying degrees of sympathetic but the same degree of desperately, penny-scrapingly working poor. The easy pull quote is “unflinching,” because it turns an eye on very ugly parts of real life for so many of us. I think people who grew up middle class will find some voyeuristic, prurient pleasure in these stories, but they’re not written for you. They’re written for us, the people who have lived this way.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 9

-I don’t need to tell you how great this book is, because the whole of booktok has told you this all year. Instead, what I will say is that it is much stranger and less tidy than you’re imagining when you hear the blurb. It’s a short read and it is one of the few times I haven’t regretted following booktok’s advice.

Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis 10

-This barely squeaked onto this year’s best of, because I started it before 2022 ended and finished it early in the new year. As I read it, especially in the first 20% of the book, I was confused as to how it ended up on my TBR. But toward the end, and throughout the year as I’ve continued to think about it, I understand more instinctively than intellectually that this is a remarkable work. A short synopsis: in the 80s in the UK, there is an epidemic of suicide, but only by adults. The teens left behind forge their own path.

#Porpentine #Bavitz #Thomas Disch #Dave Wallis #Sam pink #Stephen King #jacqueline harpman #Joanna Russ #Missouri Williams #br yeager #b. r. yeager #charity heartscape porpentine

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txttletale · 11 months

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hey ms healed! i knew and liked most of the stories you recommended in that one post already (not that anon tho) but i was curious if you might offer a more specific summary of "Cockatiel x Chameleon"? i like stories that upset/unsettle the reader but some of the tags gave me pause. (i don't mean that in a puritanical way, i swear.) sorry if it's a bother!

healed's law strikes again--it is ofc completely fair to have reservations about those content warnings. that's the point of the content warnings! specifically it is about an ennui-ridden tech sector worker falling into an online ERP community and the arcane and brutal dramas of the people in it. like, it gets really deep into the internet rivalry of a fictional patreon porn artist and #cancelled disney show creator

there is a lot of graphic sexual content in the story, featuring all the stuff in the content warnings--it's diegetically all text ERP the characters of the novel are engaging in, none of it 'happens' within the fiction, which might shift your temperature dial on it--but if you think something warned for in the tags would seriously upset you to read even in that context i'd recommend giving it a skip. no shame in not feeling comfortable reading something innit

#ask #kabarettizt

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weaselandfriends · 1 year

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Is there a narrative/thematic reason Harper works for a drone company specifically?

In workplace ennui stories, like Dilbert and Office Space, it's often unclear what the protagonist actually does at their job, or even what their company does. For Cockatiel x Chameleon, my goal was to juxtapose Harper's ennui and sense of complete personal stagnation with a "real world" that remains intensely political and conflicted. This logic underlies the irony of the "End of History" motif. While Harper and even the impoverished Van Der Gramme are insulated from a history that continues with or without them, the other characters are repeatedly crushed by it. So, positioning Harper as some small cog in the military-industrial complex highlights that innate contradiction between Harper's lived experience and the political reality of the world.

Part I Chapter 6, which is the main chapter that deals with Crux Calico, is titled "Sun shining ecclesiastical"; readers of Cleveland Quixotic might better understand the reference to the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, in which the quote "Nothing new under the sun" is repeated to signify world-weariness and nihilism. The chapter title is rephrased to, ironically, convey a more positive connotation, a sort of celebration of sameness, which corresponds to the chapter's setting at a convention in which people from around the world gather in earnest enthusiasm of the company Harper views as a stagnant prison. The title is accompanied by a Futurist painting by Gino Severini depicting an armored train with soldiers; the Futurists, a group of primarily Italian painters in the early 1900s, were extremely excited by the prospects of machinery and war (to the extent that many went ahead and got themselves killed in World War I), and in some ways were predecessors to the fascist movement. (Royce Ru is also introduced in this chapter, and is a sort of Futurist in his own right.) All of this neatly sums up the inherent contradiction in Harper's existence: She is positioned on the bleeding edge of new technology that drives political conflict and change across the world, yet is herself devoid of hope or even the capacity to visualize a future for herself. (Part III Chapter 7 is another good place to look for this contradiction; there, Harper's "big boss" first describes the cyclical nature of wildfires as burning up an accumulated pile of "useless crap," then goes on to describe the capitalistic model of perpetual growth as essential for Crux Calico's continued survival.)

There are other reasons, though. The explanation of Crux Calico's hastily-assembled consumer products division, in which the company is described as being "autistic" (shortly after Harper's first real conversation with Sister, who bandies the word about frequently), dovetails nicely into the struggles Harper herself is having with interpersonal communication. This consumer division story, which details the conflict between American and Chinese drone companies, also brings up a specter that haunts Cockatiel x Chameleon: the looming conflict between the United States and China. Brought up a few times throughout the story, such as in Papimon's description of how her parents made her learn English and her twin sister learn Chinese to "hedge their bets," this seemingly cataclysmic future event is a constant nagging question to the motif of the "End of History." (To culminate this idea, I originally intended to have the story end with Van Der Gramme accepting a commission to draw porn for Chinese gacha game Genshin Impact, but couldn't find a way to fit it in.) Royce Ru, being a North American of Chinese descent, exemplifies his optimistic vision of the future by suggesting a union, rather than conflict, between these two spheres of power.

The last reason is a simple pun: a drone is also an insect in a colony, or a monotonous sound, both definitions suggesting dullness and tedium. I call attention to this by mentioning how official company correspondence refers to drones as UAVs due to a perceived negative connotation behind the word drone.

#cockatiel x chameleon #cxc #bavitz

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