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milk-is-stable · 12 days ago

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Toby's Secret Pocket

Sickday rewatch requested by @apolloisbored I'm sick! send me a longform to watch and I'll make a commentary/headcanon post about it! (using the tag #sfth liveblog, so that's what to blacklist if you don't want your dash taken up by this)

Pre-watch thoughts: I don't rewatch this one enough, even though from what I recall it has some of my favorite things: a strong Luke character, Tom creating an instantly classic character by being absolutely ridiculous, AJ being a police chief (why is he so badly good at it every time XD), and Sam somehow bringing the most insane characters to life in the most loveable way.

Liveblogging:

Luke: "Sam coming on as the evil make a wish kid is the fastest a main character's ever been chosen." Really? Because he JUMPED to be Toby in this, he's up and miming sewing before AJ's even sat down from the intro.

Sam: this is gonna be in the US because my accent choice said so. (these are....not their best us accents, not gonna lie XD)

Sam and Luke jump to fucking with each other very quickly in this scene, and it's very funny.

COMPTROLLERS!

Half of Toby and Meth-wife's flirting is very sincere and the other half is....you guessed it, them fucking with each other.

Sam: allow me to set up some potential stakes and plot threads for this story, otherwise it'll just be the two of us yapping at each other about tailoring all day

Tom: I'm gonna join this scene as the Don now. Sam & Luke: *even more intense flirting* Tom: I SAID- Sam: okay, okay, fine.

AJ: time to insert myself into this scene. Tom: whoa! where'd you come from?

Ah, a SFTH police department...one of the most chaotic places you can take a scene.

JIMMY!

Tom keeps assuming that editing will happen and then it Does Not (it's okay, we'll bleep it, we'll bleep it!)

So for the UK readers here, Arkansas to New York is gonna be over a 20 hour drive with rest stops included, and there are pretty much no major cities down there. Like, their biggest city only has 200k people in it. I truly don't know why A) the Don is going that deep into the midwest for his tailoring or B) why Toby, who wants to work in New York, is still running a tailoring shop out of Arkansas when he's apparently so good that a New York mob boss has heard of and wants his merchandise. I question why his ability is somehow so recognized that the Don heard about it, and yet he's still not got enough money to set up a boutique somewhere else. Unless he's running the shop closer to Branson and gets all of the showgirl contracts (Even though Branson is in Missouri not Arkansas) and the Branson performers who are lucky enough to be moving UP in the entertainment world go to New York and spread the word of how good Toby and his tailoring is and those rumors reached the Don somehow, but even then, if that's what's happening he'd probably get an offer from a broadway designer before a mob boss, and let's be real how many Branson performers are actually moving up a good chunk of them are actually moving down/retiring or otherwise are going to end up staying in the midwest forever and- I'm sorry, my hyperspecific "lived in this part of the country for ten years" knowledge is taking over, isn't it? 😅 (you really shouldn't have picked Arkansas sam, I wouldn't be doing this otherwise.....then again, there is a LOT of meth cooking down there in the Ozarks, so maybe it was an accurate setting choice after all.)

Anyway, this whole scene is just the four of them fucking with one another and it's great. "Are you sure you know about comptrollers, cuz you don't know about the letters B and N" "Maybe make HIM the main character, he seems to be a fan favorite" "his name is DON CICCICIO, I really feel like I should be in this room..." "You want us three, including HIM, to go talk to the tailor? You sure?" "Yeah, I really want a face-to-face with Don Ciccicio myself..."

"Actually, theres only space for two!" "I'll leave." "NO!"

CHIEF WAIT why did you come with us??

This whole longform is a mess, tbh, and that's what makes it so good. Love that AJ and Tom just kinda let Luke flounder about during this scene without much help/plot-forwarding.

Sam: what if I move this plot along by being a comptroller? *the scene quickly dissolves back into making fun of one another*

TOM WHY DID YOU DO THAT

"why do you have hair product in" dude it's probably his soap or shaving cream, it's not like bald people don't have to wash their heads

"Toby." *cheers* "HOW LOW IS THE FUCKING BAR??" Honestly Luke, in this one? Pretty frickin low XD

The mirroring while in the secret trousers is a great bit of stagecraft.

AJ: I should have never come with you. Sam: Yeah, that really didn't further the plot much, did it boss.

The audience booing for AJ kicking Jimmy out of the force and then immediately cheering when he "slams the window shut" and flips them off is great

"We're leaving. It'll make the scene much easier."

AAAAAAAH!!!! MITOSIS! *confused-J* Helpful-Luke: it's the process of cell division!

"son..." "Dad?" "Wha- yeah, just don't let anyone know-" "DAD??? :D :D :D I DIDN'T KNOW!!!"

I cannot emphasize enough that this play is a trainwreck plot wise, but the jokes are so strong that it doesn't really feel that way.

Jimmy having a much more realistic response to shooting meth than Meth-wife (meth does not mellow you out)

Oscar to Tom for this scene XD (and to the caption writers)

Luke: Ok, this is great and all, but I think it's time we wrap this up.

Iconic Jimmy finishing monologue!

And scene! Honestly, this is such a good one for showcasing how the four of them mess with each other on stage, and the ways that they can turn fuck-ups into great comedic moments, not to mention an iconic Sam/Luke pairing. So much fun!

#sfth #sfthposting #shoot from the hip #sfth liveblog #tom mayo #alexander jeremy #sam russell #luke manning #toby's secret pocket

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dotthings · 1 year ago

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Congrats to the fans of the wee woo show. I don’t go here but it makes me happy to witness how this arc for Evan Buckley got to bloom and I’m happy because I hope this reflects another shift in the TV industry.

For some media commentary context for you: ABC network is owned by Disney. Fox network was owned by Rupert Murdoch. So I can see how the network change for 911 can easily be a factor on how this got greenlit, after years of creator Tim Minear’s intention to work in hints, on the off chance he could take it there. (I don’t go here, but I did my reading). Oliver Stark who plays Buck also revealed he's been for it and couldn't say anything, until he was sure they could do it, until it aired and was out there. (*steeples fingers*)

For further context, Bob Iger—with George Lucas’ vocal support—just fended off a right wing coup on the Disney board from the kinds of people (like Peltz) who complain “why do we need so many female leads” “why do we need movies with all Black leads.” While it doesn’t mean Disney is no longer an evil megacorp, I’m pointing out that its CEO defended inclusive Disney brand content to the shareholders and the board, as well as dismantling the idea that it can’t be entertainment while being diverse.

The ripple of this goes outside of the wee woo show fandom. I’m seeing the joy on my dash from people who don’t watch the show or don’t watch it regularly, as well as from people who have been watching a long time and noticed things and realized there was a progression and it was there all along, and I know how much this must mean to a lot of people. With the world being how it is, with what people are facing inside the US from the far right, in their real lives.

It’s very hopeful in general for inclusion levels on a major network TV show, owned by a big evil megacorp. Representation matters.

Also I'm aware the wee woo show already had a queer couple, plus it's already an intersectional inclusive series, that’s great.

There shouldn't be limits placed on inclusion though. “But you already have X” shouldn't be weaponized to tell people to shut up. There is no “enough” or “too much” when it comes to inclusion. While I'm not for undermining the inclusion that's there, I've seen that weaponization used with a series that hasn't been great on inclusion, and I've seen that weaponization used for 911, which is. It's a sus argument.

Indirect and unintentional as it is, also bi Buck shut down every concern troll, every gaslight, every denial, every rationale I've ever seen people deploy against bi Dean. Everything from people who don’t understand what bi actual means—“but he likes girls so he can’t be bi”—to “but he wasn’t declared bi from the start of the show so he can’t”—yes he can and the wee woo show just did. On one of the original big three networks. Or people who say it would "ruin the character." Really? “But he’s an action hero”—so what? Evan Buckley is a hero, Dean is a hero, both badass action heroes. “People who see this as canon are delusional”—Evan Buckley went O RLY? Not so delusional now, is it.

Evan Buckley avenged bi Dean.

It’s self-evident. It’s right there. Different show, different network, but the concepts are familiar, the situation has a certain familiarity. This turn of events on an ABC show didn't just make bi Dean fans valid. bi Dean fans were always valid, the bi Dean reading was always valid. But I appreciate how much what happened on the wee woo show bonked people with a truth stick, about self discovery, character arcing, queer readings, queer coding, and the validity of merely noticing things.

#bi Dean #dot trolls the media #dot trolls fandom

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nobuverse · 2 years ago

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"Why is everyone being so mean to me?"

First that bear, now someone stealing his hat....what else could go wrong...?

#the useless brother [ nobukatsu ]#he's going to go off and cry in nobunaga's room #; see the world through my eyes: watch it burn [ dash commentary ]#; fuck this shit lets start a riot [ crack ]

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canmom · 1 year ago

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The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, 000-012

Or, what if that mural was the heart of a web serial.

I'm reading The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of @azdoine and @lukore on my dash over the last few months.

This is absolutely not gonna be a liveblog in the level of detail of the great Umineko liveblog project. Rather I'm gonna be aiming at something like the comics comints series or those occasional posts on anime. Or indeed what I wrote about Worth The Candle last year. I must create a robot whose purpose is to watch to see if I start writing detailed plot summaries and hit me with a stick labelled 'remember you have a job now'.

That outta the way, let's talk flower!

youtube

No, not that flower!

I will start with an anecdote. When I was at university, I ended up attending a talk by court alchemist senescence researcher Aubrey de Grey, who at that time did not yet have a 'sexual harassment allegations' section on his Wikipedia page. The main thing that struck me at the time was his rather spectacularly long beard. But I did listen to his talk about ending aging.

de Grey's schtick is that he, like many people in the transhumanist milieu, believes that medical technology is on the cusp of being able to prevent aging sufficiently well to prolong human lifespans more or less indefinitely. He believes that the different processes of aging can be understood in terms of various forms of accumulating cellular 'damage', and that these will begin to be addressed within present human lifespans, buying time for further advancements - so that (paraphrasing from memory) 'the first immortals have already been born'. He has some pretty graphs to demonstrate this point.

At that talk, one of the audience members asked de Grey the (in my view) very obvious question about whether access to this technology would be distributed unevenly, creating in effect an immortal ruling class. de Grey scoffed at this, saying he always gets this question, and basically he didn't think it would be a big deal. I forget his exact words, but he seemed to assume the tech would trickle down sooner or later, and this was no reason not to pursue it.

I'm sure de Grey is just as tired of being reminded of how unbalanced access to medical technology is in our current world, or the differences in average life expectancy between countries.

So, I was very strongly reminded of de Grey as The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere laid out its major thematic concerns and characters. I was also put in mind of many online arguments in the transhumanist milieu about whether it would be a good thing, in principle, to end death.

In particular, of course, comes to mind transhumanist Nick Bostrom's short story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, in which death is likened to a huge dragon that demands to be fed trains full of humans every day. In the story, humanity's scientists secretly build a giant gun to kill the dragon. Naturally, despite all the doubters and naysayers who foolishly feel obliged to justify the existence of the dragon, the gun works. Bostrom's imagery is incredibly heavy-handed (particularly the trains à la Auschwitz), but just in case you didn't get it, he also spells out the moral explicit at the end: basically, every day not spent putting resources to abolishing death is adding up more and more bodies to the pile of people who don't get to be immortal.

So far, Flower seems to be shaping up to be a critical intervention into that milieu, with a much more grounded view of death and a much stronger model of society - admittedly not a high bar but it's going good so far!

At the time of writing this commentary, I have read the prologue and first two six-chapter arcs, namely Mankind's Shining Future (1-6) and Pilgrimage to the Deep (7-12).

the general shape of things

We are introduced - from the perspective of sardonic, introverted Su, who is going to be the protagonist of our time loop - to a group of brilliant young medical wizards, who have just been invited to visit the headquarters of a secret society whose mission is precisely to abolish death. Su's grandfather was some kind of controversial luminary who was expelled this organisation, and he also did something to her, which is giving her some kind of ulterior motive to find her way into this society.

We know pretty much from the outset that this is a time loop scenario: Su has been explicitly given the opportunity to replay the scenario in the hopes of find an alternative outcome, by some kind of presently mysterious parties. This first part is the 'control' loop, i.e. probably more or less how things went down 'originally'.

I believe Umineko is an explicit inspiration for this story, and the influence is pretty evident. But parallels with the Locked Tomb series, especially Gideon the Ninth, are also quite noticeable. @lukore spoke of it as the STEM to Locked Tomb's humanities, and I can already kinda see it, although we haven't got into the real meat of the scenario yet. This story began serialisation four years ago, making the two works roughly contemporary. The latest chapter was published in the last couple of weeks - no idea if I've arrived just in time for the ending!

Stylistically, it's generally pretty heavy on dialogue and long asides. The characters are a bunch of mega nerds who love to have big philosophical and political discussions, but their dynamics are well enough realised and their dynamics clear enough that it can double up as naturalistic characterisation. So far, the discussions have been interesting to read.

Below I'm going to make some notes and comments on various elements of the setting and story. In a followup post (because it got too long) I'm going to talk a lot about entropy. Perhaps you will find this interesting!

the world

The first few chapters are dedicated pretty hard to exposition. We find ourselves in a distant-future setting - one in which it seems reality has totally collapsed and then been rebuilt using magic, creating a somewhat oddball universe which lacks things like the element iron, and also electromagnetism. This seems like it would have pretty severe implications for just about everything!

However, the 'ironworkers' have, after producing a series of trial and error 'lower planes' that didn't quite get it right, landed on a fairly close approximation of how things used to be on the old world. Though by 'fairly close approximation' I mean like... it's a bowl-shaped world and the sun and stars are artificial lanterns. But still, there are humans, and they seem to work more or less like we're used to humans working, apart from the whole 'magic' thing.

So, an alt-physics setting. Praise Aealacreatrananda, I love that shit.

While electromagnetism might be out, the more abstract physical principles like thermodynamics still apply, and the humans of this universe have managed to find analogues to a number of things in our world. Instead of computers, they have 'logic engines' which run on magic. Horses seem to have made it in, so we get delightful blends of historical and futuristic concepts like a self-driving computer-controlled horse-drawn carriage taxi.

The biggest difference is of course that in this setting, magic - more on that in a bit - has solved most medical problems and humans routinely live to around 500. The setting is ostensibly a semi-post-scarcity one, although a form of money exists in 'luxury debt', which can be exchanged for things like taxi rides, café food and trips on the space elevator.

Politically, we are told that the world has enjoyed a few hundred years of general peace, broken in living memory by a revolution which put an end to a regime of magical secrecy. There are lots of countries, and an alliance overseeing them.

There's a few other oddities in this world. Something called a 'prosognostic event' can happen if you see someone who has the same face as you, and whatever this is, it's bad enough news that everyone is constantly reminded to veil their faces in public and there's some kind of infant 'distinction treatment' to mitigate the risk. Given that, in the regular world, nothing particularly bad would happen if you ran into a long-lost identical twin, it suggest there is probably something a little fucky about how humans work in this world!

There's evidently a fair bit of effort put into the worldbuilding of fictional countries and historical periods. The important elements seem to be roughly along the lines of:

our world is currently in what they call the 'old kingdoms' period, which is poorly remembered;

next up comes an 'imperial' period of high transhumanist shenanigans in which society was ruled by 'gerontocrats' who got exclusive access to the longevity treatment, but this all somehow led to a huge disaster which destroyed og earth;

the survivors built the Mimikos where humanity currently lives using magic and created some kind of huge iron spike that holds the universe together; there was subsequently a 'fundamentalist' period in which a strict cutoff point was put on human lifespans and a lot of the wackier magic was banned;

now we're onto a new era of openness following a small revolution, while the major political structures remain largely intact.

Writing a far-future setting is hard, because trying to deal with the weight of history without the story getting bogged down with worldbuilding details is a fiddly line to walk. The Dying Earth series of Jack Vance might be a relevant point of comparison. Vance leaves the historical details vague - there are endless old kingdoms and strange artefacts and micro-societies for Cugel and co. to stumble on. Far more important than the specifics of history is establishing the vibe of a world that's seen an unimaginable amount of events layered on top of each other and is honestly a bit tired.

Flower makes things a bit more concrete and generally manages to make this work decently well. I do appreciate the asides where Su talks about, for example, the different architectural styles that layer up to make a place, or the way a technique has been refined. It establishes both that Su is the kind of person to notice this sort of thing, and also helps the world feel lived-in.

the names

The story doesn't do a lot with language. The story is written in English, and the narration will occasionally make reference to how things are phrased (e.g. how divination predates the suffix -mancy). We can probably make the standard assumption that this is all translated from $future_language, with the notional translator making a suitable substitution of whatever linguistic forms exist in that language.

The characters are named in a variety of languages. Our main character's full name is Utsushikome of Fusai. We're told that this is "an old name from Kutuy, and means something like 'mysterious child'" - so Kutuyan is one of the languages spoken in this world. It's blatantly got the same phonotactics as Japanese, and indeed if I search up 'Utsushikome', I find an obscure historical figure called Utsushikome-no-Mikoto, wife of the Emperor Kōgen; she has no article on English Wikipedia, but she does have a brief one on Japanese wiki. Just as Su says about Kutuyan, 'Utsushikome' is written 欝色謎 in Japanese, but it relies on archaic readings of those characters and wouldn't read that way in modern Japanese. We could perhaps assume a good old translation convention is in effect where Kutuyan is replaced with Japanese.

A lot of characters have Greek names, as do various setting elements. One exception is Kamrusepa, or Kam, who is named for an ancient goddess of medicine worshipped by the Hittites and Luwians. I know basically fuck all about Hittites and Luwians but it's a cool little nod to mythology, and it won't be the only one!

I'll run down a list of characters and my comments about them in a bit. But many are named after gods or other mythological figures.

the magic

Most of the divergences come from magic existing. Certain humans are 'arcanists', who are able to use the 'Power', which is a magic system with a highly computational flavour. Thanks to Su's expositional asides, we know that an incantation is something like a short program written in cuneiform with the ability to gather information, perform maths, and manipulate particles. An example we are given is a spell called "entropy-denying", which is the following string of cuneiform:

"…(𒌍𒌷𒀭)(𒌍𒁁𒀭)𒅥𒌈𒆜𒈣𒂠, 𒋢𒀀𒅆𒌫𒃶,𒈬𒊹."

We're told that spells always start with phrases ending in 𒀭, and end in 𒊹. Beyond that, I'm not sure how far the author has actually worked out the syntax of this magic system - probably not in too much detail! Seems like the kind of thing it's better to leave vague, but also she seems like kind of nerd who would (positive). It's conceptually a reasonable magic system for a world where more or less realistic physics applies.

The use of unusual scripts for a magic system isn't that unusual - the old European occultists who wrote the [Lesser] Key of Solomon loved to write on their magic circles in Hebrew, and in modern times we could mention Yoko Taro's signature use of the Celestial Alphabet for example - but the specific use of cuneiform here seems like it might be a little more significant, because a little later in the story the characters encounter a mural depicting The Epic of Gilgamesh, which of course was recorded on cuneiform tablets. Remains to be seen exactly what these allusions will mean!

The magic system is divided into various disciplines defined by the different ways they approach doing magic, with the disciplines breaking down broadly along the same lines as the modern scientific disciplines. For example, our protagonist is a thanatomancer ("necromancer" having become unfashionable), which is the discipline dealing with death; she's specifically an entropic thanatomancer, distinguished by their framework viewing death as the cessation of processes.

Magic relies on an energy that they refer to as 'eris' (unknown relation to the Greek goddess of strife and discord). We are told that eris must be carefully apportioned across the elements of a spell or shit blows up, that it can be stored, and it accumulates gradually enough that you don't want to be wasteful with it, but so far given little information about where it comes from.

Magic in this story generally seems to act as a kind of 'sufficiently advanced technology'. It's very rules-based, and used for a lot of mundane ends like operating computers or transport. Advancement in magic is something like a combination of basic research and software development. But the thing that makes it a magic system and not merely alt-physics is that it's at least a little bit personal: it must be invoked by an individual, and only certain people can operate the magic. We're told a little about how wizards are privileged in some societies, indoctrinated in social utility in others, and expected to be inconspicuous in the present setting. It's not clear yet if you need some kind of special innate capacity to do the magic, or if it's just a matter of skill issue.

With one exception, our main characters are a gaggle of wizards, and exceptionally skilled students at that. They're at an elite institution, carrying high expectations, even if they are themselves fairly dismissive of the pomp and ceremony. They have grandiose plans: Kamrusepa in particular is the main voice of the 'death should be abolished' current.

the cast

We're entering a cloistered environment with high political stakes hanging off of it. Even if I hadn't already heard it described as a murder mystery, it would feel like someone will probably be murdered at some point, so lets round up our future suspects.

Su (Utsushikome) is our protagonist and first-person POV. She's telling this story in the first past tense, with a style calling to mind verbal narration; she'll occasionally allude to future events so we know for sure narrator!Su knows more than present!Su. She's got a sardonic streak and she likes long depressing antijokes, especially if the punchline is suicide. She will happily tell us she's a liar - so maybe her narration isn't entirely reliable, huh.

Su is more than a little judgemental; she doesn't particularly like a lot of her classmates, or people in general, and generally the first thing she'll tell you about a character is how well she gets on with them. She introduces the theme of 'wow death sucks' in the first paragraph, but she is, at least at this point, pessimistic that anyone will manage to do anything about it for good.

Her magical specialisation is entropic thanatomancy, roughly making processes go again after they working coherently.

Her name is a reference to an obscure Japanese empress, as discussed above.

Ran is Su's bestie from the same home country. She is generally pretty on the level. She likes romance novels and she is pretty sharp at analysing them. She will cheerfully team up with Su to do a bit or bait someone else when an argument gets going.

Her magical specialisation is Divination, which is sort of a more fundamental layer of magic, about gathering information by any means. In medicine it's super advanced diagnostics.

Her name is too short to pin down to a specific allusion. Could be one of a couple of disciple of Confucius such as Ran Geng, or a Norse goddess of the sea.

Kam (Kamrusepa) is the de facto class prez and spotlight lover. She's hardcore ideological, the story's main voice of the de Grey/Bostrom death-abolishing concept so far - I think she straight up calls someone a 'deathist' at some point. She loves to tell everyone what she thinks about everything, and getting the last word.

Her magical specialisation is Chronomancy, so time magic. It's described as secretive and byzantine, but also it can do stuff like (locally?) rewind time for about five minutes. No doubt it has something to do with the time loop.

As mentioned above, she's named after a fairly obscure ancient deity of healing and magic.

Theo (Theodoros) is a fairly minor character. He's scatterbrained and easily flustered, he has a similar background to our protagonist, and he's not great with people. His name is shared with a number of ancient Greek figures, so it's hard to narrow it down to one allusion. I don't think his magic school has been mentioned.

Ptolema is a cheery outgoing one, someone who Su dismisses as an airhead. And she is at least easy to bait into saying something ill-considered. Her specialisation is applying magic to surgery. As a character, she tends to act as a bit of a foil to the others. Bit of a valley girl thing going on.

'Ptolema' is presumably a feminised version of the renowned Greek philosopher Ptolemy.

Seth is the jock to Ptolema's prep, and our goth protag Su doesn't particularly like him either. ...lol maybe that's too flippant, I may be misapplying these US high school stereotypes. To be a little more precise then, he's pretty casual in demeanour, flirty, likes to play the clown. He specialises in Assistive Biomancy, which revolves around accelerating natural healing processes.

Seth is named for either the Egyptian god (domain: deserts, violence and foreigners) or an Abrahamic figure, the third son of Adam and Eve granted by God after the whole Caim killing Abel thing.

Ophelia is someone Su describes as 'traditionally feminine' - soft-spoken, demure etc. (Gender in this world appears to be constructed along broadly similar lines to ours). Indeed we get a fairly extended description of her appearance. Her specialisation is Alienist Biomancy, which means introducing foreign elements to healing (not entirely sure how that differs from the Golemancy mentioned later).

Ophelia is of course a major character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, best known for going mad and dying in a river.

Fang is the only nonbinary member of the class, noted as the most academically successful. They're not on the expedition, but the characters discuss them a little in their absence, so maybe they'll show up later. It seems like they have a bit of a rebellious streak. Their magical specialisation is not mentioned.

Fang is a regular ol' English word, but I gave it a search all the same and found there's an ancient Chinese alchemist of that name. She is the oldest recorded woman to do an alchemy in China, said to know how to turn mercury into silver.

Lilith is the teenaged prodigy in computers logic engines, and Mehit is her mother who accompanies her on the trip. They've got a big Maria and Rosa (of Umineko) dynamic going on, with Mehit constantly scolding Lilith and trying to get her to obey social norms, though in contrast to Maria, Lilith is a lot more standoffish and condescending to the rest of the gang. Lilith specialises in 'Golemancy', which means basically medical robotics - prosthetic limbs and such. She spends most of her time fiddling with her phone logic engine, and will generally tell anyone who talks to her that they're an idiot. Sort of a zoomer stereotype.

Lilith is named for the Abrahamic figure, the disobedient first wife of Adam who was banished and, according to some Jewish traditions, subsequently became a demon who attacks women at night. There may be some connection between Lilith and the lioness-headed Mesopotamian chimeric monster Lamashtu, which I mention because Mehit is an Egyptian and Nubian lion goddess.

'Golemancy' is probably playing on the popular fantasy idea of a 'golem' as a kind of magic robot, but given the Jewish allusion in Lilith's name here, I do wonder a little bit if it's going to touch on the Jewish stories of the Golem which inspired it - a protective figure with a specific religious dimension.

There are some other characters but they're not part of the main party on their way to the function, so I won't say much about them just yet. Also it's entirely possible I went and forgot an entire classmate or something, big whoops if so.

the events

In true Umineko tradition, the beginning of the story narrates in great detail how the protagonists make their way to the place where the plot is going to happen.

To be fair, there's a lot of groundwork to be laid here, and the characters' discussions do a lot to lay out the concerns of the story and sketch out the setting, not to mention establish the major character relations. A murder mystery takes a certain amount of setup after all! There's plenty of sci-fi colour to be had in the 'aetherbridge', which is a kind of space elevator that lifts you up to a high altitude teleporter network. (It's technically not teleportation but 'transposition', since teleportation magic also exists in the story, with different restrictions! But close enough for government work.)

They go to a huge space citadel, which is kind of a transport hub; some cloak and dagger shit happens to hide the route they must take to the mysterious secret organisation. They find a strange room with a missing floor and a mural of the Epic of Gilgamesh, albeit modified to render it cyclic. What does it meeaaaan?

The idea of a secret society of rationalists is one that dates back to the dawn of ratfic, in HPMOR. It was kinda dumb then, but it works a lot better here, where we're approaching the wizard circle from outside. The phrase 'Great Work' has already been dropped. I love that kind of alchemical shit so I'm well into finding out what these wizards are plotting.

the dying

A lot of the discussions revolve around the mechanics of death. Essentially the big problem for living forever is information decay. Simple cancers can be thwarted fairly easily with the magic techniques available, but more subtle genetic slippages start to emerge after the first few hundred years; later, after roughly the 500 year mark, a form of dementia becomes inevitable. It's this dementia in particular that the characters set their sights on curing.

One thing that is interesting to me is that, contra a lot of fantasy that deals with necromancy (notably the Locked Tomb series), there appears to be no notion of a soul in this world whatsoever. The body is all that there is. Indeed, despite all the occult allusions in the character names, there is very little in the way of religion for that matter. Even the 'fundamentalism' is about an idea of human biological continuity that shouldn't be messed with too much.

Su distinguishes three schools of thought on death, namely 'traditional', 'transformative' and 'entropic'. The 'traditional' form attempts to restore limited function - classic skeleton shit. 'Transformative' sees death as a process and uses dead tissues together with living in healing. Su's 'entropic' school broadens this 'process' view to consider death as any kind of loss of order - a flame going out as much as an organism dying. At the outset of the story, Su has discovered a 'negentropic' means to restore life to an organism, which she considers promising, even if for now it only works for fifteen minutes.

This is an interesting perspective, but the devil is in the details. Because processes such as life or flames, necessarily, result in a continuous increase in the thermodynamic entropy of the universe. And yet this idea of death-as-loss-of-order does make a kind of sense, at a certain level of abstraction.

Elaborating on this got rather too long for this post, and I think it can stand alone, so I'm going to extract it to a followup post.

the comments

As is probably evident by the length of this post, I am very intrigued by The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere. The setting is compelling, and it seems like it's got the willingness to bite at the chewy questions it raises instead of acting like it has all the answers, which is I think one of the most crucial elements for this kind of scifi. I like how unabashed it is at having its characters straight-up debate shit.

Of course, this all depends where they go with it. There's so many ways it could be headed at this point. I hear where it's going is 'dark yuri' and 'Umineko-inspired murder mystery', so that should be really juicy fun, but I do end up wondering what space that will leave to address the core theme it's laid out in these first few chapters.

Overall, if this and Worth the Candle are what modern ratfic is like, the genre is honestly in pretty good shape! Of course, I am reading very selectively. But this is scratching the itch of 'the thing I want out of science fiction', so I'm excited to see where the next 133 chapters will take me.

Though all that said, I ended up writing this post all day instead of reading any other chapters or working, so I may need to rein it in a bit.

#fiction #web serials #the flower that bloomed nowhere #tftbn #sff

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crookedkryptonitebeliever · 1 year ago

Text

Best and Worst of Both Worlds (Part 16)

tw: literally Yves watching ur every move, super suffocating stuff, Yandere shenanigans

Yeah ok u guys decided to lust for the creep, then the creep u shall receive

after this chapter i mean

Part 17

You told him your opinion on Montgomery.

"I see." He replied. Yves deadpanned at you before pulling you in for another kiss on the lips. Your face and the tips of your ears heat up, you're still not used to this yet.

He pulled away and chuckled at your bashfulness. Trying to cover your burning face with your hands is futile, as it only makes him tease you more.

"Call me if you need to go somewhere. I'm available for you any time." He slung the straps of his handbag around his shoulder, and Yves prepared his car keys in his hand.

You told him 'okay' as you're rubbing the last of his lipstick marks off using a piece of wet wipe.

He stroked your head, traced his fingertips down your jaw and finally held your chin. He tilted your head upwards and gave you a forehead kiss.

You whinged as you now have to wipe off one last print. He bid you goodbye before closing and locking the front door behind him.

Soon after, you dashed back into your room trying to escape your housemates hollering.

Days would go on like this: Yves breaks into your house using the spare key, scare the shit out of you when you open the door to see him standing there, receive adequate kisses, eat (br)lunch, talk for hours, landlord comes over to fix more stuff, eat dinner and finally, at around midnight- sometimes later, Yves would leave.

You would go to sleep almost immediately, but definitely looking forward to the next day.

He started coming in earlier and earlier, working on his things during times where you had nothing to say. You asked him about his work, he tried explaining it to you but you zoned out. It's so boring and complicated. Full of numbers, charts and graphs, you couldn't care less.

Needless to say, he cooked all your meals and did all your chores for you. You always protested, because it isn't his job and you should be responsible for taking out the trash or keeping yourself alive.

Yves would simply ignore you and do them anyway. If you're particularly worried, he assures you that it's some sort of a hobby of his to take good care of you. If you insist that he stops, he will guilt you; making you think that you're unnecessarily taking away part of his joy in this relationship when it isn't even harming you. So you just let him do what he wants, and you benefit from it greatly.

You really like him. He lets you take a nap on his lap while he types away at your desk, Yves listens to you ramble about your interests and occasionally adds his own fascinating commentary to it. You were astonished to know he has a whole database of random fandom trivia in his head. He washed your sheets and made your bed for you every morning.

He lets you hog his portable fan to yourself. But eventually, his bargaining powers lead to your landlord installing a ceiling air conditioner in your room. The best part? No rise in rent.

Yves gradually introduced you to a solid skincare routine. It started off with a simple face cleanser and moisturizer. Then he added toner to the regime. Then a weekly exfoliation and bi-weekly usage of sheet masks. It was hard for you to remember to do it or have the motivation, but Yves didn't mind maintaining your skin.

You just love the tingles you felt when he reclined you on your chair and he massages your face with the moisturizer. His fingers skillfully work to unravel you.

He made your house actually enjoyable to live in. You haven't gone out in three weeks and that didn't alarm you. You are glowing, physically fitter than ever, clean and most importantly, happy.

You have the drive to do so many things. Like learning a new language, learning to code, learning to knit or crochet, learning to draw... anything you wanted to do, Yves is always the expert to consult. He would buy the materials you need and teach you step by step. It made sense for him to be an extraordinary mentor, because you found out that he was also an exemplary lecturer at your university at one point.

You confirmed that he's currently a researcher, specifically, a research mathematician who works together with other branches of academia including but not limited to human Psychology, biology and sociology. The gist of his project has to do with predictive algorithms and probabilities. It's impressive and complicated, too bad you're not interested beyond what was described in a nutshell.

It's no secret that you look up to him, seeing that you're also a student looking to advance their education.

But it begs the question of his age. He has done so much in a short span of time. You wonder what his true age is.

But it's almost impossible to know because he would be offended whenever his age is brought up. It seems like he despised being perceived as ancient, which you understand. He probably comes from a time where youth is overly worshipped. You let it go, it isn't like his age affects you in any way.

It doesn't mean you didn't try searching him up. At first you suspected that he was lying because you couldn't find anything about him working at your university on the internet. But you sent an email to the administration asking about him. They came back with the confirmation that Yves is currently a hired researcher there. Strange that they knew who he is without knowing his last name. You guess there's only one Yves in the entirety of his faculty.

Speaking of names, you were shocked to find out that Yves didn't have a last name. After tons of relentless teasing from Yves for wanting to know his surname and a platitude of shame-induced face coverings later, you finally discovered he doesn't have one. This was bizarre to you, but Yves only told you off for being insensitive towards him, as not everyone has the privilege of a last name. It seems like a touchy subject, better not bring it up again.

Although it has been around a month since you think you first met Yves, you can safely say that you're madly in love with him. He is way more attentive and caring of you than anyone you ever met. Not even your parents or guardians can compare. Absolutely no one in your life has treated you this well.

There is that nagging feeling that something is very wrong. It wasn't a "He is going to leave you for someone better" feeling, it was more of a "what if Yves is secretly an organ harvester and he's healing you up to make a good price on the black market?"

But due to blind love, you forced yourself to brush it off as some implausible, impossible, silly thought.

...is it though? Yves does give off uncanny vibes sometimes no matter how suave and sexy he is. He has a lot of things to hide and the knowledge that you have of him is not enough to save you if he ever decides to steal a kidney or two.

Maybe this relationship isn't good for you. It keeps giving you inner turmoil to lose sleep over. This is definitely too good to be true, no one likes being a full time babysitter for their partner; this has to be a trap! You think you should quickly break it off with Yves before it gets too--

You were interrupted from your thoughts when you felt the chilly air from the air conditioner nip at your skin. The bliss of not being boiled alive by your own fluid trickles down your forehead.

You close your eyes and grin, letting the wind blow on your sweaty hair. This is lovely, you're so grateful to have Yves in your life. If you didn't have him here, you wouldn't be able to enjoy this temperate luxury.

Yves lets his focused gaze linger on your form for a few more seconds before replacing the remote back onto the holder. Yves pressed the button on his stopwatch, the beep was soft enough to go unnoticed.

He checked the temperature, the time and the humidity of your bedroom before logging them all into his computer. Yves turned his head to look at your position on the floor, you're splayed out like a rag as gusts of cold air strike your body.

He opened another file, which is the floorplan of this house. His eyes scanned the screen, noting down the exact coordinates of your precise location.

It would always be like this. You would start formulating thoughts and suspicions on Yves, spiral so much that you contemplated ending everything to protect yourself, then something interrupts your mind and eradicating the unwanted ideas entirely. Be it a change in temperature, texture, hunger or thirst. Sometimes, it's because you feel you hit your Yves-interaction/social quota for the day. So he would excuse himself and leave your house until you recovered.

He always comes back at the perfect time. Just right when you're starting to yearn for him. Yves ensures he never leaves for too long to make you think he's neglecting you. But he wouldn't come back too soon to make you go "yuck, this bitch's face again?"

Your signs could be as minuscule as a lower lip twitch, a brief, split-second movement of the eye, flaring of nostrils, positioning of your arms or even a change in the depth or rhythm of your breathing.

Or it could be an increase in heart rate, body temperature or sweat beading from your pores. Hell, it could even be the sound of you swallowing your spit or the smell of irritation.

They are all telltale signs that you're about to do or think about something undesirable due to overwhelm or underwhelm.

It's scary. He could just detect it with his superhuman senses. But ignorance is bliss, you still didn't know that he's puppeteering your environment accordingly. He would very much like to keep it that way.

Yves must admit, he has been careless. For the past three weeks, he failed to consider that his daily presence is wearing you down. It was his own fault for disregarding his calculations, Yves was originally only supposed to see you four times a week; that was the most optimal arrangement.

But he was enamoured, as desperate and feverish as you to be together. He just hides it impeccably well. Could you blame him, though? This was the first time you acknowledged him, the first time Yves got to kiss, touch, and hug you as freely as he wanted. The first time he gets to observe past the use of cameras- he does not need to hide. He gets to put his elaborate meal plans to use, you're eating his cooking, he's washing your clothes and you're accepting his backrubs. This is the closest so far to the ideal he wanted in his life with you. Anyone would be greedy in his situation.

But he flew too close to the sun like Icarus did. The wax melted off his wings and now he has to face the consequences that would have been avoided if only he had controlled himself better.

He's starting to notice you're not as positively receptive to his kisses as before. Sometimes even outright grimacing and shuddering in disgust when you think he's not looking. You spent a couple minutes longer in the bathroom, sometimes up to an hour, claiming you had stomach issues. But you didn't have problems with your digestion, your boyfriend made sure of that. He meticulously checks everything that goes into your mouth and he knows you didn't even pull your pants down. All you did was sit in the corner and scroll on your phone.

You did it just to escape from Yves and he's fully aware of that.

It devastated him when he went through your internet history:

Yves removed his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He checked the timestamps, and you accessed the web since three in the morning.

"Why are my boyfriend's kisses and hugs gross to me now"

"Clingy boyfriend"

"How to tell my boyfriend to stop being clingy without hurting his feelings"

"How to say no to hugs"

"How to say no to hugs and kisses"

"How to say no"

"How to stop people pleasing"

"How to tell people that i dont want to see them but not forever just for a few days"

"Social battery"

"Therapists near me"

"Therapy price"

"is University counseling free"

"university counseling wait times"

"How to break up with my boyfriend"

"Is it rude to break up over text"

"Script for breaking up"

"Nice script for breaking up"

"Kind script for breaking up"

"Breaking up without hurting his feelings script"

"ChatGPT"

"Do retired lecturers have a habit of checking for plagiarism in their day to day life"

"Is AI generated content plagiarism"

"Jobs near me"

He knows he has no one but himself to blame. He had a plan all laid out, if he followed it to a Tee, it would have conditioned you to ultimately accept his intense love without complaints. He was supposed to give you a maximum of one kiss on the lips and four others somewhere else on your face. But gave you a whopping average of 76 kisses a day, 20 of which are on the lips; 1520% of the actual daily cap on kisses.

Likewise, he hugged you too much. Yves was only supposed to give you 12 hugs, lasting 8 seconds each at most, spaced throughout the day. However, you're in his arms for a total of 6 hours a day; 2250% of the maximum.

He is the first thing you see in the morning and the last face you perceive before sleeping, From before sunrise to past beyond sundown, you would be exposed to him; from 6am to 12am the next day; he would already be in your room before you're even awake. Subconsciously, you know he's there because the brain never stops working.

Of course, you would be sick of him! It doesn't matter if you came from an affectionate family or you turned out severely touch-starved, with extreme figures like these, anyone would be nauseated with his presence by the third week!

Yves fought back the urge to run the numbers back the fifth time. The cold hard facts are there, he made a grave mistake. Painstakingly recalculating everything is just a pathetic attempt to appease his denial that he lost control over himself.

He sighed and propped his head up by an elbow, absentmindedly fiddling on his calculator. Yves's eyes flitted up to the monitor. You're curled up into a ball on your bed, scrolling on your phone. Most likely to try and catch up with your own me-time. Yves could see pixels of bags forming under your eyes.

He shook his head and decided he must rectify this. Yves got up from his seat and sauntered out of his office, switching the lights off but leaving his surveillance equipment on.

Meanwhile, you yawned, closing your eyes and letting your phone slip next to you. Finally but reluctantly drifting off to sleep.

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere oc #yandere male #yandere concept #tw yandere #yandere x you #yandere oc x reader #male yandere oc x reader #oc yves #oc montgomery

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