Storm Front, chapters 20 and 21, in which Our Hero just can't be blamed for being terrible and useless

This post would have been done yesterday, but I had to have the 'let's not use homophobic slurs as casual slang' talk with one of my online D&D groups.  I think I surprised them by skipping over 'you can't say that' and going directly to 'I can't control what you say, but I will judge you for it, and if you're my friend I appreciate it if you choose your words such that I can easily distinguish between you and the people who want me dead'.  At least I have the GM's support this time (and the lone woman in the group, who was immediately apologetic for not calling the dudebro out herself).  Anyway, that experience pretty much ruined the day for anything except thinking about the angry rants I couldn't unleash on the guy in question because it would at that point be counter-productive.  I got my unimpressive 'I didn't mean anything by it, they're just words to me, but I'll try to cut back' apology and that's the best I could really hope for in this situation.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuugh.

(Content: parental abuse, partner abuse, implied rape, murder.)

Storm Front

Chapter Twenty: Ebony Black'stone Copperfield Dresden*

Dresden cabs it to Monica Sells' house with zero fanfare or difficulties.  She never gave him her address, but presumably he was able to look her up via the phonebook, because she told him their real last name (Sells) even though she was afraid to speak her husband's true name and we don't know if 'Monica' is really hers.  Now that Dresden has worked out that she was actually just trying to drag him into this to stop whatever evil her husband is getting up to, he (and we) might wonder why she didn't do a better job of trying to clue him in (like giving him all the personal information she could and saying 'I'm like 40% sure he's gone supervillain') but maybe we'll get some justification for that now.

Dresden describes what seems like a pretty typical suburb to me--young trees, minivans, lots of 'for sale' signs on properties, not a lot of birdsong or barking dogs--and declares that it feels "blighted, a place where a black wizard had set up shop".  (I want to make a joke here about property values and white flight as soon as one 'black' person shows up in a neighbourhood, but it's hard to formulate one that's clearly only mocking racist people and Butcher's insistent use of 'black' to mean evil.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader.)

Dresden knocks and rings for a few minutes and is about to magic the door off its hinges when Monica finally answers, and we get another paragraph describing her look (jeans, flannel, and #nomakeup, which makes her look "both older and more appealing" because Dresden is That Guy).  She tries to send him away, but he bluffs that he'll tell the cops Everything if she does, then forces his way through the door.  Monica tries to taze him and I cheer up immensely for a moment, but he dodges once and when she almost gets him in the face the second time he exhales wizardliness all over the taser and it shuts down.

So, Dresden has managed to avoid burning out any of the phones he's used so far, any of the cars he's travelled in, or any of the police computers he's been near, but now that there's a taser in his face his anti-tech field ramps up to full power.  Yes.  Truly this is such an inconvenience to his life.  Butcher continues to not seem to grasp that in order for something to count as a flaw it has to actually impede the character.  It has to have effects they don't want, or that objectively hold them back.  This is also why I can't count Dresden's sexism as a legitimate 'character flaw', because while he's incredibly misogynistic, the book would also have us believe that he's right and his terrible decisions (like pushing Murphy away) are the correct and moral calls to make.  I'm trying to figure out now whether Dresden has any 'flaws' that are actually bad in Butcher's estimation, or if they're all of the same league as 'I'm so beautiful it's a curse'.

Anyway: Monica also makes direct eye contact with Dresden for the first time while she's try to electrocute his face, and they sooouuuuulllgaaaaaaze.  Dresden finally understands All The Things by reading the intense fear and love motivating her.  Monica, being a womanish lady-woman with ladybrain, has the typical soulgaze reaction to Dresden's grimdark man thoughts, freezes in shock, starts shaking, and nearly goes limp.

(Aside: is there any actual reason that a good soulgazing wouldn't prove without a doubt that Dresden was innocent of these murders and also everything else the council hates him for?)

Dresden informs us that from the gaze he learned more than he wanted to about her abused childhood and abusive marriage and her desperate desire to protect her children.  The kids, both preteens, choose that moment to appear and ask mom if they should call the cops, but Monica has just learned that Linda is dead (apparently they knew each other) and tells them it's fine.

I stepped closer to her. I had to have her help. No matter how much pain she was in, no matter what kind of agony she was going through, I had to have her help. And I thought I knew the names to invoke to get it. 

I can be such a bastard sometimes.

So here's that question about flaws again, because we're obviously not supposed to think that Dresden is a terrible person for breaking and entering and interrogating here, we're supposed to think that he's been forced into a bad position and he's doing what he must, for JUSTICE.  Because of that and many other aspects of his personality, Dresden's self-loathing here doesn't really characterise him as a sweet little woobie who needs a hug.  He comes across as another aspect of That Guy, the one who joins a discussion by saying "I know everyone's going to jump on me for saying this, but..." or who vagueblogs about how awful he is as a passive attempt to guilt people into telling him how great he really is.

DRESDEN: I'm so heartless and closed-off; it's no wonder everyone leaves me in the end. Siiiiiiiigh.

ME: I know, right?  And let's not forget your pointless dramatics and condescension.  Like, you never actually stop being awful, you just change the current configuration of awful, like a Rubik's cube constantly rotating into new permutations of overbearing patriarchy.

Dresden rattles off Jennifer, Tommy, and Linda's names again and begs Monica for her help, and she relents, though the chapter ends with her solemn declaration that "There's nothing anyone can do, now."  Personally, this is not a type of tension-raising that works for me, because I'm 100% certain that there will in fact be something that can be done.  A writer can't scare the audience with something that they know won't happen.  A cliffhanger that's meant to actually be scary and not just dramatic won't put the protagonist in danger--it'll have them racing to save a secondary character who legitimately might not make it.  (Or, you know, some other consequence that isn't as heavy-handed as character death, but we're taking little steps here.)  Of course, in this situation that would probably mean Murphy, and I can do without damselling of our lone Strong Female Character, but casting is Butcher's problem to fix.

Chapter Twenty-One: Abusers Are Bad People, This Should Not Be A Controversial Statement

In Monica's prototypical kitchen--her sanctuary, Dresden intuits, sparkling clean from all the time she spends being a Good Wife--he confronts her about the vague resemblance that he's mentioned a couple of times, and she admits that she is Jennifer Stanton's older sister.  (Rebellious Jennifer "ran away to become an actress"... in Chicago?  Is that a thing people do?  I thought it was always New York or Los Angeles.  Or, like, Vancouver if you're Canadian.)  Monica has some pseudo-deep thoughts about her sister becoming a sex worker, but they're not worth repeating here.

She explains that she was evasive in her first meeting with Dresden out of simple uncertainty--she knew her husband was up to something but that didn't mean she was comfortable setting a stranger to hunt him down.

"Who killed your sister?" [....] I knew the answer, already, but I needed to hear it from her. I needed to be sure. I tried to tell myself that it would be good for her to face such a thing, just to say it out loud. I wasn't sure I bought that--like I said, I'm not a very good liar.

Dunno what to make of this either.  'I know who the killer is, but I don't actually know who the killer is, so better maximise this woman's trauma anyway even though I totally don't want to'?  This reads more like Dresden is vaguely aware that he's a sadist but still trying to downplay it to himself.  I generally wouldn't actually put 'sadistic' on Dresden's list of flaws, but it sure sounds like Dresden thinks he is himself.  Anyway, totally unforeseeable plot twist: the killer is Victor Sells.

Dresden accuses her of knowingly sending him to the lake house where he performs his rituals so Victor would see Dresden and pick a fight.  She wanted to protect her children from her husband--her husband, she explains, who was a good man who got so angry that he couldn't provide as much for Monica as her wealthy parents could, and "sometimes he would lose his temper"--I feel like I'm reading Speaker for the Dead again--and then five-ish years ago Victor discovered magic.  He'd spend all night performing weird rituals in their locked attic and get steadily more magical, burst out shouting or laughing for no reason, set the curtains on fire with collateral anger.  Monica didn't confront him, having been raised in an abusive household and thus used to just desperately staying out of the way.

I'd like to think that we're not supposed to have any sympathy for Victor here, an entitled and narcissistic man who felt inadequate because he didn't make enough money 'to provide for his family' and so abused his family to vent his frustrations.  I'd like to think that Monica's remaining loyalty to him is supposed to be the realistic scars of abuse and not some heroic patience hanging onto the goodness that was buried underneath the abuse.  I would really like to.  But I'm not sure.

Victor invented ThreeEye and forced Monica to take a drink so she could see the world as he did.  Dresden informs us of how horrible this is, how she would have seen the true power-obsessed greed-consumed monster that her husband had become and the memory would never fade.  Victor tried to mass-produce ThreeEye but couldn't get enough power for the volume he wanted, no matter how much emotion he tapped into, until he realised he could also siphon emotional power off other people, and that lust was more useful than fear or anger for his purposes.  Obvious conclusion: track down investors to hold magic orgies.  Monica tries to say that even then, "there were moments that I could almost see him again", but Dresden is a Man and he has no room to feel compassion for Monica when he's too busy feeling RAAAAAGE at Victor.  Monica flinches away, fearing Dresden's anger, because of course she fears anger, so much of her life and her trauma revolves around getting trapped in or avoiding other people's anger.  Dresden isn't doing a thing to make this easier for Monica, which ought to count as a flaw, but since it won't actually hold him back at all (send her into a panic attack where she can't exposit plot for him anymore, for instance) it still doesn't count narratively.

Victor found the Beckitts and got their cooperation by promising vengeance against Marcone; used Monica to get to Jennifer to Linda to Marcone's lackey (Lawrence or Tommy?).  That made for enough people that Monica got to stay out of the magic orgies sometimes, but Victor continued power-hungry and she could tell he was starting to think of ways to use the children.  Jennifer threatened to go to the cops and Marcone if Victor didn't let Monica and the kids go, and thus the murdering began.

Dresden tells us that he wants to comfort her, soothing words and arm around her shoulders, et cetera, but he realises that would just make her scream now, so he gets her a glass of cold water and says he's sorry.  It's the least terrible thing he's done yet.

I wanted so badly to tell her that everything would be all right. I wanted to dry her tears and tell her that there was still joy in the world, that there was still light and happiness. But I didn't think she would hear me. Where she was, there was nothing but an endless, hopeless darkness full of fear, pain, and defeat. 

So I did the only thing I could. I withdrew in silence and left her to her weeping.

Funny, innit, how every time Dresden abandons a person to their fears without trying to give them any solace or hope, it's because he intuitively knows that none of the things he could say would actually help.  Forensic scientists want him to explain magic murder--nope, nothing he can say.  Monica thinks Victor is invincible and her children are doomed--better just leave without saying anything to her.  I mean, dude, since you're not apparently in a pit of despair yourself anymore, you must have some idea what you're going to do next, so why not give her a lifeline, or even some vaguely convincing balderdash?  'Your husband might think no one can escape his death traps, Mrs Sells, but my dad named me after Houdini for a reason--I'll be back when I've saved us all'.

Tween Jenny (named for her aunt) stops Dresden on the way out to be innocent and precocious at him, saying she recognises him from the Arcane and if he'll help her mom.

"My daddy used to be one of the good guys, Mr Dresden."

Pictured: Five-Tongue Fleming reminds us that abusive fathers are not, in fact, good guys.

"But I don't think that he is anymore." Her face looked sad. It was a sweet, unaffected expression. "Are you going to kill him?"

(I assume 'unaffected' here has to mean 'sincere, not an affectation' rather than 'dispassionate', but it can be hard to tell after a bit of evocative prose like 'her face looked sad'.)  This is of course Dresden's opportunity to tell the audience that he doesn't want to kill Victor but might have to for everyone's sake, and Jenny goes on about hoping Dresden is "one of the good guys [....] we really need a good guy."  As per usual, the author fails to grasp levels of mental development among children; eleven-year-olds (or thereabouts) might not be up for a serious debate on the morality of lethal force in the apprehension of violent criminals or the acceptability of the death penalty, but they're also not going to ask in childlike wonder if you're 'a good guy' or breeze past the question of killing their superpowered evil father.

Dresden returns to the idling cab and asks to be taken to a payphone.

Then I closed my eyes and struggled to think. It was hard, through all the pain I felt. Maybe I'm stupid or something, but I hate to see people like Monica, like little Jenny, hurting like that.

Bruh, I don't know what the dealio is, but sometimes, like, I have feelings just because other people are having feelings?  Like, someone who isn't even me is in pain, so like, I'm not here for that, bruh, and then I feel bad?  What the heck?  No one else does that, right?  It's just me being stupid and it'll go away?  Bruh.  Bruh.

Dresden thinks about going to Murphy for police support, but concludes that even if she believes him there's too much bureaucracy trying to get a warrant to raid a house in a different jurisdiction on a Sunday.  Going to the Council isn't an option because they're all travelling and thus incommunicado, because apparently there's no wizard version of a text message and despite thousands of years of magical development it's just an inviolable law of nature that people can't be communicated with while moving.  (The lesser-known third corollary of the Heisenberg Principle.)  Not sure why he can't throw a flare into the air for Morgan and just say 'Hey, I know I have a court date tomorrow, but I am 95% sure I've also tracked down an evil wizard selling wizard meth to mundanes, would you get someone to look into that for me if I accede to literally any conditions you demand?'  Like: Dresden's not even taking steps to make sure that someone will go after Victor if Harry fails.  No.  Dresden must do this By Himself Alone Solo With No One Else.

His task is to drop Victor (presumed to be at the lake house for some reason; I guess that's his only ritual spot?) without breaking any Laws of Magic.  Victor, who was untalented and ignorant and easily banished in shadow form just a few chapters ago, is now "as strong a practitioner as I had ever gone up against".  I dunno, Dresden, I bet he doesn't have a bulletproof forcefield like you do.  I feel confident that this is a situation that can be resolved with a smashed window and a blunt instrument.  Or you could go for the quick-draw solution, tap the storm before he has the chance and just pour lightning onto his house, then grab him when he runs for cover.  Or bluff, phone him up and tell him that the cops are about to hit the house on a drug bust.  Victor probably doesn't know how hard you've worked to burn that bridge yet.  'You have until the storm hits to stop this wizard from completing his evil ritual' is the kind of problem that an RPG group could have a field day with.  Have you considered hanging out around gaming shops and grabbing some Call of Cthulhu veterans to be your tacticians?

Dresden realises that he forgot to check the Sells' bathroom for Victor's hair or the like, but "I had the feeling that he wouldn't have been that careless. Anyone who spends time thinking about how to use that sort of thing against people is going to be doubly paranoid that no one have the opportunity to use it against him."  Aren't you supposed to be a magic nerd, Dresden?  Isn't this literally all you think about?  And you can even be bothered to maintain a brushcut?

But then Dresden remembers Chekov's Scorpion, that evil talisman that Monica brought him way back at the beginning of the book, still in his office desk drawer, which he can use to reflect Victor's power easily.  It does finally occur to Dresden to set the cops on Victor as a backup plan, but it turns out that Murphy has already busted into his office with a warrant for his arrest, and she refuses to believe him (over the phone) when he tells her not to go digging in his desk for her own safety.  Murphy, obvs just demands to know what he's hiding and opens the scorpion drawer, followed by screaming and gunshots.

Oh, look.  A cliffhanger where Murphy gets damselled after all.  Joy.

Next week: man save woman from scary insect.

---

*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 46, 47, and 48, in which Lan is voted Sexiest Man of the Age

Fewer than one hundred pages left to go, dear and loyal readers.  Three posts to the end, depending on how much nonsense I just dismiss and whether anything is actually going to happen.  Rally your courage; gird the bits that need girding.  (I didn't know this for ages, but apparently there is a specific girding protocol, shown here.)

The Eye of the World: p. 689--731

Chapter Forty-Six: Fal Dara

We left off last time with Our Plodding Heroes escaping the Black Wind in the Ways, a creation from the Time of Madness or possibly the War of the Shadow which was also called the War of Power.  (I kid you not, that's the explanation we get, with all of those namedrops.)  They have arrived in Shienar, in a frigid spring, and Lan cheerfully tells them it'll be warm when the get to the Blight, mythic land of monsters and eternal war.  They pass by a lot of abandoned farms--Egwene and Nynaeve note that they were recently abandoned, since the windows have light spring curtains hung instead of heavier ones for winter.  Perrin laughs at this because he's the worst, but when glared at he whirls on Mat to say that the abandoned scythe they saw only had a week's rust on it, which should have made it obvious even to him.

There's something spectacularly patronising about the constant implications that the scariest thing a woman can do to a man is glare at him like a miffed governess.

Rand tries again to convince The Girls to run off somewhere safer, and Nynaeve gets a full page of shutting him down, which is nice, apart from a few really stupid lines, such as:

"I have little liking for any Aes Sedai,and this one least of all, I think."

NYNAEVE SHE HAS LITERALLY SAVED YOUR LIFE MULTIPLE TIMES AND IS DRAGGING YOU TO SAVE THE WORLD.  Other Aes Sedai impacts on your life have included 'nothing' and 'actively trying to cause harm to your friends'.  This is nonsensical.

She also throws in calling them "you boys... you men", which thrills or baffles Mat no end.  Egwene decides to take the opportunity to ask Rand if he's upset that she danced with Aram, because Girl Priorities.  Rand flashes back to Min (SPOILER: one of his three future wives) who told him that he and Egwene were not destined to go at it like a sack of weasels, and then that bit is over with no impact on the rest of the scene or other plot relevance except to mind us of a prophecy that we might have forgotten in the intervening five hundred pages.  This book is so long that it includes 'Last time on our show...' within the same book.

They arrive at the fortress town of Fal Dara, where it's forbidden to hide your face for fear of Fades moving in unnoticed.  In the hands of a better author, I'd be interested to see a resolution of a conflict if heroes showed up (like Rand) from a culture that had strict rules about coverage with veils/hoods/scarves.  A resolution that wasn't just 'well, I guess I'll just ignore my religion while I'm here', but found a way to accommodate honoured guests and the needs of security as well.  The guards are hella psyched to see Lan arriving, shouting "Glory to the Builders!" and addressing him as Dai Shan.  (This might just be generic syllables, as it apparently means 'battle lord' in this world, but I think it also could mean 'tall mountain' in Chinese, written 大山?  I am in no way an expert in Chinese, but I suspect neither was Robert Jordan, and he does seem to want Lan to be vaguely Asian-flavoured.  ...Oh my god, but in Japanese it might be translated as 'big beautiful' this is the best thing people.)

Anyway.  The description of the fortress town is pretty vivid, if only descriptions of mundane pretty things were the reason I showed up to this story.  Lan is also called the Golden Crane, because having only one title is a hanging offence in WOTland.  We meet a bunch of the local soldiers, who assure Lan that things are never as bad as they look in spite of heavy raiding, and there's a lot of use of 'formal language', which appears to be vaguely Japanese--it's polysyllabic, unlike Chinese, but heavy on particle usage (ga, no, ni) and the phrase "kiserai ti wansho hei" appears to be a greeting.  (Or not; it's used later like a lament.  What?)  Agelmar, their leader, states instead that the trollocs are massing for a full invasion, cities are falling, they desperately need hope, and they need Lan and Moiraine to help--Moiraine for badass wizardry, Lan because he is "a Diademed Battle Lord of Malkier" and they need him for "the last Ingathering of the Lances".

So, in case we weren't sure, Lan appears to be the Aragorn of the story, heir to ancient titles and leadership but convinced he can and must only follow the humble path of the outlander.  After dinner, he recites a rhymeless verse about beauty and death.

Poetry out of Lan? The man was like an onion; every time Rand thought he knew something about the Warder, he discovered another layer underneath.

(In contrast, ogiers really are more like parfaits, minus the part where everyone likes them.)

The guards arrive to announce that they found a "madman" trying to get in to see Agelmar, who turns out to be the peddler Padan Fain who's been following Our Heroes since the start of the book.  He's really obviously half-possessed (interestingly, the locals believe that the Light protects people who are insane, and might even be the cause of insanity--is this ever expanded upon in later books?) and tries a sort of good-intentions-tempting spiel on Agelmar before Moiraine does the Vulcan nerve pinch and drags him away for questioning.

Chapter Forty-Seven: More Tales of the Wheel

Even the chapter title sounds done.  Book three, chapter twenty-seven: Yet Another Fricking Tale of the Wheel Are You People Satisfied Yet.  We don't get to see the interrogation, just people milling around impatiently.  Filler filler filler... oh, how delightful, Lan's backstory.  He's the son of the last king of Malkier, which makes him "al'Lan Mandragoran, Lord of the Seven Towers, Lord of the Lakes, crownless King of the Malkieri".  Political treacheries and jealousies explain how the last generation of Malkier's rulers obliterated themselves with the help of Cowin Fairheart, secret Darkfriend.  Lan's parents apparently saw nothing fucked up about swearing an oath to fight evil and defend the Malkieri on behalf of their infant son, whom they literally had holding the oath-making sword while he was in his cradle.  They charged off to fight a doomed last stand and Lan was sent off with a mess of loyal bodyguards to be raised as the ultimate warrior.  He is the best of the best of the best, SIR, and the only reason he hasn't rallied an army (as would instantly happen if he flew his Golden Crane banner) is that he doesn't want to lead anyone but himself to their deaths.

TL;DR: Aragorn.  He's literally Aragorn, with the exception that a lot of people just thought Aragorn was a weird loner instead of literally everyone flinging themselves at him in desperate war-puppy adoration.

So Padan Fain has been a Darkfriend for forty years and a special hound of the devil for the last three, homing in ever more closely on Rand al'Thor And His Amazing Friends, with regular vacations to perform unspeakably vile deeds and rituals that bound him more closely to Satan.  Which... I really hope after all that time he had a better plan for this part than 'walk in and get caught', but it doesn't seem like it.  Also, he was the guy following them back in the Ways that Lan declared they had no time to stop and investigate, and the Black Wind inexplicably spared him, probably because he's full of devil juice.  Nothing else actually happens in this chapter except recapping their plans: Moiraine is going to drag the most plot-relevant people she can to the Eye of the World in hopes of defeating the devil through narrative superiority, time is running out because he's starting to be able to project his thoughts into physical form, and no one else can go with them.  Et fucking cetera.

Chapter Forty-Eight: The Blight

More nice scenery as they march to Tarwin's Gap, the pass into the Blight.  So much scenery.  Occasionally I see something really cool and purely visual, like a photo list of abandoned places, and I think "Hey, 33 places, 33 chapters, I wonder if I could write a book on the premise that each major scene occurs in one of these locations?"  I feel sometimes like Robert Jordan did that, except he had six places and eleven thousand chapters so he filled the rest with dream sequences, bland banter, and unexpected capitalisation.

More description of where regiments of soldiers marched and when--these, at least, are of a different descriptive flavour than the parades of interchangeable inns and Inexplicably Identical Innkeepers we've been living with for all these pages.  Of course, references to the last guards left in the fortress, "soldiers and a sprinkling of old men, their wives dead and their grown children making the slow way south" remind us that while individual women are powerful plot-relevant in this series, women as a whole would never be accepted as regular soldiers for an army that desperately needs every fighter it can to hold back the literal legions of Satan.  What are you, some kind of feminist?

The Blight is all wrong, warm for no reason, and the sun is red despite being high in a cloudless sky, which I feel raises a variety of meteorological questions.  Our Heroes are warned not to touch anything--Lan describes, for example, a stick insect with an unspeakable dissolving venom that can only be stopped by severing your bitten limb.  This is a fantasy environment I can get behind--for whatever reason, I have always loved a vile and malicious wilderness.  Bring on your best horrors, Jordan.

We get a quality lake monster (tentacles with hands on the end, giant stingers, good stuff) before they camp for the night, and Moiraine throws a cloaking field around the camp.  Straight up invisible, I tell you no lie.  WHY HAS SHE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE?!  I can think of a few times when invisibility might have been useful, such as their many, many failed stealthy escape attempts.  If said field is stationary, okay, but they've been interrupted in the night way too many times already for this to have not been relevant.  What in the hell.  What have I said about just randomly giving heroes problem-solving magic, Robert Jordan?  Come back from the dead and answer to my blog for these books you wrote twenty-five years ago!

And one more WTF moment to close the chapter: after Egwene talks about everyone going to Tar Valon after this and Rand becoming her Warder (he thinks about how he's deeply in boners with her but Min said they're not fated), they get to sleep, but Rand awakens to find Nynaeve and Lan sitting up together.  Nynaeve wants him bad, apparently, and Lan doesn't think he's good enough or safe enough.  Plus, you know, misogyny:

"Aes Sedai marry as seldom as Wisdoms. Few men can live with so much power in a wife, dimming them by her radiance whether she wishes to or not."

Even the metaphor doesn't work--standing next to something radiant doesn't make you dim, it makes you shine.  The moon is bright because of the sun, not in spite of it.  Fucking patriarchs.

"Some men are strong enough. I know one such. [....] Will you shame me to the point of asking you?"

Wait, it's shameful for a woman to ask a man to marry him?  Since when?  Why?  Aes Sedai and Wisdoms and queens regnant and Daughter-Heirs--shouldn't this culture be brimful with the idea that women take leadership, take initiative, make decisions?  Why should it be a mark of shame for a woman to decide she wants this guy instead of having to sit there waiting for him to approach her?

And, quite apart from the philosophical questions: what the fuck Nynaeve why are you asking Lan to marry you since when do you care about him at all you have nothing in common and he's oath-bound to a woman you claim to hate--ohhhhhh.  She figures Lan and Moiraine are a thing and she wants in on some threesomes.  It all becomes clear.

The chapter ends there, because the charge towards the climactic semi-conclusion is obviously the right time to slow down for regular romantic subplot speed bumps.

NEXT TIME: In a desperate rush to cram a few more Tolkien ripoffs into this book, Robert Jordan just straight-up copies Treebeard.

The Eye of the World, chapters 28, 29, and 30, in which I am the least disappointed I've ever been

At some point I apparently stopped doing content notes, on the basis that most of the stuff being covered no longer seemed half as startling and triggery as Ender's Game got, but this week it's back with a vengeance because oh my god Perrin that had better have been Satan's idea and not yours.

(Content note: misogyny, discussed murder-suicide.  Fun content: candids of Moiraine and Elyas.)

The Eye of the World: p. 414--440

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Footprints in Air

We catch up with Nynaeve and her amazing pals as they also arrive at Whitebridge, and they have experienced zero change in party dynamic over their many days of travel since Shadar Logoth.  I mean, if things don't even happen on page I can't really expect them to start acting like real people off-page, can I?  She still fumes at Moiraine all day while Moiraine stays perfectly calm and says they're going to Tar Valon once they find the boys.  The only new addition to this is that Nynaeve protests a little too much inside her own head about how she totally doesn't have a boner for Lan.  Nynaeve is made of self-repression and indignation.

They arrive at Whitebridge and a bunch of homes have been burnt to the ground.  Oh no, are our heroes oh screw it if Jordan can't be bothered to create tension I'm not doing it for him.

In the next moment [Moiraine] was down off Aldieb and speaking to townsfolk. She did not ask questions; she gave sympathy, and to Nynaeve's surprise it appeared genuine. People who shied away from Lan, ready to hurry from any stranger, stopped to speak with Moiraine. They appeared startled themselves at what they were doing, but they opened up, after a fashion, under Moiraine's clear gaze and soothing voice.

So at first this seems like yet another redundant 'Moiraine is actually nice and Nynaeve should trust her' moment, but the bit about people startling themselves suggests that Moiraine is in fact using Old Jedi Mind Tricks on these folks who've just had their houses burn down.  From a narrative standpoint, I fully approve--morally, I think that's really inappropriate, but the Moiraine who steamrolls other people because she's a fricking wizard and she has things to do is the best Moiraine.  Give me all your dangerously intent wizard ladies.  She's the most compelling character we've met.

Moiraine [pictured without her magic soothing glamour].

So most people lie in spite of the glamour, and others have a host of useless rumours, but the gist of it is that folks (including a gleeman) showed up by boat, there was evil magic trouble, and the boat left again just before the mob arrived.  Nynaeve wonders aloud if this was Rand and company, because she is not Moiraine and therefore she must be wrong (they did not leave by boat).  They eat at the same inn as Rand, and Moiraine does some psychometry to confirm they were there recently, while Lan sniffs around and announces there was a Fade as well.  Nynaeve, showing again why she's actually a better person than everyone else, asks what Moiraine intends to do for Egwene, whom she never mentions in spite of Egwene supposedly being a potential superwizard, and Moiraine basically says "Oh, yeah, her too, totally, right, like totally, but shit happens, you know?"

And... oh, that's the end of this chapter.  It gave us another view of the White Bridge, and a recap of what happened last chapter, but with fewer details.  How extraordinarily unnecessary.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Eyes Without Pity

Back with Elyas, Perrin, and Egwene, they're making double-time across the grasslands, and Elyas is trying harder to cover the signs of their camps, but...

The fires he made were small, and always hidden in a pit carefully dug where he had cut away a plug of sod. As soon as their meal was prepared, he buried the coals and replaced the plug. Before they set out again in the gray false dawn, he went over the campsite inch by inch to make sure there was no sign that anyone had ever been there. He even righted overturned rocks and straightened bent-down weeds.

Are you... are you serious?  Bent-down weeds?  Fact one: these are explicitly described as grasslands; you can't possibly erase all the footprints created by your teenage tagalongs.  Fact two: weeds can bend on their own.  Fact three: if you cut a fricking hole in the ground, anyone who's paying enough attention to notice a bent weed is going to notice the carved earth, even if you did slap it back in place like a peaty jigsaw puzzle afterwards.

We don't know what Elyas is afraid of chasing them--not trollocs, we're assured, partly because Perrin knows the wolves can't small trollocs.  He throws this in casually, despite having sworn last chapter that he would never let the wolves inside his head again.  I'm starting to feel like that last chapter was supposed to get edited out, since the dream-raven-in-the-eye and his vow against wolf telepathy have apparently been ditched this fast.

They just barely manage to (probably) not get spotted by a flock of a hundred ravens and Elyas mutters about places they can hide, noting that ravens roost at night.  Apparently the devil can control ravens' every move (we saw the flock do an abrupt about-face) but can't order them to stay up past their bedtime.  They do, however, demonstrate the scientific fact that ravens have the same jaw structure as piranhas, as they flock a fox and devour it in moments.  A raven spots Perrin, but Egwene takes it down with her sling, which apparently means that it can't report back to the rest of the flock.  I do not in any way understand the rules of the devil's raven telepathy.  It can't be one-way only, or they'd make terrible scouts, but apparently it can't give the flock orders based on what that one raven spotted?

Perrin catches the wolves' thoughts as they skirmish with the flock, but the ravens give up after just injuring them a bit.  Perrin reveals this, and apparently this is the first confirmation Egwene's had that he's got wolf telepathy, so there's all the usual 'oh no now she'll think I'm terrible and gross because I have innate magic' business, apparently forgetting that Egwene has already been marked as Future Best Wizard by Moiraine.  They move on without addressing it.  When Perrin calculates they have an hour before the second flock catches up with them, he decides not to tell Egwene, but he does wonder to himself if he'll "have the courage" to mercifully kill her first rather than let the ravens do it.

Perrin, you monstrous tool.

I mean can we just.  He doesn't ask Elyas if there's any hope of finding shelter before then (their hiding spot is two hours off, apparently), or if he's got any other solutions or defences.  He doesn't ask Egwene if she'd prefer a clean death if they know they're doomed, or if she'd rather fight to the last the way he apparently intends to do.  He doesn't ask himself if he could stomach offing himself before the ravens get him either.  This isn't a matter of grim mercy, this is a matter of a man seeing a woman as a subordinate object and himself as the one who has the responsibility to prevent her from being despoiled.  Does anyone think there's the slightest chance Perrin would be puzzling this murder-suicide business over if he were with Rand or Mat?  He sees Egwene as his lesser, incapable of bearing burdens or making difficult decisions, and above even her own life needing to be preserved in her pretty naive state.  This is a thing that happens in the real world and it's horrifying.  I can't actually think of an adequate obscenity or profanity to sum this up with.

(But he cries while he contemplates this, so we know he's really just scared and sensitive.  Retch.)

And then, conveniently enough, they walk into the safe zone ahead of schedule: a 'stedding',a haven of legend, where the One Power doesn't work and no one can touch the True Source and there's a strict limit on the use of Significant Capitalisation.  It's actually nicer inside the stedding, more green grass shoots, presumably because the devil doesn't have as much power to poison the land within.

Which... huh.

Remind me again why these places aren't incredibly important settlements where people build fortresses the forces of magic can never touch?  Would a stedding not be an ideal community spot to keep all your male wizards in to prevent them from getting magic madness?

Anyway.

They get to a cold pool and drink deeply and Perrin decides to never talk to Egwene ever about his mercy-kill plan, though a voice (guessing the devil) in his head tells him he would have done it.  There's actually some further taunting about that, about how easy or difficult it would have been, but none of it addresses the underlying misogyny that riled me in the first place, so whatever.

We get another history lesson, about how this place was going to be the capital of the empire of Artur Hawkwing, beloved king of legend who ruled most of the world under the law of Pax "I Have A Sword And No Conscience", i.e., criminals and tyrants got shanked right quick.  He also hated magic, and thus no one could heal him of his final sickness/poisoning, and then his whole peaceful world crumbled as everyone fought for the throne.  And apparently in the thousands of years that followed, no one else who hates magic ever decided to build here either.  So that question remains unanswered.

Chapter Thirty: Children of Shadow

I wasn't planning to start on another chapter, but I scoped out the first couple of pages and PRAISE ERU ILUVATAR Elyas calls out the misogynistic stupidity of Perrin's mercy-kill plan.

"You were ready to kill her because you despise her, always dragging her feet, holding you back with her womanish ways. [....] If she had to choose her way of dying, which do you think she'd pick? [....] I know which I'd take."

"I don't have any right to choose for her."

Elyas [pictured after a shave and a mani/pedi].

I am honestly blown away that this was addressed at all, and not just a throwaway moment to show that Perrin was taking the situation seriously.  I'm filled with so much less hatred right now.  My venom glands aren't even a little swollen.

Of course, these are Manly Men, so when Perrin is filled with disgust just looking at his axe, thinking about throwing it away, Elyas tells him to keep it, use it against the people who actually need an axe in the face, and only throw it away if he ever feels like he is okay with casual murder.  Can't get too soft.

[Edit: The more I thought about this after posting, the more I realised that, in the complete context of the scene, it's much more likely that Elyas is being ironic when he says 'you were ready to kill her because you hate her' in order to shake Perrin into realising that he doesn't hate Egwene and his mercy-kill plan was a completely blameless scheme of generosity, not a terrible thing at all.  BUT I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT RIGHT NOW so I'm going to allow the above to stand.]

And that is where I will leave it for this week, because then we get into more stuff with how nowhere is safe and Jordan has the gall to kill off Hopper the bouncy wolf.  Note to my readers: if you ever feature a bouncy wolf in your stories, don't kill it off.  Make it the backup protagonist.

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!

50 Shades Darker- Chapter 1

Trigger Warnings: Sexual harassment, sexual harassment in the workplace, appropriation, domestic violence, borderline stalking, Grey being, well, Grey.

Alright. I've had a month to rest and recover, it is time to sit down and start reading this tripe again. I don't know what my innocent liver has done to deserve it, but apparently something horrible. I want to point out that in the foreword, we get this:

E L James is currently working on the sequel to Fifty Shades Darker and a new romantic thriller with a supernatural twist.


That's right boys and girls. We're being told before we even start "Hey, uh, just so you know, there's AT LEAST one more of these things". Well, thank you for trying to warn me off, book. I appreciate your efforts. Although I do have one question. Why does the book keep calling it's self a "romantic thriller with a supernatural twist"? What about these books is supernatural? Is Grey really a warlock? WAS I RIGHT?! Is BDSM supposed to be witchcraft or something now? So many questions, so few answers...

Also, I had heard that EL James wouldn't allow her work to be edited, but there is a note in the foreword thanking her editor, telling her she rocks. I WILL BE THE JUDGE OF THAT, JAMES!

We left off at the end of part 1 (which was identified as such) with Ana doing the smartest thing she's ever done and RUNNING THE FUCK AWAY from the sociopath that is Grey. She immediately began to angst over it and lament her HORRIBLE CHOICE and wondered why she couldn't just compromise all of her wants and needs to be with him. 50 Shades Deeper Darker starts off with a charming scene of some of the most generic domestic abuse ever. The scene is meant to be from Grey's view, but seriously, so very generic and bland.

He hits Mommy with a belt. Get up! Get up! You are one fucked-up bitch. You are one fucked-up bitch. You are one fucked-up bitch. You are one fucked-up bitch. You are one fucked-up bitch. You are one fucked-up bitch.
Mommy makes a sobbing noise. Stop. Please stop. Mommy doesn’t scream. Mommy curls up small.

And then the faceless villain goes and calls Grey a little shit and we're left to believe that he gets the shit kicked out of him too, but he wakes up from his flash back dream first.  Now, domestic violence is not okay and not something to be taken lightly, and that is half the reason I take issue with the way EL James uses it in her writing. It only exists as angst for our sexy hero. Grey was "rescued" by getting adopted by his wealthy family, I doubt we'll ever find out what his Mother went through, and she's simply been described as a "crack whore" to us. Her abuse has not earned her the right to be humanized, apparently. See? Actual issues here. However since I am a terrible human being, what is really bothering me about this passage is how badly it is written.

We get the kinda creepy first person narrative of a little kid riddled with lots of "Mommy". Our faceless villain wears boots, smokes, and smells like alcohol and just repeats "you are one fucked-up bitch." over and over again. I'm just saying, I think she could do better. This isn't horrific to me. This just looks like something meant for an after school special. The abuser is cartoonish, boots, belt, smokes, and drinks*. There are no other descriptions besides that. The mother doesn't get a face or voice, either. The child watching hardly even gets a voice. I feel there would be a lot more internal terror, or screaming, or more description going into the sobbing maybe? Give me something to work with here.

We then jump to chapter one. Which takes place THREE WHOLE DAYS after Ana and Grey had split. EL James really hates time jumps. Ana tells us about how things have been a haze and she's started hew new job and a special mention to Mr. Jack Hyde, her new boss. Jack Hyde. Why not just name him Jekyll and get it over with? He's described in fairly warm terms, sparkling eyes and such, and we're treated to a super short bit of dialog between the two of them.

“Excellent work, Ana. I think we’re going to make a great team.”
Somehow, I manage to curl my lips upward in a semblance of a smile.
“I’ll be off, if that’s okay with you,” I murmur.
“Of course, it’s five thirty. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Goodnight, Jack.”
“Goodnight, Ana.”

That's it. He creeps on her a little bit, leaning on her desk, and Ana gives wooden and hollow responses. However he's still into it because... she has nice tits? I guess? I am a big fan of "show, don't tell" and "try not to write too much filler" but character establishing isn't filler, it's important. So is setting a scene. I can only gleam as much as I can about Jack because he was painfully obviously named as our next antagonist, and because EVERY MAN in this book wants into Ana's pants. Glad to see getting her first book published didn't go to EL James head and she remained as ham-fisted as ever!

We then get treated to Ana being an angst-zombie, barely human over HOW AWFUL LIFE WITHOUT GREY IS! I just- YOU DATED FOR LESS THAN TWO MONTHS AND LEFT BECAUSE YOU REALIZED IT COULDN'T WORK! Yes, you get to be sad and watch bad movies and eat ice cream and cry, but angst zombie? Really?

Grey, being super respectful of the fact that leaving was obviously painful for Ana, sends her flowers with the following note:

Congratulations on your first day at work.
I hope it went well.
And thank you for the glider. That was very thoughtful.
It has pride of place on my desk.
Christian

The glider, for those of you coming in new, was something Ana had bought for him after their last Big Romantic Date because he brought her gliding, and she booby trapped his apartment by leaving it on his bed after they broke up.  So Ana reads this note, feels like shit, but tells herself he had nothing to do with it, it was all his assistant. What? Why the fuck would his assistant be sending flowers to his ex-girlfriend without getting pretty specific instructions to do so? He OBVIOUSLY had something to do with it. Ana, being the paragon of good judgement, dutifully plops the flowers into a vase where they can sit there and remind her of WHAT SHE HAS LOST OF WOE IS HER!

And so a pattern develops: wake, work, cry, sleep. Well, try to sleep. I can’t even escape him in my dreams. Gray burning eyes, his lost look, his hair burnished and bright all haunt me. And the music . . . so much music—I cannot bear to hear any music. I am careful to avoid it at all costs. Even the jingles in commercials make me shudder.
I have spoken to no one, not even my mother or Ray. I don’t have the capacity for idle talk now. No, I want none of it. I have become my own island state. A ravaged, war-torn land where nothing grows and the horizons are bleak. Yes, that’s me. I can interact impersonally at work, but that’s it. If I talk to Mom, I know I will break even further—and I have nothing left to break.

I think the real reason Ana is avoiding everyone isn't because she can't stand the thought of opening up- but because she knows they will tell her she's being a melodramatic git. Yes, break ups suck, yes, you can be sad, but Ana isn't eating, she isn't sleeping, she is engaging in dangerous and destructive behaviors because she split with a dude she had been seeing for about two months because it wasn't working out. They left on civil and friendly terms! She should be more worried that he keeps contacting her even though she asked him not to. She knows he has stalker tenancies! Augh.

From here we get to jump back to Ana at work, being annoyed at her boss hovering and asking personal questions. I would usually assume these are "trying to get to know you" type questions but we don't see any of them, and I'm sure he's going to turn into a big sexually harassing monster in the near future, so they probably ARE awkward and personal, but EL James doesn't tell us what they are, just tells us that he asks them. THE WRITING IS SO BAD IT BURNS!

Ana then gets an e-mail from Grey offering her a ride To Dartmouth. From Seattle. Four hours (if memory serves). To her friend's art show that she had invited him to when they were still together. Her friend who he refuses to even acknowledge by name he hates his guts so much. THIS SEEMS PERFECTLY REASONABLE! Ana then has a moment to realize that her phone was sent to forward all of her calls and messages to the Blackberry Grey had given her.

...

Why were you paying for two phones rather then changing the number of the blackberry?

Ana cries in the bathroom and the narrative gets kind of confusing, talking about crying herself to sleep and reminding herself that she's at work. She laments over if she can see Grey,  and if she can stand it. Apparently there are no other options for getting between Seattle and Portland? Like maybe a bus, or a train. Because university towns never have those sorts of things to the nearest big city. Naturally she'll accept Grey's offer, but that's because Ana is a big stupid head.

So the book goes on with Ana dwelling on Grey and his Dark Tragic Past TM and her boss being SUPER creepy until finally we're in the car. I'm actually going to pause her to talk about her boss.

Jack keeps saying things like "You're doing such a good job!" and hovering and opening doors and suggesting they should get drinks to "celebrate her awesome first week" how the hell could she be having an awesome first week when she is apparently living on lattes and angst? Any reactions that get described to us are wooden and forced on her part. So, he is being super duper attentive to his new assistant. His young, pretty, new assistant. Maybe he sees shes sort of... down, and just wants to cheer her up, but I'm not going to bite. Consider this the "sexual harassment" part of my rant because seriously, fuck you EL James. I will be SHOCKED if his behavior is treated as anything more than a minor annoyance, and that will confirm to me that EL James has been lucky enough to never been sexually harassed in the workplace herself.

I don't think people should stay away from writing about things they've never experienced first hand. I've yet to torturer a person to death, or have an arm ripped from its socket, but I'll write about those things. I do think, however, when you start getting into things like domestic abuse and sexual harassment in the workplace, you need to consider how you handle it. They're real issues.  Issues many women (and men) have had to deal with. Have been helpless against it because you still need to work and so what if the owner sometimes suggests you should straddle a broom handle and cram it on in there for his amusement**? It pays better than your other options. You normalize it, too, if you're helpless to do anything about it. "It isn't so bad" "they're just kidding around" I'm sure you're all at least on paper familiar with the things a person would tell themselves. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe EL James isn't appropriating real, traumatic issues simply because she wants to make her plot a little more edgy and they'll be treated as real issues, but I will be very, very surprised if she does. Hell, I'll mail the woman a card and a cookie if she handles sexual harassment in the work place like a real issue and not some fantasy land sort of thing that is all magiced away by Grey. [/end tangent]

Ana for reasons I still don't understand gets in the car. Grey is all sexy and good smelling and he immediately starts reaming her on not eating because it looks like she lost 5 pounds, and Ana commented that her dress is looser than before, too. ... IT HAS BEEN 5 DAYS! If she has been eating as little as she says she is, she would have passed out and been hospitalized by now. Assuming she is eating more than that, is 5 pounds in 5 days even possible? Or enough time to have a such a drastic change that your clothes would fit differently and people would be able to tell by looking at you? He then goes on to get growly that her boss waves at her because how DARE she know other men!

“Well? Your last meal?”
“Christian, that really is none of your concern,” I murmur, feeling extraordinarily brave.
“Whatever you do concerns me. Tell me.”
No, it doesn’t. I groan in frustration, rolling my eyes heavenward, and Christian narrows his eyes. And for the first time in a long time, I want to laugh.

Anything she does is a concern to him. Switch shampoos? He wants to know. Paint her toenails blue? How DARE she not send him a text! I get that this is supposed to be part of his appeal. He's super into anything she thinks/does/wants to do. I get the appeal of the fantasy of someone who is interested in anything you might have to say. Sometimes I start talking about writing and The Boy's eyes just sort of glaze over- but despite the fact that sometimes it's frustrating, usually I'm pretty grateful that there are parts of my life that are just mine. He cares because they affect me, but he's pretty content to let me handle it myself unless asked to help. I LIKE having that separate space from him, otherwise it would get boring. He has his shit, I have mine, it keeps us both our own people and breathing room instead of turning into some sort of horrible blob monster. Is the idea of a guy who wants to know EVERYTHING YOU DO INCLUDING WHAT YOU ATE really that appealing to other women?

Now, to touch on the other problematic part here. The eye rolling. In the last book Ana got her first spanking, an experience that read as really rape-ish and uncomfortable to me, over eye rolling. It turned into an ongoing issue, she wasn't allowed to be exasperated ever. Or at least she wasn't allowed to show she was exasperated ever. That is why it is driving them both to giggles because IT'S SO FUNNY THAT HE HIT HER OVER ROLLING HER EYES!

“Ana, please. We need to talk.”
I’m going to cry. No. “Christian, I . . . please . . . I’ve cried so much,” I whisper, trying to keep my emotions in check
“Oh, baby, no.” He tugs my hand, and before I know it I’m on his lap. He has his arms around me, and his nose is in my hair. “I’ve missed you so much, Anastasia,” he breathes.
I want to struggle out of his hold, to maintain some distance, but his arms are wrapped around me. He’s pressing me to his chest. I melt. Oh, this is where I want to be.

BOUNDARIES MAN! BOUNDARIES! This is not an okay way to handle your ex. He doesn't hug her, he doesn't go for an arm around the shoulders or something more... subdued. He pulls her into his lap. And holds her there with enough force that she doesn't think it's worth it to even try and escape. He knows he just has to wait and his black magic glamor*** will kick in and she'll be a puddle in his crotch.

...

That sounded way better in my head.

And, uh, they seem to be back together now? He's holding her hand like it ain't no thang as they go up to the helicopter because duh. In the elevator to said helicopter, the boners start.

He glances down at me, gray eyes alive, and it’s there in the air between us, that electricity. It’s palpable. I can almost taste it, pulsing between us, drawing us together.
“Oh my,” I gasp as I bask briefly in the intensity of this visceral, primal attraction.
“I feel it, too,” he says, his eyes clouded and

 What. If I was just standing in an elevator with some chick I wanted to bone and she let out a twitterpated "Oh my!" out of fucking nowhere my response, even if I was full on lady-bonering right back at her, wouldn't be "Hellz yeah I feel this too" it would be "What the hell did you just see? Is there a monster in the elevator? Damn it. I thought I had that skink infestation taken care of!". What I'm trying to say if I'm bad at being sexy. So they get out of the elevator and Grey is still being super snuggly with Ana and she isn't stopping him. As they get into the helicopter and start to head out, he gleefully points things out. Such as the Space Needle.

“I’ll take you—we can eat there.”
What? “Christian, we broke up.”
“I know. I can still take you there and feed you.” He glares at me.

Three lines, and so much to unpack. Grey is clearly not processing that they split, or sees it as a temporary thing even though Ana was pretty clear when she left. He still sends her flowers, e-mails her, takes her for helicopter rides, and at no point stop and thinks what she might want. He thinks that Ana didn't mean it and still wants him. He, unfortunately, isn't wrong, but it shows a very blatant disrespect for her choices, boundaries, and wants. Ana has been so stunned and so swept up in this that she hasn't been able to remind him that they are not together until he starts to blatantly pretend their not. When she tried to reassert her boundaries, what's his response? To be snippy, ignore them, and glare. SO DREAMY YOU GUYS!

“What’s your boss like?”
“Oh, he’s okay.” How can I tell Christian that Jack makes me uncomfortable? Christian turns and gazes at me.

Okay, so bets on the whole "Ana's boss is going to be sexually harassing her" thing being resolved in a way that involves Grey financially ruining him?


“Good thing for you this is only three floors, in those heels,” he mutters to me in disapproval.
No kidding.
“Don’t you like the boots?”
“I like them very much, Anastasia.” His gaze darkens and I think he might say something else, but he stops. “Come. We’ll take it slow. I don’t want you falling and breaking your neck.”

Because Ana can't take seven steps without falling over. Actually, that isn't true. Ana is based on Bella Swan, from the Twilight series, who actually can't take seven steps without risking horrible injury. It's meant to make her cute and give lots of strong beefy men an excuse to heave her around. Ana has in text managed to hurt herself... I think once? There's a lot of talk about how she's sooo clumsy but it's really starting to feel like an informed trait here. Which makes it all the more annoying that she apparently can't be trusted to walk down a few flights of stairs in a pair of heels. I am a klutz. The fact that I work in kitchens and haven't died is miraculous. I am constantly covered in cuts and bruises, and I can still walk in heels just fine. Is expecting characters to be consistent and realistic enough that I can suspend my disbelief really so much to ask?


So Ana and Grey are in the car and there is some awkward "I MISS YOU AND WANT YOU BACK BUT WE DON'T HAVE TIME TO TALK ABOUT THIS NOW SO WE'LL TALK ABOUT IT ON THE WAY BACK OH AND EAT SOMETHING YOU RAKE." from Grey.

“Good evening and welcome to José Rodriguez’s show.” A young woman dressed in black with very short brown hair, bright red lipstick, and large hooped earrings greets us. She glances briefly at me, then much longer than is strictly necessary at Christian, then turns back to me, blinking as she blushes.
My brow creases. He’s mine—or was. I try hard not to scowl at her. As her eyes regain their focus, she blinks again.

"HE'S MINE I TELL YOU! MINE! EXCEPT THAT I'M TRYING TO GET RID OF HIM SO MAYBE YOU COULD DO ME A SOLID AND MAKE OUT TO CONFIRM THAT THIS IS A BAD MOVE ON MY PART?"


The woman in question somehow knows Ana by name- I'll assume there's a portrait of her up at the gallery somewhere, and Grey is shuffled off so Ana and Jose can have a scene where he's in a suit and Ana gets teary because HE'S HER ONLY FRIEND YOU GUYS! Well, while Kate is gone. Her only friend who she's made no effort to contact for over a week at least. He gives her a bear hug and we get this.

“Hey are you okay? You look, well, odd. Dios mio, have you lost weight?”

 Honestly, is he wearing a sombrero, too? Has Ana over FIVE DAYS really managed to loose that much weight? I get that she was skeletal before but seriously how is this even possible?

“Christian brought me,” I say, suddenly apprehensive.
“Oh.” José’s face falls and he releases me. “Where is he?” His expression darkens.
“Over there, fetching drinks.” I nod in Christian’s direction and see he’s exchanging pleasantries with someone waiting in line. Christian glances up when I look his way and our eyes lock. And in that brief moment, I’m paralyzed, staring at the impossibly handsome man who gazes at me with some unfathomable emotion. His gaze hot, burning into me, and we’re lost for a moment staring at each other.

Well aren't they just SO DESTINED to be together? Just gawking at each other like a pair of turkeys. Ana then has a moment of "OH MY GOSH HE WANTS ME! THIS PERFECT MAN WANTS ME! STILL!" and I think I just face palmed so hard I gave myself a black eye. Jose tries to give Ana a warning about something (the inevitable portrait) but is dragged off for an interview or something of the sort. Ana at this point starts to actually look at the photographs around her. Mostly landscapes, which is his thing and was mentioned before. They're apparently pretty good?

So the random photographer spots the SUPER FAMOUS AND ENIGMATIC Grey and asks for a picture. Grey agrees and drags Ana into it- this is a big deal because he has now twice been photographed with her for some press thing, and when Ana internet stalked him before there were no pictures of him with women. We then- ugh. I'm just going to throw it up here, it hurts too much to try and paraphrase.

"...No, I don’t do dates, Anastasia—only with you. But you know that.” His eyes burn with sincerity.
“So you never took your”—I glance around nervously to check no one can overhear us—“subs out?”
“Sometimes. Not on dates. Shopping, you know.” He shrugs, his eyes not leaving mine.
Oh, so just in the playroom—his Red Room of Pain and his apartment. I don’t know what to feel about that.
“Just you, Anastasia,” he whispers.


BECAUSE ANASTASIA ROSE STEELE IS THE MOST SPECIAL AND UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE TO EVER GET STUCK UP SOMEONES NOSE! GRLEHIAH. Again, I get the fantasy here, powerful, sexy man who gives a shit about what you had for breakfast is treating you special and differently because he thinks you're special and different. Not like those Other Women who will fawn over him at every opportunity, no, you're a real person. My issue comes with the hamfisting presentation of it. Show, don't tell. Isn't that the first rule of writing?

So Ana finds the portraits of herself.

We turn the corner, and I can see why I’ve been getting strange looks. Hanging on the far wall are seven huge portraits—of me.
I stare blankly at them, stupefied, the blood draining from my face. Me: pouting, laughing, scowling, serious, amused. All in super close up, all in black and white.
Holy crap! I remember José messing with the camera on a couple of occasions when he was visiting and when I’d been out with him as driver and photographer’s assistant. He took snapshots, or so I thought. Not these invasive candids.

So, I get that he was about to warn her about this before getting dragged off but shouldn't he have asked if it was okay to use pictures of her first? I can't imagine Ana would have agreed to it. She didn't even realize he was taking the pictures. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an "ART!" sort of thing or "invasive, creepy, and way too personal" sort of thing. Discuss in the comments. Grey naturally starts to get mad that another man has noticed his perfect special snowflake (though really, Jose was on the scene first and had noticed her before Grey came into the picture, so it's more that he wasn't the first to notice his super duper special unicorn of a girlfriend).

“Did you just buy one of these?”
“One of these?” he snorts, not taking his eyes off them.
“You bought more than one?”
He rolls his eyes. “I bought them all, Anastasia. I don’t want some stranger ogling you in the privacy of their home.”

I didn't think I need to bust the pineapple out this soon. I hope she throws her wine on the portraits, sets them on fire, and skips out merrily to go bone Jose for hours on end. I don't even like Jose as a character, he basically tries to date-rape Ana in the first book, but it would piss off Grey and therefore I support it. And then the banter starts. The "OH WE'RE SO CUTE AND WITTY LOLOLOL" banter that has plagued the last book. Heavy with "I want you to slickle my peeny with your smart mouth"**** subtext. JUST STICK IT IN HER BUTT ALREADY!

“You look very relaxed in these photographs, Anastasia. I don’t see you like that very often.”
What? Whoa! Change of subject—talk about non sequitur—from playful to serious.
I flush and glance down at my fingers. He tilts my head back, and I inhale sharply at the contact with his long fingers.
“I want you that relaxed with me,” he whispers. All trace of humor has gone.
Deep inside me that joy stirs again. But how can this be? We have issues.
“You have to stop intimidating me if you want that,” I snap.
“You have to learn to communicate and tell me how you feel,” he snaps back, eyes blazing.

YES IT IS HER FAULT FOR NOT COMMUNICATING NOT YOU DELIBERATELY INTIMIDATING HER AND POLICING HER THOUGHTS MOODS AND ACTIONS!

Ana's magical appearing and disappearing backbone decides it's time to make an appearance at this point.

“Christian, you wanted me as a submissive. That’s where the problem lies. It’s in the definition of a submissive—you e-mailed it to me once.” I pause, trying to recall the wording. “I think the synonyms were, and I quote, ‘compliant, pliant, amenable, passive, tractable, resigned, patient, docile, tame, subdued.’ I wasn’t supposed to look at you. Not talk to you unless you gave me permission to do so. What do you expect?” I hiss at him.
He blinks, and his frown deepens as I continue.
“It’s very confusing being with you. You don’t want me to defy you, but then you like my ‘smart mouth.’ You want obedience, except when you don’t, so you can punish me. I just don’t know which way is up when I’m with you.”

If this was how Ana usually acted, I would adore her character. Here she's articulate, concise, and stands up for herself all while telling Grey off for being a d-bag, and she does so without resorting to screaming of]r name calling. Can I get a fuck and yes? I think this is how EL James sees Ana, but this is not the Ana we see normally. Only when the plot demands it. It's sort of like her Ultimate Form. Grey agrees that she made a good point and then, since he has lost control of the conversation, gets awful again.

“Come, let’s go eat.”
“We’ve only been here for half an hour.”
“You’ve seen the photos; you’ve spoken to the boy.”
“His name is José.”
“You’ve spoken to José—the man who, the last time I met him, was trying to push his tongue into your reluctant mouth while you were drunk and ill,” he snarls.
“He’s never hit me,” I spit at him.
Christian scowls at me, fury emanating from every pore. “That’s a low blow, Anastasia,” he whispers menacingly.

AND POINTING OUT HOW ONE OF HER BEST FRIENDS TRIED TO MAKE OUT WITH HER ISN'T?! A half hour for one of her best friends openings. Grey had been invited by Ana initially, and it asked to bring her all on his own. Now he's dictating it's time to leave because she stood up for herself and he wants to assert his power. He brought her there, he gets to decide when they leave. Now, I do think he has a point in his reasoning for disliking Jose, however it's Ana's choice, and he should respect that she and Jose talked about it and worked it out. He's allowed to still dislike him, and frankly should, I still do, but he should learn to reign that shit in. If I believed for a second the reason he disliked Jose was because of the fact that he practically tried to molest Ana, I'd be more on side, but I think it's that Jose has feelings for Ana, and that is Unacceptable to Grey.

Ana has flown hours to go and see her friend and his opening, and wanted to be there badly enough to accept the ride from her ex she was still torn up over. This means nothing to him, and she tries again.

“Please, can we stay longer?”
“No. Go. Now. Say good-bye.”

What a dream boat, amIrite ladies?

So Ana goes over to say bye to Jose, who notices that she seems PISSED and she tries to downplay it. He accepts this and is all affectionate bear hugs and spinning. Grey is having NONE OF THAT and stalks over to stake his claim on Ana as HIS even though they're not together.

He looks quickly up and down the street then heads left and suddenly sweeps me into a side alley, abruptly pushing me up against a wall. He grabs my face between his hands, forcing me to look up into his ardent determined eyes.
I gasp, and his mouth swoops down. He’s kissing me, violently. Briefly our teeth clash, then his tongue is in my mouth.

Alright, so, I'm not the only one who thinks this is TERRIFYING right? He just dragged her into a dark alleyway and is violently ramming his tongue in her mouth. Ana isn't given a chance to consent, or to protest. Now, naturally, she wants it because Grey is a fucking warlock and that's part of his magic, but this is an insipid thing to sell as part of a fantasy. A man so jealous that he's moved to violence is supposed to be a good thing? And lets be honest, this is violence. He's grabs Ana, unaware, and pulls her into a dark alleyway so he can have his way with her despite the fact that she's been vocal about being upset with him and confused and not dating him. It's one thing for your boyfriend to decide it is spontaneous sketchy alleyway sex time, it is another for your ex to.

So they make out, naturally, and it's a super intense emotional make out that leaves them both winded. Kay, show of hands, who has ever actually been left panting just from making out?

“You. Are. Mine,” he snarls, emphasizing each word. He pushes away from me and bends, hands on his knees as if he’s run a marathon. “For the love of God, Ana.”

You. Don't. Own. People. And she's your ex. She has decided that is actually not the truth at all! See? Terrifying stalker.

His tactics have worked, though, and Ana, blinded by her lady-boner, apologizes. See what I mean about the vanishing back bone?

“I’m sorry,” I whisper once my breath has returned.
“You should be. I know what you were doing. Do you want the photographer, Anastasia? He obviously has feelings for you.”

So not only is it not enough that he has made Ana apologize for having a dude friend who hugs her, he now has to guilt her over it. How dare Ana not anticipate the needs and feelings of every other man and just lead him on like that! How dare she! It isn't like she has explicitly told Jose that she only sees him as a friend or anything! Clearly any touching means you want his dick!


This is all wrapped up with a charming declaration from Grey that he's usually so STOIC AND IN CONTROL and with Ana he just fucking looses it! It is her fault that he's being such a wanker! Shouldn't that be a reason to stay the fuck away? Just saying, if someone made me loose my head, and broke up with me, I'd take that as a sign to get my shit back under control and move on, not pursue them harder. Then they're off to eat.

And that's the end of chapter 1! I'm torn on how I feel about this one. On one hand, I was expecting the first few chapters to be slow and draggy since Ana would just be sitting in a corner in a catatonic state. Maybe there could have been a time jump, I sort of expected that, too. Instead we get dropped right back where we left off, treated to an over dose of angst followed up with Grey being absolutely terrifying. I just- what the fuck? WHY is this popular? Why do women looove him? He's terrifying!

Well, that's all from me until next week. I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments, as comments encourage me to keep reading this God awful book!

*Not that there is anything wrong with wearing boots, smoking, or drinking.
**True story, happened to me. Not the worst thing he did. His brother-in-law was worse than he was on top of that.
***For new readers, this isn't in text explicitly, but it's the only way I can make any fucking sense of people's reactions to him.
**** Over eager high-fives to anyone who gets that reference.