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.

Good movies for people who like bad movies

(Sorry this isn't the second Name of the Wind post, but my brain has been frazzled and this post has been waiting in drafts for far too long.  I also suspect it's going to be topical as we continue to dig into Kvothe's adventures in the coming weeks.)

Most people who aren't Ayn Rand are willing to acknowledge a difference between things they like and things that are "good", a distinction that is at once counterintuitive and perfectly natural.  It is with that distinction in mind that I watched two movies recently: Conan the Barbarian (the 1982 original) and Vampire Academy (based on books of the same name).  These movies aren't good, but they are bad in specific ways that call into question what exactly we mean by "good" to begin with.

I'll start with Conan, because I have less to say about it: it's the incredibly straightforward story of a Proud Warrior Tribe kid whose village is destroyed by an evil man, who gets taken as a gladiator slave, runs away to freedom, slays monsters, has gratuitous sex with dubious consent, and finally kills the evil black wizard who slaughtered his people.  He has a love interest and a couple of comic relief sidekicks of indistinct ethnicity and fundamentally racist conventions, he gets some unexpected and inexplicable Christ imagery, and assures us all that a true hero is an independent burly man who single-handedly decapitates bad guys.  Throughout the adventure, he is narrated in epic saga style.

This is a bad movie, let there be no question.  Even the heroic POC tend to be cowardly and animalistic, and for all that James Earl Jones does some spectacular work as the villain, the climax of the movie is a white man setting a bunch of impressionable kids free by murdering a black man.  The love interest dies literally fifteen minutes after our heroes performed a magic ritual to bring Conan back from the dead, and yet no one asks whether maybe they should just do that again.  There's a thoroughly unexpected scene when Conan steals an evil priest's robes by using the man's predatory gay tendencies against him.  All bigoted writing--literally every word of it--is also lazy writing.

But lord how I wish we could have good movies that take their absurd epic fantasy setting this seriously.  It's the problem of the 1950s: love the aesthetic, hate the politics.  Where are my stories about people who aren't cis-white-hetero-men-with-arms-like-bags-of-footballs, adventuring across untamed lands to fight animated statues and free vulnerable people from charismatic dictators while a wizened wizard narrates their quest with the kind of absolute severity that would make Adam West proud?  Where victory isn't always murder, where strength is community and not a weird frappuccino of the philosophy of Nietzsche and incredibly unlikely Genghis Khan attributions?

Conan the Barbarian is not a good movie, but how I wish it were.

With that, we come to Vampire Academy, the bizarre Twilight/Harry Potter hybrid that I didn't know I was waiting for.  This movie is absurd and cliched, with its convenient telepathic bonds and its magic princess on the run and a vampire queen who lives in the school and calls assemblies specifically to chastise her probable successor in public (for no personal benefit).  Few of the actors seem comfortable being filmed, and the mandatory hetero love interests are a blatant discount bin Edward Cullen and some kind of Star-Trek-transporter-accident fusion of Jack Black and David Bowie.

And yet this is a movie that does an astonishing number of things right.  Our heroic bonded duo of vampire princess Lissa and mostly-human bodyguard Rose are complex characters with multiple conflicting motivations and flaws, going overboard in their petty revenge or overprotectiveness and then regretting it, trying to make things right.  The movie starts in medias res to a degree that reminded me of the original Star Wars, with our heroes on the run, immediately provoking questions about how they got there, why they left the eponymous academy, and why they're being dragged back.  (And, if you're me, whether the romantic/sexual subtext between the girls is going to remain subtextual.  It is.  Obvs.  Sigh.)  They remain, throughout the movie, likeable but imperfect, with Rose in particular (as the action hero) getting to maintain a swagger and punchiness that is usually restricted to male roles.  When her platonic bro starts to make some kind of I'm A Nice Guy rant at her, Rose dismisses him instantly to focus on more important issues.  When Discount Edward hangs around Lissa in awkward and potentially creepy ways, Rose bluffs to get rid of him, but later accepts that she doesn't get to pick her friend's friends and apologises for lying--while still making it clear that she thinks his behaviour was creepy.

(In one reversal that the blogqueen particularly liked, Discount Edward spends most of the movie being markedly useless and then gets exactly one dramatic effective moment during the climax, a fate that usually befalls the token female action hero.)

To my utter lack of surprise, internet investigation told me that this movie was a colossal failure commercially, and its Rotten Tomatoes page (aggregate score of 11%) is full of blurbs from grey-haired white men declaiming the film for being impossible to follow and trying to lure in silly teenager girls by mashing up all the modern trends of magic school and hot vampire boys.

We are left with the question: would this movie have done better with male leads?  Rose would certainly have been a more typical male character, though being younger than his hypothetical female love interest would have been a switch.  More likely that Lissa would become the love interest in need of protection (unless she was a dude too, in which case I suspect there would have been way more No Homo being thrown around and all of the leads' emotions would have to be replaced with sex or punching).  This is a movie with a strong focus on social status--characters care about how they're perceived and might prefer a battle to the death over public embarrassment--which is obviously such a girl thing, innit?  And yet my mind drifts back to a little English underdog hero called Eggsy who who just wanted to prove his worth compared to his condescending upper-class peers...

Over on the page for Kingsman (aggregate score of 74% and my unfathomable scorn) a veritable flood of enraptured white men cheer for its "stylish" "subversiveness", wit, charm, and "devil-may-care exuberance".  May I remind you that this is a film in which a lisping media tycoon decides to save the environment by inventing a machine that makes everyone turn into murderous berserkers for only as long as he holds down the button.  But "vampires want to kidnap a princess to use her healing magic for themselves" is too convoluted and weird.

And I mean: I'm not trying to argue that Vampire Academy is a Good Movie, in the sense of technical expertise or top-quality performances (apart from Rose, who was honestly delightful in every moment that she wasn't being forced into a weird romantic subplot).  But I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than plenty of other movies that are supposedly its superior, and so I start to wonder how we're defining Good Movies.  Because when you get into institutions like that--film theory and literary criticism and the like--one of the first things that becomes apparent is that a lot of our metrics and expectations have been designed by aging white dudes who scorn everything that doesn't pander directly to them.    How exactly do we decide which is more important: that a tertiary villain's actress has a natural style of delivery, or that the script acknowledges that women can have more than one personality trait?  How do we weight fluid cinematography against the 'artistic choice' to only give speaking roles to white people?

There's some kind of idea out there, never quite stated (but clearly believed by people who consider themselves 'the default'), that you can tell an apolitical story.  Like if a person just writes, lets the words flow freely without intending to make a statement about the world, they will necessarily not make a statement about the world.  If they just want to tell a story about being a hero, and they coincidentally make the climax of that story a white guy brutally murdering a black guy, there is no way the story might be racist, because they weren't thinking about racism while they wrote it.  It's only once other people come in and start overthinking things that we run into trouble, somehow introducing problems to the story just by observing what's in there.

If this blog had, like, a heraldic motto, it'd probably be something like what I wrote above there: all bigoted writing is lazy writing.  It replaces truth and originality with lies that uphold privilege and comfort oppressors.  I hope that we can, as a civilisation, move away from "X is okay if you don't mind all the bigotry" and towards "X could have been good if not for all the bigotry".  A story that hates Muslims isn't 'controversial' or 'daringly un-PC', it's a bad story pushing a bad agenda.

And if we're going to recognise that bigotry is an artistic flaw, I think it's important to give artistic value to fighting bigotry.  There's a new Ghostbusters out (it was great), and the choice to cast four lead women is considered a gimmick while the original's four leading men are apolitical.  Nah, bruh.  The original Ghostbusters has two significant women (the secretary and the damsel) and everyone else who matters is a man, and it's like that because it was written by men for themselves.*  The new Ghostbusters has a quartet of proven comic ladies because the people involved in making it agreed that it's important that there are stories about women like this.

Which isn't to say that, say, casting women is always politically progressive and creative and meritorious.  Joss "Female Characters Who Are Strong And Vulnerable In Exactly The Ways I Find Sexually Exciting" Whedon has taught us all that lessons several times over.  Heralded for years as the great geek feminist, Whedon once imagined a conversation in which a hypothetical journalist asked him why he wrote so many female characters, setting himself up for the dazzling rejoinder "Because you're still asking that question".  And yet he keeps producing exactly the same kind of character over and over again (all bigoted writing is lazy writing) because the story isn't about the representation of women, it's about that one particular kind of woman that Whedon likes best.  The entire concept that launched Buffy was 'wouldn't it be weird to see a girl do this?'  He was counting on women-as-gimmick to draw attention, but then circled back around to approximately-mainstream acceptance by slathering them in male gaze, and he has never stopped repeating this pattern. (And always tearing them down, showing them broken and abused and in need of saving anyway.)

I tragically can't close this by outlining the true rules for objectively determining what a good movie is.  That is beyond even my power as an amateur blogger.  But I think there's a lot more to be investigated in how we perceive movies aimed at or led by women.  These movies can be flawed (oh, is Vampire Academy flawed) and it's easy to brush off a cheesy movie, but is it actually the cheese and the production values that people hate, or are those just the things we let a person target when they want to destroy something because it's For Girls?

---

*There will likely be at least one Ghostbusters post coming soon, possibly one about the original and one about the reboot, in case you are hungry for more of the blogqueen's vitriol for Peter Venkman.

Storm Front, chapters three and four, in which Dresden hopefully suffers for his misogyny

Two weeks gone by already?  Hoo-whee, time sure is linear.  I can't tell you all how much I've been looking forward to getting to know Harry Dresden better.  Literally.  I can't, because I do my best to be honest with my readers.

One of the things about reading this in ebook format is that I'm not sure how much of the typesetting is intentional.  There is, for example, the technique wherein an author gives a single sentence its own paragraph, even if (or especially because) it's very short, in order to give it more weight and time within the reader's mind.  Like pretty much all writing techniques, this can be used well, and it can be gruesomely overused.  In my old hometown, there was a weekly glurge columnist who, without fail, made every single sentence its own paragraph.  I'm sure a lot of that had to do with stretching a 500-word column into an 800-word space, but it also served to make it seem like every single detail of the week's anecdote carried the weight of a lifetime's wisdom, heavy on the branch as a late-summer raspberry.

Dresden does a lot of this.

But I can't tell if it's Butcher's authorial choice to do so or if it's just a quirk of the page-to-data translocation, so I can't in good faith snark at him for it.  I can at least point out that I don't think there's any way all of the half-hearted attempts to add gravitas to a sentence are the whimsy of automatic formatting software, so he's probably guilty; we just don't know how much.

Storm Front

Chapter Three: When Being Super Gay Is Not Enough*

Dresden describes his first glance at crime-monarch Johnny Marcone with a level of detail usually reserved for YA love interests.  Salt-and-pepper hair, laugh lines, "his eyes were the green of well-worn dollar bills", "good-looking, tanned, athletic, and enthusiastic", all of which he prefaces by saying Marcone "didn't look like the sort of man who would have my legs broken or my jaw wired shut", just in case any of us thought there was the slightest chance Dresden wasn't a straight cis white man.

Dresden tries to banter with the hired goon, Hendricks, and Marcone is not amused, which seems to be the correct response to basically everything Dresden does.  Dresden guesses he's supposed to be more submissive, but rejects the Godfather movie tropes (which is an opportunity for him to throw in that Dresden has an actual faery godmother, "but that's another story", which sounds better already).  Marcone in fact wants to hire Dresden full-time for the next two weeks to not-investigate the death of Tommy Tomm (Jessica Stanton, the dead woman, is not mentioned).  Dresden says he doesn't think it's going to work out, even for double his usual fee, and dramatically locks eyes with Marcone.

Pictured: A very hetero eye-locking, courtesy of Jemma Salume.

Marcone doesn't look away, and Dresden explains that dealing with magic just gives you a new perspective on the world, which can create a second of perfect clarity with someone else in which you see each other exactly as you truly are.  This second spins out into a full page detailing Marcone's soul:

He was a soldier, a warrior [....] he was going to get what he wanted and he was going to get it in the most efficient way possible. He was a dedicated man--dedicated to his goals, dedicated to his people. [....] There, hidden away from his everyday thoughts, there lurked a secret shame [....] I was, on some instinctual level, certain that he had been aware of what I would see if I looked--that he had deliberately met my gaze, know what he would give away. That was his purpose in getting me alone.

I seriously considered at this point whether it was possible I had accidentally downloaded the erotic fan-redux of the Dresden books.  I mean, the easy thing to do at this point is point out how incredibly not-hetero this scene seems and start reinterpreting the text, like I did for Ender and Rand and Mat/Perrin, but I've already tread that ground, and I think Dresden is going to give us a sterling opportunity for a different kind of case study: not in the closeted hero of the subtext, but in a specific kind of classic patriarchal view.  Detective Murphy got a similarly-detailed physical description, though obviously it was a bit more lurid than "good-looking", but she got nothing like this kind of prolonged Rhapsody In Man, an ode to the strength and vigor and businesslike rationality of an aristocratic predator with a challenged dominion.  Does Murphy even have feelings, apart from showing appropriate disgust at dead bodies and consternation at Dresden's recalcitrance?  She's a cop trying to solve homicides in an era where 'faery geas' and 'vampire munchies' are going to get their own police codes soon.  Does Dresden not have anything to tell us about her perspective?  Guardian of her city, standing steadfast against the vast unknown?  Not nearly as much as he has to say about her legs, which he has seen so little of in those pantsuits.

The gay male community gets stereotyped as the natural allies (and sassy sidekicks) of women, but it shares this with traditional patriarchy: when men are the only people who are considered to be full people, with thoughts and emotions that are worth giving attention, you get a kind of misogyny that looks identical, whether the perpetrators are straight, gay, cis, trans, ace, bi, whatever.  The thesis either way is that women are accessories (or support staff, or sex-providers) and men are people.

It could be fun to theorise about Harry Dresden, Closeted Queer Wizard PI, but it wouldn't actually add any depth to the story.  In Ender's books, his strong male-attracted subtext illustrates for us some really important things about his world and the beliefs of the author and how both try to force people to fit a specific mold for a 'greater good' that is really just about the personal tastes and power fantasies of the man in charge.  Here in Dresdenville, Harry is equally misogynistic whether he wants to jump Marcone or not.

Back to the book.  The two-way nature of the "soulgaze" (pfffbwahahaha) means Marcone gets to see inside Dresden as well:

Most people who did that got really pale, at least. One woman had passed out entirely.  I didn't know what they saw when they looked in there--it wasn't a place I poked around much, myself.

We have long since passed the point where I'll allow Butcher to pour this kind of 'my protagonist is such a badass you don't even know' all over us without having him actually do anything of note.

Marcone is unperturbed by what he sees in Dresden, which leaves Dresden scared and angry, but rather than threaten him, Marcone just tells him it's in his best interest not to investigate the deaths.  He also says he's heard that Dresden is a real "magus", which is not a word we've encountered so far, and I'm left wondering yet again if there's any pattern to the terminology they'll use in this world.  (Dresden has consistently called himself a wizard and implied that this is a subsection of the broader 'sorcerer'.)  They both tell each other not to make enemies of them in typical Manly Posturing form and then part ways.  Dresden spends the rest of the chapter walking up the stairs to his office and thinking again about how thoroughly Marcone came out the dominant victor in their whole exchange (another mention of "those dollar-bill-colored eyes" and "the sudden intimacy of the soulgaze"), finally asserting that he will be on time for his appointment.

(I would like to note again that this is complete rubbish, as it would have required Dresden to get out of the hotel, walk some blocks, argue with Hendricks, get into Marcone's car, have the whole discussion, get out, and climb up to his office in less than five minutes.  I say once more: if authors don't want me to complain about their terrible timelines, they need to stop being so specific about the time when it's actually a throwaway guess.)

Chapter Four: Maybe She's Born With It (Maybe It's Overwhelming Misogyny)

So now we meet Monica, who also gets a long physical description that's mostly about how attractive she is: "good-looking", which is an interestingly neutral phrase that I thought he used for Marcone specifically because it was so detached, "ash blond", "makeup tasteful and well applied", "face was fair, friendly, with enough roundness of cheek to look fresh-faced and young".

I'm trying to figure out Dresden's deal.  He supposedly does simple divination--lost items especially--and he's a capable wizard with a secret past, but is he actually supposed to be a trained detective?  Did he have time for that and wizard school?  Was he apprenticed to a previous wizard PI?  Because some of the things he notes, like well-applied tasteful makeup, are really specific details to pick out about a person, especially from the perspective of a scruffy man like Dresden.  Judging by the memes these days, roughly half of men think that women naturally exude makeup from their pores whenever their internal biology realises it's time for them to seek male validation.  I feel like Dresden sits more comfortably in that demographic than in the one that sees a woman for the first time and immediately ascertains whether her makeup is 'tasteful'.

Dresden apologises for being late after all and opens his office up for her, offering the police as an excuse and then immediately moving along when corpsey memories rise to the surface again.  Dresden of course still has enough arrogance to be quietly snide about how jumpy she looks--in the same breath talking about going through familiar coffee-making motions to calm himself down from his Marcone soul-touching.  I want to think this is intentional but I don't think we're supposed to scorn Dresden this much.

Monica's husband has been missing for three days--not in a mysterious abduction way, but in a 'packed up and left without a word' way, and she came to Dresden because this followed her husband's sudden interest in magic.

"He had been buying books on it in the religion section at the bookstore. Not like those Dungeons and Dragons games. The real thing. He bought some of those tarot cards." She pronounced it like carrot. Amateurs.

Real magic, not like D&D, but like the Chapters shelf containing the complete works of Silver RavenWolf.  And what exactly is Dresden's issue with this distressed woman not knowing how to pronounce tarot?  She's not claiming to know a thing about magic and he looks down on her while she comes to him for help?  Jackass.

She had a good face for blushing, fair skin that colored girlishly.  [Monica explains the stress her husband has been under lately.] She took a deep breath, as if the effort of completing so many sentences without a single um had tired her.

I wish I could hate you to death, Dresden.  [Erika: If you're going to infantilise someone this much, at least offer them a lollipop.]

Monica didn't go to the police because she knows that if you don't take magic seriously, this looks like a simple 'man ditches family voluntarily' situation, while she believes he is still out to provide for them after losing his job.  Dresden starts asking for those tiny key details like where he works at what his name is, and Monica hesitates a long time before finally saying 'George', because apparently her girlish brain hasn't already worked out how difficult it would be to find a person without knowing anything but their gender.  Dresden tries to calm her down, quoting Marcone's line about 'good business' and not hexing your clients.

She gave a nervous little laugh. "I feel so silly," she confessed. [....] 

The woman was nervous and had certain expectations. I might ease her fears a little if I fulfilled some of them.

I hoped this would mean he'd do something magical and obviously beneficial at this point, but no dice.  He gives a prolonged speech yet again about how working with magic helps people see things from new perspectives and understandings and there are lots of scary stories about horrible wizards but she just needs to trust him and he won't disappoint her.  Books about horrible wizards?  This came out in 2000; the big name in wizardry at that point was Harry Potter and everyone was preparing to stay up all night for the Goblet of Fire launch.  I understand Dresden not working that directly into his world, but it's a bit of rewritten history to suggest that wizards are the villains more often than the heroes in modern literature.

So the missing man's real name is 'Victor Sells', which sounds like a pseudonym to be used in some secret spy conversation, but okay.  She suggests that he may have gone to:

"The lake house. We have a house down by..." She waved her hand. 

"The lake?" 

She beamed at me, and I reminded myself to be patient.

FIGHT ME JIM BUTCHER.

This is just so unnecessary.  Why is he working so very hard to convince us that Monica is so incredibly useless and stupid?  Is it a front?  Is she a secret villain and she's trying to play the role of an airheaded housewife while she gets the measure of her soon-to-be-nemesis?  That's it, right?  Because that is the only explanation that makes this scene some percentage less than pure industrial-grade Blue Sky misogyny.  I desperately hope there is a scene coming where Monica gets to be all "I thought I was completely over the top, but wow, you're such a disgusting sexist that you bought the whole thing."  (It is rather convenient, since her 'nervousness' means she doesn't give Dresden her real name or make direct eye contact with him, which might reveal her secrets.)

Anyway.  Dresden asks for a photo, to see Victor's magic books, and to check out the lake house, which Monica approves--she hands over an envelope full of cash, another with a magic charm, and a third with her phone number and a photo of her husband.

"I'm not cheap. It might be less costly for you to hire someone else." 

"We've got quite a bit of savings, Mr. Dresden," she told me. "I'm not worried about the money." That seemed an odd statement from her, at the time--out of tune with her generally nervous manner.

Okay, I am fully predicting now that Monica is playing Dresden.  She's not going to the cops because Victor isn't really her husband and he's been using magic to throw off her tracing, but won't be expecting Dresden.  In which case: Jim Butcher, my demands that you fight me are withdrawn on a probationary basis.

Monica leaves after 'accidentally' letting it slip that she needs to pick up her kids from school and getting Dresden's assurance that he will contact her within a couple of days.  He checks the envelopes;the first two ten $50 bills, a photo of Monica with "a man of lean and handsome features, with forehead and shaggy eyebrows that skewed his handsomeness off onto a rather eccentric angle" (everyone is hot in this book except Carmichael, what's with that), and her phone number.  Dresden notes how weird it is that Monica was ready to give him so much information that he could use to find out her name but not actually speak it aloud, but brushes it off as typical client foolishness which he'll have to resist the urge to mock her about later.  Monica is definitely playing him and Dresden is terrible.

Final envelope: a dried scorpion husk, immediately identified as a potential focus for nasty magic, to be worn uncomfortably against the skin.  (Much talk of how its claws could catch in your chest hair or jut into your breasts.)  Dresden notes that he can't actually tell if it's magical or not without trying to use it, which is a detail I actually like quite a lot--most wizardy worldbuilding seems to have magic things radiate an aura of power like they're radioactive, and while 'magic as potential/kinetic energy' makes sense given the prominence of nuclear power in the last century, I want to see more of 'magic as verb' and... oh.  Never mind.

Cautiously, I extended my senses toward it like an invisible hand, feeling about for any traces of enchantment or magical energy. 

Nothing. It was as dry of enchantment as it was of life.

Okay, so he does just have Detect Magic.  Business as usual.  He thought he saw it move, found it was entirely unanimated, shoved it into his desk drawer, and the chapter ends.  I guess it could have been worse?

I've said in discussion before that while 'sexist' is certainly a legitimate flaw for a character to have, it tends to be the kind of flaw a character doesn't actually suffer for, which means that to plenty of (sexist) readers it reads as a neutral or positive trait.  If you are not sexist, and you for some reason want to write a character who is, then the responsible thing to do is make it clear in text that it has negative effects, especially for them.  There is, I hope, some chance that Dresden's sexism just got him completely hoodwinked by a rival wizard.  If so, that might be the first time I have actually seen an author write a sexist protagonist whose sexism was explicitly a flaw that held them back from success.

I'm so wrong about this, I just know it.

Next week: Erika returns to talk about Love Never Dies, the deeply suspect sequel to Phantom of the Opera.

Two weeks: I face the tremendous challenge of staying on the high road when Dresden knocks off work to go to his favourite pub, McAnally's.  100% serious.  Maybe there was a better way we could have transliterated that one from Gallic, eh?

---

*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

The Eye of the World, chapters 39 and 40, in which it appears that the plot starts up again

Sorry about the delayed post--I had written something up for Wednesday about Terminator Genisys, which I thoroughly enjoyed, especially in the way it recentered the storyline away from 'Sarah is important because she's the mother of Slab Hardcheese John "Manly War Messiah" Connor' and onto 'Sarah is important because she's a colossal badass who takes control of her own life, and her victory is that she reclaims her agency from the cycles of predestination'.  But reading that post over again, I found that I didn't have much else good to say about the movie in terms of politics or representation (the Dysons, a black father-son team of computer geniuses, get sidelined compared to T2, everyone is straight, and there's an awkward new patriarchal dynamic between Predestined Love Interest Kyle Reese and Sarah's foster dad).  So I shelved that post for future considerations and instead you get more WOT after all.  Take it.  Take it and feel my pain so that catharsis may purge your own anguish

(Content: villainously pretty men.  Fun content: villainously pretty men.)

The Eye of the World: p. 582--618

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Weaving of the Web

We're back in Randland, where Robert Jordan once again taunts me with the prospect of a timeskip that didn't actually happen:

Next to the day when Egwene and Perrin walked in, alive and laughing over what they had seen, this was the day he had been waiting for most.

Egwene and Perrin have not actually walked in yet; Rand is just looking forward to it.  Mat is exactly the same as he's been for the last 300 pages, surly and paranoid and not wanting to do anything, and I'm not clear on what this special day is that Rand has been looking forward to, but apparently it means everyone is rallying in the street.  The innkeeper informs Rand that a beggar has been seen in the city, asking for Rand and friends by name, and this is Deeply Suspicious--not because random strangers looking for visitors by name probably have secret motives, no, but because Caemlyn has a welfare program and therefore there's no excuse to beg.

"...Even with things as hard as they are. On High Days, the Queen gives it out with her own hands, and there's never anyone turned away for any reason. No one needs to beg in Caemlyn. Even a man under warrant can't be arrested while he's taking the Queen's Bounty."

Which: really?  Okay, but really?  Props to Caemlyn for establishing a no-questions-asked food program, but these matters are far too complicated to just be waved off.  Logistics: who decides how much bounty a person gets?  Can they collect for their family as well?  Who checks what they are and aren't allowed to take?  Can a person pick up the Bounty for their neighbours, and what kind of documentation is needed?  Or can a perfectly self-sufficient individual just pick some up anyway, since no one's turned away, and then deliver it to whomever they choose?  What if they need to pick up Bounty for multiple neighbours, because they live in a building that houses multiple seniors with mobility issues?  Can someone take the Bounty, drop it off elsewhere, and then get back in line for a second helping?  Is any kind of identification needed?

Is medication included in the Bounty?  What happens to the family head with a sole income who loses her job because of a fire in the dairy and not only has to get food enough for her husband (veteran, blinded in combat with those vile Darkfriends) and four children but also pay rent on the apartment and also pay the apothecary for regular elixirs to help Tiny al'Timmy with his bad lungs and her husband's frequent infections?  How much help does the Queen's Bounty give to her?

And you can't be arrested while taking the Bounty, okay, but what's the statute of limitations on that?  If the local cops decide that last week's murder was probably committed by Dayo ay'Oade, on the basis that he's foreign and brown and they just knew he couldn't be trusted, how safe is he when getting the Bounty?  Is he free game once he leaves the plaza, or after sunset, or what?  Is there anything at all to stop the cops from following Dayo six blocks away from the Queen and then making with the truncheon-based brutality?  Or grabbing him while he's on his way there?  What if Neal al'Caffrey runs into the Caemlyn Museum of Pretty Artifacts With Complicated Backstories, grabs The Sword That Was Broken And Reforged And Then Cracked Again But You Can Hardly Notice It, sprints out the door and straight into the welfare line?  Do the cops just have to stand there uselessly while our thief waits to get his municipally-allotted bread?  When are they allowed to start chasing him again?  Can honest citizen Strangleford ay'Killsman successfully avoid incarceration for his entire life by hanging onto the right baguettes?  IF YOU WANT TO WORLDBUILD FOREVER THEN AT LEAST JUSTIFY YOUR WORLDBUILDING, JORDAN.

But where was I?  Right: there are lots of reasons that the Queen's Bounty can't be as simple and perfect as we're told, and thus reasons why some people might beg anyway.

Rand leaves the inn, having been warned to keep an eye out for trouble.  We finally get a sense of the tensions, because people are wearing significant amounts of red or white around town, with political significance: red says "Yay Queen Morgase" and white means "The Queen and the wizards have ruined everything".  Rand didn't realise this when he decided to disguise his heron sword with a red wrapping, and now he's part of it too, to his regret, since the reds are heavily outnumbered.  But--ah, at last we get some explanation, because apparently people are celebrating the capture of the false Dragon, who is to be presented to the Queen today before he's dragged off to the wizards.

Rand, political genius, notices that a crowd of white-banded citizens charging down the street thinks nothing of intentionally shoving aside some Whitecloaks and stampeding onwards, showing a level of defiance and fearlessness that, in his estimation, means that could try to depose the Queen any day now.  Rand disappears into a singing crowd, providing us with this Tolkienesque lyric:

Forward the Lion / forward the Lion / the White Lion takes the field. / Roar defiance at the Shadow. / Forward the Lion / forward, Andor triumphant.

I can't make that scan, let alone fit a catchy tune, and it doesn't even pretend to have a rhyme.  That is maybe the worst rallying song I've ever heard.  Rand follows the crowd until it reaches the palace, guarded by red soldiers against a near-rioting crowd of white, but he's forced to run when the aforementioned beggar finally appears and spots him.  Rand thinks about going back to the inn, but isn't willing to miss his sole opportunity to ever see the Queen, having apparently forgotten that the Queen literally shows up to hand out food bundles to the poor on every holiday.

After a couple of vitally important pages of Rand running around the city to no avail, he finally climbs a hill and a wall to get a view of the plaza, and the procession arrives with hundreds of soldiers guarding a sixteen-horse wagon, flanked by Warders and bearing a cage guarded by eight Aes Sedai.  For a change, we get some description I actually like:

Logain was a king in every inch of him. The cage might as well not have been there. He held himself erect, head high, and looked over the crowd as if they had come to do him honor. And wherever his gaze swept, there the people fell silent, staring back in awe. When Logain's eyes left them, they screamed with redoubled fury as if to make up for their silence, but it made no difference in the way the man stood, or in the silence that passed along with him.

I'm assuming he's a villain, although right now I feel like I'd enjoy seeing him as a protagonist too, as long as he wasn't Our Hero.  A good guy who has his own goals and concerns that aren't identical to Rand.  Or if he's just a villain who wants something other than the end of the universe.  I'm good with either of these things.

Rand wonders what the Aes Sedai are there for, gets told by a previously-unnoticed little girl that they're stopping him from using magic, and is so surprised that he falls off the wall.  Cliffhanger!  Well.  Clifffaller.

Chapter Forty: The Web Tightens

Rand dream-hallucinates a bit and wakes up on the ground, bloodied and rattled.  The girl arrives, climbing down a tree in very fancy dress that goes on for a paragraph, including velvet slippers and much embroidered silk.

He could not begin to imagine who would choose to climb trees in clothes like that, but he was sure she had to be someone important.

This is it.  If ever anyone asks you to summarise the Wheel of Time book series for them, just flip to the second page of chapter forty and show them this line.  This is the truest most finely distilled essence of this book, cold-pressed and oak-aged until it could cut through anchorwood.  Reading this sentence and understanding its every nuance is exactly the same experience as reading the entire book.  You're welcome.

She's also, he can tell at a glance, deeply self-possessed and (shocker) stunningly beautiful (blond and red-lipped, which Rand possibly thinks is just how girls look, because he can't conceive of makeup).  She's different but, in his estimation, just as hot as Egwene.

He felt a twinge of guilt, but told himself that denying what his eyes saw would not bring Egwene safely to Caemlyn one whit faster.

I--wait, what?  He's creeping on some random girl who just startled him into injuring himself, his first thoughts on seeing her are '10/10, would bang like a gong', and he assuages his guilt at ogling someone who isn't his not-girlfriend by telling himself that he can't save her by not ogling other women?  Does that compute for anyone?

She's followed by her younger brother, and they quickly identify each other (unnecessarily, but for the reader's benefit) as Elayne and Gawyn, and since Elayne has a habit of playing vet to the injured animals she find, she immediately busts out her first aid kit to patch up Rand's skull.  While doing so, the siblings have a bizarrely private discussion that serves as a huge infodump about how the Queen is semi-secretly in love with her First Prince Regent and they both want to get married but neither one will 'bend' to... something that we're not clear on.  It becomes increasingly obvious, but eventually Rand needs them to spell out that they are children of...

"Morgase, by the Grace of the Light, Queen of Andor, Defender of the Realm, Protector of the People, High Seat of the House Trakand."

The prince and the 'Daughter-Heir' (ye gods that's a bad title--if the queen always rules, why isn't her daughter just 'heir'?) are legitimately surprised Rand didn't realise he had climbed into their backyard, and insist on knowing his name before he leaves.  On hearing he's from Two Rivers, Gawyn starts spouting off regional facts, until they get interrupted again:

The young man who stood there was the handsomest man Rand had ever seen, almost too handsome for masculinity.

I... wow.  He no-homo'd so hard he tried to reassign someone's gender.

Rand, if you think a dude is hot, that doesn't mean he's a woman, that means you think some dudes are hot.  It's not a big deal.  I was so much more comfortable with myself once I acknowledged that was a thing for me.  You can repeat "he's so smokin' I could almost swear he's a gender I'm attracted to" all you want, but if you want to insist that you're so straight you sleep on a bed of rulers, maybe don't follow that up with:

Dark of hair and eye, he wore his clothes [...] as if they were of no importance.

Aw yeah they aren't.  Just cast aside those unimportant clothes, Galad.  Apparently Galadedrid Damodred (I kid you not) is half-sibling to the royal kids, sharing a father but not the queen as his mom, and he's quite popular with both the loyal reds and unruly whites in the city.  He tries to convince Elayne to get rid of Rand immediately for her own safety, but Elayne tells him to shove off.

"I hate him," Elayne breathed. "He is vile and full of envy."

Ohhhh, right, villainous prettyboys, gotcha.  There is definitely something maliciously suspicious about beautiful men who go around making perfectly good straight boys question their orientations.  On the plus side, Gawyn vouches heavily for Galad, saying he's saved his life twice, so maybe there's a chance he's not evil?  Wait, I just remembered his name is Damodred.  Carry on.

The palace guards arrive and there's some back-and-forth of orders and superseding orders between the captain and Elayne until word arrives that the queen demands to see the intruder and also her kids, so they march off, though not before Jordan realises he forgot to give us a long description of the gardens, so Rand abruptly remembers that scenery exist and takes it all in before they leave.  There's another page of Rand trying to figure out what position to take in the procession and when he's dragged before the throne, and another describing the carved walls of the room and the woman seated behind the queen, knitting furiously.  The queen is of course beautiful and flawless and commanding, and the knitter quickly proves to be Elaida, the queen's personal wizard.  The children are scolded for going to get a look at Logain, ridiculously dangerous as he is, and questioned about Rand, but Elayne says that meeting a commoner face-to-face with no attendants has been an important bit of education.

Morgase rapidly rises several ranks in my listing of favourite characters by pointing out that Two Rivers hasn't been taxed or hosted royal soldiers in generations, which makes Rand's status as a queen's subject somewhat suspect.  I could have done with someone making that explicit five hundred pages ago, instead of leaving me wondering what in blazes this world was doing, but at least we have canon now.

Elaida in the meantime notes that Rand is a pasty ginger and thus unlikely to be from that region, and when she notices the heron sword, all the guards freak out.  There is much suspicion, et cetera, Elaida declares that the sword is rightly Rand's even if he's too young to have earned it, and that he's dangerous.  Morgase does what a queen must do: put exposition ahead of remotely natural dialogue.

"Is this a Foretelling, Elaida? Are you reading the Pattern? You say it comes on you when you least expect it and goes as suddenly as it comes. If this is a Foretelling Elaida, I command you to speak the truth clearly, without your usual habit of wrapping it in so much mystery that no one can tell if you have said yes or no."

That is definitely how real people talk to other real people with whom they have a long history of this exact process.  Sigh.  Elaida does indeed Foretell, but it boils down to the shocking plot twist that bad things are happening and Rand is plot-relevant.

They recommend locking him up, but Queen Morgase declares that she trusts him and she's willing to gamble that he isn't telling super-outrageous lies in the hopes that people will think no one would tell a lie that outrageous, and she commands him escorted away to go free.  Elayne takes a final opportunity to tell Rand he's hot, and Gawyn does the same tells Rand that while Morgase thinks Rand has a Two Rivers accent, he looks like an Aielman.

Wait, aren't the Aiel people from a desert or something?  What kind of vengeful author-god would populate a desert with pasty gingers?  (No points for the obvious answer: 'one who will eat his own hands before he makes someone brown plot-relevant'.)

Oi. That's enough recapping for now.  But for the first time in many weeks, I didn't feel like I could blithely skip past multiple pages at a time without commenting on the stuff contained, which I have to take as a sign that the plot has begun happening again, even if this chapter didn't apparently have any plot consequences apart from introducing us to the royals.  Unlike the parade of interchangeable wagon-drivers and innkeepers up to now, at least I can be confident we'll see all of these folks again.

There are fewer than two hundred pages left to go in this book, folks.  Who wants to lay bets on whether Jordan is capable of writing something that resembles a climactic sequence in that much time?

Ender's Shadow, chapters eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, in which Bean doesn't murder anyone

(Content: ableism, discussion of murder. Fun content: a slow loris, the return of the whatnapple, and the best part of this book, in the midst of some really impressively bad writing.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 276--315

Chapter Eighteen: Friend

Graff and his unnamed boss (General Levi?  The Polemarch? We don't know, and I suppose technically it doesn't matter) have a terrifying conversation about sending Ender or Bean to Command School.  Graff insists that Bonzo's death "was not foreseen", and the boss counters that "this is precisely the level of violence you anticipated. This is what you set up. You think that the experiment succeeded."  I think the evidence is pretty solidly against Graff here, given that he's basically recreating the Stilson fight.  'Murder twice, xenocide once', as the proverb goes.  But we knew that--the best addition here is this particular Total Logical Disconnect:

"Didn't he inform you that it was Bean who may have pushed Bonzo over the edge to violence by breaking security and informing him that Ender's army was composed of exceptional students? [....] Bean was acting to save his own life, and in so doing he shunted the danger onto Ender Wiggin's shoulders. [...] When Bean is under pressure, he turns traitor."

Not a word of this makes any sense.  First, what 'security' was breached by Bean telling Bonzo that Ender got assigned good soldiers?  Bean was commanded not to talk about his assignment to create Dragon Army, but just saying 'Dragon Army are all really smart and underappreciated' is the kind of assessment anyone could make, especially Bean.  Second, how is Bonzo supposed to be provoked by hearing that the game was stacked against him?  'Hey, you know your most hated foe who's getting all this credit as a genius for winning his battles?  Well, his subordinates are brilliant.'  That is the opposite of provocation--that's an opportunity to say that Ender is just skating on his advantages and actually has no personal skill.  The provocation would be 'Ender is so much better than you that he could win if Dragon Army were mops in wigs and flash suits'.

A rare portrait of C Toon with Bean's squad (not pictured: Ducheval, or dozens of naked children).

Lastly, it should be a matter of record that Bean made every attempt to call in the existing authorities--people whom, on paper, he's supposed to rely upon to solve these problems--to stop Bonzo, and was denied.  Bean got himself out of a dangerous situation and then immediately attempted to access overwhelming forces to prevent that danger from threatening anyone else.  A slow loris could see through Graff's argument here.

A rare interview with the rejected jurist for Graff's court-martial (she was removed after asking a question about jury nullification).

There's still the final laser tag match to go, Dragon versus Tiger and Griffin, with one more bit that technically isn't a retcon--Bean is pushing Ender through the whole way, reminding him to act, and as soon as Ender has his plan (the full-size armored transport made of soldiers) he slots himself into the formation and puts Bean in charge of the whole the-enemy's-gate-is-down plan.  Bean thinks about how they won this fight on Ender's reputation, which scared the other armies into inactivity, but that won't matter in the war to come, which is as close as we get to anyone acknowledging that laser tag is not meaningful campaign training.

Y'all will recall that last chapter Bean merrily hopscotched between a burning passion to be the very best like no was ever was and a humble conviction that only Ender's glorious mind matters.  He has finally located his sweet spot, as the fanatical self-effacing disciple:

If it could be done, Ender was the one who would have to do it. All those months when Bean refused to see Ender, hid from him, it was because he couldn't bear to face the fact that Ender was what Bean only wished to be--the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. 

There's another layer of WTF to dig through, but let's just wallow in this one for a moment: ignoring the life-changing experience that was Ender's Game, what do we actually know about Ender in this book that justifies Bean's opinion of him?  Who has relied upon Ender so far?  When has he proven that he 'would not betray you'?  When has he had the opportunity to betray anyone?  All of his interactions with Bean have been hostile until he finally gave Bean the Meaningful Man Nod Of Approval and gave him his special ops team.  Apart from that, they've all had a fairly normal relationship with Ender as their teacher.  He puts his trust in them, which is nice, but what have we seen that would cause all the Dragons (specifically chosen by Bean for their lack of prior interaction with Ender) to adore him so?

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don't want to go through what you've been through to get there.

...Bean remembered falling into line behind Poke or Sergeant or Achilles on the streets of Rotterdam, and he almost laughed as he thought, I don't want to have to go through what I've gone through to get here, either.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, CARD.  Bean is, by my estimate, not quite six yet, meaning that less than two years ago (a quarter of his life, granted) he was literally starving in the gutter, and his first thought upon seeing how tired Ender is after all this laser tag and murdering a dude in the showers is 'I wouldn't want to have had his life'.  Yes, Ender killed a kid a couple of hours ago and I imagine that weighs on a boy, but up until this day what terrible trials does Bean imagine he's had to endure in order to get here, apart from being very good at laser tag?  Bean knows nothing about Ender's life!  Bean doesn't know about Stilson.  Bean doesn't even know about Peter!

There's the rest of the super-dramatic scene with Ender declaring "The game is over" and practice is cancelled forever, and everyone goes back to their bunks, where Bean finds a transfer slip making him the new commander of Rabbit Army, and all the other toon leaders are commanders now as well.  They all want Bean to bring Ender the news, but Bean stops by Rabbit Army first, where the ranking toon leader tells him that a lot of commanders just graduated (Bean says precisely nine, to make room for the nine Dragons moving up), but he describes it like this:

"A lot of commanders," said Itú. "More than half."

Y'all.  Send help.  Nine commanders cannot possibly be more than half of Battle School, can it?  Fewer than eighteen armies?  Even the wiki lists twenty-one, and implicitly there are many more.  (The scenes in the commanders' mess hall become way more pointed if there are only two dozen people in there; how could Ender and Bonzo not have been constantly running into each other all month?)

Bean and Ender have their final face-to-face talk, which isn't all that different from the first go-round except that Bean has a lot of 'I already know that' monologue going inside his head when Ender says stuff that Retcon-Bean obviously figured out ages ago, or saying things like "He had it coming" about Bonzo and then flinching and mentally chastising himself for how terrible that is to say.  Eventually Anderson arrives to spare us any more of this scene, to tell Ender he's going to Command School.

He turned to Bean, took his hand. To Bean, it was like the touch of the finger of God. It sent light all through him. Maybe I am his friend. Maybe he feels toward me some small part of the... feeling I have for him.

Y'all know I strictly ship Ender/Alai, but we can all agree it's hard not to read that as hella gay, yes?  Not respect or admiration or fraternity or even just flatly and unabashedly calling it love, but "...feeling".  I'm having Fifty Shades flashbacks.

For some reason what came into Bean's mind was the moment when Poke handed him six peanuts. It was life that she handed to him then. 

Was it life that Ender gave to Bean? Was it the same thing? 

No. Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.

YOU'RE ALL PLAYING LASER TAG.

Anyway, Bean resolves to keep being awesome at his studies and games in the hopes that one day he will impress the teachers so much that they'll bring him back to Ender's future army, and the chapter mercifully ends.

Chapter Nineteen: Rebel

Bean is immediately notified that, with half new commanders, they're all to start eating in the commanders' mess immediately (not wait for their first victory), and since Ender's Game doesn't discuss Battle School from this point on, Card finally gets around to observing how badly it's designed:

Standings and scores! Instead of fighting the battle at hand, those scores made soldiers and commander alike more cautious, less willing to experiment. That's why the ludicrous custom of fighting in formations had lasted so long--Ender can't have been the first commander to see a better way.

That's reasonable on the face of it, but that suggests that, rather than being super-brilliant, Ender is simply the first person stubborn enough to insist on trying something new, which... really?  Petra or Dink weren't daring enough?  Dink doesn't even like the fame and glory side, he just loves laser tag!

Bean does another tabletop speech calling them to shut down the boards and instead play purely on the basis of creativity and experimentation, learning from each other above all else.  (An idea he came up with now that he's part of the legendary and defunct Dragon Army that devastated the standings flawlessly for about a month.)  Eventually everyone gets on board, and Dink, most senior student in the whole school, agrees to take it to the teachers or they all boycott the games.  Then it's time for Bean to properly meet his new army, which he speechily does, saying he called them to back up Ender (when they thought he'd be ambushed in the halls) because he was sure they were honorable soldiers whether they liked Ender personally or not, and etc flattery gets you everywhere.

He's corrected on one point--he's not the only new Rabbit, because they just got a brand new transfer student: Achilles.  Bean wonders if the teachers imagine Bean will be able to help Achilles adjust to the school faster, but he's also fourth-wall-crackingly aware: "Maybe he's here to be my Bonzo Madrid."  Achilles starts telling street stories, but Bean shuts him down and demands his authority be respected, even though he can see Achilles renew his plans for murder.

For the first time, Bean understood the reason Ender had almost always acted as if he was oblivious to the danger from Bono. It was a simple choice, really. Either he could act to save himself or he could act to maintain control over his army.

I--what?  How exactly would it have undermined Ender's glorious aura of command if he had actually said 'Bonzo is a goddamn menace and he needs to stay the fuck away from me'?  Everyone's supposed to love Ender unconditionally.  Is Card telling us that the essence of command isn't actually the charismatic bond of trust, but James-Bond-esque cool necessary for snappy one-liners and slowly walking away from explosions?  Is this like "never let them see you sweat"?  Whatever.

Chapter Twenty: Trial and Error

Carlotta immediately gets on Graff's case about Achilles being removed from his school which was inexplicably in Cairo, I guess for exoticism points.  She lists more suspected kills: Achilles apparently took out Ulysses before he was removed from Rotterdam, a teacher he hated at his first school, and the surgeon who repaired his leg--anyone who mocked Achilles or saw him in a state of weakness.  Graff insists he'll send a message up to Battle School, despite having been removed himself.

"If you let Bean come to harm, God will have an accounting from you." 

"He'll have to get in line, Sister Carlotta. The I.F. court-martial takes precedence."

Oh, now he gets a court-martial.

Bean has a private bedroom now as commander, which means he can pry open the upper air intake vents rather than just the little outflow vents at floor level, which means he can get into ducts big enough for any child to fit inside.  I have no idea why the air intakes are larger than the outflow vents, but I am not a space architect.  The point is that he clambers in there and starts setting a trap.

There's an extended sequence from Achilles' point of view, which is undoubtedly edgy if you're into close-third-person scenes from the perspective of serial killers.  Not really my jam.  Achilles is very excited about laser tag, although his mentor Ambul made the 'mistake' of laughing at him while he was frozen.

People shouldn't do that. It was wrong, and it always gnawed at Achilles until he was able to set things right. There should be more kindness and respect in the world.

That's basically this whole section in a nutshell: Achilles of course doesn't think of himself as evil, he just thinks that failure to respect his glory is Wrong and it can only be made Right via murder.  It goes on like this for a while as he plots Bean's death.  He also disdains Bean's delegation tactics in battle, thinking to himself that it's all about authority and submission of soldiers to their commander's will.  Of course, in a massive swerve:

No one but Achilles seemed to understand that this was the great strength of the Buggers. They had no individual minds, only the mind of the hive. They submitted perfectly to the queen. We cannot defeat the Buggers until we learn from them, become like them.

No one but you understands that, Achilles, because the fact that the formics are a telepathic hive-mind with no thoughts or will save for that of the queen is Mazer Rackham's crackpot theory and a matter of inconceivable military secrecy so there is literally no way a street urchin like you knows it oh my god Card read your own book.   ...Where was I?  Achilles is going to kill Bean, somehow.

Bean calls Achilles into his private quarters and explains that Ender wasn't a genius at all--he just learned all the other commanders' plans and teachers' schemes in advance by spying on them through the ducts--and he needs someone he can trust to help him carry on this legacy of glorious cheating.  Achilles buys it completely, because the universe always bends to his will, and they scramble naked [drink!] into the vents.  Achilles internally monologues about memorising the path and looking for opportunities to get his hands on something lethal.

...When Achilles grieved for the child, his tears would be real. They always were, for there was a nobility to these tragic deaths. A grandeur as the great universe worked its will through Achilles' adept hands.

So basically Achilles is who Ender would be if Ender saw himself the way the book treats him.

They get to a downward shaft in a larger room (I don't know why a space like this would exist) and Bean lies about the deadline, saying they have to use it to safely rappel down to the teachers' level but it cuts the skin if it slides, so the only safe method to pull on it is by tying it tight around your torso.  (The slow loris was also not convinced by this plan.)  Achilles plans out how he'll get Bean trapped, hanging in mid-air by his waist, as he plays along with the plan, but of course Bean gives the order and as soon as Achilles has a tight loop on himself, he gets yanked up into the air himself by someone hiding on the shadows with their hands on the other end of his line.

And this is it, the best part of the whole damn book, because Bean neutralises Achilles, gets him hanging helplessly, and then beats him with words:

"First thing is, you forgot where you were. Back on Earth, you were used to being a lot smarter than everybody around you. But here in Battle School, everybody is as smart as you, and most of us are smarter. You think Ambul didn't see the way you looked at him? [....] And since we just had a case of one kid trying to kill another, nobody was going to put up with it again. Nobody was going to wait for you to strike. Because here's the thing--we don't give a shit about fairness here. We're soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance." 

[....] He had forgotten that when Bean said for Poke to kill him, he had not just been showing respect for Achilles. He had also been trying to get Achilles killed. 

[....] "Bring me a teacher, I'll confess." 

"Didn't you hear me explain how stupid we're not? You confess now. Before witnesses. With a recorder."

For once--for once--I buy it.  I am convinced by these characters: that Achilles would be this smart and still make these mistakes, that Bean would plan ahead like this and set this trap, that the other students would back him up.  One chapter and done.  This is the kind of solution that a genius soldier protege should finagle, not walking into a shower-arena for single combat and expecting the best.  This is for once rare moment a scene that gives me what I want from this story and not what I expect due to narrative tradition.

And it's Bean's crowning achievement, because he rejects killing.  He wants Achilles gone, and he could get away with murder here, he says as much (no one would ever find Achilles' body if they just left him there next to the air purifiers), but he is going for institutionalisation, and he's winning by creating a plan that relies on the help of his genius friends, instead of going solo like the wunderkind.  Graff's last act was to put someone in Battle School who would pose a threat to Bean, same as Bonzo to Ender, and Bean goes off the playbook.  If Ender were capable of this, the penitent formics would still be alive instead of dying in a cosmic catastrophe.

Achilles confesses to all seven murders and et cetera et cetera he's "insane", as if sanity is a meaningful predictor of violence (spoilers: no it fucking isn't), and Bean leaves Achilles hanging there as he and his four comrades leave without letting him see their faces.  Achilles is basically all 'I'll get you next time, Gadget' in his head, plotting how he'll have to one day kill every Battle School student to cement his control over the world, because Achilles is the villain of the next two Shadow books as well, but for now he's done with, because, as noted, Bean is better than Ender.

Next week: Petra makes a saving throw and Bean reads ahead in the script.