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 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.

The Eye of the World, chapters 1 and 2, in which nothing happens

Sorry about missing last week's post; hope you all enjoyed seeing the blogqueen back in action.  I was in the American South, where it's apparently reasonable for train stations to have signs that expressly forbid all weapons "except firearms (with a permit)", which says all that is necessary about that.  On the plus side, I spent some more time with my American friends, makers of the excellent YouStar web series.  (I play EruditeConnoisseur64 and try to keep a straight face.)   So the risk was acceptable.  Everyone was very nice and I met very few huge racists.

Now, back to the Wheel of Time.

(Content: gender essentialism. Fun content: how excited are you about blatant theft from random cultures, languages, and mythologies?  No?  What about Mallory Ortberg?)

The Eye of the World: p. 1--31

Chapter 1: An Empty Road

There's a lot of advice out there about how to start your book: with action, with things happening, with decisions being made, with whatever the real inciting event is.  Famously, fantasy novels are bad at this, spending endless quantities of time meandering about with farm chores and pub crawls to be more like Lord of the Rings before they get around to the plot.  I am unsurprised that EOTW is a great example of the latter.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Nice for them as likes it, I guess.

Our Hero, Rand al'Thor (and his dad) are walking down the Quarry Road that I thought was a river but in fact just ends at the start of a river, feeling uncomfortable in his wet cloak on a blustery day, other hand on his bow in case of wolves.  Summarising the first three pages: wind, trees, foresty, cold, Dad al'Thor is a tough salt-of-the-earth man, Mom al'Thor is long dead (although it's preemptive, I'm still going to call that Fridged Women Tally: 2).  Four pages in, Rand sees a mysterious black rider on a black horse on the road behind them, who has disappeared by the time Rand points him out to dad.  They agree they need to go smoke and booze in a warm house, and dad suggests Rand wants to see Egwene, the mayor's daughter, though Rand silently disagrees because she makes him feel funny in his bathing suit area without even meaning to.

He we hoping his father had not noticed he was afraid when Tam said, "Remember the flame, lad, and the void." 

It was an odd thing Tam had taught him. Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it--fear, hate, anger--until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything. Nobody else in Emond's Field talked that way. But Tam had won the archery competition at Bel Tine every year with his flame and his void.

Now we've got this randomly introduced pseudo-zen thing from Tam, but also an obvious reference to Beltane, so evidence continues to lean towards this story randomly hodgepodging cool things from various cultures however Robert Jordan whims.  Is there an actual reason this farmer dude is a zen archer?  I'm hoping so, but I'm also worried it's going to be terrible.

They arrive in Emond's Field, where the heads of houses are called "goodmen" and "goodwives" and gender roles are enforced by cosmic law.

Whether or not leaves had appeared on the trees, no woman would let Bel Tine come before her spring cleaning was done. [....] On roof after roof the goodman of the house clamebered about, checking the thatch to see if the winter's damage meant calling on old Cenn Buie, the thatcher.

I feel like I'm in the medieval fantasy version of Pepperidge Farm, except that would probably be more like Mallory Ortberg's Letters from Chris Kimball, which are masterpieces of sothothic horror.  Someone named Wit Congar stops the al'Thors to complain about the Wisdom of Emond's Field, Nynaeve, who is apparently a person and chosen by women.  She apparently badly mispredicted the severity of the last winter, and Wit wants the Village Council to overrule the Women's Circle, but he gets called out by his wife Daise, "twice as wide as Wit, a hard-faced woman without an ounce of fat on her", so as we can see when people don't conform to their expected gender positions they are whiners and nags.  The al'Thors book it before Daise notices them, because they are both single men and therefore the women of Emond's Field would like nothing more than to set Tam (and now Rand) with a widowed friend or someone's daughter.  Rand is much too stubborn to allow himself to be set up with any farmgirl he likes, or something.

I'm skipping a lot of description of the layout of the grounds and of Pepperidge-Farm-remembers type narrative, like the Pole (obviously a maypole): "No one knew when the custom began or why--it was another thing that was the way it had always been--but it was an excuse to sing and dance, and nobody in the Two Rivers needed much excuse but that."  ITS FOLKSY, GOT IT?  DO YOU GET IT?

They're also very excited about the prospect of fireworks for the first time in a decade.

The al'Thors arrive at the al'Veres' place, home of the mayor/innkeeper, and they all talk grumpily about the weather and the prospect of next winter never ending and everyone freezing to death, et cetera.  Rand instead talks with his buddy Mat, who plans to set an old badger loose in town to scare the girls, but by sheer coincidence he also immediately brings up that he recently saw "a man in a black cloak, on a black horse [...] and his cloak doesn't move in the wind" , just as Rand did, and then he vanished as soon as Mat looked away.

"I actually thought--just for a minute, mind--it might be the Dark One." He tried another laugh, but no sound at all came out this time. 

Rand took a deep breath. As much to remind himself as for any other reason, he said by rote, "The Dark One and all of the Forsaken are bound in Shayol Ghul,beyond the Great Blight, bound by the Creator at the moment of Creation, bound until the end of time. The hand of the Creator shelters the world, and the Light shines on us all."

Well, that's one way of getting exposition out of the way.  Just so we're clear on this, that's Shayol as in the Hebrew Sheol, and Ghul as in demon.  Jordan must have spent at least half an hour creating his mythology.

Mat gets roped into helping unload the booze from the cart, with the promise of then getting to go see the visiting gleeman, who is apparently made of awesome.

To have one there actually during Bel Tine, with his harp and his flute and his stories and all... Emond's Field would still be talking about this Festival ten years off, even if there were not any fireworks.

I'm going to assume that 'gleeman' is a euphemism for 'marijuana dealer'.  Nothing much else happens for the rest of the chapter as far as I can tell, beyond talking about how much people will be excited and how much the fireworks cost.

Chapter Two: Strangers

The Village Council (which appears to be all men--please tell me that the neutrally-named council isn't the male counterpart to the Women's Circle, please please please) are gathering in the mayor's home, looking grim and smoking and suchlike.  The mayor's wife arrives with food, of course, and Rand likes her because she doesn't try to set his dad up with anyone.

Toward Rand her motherliness extended to warm smiles and a quick snack whenever he came by the inn, but she did as much for every young man in the area. If she occasionally looked at him as if she wanted to do more, at least she took it no further than looks, for which he was deeply grateful.

The mayor's wife wants to jump our teenage hero, but she only gawks, so he's grateful for the relative lack of inappropriate actions.  Le sigh.  That is not how gratitude is supposed to work.  I suppose/hope Jordan just means grateful in the sense of glad, but the connotation is not the same.  Rand and Mat finish hauling in the booze kegs and meet a younger boy, Ewin, who tells them all about the strangers in town.  Not the black rider:

"And his cloak is green. Or maybe gray. It changes. It seems to fade into wherever he's standing. Sometimes you don't see him even when you look right at him, not unless he moves. And hers is blue, like the sky, and ten times fancier than any feastday clothes I ever saw. She's ten times prettier than anybody I ever saw, too."

I'm kind of charmed by the way everyone in this book at the same time has no familiarity with magic but are constantly like 'Did you see someone teleporting on the road today?' 'Yeah, and the dude in the inn can turn invisible!'  It's almost like magic realism, minus the realism.  Also, while the dudes thus far have been characterised with their skills, their philosophies, their senses of humour, their jobs, all that jazz, all of the women have been characterised based on their interactions with men and/or their physical attractiveness.  That's a lot less charming.

Oh, wait, no, we play Six Degrees of Bechdel Separation, because Rand hears from Ewin who overheard the visiting lady Moiraine talking to the village Wisdom, Nynaeve, who got all huffy because Moiraine called her "child" while asking for directions.  She apologised upon realising she was talking to the Wisdom, and asked a bunch more respectful questions.  So our two plot-relevant living women have now been characterised by their failure to get along and Nynaeve's uncontrolled temper.

Outside, Rand gets another unpleasant feeling of being watched, which apparently comes from a raven on the roof of the inn.  He and Mat both whip stones at it, but it sidesteps them, and then takes off when Moiraine appears and calls it "A vile bird [...] to be mistrusted in the best of times."  Harsh, gal.  #notallravens

Moiraine is indeed the tiny woman from the cover, only as tall as Rand's chest, young but "there was a maturity about her large, dark eyes, a hint of knowing that no one could have gotten young".  Her clothes and jewelry get a half-page of dedicated description.  They all trip over their tongues introducing themselves, and Moiraine explains that she's a historian, come to Two Rivers as "a collector of old stories".  There's some rambling chatter about the Wheel of Time and the Great Pattern and how the names for things and people change over time,and then she leaves,"appearing to glide over the ground rather than walk, her cloak spreading on either side of her like wings."

So far I have no reason to believe Rand is a more interesting protagonist than Moiraine would be.

They finally spot her bodyguard, Lan, standing by the inn, stealthy and hard-faced with a hand on his sword.  Ewin guesses he's a Warder, but Mat shoots this down because Warders are 1) fictional and 2) covered in gold and jewels and spend all their time slaying monsters in the Great Blight up north, which... look, are they real or not?  If your case is 'that's not real', maybe just stick with that, rather than adding the details of the not-real thing you're saying doesn't exist?

Moiraine hired them all as assistants while in town, and pressed a silver coin on each of them that Rand estimates is worth a good horse.  They each agree that it seems like it would be wrong to spend it, and will keep it as their bond with Moiraine, and then they see a huge eight-horse wagon rolling into town, the peddler.

It was going to be the best Bel Tine ever.

Christmas is going to be ruined and I'm legitimately looking forward to it.

So, apart from the rubbish representation of women so far, what I'm noticing is mostly that if I had actual affection for this story, instead of the cold stony husk that is my unbeating heart, I could imagine finding this crawlingly slow opening rather relaxing, the kind of thing that I would look forward to rereading on days when I just wanted something soothing and familiar to dwell in, the literary equivalent of petting a cat.  However, it should probably be noted that I recently started some really great antidepressants and I find damn near everything soothing compared to how I felt a month ago, so maybe I'm not the most unbiased opinion on such matters.

The long fugue down the aisle towards children

Do you know "Here comes the bride" is styled after a funeral march? It's from one of Wagner's operas (and if you know Wagner, you probably know where this is going) and is played as the bride and groom prepare to consummate the marriage (yes, Here Comes The Bride is actually not what Elsa marches down the aisle to) when the antagonist (spoilers!) bursts in and starts killing a bunch of people. It's also meant as foreshadowing of the bride dying horribly because Wagner.

This is a song that 70% of couples choose as the opening credits to their married life, because it's what you do. No wonder it's even odds on divorce.

There is a script that we are all fed for how our lives will pan out. We'll grow up, go to school, start a career, meet someone, get married, have kids,  pressure them to do the same so we can have grandkids, retire, travel a bit, die.

I think at some point in our lives we all buy into this script, but I think it's a toxic one. It encourages us to define ourselves by our roles (wife, mother, teacher) rather than who we are (Monica with a great sense of humor, a passion for model sail boats, and salsa dancing). It tries to force everyone into one mold, and there is so much social pressure that it's hard not to try.

When I was a teenager, I assumed I probably wouldn't get married, and kids were just not on the radar. This was constantly met with people flat out telling me I was wrong and to "just wait". I was open to the idea of marriage, someday, maybe, but kids? Less likely. This went on, but would eventually die down when I didn't relent, or hide my annoyance at people telling me I was wrong and didn't know my own mind and couldn't possibly know my own mind. People would react so strongly to my rejecting the script that they would start fighting with me about it. When I was a 15 year old girl and admitted that maybe in ten years I'd feel differently, but for now?

Ten years later, I'm getting ready to walk down the aisle myself, but I still don't want kids. Those same people who were picking fights with me at 15 are still doing so at 25. Over my not wanting kids, which I've written about before, wanting to buy a condo in the city instead of a house in the suburbs, keeping my last name... People get nervous when you go off script. They get angry, I would assume (and it is just that, an assumption) that because they bought into it, it is the Right Way and by actively not choosing it, you are telling them they (and their friends and family who bought into it, too) are Wrong.

This is where it starts to get toxic. Little girls are not sold the idea of marriage, we sell them the idea of a wedding. We tell them about this magical day where they get to be a princess and everything is about them and everything will be Just. What. They. Want. It will be the happiest day of their lives! I can not count the amount of people who have told me "It's your wedding! Be more of a diva!" which strikes fear I can not readily articulate into me. We're told that this is part of growing up. If you're in a long term, seemingly happy relationship, it doesn't matter that you're 20*, people will start giving you unsolicited advice to just get married already! If you're 25 and in that position people start asking what's wrong, why haven't you done it yet?

It's hard not to be swayed by it. If it were one or two people spouting this it'd be easy enough to brush aside, but it isn't. It seems to be everyone, and it starts so early. It's hard not to internalize it. So we grow up thinking if we're not married by 25-30 we're doing something wrong. It leads to anxiety and panic and maybe getting married because we feel we're supposed to more than because we want to. It leads to having a hard time being happy for your friends when they get married because you're not yet, or because maybe you legally can't get married. It leads to unrealistic expectations of marriage, because half of us are sold a wedding, not a marriage. Which brings me back to my earlier snark about divorce rates.

Marriage is only one step in this process, though. What about kids fresh out of high school who take on staggering debt to get an education when they're not positive that's what they want because they're still kids, and because that's what they're told to do? What about the shame we push on the kids who don't go to school, or can't?

And what about kids? I've written before about how annoyed I get when people ask and insist I have kids. When people tell me I will never understand what love really means until I have kids (again the assumption that I will) and that it is the greatest thing EVAR and really I'm missing out why have I not insisted The Boy put a baby inside me already? They make some pretty horrible assumptions, and not just assuming I'm incapable of knowing what I want. They assume that I CAN have kids. I'm sick, and I don't know what's wrong with me, it's entirely possible that I physically can't. I'm a cook; I'd be skeptical if I financially could either. What about the women who desperately want to have children but for one of many, many reasons can't? What about adoption? There are a lot of reasons that can't work, either, and we talked about making obvious suggestions and how that's bad before, remember? Are we just pretending these people don't exist? That's a painful enough scenario to be in to start with, I'm not okay with adding to their pain by pretending they don't exist, and by pretending that they will never be complete or whole person until they have a child. It's bullshit, and it's toxic, harmful bullshit.

On the other side of the coin there are people who are married, and maybe things aren't going so well and they figure that they'll have a kid and that will help them through this rough patch. Adding kids to the equation doesn't mean making any major changes which will lead to stress and hardships during the time of transition! Babies are magical, after all, and bring nothing but happiness! What if THAT couple faces infertility? Will they feel their struggling (or failing) marriage is due to their inability to check off the next box on the list? Will they not be real adults until they do? What if they conceive and the child is sick and now they're even more angry and bitter at each other because remember what I said above about major life changes stressing people out?

The narrative, and the enthusiasm we push it with, often leads us into shame, embarrassment, insecurity, corners and dead ends because there is no one size fits all life, or path. Yet we push it on others, and ourselves, because that is what we think we're supposed to do. Asexual? Infertile? Disabled? Impoverished? Gay? Doesn't matter! You can** still have all these things! And if you don't then how will you ever be happy?

I feel I often stop and call for us to simply reject a cultural norm on this blog, but I fear I don't fully credit how huge a thing that can be to do. I mean, we can't just will dinosaurs back into existence, as much as I would also like to call for that. I like to think I've rejected the norm, but now that I've taken one of the Approved Steps I understand how easy it can be to get swept up in enforcing and encouraging the narrative. So what, and how, can we do it? Amber and frogs?

Step 1 is recognizing when we're enforcing it. Asking someone why they don't want to get married (or have kids, or go to college or or or) or telling someone they should seems like a good starting point. These are valid choices, or painful circumstances which are really none of our business either way.

Step 2 is having conversations about the narrative with other people. We need to talk about it, and we need to call people out for trying to push this agenda, and we need to support people resisting it.

Step 3 is to invade the media. Wait, what? I know that some of you are artists, in what ever medium you happen to art in, think about breaking that pattern as often as possible. Don't have your hero settle down with their love interest and live happily ever after! Have them find a different kind of happy ending. Seeing other narratives will help us normalize that there's more than one, which will loosen the stranglehold the current one has on us.

I am not saying that these are bad things to want, for the record. If you want to get married and be a stay at home parent? Power to you and I'm jealous you know what you want out of life! What I am condemning is how we push the idea of marriage/kids so fervently that people feel that these are just things you're supposed to do rather than choices that should have a lot of thought going into them.

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*No, really. When I was 20 people were pushing me to just marry my high school sweetheart. Co-workers, relatives, random people I'd get chatting with at bus stops...
**I am not, by the way, saying that you can't still get married have kids etc if you ARE these things, simply that they are very real reasons why you may not want them.

I don't care who's born what way

"When did you choose to be queer?"
"Sometime in the spring of 2012.  I don't remember the month.  It was definitely a weekday, though."

I don't actually think 'choice' is particularly relevant to morality.  By which I mean that while it's vitally important to protect the right to choice (autonomy, self-identification, consent--these are not optional) I don't generally think something becomes more moral or less moral because it's a matter of choice.  And one of the most common places we see this is in talking about whether it's okay for lesbians to get with other ladies, or whether it's okay for trans men to transition, or et cetera et cetera heterocisnormativity.

"These people are choosing to act in unnatural ways!"
"But it's perfectly natural; they're born that way.  You don't choose to be straight, do you?"

No, stop, back up.  This is a derail, and it's one that we've spent too long allowing, and it's one that plays against the kinds of choice that are important, and it doesn't win us much anyway.

It doesn't matter if being queer is a choice.

It doesn't matter.

It's not a choice; anyone can tell you this, but that's not the point to fight.  What matters is that ending discrimination is a good thing, and allowing people to consensually love and marry and boff is a good thing, and allowing people to be themselves is a good thing.  The law already tells us who can consent to what and who can't.  Job done, game over, high scores all around.  It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

If we keep hyping up how important it is that there is no Queer Choice, we lose ground in two important ways.  First, we leave open the notion that if there were a choice involved, it might somehow become okay to discriminate against gay men because, after all, they decided not to conform.  (This just in: racism would still be stupid even if every human in the world had the power to snap their fingers and turn white.)  And secondly, it helps people who keep bringing up even stupider arguments, like arguing that marriage equality some kind of 'gateway right' and soon we'll be legalising incestuous marriages and sex with ducks.  As if the only reasons we have problems with those things are because they're 'unnatural', rather than obviously harmful and consent-unfriendly.

We know that people can have inborn tendencies toward terrible things that are totally unrelated to sex, so we have reason to think there are inborn tendencies towards terrible sexual things.  'Born that way' is not relevant to the morality.  Kleptomania is real; that doesn't make stealing morally appropriate (although it does have significant impacts on how people need to teach themselves and choose to respond and et cetera my point is not that mental illnesses are morally suspect either just so's we're clear on that).  Rape culture narratives tell us that men can't help being aggressive and hostile when they want to make with the boning, because they're 'born that way'.  To hell with 'born that way' as having relevance to sexual morality.  What matters is: does this hurt anyone and does it help anyone?  And all else equal, sex and gender queerness gets a pass on that.

There are plenty of bigots who have already fully embraced the 'born that way' aspect and still don't care.  From this we get the Side B Christians who believe that gay people exist but that it would still be wrong for them to act on their nature (the only kind of romantic/sexual attraction they experience) because apparently sometimes their Creator just likes to screw with them.  So even buying into 'born that way' doesn't actually guarantee any kind of acceptance; sometimes it just means they treat the desire of girls to kiss girls the same way they treat a heroin addiction.  Awesome.

In case I don't already bring this up enough: I'm bi.  (I am not pansexual, but I'm pretty sure this applies to anyone who is, too.)  I like girls enough that I was able to get through about 27 years without even acknowledging that I like guys too.  If anyone does have a choice, I do: I could probably limit myself to relationships with women and end up just about as happy as I would be if I considered both women and men.  If I date a guy, it's not going to be because I have no other choice, it's going to be because I've said okay, this is a thing I could try: let's run with it.  That's not immoral either.

And I'm no expert on trans issues, but it seems to me that a huge emphasis on being 'born that way' is of less-than-zero help to people who already have to fight to define their identity in any way other than according to the assumptions made by other people at the time of their birth.

'Born that way' is deterministic, and that's a problem for anyone who doesn't fit into the popular categories.  The people who have any kind of fluidity in their identity (attraction to more than one gender, or transition through more than one gender identity) already get sidelined constantly when it comes to the supposed rainbow of diversity.  There's no such thing as a 'bisexual relationship'--it's a superposition (to get quantum mechanical again), it's being in a state of appearing either straight or gay until suddenly you aren't.  I have genderqueer friends who've done their best to help me understand the idea of feeling male one day and female another and genderless a third, and suddenly 'born that way' isn't a checkbox but a probability distribution or a Venn diagram and it's still all harmless and it's still okay.

'Born that way' play into the idea that people don't change, can't change, shouldn't change, and I don't believe that, and I'm very done with ceding that point to bigots in the hopes that it will somehow encourage them to change.

Ender's Game, chapter three, which is much less terrible than previous chapters, or maybe I'm just getting inured to it all

So, for the sake of pacing, the first Book Club post on Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut will be next Sunday, not today.  All you dedicated people get for today is the next episode of Ender's Game.  How will you ever bear the deprivation?  I recommend lying back and being happy that you're not the one who has to pour over every word of this and try to figure out what Card was thinking and not-thinking at the time.  Also, there was a corgi in a scarf two weeks back which really does help quite consistently.

(Content: sexism, gender essentialism, reproductive coercion. Fun content: the mighty warrior Stefen Colbear.)

Ender's Game, p. 16--26

Chapter Three: Graff

This chapter's exchange on the Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue is brief and regards how much Ender loves Valentine ("our weak link" who "can undo it all"), and Graff's plan to ensure that she does not:

"I'll lie to him." 

"And if that doesn't work?" 

"Then I'll tell the truth.  We are allowed to do that in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."

Excellent work, unaccountable military authorities!  I appreciate a we're-allowed-to-tell-the-truth-in-emergencies joke as much as anyone, but I think it's worth noting that your lies have, within the last twelve hours, resulted in the unanticipated murder of a child by another child and, within the last few years, probably psychologically and emotionally warped untold numbers of other children, so your continued casualness mostly reads as pure sociopathy.  I get using grim humour in order to stomach doing terrible things, but so far, given the way you've talked about your monitoring technology allowing you to experience the sensations and emotions going through these kids' heads, this entire testing process looks hideously gratuitous.  They really have not made it clear what made this last series of brutal events so important.  This should be the part where Graff explains it all.  (Spoiler: NOPE.)

It's the next morning, Ender is having breakfast and reflecting on facing Stilson and his gang at school.  At long last, it appears to have occurred to him that he can't really guarantee that they won't just beat the hell out of him in revenge today.  He's pretty sure they won't, but he's still afraid and doesn't want to go.  There's some plausible banter between the sons and parents, although Mrs and Mr Wiggin remain about as deep as a lunch tray--he's reading the paper and responding only when needled (Peter makes a joke about obviously getting all of his genius genes from mom); she's trying to convince Ender to eat more and he's suggesting she should hook him up to a breakfast IV.

The table beeps, meaning someone rang the doorbell, and the camera shows a man from the International Fleet, "the only military uniform that meant anything anymore".  Which is kind of strange, since later books and even later events in this book will make it clear that Earth still has a lot of big, well-equipped, highly trained militaries that aren't the IF.  Why don't those mean anything?  I guess because the IF gets to make shadowy decisions to let people die at their whim?  Also because they're in charge of maintaining the shields that prevent international nuclear attacks.  They have their fingers on the buttons that make all the other The Buttons irrelevant, which sounds like a good job to be in.

No one says it, but everyone makes it clear that they think the IF dude is here for Ender, which of course sets Peter off a bit, but that gets cut off when they reveal that Stilson is "in the hospital".

Ender shook his head.  He had expected someone from the school to come about Stilson, on an officer of the fleet.  This was more serious than he had thought.  And yet he couldn't think what else he could have done.

We've already belaboured everything else he could have done, with options heavy on 'running' and 'getting help from the many nearby adults'.  But no, the world's greatest strategic genius can only think of one hyperviolent way to solve his problem.  What the hell.  Anyway, the IF dude asks if Ender can explain himself, and Ender cannot, because "he was afraid to reveal himself to be any more monstrous than his actions had made him out to be".  Ender hopes they'll just punish him and get it over with.  This is the same kind of self-loathing (but lack of repentance) that Peter displayed at the end of last chapter, not that I'm surprised neither of them realises it.  THERAPY.  THERAPY FOR EVERYONE.

Time for some longer quotes, because this is another foundational chapter.  Card lays the groundwork early and thick.

 "We're willing to consider extenuating circumstances," the officer said.  "But I must tell you it doesn't look good.  Kicking him in the groin, kicking him repeatedly in the face and body when he was down--it sounds like you really enjoyed it." 

"I didn't," Ender whispered. 

"Then why did you do it?" 

"He had his gang there," Ender said.

"So?  This excuses anything?" 

"No." 

"Tell me why you kept on kicking him.  You had already won." 

"Knocking him down won the first fight.  I wanted to win all the next ones, too.  So they'd leave me alone. [....*] You took away the monitor," Ender said.  "I had to take care of myself, didn't I?"

Mr Wiggin says Ender should have asked a grown-up for help, but the officer cuts himself off and introduces himself as Hyrum Graff, director of the Battle School, and invites Ender to enter their program.  Mrs Wiggin rightfully freaks out and ironically asks if they'd be offering him a medal as well if he'd killed Stilson.  Ender asks why they're letting him in now.

"The final step in your testing was to see what would happen when the monitor came off.  We don't always do it that way, but in your case[...] It isn't what he did, Mrs Wiggin.  It's why. [...] It wasn't a charade, Mrs Wiggin.  Until we knew what Ender's motivation was, we couldn't be sure he wasn't another--we had to know what the action meant.  Or at least what Ender believed it meant."

I suppose that Graff is stopping himself from saying "we couldn't be sure he wasn't another Peter", reminding us of course that there is a vast difference between Ender, who dispassionately murders an incapacitated child in order to intimidate the others, and Peter, who threatens and torments his siblings to cope with his inferiority complex.  Those are clearly totally different things.  INTENT: STILL MAGICAL.

If I wanted to be charitable for a change, I'd suggest that Graff is pleased that Ender is thinking in terms of long-term strategy, but knows that they will have to school him in discipline and threat assessment and considering all tactical responses, but the book is going to remain pretty consistent on the idea that Ender's limitless willingness to destroy is exactly what they want.  I'm not sure why that's supposed to be so valuable, since there are lots of people obviously willing to destroy pretty much anything to win, and Ender's real gift is supposed to be his empathy, which he has tremendously failed to display in this incident.

Graff explains that Mrs and Mr Wiggin already gave their consent for Ender to go when he was born, so now it's just Ender's decision, since they only take volunteers for officer training.  There's some sales-pitching; Graff says that any student who's ever made it through first year at Battle School has become a commissioned officer, and none has ever retired from a position lower than CEO of an interplanetary ship, and also I guess when they hiccup they emit a flock of eagles?  It's pretty obviously the greatest thing ever for anyone, the only job worthy of Ender's time, and everybody will be ashamed to be so much less awesome when they meet him.

The only extant portrait of Commander Mazer Rackham.

Graff and Ender speak privately, and Graff admits that Ender won't be able to see his family again for a decade if he goes.  Ender privately thinks that this is a good thing because Peter presents a legitimate threat to his life.  Graff adds that he has seen enough of the monitor recording to know that Ender won't miss his parents, which brings up yet again: what do those monitors actually monitor?  Do they get feelings?  Are they straight-up telepathic bonds that let people hear his thoughts?  Because it's very weird that they seem to be able to read his mind but they still think they don't know how his brain works.

"You'd be amazed how sensitive the instruments are.  We were connected directly to your brain.  We heard all that you heard, whether you were listening carefully or not.  Whether you understood or not.  We understood."

Graff also says that Ender's parents won't miss him for long--not because they don't love him, but because they are Secretly Religious and have a complicated relationship with family size.  Dad, John Paul Wiggin (formerly Wieczorek) was seventh of nine children.

Nine children.  That was unthinkable.  Criminal.   

"Yes, well, people do strange things for religion.  You know the sanctions, Ender--they were not as harsh then, but still not easy.  Only the first two children had a free education.  Taxes steadily rose with each new child.  Your father turned sixteen and invoked the Noncomplying Families Act to separate himself from his family.  He changed his name, renounced his religion, and vowed never to have more than the allotted two children.  He meant it.  All the shame and persecution he went through as a child--he vowed no child of his would go through it.  Do you understand?"

Except not really, because John Paul and Theresa Wiggin are still religious (she's Mormon and tries to hide that she was born in Utah).  They gave their kids saints' names, and one of the things their religions agreed on was big families, which Ender simultaneously symbolises (a forbidden but permitted Third) and shames them for (because they dare not have more kids and they feel like they should).  What could be more fun than competing forces of cultural and governmental reproductive coercion?  This is all very interesting backstory and could make for a good premise for a book.  Too bad it won't be relevant ever again in this novel!

Graff further entices Ender by describing the Battle Room, the original concept from which the rest of this story sprawled out, but we don't need to cover that yet.  Ender asks if all the students are boys.

"A few girls.  They don't often pass the tests to get in.  Too many centuries of evolution are working against them.  None of them will be like Valentine, anyway.  But there'll be brothers there, Ender." 

"Like Peter?" 

"Peter wasn't accepted, Ender, for the very reasons that you hate him." 

"I don't have him.  I'm just--" 

"Afraid of him.  Well, Peter isn't all bad, you know.  He was the best we'd seen in a long time.  We asked your parents to choose a daughter next--they would have anyway--hoping that Valentine would be Peter, but mildly.  She was too mild.  And so we requisitioned you."

Girls: evolutionarily predisposed to not be useful.  And let's again be clear here, Valentine and Ender are both empathetic, but Ender sometimes chooses to be brutally violent and Valentine does not.  That's why they're taking him and not her.  I get that they only want soldiers who will commit to battle, but the case so far for Ender Wiggin being their greatest hope ever seems really patchy.

"Our tests are very good, Ender.  But they don't tell us everything.  In fact, when it comes down to it, they hardly tell us anything.  But they're better than nothing."

Stilson: dead because 'well, this test won't tell us much, but it's better than nothing'.

Graff goes on, saying that the IF has a much better fleet than they did eighty years ago when the aliens first ravaged Earth, but they need a general, and the only reason they defeated the Second Invasion was because they had the most brilliant commander in history, Mazer Rackham.  It's a pretty good speech, but I think this post has been quote-heavy enough already.  Card is a capable writer and he knows how to make this kind of propaganda and declamation shine.  (Backhanded compliment, but so it goes.  I do sincerely think these sequences are done well, though.)

"I'm afraid," said Ender quietly.  "But I'll go with you." 

"Tell me again," said Graff. 

"It's what I was born for, isn't it?  If I don't go, why am I alive?" 

"Not good enough," said Graff. 

"I don't want to go," said Ender, "but I will." 

There's no packing, just tearful goodbyes and dad promising to write and Peter shouting 'kill some buggers for me' and Valentine begging him to come back some day, and then they're gone.

While rife with the usual sexism and excuses for needless cruelty that suffuse the book as a whole, this chapter is easily my favourite so far, and pretty much where I think the book actually begins.  Chapter one exists so Card can make a statement about how personal virtue can excuse stunning atrocities, chapter two exists to try to convince us that Ender and Peter are radically different.  Chapter three gives us backstory, worldbuilding, and presents Our Hero with a real choice to jump at the call of adventure and try to save the world, or stay in that which is familiar and safe where people love him.  It's relateable, it's sympathetic, and it doesn't depend on us thinking that Ender was totally justified in murdering a bully.  If this novel were about the story instead of The Philosophical Point, this would be chapter one.

And I should note that Card agrees with me there.  I mentioned in comments previously that I once met Card; I was at a reading/signing when Ender's Shadow was published, and he was talking about the various iterations of the Ender's Game movie scripts that were cycling along.  He noted that, in the script, he'd had to cut Stilson because in a movie that level of violence wouldn't work for introducing the main character.  As much as I support the idea that books can tell stories that movies can't, I think it's important to note that books put us inside characters' heads and in movies we just watch them like they're other people.  In this, movies are vastly more like the real world than books are.  And I think there's a big point to be considered when the daring and brilliant opening chapter to your novel falls flat when presented in a format that more closely resembles reality.

Come back next Sunday for the first installment of the Book Club with chapter one of Cat's Cradle, and of course don't miss the unbearable writing of EL James in Erika's next Fifty Shades post this Thursday!

(Also, we appear to have adopted rot13 for ciphering spoilers on this blog, which can be translated on rot13.com if needed.  That's just for things that aren't Ender's Game, though; spoilers for the book are free game.  Stilson is dead, by the way.)

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*This snips a passage about how Ender hates to cry and is ashamed to be seen doing so by his parents and a military man, because that is obviously a healthy sentiment to have been instilled in a six-year-old boy.  No one says anything about it--his father doesn't reprimand him for showing weakness--so how the hell did he get this idea established in his head?  Manly warfare?  Don't cry?  Who is teaching him these things before the age of six?

I think we should be friends

Hello!  So, Erika the Over Queen of the blog is still hungover and not able to prepare a Tuesday post (because obviously the party was only on Saturday and that is not nearly enough recovery time) so instead, for those of you who are still all "Who is this guy with all the Ws in his name and what makes him think he should be on this blog", we now have a chance to get to know each other better!  But this is also a busy month for me and I have not lately blogged a bunch (the second Ender's Game post will go up next Sunday, though!) and so for your amusement and judgment I offer the following, which was previously posted on my original blog under the title "The Comrade Sector".

(Content: screwed-up gender dynamics, heterocentric discussion of sexist concepts.  Fun content: Klingons and daguerrotypes!)

(Alternate titles for this post included The Ally Territory, The Companion Realm, and Eight Rules For Dating My Non-Age-Specific Fellow Sapient.  [Edit: also, Salacious Tortoises would have been a good one.])

This is one of those subjects that makes it hard for me not to just profane for a while.  I have been spending time (any amount is too much) on parts of the internet where 'The Friend Zone' is treated as an established and accurate concept, and now I just want to reboot the world.  On the plus side, it's also providing me with a fascinating new perspective on the way I view people.

I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I love the heroic villain archetype is that they are doing the right thing even while not feeling like it.  They protect people they don't particularly care about and they stand up for ideals that they think are just daydreamy nonsense.  This is what I feel like most of the time, because while I'm a long-run optimist (I believe that people will eventually transcend their current widespread and colossal failures) I'm a short-run pessimist (I believe that on the road to that transcendence we will oppress, harm, and in various ways kill uncountable multitudes of people and things) and I have unreasonably high standards for folks.  I tend to think of myself as being misanthropic by nature, and continually try to remind myself not to act like it.  And yet the internet, in its signature style, teaches me things that were not the things I expected to learn.

And one of those things is that I'm way less misanthropic than some of the chuweros out there subscribing to supposedly mild and mainstream concepts that are actually totally awful.  And the Friend Zone will here act as our exhibit A.

The definition is simple: a woman (occasionally a man) is said to have 'friendzoned' a man (occasionally a woman) when she spends time with him but rejects the possibility of a romantic relationship, which the man was interested in.  Once it happens, there is no escape from its sorcerous boundaries, no matter how the man may entreat for a fresh trial to prove his suitability.

Or, in normal-person talk, ladies only date dudes they want to date, and callously disregard the dudes they don't want to date who nevertheless want to date them.

I grew up in the age when home video game consoles exploded, and so was bombarded with the insistence that this new form of media would corrupt and ruin the young and completely remove their appreciation of daguerrotypes and that sort of thing.  Is this the reckoning that was foretold?  Do people now believe that relationships have terrain hazards?  If you mistakenly equip the Hylian Shield as you're heading up the river valley, the octorok will shove you off the ledge and you'll land in the friend zone and have to start over?

All of the things wrong with this framework require some effort to disassemble and fully appreciate.  It presents the idea that forming a relationship is, from the dude's perspective, the task of continually avoiding 'getting friendzoned' until some kind of romantic connection can be made.  It's an inherently adversarial concept like something out of Klingon rituals ("Women roar.  Then they hurl heavy objects.  [The male] reads love poetry.  He ducks a lot.") and it repeats the same eternal stupid thing about men wanting (especially sex, but often generalised into 'affection') and women withholding (see previous).  But beyond that, it also implies that a woman can want to friendzone a guy but not be able to until he does something to justify it.  It has to presume this, because otherwise it would have to accept reality, which is: if a woman doesn't want to date a man, then she won't (voluntarily).  There is no complicated process, there are no rules, and there is no rigid categorisation; no one is getting a forehead stamp and sorted into the Non-Dating Cabinet.

Or, in abnormal-person talk: if the friend zone existed, it would be immediate and unstoppable.  You can't dodge it, you can't ward it off - you don't get put in it; it simply eminent-domains the ground under your feet. 

But some people apparently see a personal benefit to operating on this nonsensical framework (elsewise they wouldn't be parroting it to each other), and as near as I can tell, it's about the externalisation.  It lets a person reclassify what they did (or have done, or are doing) that made them an unsuitable date and turn it into something that was done to them.  And this is a particularly important reclassification to pull off if you are a Nice Guy.

The Internet Nice Guy, of course, is the guy who is sweet and caring and giving but women just won't date him because they're only interested in jerks.  At least according to his webpage.  In reality, it turns out that he's a self-important self-entitled guy who thinks that not actively burning down orphanages puts him in the top 1% of humanity and just can't understand why women don't reward his awesomeness with Naked Fun Times.  He's already spending all of his time hanging out with them and only doing what they want and trying to make them completely dependent on him for their emotional needs - what more is he supposed to do, explicitly say that he is attracted to her?  MADNESS.  If he did that, he would just get friendzoned!  Do you expect him to fall for such an obvious ruse?

At this point, I may sound like I'm constructing strawmen and chastising them for their dealings with strawwomen, but it's honestly not that difficult to find examples.  Erika linked me to another blog's post on friendzone concepts, and lo, but the second comment from the top was a guy explaining that Some Women really do manipulate guys and use the dudes' "honest mating attentions" for personal profit which they have no intent to compensate the dude for.  Check it out.  That's a direct quote: "honest mating attentions".  I couldn't make this up if I tried. So: do I have a low opinion of my species as a whole?  Often.  Am I insufficiently sympathetic to others' pains?  Probably.  But am I as much a misanthrope as that guy?  No.  Because that guy believes that women are heartless selfish manipulators and men are conniving fools who are trying to trade for sex but are being hornswoggled by the evil women's superior treachery.  That is what some quality misanthropy looks like. Now, as a socially-awkward person myself (and note that when I talk about Nice Guys, I refer to a group I was previously part of) I do like rules, and I think the desire for rules is part of what makes Nice Guy philosophies and frameworks like 'the friend zone' so attractive to dudes: it purports to take a complex system and reduce it to a simple series of laws, interactions, and consequences.  Never let it be said that I am unwilling to provide good rules to replace bad ones.  Here are some actual rules that serve well:

1. If a person does not want to date another person, then they won't.  Attempting any strategy that might subvert rule 1 makes you a bad person.  (Trying to actually be a person they would want to date is a somewhat more complicated grey area; even if New You can be sustained, it's still generally a better plan to try with someone else.)
2. Person A, if treating Person B like a friend when Person B has only ever acted like a friend, is not doing anything wrong.
3. Acting like a friend purely for the purpose of getting something from your supposed friend makes you a bad person.  (This was true when it was the jerks in school ingeniously absorbing the kid whose family had a pool, and it remains true now.)
4. If a friendship is all one-way, then it's not a friendship, it's indentured service.  Ditch 'em.

But there's a second aspect to this friendzone concept - its inescapability - that needs to be dealt with separately.  The premise is, again, that once a person has been identified as a friend rather than as a Potential Naked Fun Times Compatriot, the process can never be reversed, and it is impossible to go from being close friends to romantic partners.  Or, more importantly, dudes will claim that women will use their existing friendship as an excuse not to start dating.  So, keep in mind:

1. If a person says they don't want to date another person, the most probable answer is that they don't want to date them, never have, and never will.
2. It is possible that a person legitimately believes that, regardless of their possible attraction to you, the potential failure of a romantic relationship is too great to risk the consequences for the friendship.
3. Ask yourself if you can, if nothing else, imagine a friendship with [member of whatever gender(s) you're attracted to] that you valued so much, in its platonic form, that you would hesitate or turn them down if they propositioned you.  If the answer is 'no', then chances are good we've just identified why your friend didn't want to date you from the beginning.*
4. No one needs an excuse in order to not date someone.  Therefore, if you have had what you believe to be An Excuse deployed on you: it was for the sake of sparing your feelings and the other person simply doesn't want to explain that, while you're fun to hang out with, they might rather make out with a galapagos tortoise.

I have had a lot of female friends.  I have been attracted to some of them.  I have broached the subject of dating sometimes.  I have sometimes been turned down; I have even had things which I suspect were Excuses deployed on me.  What is the correct response here?

Move on with your life.

Which is bleedin' difficult sometimes, I know.  Great Jaddeth Below, I know.  When I refer to myself as a 'former Nice Guy', I see parallels with 'recovering alcoholic' - with destructive behaviours, we might never stop wanting to backslide, we might have to work constantly to be better than ourselves.  I may never stop wanting to be Romantic Comedy Guy.  But resisting that is the definition of winning.  (And sadly there are no cookies for basic decency.)

I used to dislike stories that made it explicitly clear that Our Heroes could never really win - that they would just right this injustice, push back evil this time, and then some day it would come back, and they would fight it again, or someone else would have to do it, forever.  But I get it now.

---

*Gracious, I almost let a post go by without a footnote.  Well, it occurred to me on rereading this rule that the 'you' here might just be a polysomething person of the sort who doesn't feel any particular need to maintain hard lines between platonic and sexual relationships, and that may be just fine on its own; I'm not saying you're a horrible person.  But I hardly need to tell someone who has a robust set of sociosexual ethics that the turning-you-down person may not be comfortable getting into that, so I think the rule stands on its own, both in its judgey and non-judgey forms.

Ender's Game, chapter 1, part 1, in which Will inexplicably follows in the style of the terrible decisions that have gone before

A lot of it's about whether you can see the evil in yourself, I figure.

I've been playing with the idea of running a book analysis (like Fred Clark's Left Behind work or Ana Mardoll's Narnia and Twilight analyses or Eri's Fifty-Shades-related masochism for which I have yet to stage an intervention) but the question was what to read.  I considered James Bond, because James Bond is in a lot of ways Twilight for the stereotypical man, but more importantly it's one of the few stereotypical-man-approved things which I often enjoy--at least the movies.  And I thought it might be interesting to see just what the original books are like, except that I watched the first three James Bond movies over the holidays and sweet and sour pan-fried cyborg zombie raptor Moses the sexism is like a frozen turkey to the face.  It's only surprising in its extremity and it's subtle like a trebuchet.  It's just not that interesting to wallow in.

Ender's Game, though.  Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, is a sci-fi classic, a lauded masterpiece of worldbuilding and psychological intricacy.  But most importantly: it is a book for people who think they're smarter than anyone else, and that is far more tempting to me.  That's a deep and insidious satisfaction, and it can be used to justify a whole lot of stuff.  And, as I realised a while back while talking over at Ana's site, I Have Thoughts about this book.  It's zomg gender essentialist, it's in that twisty place of glorifying war while telling us how terrible it is; it's--well, it can either be read as homophobic or kinda gay but either way it's weird about dude relationships--and the whole story is basically about constructing a position where someone might perform genocide while maintaining a sort of blamelessness or at least sympathy.

The foreword to my edition includes Card saying that he thinks he received some harsh critiques because the book is straightfoward doesn't require literary expertise to understand.  I think I can be more inventive than that, but more to the point, does anyone else giggle when authors start to explain why those ivory-tower types were so offended by the author's just-folks approach that they couldn't judge the book on its actual merits?  That sort of thing delights me.  Also, I can only read this as Card confirming that we should believe the book intends to say the things it says and it's not some kind of reverse-psych double-pump retrosophical unmeaning.  Obviously that doesn't mean that every character's thoughts are meant to be objectively true, but if the whole book is saying that Men are This and Women are That, gender equity is probably not the thesis.

I'm saying there's a lot to parse in this tome. Let's squeeze the first page for all it's worth.

Ender's Game: p. 1

Chapter One: Third

(Every chapter starts with a bit of contextless dialogue, an exchange between two or more people without names or locations given--although in this book I'm pretty sure one of them is always Colonel Graff.  We'll meet him in a little while.  The point is that we open with the administrative powers that be declaring that Ender needs to be taken away from home for training.)

"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.  Or at least as close as we're going to get."

"That's what you said about the brother." 

"The brother tested out impossible.  For other reasons.  Nothing to do with his ability." 

"Same with the sister.  And there are doubts about him.  He's too malleable.  Too willing to submerge himself in someone else's will." 

"Not if the other person is his enemy."

These are the opening lines and this is the entire summary of the book.  The government is searching for a perfect military leader and their training starts with little kids, and Ender's brother was too vicious and his sister was too sweet, so the government requisitioned his parents to make a third kid (in spite of the population control laws) in hopes that he'd be somewhere in-between.

So here's the first fact about how special Ender Wiggin is: he was made to order for the government to be a hybrid of the innate strengths of both Men and Women. This is going to be one of the core points of the story, so buckle in now: in the futuristic universe Ender Wiggin is born into, it is objective fact that women are predisposed to be compassionate and men are innately conquerors.  Scientific testing says so!  But the point is not that compassion is bad; it's in fact the key to Ender Wiggin being amazing at conquering.  He will weaponise his feminine empathy to be the deadliest commander ever, but Graff notes that the only way to make sure Ender does so is by putting him in a hostile environment to make him defiant and manly.  (Writing it out so makes it seem so outrageous that even I think I'm making this up, but it's seriously right there in the first lines of the book.)

There's a lot of determinism in this book, a whole lot of inevitability, which is going to be key to Ender's eventual fate as an innocent mass-murderer.  That first line, "I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one", refers to the military screening person whose job it has been to monitor Ender through a chip in his spine and decide whether this six-year-old boy is the greatest commander in history.  Apparently that's the sort of thing you can tell when a person is six.  Admittedly, they know he will need training, lots of training in very controlled environments and lots of prodding with sharp stimuli, but they know that this six-year-old is the only one with whom it can work.  Every other six-year-old in the world can't measure up; if you're not The One at six, you never will be.

It's not just about Ender's ridiculous intelligence, because we're going to meet endless numbers of improbably intelligent children, including Bean, the only one smarter than Ender himself.  It's all of his innate qualities: his depth of feeling, his rational solution to the fight-or-flight dilemma, his desire to be loved.  Let there be no doubt that scientific testing has proven that Ender Wiggin is born to be the perfect general.

"So what do we do?  Surround him with enemies all the time?" 

"If we have to." 

"I thought you said you liked this kid." 

"If the buggers get him, they'll make me look like his favourite uncle." 

"All right.  We're saving the world after all.  Take him."

'Bugger' there needs some explanation--the enemy aliens in this war are in fact giant insects, a point that will come up regularly and be  relevant in more ways than 'golly they're weird'.  It is not a slur against dudes who are attracted to other dudes.  The fact that the author decided to call the evil scourge of the galaxy 'buggers' and is also himself a colossal homophobe is probably just a complete coincidence.  (In the parallax novel Ender's Shadow, someone calls them 'buggers' and then corrects herself, calling them 'formics' and observing that people complain that 'bugger' is a bad word in English, even though the futurespeak language they're speaking is Not Quite English and so obviously that is just SILLY.  But eventually 'formic' becomes the normal in-universe term for them.  Just not in this novel.)

So yeah.  That's the rest of the first page, reminding us of three more things: the fate of the world is at stake, everything is justified by that, and that victory goes to the people with the willingness to destroy the things they love.  That last one is a clearer running theme in the Ender's Shadow series, but it'll be relevant here as well.  Ender's Game will suggest that loving something is in fact a precursor to gaining the power to destroy it.  Loving your enemies is vital, just like the religion underpinning this story has always said.  Unlike that religion, though, it goes on to say that loving your enemies is vital because then you can really effectively beat the hell out of them.  You have to see them like they see themselves, understand them like an omniscient god, before you can make with the smiting.

But in fairness to Card, I don't know if that's the thesis he wanted people to take out of it.  Ender will be celebrated before the end, but he will know why he is celebrated, and he will hate himself for his ability to love and destroy.

It's mostly about whether you can see the evil in yourself, I figure.

(For anyone who's wondering, future posts in this series won't quote every line of text and whenever possible I will try not to refer to events that haven't come up yet.  This is just an inaugural special edition.  Tune in next time for the first chapter proper, which is again gender-essentialist as hell and brims with self-satisfaction but is, in my opinion, actually really well written.  Weird, right?  I know!)

50 Shades Darker Chapter 4 in which they ruin Ice Cream.

Alright, happy new years y'all! Hope that your hangovers were gentle and your year is already off to a rockin' start!

So, chapter 4 takes off seconds where chapter 3 left off. I feel the chapter breaks in this book are arbitrary. This wasn't a dramatic break, it was just some dick sneeze where they cut it. Most of the chapter breaks are like this and I just- DAMN IT EL JAMES DO YOU NOT EVEN READ?! Ahem. So this chapter starts with Grey pulling his dick out of Ana--no, really, and with this little nugget in there:

his hands holding mine by the side of my head. Sadly, I suspect that’s so I don’t touch him.

There is a lot about this book that makes me sad. The fact that it's wildly successful when it's such shit, the fact that it romanticizes abuse, the fact that Ana is an insufferable wank, the fact that other women out there LIKE Grey. The ongoing inability for Ana and Grey to not empathize with each other is climbing on that list. While I never agreed with Ana's inability to respect Grey's wish to not be touched simply because he didn't want to be--a wish she herself has wished more people were respectful of when it comes to her--but I can understand how when you don't know the why of a thing it can be hard to simply accept it. I still maintain she was shitty about it, but I could at least wrap my head around it. I'm having a much harder time doing that now and remaining sympathetic to the character. She observes that he is doing things to prevent her from touching him, and while I don't fault her for being sad that she can't, she should be able to realize that he doesn't trust her enough not to, and maybe go about making it obvious to him that she is going to respect the hell out of that boundary instead of pushing it at every given opportunity?

He takes hold of my chin and kisses me hard. A passionate, beseeching kiss, asking for what? I don’t know. It leaves me breathless.
“Don’t leave me again,” he implores, looking deep into my eyes, his face serious.
“Okay,” I whisper and smile at him. His answering smile is dazzling; relief, elation, and boyish delight combined into one enchanting look that would melt the coldest of hearts. “Thank you for the iPad.”

So I assume he was asking her not to leave with the tongue-slipping? I find this passage just weird and awkward. Why have Ana ask what he's trying to ask without words and a line later have him just say it? I find this troubling as well--Grey was trying to hold Ana to something she said in her sleep it's easy to say "sure I won't leave you" in the afterglow of perfect sex, you know, the only kind these two will ever have, but it doesn't mean anything, and it makes me sad that neither of them recognize this.

I also find the mention of the iPad here so weird. I mean, I get that it was a sentimental gift, and she really is into it, but she already thanked him, a few times, and they just boned. I know iPads can be addictive but it should not be the first thing you think about after sex.

She also then asks him which his favorite song on the playlist was and he's all "OH THAT WOULD BE TELLING OF MY DEEPEST FEELINGS WOULDN'T IT HMMM?" and I started screaming at the book.

"GOD DAMN IT GREY NO IT WOULDN'T. SOME OF MY FAVORITE SONGS ARE ON THAT LIST FOR BEING CATCHY AND UP BEAT OR HAVING CLEVER LYRICS NOT BECAUSE THEY'RE ABOUT ADVENTURES! NO, APPARENTLY EVERY SONG MUST BE CHOSEN BASED ON HOW IT RELATED TO YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS" Is EL James secretly 13?

“Come cook me some food, wench. I’m famished,” he adds, sitting up suddenly and dragging me with him.

YES BECAUSE I LOVE IT WHEN MY EROTICA MAKES "GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN" JOKES! I get that they're supposed to be cute and silly but really, I actually have to listen to this shit from men (always men) cracking jokes about it and I'm just--I want them to get a new bit already.

Since we've gotten Grey's Dark! Tragic! Past!(TM) it is not time to get Ana's, because that is how this book runs.  

Christian and I sit on Kate’s persian rug,

Why the FUCK does a recent college grad have a fucking Persian rug?! How rich IS her family, and how spoiled is she?

Since we know husband Number 1 (Ana's Dad) died because of generic war training stuff, and that Ana wasn't raped or beaten in her youth, that means we get to find out what the hell the deal with Husband Number 3 (or he who shall not be named) is!

Christian gazes down at me. “You didn’t stay in Texas with your mom?”
“No. Steve, her husband and I, we didn’t get along. And I missed Ray. Her marriage to Steve didn’t last long. She came to her senses, I think. She never talks about him,” I add quietly. I think that’s a dark part of her life, which we’ve never discussed.

Or Steve. I guess we could call him Steve. And I guess the Dark Tragic Past for Ana isn't so much dark or tragic and just that her mother married a jackass who she quickly divorced and that Ana was lucky enough to have a loving surrogate parent who was happy to take her in. Sure, he couldn't cook anything at all ever, and she took care of him because she's such a GOOD GIRL and Ana has always been taking care of other people, but ignoring the author's heavy implications, that's a pretty decent crop. It's still not a good crop, and I'm not trying to belittle the experience of being chased out of your own home because your mother married a man so foul that you felt you couldn't stay--and, rather than leave him because he chased you out of the house, choose to stay with him. That sucks, but that's a realistic sort of suck, not a big dramatic AND HE STOLE HALF OF ANA'S COLLEGE FUND AND BROKE ALL OF HER SNOWGLOBES! It's a nice change of pace from EL James' usual over the top angst for all.

“Sounds like you looked after him,” he says softly.
“I suppose.” I shrug.
“You’re used to taking care of people.”

Oh, EL James, you had gone three whole lines without trying to wring every interaction for maximum drama and angst. I was almost proud of you. Grey then goes on to tell Ana that HE SHALL TAKE CARE OF HER!

“I’m still mad at you for buying SIP.”
He smiles. “I know but you being mad, baby, wouldn’t stop me.”
“What am I going to say to my work colleagues, to Jack?”
He narrows his eyes. “That fucker better watch himself.”
[....]
“Oh . . . will I be out of a job?” I ask, alarmed.
“I sincerely doubt it,” Christian says wryly, trying to stifle his smile.
I scowl. “If I leave and find another job, will you buy that company, too?”
“You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?” His expression alters, wary once more.
“Possibly. I’m not sure you’ve given me a great deal of choice.”
“Yes, I will buy that company, too.” He is adamant.
I scowl at him again. I am in a no-win situation here.
“Don’t you think you’re being a tad overprotective?”
“Yes. I am fully aware of how this looks.”
“Paging Dr. Flynn,” I murmur.
He puts down his empty bowl and gazes at me impassively. I sigh. I don’t want to fight. Standing up, I reach for his bowl.
“Would you like dessert?”



Holyfuckingshit. Remember what I said before about this book needing very little editing to be an erotic horror? Oh, what's that, there is nowhere you can go where he won't find you? He'll fire any man (and maybe woman) who so much as looks at you? Telling him you are angry and not okay with this is of no concern to him because he's concerned about your... safety? Grey is a fucking sociopath who has basically kidnapped Ana without physically restraining her. She went to Georgia to visit her mother, and he followed her when she made a cutesy "Miss you!" comment. She knows he can (and will) follow her where ever she goes, she knows he has power and resources beyond anything she could possibly hope to combat. Sure, she could go to the cops, but do you really think Grey wouldn't just buy them off? This book isn't erotica, it's a tragic tale of domestic abuse, and about how Grey strips the agency and power from Ana to control her. He's also training her, I'd like to point out. She doesn't want to fight, so she offers a domestic, ladylike (hey, remember that list from book 1 that listed the obscene things he wanted in a woman?) out. He's trained her to be afraid to fight with him.

“Now you’re talking!” he says, giving me a lascivious grin.

And when she acts in the way he wants her to she's rewarded with the side of him she likes. He's wonderful and sweet and fun so long as she never pushes too hard for any given want or need or boundary. I was bitching about Ana pushing against Grey's boundaries early, but he just steamrollers over hers to cartoon villain lengths.


“We have ice cream. Vanilla.” I snicker.
“Really?” Christian’s grin gets bigger. “I think we could do something with that.”



NO YOU LEAVE ICE CREAM ALONE!

“In the oven.” I smile sweetly at him.
He cocks his head to one side, sighs, and shakes his head at me. “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Miss Steele.” His eyes glitter.

I thought that was toilet humor and/or puns. One of us has been lied to, Grey, and I suspect it's you.


“I am very glad to hear it, Mr. Grey, and I thought you said that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit.”
“Well, Anastasia, my new motto is if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

WHAT DID I JUST SAY ABOUT PUNS GREY?! Ana is properly shocked and disgusted at him for making that joke but he distracts her with his black magic penis glamour.

“This will do just fine.” He looks up at me, eyes dark. “Ben & Jerry’s & Ana.” He says each word slowly, enunciating every syllable clearly.
Oh fucking my.

Sometimes when I work on these posts The Boy looks over at me as a thrash and groan and scream and suggests that rather than do a decon, I just film my reactions to reading the book. This section would have been a good one for it, as I suspect I may be curled into a small, trembling ball by the end of this chapter. Grab your drink, this one's going to be a doozy.

I feel winded. Desire, dark, sleek, and wanton runs hot through my veins. We’re going to have fun, with food.

OH MY HOW EDGY! NO ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT BEFORE! Although seriously, considering how fixated Grey is on food I'm surprised it's taken until book 2 for this to happen.

“I hope you’re warm,” he whispers. “I’m going to cool you down with this. Come.”

Die.


“Wouldn’t dream of it, baby, but I do want to mess with you and these sheets.”
My body practically convulses.

She actually then hits the floor and has a seizure.

My robe falls open while I stand paralyzed under his heated gaze.

He's got eye lasers now?! Warming her up so the ice cream melts and makes a huge fucking mess of her mattress. Sure, the sheets are still there, but it'll soak through so he'll have to buy her a new super comfy huge bed with a head and foot board perfect for bondage.

When I’m tied-up, staring at him, he visibly relaxes. He likes me tethered. I can’t touch him this way. It occurs to me that none of his subs would have touched him either—and
what’s more, they would never have the opportunity to. He would have always been in control and at a distance. That’s why he likes his rules.

THANK YOU FOR THAT INSIGHT ANA! THAT WAS IN NO WAY OBVIOUS UNTIL JUST NOW! Gotta love that his BDSM tendencies are being drawn more and more as a sign of damage and not kink. Those two things are clearly the same thing! I'm such a fool for assuming it's a matter of different strokes for different folks! Thank you Ana/EL James for showing me the light! Seriously, you're stark naked being threatened by a man armed with a spoon and carton of ice cream, your mind should be in other places.  

My inner goddess is doing a triple axel dismount off the uneven bars, and abruptly my mouth is dry. He really is beyond beautiful. He has a physique drawn on classical lines: broad muscular shoulders, narrow hips, the inverted triangle. He obviously works out. I could look at him all day.

I've been trying to leave the inner goddess stuff out as much as possible. It's all just mindless obnoxious fluff and I really just want her to get crushed by an anvil, but I want you to know I have been avoiding putting it here for your sake. There is a lot more of it than you're seeing here. Also how many times do you think EL James will describe Grey to us (IT HAS BEEN TWO BOOKS WE GET IT DUDE'S A BABE!) before the pages turn purple from all of this purple prose? That or start having to reach for things that prove the sonofabitch isn't human. "As his turgid wang glittered with saliva and fairy dust". 

“Hmm . . . it’s still quite hard,”

That's what she said.

 he says with a raised brow. Scooping out a spoonful of the vanilla, he pops it into his mouth. “Delicious,” he murmurs, licking his lips. “Amazing how good plain old vanilla can taste.”

Hey, remember last book when he was mocking vanilla? Because I do.

“Hey,” I start in protest.
“Why, Miss Steele, do you like your vanilla?”
“Yes,” I say more forcefully than I mean and try in vain to buck him off.
He laughs. “Getting feisty, are we? I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Because if you get feisty he'll leave you there until Kate comes home to find you naked tied to the bed. Just kidding he'll only blue ball you. Grey decides that he will be a good boy and share his pilfered ice cream.

“Hmm, well, this is one way to ensure you eat—force-feed you. I could get used to this.”

Uhm?


“Mmm. Tastes even better off you, Miss Steele.”

Melted ice cream does not taste better than unmelted ice cream, even when eaten off of a sexy lady. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.

I pull against my restraints and the bed creaks ominously, but I don’t care—I’m burning with desire, it’s consuming me.

Pleasebreakthebedpleasebreakthebedpleasebreakthebed.


and into my navel where he deposits a large dollop of ice cream. Oh, this is chillier than before, but weirdly it burns.

Ana, have you never been stuck in the cold long enough for it to burn a little? She's been in Washington for a good chunk of her life, I'm pretty sure they get cold winters. You should understand how cold/burning works. No? Oh, er, uhm, alright. I guess.

And I try, I try to stay still despite the heady combination of cold and his inflaming touch. But my hips start to move involuntarily, gyrating to their own rhythm, caught up in his cool vanilla spell.

cool vanilla spell.

Cool vanilla spell.

Cool Vanilla Spell. 

I don't even have words. 

I moan. Holy cow. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s tantalizing, but he doesn’t stop. He trails the ice cream further down my body, into my pubic hair, on to my clitoris. I cry out, loudly.

"IT'S CALLED A YEAST INFECTION ASSHOLE!"

I erupt unexpectedly

Show of hands, who didn't expect this? That's what I thought.

 into a mind-blowing orgasm that stuns all my senses, obliterating all that’s happening outside of my body as I writhe and groan. Jeez, that was so quick.

Is it really that hard to write an orgasm? There's exploding and shattering everywhere. It all sounds very messy, and not even from all of that wasted ice cream.

I am vaguely aware that he has stopped his ministrations. He’s hovering over me, sliding on a condom, and then he’s inside me, hard and fast.    

Give a girl a second to catch her breath won't you?

He then flips her over, seats her on his dick (facing away, so she can't touch him, naturally) and starts to go to town. 

“Do you know how much you mean to me?” he breathes against my ear.
“No,” I gasp.
He smiles against my neck, and his fingers curl around my jaw and throat, holding me fast for a moment.
“Yes, you do. I’m not going to let you go.”
I groan as he picks up speed.
“You are mine, Anastasia.”
“Yes, yours,” I pant.
“I take care of what’s mine,” he hisses and bites my ear.

This all seems really kind of threatening and black magic/warlocky to me. I think his powers work better when he's inside her, and she will now be less resistant to him owning every place she ever works. Also, how does she know he's smiling when she is facing away?

His magic is powerful, intoxicating. I’m a butterfly caught in his net, unable and unwilling to escape. I’m his . . . totally his.
“Come on, baby,” he growls through gritted teeth and on cue, like the sorcerer’s apprentice I am, I let go, and we find our release together.

If this is not proof that Grey is, in fact, a warlock, I don't know what is. 

They then immediately get into a conversation about how much they love each other and never ever ever want to break up. 

“I’ve never felt the way I felt when you left, Anastasia. I would move heaven and earth to avoid feeling like that again.” He sounds so sad, dazed even.

And by "move heaven and earth" he means "lock her in a cabin in the woods".

He then asks her to go to a random charity party his Dad is hosting tomorrow, and confesses he kept all the clothes he bought for her. 

I purse my lips. “Do you, now?” I mutter, my voice sardonic. I don’t want to fight with him tonight. I need a shower.

Again, there's this "I don't want to fight with him so I won't enforce a boundary" and it makes me both sad and uncomfortable and I feel like he's training her with his rage when she dares object. 

The girl who looks like me is standing outside SIP. Hang on—she is me. I am pale and unwashed, and all my clothes are too big; I’m staring at her, and she’s wearing my clothes—happy, healthy.
“What do you have that I don’t?” I ask her.
“Who are you?”
“I’m nobody . . . Who are you? Are you nobody, too . . . ?”
“Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell, they’d banish us, you know . . .”1 She smiles, a slow, evil grimace that spreads across her face, and it’s so chilling that I start to scream.       

The one is a footnote, before I go on, pointing out that this is from "I'm nobody. Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson. Ow, my liver.

So Ana wakes up screaming and Grey is reasonably worried and freaked out and asks what the fucking hell and Ana tells him about the girl who looks kind of like her that she met outside of SIP.

“Who?” I press.
“It’s Leila.”
I swallow. The ex-sub! I remember Christian talking about her before we went gliding. Suddenly, he’s radiating tension. Something is going on.
“The girl who put ‘Toxic’ on your iPod?”
He glances at me anxiously.
“Yes,” he says. “Did she say anything?”
“She said, ‘what do you have that I don’t have?’ and when I asked who she was, she said, ‘nobody.’ ”
Christian closes his eyes as if in pain. Oh no. What’s happened? What does she mean to him?
My scalp prickles as adrenaline spikes through my body. What if she means a lot to him? Perhaps he misses her? I know so little about his past . . . um, relationships. She must have had a contract, and she would have done what he wanted, given him what he needed gladly.

Jesus fucking Christ Ana he has said he would buy entire organizations to keep you safe and would move the stars and moon to keep you two together. I'm not saying these are good things, but can you stop being so uncertain? If a friend said these sorts of things to me, assuming they're sprinkled with stories of how way too into her he is, I would be grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking while letting out a wordless scream. If that didn't work I would bounce because fuck. That. Noise.

Grey's response is to ask about the girl, and for the new readers, at the end of the last book there was some crisis where someone went missing. A she. We weren't told who or why or what or how or huh, but it was left hanging. After this he calls... someone, to tell them about this sighting.

“Find out how . . . Yes . . . I wouldn’t have said so, but then I wouldn’t have thought she could do this.” He closes his eyes as if he’s in pain. “I don’t know how that will go down . . . Yes, I’ll talk to her . . . Yes . . . I know . . . Follow it up and let me know. Just find her, Welch—she’s in trouble. Find her.” He hangs up.

He then once again tries to drag Ana back to bed for even more sex. Jesus Christ, how are they not chafed?


“Well, I need some tea. Would you like to join me for a cup?” I want to know what’s going on. I will not be sidetracked by sex.

Oh hai there Ana's back bone! Nice of you to drop in! Ana asks and he refuses to talk, on account of it has nothing to do with her and he doesn't want her tangled up in this! Ana points out that she showed up at her place of work and knew her name and what she looked like and spoke to her.

“Okay,” he says, resigned. “I have no idea how she found you. Maybe the photograph of us in Portland, I don’t know.” He sighs again, and I sense his frustration is directed at himself.

So he makes this huge deal about protecting Ana but didn't think of the potential consequences of dragging her in front of a camera with him for random media shots?


I distract myself with pouring tea into teacups. So Leila wants back into Christian’s life and chooses a suicide attempt to attract his attention? Whoa . . . scary. But effective. Christian left Georgia to be at her side, but she disappears before he gets there? How odd.

Grey is handling this wrong. I mean, his ex clearly is in trouble and needs help and I am pleasantly surprised to see a character view it as such and want to do just that, but when someone is engaged in this sort of behavior the right answer isn't try and rush to their side and give them exactly what they want. That's rewarding and reinforcing this sort of thing. If Grey wants to pay to buy her the best shrink money can buy, and hire people to find her and help get her to said shrink since she's vanished, that is an awesome thing for him to do, but engaging with her directly is dangerous to him, to her, and to Ana. Otherwise this is going to turn into the anime trope of "Guy leaves the woman he loves to be with the one who needs him. Even thought she is evil and selfish and awful and abusive". Oh, I just summed up the rest of this book, didn't I? Damn it.

“Let me get this straight. She hasn’t been your submissive for three years?”
“About two and a half years.”
“And she wanted more.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t?”
“You know this.”
“So she left you.”
“Yes.”
“So why is she coming to you now?”

So this woman left Grey because she wanted a real relationship, got married within 6 months, carried a torch but tried to live a normal life, ran out on her husband about 4 months ago (I think about the time the first picture with he and Ana surfaced) she took that to mean ZOMG HE HAS A REAL GIRLFRIEND AND THAT BITCH HAS WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED! Turned up on his doorstep, when he wasn't there threw a shit fit, opened a vein causing his poor housekeeper who was just scrubbing out the toilet in her pencil skirt to have to rush her to a hospital, and realizing she had just done something really... dramatic, I will guess out of embarrassment, ran away before Grey got there. She has been MIA since then, and somehow tracked down Ana and harassed her/was creepy as hell at her when she found her. I think that brings us up to speed.

Grey decides he doesn't want to talk about it and drags Ana back to bed, claiming his reward for talking (access to her cooter) and we then get to wake up with them the next morning.

Hmm . . . Reaching up, I tentatively stroke his chest, running my fingertips through the smattering of hair, and he doesn’t stir. Holy cow. I can’t quite believe it. He’s really mine—for a few more precious moments. I lean over and tenderly kiss one of his scars. He moans softly but doesn’t wake, and I smile. I kiss another and his eyes open.
“Hi.” I grin at him, guiltily.
“Hi,” he answers warily. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at you.” I run my fingers down his happy trail. He captures my hand, narrows his eyes, then smiles a brilliant Christian-at-ease smile, and I relax. My secret touching stays secret.
Oh . . . why won’t you let me touch you?

 ANA WE HAVE GONE OVER THIS! This is supposed to be cute, but all I see is her ignoring his direct wishes because his discomfort with being touched isn't as important as her wanting to tweak his nipples.

“I think you’re up to no good, Miss Steele,” he accuses but his smile remains.
“I like being up to no good near you.”
“You do?” he asks and kisses me lightly on the lips. “Sex or breakfast?” he asks, his eyes dark but full of humor. His erection is digging into me, and I tilt my pelvis up to meet him.
“Good choice,”

We shockingly don't see the sex scene, although that's what, the fourth time this chapter? Ow. Instead they cut to her getting dressed and mentioning she needs a haircut, to cash a cheque, and buy a car. Because buying a car is something you just go out and do that day with no previous research.

“Ah,” he says knowingly and bites his lip. Taking one hand off me, he reaches into his jeans pocket and holds up the key to my little Audi.
“It’s here,” he says quietly, his expression uncertain.
“What do you mean, it’s here?” Boy. I sound angry. Crap. I am angry. My subconscious glares at him. How dare he!

Yes, how dare he give you back the car that he forced upon you before. This is totally unexpected and unprecedented. Ana hasn't cashed the cheque that she was given for him selling her old car, and when she tries to give it to him in exchange for the car he's trying to force on her again, he gets pissed.

“Do you really want to argue about this?”
“No.”
“Good—here are the keys.” He puts them on the chest of drawers.
“That’s not what I meant!”
“End of discussion, Anastasia. Don’t push me.”
I scowl at him, then inspiration hits me. Taking the envelope, I rip it in two, then two again and drop the contents into my waste bin. Oh, that feels good.

Grey's response is to have TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS put into Ana's bank account. Apparently her old car was an antique.

“Good . . . Monday? Excellent . . . No that’s all, Andrea.”
He snaps the phone shut.
“Deposited in your bank account, Monday. Don’t play games with me.” He’s boiling mad, but I don’t care.
“Twenty-four thousand dollars!” I’m almost screaming. “And how do you know my account number?”
My ire takes Christian by surprise.
“I know everything about you, Anastasia,” he says quietly.

AHHHHHHHHHH! And then they start fucking. Again. No, really.

I glower at him and he glowers back, two angry stubborn fools glaring at each other.
And I feel it, the pull—the electricity between us—tangible, drawing us together. Suddenly he grabs me and pushes me up against the door

I keep having to cut sentences off halfway through because EL James hates periods, if you were wondering.


“Lord, I want to take you now, but I’m out of condoms. I can never get enough of you. You’re a maddening, maddening woman.”
“And you make me mad,” I whisper. “In every way.”
He shakes his head. “Come. Let’s go out for breakfast. And I know a place you can get your hair cut.”
“Okay,” I acquiesce and just like that, our fight is over.

Yup, just like that I dropped the topic and he was pacified!

So they go out for breakfast and Grey then takes Ana to the beauty salon he owns for her hair cut.

Yes, that's right, Grey owns a few high ends beauty salons. WHAT THE FUCK DOES HE EVEN DO FOR A LIVING?!
 
 Holy fuck! It’s Rule no 6, the damned beauty salon. All the waxing nonsense . . . shit!
This is where he brought all his subs? Maybe Leila, too? What the hell am I supposed to make of this?
“Miss Steele will tell you what she wants.”
I glare at him. He’s introducing the Rules by stealth. I’ve agreed to the personal trainer—and now this?

You give an inch, they take a mile.

“Yes. It’s a sideline. Anyway—whatever you want, you can have it here, on the house. All sorts of massage; Swedish, shiatsu, hot stones, reflexology, seaweed baths, facials, all that stuff that women like—everything. It’s done here.” He waves his long-fingered hand dismissively.

 Oh hey, something new to talk about besides what a creepy cockhole Grey is and what an awful harpy Ana is! I've talked about gender norms a little bit on this blog before, but this just leaped off the page at me. Grey has casually assumed half of the world's population likes massages and things of that ilk, simply because of their gender, and that the other half does not, because they have danglers. In Grey's list of "SHIT I EXPECT YOU TO DO" back in chapter 11 we saw this:

The Submissive shall not look directly into the eyes of the Dominant except when specifically instructed to do so. The Submissive shall keep her eyes cast down and maintain a quiet and respectful bearing in the presence of the Dominant.

...

The Submissive shall always conduct herself in a respectful manner to the Dom­inant and shall address him only as Sir, Mr. Grey, or such other title as the Dominant may direct.

and I accused Grey of being a fundie. I found then, as I do now, this to be very restrictive and... old school, shall we say. He wanted her to be a good little woman, quiet and meek and not someone who would make him think or pay too much attention. He thinks that's how women should be. I didn't give it much thought beyond that, but we see him painting women with a broad brush again. I've jokes that EL James hates women before, but I'm starting to wonder how much I'm kidding.

I peek up at him, and suddenly he blanches—something, or someone, has caught his eye. I turn to see where he’s looking, and right at the back of the salon a sleek platinum blonde has appeared, closing a door behind her and speaking to one of the hair stylists.
Platinum Blonde is tall, tanned, lovely, and in her late thirties or forties—it’s difficult to tell.

OH HAI MRS. ROBINSON!


“Excuse me,” Christian mumbles hurriedly.
He strides quickly through the salon, past the hair stylists all in white, past the apprentices at the sinks, and over to her, too far away for me to hear their conversation. Platinum Blonde greets him with obvious affection, kissing both his cheeks, her hands resting on his upper arms, and they talk animatedly together.

I'm torn on this. Given how Ana has spoken of Elena before, I'm not surprised that Grey wants to talk to her not-near Ana. I however still think this is probably kind of shitty. Unless he's about to talk her out of coming over to say hello so Ana doesn't try to claw her eyes out?


Platinum Blonde turns and looks at me, and gives me the same dazzling smile, as if she knows me. I smile politely back.

Also we're up to four brunettes that have been mentioned in the book. Ana, Grey's sister Mia, Grey's ex Leila, and the receptionist at Ana's work. This is counting every service person they've ever met, most of which were women. Just throwing this out there.

Christian looks upset about something. He’s reasoning with her, and she’s acquiescing, holding her hands up and smiling at him. He’s smiling at her—clearly they know each other well.

How the hell can Ana tell from across the room that he's reasoning with her as opposed to just talking animatedly about something? Maybe they're having a passionate discussion about which is better, raspberries or cherries? Raspberries, for anyone wondering. It's science. You can shove a chocolate chip inside of them. Can't do that with a cherry. And those pits? Raspberries are simply superior.

It is after this that Ana realizes it's Mrs. Robinson, because it wasn't dramatically appropriate for her to do so until EL James could end the chapter with her realizing it.

I'd rant about "WHY THE FUCK DID GREY BRING ANA TO THE SALON ELENA WORKS AT?" but I suspect, since he owns several, that means she owns several, and the odds of her being there were low.

Alright my dears, that is it from me this week. As always, comments make me want to continue with this project, so you should leave lots of them to assure my liver that it's worth it. VALIDATE ME DAMN IT! *Ahem* Until Tuesday!

PS: This chapter basically caused my proof reader to repeatedly curl up in a little ball screaming "WHHHYYYY"  He looked like this: