Tarzan: Gender in the jungle

I was planning to write a thing today about therapy, about depression, about the general malaise and despair that comes from doing the things that are supposed to make you better and seeing no difference and having no idea where to turn to find any alternative, but 1) it was itself hella depressing to write and 2) it went nowhere productive.  Maybe I'll try writing a thing about therapy again some time in the future.  Right now if you want to understand where I'm at mentally just read the first half of Depression Part Two by Allie Brosh (everything before things start to get hopeful) and also this tumblr post by Cliff Pervocracy.

So instead today we are going to talk Tarzan, specifically Disney's Tarzan from 1998 and what it's got for it and against it.  This is actually an oddly appropriate followup to my previous post about Kingsman, because both stories are about men (Manly Men) and the true marks of civilisation, and are unnecessarily white and prevent the women from having any substantial agency in key moments.  (I listed some of my thoughts to the blogqueen over skype, which she summarised as "So, needs more lesbians".  She's not wrong.)

Disney did not shake up the classic Tarzan story in any major way: an English couple suffer a shipwreck somewhere on the massive coast of Africa (no more specific than a whole continent) and do their best to survive before getting killed by a leopard, but their infant son survives to be raised by a passing clan of gorillas.  Years later, more English explorers arrive, leading Tarzan to the shocking discovery that he's not just a pasty hairless gorilla, but another species entirely, he falls in love with Jane, the young woman on the expedition, and they are torn between his jungle home and hers in London.

The movie has some strong points; one that jumped out at me this time was Clayton, the villain, who follows more in the style of Gaston than Scar, Jafar, or Dr Facilier--far from being a fastidious conniver sowing chaos through whispers (like some kind of woman), he's a great burly gun-toting explorer out to take what he wants from the wilderness through right of conquest.  In another time, Clayton would be the intended hero of the story (the writers did this very intentionally--in the original novels, Tarzan's human name was John Clayton).  Instead, he's played here as contemptible from the outset, pointing his gun where it doesn't belong and assuming he can get what he wants by shouting demands.

In a movie that's all about Tarzan trying to figure out his identity, Clayton very quickly sees himself as Tarzan's model for what a man is supposed to be: strong, commanding, and ruthless.  Tarzan's own father-figure, the gorilla Kerchak, is distant and dismissive, which might have made this a compelling possible bond, but Tarzan spends the middle of the movie focused on Jane, who is helping him discover things like written language, astronomy, and erections.  I think maybe my favourite thing about Tarzan's story is that he never does attach himself to a father-figure; his biggest influences are all women (mother Kala, best friend Terk, and love interest Jane).  His most important moments with men are rejections: he refuses to let Kerchak's judgment discourage him, he refuses to operate on Kerchak's principles of defensive xenophobia, and he rejects Clayton's temptation to might-makes-right conquest.  When Clayton's Evil Scheme to capture all the gorillas is inevitably foiled and Tarzan has him at gunpoint, Clayton even goads him to shoot: "Be a man."  Tarzan instead smashes the rifle and declares "Not a man like you" before the forces of plot convenience go to work and Clayton accidentally hangs himself with a vine.  It's not uncommon for Disney to allow the hero to keep their hands clean while still killing the villain (Gaston doesn't even get pushed--he just trips and falls to his death once his role in Beauty and the Beast has been completed).  It's a little less common for the hero's refusal to implicitly be a rejection of white male entitlement as a whole.  So, like, high five on that part, writers.

But on this viewing, what I mostly felt was that Tarzan is a layered story about bigotry and the struggles of mixed identities (from a child's despairing 'why don't I look like everyone else' to an adult's ongoing efforts to not lose either side of himself) which is tragically wasted on a straight white dude.  A white dude with dreads.  (Fellow white people: as you are hopefully aware, our hair doesn't do dreadlocks.  No, the Norse didn't do dreadlocks either.)  This whole movie is white.  The humans are all white (even the unvoiced extras), the gorillas are all voiced by white actors, everyone.  The only character for whom whiteness is arguably an integral part of his character is Clayton, who embodies the colonialist English 'adventurer'--that kind of entitlement is very us.  Our other three significant humans are Tarzan himself (whose parents are also onscreen for the intro song), Jane, and Jane's father, Professor Porter.  None of these people need to be white.

I'm aware that in the original novels (which are deeply racist and stunningly misogynistic, surprising no one) Tarzan turns out to have been an English Viscount, which has largely been a whites-only club for most of history.  (Although the crown was a fan of granting Indian people aristocratic titles under the British Raj.)  But the original novels also don't feature any musical numbers with Rosie O'Donnell, so it's not like we're trying to be that purist, and in this movie, Tarzan's parents don't even get dialogue, let alone backstory, so they could be literally anyone and not impact the story.  Similarly, even if we imagine that only a white Professor Porter would be likely to have the wealth to boat down to Africa to study wildlife, there's no reason his (dead, never-pictured) wife should have to be white as well, and a biracial Jane opens up a whole new connection to Tarzan, who has also grown up with all the joys of being visibly different from his peers.

(Disney isn't exactly known for doing intricate love stories, and this movie as it stands is no exception: Tarzan admires Jane's fieldwork and she's amazed by his expertise in navigating the wilderness, but for the most part they appear to love each other because they're both very pretty and have literally no other viable partners.  It's hard not to wonder whether, five years after the movie, Jane doesn't perhaps raise the subject of making a quick jaunt home to pick up some books and penicillin and clothes not made of skin, especially once she learns that basically all animals can 'talk'.)

Lastly, in a movie about Manly Men Doing Manly Things (not referring to this excellent webcomic of the same name, sadly), how do the women fare?  I've already listed the three named women, all defined by their relation to Tarzan--his mother, his bestie, his ladyfriend.  Kala is a typical Disney mother (caring and understanding in all things) who at least gets to survive the movie.  Jane is primarily a plot object with only one goal (meet the gorillas) who casts aside her entire life up to that point, and any of her prior goals and dreams, to be with her man.  (Any hope of interpreting her choice to live in the jungle as something to do with studying the apes is undercut by her willingness to leave until her father reminds her "But you love him".)  The least stereotypical woman in the cast is Terk, Tarzan's best friend, who tends toward the disruptive, sarcastic, and acerbic, but this ultimately doesn't do much for her agency.  None of her choices really impact the plot--in the moment when she might be most relevant, when Tarzan has decided to leave with Jane but immediately then been captured by Clayton's goons, it's not her loyalty that leads to his rescue--it's the tertiary elephant friend Tantor who overcomes his timidity to reprimand Terk for being emotionally withdrawn and then charges in to save the day.  Narratively, I get why the writers would think this is a good twist--the timid character finally standing up to the heroes is generally good stuff, like Neville facing down the trio in the first Harry Potter--but here it means that Terk's last chance to impact the story is instead handed off to the nearest man and she is a barely-consulted tagalong.

I do like this story as it works for the men and the contrasting manly identities, but stories for men aren't a rare commodity.  I'm aware of one retelling of Tarzan from Jane's perspective, about which I've heard deeply mixed things, and given the dozens upon dozens of Tarzan stories at this point, I think we can do with a few more that maybe ask what kind of person you have to be to leave civilisation behind, charge headlong into the merciless wilds, and decide that this is the place you will feel most at home, with your mighty half-intelligible beast-master husband at your side.  Or wife.  Like we always say here at SS&S: this story could have been about lesbians.

The Liveblog of Impossible Things: Doctor Who, season eight, episodes 1-3

Oh my stars and round things, have I never made a Doctor Who post on this site before?  That is amazing.  Let's fix it really hard this week.

My abiding love of Doctor Who was once so strong that I watched The Impossible Astronaut (episode 6.01) and said aloud to my mother "If it were anyone else writing this show, I would be worried that the plot twist for this season was going to be terrible, but I know that Moffat has something great planned."  Doctor Who was as close to religious ritual as I got: new episodes were like holy days, brief periods of time in which we imagined what could be and what was and what we would do in the worst possible moments of our lives.  Rose becomes a god.  Martha laughs in the face of armageddon.  Donna shines brighter than anyone in the universe.  Jack lives.

My adoration of the show even let me look past the varied weak points of the fifth season and brush off (as rough edges to be soon fixed) the perennial flaws of Moffat's writing.  To this day, while I won't argue with anyone who says the Eleventh Doctor is a terrible person, I personally like to maintain that he was a great man and his actions were unfortunately misrepresented by inept writers who meddled with the truth.  (This applies triply to the 50th Anniversary episode.)

The show has since devolved into a case study in Special Smart White Guy Privilege about a man who travels the universe being rude to everyone and getting away with it because he's good at his job, also known as 'that plot you've seen a million times before', but now with more rayguns and women who literally tear apart the universe over their infatuation with Our Hero.

So while I downloaded Deep Breath (the first episode with the Twelfth Doctor) and watched it immediately when it was released, I then set about a strict regimen of completely forgetting about the show for the rest of the year.  I am told I didn't miss much, but it's the holidays and a friend has lent me the boxed set that she just got for Christmas, so let's just marathon the lot of them and get it over with, shall we?

Episode 8.01: Deep Breath

I'm skipping rewatching this one.  Summary: the Twelfth Doctor is rude in that way that's supposed to make white male heroes charming, his human companion Clara is a spunky young lass who puts up with his antics out of loyalty to his previous self, the Doctor definitely would/wouldn't voluntarily kill someone, and he has a new hidden nemesis who is a vaguely posh pretty thin middle-aged governess-type woman, also known as 'the only kind of female villain Moffat knows how to write', and the word 'knows' in there is generous.  Come with us on a journey of discovery to find out why the Doctor's new face has previously been seen on a patriarch in Pompeii and a government monster in modern London.

Final score: Creepy, striking, weird, pointlessly adoring of the cranky old white man, Vastra and Jenny's kiss didn't need an overlay of 'we must share oxygen' to justify it.

8.02: Into the Dalek

The episode opens with the crew of a not-X-Wing ship trying and failing to escape a Dalek mothership in space.  The surviving pilot awakens on the TARDIS, where the Doctor is Charmingly Rude to her about saving her life and how she can't kill him and claim his ship because "you'd starve to death trying to find the lightswitch".  I'm trying to imagine the Ninth Doctor acting like this around someone whose brother just died beside them, victim of Dalek cannons, and I take a moment to shake my fist at the uncaring gods who let Moffat do this to us.

He returns her to her warship, where they intend to kill him for security purposes but decide instead to zap him with a shrink ray and jam him inside a captured Dalek.

The new intro graphics look intentionally low-budget, like they're trying to find the most expensive way of simulating a papier-mache model dangling from a string in front of the camera.

We then cut to a dude pretending to be a drill sergeant but proving to actually be a gym teacher at the same school where Clara works.  He's also an ex-soldier, and tears up when a student asks if he's ever killed someone who wasn't a soldier.  He's running a cadet program at the school, which he insists includes a moral element beyond shooting people, which Clara summarises as "Ah, you shoot people and then cry about it afterwards", which puts me much more on Clara's side than his so far.  He is all awkward in ways that clearly are supposed to be adorable, but luckily for him they are in mutual boners for each other.

Clara gets whisked off to join the Doctor on his new journey, because the captured Dalek has declared its intention to destroy all Daleks, which has the Doctor thinking about saving it.  (He asks Clara if he's a good man, she says she doesn't know.  I'm not sure he's an anything man anymore, myself.)  He guesses that it's so damaged its hatred toggle flipped around in the wrong direction  The lot of them get shrunk down and injected through its eyestalk.  They're not actually that small; maybe five-ten millimetres tall?  I'm pretty sure this is all in the realm of normal slicey-slicey surgery, not even futuristic robot surgery.

The inside of the Dalek body turns out to be a 'perfect analog' of a living body, and therefore firing a grappling hook into the metal plating summons antibody drones.  The Doctor tells their unfortunate redshirt to eat a pill before the drones vaporise him, which lets him track the residue to some waste tube.  Trying again to imagine Nine's response to an about-to-die man being "Hey, chew this and you can still be useful to me" rather than any kind of apology or sorrow.  Who the fuck is this man?  (Also, what kind of internal sensors react hostilely to a tiny puncture in a metal plate but ignore complex radio communications beaming in and out of their robo-intestines?)

A radiation leak is killing the Dalek, but also caused it to reach a reversal of the normal conclusion: it saw a star born as concluded that 'resistance is futile', but not resistance to the Daleks, resistance to life, which keeps coming back and keeps fighting.  Ten seconds later, the Doctor seals the radiation leak and the Dalek immediately sets about slaughtering everyone on the ship in dramatic slow-motion.  Clara slaps the Doctor for being pleased that he was right that all Daleks are evil, but they have the dramatic realisation that good Daleks are possible and set about mucking with its robo-brain and its memory banks.

Sidenote as I watch the actiony climax: this episode is rubbish on any kind of mental health-relevant philosophy.  The Daleks "are" evil, but the Doctor points out that they have mental suppressor tech that quashes any hint of empathy, but then the mentally-damaged Dalek "is" good, and when fixed it proves that it always "was" evil.  It's not clear to me either that the Dalek ever "was" any of these things, given that we have no idea what it would be without its suppressor working.  (Why did no one think of breaking the suppressor to start with?  Why was anyone surprised that it would start murdering people as soon as the leak was repaired while its suppressor was still running?)  The conclusion appears to be that if someone has any kind of factor impairing their ability to be kind or polite or generous, this reflects on their innermost morality and nature.

The climax seems to lean pretty hard on this as well, when the Doctor mind-melds with the Dalek to show it the beauty of the universe and it instead latches onto his hatred of the Daleks and goes on a rampage to rescue the remaining redshirts.  So, even a Good Dalek is fundamentally evil and destructive after all.  The Doctor says this isn't victory, "victory would have been a good Dalek", and it responds "You are a good Dalek", referencing episode 5.06, 'Dalek', a vastly better episode that covered basically all the same plot and philosophical notions, on a lower budget, with a more family-friendly script and kinder Doctor.  Moffat fucking loves referencing old episodes in a way that he has not narratively earned.

The soldier girl from the beginning, Journey Blue, asks to leave with the Doctor, and he sadly lists all her good qualities before saying he wishes she hadn't been a soldier, and turns away.  Apparently forgetting that his own daughter Jenny was literally born a soldier, Dalek-style, and in the space of a day grew to be much more heroic.  (Clara should know this, Clara knows the Doctor's whole life, or maybe she doesn't, I don't even know anymore.)  The important part of course is supposed to be that the Doctor doesn't like soldiers and Clara's new boyfriend is a soldier, oh noes, what tension shall this create.

Final score: Doctor Who is always supposed to be accessible to children, no matter how grim it gets; who was this episode for?

8.03: Robot of Sherwood

Clara reveals that she's always wanted to meet Robin Hood and the Doctor informs her that he doesn't exist, so I just want to take a moment to note that the legends are very liked inspired by the locals who became guerrilla insurgents to resist the Norman invasion of England.  These people, the ones who left behind their families to live in the wilderness and fight the conquerors, were the first Wildmen, and I am their descendant, so fuck you very much, Mr I-Know-Everything, Robin Hood was my nth-great-grandfather.  Naturally, the TARDIS lands in Sherwood Forest and immediately gets an arrow in the door from Robin Hood, who is realistically scraggly for a man who lives in the woods but oddly well-bathed.  Robin Hood declares his intention to take the TARDIS, as "all property is theft", so apparently he got to that line about 650 years before Proudhon.

The Doctor fences with Robin Hood, but using a spoon, which is at once incredibly stupid and charmingly weird.  It's the type of thing I would let go without a blink from the Ninth or Eleventh Doctors; weird for Ten or Twelve.

There is also a Sheriff of Nottingham pillaging the locals villages, stealing daughters and shanking old dudes.  Straightforward enough.  We meet the Merry Men and the Doctor goes around stealing hair and blood and such to try to prove they're not real.  There is the traditional archery competition to capture Robin Hood and the Doctor steps in, also a master archer in addition to master fencer.  When did the Doctor suddenly start studying all the weapon arts?  They do the 'split the arrow' trick about five times total, so I guess this is supposed to be a funny episode?  I should not have taken this long to realise that.  The Sheriff's soldiers are revealed as robots, everyone gets captured, Robin Hood and the Doctor squabble in their cells, and Clara is identified as the ringleader and taken away to be interrogated.

This is the kind of episode that sets out to be all 'women are the truly competent people and very badass' and comes out 'men are infants and need women to mother them forever'.

Down in the dungeons, the slaves are seen running forges, and one of the robo-guards pours the metal into an enormous circuit-board-looking mould.  Uh... that's not how circuit boards work.

Clara has dinner with the Sheriff in traditional villain manner, where he demands to have the screwdriver explained to him.  Clara instead bluffs him into revealing what deal he made with robots from the sky.  They crashed, offered him power, and he now intends to conquer the world.  The Doctor and Robin somehow break free (no explanation how, after a long scene of them utterly failing) and find the hidden ship at the core of the castle.  The robot needed gold to fix their engines, but the Doctor declares they're too far gone and all he can do is blow up half of England.  Et cetera et cetera action scenes, banter.  There's a moment after the Doctor has helped the slaves free themselves by reflecting their laser back at them with gold plates, and the last girl to escape gives the Doctor a kiss on his cheek.  He looks startled, reflected, and I begin to hope that this Doctor is supposed to be seen as a cantankerous jackass who needs to remember that he loves people and they are the purpose for his whole journey, as opposed to self-aggrandisement.

When the world is saved with improbable archery, Robin (who is real after all, not a robot) and the Doctor have a last chat about people and legends and pretending to be a hero and inspiring others, it looks like a pretty good show for a moment, and then the TARDIS leaves and Marian appears behind it for her one line, "Robin!", so that Our Hero gets his Love Object Reward.

Final score: A roundabout, slapdash mess that destroys any shot Twelve has had so far at character consistency, but also less conceptually offensive than the first two episodes.  Terrible, yet charmingly so.  Quoth Rosa Diaz, "And the night gets even worse-better!"

Probably come back tomorrow for the next episodes!  Happy imminent New Year!

The Eye of the World, chapters eight, nine, and ten, in which they bravely run away

I cannot believe how fast this book goes by, despite being a massive brick.  It doesn't ask to be engaged with at all, and the prose is pretty poetic at times, so it's really, really easy to skim through and not miss anything.  Plus so far all the characters have been recapping everything that happens to them at least twice, so if you do somehow manage to miss something, you get a second chance later on.  This is the essence of shut-your-processor-off fantasy.

The Eye of the World: p. 104--147

Chapter Eight: A Place of Safety

When I was in high school (I have now been out of school for as long as I was in school, which is very weird) I knew a guy who summed up his abandonment of the Wheel of Time by saying "Let me guess what happens in the next book: they're going to talk some more".  The quantity of unnecessary dialogue in this book really is spectacular.  It's like stream-of-consciousness writing, the type that is supposed to get edited later.  I'm sure to some readers it creates a sense of realism and makes it feel like the village really is full of lots of different people, but they're all so interchangeable they kind of blend together for me into a single six-armed eleven-eyed aberration, Rufus al'Plainspoken, the Son of the Soil, the Earth-Salted One.  So I hope you'll continue to forgive me for skimming swathes of dialogue that don't actually serve any long-term purpose.

I also hope it's supposed to be kind of funny that Rand continues to be so intense about being adopted:

While he was still coming through the door Rand's eyes went to his father--his father no matter what anyone said.

No one has said anything because no one knows except you and your dad, Rand, you can probably take a breath.  Sorry.  If I had feelings instead of this damned mechanical ticking contraption in my chest I'd probably think his anxiety was adorable and sad.  There is much shuffling and muttering as people get told where to go and then Moiraine settles down by Tam's bedside to work her mojo.

In the stories Aes Sedai wonders were always accompanied by flashes and thunderclaps, or other signs to indicate mighty works and great powers. The Power. The One Power, drawn from the True Source that drove the Wheel of Time. [....] For all he could tell, though, Moiraine might just as well have gone to sleep.

I am left wondering if there's going to be any explanation for any of the Capitalised Terms of this mythos, and if they will actually matter.  Why is it the One Power?  (Especially if it comes in male and female flavours and they apparently don't touch enough for the curse on the male part to infect the female part?)  Are there False Sources?

Lan notices Rand's sword, and explains that the herons are a mark of a master swordsman, and remarks like eight times on how strange it is for it to be in the hands of a sheepherder.  (Isn't shepherd a word here?)  Rand diverts to talk about the Black Rider, which Moiraine says doesn't matter much now and wouldn't have helped even if they'd known in advance.  She slanders carrion-eaters more as minions for the Dark One, and then Rand notes that his dad is looking better.  Moiraine explains Morgul Shayol Ghul blades for anyone who hasn't read Lord of the Rings already, and says that even her angreal can't do too much for a tainted wound.  (Not sure why exactly she flashes the holy irreplaceable relic at Rand.)  There's more capitalised talk about how the black rider was a Myrddraal which is also called a Halfman, Lurk, Fade, or Shadowman, spawned from early experiments by Dreadlords when they were making Trollocs.  There's a kind of unrepentant enthusiasm for just throwing in new words that I am starting to get caught up in again.  Dwerrow.  That's not in the book, I just like to say it.

Moiraine and Lan exposit further that the trollocs were in town searching for a boy of very specific age, in the range of Rand, Mat, and Perrin, who were all born within weeks of each other, and therefore the three of them must leave the village to protect it.  Why me, I'm not special, the Dark One couldn't possibly be interested in me, et cetera.  The threat of further battles torching the whole countryside before the Aes Sedai could kill all the trollocs and myrddraal reinforcements convinces Rand to go, and Moiraine advises him to leave his dad a note, since they'll have to take off that night.  (Rand hasn't slept yet after a day of hauling and farming followed by a night of running and murdinating; does she think he will just keep walking?)  I'm not sure if this is considered reasonable or if we're supposed to think Moiraine is heartless for being all "Time to go to the city of witches for an indeterminate length of time, leave your not-quite-dead Mystery Dad Swordsman a note on the fridge".  Rand still hopes to get to talk to his father before they leave, and et cetera domesticity and soup, he falls asleep in a chair by the fire.

Chapter Nine: Tellings of the Wheel

Is this going to be a prophetic dream?  Let me flip ahead.  Yes.  It is five pages of prophetic dream.  The landscapes are nicely described, first jagged stone ridges and mist-rivers leading to a huge black mountain where Rand feels Shai'tan demanding his service (hot), then the broken mountain from the prologue, which is now the site of Gondor Tar Valon, I think, and he's still being chased by the devil, smash cut to inside the city, full of all the wonders of architecture.  This bit is actually nicely creepy, as he keeps trying to delay going to a white tower that always seems to be up ahead, and everyone in the street gets sad and impatient, but when he relents and starts toward the tower they begin to cheer and dance for him.  At least, I think it's supposed to be creepy?  They all keep insisting only he can save them, and girls dance around him and throw flowers at him until he starts dancing, and when he finally steps inside the tower the doors shut and he's faced with a myrddraal, JUMP SCARE, fade to black.  So, he's being chased by the devil, we've had some establishing shots of Mordor and Gondor, and Rand subconsciously knows he's the protagonist.  (Unless Mat and Perrin have the same dreams.  How much fun would it be if three friends all thought that they were the only Chosen One and they had to stop each other because if anyone except the right Chosen One tried to fulfill the prophecy they'd ruin everything?  Betting we don't get that in this book.)

The food Rand didn't eat has been replaced by Mrs al'Vere, who is apparently an aggressive feeder (gender roooooles), and to my mild surprise Dad al'Thor actually wakes up and talks to Rand, there is much recapping.  Dad admits that Rand really should go to Witch City (Tar Valon) but he insists that Rand pay very close attention to the Aes Sedai's words, because she might not lie but she will happily and constantly mislead.  Women, amirite?

More exposition about how Warders are bonded (shockingly, not Bonded) to their Aes Sedai and get some generic Captain America powers out of it, fast healing and such, and Rand speculates that the Aes Sedai must get something out of it too or they'd never make a deal.  Superhuman bodyguards aren't good enough, Rand?  We've got dainty perfect lady wizards running around pair-bonded with super-ripped gruff brawlers, do we not think that most of them are doing each other like crossword puzzles?  Because I'd expect a lot of that, with or without associated romantic entanglements.

Rand never does ask his dad about Heroic Adoption, and then Lan drags him outside where there's a mob come to chase the witch out of town.  The mayor and smith intervene, pointing out how she healed everyone last night, but Moiraine steps in herself with white fire sparking off her staff and rants for about a page about how awesome this part of the world used to be, back when the river was called, I kid you not, Manetherendrelle.

"Their King was Aemon al Caar al Thorin, Aemon son of Caar son of Thorin [if I made a drinking game out of this there would be no survivors], and Eldrene ay Ellan ay Carlan was his Queen. Aemon, a man so fearless that the greatest compliment for courage any could give, even among his enemies, was to say a man had Aemon's heart.  Eldrene, so beautiful that it was said the flowers bloomed to make her smile."

So, as we guessed, al'Thor is 'son of Thor', and apparently the 'daughter of' thing was just tossed out entirely somewhere along the line.  I would have guessed that this was because the fall of the noble past led to more patriarchy, but then we find out that in the golden age the king was fearless (allowing him to take the right action in any situation, presumably) and the queen was hot (making it unnecessary for her to take any action in order to justify her existence, presumably).  This is billed as less sexist than Tolkien.  Absolutely, there are more female characters in this book, but their treatment is consistently lacklustre and they all have to be dainty and pretty (and implicitly white and straight).

Moiraine goes on talking about how the people from here were devastating warriors around the world, and how they rushed home when they heard the trollocs were attacking their homeland, how terrifying their enemies were.  All of them men, of course.  Only men.  It's a big deal when after ten days they think they're doomed and the men and women (with their husband, no single women allowed ever) finally came to their aid.

Ah, but no, Eldrene the Hot Queen is obviously a strong female character, because when she's busy evacuating civilians she can feel her husband die in battle, and on the spot she wills the whole evil army to burst into flames, at the cost of her own life as well, and the stones of her now-empty city.  (Call me ruthless, but the body count of her people at this point is, like, a billion, there's been slaughtering across the border for weeks; could she not have taken them all down with her on day one and let the army mop up with vastly fewer casualties?)  Moiraine finishes by explaining how the kingdom never recovered and now the villagers are the only descendants, so shame on them for being scared because a witch showed up in town and then orcs burned half of it down.  Bit by bit they apologise and shuffle away, and Lan tells the boys to get a move on already.

This was the real beginning, leaving the inn and following the Warder into the night...

YOU'RE NOT WRONG BUT WE'RE ON PAGE 135 COME ON.  I mean, I know Fellowship of the Ring has the slowest start in the world, book one is basically a six-month pub crawl, but of all the aspects to copy, who thinks that's the best possible one?  If Jordan is serious, I am curious if things will happen at any sort of meaningful pace now.

Chapter Ten: Leavetaking

Welp, they are going signature-weapon style: as Lan preps the horses, they tease Rand about his heron sword, while Mat's got a bow and Perrin's got a honking great axe.  They confer and recap with each other more about what's already happened (Mat and Perrin only left notes for their families, as ordered), and then Egwene arrives to declare they're not leaving without her, because she wants to see the world.  (Lan didn't hear her coming.  Lan was just chastising the others for not paying attention to their surroundings two pages ago.  Lan is bad at things.)  Twice in four pages Moiraine is all 'It's part of the Pattern now, nothing we can do about it' and agrees to bring her along.  What does that mean?  If someone starts to do something, they can't be stopped, because it's part of the pattern?  Why wasn't the destruction of the village part of the pattern?  Is this just going to be the Aes Sedai's go-to phrase for 'shut up I've made my decision'?  It turns out the gleeman Thom is also hanging out in the loft (Lan you're so bad at this) and he wants to perform in Tar Valon, and lampshades Moiraine's 'part of the pattern now' thing, so Rand fetches his family horse Bela for Egwene.

"I still think you shouldn't come," he said. "I wasn't making it up about the trollocs. But I promise I will take care of you." 

"Perhaps I'll take care of you," she replied lightly.

Strong Female Character is a go.  The seven of them finally head out (two more to go for a full fellowship?) and pass a patrol of ill-equipped villagers.  Lan judges that two trollocs would slaughter them all, but figures they're better than nothing.  I hate that.  Rand killed one trolloc by accident and Dad al'Thor took two out in two swings when ambushed.  If I'm supposed to be afraid of the Big Bad's lackeys, they need to actually be played as dangerous, not just described as more than a match for the NPCs.  (This was something that I thought Mistborn did very well--the Inquisitors are meant to be scary, and they are, to the point where it's a huge deal when they finally take one down, at terrible cost to the heroes.  More of that, less of this, please.)

Rand spots a thing that he hopes was just a bat against the moon, but he judges the distance and realises it's too massive, and they collectively identify it as a Draghkar, even worse than trollocs and myrddraal (though still under the myrddraal's command), and that means they'll be spotted soon, so they rush for the ferry.  ...The ferry.  They're fleeing the bad guys by ferry in the middle of the night.  All I can hear is Dominic Monaghan saying that the only other crossing is 'toenty muyales' away in an accent never before used by the human tongue.

We're now 148 pages in.  We're keeping pretty good pace with Fellowship, actually; on page 148 of my copy they've just arrived at the inn of the Prancing Pony, just past the movie's scene with the ferry crossing.  But those 148 pages include Tom gorram Bombadil on top of the birthday party and pub crawl and Black Riders.  I will not hear a word against Tom Bombadil, but let's not pretend he was a vital plot force, and even with him Fellowship is moving faster.

Next week: Egwene's gonna be a totally sweet wizard.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter seventeen, part two, in which Mighty Whitey saves the day

We're closing in on the end now.  This is the supposed climax of the book, and then there's a final chapter to pretend to resolve plot points and set up the sequels.  Needless to say, there's very little tension, because it's mostly about Ender giving the Little Ones the Simple Wikipedia version of peaceful nationalist propaganda (irony meter broken) and them instantly realising how much better this way of life is because they're very smart and just needed to be shown the ways of civilisation.

(Content: misogyny, imperialism, racism, death. Fun content: more matriarchy, the most harrowing Garfield story ever.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 331--355

Ender has been negotiated with Star-looker for hours now, but adrenaline is keeping him sharp past midnight, while Ouanda and Ela are getting dozy because I guess the socio-cultural information on the Little Ones, the future of interspecies interactions, the fate of their entire planet, and the impacts this could have for all of humanity's future aren't that exciting.  Ender has been trying to help them figure out cultivation (now that they've started farming, they care about prairie land for the first time, but they don't know how much to claim or cultivate and neither does he because, praise the Jade Emperor, Ender is somehow not an expert in agriculture).

Harder still was the concept of law and government. The wives ruled: to the piggies, it was that simple. But Ender had finally got them to understand that humans made their laws differently, and thathuman laws applied to human problems. To make them understand why humans needed their own laws, Ender had to explain to them human mating patterns.

If that makes the slightest sense to anyone, please let me know.  "We just let our adult females tell us what to do."  "Humans can't do that."  "Why not?"  "Well, unlike your species, human women generally survive pregnancy."  "Oh, heavens!  You can't put them in charge!  Fertility is the mind-killer!"  Is that it?

 Laverne Cox summarises the logical conclusion.

The wives find the idea of adults mating creepy, and the idea of loyalty to your immediate family over the rest of your tribe bafflingly arbitrary.  (They have a point on the latter.)  Regardless, after three hours, they've agreed that Little One law applies to the forest and anyone who enters it, and human law applies within the fence.  Ender brings up the hive queen, whom they expect to rapidly outpace both of them since she doesn't actually have to teach anyone anything and her drones are totally sweet super-labourers.  Star-looker declares that the rest of the forests of Lusitania are theirs to divide up as they see fit, and Ouanda points out that it's considered poor form to graciously gift someone with a neighbouring country you're at war with.

At that moment, Novinha and Quim arrive with Miro's message--they relay what he heard earlier, about the Little Ones' plans to use their mass numbers to conquer the world, and Arrow confirms what Ouanda says, that in any war the winning tribe gets rights to the trees of the fallen (thus improving their gene pool).  They're counting on Ender to prevent this tribe from taking over the world.  Leaf-eater and Human argue about whether the wives should be told what's just been said (Human, naturally, prefers to say nothing, because we're supposed to like him).  Leaf-eater threatens to translate it anyway.

"Stop!" shouted Ender. His voice was far louder than he had ever let it be heard before.  Immediately everyone fell silent; the echo of his shout seemed to linger among the trees. [....] "Tell Shouter that if she lets Leaf-eater translate words that we humans have said among ourselves, then he is a spy. And if she lets him spy on us, we will go home now and you will have nothing from us. I'll take the hive queen to another world to restore her."

In case we thought that all this talking was insufficiently manly (it's been ages since we heard about Ender's rippling white shoulder muscles), he asserts his power through shouting and threats and defines 'spy' to suit his own purposes when, in all likelihood, the Little Ones have never had such a concept before in their history.  (Hard to sneak around a forest and do reconnaissance when literally every tree is sentient and psychic and your enemy.)

On the plus side, Human does raise some counterpoints, arguing that Ender is meddling in Little One affairs (Ender says he only promised not to "try to change you more than is necessary") and that he knows Milagre has basically declared war on their own galactic government, so he finds this hypocritical.

Surely Pizarro, for all his shortcomings, had an easier time of it with Atahualpa.

That is an actual line of text in this book.  That is what our hero is thinking right now because his translator has made some very fast and comprehensive assumptions about human politics based on an incomplete understanding of intergalactic law. Of course Pizarro 'had an easier time of it' you colossal jackwagon; Pizarro was a colonialist warmonger who held a mock trial and then murdered Atahualpa when he got bored of dealing with him.  'For all his shortcomings'?  Who the hell edited this book?  STEP FUCKING ONE: CHECK IF YOUR HERO EMPATHISES WITH A HISTORICAL MONSTER.

(Actual line from wikipedia, at the end of the introduction: "modern Peruvians look askance at Pizarro, considering him the force behind the destruction of their indigenous culture, language, and religion".  You don't say.)

Ender explains that they hope not to actually fight other humans, and if they do, the point will be to win the right to star travel for the Little Ones.

"We have set aside our humanness to become ramen with you. [....] Human and piggy and hive queen, here on Lusitania, will be one. All humans. All buggers. All piggies."

Human considers this, and then waxes poetic about the Little Ones' lifestyle, their histories of war (their oldest fathertrees are the heroes of the war that started their forest; their "houses are made of the cowards"), and they've been increasingly excited about their prospects for global domination over the last few years (Human says ten, which doesn't match the timeline, but what else is new for Card).  Asking them to abruptly give up those dreams is hard, he insists.

"Your dream is a good one", said Ender.  "It's the desire of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control."

If Card keeps telling me what the fundamental desires of all living creatures are, I'm going to have to declare him raman.  If things like 'ownership of the universe' or 'endless grandchildren' were really universal desires, he probably wouldn't need to tell us as much quite so frequently or persistently.

I'm torn on how much of Ender's further arguments to share, because on the one hand it's like the word of the day on Sesame Street is 'imperialism', but on the other, I did sign up to examine what the hell is going on in this book for my many confusingly-devoted readers.

• Ender points out that humans have given them technology instead of conquering them, and thus modelled the idea that it's possible to make other people greater without making yourself weaker.
• Human counters with the idea that strength is relative and thus if all the tribes gain technology at the same rate, none of them have really gained anything.
• Ender walks through the idea that it's possible to bring glory to your fathertree without killing any of the other fathertrees in the forest, and (once Human buys into this), argues that the lines dividing 'in my tribe' and 'not in my tribe' are arbitrary, and therefore the best way to own the universe and maximise your glory is to bring everyone into your tribe.

"If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, than that is what the tribe is. [....] We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe." 

Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation.

This is, by a wide margin, the best morality that Card espouses in his books.  (The Ender's Shadow series ends up in the same direction, most explicitly when Bean analyses Peter's work and says that he's also trying to make every human on Earth see themselves as one 'tribe'.)  And yet it's rather hollow in the larger context, given that Ender considering everyone to be 'in his tribe' hasn't stopped him from violating the rights and privacy of anyone or leveraging threats of his illegitimate government power against people for the last few days, even when there was nothing at immediate stake to his knowledge.  It hasn't caused him to respect the customs or privacy of the Little Ones, or stayed his hand from meddling in their society (except when Ouanda and Ela wanted to fritter away their time saving the lives of alien women, what nonsense that was).

And out here in the real world, I don't think this is the brilliant breakthrough Card imagines it is either.  Just look at him: he wrote this book about thirty years ago; about a decade ago he wrote another series with the same 'one tribe' aesop, and yet he's also practically a spokesperson for sexism, racism, and homophobia camouflaged under religious beliefs and legalistic vagueness.  Orson Scott Card, who wrote a fanfic about Barack Obama declaring himself Emperor of the United States and oppressing white people--Orson Scott Card, who just barely didn't declare himself the potentially-insurgent enemy of any government that would dare to support same-sex marriage*--this man opines on how much people just don't understand the idea of 'one universal tribe'.

Beyond simply hypocrisy, I think this illustrates the weakness of Card's quick-and-easy all-one-tribe system, which is that it doesn't necessarily mean anything.  Ender declares that they're all ramen together, all one tribe, and then declares that humans won't recognise Little Ones' laws outside the forest and vice-versa, and leverages his technological advantages to dictate terms and demand apologies for ritualistic empty threats, but none of that can actually be used against his unilateral declaration that he's on their side and they're all equal.

And ultimately it doesn't matter if he declares everyone 'one tribe' or not, because within the tribe it's still very easy to declare that those people are our enemies for whatever other reason--they want the wrong rights or they support the wrong way of doing things.  And this is, I think, the ultimate reason why privileged people are so desperate to explain how they're being oppressed--if you can say you're provoked, you can go to war with a clear conscience.  (Spoilers: that's exactly what the final treaty says.)

Human agrees to try to sell the wives on this philosophy, and Ender agrees to make exactly the same treaty with every forest of Little Ones on the planet and to restore the hive queen and let her make her own treaties.  for the final matter, Ender gets around to asking about the third life and why they killed Pipo and Libo. Human confirms that the first life is their infancy in/on the mothertree, the second life are the standard-issue Little Ones, and the third life is tree.  Ender explains that humans don't have a tree life, and that the afterlife of the Bible is an immaterial thing, entirely different.  It still takes Human a remarkably long time to work out that this means they straight-up murdered Libo and Pipo.

Revelation: the Little Ones mark momentous honors by planting someone.  Pipo and Mandachuva jointly made a biological breakthrough (I still don't grasp exactly what), and Libo and Leaf-eater worked out forest agriculture, and therefore in each case one of them had to be ritually planted.  Pipo and Libo each refused to eviscerate their pal, and therefore had to be eviscerated themselves.  (Leaf-eater and Mandachuva both have emotional breakdowns.)  I feel like we covered a lot of this ground a while back, but the extra twist is that this treaty is an equally momentous occasion, and therefore under forest law either Ender has to cut open Human or Human has to cut Ender before the end of the day.  Human now understands and therefore won't cut Ender, but he does demand to be given "the honor of the third life".

Ender agrees, although Ouanda is horrified because being the shocked female is her only remaining job.  Human sends them away with Arrow while he explains human biology, and as they leave, they hear an eruption of wailing from the wives.  Ouanda and Novinha take some solace in it, while Ender reflects on how much more emotional pain he will go through cutting open Human, since "to Ender himself he would be taking away the only part of Human's life that Ender understood".  Now, if I were in his place, I would feel some kind of creeped-out gut reaction too, absolutely, but it reads to me like Ender feels there's something still intellectually or morally wrong with the act, and I don't understand why, except to try to upsell the angst factor because "Once again, he thought, I must kill, though I promised that I never would again".

Novinha pulls the 'I can't see in the dark' tactic to justify taking Ender by the arm, and they both laugh as Ela chastises Olhado for not realising it's a ploy to hold hand.  Novinha tells Ender that he'll be able to do what's needed, not because he's "cold and ruthless", but "compassionate enough [...] to put the hot iron into the wound when that's the only way to heal it".  Novinha is only a genius xenobiologist, so I suppose she wouldn't have been taught that cauterisation was a gratuitously hideous practice that was used throughout Europe for centuries mostly because everyone forgot how ligature works.  Like, the metaphor does approximately work, but it mostly makes me think that there's probably a better solution.  (Traditional empty threats: completely unacceptable.  Eviscerating a person to validate a treaty: well, what're you gonna do?)

Ender wakes up lying in the grass with his head in Novinha's lap.  A bunch of Little Ones have emerged from the woods, led by Human, including several that Ouanda doesn't recognise ("from other brother-houses" which, apparently, have been permanently retconned in).  They carry the printout of The Hive-Queen and the Hegemon that Miro brought them years ago, which he conveniently printed single-sided, such that they've used the blank sides to write up their treaty.  Ouanda mutters that they never taught them to write, but having learned how to read**, they figured out the writing aspect themselves and improvised some ink.

The written version has some additions: the humans have to have the same terms in their treaties with every forest, any inter-species disputes will be settled by the third party (i.e., the hive queen will adjudicate if humans and Little Ones ever have a conflict), forests that have signed the treaty won't go to war unless they are physically attacked by non-treaty Little Ones, and humans and Little Ones are forbidden to 'plant' each other, with the exception of Ender slicing up Human.

Human insists it's a great honor, even if it feels wrong to him, and says that all his life he has known Ender would be the one to understand him and to plant him.  (Star-looker signed the contract, and Human relays her words, that she was named for always staring at the night sky but until Ender arrived she hadn't known what she was waiting for.)  Basically, they love him and they have always loved him and they wish they could all cling to his nipples or something.  Ender silently (very silently) thinks about how much hope has been placed in him even though everyone else has done the hard and important work.  Now let us never speak of that blasphemy again.

They pass the treaty to Ouanda and go to Rooter's tree, which opens up to let Human climb inside and talk to his father for a while.  (A sweet moment for Father's Day, I guess?  Make sure to call your dad if he's not a terrible person or a psychic tree.)  They clear the space for Human's tree, so that he and Rooter will approximately flank the gate to Milagre, and Novinha sidles up to quietly observe that he signed the contract "Ender Wiggin".

"I never went to the priests to confess," she said, "because I knew they would despise me for my sin. Yet when you named all my sins today, I could bear it because I knew you didn't despise me. I couldn't understand why, though, until now."

I understand why Novinha would think everyone would despise her, because that's the kind of thing despair and depression makes you think, but really, she cheated on her abusive husband and thus Ender isn't going to challenge the idea that she's a monster no one but the Xenocide could ever empathise with?  Most of Milagre doesn't even know the worst things she did (hiding scientific information that has prevented any progress in researching Descolada, so that everything on the planet is a world-killing bioweapon that can't be defused or defended against, and incidentally preventing Libo from having any hope of understanding why his father died, potentially contributing to his own death).  I don't hate Novinha (as an individual, rather than a character), and I've murdered zero people.

Ender and Human have more poignant discussions about how much they are brothers, and Human asks Ender to write another biography, "the Life of Human", to go with HQ&H.  He agrees, and tries to clear the others away, but they all have their reasons to stay (Olhado is recording everything as evidence for the other tribes, Ela is a scientist, and Quim compares it to Mary staying at the crucifixion).  Ender does the necessary surgery with Mandachuva and Leaf-eater's guidance about what organs go where, and they take root quickly, turning into a tiny sapling in minutes.  When Ender is finished, the other Little Ones are dancing, but he just crawls away up the hill and collapses in the grass, and Novinha's family follows.

The mayor and THE BISHOP arrive shortly before sunrise to find them all asleep in the grass.  Ender reports they have a treaty; the mayor reports that Jane has restored all their files.  Then she notices what a literally bloody mess he is, and sees Human's corpse down the hill.

"I would rather have no treaty," said Bosquinha, "than one you had to kill to get." 

"Wait before you judge," said the Bishop. "I think the night's work was more than just what we see before us."

I understand now, at last.  Bishop Peregrino is the comic relief.  Dude feared/hated the Little Ones, hated Ender until about twelve hours earlier, knows nothing about the Science Mystery, knows only the brutal aspects of Little One death rituals, and yet his dialogue (as it has been for the last few chapters) consists largely of 'I bet this Speaker guy is secretly awesome'.

The Bishop surveys the corpse/sapling:

"His name is Human," said the Speaker. 

"And so is yours," said the Bishop softly. [....] Am I the shepherd, Peregrino asked himself, or the most confused and helpless of the sheep?

Immediately bored of exploring this possible epiphany, the Bishop declares that it will soon be time for mass, and leads them all away--Novinha silently asks Ender to come along, but he asks for a moment more, hopefully to wash up.  When he does arrive at the cathedral, shortly after the beginning of mass, he quickly finds the family and takes the spot where Marcos used to sit.  The Bishop mulls a bunch of poetic facts and reversals (Ouanda isn't there, she's caring for her brother Miro; Grego is sitting happily with Ender; "Novinha, the lost one, now found", whatever he thinks that means; and the all-important fence now harmless) and concludes that it's the same miracle as transubstantiation:

How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

Which I'm pretty sure is heretical.

Next week: A Very Special Episode of ableism with Miro and Jane.

---

*So it turns out there's a section of his website called "Quotes in Context" (no link, but easy to find) that is meant to explain how his completely reasonable views have been viciously misrepresented, and it's hilarious.  Like, the line "I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn" wasn't Card talking, we must see, it was Card writing a hypothetical future person who decides to overthrow and remake the government for recognising same-sex marriages without their express permission.  This is the adult bigot equivalent of blaming a broken lamp on his imaginary friend, and it cracks me up.

**It occurs to me that, while the book has treated Miro and Ouanda bringing them HQ&H and the New Testament as a big deal because of the philosophies inside, the simple introduction of the written word was a vastly bigger and altogether separate undertaking.  I mean, it takes humans years to learn to read effectively, young or old.  Miro and Ouanda only had a few hours a week to spend with them.  How did they even have time to teach them how to read?  (Stark is supposed to have gotten rid of a lot of the confusing parts of English, like silent-GH or whatever, but I'm skeptical that means they can teach them how to read a two alien biographies and Christian scripture in less time than it takes to get an online liquor handling license).

Speaker for the Dead, chapter eight, in which we genre shift to thriller-horror

I wondered, weeks ago, why chapter three was named for Libo instead of Novinha, and now we have the answer: Card was saving her name for this chapter.  Chapter three, of course, was the chapter in which Novinha ruined science, came up with like four terrible plans to protect her boyfriend, and then called Ender to save the day.  Presumably now, twenty-two years later, she'll have a much better showing, right?  (Just kidding; ya'll know how he do.)

(Content: domestic abuse, and if anyone can think of how the hell to summarise Ender's deal in this chapter, please make a suggestion, because it's terrifying.  Fun content: scientists who dare to follow the scientific method, those bastards.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 123--133

Chapter Eight: Dona Ivanova

The notes this week are from Libo again, and again an excerpt from evidence used in some future trial, and also hilarious, because it turns out that the xenologers have been intentionally giving the Little Ones new knowledge since Pipo was still alive.  I almost want to call this a retcon, except I can't off-hand think of any 'Oh no we revealed things' moments that chronologically came after the acrobat incident.  Anyway, Libo is explaining to his daughter how much lying she'll have to do in her reporting as well, to avoid revealing the Prime-Directive-breaking to the other scientists:

When you watch them struggle with a question, knowing that you have the information that could easily resolve their dilemma; when you see them come very near the truth and then for lack of your information retreat from their correct conclusions and return to error--you would not be human if it didn't cause you great anguish.

(Remember, species is decided by vote.)  The one thing I like about this is how much withholding information from other scientists is cast as the exact mirror of withholding it from the Little Ones, which is the least-condescending thing that the book has yet done for them.  I mean, given Card's characterisation of Other Scientists, it's still no compliment, but it's a step up from "What's the deal with all of the not-raping?"

And for every framling scientist who is longing for the truth, there are ten petty-minded descabeçados [headless ones] who despise knowledge, who never think of an original hypothesis, whose only labor is to prey on the writings of the true scientists in order to catch tiny errors or contradictions or lapses in method.

Like, fuck peer-reviewers, am I right?  'Rigour', pah.  'Reproducible results', double-pfeh!  Science isn't about constantly re-checking and re-testing and investigating apparent contradictions in order to smelt through masses of data in order to identify the common and reliable truths of the processes of the universe!  Science is about writing things down.

And let's not forget that these xenologers on other worlds have zero ability to actually test any of their hypotheses; if they study Little Ones, literally the only thing they can do all day is re-read the reports of the xenologers of Lusitania and try to link facts together in new ways.  Once they've come up with an "original hypothesis", the only way they can test it is by checking whether it matches all existing data, and asking the Lusitanians to find a way to test it more directly.  They're all detectives who are never allowed to leave their desks, and Libo is criticising them for noticing contradictions.

Given that Card is not and has never been a scientist, and given how logic-free some of his writing has proven to be, it's hard not to read this more as an attack on critics of art (as compared to those great creators, the authors) than on insufficiently-creative scientists.

But maybe the best part is what information Pipo and Libo started sharing:

That means you can't even mention a piggy whose name is derived from cultural contamination: "Cups" would tell them that we have taught them rudimentary pottery-making.  "Calendar" and "Reaper" are obvious.  And God himself couldn't save us if they learned Arrow's name.

Yup.  That's how that's gone down.  Pipo and Libo, xenologer academics, have taught the Little Ones pottery, archery, farming, and time-keeping.  And they think it's a much better and safer idea to keep these things quiet rather than indicate that the Little Ones might have invented any of these things themselves.  In a society built mostly of secrets and places humans aren't allowed to go, they figured never mentioning that they had given the Little Ones calendars was easier than saying "Oh, and they must be trusting us more because today I overheard one of them talking about a holy day coming up and they've revealed they do in fact have a calendar after all!"

But more to the point: WHY.  The Little Ones are low-tech, but they also have no need to be otherwise.  They have no predators and they don't hunt large animals, so they have no use for archery except war--did Pipo and Libo learn/teach how to make bows so they could defend themselves better against the other tribes?  (What if the close-contact murder is actually vital to the genetic exchange in their wars?  It would be awful but also kind of perfect if they gave the Little Ones bows and arrows for combat and the entire species died out in ten years because they were killing in a non-reproductive manner.  Card would have to be on board with that; we know how he feels about non-reproductive genetic exchange.)

The Little Ones also don't have any reason to farm that we know of, so why reaping?  Agricultural revolutions completely reshape societies if they take effect at all.  And wouldn't the satellites notice if the Little Ones started farming and were able to support a much larger population?  We don't even understand their current nutritional needs and yet they adopted farming and yet they haven't done anything with it in twenty years?

This book is an amazing exercise guide for critical thinking skills.

Novinha is finishing up in her lab at the end of the day, stalling before going home, chastising herself for not being a better parent, never seeing her youngest children except when they're asleep in bed.  She thinks she should be happy Marcão is gone, thinks that "all our reasons expired four years" ago, and wonders why she never thought of leaving him, even if they couldn't get divorced.  She's still aching from the final time he beat her, three weeks ago.

The pain in her hip flared even as she thought of it.  She nodded in satisfaction.  It's no more than I deserve, and I'll be sorry when it heals.

So, Novinha is obviously horrifically emotionally and mentally damaged, in ways that are pretty normal for abuse survivors: she's internalised the idea that she deserved to be hurt (she keeps using the phrase "no worse than I deserve"), even though she hated him.  I wait to see whether she gets corrected or if Card determines that she really did 'deserve' to be hurt for her sins.  As she approaches her home (having bid a rather poetic good-bye to her plants), she sees all the lights are on and grows immediately suspicious.

Olhado is uploading/downloading memories when she arrives, and she thinks a bit about the ones she wishes she could delete and could replace, and how it's her fault, her curse, that Olhado lost his eyes instead of being "the best, the healthiest, the wholest of my children", which I hope will be explained because: what?  Olhado tells her that the Speaker has arrived, and she panics as Ela shows up with cafezinhos in the kitchen.  Olhado and Ela try to tell their mother that Ender is italicised-"good", unlike what the bishop claimed, but she takes silent pride in being unshakable, and reflects on how it's not her fault Libo is dead, since she kept her secret all those years.  She sits, and Ender, still a ninja, reaches in and is already pouring before she notices him.

"Desculpa-me,"she whispered. Forgive me. "Trouxe o senhor tantos quilômetros--" 

"We don't measure starflight in kilometers, Dona Ivanova. We measure it in years." His words were an accusation, but his voice spoke of wistfulness, even forgiveness, even consolation. I could be seduced by that voice. That voice is a liar.

Look, y'all, I'm doing my best, but I cannot speak and I can barely imagine how to turn those two sentences into an accusation while expressing wistfulness but allowing for forgiveness and offering consolation.  Like, two, maybe, and I would sound like a twit to anyone except maybe someone very emotionally damaged who was just happy I wasn't brimming with evil.

Novinha apologises for having called him away twenty-two years, and Ender just says he hasn't noticed it yet, then he springs the passive-aggression on the abuse victim he's supposedly come to help:

"For me it was only a week ago that I left my sister.  She was the only kin of mine left alive.  Her daughter wasn't born yet, and now she's probably through with college, married, perhaps with children of her own.  I'll never know her.  But I know your children, Dona Ivanova." [....] 

"In only a few hours you think you know them?" 

"Better than you do, Dona Ivanova."

Everyone gasps, though Novinha privately thinks he might be right, but more importantly how does Ender judge this?  He knows literally nothing about Dona Ivanova; he invented a bond with little Novinha and then arrived here and learned nothing about the family before coming to see them.  He has literally no evidence on which to judge how well she understands her children.  He then turns to walk out, and Novinha snaps at him to come back, but he proceeds to her bedroom, where Miro and Quim are arguing.  Novinha is startled to see Miro smiling, but it vanishes when he sees her, which stings more.  She tries to ignore it and tell Ender again to leave, saying he has no death to speak, saying that as a foolish girl she imagined the original Speaker would come and console her.

"Dona Ivanova," he said, "how could you read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon and imagine that its author could bring comfort?" 

It was Miro who answered [....] "the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the tale of the hive queen with deep compassion." 

The Speaker smiled sadly. "But he wasn't writing to the buggers, was he?  He was writing to humankind, who still celebrated the destruction of the buggers as a great victory. He wrote cruelly, to turn their pride to regret, their joy to grief."

Just a note: first the mayor wasn't shocked Ender could be two thousand years old, and now Novinha suggests that the Speaker might have lived three thousand years, and yet literally no one except Plikt (who needed four years to entertain the notion) actually considers how far into ancient times people might have come forward in this galaxy.  Speaking of scientists who lack creative thought and curiosity.

I do like this exchange as far as it can be taken as a commentary on scripture, and the changing meanings of old writing, the way people might look at something today and see a story completely different from the way it might have struck its original audience.  Again, a very weird thing to hear from the keyboard of Orson Scott Card, given that he's the worst kind of fundamentalist and bigot.

Novinha mentions the Speaker's target, Ender, a person who ruined everything he touched, and Ender snaps for a moment, "his voice whipped out like a grass-saw, ragged and cruel", to say that everyone touches something kindly and to say a person destroyed everything they touched is "a lie that can't truthfully be said of any human being who ever lived", and I am abruptly and uncomfortably aware that Marcos is going to get a post-mortem redemption arc.

Ender says that while Novinha called him first, others have called speakers since then, so it's not all on her conscience, and she wonders who else could know enough about speakers to have done so.  She's shocked to learn someone called a speaker for Marcos, that anyone would miss him, and Miro speaks up:

"Grego would, for one. The Speaker showed us what we should have known--that the boy is grieving for his father and thinks we all hate him--" 

"Cheap psychology," she snapped. "We have therapists of our own, and they aren't worth much either."

Wait, they do have therapists?  No.  Not buying it.  The last time we saw anyone with anything approaching therapeutic qualifications they were Valentine's school guidance counsellor.  The planet should have therapists, among many other things, but I just don't believe for a moment that Card's universe contains therapists.  At some point, someone would go to one.

Miro and Ela start laughing about Grego soaking Ender's pants, and Novinha has a montage of flashbacks, the joy of Miro and Ela as small children, Marcos' slow growing hatred, the way everything was ruined by the time Quim was born and he never got a happy childhood.  Marcos' rage grew "because he knew none of it belonged to him", foreshadow, clunk.  Novinha's response to this flash of cheer is of course to retreat to rage that anyone would interrupt the quiet gloom she's created, and try to throw Ender out again, though she knows the law protects his quest for TRUUUUUUTHHHHH.

"If I told nothing but what everyone already knows--that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar until the constables sent him home--then I would not cause pain, would I?  I'd cause a great deal of satisfaction, because everyone would be reassured that their view of him was correct all along.  He was scum, and so it was all right that they treated him like scum. [....] No one's life is nothing.  Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."

There's some back and forth about whether Novinha is really hating Marcos or herself, how recently Ender studied her younger self, how Pipo loved her, et cetera, but I'd rather focus on the above.  There is this cultural notion we have with empathising with the worst people.  Empathising with good people is obvious and admirable, but empathising with villains is the mark of A Great Heart.  You may notice that in that dichotomy, no one ever gets around to empathising with the middle ground.  The neutrals, the people who are just trying to get on with their day, they're not part of the consideration.  You have to be a hero or a monster before anyone cares about anyone caring.

So let me provide an advance alternative interpretation--I'm guessing it's alternative, I'm guessing this isn't what Ender is going to say, although if I'm wrong about that I will be 1) impressed and 2) irritated that my blog hasn't won the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Marcos' truth is the story of no one stopping him.  Marcos is an abuser and apparently everyone knows and no one has ever done a thing to intervene.  They know that he beats Novinha, but the police don't stop him, they know that Grego is practically feral but they don't help him, they don't try to draw Novinha--daughter of Os Venerados, sole master of shaping and reshaping life for their alien world, bringer of potato vodka--out of her abusive home and into a shelter, or haul Marcos out of his house and into a jail cell.  They do have cops, apparently, cops who will kick him out of the bars but not stop him from nearly murdering his wife.  And for two decades they have watched him grow more terrible and violent and watched him damage his family and they have done nothing, because it was easier to pretend everything was okay.  It's the same gross neglect that they inflicted on Novinha until she became xenobiologists, but extended four times as long and harming five or six children instead of one.  How's that for a truth that would make the people of Milagre uncomfortable and shake their assurances that they did the right thing by gossiping about how awful Marcos was?

But yeah, I can't wait to hear Ender explain that Marcos' had a secret kindness that redeems him.

Novinha tries again to throw Ender out of the house and yells at him in Portuguese, and we get another grammar lesson about how rude she was with her pronoun forms, and yet Ender's response in the same overly-familiar Portuguese tones was instead kind and intimate: "Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee".  Wait, what?  He walked into her house, got all her children on his side, told her that she's too cruel to herself and to the memory of her abusive husband, and then told her he would plant a garden in her fertile ground?!  That is the creepiest fucking thing I have read in months.

Oh, and then Quara wakes up crying and Novinha hears Ender go into her room and soothe her with a Nordic lullaby.  Forget it.  This is just a straight-up horror flick now.  Next morning he's going to be wearing Marcos' skin like a snuggie.

Novinha falls asleep, and when she wakes again in the night she hears her children gathered in the living room, Miro and Ela and Quim and Olhado, laughing together, and she dreams that Libo is among them, alive, her true husband, foreshadow, clunk.  She fears that Ender will, in repairing her family, learn her secrets and reveal them and Miro will die like Libo did, because apparently she's in denial that keeping her secret didn't protect him.  I'm not clear if Ender ever actually left the house or if he just moved in.  Regardless, that's the merciful end of this chapter.  Next week: science investigation, Ender is a jackwagon, and in a shocking twist teenage xenologers make bad decisions.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter six, part one, in which I no longer know what is going on

Totally unrelated news: some very talented friends of mine have produced a web series called YouStar, about a trio of siblings who join forces to win an online music video competition by appealing to the disturbing romantic trends of our time.  It's pretty great and everyone involved is brilliant, and as a bonus, I have some cameo scenes, so if you'd like a mental image and voice to put these Ender posts to, you should definitely watch all of them.

The first three episodes can be found here, and new ones go up on Thursdays.  (My first appearance is episode 3, but start from the beginning or you won't have any idea what's going on and you'll be missing out on their brilliance.  You'll know it's me when you see a low-quality video of a guy in a bowtie spewing the most ridiculously pseudo-academic jargon he can improvise.  They say to write what you know.)

(Content: death, terminal disease, discussed rape of prisoners.  Fun content: did you see that YouStar link?)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 84--97

Chapter Six: Olhado

We have left behind Pipo's incredibly bad science notes in favour of grown-up Libo's notes.  Unfortunately, these are no less awful.  Libo writes of the Little Ones' storytelling, which is almost always about war, and how war seems to be their only form of interaction with other tribes.  Everyone dies, and bafflingly they never seem to have any interest in enemy women "either for rape, murder, or slavery, the traditional human treatment of the wives of fallen soldiers".  It might be three thousand years in the future and humanity might have all but forgotten the concept of war, but that's no reason to stop defaulting to ancient sexism and rape culture-derived assumptions!

Does this mean that there is no genetic exchange between tribes?  Not at all.  The genetic exchanges may be conducted by the females, who may have some system of trading genetic favors.  Given the apparent subservience of the males to the females in piggy society, this could easily be going on without the males having any idea; or it might cause them such shame that they just won't tell us about it.

How could you have 'genetic exchange' that the males don't know about, given that males are presumably the people being exchanged?  I think they're going to notice getting traded.  Is he hypothesising that the women just trade men for an afternoon sometimes, or keep harems, and/or that the 'traded' men are then killed?  Has Libo considered that maybe the reason the Little Ones are so enthusiastic about war is that they consider it the vastly superior alternative to slavery and rape?  That maybe they glorify death in battle because it always carries the implicit notion of "He got honor, and then he got out before the worst could happen"?  (I mean, I'm sure that we're going to find out war is actually part of their reproductive process, but if Libo's not going to go near that idea, he could at least try harder with the theories he has got.  ...Wait, if war does turn out to be part of reproduction, does that mean that all their tales of battle are basically porn?)

Does he know of anything yet that the Little Ones have indicated shame about?  For all that the error of the Lusitanians is supposed to be that they're treating ramen like varelse, it seems to me that their actual mistake here is that they're treating aliens like humans and then aggressively rejecting any motivations that don't come from stereotypes about ancient humanity.

Libo's apprentice is his daughter Ouanda, who apparently took notes on a storytelling session (I guess from memory, since they're not allowed to write things down?) by one warrior speaking of another who brutally slew several of the first one's allies before getting killed himself.  There are various remarks that I suspect might be hints, like the storyteller showing his enemy a handful of grass, and singing a song "of the far country", and then the whole group breaking out into a chant in the Wives' Language, despite there being no women present.  The Little Ones also speak Stark most of the time and slip into Portuguese for emphasis, a pattern they apparently picked up from Libo.  (Why, again, did they teach the aliens two languages when they're trying to avoid contamination--never mind, we're all bored now.)

Ender's in space again and hasn't got much to do.  I actually kind of like their warp drive, if only because it's so bizarre--the ship makes an instantaneous "Park shift" to high speed, but apparently can't predict how high, so once it's in motion it figures out its velocity and then sets a timer for the appropriate moment to downshift back to normal speeds.  I think that's the first bit of SF I've liked in this book.

He starts from Spanish (he's fluent, obviously) and learns Portuguese, but talking to the ship gets boring after a couple of hours every day.  Apparently Jane can't talk to him while he's in flight, nor can the hive queen, due to the sixteen-hours-per-minute time dilation, which you will recall he only had explained to him yesterday despite this being the twenty-fourth time he's done this exact thing.  After eight days, he's functional in Portuguese and "desperate for human company--he would have been glad to discuss religion with a Calvinist, just to have somebody smarter than the ship's computer to talk to."  Gettin' tired of your Super Bowl Day WOO SUCK IT CALVINISTS routine here, Card.

The starship performed the Park shift; in an immeasurable moment its velocity changed relative to the rest of the universe.  Or, rather, the theory had it that in fact the velocity of the rest of the universe changed, while the starship remained truly motionless.  No one could be sure, because there was nowhere to stand to observe the phenomenon.  It was anybody's guess, since nobody understood why philotic effects worked anyway[....].  Someday a scientist would discover why the Park shift took almost no energy.  Somewhere, Ender was certain, a terrible price was being paid for human starflight.

If the starship is remaining motionless and moving the universe around it, Futurama-style, wouldn't that prevent two starships from moving at the same time, since each would gain velocity relative to the other one?  Or am I being too Newtonian here?  Someone who understands real physics better than I do, please let me know if this is less stupid than it sounds.  (Not the part about Ender's intuition and his nightmares that every Park jump is fuelled by the death of a distant star--I'm sure that's stupid.  And prescient, somehow.)

Jane explains that Lusitania has no landing authority, just an automated shuttle that takes people down to the surface when needed.  It might not fly often, but do the Little Ones not notice the huge metal sky-boat rocketing out of the clouds when it does come?  We've discussed before how humanity must not have cloaking technology, or else they'd never be so stupid as to approach aliens like they have.  Jane also notes that, since Ender is the Speaker, he literally can't be refused access to the planet, which sounds like a terrible idea, given that there are literally no background checks or overseeing authorities to become a speaker.  Are they even going to check his bags?

Plot twist: Novinha cancelled her call for a speaker five days after she sent it--from Ender's perspective, about six minutes after he went to warp speed.  Starways Code says that you can't cancel a speaker once they're in transit, probably because, to quote Anton Mates a couple of weeks back: "How often do you think Speakers set out for distant planets, and then about seven years into their voyage they get a message saying that they're no longer needed, thanks, the police finally figured out that Mr. Jones was poisoned by his ex-wife because she despised his politics, and a poet in another star system did a really nice eulogy over the ansible for him?" 

But, as a bonus, Novinha's kids Miro and Ela also called for a speaker.  Ela, just a few weeks ago, to speak the death of their father Marcão after he died of some terminal disease.  Miro, four years ago, to speak the death of Libo, who was apparently killed by the Little Ones in exactly the same style as his father.  (Bets that the book will 100% blame Novinha's secrecy for Libo's death in the end?  Ha ha of course it will.)  Officially, contact with the Little Ones is now forbidden, but Ouanda refuses and no one is willing to stop her; they're just going to wait thirty-three years for the scientists from Calicut to arrive and take over.  Y'all, this galaxy is weird.  You could literally train multiple replacements in the time it takes for an expert to fly in to deal with your problem, but they do it anyway.

Bonus plot twist: the hive queen detects another philotic mind on the planet.  Ender seems bizarrely disinterested in this.  It's not the Little Ones, but it knows of them.  She's also super in favour of settling there; it looks totally sweet and woodsy.

We skip over to Ela in church, watching her little brother Grego use a screwdriver to pry rivets out of the plastic pews during the homily, and reflecting on what the consequences would have been when their father was alive, how he would have ultimately put all the blame on Miro.  Grego is a little monster; when a nun tries to stop him from destroying the bench, he tricks her, knees her in the mouth, and she flees, bleeding.  Ela, being a viewpoint character, obviously has darkly poetic thoughts about how the physical sickness that killed their father (weird organ mutations that I'm guessing are another variant on Descolada) lives on as a spiritual sickness in his children, because sure, let's assign a moral value to being afflicted by disease, that's not stupid and terrible.

Ela notes that her mother (Novinha) doesn't help at all by being so obsessed with work and inventing new cereals.  I'm trying to think of any career-focused women in any of the Ender/Shadow novels who aren't chastised for failing to focus on their family, and I'm not coming up with anyone.

Bishop Peregrino starts ranting against the coming Speaker for the Dead ("give him your smiles, but hold back your hearts"), which freaks Ela out because she think he's somehow found out about her request, but her brother Quim (it's short for Joaquim and that'll have to do) explains that someone called a speaker for Pipo decades ago and he arrives that afternoon.  Ela panics further, because she thinks it's too soon for Marcão's death to be spoken and his awfulness to be revealed.  I dunno.

Her other brother Olhado must be important, since the chapter is named for him.  He has electronic eyes, and when he's bored or hiding from reality he switches them off or replays old memories, but to leave church:

Olhado switched his eyes back on and took care of himself, winking metallically at whatever fifteen-year-old semi-virgin he was hoping to horrify today.

I'm not sure I even want to know what Card means by 'semi-virgin'.

Ender and Mayor Bosquinha ride in a hovercar over the grasslands toward Milagre, and I wonder again what happened to the ban on ever letting the Little Ones see human technology. "Good god, man, do you really think that just because we launch shuttles in and out of orbit and sending anti-gravity cars cruising over the hills that you can just go and use a pen in front of them?  We have no choice about the cars; are they supposed to walk the whole afternoon?!"  That's basically how I figure that went down.

Bosquinha doesn't want to talk about the Little Ones, and manages to indicate (intentionally?) that the Bishop has named Ender a "dangerous agent of agnosticism", but notes that the cargo ship full of skrika probably won him friends, as "you'll see plenty of vain women wearing the pelts in the months to come."  I'm now trying to tally any women in any of these books who aren't criticised for some intensely feminine-coded flaw.  I can think of two candidates: Petra, who is of course too masculine, and one in the Shadow books who spends all her time supporting Bean and ends up getting fridged to make him sad.

The mayor instead talks to Ender about local life, such as the useless native grass that can't be turned to thatch because it dissolves in the rain once cut, and the herd animals whose meat has no nutritional value.  But then there's an important moment:

The tone of her voice was heavy with concealed emotion.  Ender knew, then, that the fear of the piggies ran deep. 

"Speaker, I know you're thinking that we're afraid of the piggies.  And perhaps some of us are.  But the feeling most of us have, most of the time, isn't fear at all.  It's hatred.  Loathing."

Ender intuited something, knew it, and was then immediately told he was wrong.  Glory hallelujah praise be to Zalgo.  It's moments like this that make me wonder if our third-person-omniscient narrator is supposed to be unreliable and Ender isn't half as smart or right as he thinks he is.  Wouldn't that be awesome?

Bosquinha goes on about the bishop's theologising and whether the Little Ones are morally vacuous or simply unfallen, but then apologises because she's sure she sounds ridiculous to a speaker.  Ender says nothing, just thinks to himself that religious people always think they sound absurd to nonbelievers, which, in my experience, is also incredibly not true, and then congratulates himself for appreciating sacredness in many forms and how the mayor will have to slowly learn to see the truth about people instead of her assumptions.

He starts by mentioning the local religious order, the Children of the Mind of Christ, and explains that he's heard of them before, when he spoke the death of San Angelo on Moctezuma.  The mayor is shocked, not because Ender has just revealed he's been a speaker for more than two thousand years, but because it's supposed to be a heretical story that the now-sainted man asked for a speaker on his deathbed, afraid people were going to claimed he had performed miracles.  Ender, however, attested the miracles himself, and San Angelo was canonised within a century.

...What?  There had better be more backstory coming, because so far this makes no sense at all.  Speakers are required to tell the truth, so if Ender attested to miracles he must have believed they were real, but Bosquinha implies that he thus "meddle[d] in the affairs of the Church".  Ender just says that "where the followers of San Angelo are, the truth has friends", even though Angelo apparently called Ender to speak his death specifically to refute these miracles.  So either Ender lied or Angelo wanted him to lie, and either way I'm not sure how these people are supposed to be truth's best friends.

Bosquinha sniffed and started the car again.  As Ender intended, her preconceived notions of a speaker for the dead were now shattered.

On the plus side, for once a religious author is writing a religious character being startled that their assumptions about an agnostic were wrong, rather than the reverse.  On the downside, Card is no better equipped to write an agnostic than most fundamentalist Christians are to write an atheist.

Bosquinha's complete non-reaction to Ender saying he was there on Moctezuma two thousand years ago indicates to me that, as we've all been saying, incredibly 'old' people should be very common in this galaxy, so I'm even less sure why Ender's ancientness is still treated as such a big deal, and why it took Plikt four years to work out that Andrew Wiggin is Andrew Wiggin.

That's all I can take for this post; come back next week for Ender's detective work and Olhado's sweet robot eyes.