#serenity-the-firefly

[specialagentartemis]

ykw i am having so much fan watching you be a hater, that i’ve decided to ask for more. PLEASE give us a rant about a book you hated.

Haha aw I'm honored. And uh I hope you don't have any particular attachment to Becky Chambers. Sorry in advance.

But A Psalm for the Wild-Built won a Hugo and I do not get the love. Book 1 was nice enough, yeah. Book 2 had me tearing my hair out.

Sibling Dex is a restless Tea Monk who serves the God of Small comforts on the science-fantasy planet of Panga. I genuinely love the idea of a tea monk - part therapist, part confessor, travels around to the different towns, mixes tea blends for people, lets them talk about their worries and fears and stresses, and gives them, if not advice, then sympathy and a listening ear and some calming tea. This is meaningful work but they're unhappy. After doing this for a while they're still unsatisfied with their life, so they go into the woods searching for self-actualization, and meet a robot named Mosscap, a wild robot that lives in the woods. See, hundreds of years ago, all the robots "woke up" and became sentient one day, then they staged a quiet rebellion against humanity's greed and industrialization by walking into the woods and never coming back. Now, the continent is split in half: humans stay on the Human Side, and robots stay on the Robot Side. The Robot Side is kept wild and humans are discouraged from going in there because humans can't be trusted not to ruin Nature. The rpbots are welcome to come to the Human Side, they just never have. Dex is the first person in a While to venture into the woods of the Robot Side, and the first human since the great walkout to see a robot. Mosscap gives Dex a lot of philosophical pep talks about not pushing themself so hard, about allowing themself to just rest and appreciate the world without feeling like they need to be Providing A Service to justify their existence. It's a nice theme. Underbaked, imo, but nice. Relateable.

Book 2 was a goddamn mess.

Book 1 mostly takes place in the wilderness of the woods, so it's okay if the nice utopian human community Dex comes from was sketchily-built. It Just Works, and everyone Is Just Nice, this is a science-fantasy parable. There were some issues I had with it - like the strict ideological and physical divide between Nature and Humans, and the fact that Dex's religion seems to be the Only Religion In The World, and it's vaguely secular-humanist with the gods being not "really" gods but names given to primordial forces and philosophical concepts, and the religion not really making any demands of its adherents in any way except to become their best selves and devote themselves to what they like... it's potentially interesting, but overall kinda lazy. It felt like Becky Chambers was aware of the idea that having an enlightened-atheist sci-fi utopia is Problematic, so she made there be a central religion, but she also didn't want it to have any of the ~icky~ things religions have, like belief in anything supernatural, or dietary restrictions, or creeds, or codes of behavior, or expectations to make any kind of sacrifice in any way. All the gods "ask" is that humans observe and appreciate the world. But whatever.

In book 2, Dex and Mosscap return to Dex's society, and the book seems to want to explain how the world works, and oh my GOD is Chambers not prepared to do this.

"Observe and appreciate" is all anyone is asked to do. Book 2, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, is an ode to ultimate virtue of Doing Nothing. There's this attitude I see in a LOT of utopian fiction, where the author is bluntly just not a good enough author to imagine a utopian society where people act like people, so in the world of Panga, utopian society is achieved through 1) homogeneity 2) no one giving a crap about anything.

As far as I can tell, there is the one religion. Most people are Fine with this. Most people are Fine with anything. There are no characters with distinct personalities. There's no money, except there is, except it's not real money and no one will deny you anything if your balance is in the red, even though your balance is available to be seen by anyone - this does not cause any kind of shame or pride or competition in any way, and Dex doesn't understand why it might. There are no hierarchies or governing bodies, people just volunteer to step up when things need doing (this is portrayed as great and not deeply concerning). There are different communities, but in them, everyone is uniformly nice, friendly, and helpful at all times. There are some parts of nature, like the seashore, where people are not allowed to go because they'll ruin the environment, and this is accepted as correct and necessary. Most people live in hippie, pro-recycling, high-tech, end-of-history green communities; there's one group they visit, however, that doesn't trust technology, and lives in a vaguely sci-fi-Amish way. You might think, Dex travelling around with a robot, this might cause conflict! It does not. The people from this community calmly explain their anti-technology position, Dex calmly explains their pro-technology position, and they politely respect each other. "Not bothered either way" is a phrase that turns up in various permutations a lot and is held up as the good, mature, responsible way to be.

There's a scene where they catch a fish for dinner, and instead of killing it, the scifi-Amish guy says "We let the air do that for us, and they let the fish slowly suffocate to death in the air while they all look on solemnly and sadly. This is portrayed as a deep, beautiful moment of them witnessing and honoring the final moments of a living being's life. And not. y'know. them torturing a living being to death so they can keep their own hands clean.

This is what I mean about the valorization of passivity: observing is all you are ever obligated to do. Letting a fish die in the air is better than killing it quickly and humanely, because doing things gets your hands dirty, while letting things simply happen is the Correct way to do it.

At the end, Mosscap and Dex blow off all their promises and appointments and just hang out at the beach chilling out instead, because do what you want forever, you don't have to do shit. This is the happy affirming ending. Mosscap you fucking said you'd meet with the city leaders as the robot ambassador to the humans, did you tell them you were blowing off this commitment because you didn't feel like doing that anymore??? Did you even let them know??????

It is SUCH a baffling book. The theme wants to be "you are more than your job, you deserve to just Be" and ends up feeling like "you don't have to do anything ever, and no one can make you do anything you don't want to do if you don't feel like it, and you don't owe anyone anything and searching for a purpose in your life is just making you stressed out so chill at the beach instead."

The thing that drives me crazy is like. Mosscap cheerfully tells Dex about robots that spend twenty years in a cave watching stalactites form because they think it's beautiful, and those robots are just as much a valued part of society as anyone else. Appreciating beauty and wonder is good enough, you don't need to be productive. And I'm just. fuckin. like. Humans are not robots! Robots don't need to eat or sleep! Humans need food, and clothes, and shelter, and medical care, and if we don't have SOMEONE working to provide that, we Die! Nice as it would be, we CAN'T just all do nothing forever until we feel like it! We can't do that!

And at the same time, the book bizarrely treats wanting a purpose in life as like... almost disordered. If you are seeking a purpose in life it's because you just haven't let go of your guilt and relaxed enough. It's bizarre. Valorization of passivity. Humans aren't meant to be in nature so we just Shouldn't. Doing nothing and having no strong opinions is the most self-affirmed you can possibly be. Letting a fish suffocate is more moral than quickly breaking its neck or spiking its brain. Someone else will do it. Who, if we're all supposed to be resting and only doing what we feel like? Don't worry about it.

"The heart of this book is comfort [...] There is nothing in it that can hurt you." YOU LIAR BECKY CHAMBERS THE FISH SCENE STILL DISTURBS AND UPSETS ME TO THIS DAY

[marzipanandminutiae]

you make some really good points about smallclothes! However i suspect that grrm was not thinking about it that hard given how those sentences feel like he just ctrl+f’d “panties” in his writing and then replaced every instance with “smallclothes”

Yeah another friend who's actually read the books pointed that out to me. That's what I get for giving him the benefit of the doubt!

Leaving the post up for the pics and because the OP- while really great! -did still get the era of split-crotch drawers and the issue of whether men wore Crotch Underwear in the Middle Ages wrong

[tohakumaru]

hi!! sorry if this comes off as pushy, but did you ever get my application for residency in nowhere? I filled it out…years ago at this point lol. I really don’t mind waiting, i just wanted to make sure that you got it! Anyways i love your art and whenever im reminded of this blog’s existence i spend twenty minutes catching up on the latest posts and im always so delighted & moved by it.

oooh dear this one got buried under a ton of spam, coupled with not touching the blog for a couple of months - i am so very sorry.

yes, i did!! slowly working through the list, maybe 2025 will be my lucky streak with progress, too many house-movings are bad for house-making methinks.

thank you a million times for your patience, and i wish you a happy new year!

[googoogojob]

Finally the "safe space ship"

[lovebvffys]

✦ Favorite Outfits Meme ✦

Kaylee Frye (Firefly)

[slyandthefamilybook]

[miniminidi]

meow, sit down please

[schnoobums]

“Figures. First time on the Core and what do I get to do? Dig through trash.”

FIREFLY (2002) E8: Ariel

[90s-kid-sad-adult]

albatross

[waywardwizzard]

Am I doing it right? This is how you do it, right??

[specialagentartemis]

ah i see. so becky chambers has fallen into the “you don’t owe anyone anything = the bonds of community/the social construct are pointless oppressive structures” and “self care = doing whatever you feel like” traps huh.

also irt the person asking for antidotes to becky chambers: CANNOT recommend a memory called empire and a desolation called peace enough. The author is so so invested in exploring her alien cultures and iirc she has a linguistics/history/anthropology background so she can actually pull it off. And the main characters are all well developed and complex and deeply flawed while still being likeable! (Hopefully artemis you haven’t already read and hated these books lol)

Hah I simply haven't gotten around to reading those yet, no... they are On my List... 2 many books

“self care = doing whatever you feel like” is definitely there, but it's not even so much that the bonds of community are pointless, it's more... it's okay if you do nothing, because the Bonds of Community mean that other people will be okay with it and pick up your slack no matter what you do. Sort of? A Prayer for the Crown-Shy was so muddled in its themes that I wasn't fully sure what, exactly, she was going for by the end. Mosscap is on a quest to determine what humans need, and nobody can articulate anything in particular that they need or want, because they don’t know, because everything they need or want is provided by their perfect society. In this perfect society, nobody wants for anything, which means nobody wants anything. Except Dex. Who can't articulate what it is they want. And it almost seems like that's treated as a problem with Dex, something Dex needs to get over.

A surface motif of “I’m OK you’re OK we’re all OK and that’s OK” and “you deserve a chance to rest, you don’t need to know where you’re going in life, and that’s OK” is all well and good, I can support that, but the presentation was all over the place. At the end, she even seems to recognize it, and try to address it. Mosscap reveals that when it asked "what do humans need?" the most common answer it gets from people is "a feeling of purpose." But it just kind of makes everything more muddled. Do humans need a sense of purpose? Or is trying to find your Purpose just making you unhappy and you need to just, stop caring if you have a Purpose or not? Mosscap treats Dex's search for a Purpose In Life as almost disordered, like something they just need to reframe their worldview and then get over and be happy doing nothing and going with the flow. Dex's deep longing is almost addressed, but then just... not. Mosscap's position is that Dex should basically just get over it, embrace doing nothing, and hang out with it on the beach. And so they and Mosscap blow off their obligations to have fun on the beach.

[cat-cosplay]

How to "Wash" your cat

[aevris]

stuck his ass in the nostromo (screencap study i've been working on)

[clauderains]

Alan Tudyk | Photo: Andrea Fremiotti

[lovebvffys]

✦ Favorite Outfits Meme ✦

Zoe Washburne (Firefly)

[pulpsandcomics2]

Serenity