Death Note: Rules, principles, and the purpose of a remake

Oh, hello friends.  I didn't see you there.  Please, come in.  At the time of writing, I just finished watching the Death Note remake on Netflix and it proved to be the perfect material to break the ice on this long-forgotten snark platform of ours.

(I wish I could say this is the start of regular blogging here again, but that tragically seems unlikely.  I do have a twitter now, and of course the blogqueen has been tweeting prolifically for years.  We'll see if I can follow in her illustrious keysteps.)

Death Note (The American One, Mostly)

(Content: death, murder, sexual assault, misogyny.  Fun content: that depends on how much you missed me.)

I feel like any adaptation--whether it's book to film, or a series reboot or reimagining, whatever--has two extra criteria for judgment that original creations can ignore: 

1. Does this story stand on its own, without already knowing the source material? 
2. What value did the adapters get by changing whatever they changed?

And I feel like, regardless of one's opinions on the original story, the American Death Note fails completely on both of these points.  Its protagonist, Light, is changed in bizarre ways that sabotage the thesis of the original, while the supporting leads Mia and L are burdened with new rubbish flaws all too typical for the treatment of women and black men in US cinema.

Death Note (as in 'notebook') started out as a hit manga, which got turned into a hit anime, which got turned into a bunch of other supplementary materials and movies and such, all of which were Japanese and all telling the same core story of high school student Light Yagami, who gains magical murder powers and gets into a years-long battle of wits with law enforcement as he slaughters hundreds of criminals for the supposedly greater good.  It was far from perfect, but it was compelling and creative, telling a story of a seeming paragon of his community who didn't need to be corrupted--he just needed the opportunity to be evil and he'd drag himself down without a blink.  In the name of saving the world from dangerous criminals, he'd kill innocent people to cover his trail, to protect himself, or just to make a point.  He'd manipulate people's emotions, twist and control them, sure of his own perfection and his justified ends.

Light Yagami is a model student, a star athlete, an Encyclopedia Brown-grade genius who helps his cop father solve crimes, and gorgeous heartthrob with legions of girls swooning over him.  He might have gone on to become a brilliant lawyer or miracle doctor or follow his dad's path and be a legendary detective, but he finds a magic book that can kill people and he thinks why not be a god?  Death Note is a story about how someone who's basically modern nobility might actually be the worst kind of monster.  (Before it meant anything else, 'aristocracy' meant 'rule by the best people'.  Sometimes we have to remind ourselves not to trust that idea.)

Light Turner, the protagonist of the Netflix movie, is not this*.  Instead of the outwardly perfect superman, he's a standard American teen protagonist: a nerdy outcast, smarter than bullies but still getting into trouble, with a recently-dead mother and a crush on a cheerleader.  Where the original story makes the Yagamis a magazine-perfect family with mom, dad, and 2.3 kids, Light Turner lives with his dad in a tiny house next to a freight rail line for no apparent reason.  Class politics aren't part of this story, it's just a truth universally acknowledged that a sympathetic teenage protagonist comes from a working-class family.

Where Light Yagami showed vulcan-ish logic and emotional control, Light Turner is every inch the awkward teen, ineffectively confronting bullies and stuttering when pretty girls acknowledge his existence.  Where Light Yagami started experimenting with the killing book of his own accord and didn't hesitate to start offing detectives getting too close to his trail, Light Turner has to be pushed into using it for the first time (to rescue another student), and ultimately goes through the whole movie without killing anyone who hasn't already committed some ghastly crime.  (His second kill is the mafia goon who killed his mom in a traffic accident, who apparently went free because the mob bribed the jury.)

I spent most of the movie trying to figure out if the adaptation writers had intentionally chosen to make their protagonist nothing like the original, or if they thought we were supposed to sympathise with Light.  I think it was intentional, but good lord, at what cost?  Let's talk about the women of Death Note.

Light's mom is not significant in the original story, and she's already been killed for plot fodder in this one.  Other women were mostly extras or quickly killed.  His sister got left out of this version entirely.  The only major female character in the original is Misa Amane, a model who hero-worships Light for killing her parents' murderer and becomes his willing accomplice and nominal girlfriend.  She's clever by normal standards but, of course, foolish compared to proper geniuses like Light, and thus spends most of the story being his willing plaything, killing as he directs and absorbing whatever casual cruelty he shows because she just wants to be useful to him.  It's awful, and the audience is meant to condemn Light for his treatment of her, even if she is also a killer.

In this version, Misa becomes Mia Sutton, and she is the Real Villain of the story.  Mia is the one who pushes Light to kill more people, more publicly, to kill anyone who dares challenge him, and possibly manipulates his emotions to keep him on her side.  I'm sort of impressed that the adapters managed to substantially increase female agency while also keeping the misogyny, and even bumping it from 'evil people mistreat women' to 'the only woman is pure evil'.

Mia is introduced early in the story as the cheerleader that Light watches from the sidelines like an earnest shy creeper.  He's shocked that she knows his name (as American movie tradition demands), and the minute she shows any interest in the book he's reading, he tells her everything about it.  He even declares that she "of all people" should understand the potential of the book, indicating she has some important backstory that got cut from the final version of the movie.  They talk about being able to bring peace to those who have been let down by cops and politicians, and inventing a god of justice to make people too scared to commit crimes.  And then they have sex, because (again) American movie tradition demands it.

[Light and Mia sneak past his dad, sleeping in front of the TV, and up to his room.  Light leans toward her, then hesitates.] 

LIGHT: Can I kiss you? 

MIA: You're not supposed to ask. 

ME: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

We actually have scenes where they are actively making out or undressing each other while googling war criminals to kill off.  This is just apparently their fetish. (ERIKA NOTE: Just saying, Drawn Together picked "murder and wreckage" as a fetish for one of their episodes and probably handled it better. That is not a high bar.)  They also decide their murdersona needs a name--where the Japanese public just started referring to the force murdering all these criminals as Kira ("killer") in the original, Light intentionally chooses the name in this version, with the justification that it means 'light' in Celtic and Russian, and then tries to use the Japanese connection to throw off suspicion.  It doesn't work, and that's when we meet L.

In all versions of this story, L is the counterpart to Light.  Light appears normal, trustworthy, and pretty, and he is an utterly amoral murderer-protagonist.  L is weird, no one trusts him, he looks creepy, and he's the virtuous antagonist.  He's Light's only intellectual equal, tracking down an untraceable killer just as fast as Light can cover his tracks.

Like everything else in this story, the adapters appear to have missed or ignored the point.  Even just consider the following:

Pictured: the live-action American Light played by Nat Wolff, an archetypal gawky Movie Teen, next to the cool and precisely styled anime version of Light.

Pictured: the anime L, an unkempt man with an unsettling stare, and his American live-action counterpart, Lakeith Stanfield, who is more attractive than any human really needs to be.

Granted, apart from making L hot, the adaptation's initial depiction of him is pretty solid.  He's still eccentric, still obsessed with sweets, and they even cast a black actor in this heroic role (I'm generally for this!).  We find him inspecting a Japanese crime scene (cameo by producer Masi Oka) and then boarding a jet with his assistant, the elderly Watari, the only character who stayed Japanese through this adaptation.  L is a Sherlock-esque consulting detective, smart enough to have already narrowed down Kira's true location to Seattle.

(While the original story spends immense time on the details of Light and L's battles of wits, this movie glosses over most of them for the sake of time.  I will summarise because I have a question.  L realised that, before the Kira name started going around, a guy in Seattle in a standoff with police suddenly set his hostages free and then died in a convenient traffic accident, inexplicable events typical of Kira's murders.  To confirm his theories, L started seeding older criminal files into police databases in the Seattle region, and Light apparently used one of those to kill off gangsters in Japan.  When we first see L, he's examining a club where said gangsters appear to have killed each other, but the staff working the club are also dead.  Light wouldn't have been writing the names of the club dancers or waiters unless they were also violent criminals.  Was that just literally a Villains-Only club, or did a bunch of innocent people get killed as well?  That's not supposed to be how the Death Note works.  It has rules.  It has so many rules.**)

Once L arrives, the hunt for Kira amps up, and Light realises he's being tailed by an FBI agent (on the grounds that Light may have access to the police database, which they know Kira does).  Light, as our sympathetic protagonist, gets scared and wants to stop using the Death Note entirely, even though public faith in the justice of Lord Kira is taking off.  Mia says they just have to find out who all of the agents on the team are and kill them simultaneously, to scare off further investigation without implicating Light specifically.  Light is shocked, shocked to hear Mia suggest they use murder to solve their problems.  He's a sympathetic protagonist, after all!  All he's done is kill a few hundred bad guys.  That's what American heroes are supposed to do!  But Mia isn't an obedient girlfriend in this one--she steals a page from the book and kills the FBI agents herself, while Light just thinks it was the work of Ryuk.

(I haven't mentioned Ryuk until now because, in this version of the story, he's basically irrelevant.  Ryuk is the death god who originally owned the book, and he pushed Light to initially use it to kill the school bully who was at that moment threatening to rape another student.  In the original story, of course, Light needs no tempting, and Ryuk mostly exists so Light has an audience surrogate to explain his schemes to.  In this version, he has Mia to help with plot exposition, and she handles the corruption for him too.)

In the aftermath of the agents' mass "suicide", Light's cop father makes a public challenge to Kira, and when he doesn't die for it, L immediately concludes that Light is the killer.  (They have a showdown which is actually pretty good, because Lakeith Stanfield is a top-notch actor.)  To save himself, Light uses the book to compel Watari to go find L's real name.  (The book can "influence" someone's actions for up to two days before killing them, but One Time Only you can burn a page from the book to spare someone's life even after condemning them, so Light is planning to save Watari once he's got the information he needs.  Light's a protagonist, after all, and therefore a good guy!)

I said at the start that adaptations need to stand on their own without knowing the original version***, and this is once of the places where Death Note faceplants.  In the original story, L and some of his colleagues have a complicated and mysterious backstory that is only occasionally hinted at over the course of many chapters.  In this version, the compelled Watari phones up Light and hypnotically explains that L is an orphan raised in a special program that conditions its subjects from childhood to become ultimate detectives.  L was only initiated into the program when, at the age of six, he was able to endure the requisite seven months in solitary confinement without a complete mental breakdown.

That's...

Uh...

Look, in a fifty-episode anime or a hundred-volume comic book, okay, I guess you can spread out the heavy lifting that it takes to introduce those sorts of concepts organically, but in a robotic monologue from a hypnotised butler in the middle of this movie about the corrupting influence of power, that's fuckin' weird.  (Not to mention also being much more backstory than Mia ever gets!)

The conclusion of this is that L's name can only be found in the abandoned orphanage's records, which the writers could have done without the bizarre Ender's Game For Detectives exposition slam.  Watari goes off to hunt for the name, and his disappearance immediately causes L to crack.  Now, far be it from me to object to rational characters acting irrationally when people they care about are in danger, but for the rest of the movie L becomes an increasingly loose cannon, starting with storming the Turner house to accuse and threaten Light's life face-to-face.  That's not something the original L would ever do, and it's at best uncomfortable that they've decided to add this uncharacteristic emotional unhinging after making him the only significant black character.  (It only ramps up after the plan fails, Watari dies, and L, who hates guns, grabs a gun and steals a cop car to chase down Light.  But I'm getting ahead of myself; there's more feminine evil to discuss first.)

Lest we forget just how incredibly American this version is, the climactic events all occur on the night of the homecoming dance at Light and Mia's school.  There's some very weak misdirection involving a top hat that's supposed to let Light slip away from the dance, get L's name from Watari by phone, and then burn the page to save him, but Light discovers that page has already been taken from his book by Mia.  This knocks Light into realising that Mia, not Ryuk, was behind the deaths of the FBI agents--as she explains, she was "protecting" him, both from the cops and from his own cowardice.  She doesn't want to ever stop meting out death in judgment, so she demands that he make her the official owner of the book.  As insurance, she's written his death into it, but since she stopped him from saving Watari, the One-Time-Only Takeback can still be used to spare him.

(Side note: like a lot of the schemes in this movie, this doesn't actually make sense.  Light knows where the book is; Mia does not.  To save himself, he doesn't have to give the book to her, he just has to go burn his own page.  Mia does have one page that she stole, but that's not the one with Light's name on it.  There's no reason for him to give her the book now.)

A prolonged chase scene across the city ensues.  L manages to corner Light at one point, and Light starts to spill everything, but a random bystander shows up on the scene.  L makes the mistake of saying that he's caught Kira, and rando knocks L out with a plank because he is a true believer in Lord Kira.  Light and Mia have their final confrontation on a Ferris wheel.  Light asks her to Choose Love and give up on the book, but as soon as he's distracted she grabs for it and they both fall from the wheel.  She dramatically lands on a flower stall and dies amidst petals, while Light falls into the harbour and gets rescued.  The page with his name on it 'coincidentally' lands in a literal trash fire.

(There's then an incredibly uncomfortable scene in which a bunch of old white cops tell L that Light, currently hospitalised, is clearly not Kira and that, while L might not get jailed for his false accusation, he should know that he ain't welcome in their town anymore.  In a better movie, that kind of implicit threat would be an intentional reflection of police racism.)

Light wakes up from a two-day coma.  He's alive because everything that just happened was according to his last-ditch plan.  He used the book to compel a couple of sex offenders to rescue him from the water and hide the book while he was in his medically-induced coma, then kill themselves when their job was done.  He wrote his own survival into the book as part of their deaths, which... should not work according to any rule we've seen.  It's a book that kills, not saves.

He also wrote Mia's death in, which he admitted to her during their confrontation, but he insisted that it was a conditional thing that would only happen if she tried to steal the book.  This is presented as if it's something we should believe, but according to the rules as presented to us, the fact that he wrote 'she dies after taking the book' means she was magically compelled to steal the book, even if she really did want to Choose Love instead.  Was that what the writers intended?  Was this supposed to be a tragic mistake or a cover for a sinister plan?

Finally, Light's dad arrives and declares that he's realised Light really was the killer--no one else would have caught the connection, but the mafia goon who killed Mom Turner died right before the Kira business started.  Neither of them seems to know what to do now.  Meanwhile, L continues on his Emotionally And Morally Compromised Quest and searches Mia's home (she seems to have lived alone in an apartment, what was her backstory?!) until he finds the page of the Death Note she stole.  He twitches and cries and laughs as he stares at the page and at the nearby photo of Mia and Light together, obviously trying to decide whether to kill Light or not****.  Ryuk pops up to remark to Light that humans are "so interesting!"--and roll credits.

In summary, the white male protagonist gets rewritten as a misled but principled antihero, the white female lead gets powered up from amoral accomplice to ruthless evil mastermind temptress, and the black hero actually on the side of peace and justice goes on a rampage for revenge because he can't control his emotions.  Nothing remains of the original story of an apparent paragon of humanity becoming an unfathomable supervillain just because someone gave him the chance to act without accountability.

So what exactly was the point of this remake?

---

*When people first heard there was going to be an American remake of Death Note, many people pointed out the worst implications due to cultural differences (like American school mass murders, and the overfilling of US jails with black prisoners).  At least they avoided some of that in this script?  Which isn't to say there isn't still plenty of racism and xenophobia to go around: when we see Kira execute a military commander who's been torturing prisoners, they make sure it's an officer in some east Asian military, not American.  Acknowledging evil within the US army is going too far even for this Super Edgy movie.

**The rules of the Death Note are a central part of the original story, and we get every single one of them in detail over dozens of chapters.  This is a good choice for a battle of wits, because the audience understands exactly what the terms of the game are, and it helps us not feel like conflicts are just being resolved by someone pulling a new superpower out of their ear.  Here in this movie, we get a half-dozen rules and the rest are just blurred past with various exclamations of "Why does this thing have so many rules?"  I can see why they would do that to save time, but it does sort of undercut the characters' supposed cleverness, and Light Turner writes various things that the original rules would never have allowed.

***My personal go-to for failure on this is Star Trek Into Darkness, which wants the audience to be shocked and terrified by the revelation of the name Khan, a character who hadn't been featured anywhere in 30 years, let alone in this storyline.

****They obviously wanted to be able to pick it back up for a sequel if they could.  I'm guessing if they did that, L would in fact kill Light's dad to cause Light to suffer as L has, and then it's back to one-on-one cat-and-mouse between them because no one trusts L or believes Light is Kira.  I would protest the loss of the original conclusion as well ("teamwork > loner geniuses"), if it weren't so obvious that they're hoping to continue this story.

The Name of the Wind, chapters 2 and 3, in which people pretend not to be main characters

This post is late for a variety of very good reasons, including helping friends move and going to the local Pride parade and being too tired to move.  Regardless, I will consider whether Sundays are actually the best day to aim for posting.  Sorry for the erratic schedule.

The Name of the Wind: p. 19--34

Chapter Two: A Beautiful Day

It was one of those perfect autumn days so common in stories and so rare in the real world.

I think the first time I read a line in a book about how "this is real life, not some book" I thought it was really clever.  That was, I'm going to estimate, minimum eighteen years ago.  At this point, every reference to the same (this isn't a movie/TV show/cartoon/daguerreotype) at best gets an arched eyebrow from me, but in the case of this book, it's more the slightly-cracked chortle and shrug of a surrendered man.  Of course this is that kind of book.  How did I ever imagine otherwise?

This chapter introduces our second (third?) protagonist, Chronicler (I wonder if he's important to the Kingkiller Chronicle), who is busy observing all of the lovely scenery when "a half dozen ex-soldiers with hunting bows" very politely rob him.  He doesn't particularly put up a fight: "he had been robbed before and knew when there was nothing to be gained by discussion".  There's very little actual tension, which is presumably intentional, and the commander is a very fair-minded thief, ordering his lackeys not to take too much, or to at least leave their old cloak if they're taking his, that kind of thing.

It's a weird scene, and I would argue vastly more memorable than anything that happened last chapter (competing with the monster science), but I'm not sure what to take away exactly.  It doesn't do a lot of worldbuilding--the thieves mention that they're going to sell his horse to the army, but we don't know why these people are ex soldiers (and recently enough that they still call their leader 'sir'), or why they're so polite about it.  We do get Chronicler characterised as a wise dude who is always prepared--as soon as they're gone with his stuff, he gets more cash out of his secret boot stash and partly refills his purse in case he gets held up again, since he knows a thief hates to not find anything at first glance.  The narrative informs us of an additional bank deposit baked into his ultra-stale bread and in his ink bottle.

Finally there is a weird sort of fake-out-fakeout when he's thinking about what a nice peaceful day it is and gets startled by a "dark shape" coming at him out of the trees, but it's just a crow after all and he goes merrily on his way.  This chapter is so meta that it's making a joke out of pretending it's going to do something violent after pretending that it was pretending not to all along.  Which is, to me, the kind of cleverness that isn't actually interesting?  And I make puns without shame.

Chapter Three: Wood and Word

Back to Kote at his tavern, surprised by the arrival of Graham the wood-carver with the mounting board Kote apparently commissioned from him four months ago, delayed by the precise rare wood he'd had to acquire.  Graham notes that Kote "has begun to wilt", presumably again a reference to 'cut flowers' as so purposefully described last time:

The innkeeper's gestures weren't as extravagant. His voice wasn't as deep. Even his eyes weren't as bright as they had been a month ago. [....] And his hair had been bright before, the color of flame. Now it seemed--red. Just red-hair color, really.

Is... is Kote losing his protagonism?   I'm imagining the secondary characters gossiping at a nearby corner: 'And the last time he came into my shop, I could barely hear his leitmotif for more than a couple of seconds!'  (Also, side-pedantry, but why do authors insist fire is red?  Most fires I've ever seen have been very intensely yellow with edges of blue and orange.  Embers might be red, but it's always 'flame-red'.  This is like the non-racist counterpart to 'almond-shaped eyes'.)

Graham talks about how difficult it was to work with the wood, and even harder to burn the name "Folly" in as requested.  Kote overpays him for the work and doesn't offer any further explanation for his weird purchase.  Graham leaves and Bast arrives to ask vague and portentous questions:

"What were you thinking?" Bast said with an odd mixture of confusion and concern.

Kote was a long while in answering. "I tend to think too much, Bast. My greatest successes came from decisions I made when I stopped thinking and simply did what felt right. Even if there was no good explanation for what I did." He smiled wistfully. "Even if there were very good reasons for me not to do what I did."

How long am I going to have to wait for them to stop talking about talking about 'what he did' and actually tell us what it is?  I know it's only chapter three, but if I have limited tolerance for 'as you know' exposition, I have even less for 'I think we need to discuss That Thing We're Keeping From The Reader in vague terms'.

Kote says he plans to hang the sword (of course it's a sword) out in the open, to Bast's horror, but Bast fetches it from under his own bed (aww) and Kote finds a spot over the bar.  When he sees Bast's careless grip on the scabbard, he gives us this gem:

"Careful, Bast! You're carrying a lady there, not swinging some wench at a barn dance."

Dude.  Of all the ways to tell your apprentice to be careful with your favourite weapon, you chose 'feminise an inanimate object and draw parallels to the types of women you should or should not be respectful of'?  (Running tally of female or feminine characters: a dead horse and a sword named Folly.)

Before he hands it, Kote, draws the blade, which, like its owner, is both old and young at once:

It was not notched or rusted. There were no bright scratches skittering along its dull grey side. But though it was unmarred, it was old. And while it was obviously a sword, it was not a familiar shape. At least no one in this town would have found it familiar. It looked as if an alchemist had distilled a dozen swords, and when the crucible had cooled this was lying in the bottom: a sword in its pure form. It was slender and graceful. It was deadly as a sharp stone beneath swift water.

I have no gorram clue what this sword is supposed to look like.

I mean, to be honest, I will be happy if it's anything other than a katana, but I don't know how to reconcile something being the purest distillation of all swordiness with being something bizarre to the entire village's basic expectations of what swords look like.  What I'm saying is that until I am absolutely forced to reconsider, I'm going to assume it's one of these:

Pictured: a sanégué sword from Burkina Faso, incontrovertible proof that the human spirit defies all deterministic projections.

Kote's all cheerful about finally having Folly on display, while Bast is super awkward, but they have to get ready for the lunch rush and there's a rather romcom remark about how they discuss minor things as they work: "it was obvious they were reluctant to finish whatever task they were close to completing, as if they both dreaded the moment when the work would end and the silence would fill the room again."  Isn't that basically one of the subplots in Love, Actually?

They are spared the onslaught of awkward silence by the arrival of a small caravan of customers: wagoneers, guards, a tinker, and a couple of young rich travellers obviously seeking safety in numbers.  Two of the wagoneers are specifically noted to be women, making them the first female humans we've seen on page.  They are not named.

When everyone's fed and supplied and they've agreed on rooming arrangements, the tinker takes a quick roll through town to judge business, and attracts the attention of a group of children who respond to his indifference by playing a game that includes a cheerful rhyme about running and hiding if the fire turns blue, referencing the Chandrian again.  This isn't bad worldbuilding, but it does feel kind of shoehorned?  The tinker responds with his own song rhyming all the goods he has for sale, specifically beckoning the women of the village to come buy "small cloth and rose water".  Nothing is specifically recommended to the men, and certainly not for the sake of making themselves more attractive.  Basically this portion is straight out of Eye of the World.

Keeping in that theme, Kote spends the next scene basking in being around actual travellers again, but the sounds they make specifically include "men laughing" while "the women flirted".  Option one is that flirting is a romantic activity and therefore inherently womanly, not something a man would do; option two is that the women are strictly flirting with each other.  I know which option I'm going to pretend Rothfuss meant.  But then, later in the evening when folks are getting inebriated, someone somehow--le gasp--strikes upon Kote's super secret backstory.

One of the richer dudes identifies Kote as "Kvothe the Bloodless", based partly on his appearance but mostly on his voice:

I heard you in Imre once. Cried my eyes out afterward. I never heard anything like that before or since. Broke my heart. [....] I saw the place in Imre where you killed him. By the fountain. The cobblestones are all [...] shattered. They say no one can mend them.

So, I know that 'this was broken so hard that no magic can undo the harm' is a fantasy staple, but when it comes to cobblestones, not to be That Guy, but couldn't you just... replace them?  Dig up the broken ones and put down new ones?  Maybe I'm missing key information here.

Kote laughs the idea off, pretends it's a compliment, and then pretends to be a huge klutz for a second just to dispel any notions that he could be some kind of legendary poet-warrior.  Bast helps him limp away and Kote gives him instructions to give the man some sleeping meds and then casually drop Kote's backstory into conversation, involving an arrow to the knee and a generous merchant.  He only says it once, but he and Bast use a sort of ritualistic 'listen three times'/'I hear you three times' phrasing to make it clear that this is Serious Business.  Kote spends the rest of the night brooding heroically in his room, and we're told as he undresses for bed that the fire highlights all of his many, many scars, all smooth and silver "except one".  Plot significance meters are overloading, captain!

(Given how much nothing has happened at this point in the book, I'm reflecting back on the first chapter and wondering how Kote knew so much about scraelings but had never apparently dissected one before.  That's an odd level of familiarity, no?)

The next morning the caravan leaves without incident and Kote appears to busy himself with deeply mundane concerns again, but he does go to the blacksmith to buy an iron rod (like everyone else in town already did) and also a leather apron and gloves, which he claims are for gardening.  There's more semi-poetic stuff about how things are ready to die in autumn, basically the same pensive morbidity as the last two times Kote has closed a chapter for us.  The only difference here is that the narrative eye settles on Bast, obviously troubled and looking for an opportunity to do something about it.  Regardless, this basically feels like Rothfuss had two distinct ideas for his first chapter and decided to use both of them in sequence.

Next time: Kote and Chronicler meet.  Will sparks fly?  Will Bast be jealous?  Will there be a named female character any time soon?  Only time will tell.

The Name of the Wind, chapter one, in which Will is charmed by a Science Hero

Howdy folks.  Sunday updates are back!  The long drought is once again over and we have a new project, decided by my need to resolve an apparent contradiction.  On the one hand, I have heard that The Name of the Wind is the most archetypal of male wish-fulfillment fantasy; on the other hand, I've seen women recently talking about how much they love Rothfuss, in the comments of a video of him talking at a con about proper diversity of representation in fiction.

He also posted this, presumably on July 5th:

Pictured: a status update about letting his young son wear eyeshadow and lipstick on a night out, because, quote, "Fuck it" and "Freedom".

So already I feel like I'm dealing with a much higher calibre of human being than the aw-shucks misogynist Butcher or the frothing hatemonger Card.  Male wish fulfillment and a philosophy of inclusion and free expression--these things don't have to conflict, but they are definitely an unusual combination.  Let's see if we can figure out what's going on.

No further delays.  Are you excited?  I'm excited.

(Content: referenced animal death. Fun content: chimney history, Viola Davis' poker face.)

The Name of the Wind: p. 1--

Prologue: A Silence of Three Parts

The title page informs me that this book is "The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One", which is even more amazing than your typical 'Book One of the Interminability Cycle'.  A single day.  I assume this due to flashbacks, but suddenly I wonder why no one's tried to do the dragons-and-wizards version of 24 yet.

There is of course a map, labelled "The Four Corners of Civilization" which conveniently ends all along the right edge of the page with the practically-vertical Stormwall Mountains.  Nothing civilised anywhere else, I guess?  These people are terrible explorers or huge narcissists, but--to be clear--I am fully expecting this book to be unabashedly pretentious stereotypical fantasy, and I will not hold that against it any more than I condemned Wheel of Time for being a by-the-numbers Tolkien ripoff.  (Bad example?)  Until and unless Rothfuss earns my ire with offensive handling of actual characters, my exclamations will probably all translate to 'that is terrible I love it'.

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

SEE PREVIOUS STATEMENT.

The first part of the silence is absence: no wind, no drinking crowd, no music.  There are a couple of guys drinking intently, whose lack of conversation "added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one".  The third silence is an excuse to describe the scenery:

If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar [....] in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire [....] in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.

He has "true-red" hair, so I assume he's a main character.  He owns the bar, and the poetic third silence: "It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die."  That's the entire prologue.  I have no idea what it means but, again, it is shamelessly over-the-top and I love it.

Chapter One: A Place for Demons

Same inn, different night?  A stock character named Old Cob is telling a quartet of young men a story of wandering hero Taborlin the Great, disarmed and imprisoned in a tower where the flames had turned blue, which the smith's apprentice correctly identifies as a sign of the Chandrian (bad guys of some type, clearly).  They pause for Medieval Fantasy Dinner, "five bowls of stew and two warm, round loaves of bread", which is some nice baking service--and then back to the story, where Taborlin turns out to be Superman levels of overpowered, because he "knew the names of all things, and so all things were to his command".  He commands the stone wall of his cell to fall apart, jumps out the hole, and "he knew the name of the wind" [DRINK!] so it caught him on his way down.  He doesn't even have the stab wound from his captors, thanks to his new magic amulet that they somehow failed to take from him.

The men start arguing over the precise rhyming scheme about being kind to tinkers (such as the one who gifted Taborlin this Amulet of Gamebreaking), and the innkeeper, Kote, interrupts for basically the first time since he moved to town a year ago:

A tinker's debt is always paid:/Once for any simple trade./Twice for freely given aid./Thrice for any insult made.

I had been thinking that the innkeeper was the protagonist, but he's got a name now, whereas the narrative has paused twice now to tell us that the smith's teenage apprentice is still always called "boy", which I find Suspicious.  Old Cob specifies that the amulet would protect Taborlin from evil, "demons and such", causing Shep to grumble about needing it himself.  Implications follow that Shep's farm may have been hit by demons last week and everyone is too polite to ask about it while sober.  I hope it was demons.  I would give a lot to see a fantasy novel written from the perspective of ordinary villagers just trying to get on with life in a world where apocalyptic devil-gods and prophesied heroes and monster hordes are as common as rainy days.

Another disagreement arises about whether the Chandrian are demons or, as Jake insists, "They were the first six people to refuse Tehlu's choice of the path", et cetera.  On the plus side, rather than everyone having a weirdly encyclopedic knowledge of their mytho-history, they seem to have various competing stories and can't agree what's what.  Already we're doing better than Wheel of Time.

No dark night in a tavern is complete without someone stumbling in on death's door, so here comes Carter, smeared with blood.  (Aside: the surname 'Walker' and the locative name 'Rannish' suggest to me that we're in an era in which surnames are relatively new, but apparently the occupational name 'Carter' has already made the jump to forename.  Reminds me of a couple of weeks ago when I asked my GM about an NPC named Christopher in a fantasy setting without Christianity.  He politely ignored my musings, which is probably for the best.  This is why I have trouble connecting with people.)  Carter is clutching a blanket that looks "as if it were wrapped around a tangle of kindling sticks" and, a paragraph later, clunks onto a table "as if it were full of stones".  I'm sure it's nothing creepy like a bunch of bones.  Carter is "crisscrossed with long, straight cuts" but insists that he's fine, although his horse didn't make it.  He is reprimanded for travelling alone when there are brigands around, until he dramatically tugs open the blanket roll to reveal a giant dead spider.

Kote casually identifies it as a scrael, then quickly insists he's never seen one before but only heard about them from travelling merchants.  He quickly sets to sciencing it as best he can--its body is stone, feet razor-sharp, no eyes, no mouth, and when he finally manages to snap it open, it's full of homogenous grey sponge "like a mushroom".  Kote is terrible at being an undercover hero, but after Dresden's tremendous disinterest in learning anything more about anything than he has to, I am all over a character whose response to monsters is to start making notes and running tests.

Everyone is deeply upset and confused by the prospect of an actual demon corpse in the bar--they don't doubt demons exist, but they're supposed to be far-off mythical things, like kings and gods.  Kote just shrugs and says they can test with iron or fire.  Graham, in the audience, helpfully specifies that demons "fear three things: cold iron, clean fire, and the holy name of God."

Kote gives him this face...

Pictured: Viola Davis, unimpressed.

...and moves on to finding iron--pure iron, not alloyed steel.  He eventually locates an appropriately pure penny (a shim--we get names for all the coin types, which is pretty good flavour without breaking our stride too much) and presses it to the scrael's stone body.  A moment later, it burns through to the table underneath.  Kote wipes his hands on his apron and asks what they should do now.  SCIENCE HERO!

Another silent scene, this time of Kote alone in his bar, cleaning everything.  It's super clean.  So clean to begin with that even after cleaning for an hour, his cleaning bucket water is still clean enough "for a lady to wash her hands".  I'm not sure if this is characterisation or what.  Is Kote obsessive or does he not sleep ever?  The narrative notes that 'Kote' is a chosen name for him, one of many (his student calls him Reshi), and implies that he's actually much older than the twentysomething he looks.  When he finally does return to his room, he's greeted by a new character, Bast, who makes me vaguely uncomfortable given that he's the first dark-skinned person we've met and is seemingly a servant, bringing food.  At least, he's described as "dark and charming, with a quick smile and cunning eyes".  'Dark' in these cases sometimes just means hair, but overall it sounds to me like a stock description of a Mildly Foreign Person whom we're meant to like but also not be sure whether to trust.  We're also in Jacob-and-Carter country, so Bast is probably meant to sound exotic (though it's a decent abbreviation of Sebastian, and apparently also a German surname).  I'm going to go ahead and picture him as mixed north African/west Asian.

But he's not just a servant, at least.  He's Kote's apprentice, by the sound of it studying magic or alchemy.  Buuuut he's also super promiscuous, as they banter and Bast admits that he didn't get any reading done today because he took his book outside and immediately got entangled with a pretty girl.  Again.  He's a big fan of all the women under thirty in this place, apparently.  So, our first POC is vaguely subservient, scholastically under-motivated, and extra sexual.  This is all discussed jovially and without any chastising from Kote, so we're probably not supposed to think less of him for this, but I become immediately suspicious when these sorts of traits line up.  (Also, we've had half a dozen named men and one Significantly Unnamed boy and the only named female character thus far is the dead horse.  Don't think I'm not noticing these things just because I am pleased with Kote's I-wonder-what-happens-if-I-do-this curiosity.)

Kote explains about the scrael, to Bast's immediate concern, but Kote reassures him that it was properly dead and he subtly made sure they disposed of it properly, with a rowan wood fire and a sufficiently deep hole and such arcane precautions.  He also mentions giving Carter about fifty stitches, and instructs Bast to tell anyone gossipy a specific backstory about learning from his father the a caravan guard.  They have further Significant Conversation that we don't fully understand, about how "they thought it was a demon" that that was probably for the best (but nothing about what it really is, ominous chord), and everyone's going to be stocking up on pure iron to fight demons and Kote wouldn't blame Bast if he wanted to leave now.  Is this implying that Bast is also not human?  I have a suspicious eye on you, Rothfuss.  (Bast says he would never leave, since Kote's his only possible teacher.)  The Bast-is-a-demon-or-something theory intensifies when the banter proceeds to Kote jokingly trying to banish him with various incantations in ancient language, to which Bast laughs through fake scowls.

Kote is left to eat in silence, and I contemplate why I enjoy the return to pretentious pseudo-poetry in the narrative here, even as it tries to quietly inform me of how special Kote is.  He reflects on his slight pride in engineering a fireplace into the middle of the room--

(I did some quick research here to try to figure out if/when this was a new creation, and discovered a book that argues that the invention of the chimney was the single greatest factor in the development of class segregation in Europe.  The world is a font of endless wonders and this sustains me through times of trouble.)

--and then spends a lot of time looking everywhere in the room except towards a particular wooden chest, "the same way you avoid meeting the eye of an old lover at a formal dinner, or that of an old enemy sitting across the room in a crowded alehouse late at night".  (I note that Rothfuss is pretty good about not gendering his hypotheticals; I feel confident Dresden would have made it very clear that the 'old lover' was a white woman as beautiful as she was cold, et cetera.)

The chest is made of roah, fantasy wood worth its weight in gold: "a chest made of it went far beyond extravagance".  I had enough of this with Trillionaire Ender Wiggin to last me a lifetime, thanks.  The chest has three locks: one iron, one copper, "and a lock that could not be seen".  DO YOU REALISE YET HOW IMPORTANT THIS BOX IS?  I'm mostly expecting it to have a weapon inside, e.g., the sword that he Swore He Would Never Wield Again, but I'm hopeful that I'll be wrong there.  He eventually locks eyes with the box, looks all weary again, and goes to bed.

Next day, the bar crowd is nervous, although not too nervous to throw us some more worldbuilding tidbits: the Penitent King is trying to suppress a rebellion in far-off Resavek, and everyone's expecting a third round of taxes this year, which will be bearable for most of the farmers except those already struggling, and "Crazy Martin", who planted barley instead of the beans that armies live on.  Travelling merchants have fewer and fewer luxuries as well.  I actually kinda like this sequence, far more than a Wheel-of-Time-y scenario where everyone's chipper but there are Grim Rumours in The East that they Foolishly Dismiss.  Not least because it only takes a couple of paragraphs for Rothfuss to sketch us a sense of village life and how they adapt to the times and economics of their world, and we aren't subject to a deluge of vaguely-rustic down-home slang.  The village is also full of gossip, since Carter is half made of stitches now, although no one really takes the claims of demonic invasion seriously.

Trying to convince folk would only make them a laughingstock, like Crazy Martin, who had been trying to dig a well inside his own house for years now.

A brief investigation has not provided me with any insight as to why people wouldn't want an indoor well.  I mean, I know wells run dry, but if you're building a house and you have a private well, is there any particular reason not to build the house around the well?  (These are the questions I ask that, four years later, cause someone to look at me bug-eyed and say 'Why do you know that?'  Funsies, my friends.  Funsies.)  Still, as Kote predicted, everyone in town finds time to drop by the blacksmith and buy a length of iron, just in case some hellspawn needs smiting.

By the end of the chapter, it has begun to drag a bit, particularly once it gets around to how "they reminisced that three years ago no one would have even thought of locking their doors at night, let alone barring them".  Pepperridge Farm remembers.  The evening's drinking stumbles to end at a slow and low point, ending the chapter, which if nothing else tells us how confident Rothfuss is that we are firmly in the grip of his narrative tension.

Still not one named human woman, but also a lack of outright misogyny or even 'benign' sexism, so this is one of those times where a score of zero is actually an improvement over most of the books you've had the joy to experience with me.  I confess I hold actual hope for this story yet.  (I can't tell if Kote and Bast are close enough in age for me to ship them yet, but I assume you're all prepared for that to start happening soon.)

Next week: a secondary protagonist named Chronicler (amazing) gets politely robbed and Kote starts to reveal his Seeeeecret Paaaast!