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this interaction made me chuckle

Kyr: I want to die for the war 

Avi: I want to win the war 

Kyr: you’re so fucking weird 

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The morality that Some Desperate Glory touches upon is genuinely so mind boggling. Is it ok to kill 14 billion people over and over again in a sub reality if it’s the same 14 billion? Do their deaths matter if it’s a universe that is created and ends for the soul reason to run doomsday? Do they exist in the same way that the other characters exist? When Mags beat doomsday, did earth survive past when the simulation ended?

If you kill the same person over and over again have you killed once or many times?

Emily Tesh takes utilitarian ethics to places I’ve never imagined 

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I'm surprised by how many people are questioning theis one part of the ending of Some Desperate Glory. Not that the book was perfect, and the third act seems to be considered the weakest for a reason, but I've seen so many posts about how 'nobody actually believed Gaea Station's principeles' when that is not how I read it at all!

The way I saw it, of the people in Nursery, only Sergeant Sif knew that there were no majo attackers. That is the children, as the most vulnerable group, explained. And the rest were given a choice: death or escape. We see how shocked Kyr was at the amount of humans on Crysothemis who are just living normal lives. The people of Gaea consider themselves the last of humanity, minus some maybe fifty traitors. Even taking away the urge to survive at all costs, they may very well feel a responsibility to live as representatives of the human species more than anything. And that's the ones who truly believe in the cause, which obviously can't be all of them.

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The Worsties + the error message

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Further into Some Desperate Glory and honestly appreciating the existential horror potential of finding out you live in a hyperreal simulation or alternate universe or lotus eater trap or something and your sister gets her original memories returned and suddenly becomes a massive bitch and starts talking about assassinations and sabotaging reality, but looks at you, flinches, and says it's probably best if you just get given the necessary info secondhand.

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It's just, Kyr loves her messmates! They're her team, her family, she dedicates so much of her time and effort to trying to help them thrive on Gaea, and they fucking hate her! And she has no idea! It clobbers her in the face when she hears "I never liked you" said as if it were obvious. And it should be! Valkyr Marston is the worst! Her best idea of how to express love is to act like a god damn drill sergeant! She reduces Lisabel to tears repeatedly and thinks nothing of it! Hell, I've known people like Kyr, people who have twisted and contorted every part of themselves around a dogma, an institution, who filter every single one of their impulses through that lense, and they're always so god damn smug about it! Even ignoring the way it warps her good and kind impulses, she just radiates fragile, violent pride. How else could she function? How could she tolerate the harm she's done herself on behalf of Gaea except to treat it like a test that only she was strong enough and brave enough to pass, and to hold herself above everyone else who doesn't meet the invisible standards she judges herself by.

And fuck is it satisfying when she is finally able to see herself through her messmates' eyes. The sense of loss is palpable. But she makes the effort! She tries to do better by them! And we get to see that they were ready to love her, to embrace her, to be her friends. All she needed to do was act more like a person and less like a fascist ideal.

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Eliza Clark, the woman that you are. Discussion/comparison/analysis under the cut.

I'm certain I got all turned around, because She's Always Hungry was my first Eliza Clark, and then I went back, first to Boy Parts, then to Penance, and found that She's Always Hungry was only the conclusion to Clark's many master theses. The main being, living in a man's world.

I'm relucatant to use the term male gaze, as it's been bastardised to hell and back, but considering Irina's photography, it fits. By definition, it refers to art made by (heterosexual) men that presents women as sexual objects and sexual objects only. It only concerns itself with the world from the eyes of the man.

And so begins Boy Parts, and Irina's quest for impact. You can #womeninmalefields #womenswrongs #icouldfixher #shecouldmakemeworse all you want — fact is, however commically villainous, however stereotypically mean and literally violent a woman is, the worst men will let her be is a bitch.

Whatever she does, whatever big disaster she tries to make in order to prove to herself that she can... all that is less important than her being A Woman. An attractive woman, at that. There is additional baggage.

Penenace continues the legacy beautifully, yet more discreetely. Still, it is everywhere. From the very start of the book, with the I Peed On Your Face podcast, to Penance itself being the work of a male journalist, and even the way Simon Stirling-Stewart rebrands his hotel using the death of Ellie Miller, an employee in the second Empire hotel.

The prosaic parts of the novel are fundementally an intrusion — these are not the girls' real thoughts. Not their real words. Again a sense of humanity, a softening and sanitising of murderers, because they are women. Girls.

I could eat these books.

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a little drawing of shesheshen & blueberry from someone you can build a nest in

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literally any upper middle class tiktok self-identified ‘that girl’ in a pastel workout set with a thirteen step skincare routine and a green juice is a million times closer to being patrick bateman irl than any self-identified sigma film bro

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She's Always Hungry by Eliza Clark is a short story collection that is mainly sff/horror fiction with, of course, themes of hunger. A short but incredible read, I sincerely recommend it!

Since I'm practically spending this summer waiting for and recovering from top surgery I am hoping to spend a lot of time reading, both for my dissertation next year and recreationally, so if you have any recommendations (specifically in the horror category, but I'm open to others like fantasy/sci-fi) I'd love to hear them :]

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When the Sleeper Wakes, H. G. Wells

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Just barely scratched the surface, but I'm finding Someone You Can Build a Nest In to be a novel take on shapeshifting. Such visceral description!

Really putting the monster in monsterfucker. Then underlining it. Then circling it. Then underlining it again. We love to see it.

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We Need to Talk About The Giver

In the past couple of years, I’ve seen a resurgence of discussion about The Hunger Games online, but I rarely, if ever, see anything about Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, you’ve very likely read it. For a little while it was a popular school assignment, until “concerns” about a scene describing a very chaste dream indicating the protagonist was developing sexual feelings for a girl in his class made it equally popular to ban from school reading lists. The stage play adaptation was good. The movie, despite its star-studded cast, was awful. (That might be why nobody talks about it.)

Lois Lowry published The Giver in 1993, when the popular thought was that avoiding ever talking about race, disability, gender, or sexuality was the way to mark progress. Discussions of these things were (and are) uncomfortable, and isn’t discomfort the same thing as pain? Isn’t making someone uncomfortable the same as hurting them? Isn’t hurting someone the same as doing something wrong?

In this way, “leveling the playing field” for marginalized people began to look like pretending everyone was the same. “Colorblind” ideologies, as well as euphemistic terms like “differently-abled”, grew in popularity as people found ways to avoid acknowledging the ways in which other people’s lives were different from, and sometimes more difficult than, their own. At best, it was an effort at politeness. At worst, it was intentional suppression. Often, it ended up being condescending and muddled either way. Afaik Lowry didn't really talk about the philosophy of the book in interviews, wanting it to stand on its own, but the book totally skewers that whole ideology in a way that's still relevant today.

The book's society, the Community, emphasizes "precision of language", which ends up meaning the total opposite. The society constantly uses euphemisms ("Release" for euthanasia and death, for example) and through "precision" has eradicated big concepts like love that are simple, but become complicated when intellectualized.

The Community insists on ritualized constant apologies with ritualized mandatory acceptance. These are, of course, meaningless apologies that result in equation of big/intentional harm with small mistakes. Consequences for infractions are frequently too great, from constant, ritualistic public apologies for lateness and other small mistakes to Release – death – for a pilot who flies too low.

The Community has no fictional stories, only dictionaries and books of facts directly related to everyday life in the Community. There are no arts or history classes in schools, and there is no Storyteller (possibly not in living memory). In fact, there's little or no education not directly relating to a person’s vocation after age 12. All these things make it easier for the Community to deny the reality of Release and make it very, very difficult to feel true empathy, if not impossible.

The Community has literal colorblindness – nobody except the Giver and the Receiver can see color in anything or anyone. All skin tones and hair colors look the same to most people, and most people look the same thanks to genetic engineering. The only physical variation Lowry ever describes is the “pale eyes” of the characters with “the Capacity to See Beyond”: the Giver, Jonas, Gabriel, and a child named Katharine who the Giver mentions as a potential replacement Receiver for after Jonas runs away.

Sexual feelings are intentionally medically suppressed. It is illegal to be naked in front of another person (unless the naked person is an infant or an elderly person who needs assistance with bathing) because nudity is believed to be inherently sexual. Marriage is exclusively man/woman, and purely for raising children, not sexual or romantic at all. Adults apply for spouses who are chosen for them, apply for children supplied by Birthmothers, raise 1 or 2 children to adulthood, then split up and live among the Childless Adults until they are too old to take care of themselves. While the gender binary doesn’t determine vocation (unless you’re a Birthmother), it’s still strictly enforced in the ways that coming-of-age ceremonies happen and the ways that family units are built. One man, one woman, one boy, one girl.

Birthmothers have “no honor” in their vocational assignment, even though they create other humans that allow the Community to continue to function. They are highly valued during their three childbearing years (it’s implied that these years come very early, possibly while the Birthmothers are still teenagers), but they are put into difficult manual labor jobs after a maximum of three births. Other members of the Community look down on both Birthmothers and Laborers as “unskilled”, unintelligent workers, even though their labor is essential.

And then we come to the eugenics. Birthmothers are chosen for their strong bodies. All human embryos are genetically engineered to eliminate all possible differences in skin tone, hair color, and ability. Old people are killed shortly after they are no longer able to work. Babies are killed for not meeting development milestones at the established times, or in cases of identical twins, because they have the lower birth weight. The Giver is not an anti-abortion novel, as it's frequently interpreted, but an excellent case for the idea that when we eliminate disability in chasing a “perfectly healthy” species, we eliminate disabled people.

The world of The Giver looks like adulthood looked in the bleakest stress dreams of my childhood. A vocational track is chosen for you, you’re not allowed to deviate from it, and you’re expected not to have outside interests or time for fun. Marriage is only for the purposes of having children. Sexual feelings are a natural phenomenon of adulthood, but one to be treated with medicine, like period cramps. However, marriage is still considered the only way to have an “exciting” life – a woman in the House of the Old complains that a Ceremony of Release (read: pre-funeral) she went to was boring because the dying person “never even had a family unit”. It makes sense. In a world where there is no fictional content to consume, no creative education, and no travel, life without marriage and kids is just… work. After a short childhood, mostly for the purposes of analyzing what kind of job you’ll be best at, you work until you become old and die.

The Community is not a capitalist society – nobody owns wealth, and Sameness has eliminated class as well as race. However, The Giver’s greatest horrors are pretty damn capitalist. Early on, Jonas’s mother warns him that his life will change dramatically after the Ceremony of Twelve: his friends and his play time will become less important to him as his vocational training ramps up. Adults are expected to work and make families (so that they can raise other adults who will be expected to work). Everybody is measured in terms of whether and how they’ll be useful workers. This is not to create wealth for an oligarchic few, but to create riskless, joyless stability for themselves and everyone else in the Community. The Community, and other Communities, were established after some great event in the past – while we don’t get into specifics, it’s implied that hunger and poverty were part of it. Sameness and the shallow, emotionless placidity that come with it are a reaction to a scarcity of resources from a long-ago catastrophe. It’s heavily implied in The Giver, and outright stated in later books, that other Communities have moved on from that reactionary thinking.

The Giver asserts that depth of feeling and empathy come from three places: ability to feel pain, experiencing real choice and the proportional consequences of those choices, and from stories (memories) of others’ experiences. The Community eliminates pain, choice, and story, totally eliminating depth of feeling from life in the name of exaggerated safety and comfort.

That said, The Giver doesn't shy away from the reality that living with traumatic memories is hard. The narrative insists that Rosemary, who applied for medical assisted suicide during her Receiver training, was not a coward. The Giver and the Community didn’t adequately prepare her for what she would experience as the Receiver of Memory. Jonas and the Giver only find their memories bearable through being able to relate to one another – once they know they’ve each experienced a memory of something similar, they’re able to discuss it on the same level with one another.

This is a story about purity culture. This is a story about eugenics. This is a story about what happens when we take avoidance of pain too far - and like all science fiction, it's a story of where our real society was then and where it is now.

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characters who are undead. characters who die in the end and so they've been dead from the start. characters who are chased by death. characters that chase death. characters who died and came back to life. characters that die again and again and again. characters who consider their past self dead. characters who were born in someone else's corpse. characters that claw their way out of the grave. characters whose deaths leave such a gaping wound that even their absence is still a presence. characters who are emissaries of death. characters who are alive but consider themselves dead. characters whose deaths are ambiguous. characters whose existences are defined by death.

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“I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.”

— Marie Howe, Boston University’s 2016 Theopoetics Conference  (via mothersofmyheart)

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“Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!”

Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins