joumiwrites

[joumiwrites]

One element, two stories: The Amber Spyglass and The Good Place

This is the first post of a new series in which I'll talk about common elements between two stories, not necessarily two novels. Today we'll compare The Good Place tv series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, especially the third book, 'The Amber Spyglass'. There will be spoilers for both, especially the fourth and final season of the show, so please stop reading if you don't want to know the ending.

In this context, 'common elements' doesn't mean much; two stories chosen randomly might have a lot of themes and archetypes in common, especially when they belong to the same genre. I'll only analyze those cases where the element in common has a peculiar combination of characteristics. Like...

Like a door in the afterlife that allows the souls of the dead to escape and dissolve forever.

Not only this element is very specific, but the themes that surround it are similar, even if the stories approach them from different angles: grim and hopeless for His Dark Materials, hopeful and optimistic for The Good Place. These doors are both situated in the afterlife of the respective story, as a way for the souls to escape. But why would they want to do that in the first place?

For His Dark Materials, the answer is easy: the afterlife is an endless, empty wasteland. The souls are stuck there in the company of harpies, which are exactly as fun and non-threatening as the ancient greek myths about them suggest. Think the Limbo in Dante's Inferno, but absolutely everyone goes there, regardless of their deeds in life.

What makes everything worse is the lack of daemons: a piece of the person's soul that lives outside their body in the shape of an animal. Upon the person's death, the daemon disappears. Imagine a sentient part of you that has always been by your side dissolve forever, leaving you alone in the aforementioned Limbo of nightmares. Fun, right?

Obviously anything, even dissolving into nothingness, would be better than an eternity there. It would be a terrible situation even if the souls were still alive.

On the contrary, in the afterlife of The Good Place the dead suffer because they are not alive, or better, because they can't die.

But let's take a step back (heavy spoilers ahead): the afterlife of The Good Place has a bad part and a good part. After four seasons of misadventures, our protagonists finally arrive to the good part. In this place, people can do whatever they want, forever. You can literally request anything, and a Janet (an almost omnipotent AI assistant) will bring it to you. Which turns out to be fun for the first millennia or so, but then people start to ask for random stuff, get maybe half a second of satisfaction, then request something else. They become severely distracted and unfocused, because they can go on for eternity, so what's the point of focusing on something? Whatever they want to do, they can always do it later, since they have an endless supply of 'later'. And if you have done everything there is to do, there's nothing left for you.

As soon as the protagonists discover the trap, they scramble to find a solution, which is literally an escape door. Nobody knows what's behind it, but once you go through, you can't come back. The final scenes of the series suggest what might be happening, but we'll examine that later. The main idea is that by having a door that could actually kill you, you'll always have the possibility to leave, so naturally you’re brought to think about what you want to do and act on it before you decide to move on.

Theme-wise, the biggest similarity is that they're both atheist narratives, for three main reasons:

1) Human beings can more or less change their situation, if not on an individual level, at least as a group. No situation is permanent if they don't want it to be, not even when it was imposed by entities bigger and more powerful than them. In the good place this is evident, because the new rules of the afterlife have literally been designed by Chidi, a human. Even before that, during the show humans had a lot of agency and they could negotiate with the powerful beings around them.

The situation is different in The Amber Spyglass. The dead are completely stuck, the only creatures they can communicate with are harpies, and not only they can't do anything to help them, but they wouldn't even if they could. Only the protagonists can save the situation by opening the door with a magical tool. Just like the protagonists of The Good Place, saving the souls trapped in the afterlife is their choice. In this case, opening a door is a more obvious solution, because that's what the aforementioned tool does, but they could have closed it behind them after leaving the place, so props to them.

2) In the end, humans are the ones to decide when to actually go. Sure, gods and superior beings decide what happens after the 'first' death, but humans have the ultimate decision on when to disappear for good.

3) Speaking of gods, they have some characteristics in common in both works. First of all, they aren’t omniscient nor omnipotent, and they’re still subjected to the rules of the universe they live in, just like any other creature. For example, the judge in The Good Place is the highest authority on everything, but she still needs to search inside each Janet to find the “clickery thingy” that can erase humanity. She can’t get this information at will.

The Janets are the second more powerful entities of this universe. Their powers have limits, even if they can be stretched by rebooting them multiple times. But no matter how powerful the Janets become, they have to obey the judge and follow their programming and their 'moral alignment': good or bad, depending on which side they work for. Which means that a simple human can reboot a good Janet without any problem (except having to hear her beg for her life).

In His Dark Materials, 'God' is literally a ruse. The first angel, the Authority, declared himself as god, even if the one actually ruling is Metatron, another angel. But both have physical bodies, can get old and also die.

The last element I want to analyze is what happens after a soul crosses the door. In His Dark Materials, it dissolves into atoms. This is presented by the protagonists as a huge liberation, justified by saying that their atoms belong to the universe and will go back to create everything that lives in it. There's also an awkward line about their atoms finding each other and being stuck together for eternity, even if it's clear that they don't have any control over this. The fact that dissolving into atoms essentially means not existing anymore isn't addressed and analyzed, which in my opinion is a huge oversight.

So, nothing else is left behind? Well, I've talked about daemons and the fact that they dissolve after the 'first' death of the person. The link between daemon and person attracts Dust, particles that in this world are attracted by sentient beings and create angels. They're heavily analyzed in the books, but the gist is that Dust is a metaphor for consciousness. In this world's version of the Adam and Eve story, the apple caused the Dust to settle on them, and thus to become aware of the difference between 'good' and 'bad'. Human beings are in a sense contributing to this universal consciousness with Dust that was 'tainted' by their connection to their daemons, their conscience/inner-self (this isn't explicitly said in the books, I'm just extrapolating).

In the final scenes of The Good Place, after Eleanor crosses the door, we are shown a single speck of golden dust that causes an act of goodness in the world. It falls on a man who had trashed a letter not destined to him and prompts him to pick it up and bring it to the right addressee. We can infer that the souls leave behind their ability to distinguish good and bad actions, skill they have gained while passing through the new afterlife system.

So in both cases human beings keep existing and influencing the world after the end of their lives, even if transformed into something different, be it atoms or fragments of conscience. The afterlife becomes just an intermediary step, a part of life like any other.

[joumiwrites]

Three early horsemen

The three horsemen appeared in front of the house with a sound of slashed reality. A dog stopped barking, then started again at full force.

“Strange beasts,” the dark one said. “Maybe we should call back the horses.”

The fiery one stepped forward, already taking a human form, height, shape and colors changing fast.

“They'll be fine.”

“We won't need them here,” the white one said.

They looked around, searching for the ashen one. They could feel an essence like their own somewhere nearby, but there were only humans walking along the street, their bodies dark silhouettes without light.

Death was already looking at them through one of the front windows. She knew who they were, even if she had never met them. She checked the calendar on the wall, looking at the rows of numbers that divided that day from the one circled in red.

She straightened her back and went to open the door.

“Ashen one,” they greeted her, every trace of uncertainty gone from their faces.

Their human forms were hidden by the light that emanated from each one: red, black, white.

“It's too early,” she said. “It's supposed to start in a month.”

“We know,” the fiery one answered, almost cutting her off.

“We wanted to meet you,” the dark one added.

“We want to see what you can do,” the white one concluded.

Death nodded, not knowing what to say. They had witnessed the first war of the angels and the eternity after that, while she only knew what was contained in the universe she'd been born with.

“I'm the essence of chaos,” the fiery one said.

“You must find Earth pretty boring, then,” Death observed.

“No. I know it will get better in a few days.”

Death couldn't smile back at that, so she looked at the dark one.

“My essence is lack and emptiness.”

“Mine is hatred and desperation,” the white one declared with superiority. “And yours, ashen one?”

“I'm Death,” she said, “I bring endings.”

They waited in silence for an explanation. She stepped back.

“Please, come in.”

“Death?” the fiery one repeated as they entered.

She closed the door.

“This is how humans call me. Thousands of versions of this name.”

“They have seen you?” the white one asked.

“No. It's the name they gave to my essence, and I thought it was fitting.”

They stood in the living room. There was a single wooden chair against a wall, while the rest of the space was occupied by marble pedestals, each supporting an object from past eras: a statue of a roman general; a bag of sand from a sea that only dinosaurs had seen; clocks of any shapes from every century of human history, because she had a sense of humor.

The fiery one started to wander from one pedestal to the next, picking up the objects to examine them, only to put them down in a different position. The white one walked straight towards the chair and sat on it, legs crossed and hands folded on top of the knee. The dark one stood at the center of the room, arms abandoned at the sides and eyes fixed on the empty ceiling.

Death propped her back against a wall.

“What do you do in Hell?”

The white one looked at her.

“You don't know?”

“No. An angel comes here once every millennia to give me instructions. The only thing they told me was that you existed and lived in Hell.”

The white one nodded and looked away, as if forgetting her question.

“We are a punishment,” the dark one said slowly, as if every word was dripping from a place miles above the room. “For the angels who were defeated. I make them crave divine light, so that they'll always remember what they lost.”

“I make them hate each other,” the white one said. “So that they'll always be alone, at their core. They can never find comfort in each other's company, and when they do, they live in fear of an inevitable betrayal.”

“And I change the rules of their world.” The fiery one smiled. “So that they'll never be able to organize themselves enough to attack again.”

“And you?” the white one spoke again. “What do you do here?”

Death thought about it. Was she a punishment too?

“My duty is easier than yours. I just need to exist, and everything around me will eventually come to an end.”

“You said that your name is 'Death' because of what you do to humans,” the dark one said. “What is that, exactly?”

“It's just an ending like the others. They cease to exist. They disappear from this world.”

“And then?” the white one asked.

“Then nothing.”

The white one's brow furrowed.

“Now that we are here, will we end too?”

Death focused on the strings, the tendrils of power that connected her to everything in that world that could end forever. The strings were always moving and changing, some were created, some disappeared. But she was sure none of them were connected to the other three horsemen.

“No,” she said. “You're not from this world.”

“I want to see it” the fiery one said, letting one of the vases fall to the ground.

It shattered, and the thin tendril of power that connected it to Death dissolved. The other two didn't pay it any attention, and Death didn't either. She'd felt the object's ending approach as its string became thinner.

“What do you want to see?” she asked.

“What you do to humans. The thing called death.”

“You want to see people die.”

The fiery one looked at her, light moving behind the eyes, and nodded.

“Follow me,” she said, and left her physical form for the instant necessary to travel to the other side of the planet, following a group of strings that were changing faster than the rest.

An explosion showered her with chunks of dirt.

“I saw it,” the fiery one screamed in excitement at her side.

Death looked at the man's corpse. A million more strings had dissolved with him, small things that had lived in the ground.

She stood behind with the other two horsemen while the fiery one walked through the projectiles, straining the human neck to look around. The red essence shined stronger at every explosion, at every soldier screaming or dying, and when a building collapsed it looked like the fiery one was about to explode too.

“This is glorious.”

A tank fired. The fiery one raised a hand, and the projectile deviated. Death felt the strings of the soldiers in the new trajectory become even thinner. She grabbed the tendrils with both hands and pulled them closer.

The men were all badly injured, but they didn't die right there. Some of them would have survived.

Death released the strings. Humans could kill each other, if they chose to. But she wouldn't have let anyone interfere with that, not before the final day. It felt wrong to do otherwise.

The fiery one shined while the explosion hit, looked around for a while longer, then walked back towards the other horsemen.

“I want to see this in Hell. Tell me how you did it, I want to know everything.”

Death hadn't done anything, so she didn't answer.

“Is death always like this?” the white one asked with a hint of disgust.

“It's loud,” the dark one added. “And the suffering doesn't last much.”

“It's just war,” Death said. “There are many other ways to die.”

“I've seen war,” the fiery one said as an explosion hit close. “It was quick and orderly. The angels above won immediately.”

“It's different here,” Death said.

“How do humans call it?”

Death listed the word in all the languages people had spoken across the millennia.

“I like how it sounds,” the fiery one said. “I want to be called War.”

War turned to look at the people screaming and shooting.

“It's a pity I won't be able to see this anymore, after the final day.”

Death raised her head, following a sudden thought.

“What will be you task once Apocalypse ends?”

“We'll keep punishing the devils,” the white one said.

“I'll also get to keep the matter of this world in chaos, once everything is destroyed,” the fiery one added. “Like I did before it was created.”

“Now the earth was formless and empty,” Death said.

They gave her confused looks.

“It's from the Bible. A book humans wrote.”

“A book?” the white one asked.

“They knew a lot about how this world was created, and what comes next. They knew about us.”

She crossed the space back to her own house, and they followed, War an instant slower than the others. Death guided them towards her garden, this time. She cared too much about her clocks.

“What about you?” the dark one asked. “What are you going to do after the last day?”

Death recalled the words of the angel during their last visit.

“I'll be a guardian between Heaven and Hell. No one will be able to get closer to the divine without crossing my path.”

She didn't talk about the tendrils. Of how the power seemed to flow from the people, the creatures, and the objects to her, and not vice versa. How humans had described the world after the Apocalypse as an endless one, and they were always right about these things. She'd been born with that world, she'd have died with it.

“If I knew war was so magnificent here, I'd have visited sooner,” War said. “I don't want this world to end so soon.”

“It's the reason we're here,” the white one said.

“I know.”

Death looked at them as they spoke. She didn't want to disappear. She was scared of her own essence, after all.

“We could wait some time,” she said. “And visit more wars.”

“More wars?” War asked, shining of red.

“No,” the dark one said.

“We'll see what you'll show us until the final day,” the white one added. “Then we'll destroy this world, as we were sent to do.”

Death lowered her eyes and nodded.

They stood in silence for a long instant.

“So, what next?” War asked.

Death focused on the strings. She found two more conflicts that War would have appreciated, but even if they both wanted to delay the Apocalypse, she knew they couldn't prevent the other horsemen from destroying the Earth alone.

She focused on the dark one; the essence of lacking, emptiness. There was a place in the world that was full of that.

“Follow me,” she said, and moved.

They were in the dark, but they didn't need eyes to perceive the walls of the cave and the group of humans scattered inside it.

“Please,” one of them screamed. “Somebody help.”

“Stop wasting your breath,” another answered, while most of the others just shushed him.

War looked around with a bored expression and kicked a rock. The sound startled two of the men, but they didn't have the energy to get up, so they just stared at the dark until they seemed to forget what they were looking for.

“A lot of suffering,” the white one observed, hands clasped behind the back.

Death ignored both of them, focusing on the dark one. The dark essence was flowing outside the contours of the human shape.

“They crave,” the voice was deeper than usual, without a trace of boredom, “so many things.”

The dark one walked in circle along the walls and round corners of the cave.

“Food,” Death said, following the trail of darkness, “Water.”

“Safety,” the dark one continued, “Light. Freedom. Love.”

They completed the circle and stopped between a man who was sleeping and one who cried quietly, clutching the image of a woman as if he could see her despite the dark.

“How did you do this?” the dark one asked.

“Every human needs these things. They can't reach them in this place, and that makes them suffer.”

“The devils only need one thing, divine light. And they're already trapped in a place where they can't reach it.”

“That should make your task easier.”

“It does,” the dark one said, and this time the words oozed boredom like another dark essence escaping its bounds.

“There are many more ways to cause this,” Death whispered, gesturing at the cave. “War is one of them. So are earthquakes, wild fires, floods. Or you could try to take away just one thing, like food, and see how everything else starts to crumble.”

The dark one's eyes moved around the room, as if they could see the things she was talking about.

“I've seen this world from above. There's food growing in the fields, everywhere.”

“And with your power, you could destroy it all. Bring the greatest famine the world has ever seen.”

The words felt wrong, but it was the only thing she could offer.

“Famine?” the dark one repeated. “I like this name.”

“Then it can be yours, like all the rest. There's nobody here to stop you.”

Famine turned to look at the white one before focusing on her again.

“If you want to delay the Apocalypse, I'm with you.”

Death nodded. She thought about it as they jumped back to her house. They were three against one, they could decide what to do. But even if they won, with Famine and War loose on the planet, the Apocalypse wouldn't have been delayed by much. She needed someone who could reason with them on her side.

“The final day is near,” the white one said, sitting on the chair. “What will you show us now?”

Death consulted the strings, looking for hate and desperation. The world was full of it and, she imagined, Hell too. She needed to find a place that was different enough to capture the white one's interest.

“Come,” she said, and moved towards a group of strings full of life that were clashing against each other, next to another one that was slowly disappearing.

The house they were in had a high ceiling and white walls that reflected the light of the sun. There was a group of people inside, clearly divided in two sides even if they were standing in a circle, screaming at each other. Some of them looked angry, some miserable.

“Finally some chaos,” War said.

The white one stepped forward and watched the scene with a bit of interest. Death waited for a reaction, eyes going from the horseman to the people in front of her and back. But the white one didn't move for a long time.

“Do you like it?” Death asked.

“I know what you're trying to do. It won't work with me. There's nothing you can offer better than what I already have.”

Death hesitated.

“Their hate for each other is intense.”

“I can feel it. But intensity isn't as important as vastness. There are fights between devils that have lasted for centuries, and still have consequences to this day. A pyramid of relationships made of hatred for common enemies and distrust of temporary allies. Even if I could do that with humans, they'll eventually die, and all that work would be lost.”

“The angel told me there are ten thousands devils in Hell. Humans are seven billions. You could cover the world with these pyramids, if it's vastness that you want.”

“They would crumble in a century or less. It's pointless.”

“What about desperation? Humans can feel it deeply.”

“You won't convince me. Stop trying.”

“I'm not trying to convince you.”

“Then you're wasting our time. I wanted to see death, but I don't see it here.”

Death lowered her head and stepped in the direction of a big door.

“This way.”

The white one followed her, while War and Famine stood behind, talking in low voices.

The only bed in the room was surrounded by glass walls and a glass door. A faint string passed through them, ending on the forehead of the old man inside the bed.

Death stopped in front of the glass, while the white one crossed the barrier to look at the dying man.

“Desperation, yes.”

Death observed as the interest slowly faded from the white one's face. She didn't say anything. Pushing for a discussion would have been as useless as talking about the weather with an angel.

The white one frowned.

“I can't find the reason for this death. The other ones were more easy to understand.”

“It's an illness. Something that destroys human bodies.”

“Why? What does it do?”

Death looked at the old man.

“I don't know. There are so many illnesses I can't remember them all. They damage different things.”

The white one nodded, then turned as if to leave, and seemed to notice the glass barriers just then.

“Why these walls?”

“I don't know for sure. My guess is that the illness is contagious, so nobody can get near him except to bring him cures.”

“What would happen if they did get close?”

“They would get the same illness.”

The white one turned again to look at the man in the bed.

“Could he get up? Escape?”

“I don't think he's strong enough. And the others would try to put him back in.”

“His enemies?”

“His family and friends.”

The white one's essence trembled.

“How is that possible?”

“They don't want to be infected. And they want him to continue the cure, so that he'll live longer.”

The white one seemed to reflect for a bit.

“Tell me how these illnesses work.”

And Death told him of the plague, leprosy, the Spanish flu. Of how people who got it were isolated and sometimes outright rejected. How entire groups of people were hated because others thought they were the cause of the disease. She talked about the fear of who was healthy, and the desperation of who was ill.

“This word, 'illness'... it feels weak,” the white one said.

“I've heard them using the term 'pestilence'.”

“Then I'll take that name too.”

The white essence flickered like a candle.

“But it doesn't mean you won. I want to see the things you have talked about, and cause a pestilence myself. If it won't satisfy me, I'Il start the Apocalypse alone. And believe me: I'm strong enough to see it through.”

Death nodded. She followed Pestilence back to the other room, then jumped to her home with the other horsemen.

A light rain was washing the garden. Pestilence was talking with War and Famine, in a low voice. Death stepped forward and stared at the roses, thinking about her future. It would have been short, if all of them used their powers on the world at the same time, Apocalypse or not.

“We have decided to stay,” Pestilence announced. “But we won't destroy the world, yet.”

“Where is the biggest war?” War asked. “I want to see it.”

Famine looked at the sky.

“We should ask for permission, first. I don't think we can delay the Apocalypse without the Divine's approval.”

They all looked up.

After an instant of confusion, Death did the same. Humans who glanced over the fence would have seen four people looking straight up at the rain, eyes wide open.

“Luminous one,” Pestilence called. “We ask for your permission to stay here and experience this world. We'll start the Apocalypse when we are ready.”

Death lowered her eyes to glance at the three horsemen: they were looking at the sky with full certainty they'd receive an answer. War's essence was pulsing, at different intervals and intensities; Famine's extended its smoky tendrils in the air; Pestilence's swayed and flickered like a flame.

And her own, Death knew without even looking at it, was gray and calm like a lake in a cloudy morning. The strings flowed into her through every corner of the planet.

They looked at her. War kicked the ground, sending pebbles and fragments of soil flying around.

“Let's go, then. I want to see war. I want to create explosions. You have to teach me how to start them.”

Death stared at War for a moment.

“Teach you?”

“And me,” Famine said. “I know how to use my powers, but I don't know much about this world.”

“I want to know too,” Pestilence added. “So that I can judge properly the worth of what you have offered me. If we're to cause death properly, we should know how it works.”

Death looked at them, and then at the sky, to gain some more time. She could tell them she didn't do or know anything, and lose any kind of power she had over them. Or pretend she could teach them, rein them in, and become the direct cause of all the destruction they would bring to the world.

“It's not easy,” she started. “Death needs to be balanced with all the rest if you want it to work. Just throwing explosions around, destroying food everywhere, cover the world with illnesses will destroy this balance, and then your powers won't have effect anymore.”

Because everyone would be dead, she thought, but didn't say it. They wouldn't have considered it relevant.

“What do you suggest we do, then?” Pestilence asked.

Death pulled a string, the only one who wasn't dissipating at all.

“Call your horses and follow me. I'll show you everything you need to know about this world, and tell you when you can use your powers without destroying the balance.”

The string she'd pulled got shorter and shorter, until the gray horse was at her side. A part of her essence that had taken shape.

“I'll follow you as long as it suits me,” Pestilence said, as a white horse appeared at the end of the garden.

Death nodded, then looked at Famine.

“As long as we keep moving. I don't want to stay in one place.”

“We won't stop for a while.”

A black horse turned the corner of the house.

“I want to see war,” War said, as a red horse jumped over the fence.

“We'll start with that, then,” Death answered, mounting on her steed.

She went north, cities and forests flowing around her every time the horse's hooves left the ground. She could move faster alone, but it didn't feel half as good, and she wanted the other horsemen to look around, experience the reality around them as much as possible, like she had done during her first centuries. They were the younger ones, now.

She looked over her shoulder at the three of them, riding one next to the other. She had to balance their impulses carefully. Distracting the other two while one of them tortured a piece of the planet, let the world rest as long as possible before starting again.

She didn't like the idea of them interfering. But at least the strings would have kept tangling into each other, like they'd been doing since the universe was born, as she guarded over them for the rest of her existence.

[joumiwrites]

the astrologian

[joumiwrites]

Another interesting place is Neovel. It’s a pretty new platform that was funded through Kickstarter. It has a system for remunerating writers: there’s a premium subscribion for readers of three dollars, and half of it goes to the site, half gets divided between writers based on how many chapters of their works have been read.

I was considering to publish there a webserial I’ve been brewing, and I recently started using it as a reader. It’s still buggy, but the support staff answers immediately, and the platform makes it very easy to keep track of where you left a story.

You retain the copyright and publishing rights of your work.

It seems promising, maybe someone who has used it as a writer can share how their experience has been so far?

writers… writers on tumblr… [tapping the glass from the inside of my enclosure] does anyone have opinions on the best places to post longform and/or serial writing? obviously some pieces can be placed in a single tumblr post, but others are multi-chapter or much much longer…

the only place really coming to my mind is wattpad, and i do like their inline commenting system, but I Do Not Trust Like That. i have thought of medium but know little about it (they let you post fiction on medium, right?). i could of course just post things in tumblr posts and thus keep everything confined to my blog… but what do i do when i try to write a short story and end up with 23k words of my main character’s gender crisis. i could post a google doc link, i suppose… and then of course there is making one’s own website but i… haven’t the faintest idea how to do that.

this is a genuine question; feel free to rb/reply if you have answers?

[joumiwrites]

One thought on: The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin

The thought I had for this book deals with some heavy themes like euthanasia and death penalty, both of which are also present in the book itself, even if obviously they aren't called this way because it's a fantasy set in a fictional culture inspired by Ancient Egypt. I want to be extremely clear on one thing before I begin: death penalty shouldn't exist, period. I don't care how many crimes a person has committed (or not), no country should be able to legally kill them because of it.

So I will discuss all these themes as hypotheticals, in the context of a fantasy world. But first, let's talk about the book.

“The Killing Moon”'s most striking feature is the worldbuilding. The story takes place in the country of Gujaareh and the neighboring Kisua (I've listened to the Italian audiobook, so the spelling of some words might not be accurate). The difference between the people and culture of Gujaareh and Kisua are highlighted during the book, through the lenses of the three protagonists: the Gatherer Ehiru and his apprentice Nijiri, from Gujaareh, and the ambassador Sunandi from Kisua. Gujareeh in particular is a very peculiar country, since they use a kind of magic based on dreams and their manipulation. As a result, dreams have become important even from a religious standpoint, the people who practice magic have a high social status, and the most important principle on which society is founded is maintaining peace.

A lot of attention is dedicated to each character's thoughts and internal struggles. This made them feel like actual people, but it was still difficult to connect with them, because they're very single-minded. Each one of them only thinks about their goal: for Ehiru it's finding the truth, for Nijiri it's taking care of Ehiru, while Sunandi only wants to complete her mission. The story never forces them to take a break, think about other goals, or reconsider the ones they already have, and the atmosphere is always serious, so at the end of the novel they still feel quite distant.

But let's get to the juicy part. The only thing I'll spoil will be worldbuilding details that are shown in the first scenes of the book. Obviously if you want to fully experience it with no surprises, skip this post.

Magic in this world is mainly used to heal people. The medical knowledge of Gujaareh has grown to the point that the healers can, for example, make limbs regrow. But they need fuel, that comes in the form of four substances that can only be gathered from a dreaming person. The most powerful of these substances is dream blood. Sadly, it can only be harvested when a person dies.

The task of gathering dream blood is fulfilled by an order of people called 'Gatherers', who are essentially assassins, but also important religious figures who can use dream magic. They are sent to kill people and return with the dream blood that will be used to cure other citizens.

So the question is: how are the victims chosen?

With the way dreams work in this world, the system devised around these Gatherers is in equal part the best version of euthanasia and the worst version of death penalty (by 'worst' I mean extremely efficient and difficult to abolish).

Let's start with euthanasia first: in order to receive it, the person has to ask for it either in person or by sending a closed one to the Ethawa, a religious building and institution composed of religious figures, Gatherers and healers. The ones who make this kind of request are mainly very old or very ill people who experience a lot of pain.

An argument that's always brought up against any kind of euthanasia in the real world is that medicine is always improving, so a solution could be found at any moment. But medicine in Gujaareh is so advanced that if the doctors tell you they can't do anything, it's probably true.

Plus, the way the Gatherers operate neutralizes two of the biggest fears that surround death. The first one is the fear of a painful passing: the person has to be asleep for the dream blood to be harvested so the first thing the Gatherer does is to put the patient  to sleep. But not only that: the Gatherer also sees the best memories of the patient and creates a dream in their mind where they get to relive them as if they were actually there.

Second, the fear of what comes next: because there is the strong belief that the dream world is real, and considering what we see during the story, it might actually be true. So the person gets to spend the rest of eternity in this dream the Gatherer has created, in their favourite place, surrounded by the people they love.

The death itself happens through magic, there isn't physical violence involved, and everything is over in an instant.

This kind of death might be a blessing for people who want it. But not everybody is voluntary.

In Gujaareh, disrupting the peace of the country is a crime, and corruption is punished with death. So people who are deemed corrupt get reported to the Ethawa, that checks whether the person who signaled the corruption was right, and sends one of the Gatherers to harvest the dream blood of the chosen victim.

And, as we'll see, it works too well. First of all, because the murder is committed in secret by the Gatherers, who are also important religious figures. They have access to everything and everyone, nobody will stop them. The majority of the population won't even know about the death and why or how it happened. It's not kept secret, as far as I know, but it's not advertised either.

This, connected with the points above about lack of pain and the guaranteed paradise, makes it more difficult to consider this kind of punishment something wrong. It's easier to consider it a win-win situation: the criminals get to live forever in their favourite place and the rest of the country doesn't have to deal with them anymore. They even get resources out of this murder, that will then be used to cure people.

Let's not forget that the murders are generally commissioned by someone. The commission is examined by the same entity that sends the Gatherers, the Ethawa. The Gatherers themselves are trained to act even without knowing anything about who commissioned the murder and why, and how everything has been verified. So even if someone innocent gets murdered, everything remains hidden inside of the Ethawa.

In the first scenes of the book we see a mistake happen in the way someone is killed. There was no punishment, no law about this particular situation, and the general public never knew anything about it.

All the problems with this system are addressed in the way the characters interact, with the ones from Gujaareh seeing this kind of death as a blessing, and the ones from Kisua seeing it as straight up murder with no redemption.

Without spoiling anything, the ending hints at a possible future evolution of this system which isn't shown in the book itself. But the good news is that the sequel, The Shadowed Sun, is set in the same world some years in the future, so I think I'll go ahead and add it to my TBR list with the others N. K. Jemisin's books.

[joumiwrites]

Milk on the Moon

It was a slow morning, even for a coffee shop that had an average of thirteen clients a day. Back on Earth, it was a sign that business wasn't going well and the place would have to close soon. On the Moon, where every tourist wandering the corridors of the Plunar residence had at least a thousand dollars to spend every day just for food, it was more than what we dared to hope for.

I was cleaning all the tables, slowly, for the third time in a row, more to keep busy than for any real necessity. Vadim was polishing the cups, again, while Annika had given up on cleaning the floor for the second time and sat on a chair, an old paperback book opened on her legs. She was a rank three, after all; not likely to be fired, even if she didn't pretend to be busy all the time.

A man entered, and we all exchanged glances, a bit like drivers at the start of a race. Wondering which one of us was going to leave the coffee shop to risk death on the rocky lands outside.

Only Maricia smiled at him from her spot behind the counter.

“Hi! How can I help you?”

The customer was wearing a floral shirt. I always found it funny, how they still behaved as if they were tourists on Earth, changing between summer or winter attire depending on which part of the residence they wanted to spend the day in.

He looked up at the screens behind the counter, where the drinks were lined up in fast-food graphics, even if the prices would have been more appropriate for designer clothes than food, and we weren't exactly fast, as he was about to discover.

“Do you sell lunar milk here?”

Maricia nodded.

“We use it in all of our drinks. It comes from our cows. It tastes a lot better than what you can find on Earth.”

“Yes, I've heard. Why the hours?” he asked, pointing at the list with chocolate-flavored drinks.

Maricia's smile didn't waver as she began the same explanation she had to repeat every day, to about seven customers on average.

“The milk has to be sterilized before it can be served. The process usually lasts about twelve hours. We can speed it up, but it requires more power. That's why the prices are higher if you want it to be ready quicker.”

“And I'm supposed to wait twelve hours for a milkshake?”

“You can stay here, or you can go about your business, and we'll bring it to you as soon as it's ready. You'll just have to keep one of these trackers,” she showed him a small gray disk, “on yourself, so we'll know where to deliver your order.”

The man nodded and raised his eyes to the screens again. It wasn't difficult to imagine what was going through his head. On one side, paying about seventy bucks or more for a drink that would have been delivered hours later was usually an involuntary experience, in one of those low quality restaurants on Earth; on the other, lunar milk was praised everywhere as one of the most delicious products you could find on this otherwise empty planet. And it couldn't be exported, since it soured after about a day, regardless of how well we tried to preserve it.

“I'll take a chocolate milkshake,” he said.

Maricia tapped on the touch screen on her side of the counter.

“How many hours?”

I stopped passing the rag aimlessly on the table and straightened my back. Vadim and Annika were watching the man too, their faces tense. We were all ready to spring into action the moment he called our number, like a silent game of steal the bacon. Steal the milk, in our case.

“Let me see... Eight.”

“Eight hours?” Maricia repeated with a glance in my direction.

I met her eyes and nodded.

As soon as the customer had left the shop with a gray disk in his pocket, I put down the rag and took off the apron.

“Lucky,” murmured Vadim.

“Only if I return alive.”

“Good hunt, Emma,” Annika said.

I thanked her and headed towards the door on the back. After a small room occupied by two piles of chairs, a fridge and a cupboard, there was a bigger one, with a series of benches surrounded by large lockers. A changing room, but with moonsuits instead of clothes. I put on mine, plus the backpack I always kept filled with rations and equipment. I checked that the helmet was well closed and waited for the small computer it contained to boot up. Nothing fancy, just a way to communicate with others and signal where my body was in case I got stomped to death. And remote controls for my tools, obviously.

The data projected on the glass of my helmet informed me that everything was in order. No holes in the thin but extremely resistant cloth of my black moonsuit. Alien technology, like almost all the rest.

I double checked anyway, then entered the airlock. I could see the lunar landscape through the small round window. In that area, the rocky terrain was mostly covered in green... stuff. I mean, most inhabitants of the residence called it 'grass', but we all knew its green color was completely artificial, it didn't make photosynthesis, and ultimately had nothing to do with plants. Whatever it was, cows loved it.

Unfortunately, despite the pretty lie Maricia had to tell customers in order to avoid an interplanetary scandal, there were no cows on the moon. Not anymore.

I opened the door and stepped onto the rocks. I jumped on the spot, then regulated the gravity level on my boots by selecting some options on the helmet screen. Choose, blink, choose, blink, until I could walk comfortably. I had no idea how it worked, but I was so grateful I didn't have to bounce around like in the old documentaries.

I started walking at a brisk pace, beyond the vehicles full of tourists that were roaming the area around the residence. I waved as one of them passed me by, watching the dark shapes of the people inside move closer to the windows. They were all wearing moonsuits like mine, for security reasons, but they pointed at me as if I was some sort of alien.

As soon as I was far enough from the touristic area, I started running, eyes on the green and rocky ground, in search of tracks. I didn't need to slow down for that; bovirans' hooves were big and the absence of wind on the Moon meant that the signs of their passage would have stayed in place for... forever, actually. Unless a vehicle passed over them.

Bovirans ate the green stuff too, so I knew I could find them at the edge of the green sea. They were herbivores, so to speak, the same way hippos were: potentially lethal for any human being who got too close to them.

They hadn't always existed on the Moon, obviously, or every single human would have known about them by now. When the Plunar residence was built, they wanted to find a way to bring animals to live on the Moon. The logical approach would have been to build a sort of stable to keep them in, complete with its own breathable atmosphere and Earth-like gravity.

But some biologists had found a technique to manipulate the genes of the animals in a way that made them adapt to different living conditions. I don't know the details, obviously, but I remember the advertising plastered all around the subways, back on Earth: come at the Plunar residence, and you'll see cows roaming free on the Moon. They also talked about the new cafeteria, where you could drink actual milk, and not some soluble dust that sort of tasted like it.

I only learned about the alien settlement on the hidden side of the Moon when I arrived on a Plunar spaceship, together with the other baristas, the scientists involved in the project, and a bunch of cows. Now the Plunar company has strict rules about what to tell to new staff, but at the time the Radak had just landed and it looked like we were about to die any day, so the news was openly discussed with everyone. Except tourists, and cows, since they both needed a peaceful environment to be milked properly.

After the first few months, when we indirectly witnessed the construction of a Radak base and the beginning of diplomatic communications, there was an agreement: the Radak wouldn't go any further than the Moon, and would keep themselves hidden from any human who wasn't a Plunar-employed diplomatic. In exchange, we gave them the techniques we used on cows, and they immediately applied them on their own cow-like monstrosities.

I've never seen any of those animals, I can't even spell the species' name properly. All I know is that they could somewhat survive on the Moon already, probably because they didn't need to breathe, or didn't do it as much as a regular animal from Earth. But they reproduced quickly, and could only eat a specific type of plant that had to be imported from the Radaks' native planet. Very costly. That's probably why they needed the genes.

The consequence nobody could predict was that their modified genes made the cows and these creatures, let's say, compatible. They found each other, and thus the bovirans were born. A new species that could survive on the Moon, ate only the green stuff on the ground that I refuse to call 'grass', and could kill a person just by stepping on them. If that wasn't enough, they all had a long lizard-like tail for ranged attacks, and most of them also forward-pointing horns for duels.

Fortunately, the boviran that appeared in the distance, right in front of me, was still young enough to only have two stumps on his head.

I slowed down and tried to approach it from behind, but the creature turned its head to look at me. It didn't look startled, but could still become dangerous if it saw me come closer, so I stopped and waited for it to ignore me again. I don't know how it sensed my approach, since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, no air to carry sounds and no winds to diffuse smells. But as I said, I don't know much about these animals. I'm just a barista.

Or at least, being just a barista was the idea when I applied to work there. The selection was very different than the one they made for more specialized staff. There were tens of thousands of candidates, and the main requirement to get the job was to be willing to accept a fifty thousand dollars debt. The one-way ticket on the spaceship for the Moon.

It seemed reasonable at the time, because the pay was way higher than anything I could ever dream to get on Earth, and they had invested so much in the cows program that it didn't look like we'd have to go back anytime soon. Except the whole boviran thing happened, the cows died because the genes turned out to be mortal on the long term, the program was shut down, and the cafeteria declared closed. Most of the scientists were moved to other programs, some of them started studying the aliens and their creatures, while baristas and breeders were told to pack up and leave with the next spaceship, and add another fifty thousand dollars debt to what we already owed to the company, to cover the cost of the trip back, as per accord.

The day we received the news, we all converged to the cafeteria, disregarding the order of the shifts. We kept it open for the whole night, pacing and discussing and crying while the whole residence was asleep. Some of us wanted to start a protest, but we realized they'd just need to seal the corridors connected to our area of the building and wait for us to beg for food. And there was risk of legal mishaps everywhere.

It was Maricia that came up with the solution: they wanted to send us home because there were no more cows, and no milk. But bovirans, she told us, could produce milk too.

The revelation shocked us. She wasn't a barista, but one of the breeders. They were responsible to check on the cows every day, wherever they could have roamed, finding them through a chip implanted in their ear. And milk them, obviously, with the proper tools.

When they started to find pregnant cows, they thought the scientists had decided to anticipate the reproduction program without informing them. And when they realized it wasn't exactly what was happening, it was too late.

One of Maricia's cows had given birth to a boviran not far away from the residence. She'd observed the creature for weeks as it grew fast, like the alien animals it descended from. And she'd noticed that it stored and produced milk with its tail. Apparently, bovirans didn't need it, since they laid eggs like their alien ancestors, then abandoned them to develop alone. Milk was a trait they inherited from cows and stuck around for no reason, like body hair on human beings.

I don't even remember how, but we organized in teams that would have to patrol the areas around the residence, looking for a boviran to capture and milk. My team found one, but we weren't able to trap it for long enough to extract the milk. Fortunately, one of the other three teams managed to get a full cup.

Like most of us, I only heard of what happened next from word of mouth, while we were spending our days in the empty cafeteria as a form of peaceful protest. The group that had extracted the milk brought it to a scientist, who confirmed it was drinkable, and thus, sellable. So Maricia, who seemed to have a more complex plan than what she'd told us at the beginning, went with a couple others to negotiate with the manager of our area of the residence.

They returned with a compromise; the Plunar company would have kept the cafeteria open and given us a reduced pay. But we would be the ones responsible to milk the bovirans while keeping their existence a secret to everyone not involved. And we'd had to keep track of each other's performance, so that they could cut the excesses when necessary.

So we began our new jobs. We kept the division in four teams, but tracking the exact contribution of each hunter wasn't easy. Did the person who scared the boviran into the trap work more than the one who set it up? We didn't know, and a lot of people that didn't deserve to were eventually fired after the first budget cut. A lot of us decided to start hunting alone, until Maricia and some others came up with the current rank system.

The rules are simple: everybody has one shift at the cafeteria each week, there must always be a person of each rank present, and once you take an order, your shift is over and the next person is called to fill the gap. This way, everybody had a more or less fair chance to get at least one order every week. The higher your rank, the higher your work was evaluated, so you had a lower chance to get fired.

Speaking of rank, while I looked at the grazing creature I realized that the timer on my helmet's lower left corner had still five hours left. Usually, that meant I had two hours to milk the boviran and three to go back to the base. But the lengthiest part, finding the animal, was already done.

I extracted my weapon and began walking towards the creature. If I managed to take the milk in at most one hour and run home in two, I could qualify for rank six. Sure, I'd have to repeat the feat two more times, but there was no point in worrying about it right then.

The boviran raised its head from the green food. I didn't walk straight towards it for fear it would charge, but I followed a slight curve towards the left, where a group of rocks could provide some protection in case of attack.

The animal began to move away from me. I followed, walking fast to keep up with its long legs. I needed to tire it up enough to get closer and immobilize it, but it usually took me at least an hour and a half of chasing to get to that point. I didn't have that much time, now.

So I walked faster, and when the creature started running, I did too. Before it could get too far, I stopped, pointed, and shot. The spider-like projectile sprung forward, seven legs closed in a sort of tail behind it. When it touched the boviran's neck, it extended the legs and started moving them around, touching and probing the animal's skin and its sparse gray hair, as if looking for something. Some sort of metal, since finding ores was its original function.

The creature opened its mouth in a silent scream and started shaking its head. It jumped around as the spider climbed up, towards the horns, then the eyes. Once it found them, it extended two of the arms until they looped around the head of the boviran, then lowered its body to obstruct the animal's sight. The beast kept screaming and kicking, as if the danger was behind it, but the spider didn't budge.

I got closer to the animal's lashing tail, keeping myself well out of range. Again, my usual strategy was to wait until the boviran tired itself out so much that its attacks became slow and weak, but there wasn't time. So I took out the weights from the backpack.

They were two spheres of some kind of metal, pitch black and almost entirely lucid, except for a round handle. A metallic cord connected them, looping around each handle. They'd been created to test the gravity-altering technology of the aliens, and now they were used to get milk.

I left one fall at the left side of the creature and made it heavier with the controls on my helmet, then threw the other over its tail and increased its weight while it touched the rocky ground. When the boviran tried to raise the tail for another attack, the cord between the weights tensed and held it down. But the animal was still moving around, and there was a chance it would slip past the cord. So I took out the extractor from my backpack and ran towards the spot on the back of the creature just above the tail. The skin was red in that point, with white spots here and there. Whether the creature was male or female, I knew I'd find the milk there.

I was close enough to risk receiving a kick or being stomped to death. My only advantage was that the creature couldn't perceive my presence. Yet.

The red spot on its back was just above me. I needed to jump and stick the pointy end of the extractor there. The tool would have done the rest, switching on a green led as soon as it was finished. The problem was retrieving it, especially since the creatures tended to run away as soon as they felt the sting, and that day I didn't have the time to follow my prey for hours until it tired itself out.

I needed to find a new strategy.

The only idea I could devise in that moment was to jump onto the back of the creature, plant the extractor in the right spot, and hold on for dear life to the tail. I barely managed to wrap arms and legs around its thick base, when the boviran kicked the air one last time and started running, spider still wrapped over the eyes. I was facing forward, so I could see each rock in our path that could make the creature fall and squash me. I held my breath every time the animal stumbled, my heart racing in a rodeo of its own. I was considering using the remote controls on my helmet to make the spider release the boviran's head, when I saw where we were going: straight towards the Plunar residence.

I could only see the faraway lights behind the round windows, but we were quickly getting closer. I needed to either stop the creature, or jump down and hide so well I couldn't be identified as the traitor who revealed the existence of alien creatures to the rest of humanity. I didn't even want to imagine the legal repercussions of that. At least, I had a little time to think of a plan.

Or I did, until a touristic vehicle appeared from behind the building. It was approaching fast, following the usual route across the green stuff. I ducked, as if it was sufficient to hide both me and the beast from the glass windows at its sides.

“Here is shuttle 0240FT.” The voice was low inside my helmet. “Please identify your vehicle.”

The driver probably hadn't realized we weren't exactly a vehicle, and was wondering why one of his colleagues was barreling straight towards him.

“I lost control of the car,” I said. “Please, clear the path before we crash.”

“Car? Wait.” He held his breath. “Is that...”

He could see the boviran, and wasn't steering the vehicle away. On the contrary, it stopped moving, right in the animal's path. I didn't have any other ideas, so I switched off the spider, that retracted its legs until it was hanging from the boviran's neck. The creature saw the vehicle and stumbled in an attempt to change direction. I took the extractor and jumped off as the boviran fell to the ground.

I rolled on the rocks, praying that the moonsuit wouldn't tear. Red warnings flashed on the screen until I stopped, some meters away from the fall. I kept hands and knees on the ground, unmoving. The extractor's green led blinked in my hand. The white of the milk completely filled its glass body. I felt like I could cry of joy.

Then I raised my eyes and saw a line of tourists standing in front of the vehicle's side window, helmets facing me.

“We're fucked,” the driver said. “I'm going to lose my job, and it's all your fault.”

Evidently, he was there since the beginning, like me, and knew about the bovirans. Which was good, because at least he wasn't screaming of fear in my ears while I was thinking of a way to save our asses.

I looked at the animal, still laying on one side, front legs on the ground as if it had tried to get up, but found out halfway through it didn't have enough energy to complete the action. Too exhausted to charge me, at least for the moment, the only thing that moved were its eyes and ears. Apart from that, it looked like somebody had put it in stand-by mode.

“Hey,” I said, “Let me talk to the passengers. I have an idea.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Come on. This can't get any worse, right?”

He didn't answer. After a second, I heard a beep in my ears.

“Dear passengers,” I tried, and some of the helmeted figures looked up.

I waved my arms to signal it was me talking. I was extremely lucky they couldn't bring any personal equipment outside the residence, cameras and phones included, or the lie I was about to tell would have spread across the two planets only to end up on the dead carcass of my career.

“The Plunar company thanks you for attending our last animatronics show.” I tried to sound as cheerful as I could. “Remember to visit the cafeteria and try our amazing lunar milk. From actual cows,” I added as an afterthought, stupidly trying not to look in the creature's direction.

I bowed. When I straightened my back, some of the tourists were clapping silently. The vehicle started moving away from me, along its route, and soon I was alone with the boviran again. The creature looked at me with its big, long lashed eyes. It occurred to me I couldn't leave it there, on the path of the touristic vehicles.

“Go away,” I said, but obviously it couldn't hear me.

So I made some steps towards it, and it jumped to its feet. When I bent to pick up the spider, it ran away, much slower than before.

I stared at the creature with the extractor gripped in my hand. I still had the weights to retrieve, but it would have taken me too much, even if I could track them with my helmet. Besides, I had a drink to serve. I could take care of that the next day, in my free time.

I walked towards the cafeteria and entered the airlock. I checked the timer as I waited: two hours and forty minutes left. I had made it in less than six hours.

I changed myself, never leaving the extractor out of my sight for too long, even if there was nobody else in the room. I was too scared it would drop and shatter, and too tired to move my eyes away from it. All that effort for a cup of milk. The most delicious one, or so people said; I'd never tasted it myself.

After washing my sweat-streaked face in the bathroom and wearing the apron again, I emptied the extractor in a shaker I found in the cupboard, then picked it up with both hands before entering the shop.

Maricia looked at me with a hint of surprise on her face.

“So soon?”

“Yeah. Where's the guy who ordered this?”

She hesitated. A customer entered in that moment, capturing her attention. I prepared the milkshake as I listened distractedly to her words. They were familiar, almost cozy, and not just because she repeated the same lies in the same tone over and over again, day after day. Her voice after a successful hunt meant we were home, safe. She was the one welcoming us back, because she was almost always there.

The rules were clear: one barista of each rank had to be always available at the cafeteria. And she was the only hunter to have reached rank one.

The customer left, and an instant later Annika bolted for the door. I couldn't see Vadim anywhere, so I guessed he'd already gone hunting.

Maricia approached me as I was pouring the milkshake in a tall metal cup.

“The good news is that you qualify for rank six, for now. You need to be quick with the next two if you want to officially enter it.”

“I know,” I said, screwing the lid tight.

“But your customer called an hour ago and canceled the order.”

I lowered the cup, still holding it with both hands.

“So no tip today.”

“No.”

I looked down.

“Then what do I do with this? It's going to spoil before tomorrow.”

Maricia shrugged.

“Keep it for another customer. It's a pretty common order. If you pretend to prepare it quicker just for them, maybe they will tip you well.”

I nodded. Camille, a rank twelve, entered the shop, probably to take Vadim's place. Maricia turned to greet her, leaving me alone.

I looked down at the milkshake, then headed towards the door. If I had to wait for a customer, at least I wanted to be outside.

There was a balcony a few steps from the shop. I rested my arms on the parapet, watching the huge plaza below me, complete with plants, a fountain, full benches and screaming children. It was nice to see so many rich people in one place. Potential customers.

Fuck them. I could be dead tomorrow.

I opened the cup and took the first gulp of milkshake, so fast it almost choked me. I slowed down, sipping the rest carefully. The advertisement had lied on many things: the cows, the lack of danger. The silence on the alien colony was almost a lie in itself.

But it was right on one point: the milk there was fucking delicious.

Baristas don’t just make coffee, they are brave young men and women that have to hunt down wild beasts in the back like the Macchiato and the Frappe before serving it to waiting customers.

[joumiwrites]

The Boys S2  - rambling impressions

I finished The Boys season 2, I liked it, and I have some random thoughts I need to put somewhere.

There will be a lot of spoilers. I'll try to keep the most spoilery stuff at the bottom of the list, but if you plan to ever watch the show, I suggest you skip this post entirely.

I can't remember a villain giving me as much anxiety as Homelander does every time he's on screen. Because he's unhinged, but completely capable of behaving like a normal person, a charismatic one even, and put on this façade for the whole world. It was nice to see it crack in this season. Also, he's what we would commonly consider a sociopath, but he isn't a stereotype, which means he has things he seems to care about and clear goals, which honestly just makes him even more terrifying

I'm... very confused about why they dedicated so much screen time to the Deep. I mean, I can see how it would be development that will be used in future seasons, but in this one I failed to see how his storyline was relevant to the plot. Was it just a way to show how that church operates (I forgot its name, let me check... Church of the Collective)? But then the only character who had something to do with it in a plot-relevant way was A-Train, and he appeared for a way shorter time (or so it seemed to me, at least). And if the church was important in itself, well, the last scenes of the last episode took an interesting turn.

Maeve being officially labeled as bisexual? Loved it. Also the fact that the show dealt with erasure in the same scene. And her being too done with everything, just wanting to keep her girlfriend safe, and then her leaving (for a very good reason), and Maeve being done with everything again, and still showing up to save the situation.

The “girl power” scene was so good and so cathartic: first of all, because they're punching and kicking a nazi bitch; they're doing it without holding back, with powers and fists and kicks and we see her suffer for it; they force her to back off, saving their friends' lives. Compare this to Marvel's scene in the final movie of the Avengers (can't even remember the exact title of the movie and this time I won't bother to check), where all the female heroes teleported in one place for no reason, walked as a group looking around in a cool way for a couple of seconds while in the middle of a battle, and then went off to do their own thing. There was no purpose or sense to the whole scene from beginning to end.

I have... thoughts on how they handled Kimiko in this season. First of all, the positive: I'm glad she got more space to be a character and not just a killing machine. We saw her starting to communicate with the rest of the group, even developing a relationship with Frenchie that wasn't completely one-sided, while Frenchie's whole attitude towards her changed in a positive way that included seeing her as perfectly capable of standing on her own (side note, Frenchie being a cutie and Kimiko's smiles completely destroyed my bisexual heart). She was reunited with her brother and seeing them communicate in their own sign language melted my heart.

The negatives: I hated how Kimiko's brother's death wasn't addressed as an important event by the rest of the Boys (and I say 'the rest' because Frenchie doesn't really count and I'll explain why in a second). Because the problem is that they started out not seeing her as actually being part of the team in season one, while here we see in one of the first episodes (can't remember which one exactly) that they consider her one of them. So I don't understand why, after Stormfront killed her brother, we didn't see any other character mentioning it? The last scene with her in that episode was her sitting on the sofa, staring angrily at the tv. Nobody addressed what happened, not even in the following episodes, even thought they all knew he was the most important person in her life. Even the way Frenchie approached her was just to tell her how to react. And the thing isn't mentioned again, she just has to deal with her feelings alone. And I think she'd have rejected other people's help regardless, but the point is that we didn't see the other characters trying or giving enough weight to the situation.

How did Queen Maeve know where to find Stormfront for the last fight? I don't really care because the scene was awesome, but I find it funny how I had a similar question at the end of season one: how did Starlight know where to find the Boys?

I loved all the actors, they were absolutely perfect for their characters. I know, not very interesting, but I needed to say it. Can't wait to watch more.

[joumiwrites]

One thought on: Circe by Madeline Miller

Naming this series of posts was the most difficult thing ever. Mainly because this is not strictly a review, and it's too short and incomplete to be a proper analysis. It's just that sometimes I have these very specific thoughts about a book I've liked and the only way to properly analyze them is to elaborate them in written form.

Even if it's not technically a review, I'll begin with my general opinion on the book as a whole, to set the mood.

Today I'll focus on “Circe” by Madeline Miller. It's a retelling of the story of Circe, the witch from the Odyssey that became famous for turning men into pigs and delaying Ulysses' journey home for a year.

This novel is beautifully written. There's a mythical atmosphere that hovers on the background of everything that happens, even the most 'human' and mundane events. It's in first person, following Circe's viewpoint as she grows up among powerful gods, trying to find love, acceptance and her place in a world that doesn't want her to exist.

Love in particular has a big role in the story, especially romantic love. Which was expected, since she's mostly known from the time when she kept Ulysses on her island. What I didn't expect were the other men. Every portion of her life is marked by the presence of a man (or god) she falls in love with. You can almost say that every decision she makes is somehow prompted by a man. Which is a bit of a wasted potential, since we don't get to see Circe shine on her own.

But there's one thing that this book does really well: mythology. And I'm not just talking about how Miller weaved the myths together inside the story, but the worldbuilding itself. She managed to give coherence to the confusing jumble of mythology.

Greek myths focus on gods and mortals and how they hurt or save each other. They don't care about telling us the difference between a god and a titan: is it all just generational? Are they otherwise the exact same thing, or is there something more? And why titans weren't worshipped or, when they were (Helios and Chronos come to mind), they didn't have a seat in Olympus?

What's the difference between a nymph and full blown goddess? Are nymphs even goddesses or just magical creatures? How do you distinguish a goddess from a witch? How can a goddess be also a witch, if the powers of the other gods are innate and don't depend on anything else but the gods themselves?

These are some of the questions that have always bugged me, since I was a kid learning about Greek mythology in school. Now that I'm older, I don't expect it to explain all of this. I know each city of Ancient Greece had its own differences in beliefs, even if some of them never changed (for example, there were always twelve gods on Olympus, even if nobody agreed on who exactly they were).

Plus, the religion these myths were part of was practiced for at least a thousand years, during which some beliefs changed and new gods were imported from other religions or outright created.

It doesn't help that, when myths are told or referenced, they're usually treated as if they were completely separate from one another, and the connections between them are usually difficult to see or even remember (looking at you, Zeus and your thousand lovers and children).

Miller manages to make all these connections clear and solid, while offering an explanation about the nature and differences between gods, titans, nymphs and, obviously, witches. And she managed to do all of this without adding rules.

What I mean by this is that she didn't add any worldbuilding information that couldn't already be found in the myths themselves. She only worked on the characters and the relationships between them. She made clear what the gods' goals and fears were, how the war between gods and titans has impacted the world, and why the characters act the way they do in the myths.

And we find out that most of the distinctions between all the categories above, humans, gods, titans, nymphs and witches, is based on differences in power. The gods are scared of any power that isn't their own, nymphs are inferior to goddesses because they're not as powerful, and it's better for a nymph to turn into a monster than staying a simple nymph. And in this context, it's clear from the beginning why Circe is so alienated from the world of gods around her: aside from her quiet nature and her desperate search for someone that can understand her, she makes a point of telling us how her voice is weak like the one of a mortal, when mortals are the lowest point in this hierarchy of power.

"Circe" makes Greek mythology feel new, both through its amazing worldbuilding, and by having as a protagonist one of the most secretive and fascinating characters of the Odyssey.

[joumiwrites]

HOW TO MAKE A VASE by Yah Yah Scholfield / 3.7k words / a commission piece that now belongs to the people ! / Midsommar ( 2019, dir. ari aster )

Um! Anyways, this story was so weird to write! It’s about grief! It’s about a cult! It has mentions of death and gore and a car crash, and it’s honestly very sad, but also sort of cathartic in a weird way…?

How to Make a Vase is about Valerie, a young woman who loses everything after a horrible car accident. In her loss, she reconnects with an old friend who brings her to a ceramics club with a charismatic leader who convinces her to do the unthinkable. I’ve decided to tell it in a sort of step-by-step, instructional manner which I hope reads well!

TRIGGER WARNINGS; mentions of child death, graphic car accident, some gore, mentions / slight inner workings of a cult

  STEP ONE: Don’t die. You come upon the stretch of black ice too quickly to avoid it, and your steering wheel spins wildly in your hands. It’s out of your control now; brace yourself for impact. Feel as the car compresses around you, the metal frame of your trusty Buick crumpling in and down on you like so much tissue paper. The windows shatter. See the glass flying, the shards embedding themselves into your skin. Hear the screech of your tires, the wind whipping through your ears, the sound of the fire roaring with you inside of it. You can’t scream— not yet. There’s not enough air in your lungs for it, so all you can do as your car twists and burns and flips is sink down deep. Sink into the sensation of burning alive, of skin going crisp, of flesh and blood boiling. If you have no hellfire at hand, the feel of hot steel slicing through your oh-so-delicate internal organs is a good substitute.

When your car finally comes to a stop off the shoulder of the highway, you might be tempted to fall back into your seat—still buckled, you’ve always been such a cautious driver—and die. The pain you feel is unimaginable, insurmountable. It hurts, from your torso to your extremities to your pounding, pulsating head. The last time you felt like this you were just a little girl, and you were lying prone on the ground after a long, breathless fall out of your treehouse. Your body was smaller back then and hardier; you’re an older woman now, and the pain is not so easy to shake off as it was when you were young. You lay in your seat, nauseous, scraped clean, every inch of you prickling and raw, like the epidermis had been grated away to reveal the fleshy, pink dermis.

Continua a leggere

[joumiwrites]

a hypothetical d&d party

The bard is mute.

It’s not the first thing people notice about her, usually.  The first thing is generally that she’s young, and female, and lovely–the first thing people notice about their entire party is that they’re all young, and female, and lovely, and that’s gotten more than one would-be thief or mugger in far over their head when they haven’t noticed the the paladin’s hammer or the ranger’s axe.  It comes up rather quickly though, often enough.  Whoever heard of a bard who can’t sing?

She plays a lute, mostly, or a lap-harp made of shell and sinew, string instruments she can pluck while she smiles in secret and watches everyone around her.  She dances quick, except when she’s tired, when she’s scared, when she forgets to remember the feet at the ends of her legs.

She doesn’t tell her story to strangers, but enough of the other girls have learned to sign by now, and it’s easy enough to sketch out the outlines of the old bargain: the voice, the prince, the witch, the thousand shards of glass she walked upon on her way up the beach, the look in her sea-green eyes when they travel too near water.  The thousand shards of glass she walked upon when she left the palace, and turned back towards the sea to throw herself upon the rocks, and then made her way up the road inland, and kept walking.

.

The warlock is beautiful and mild and self-effacing and shy, is tidy and generous and charming.  She’s small with herself in exactly the right way to shout abuse to the half of her party who knows how to recognize that same look in the mirror in the morning.  The bird on her shoulder is too small, too bright, too sweet for a real warlock’s familiar.  The knife at her belt is sharp enough for anything that needs doing, though, cooking or otherwise.

Her fae patron visits sometimes, in the quiet hours between dusk and midnight, a sweetly old godmother made of moonlight and shadow.  She’s kind to the whole lot of them in her own chaotic way, free-handed with transmutations and illusions that break halfway through the evening, for better or worse.  She once spent three hours around their campfire drinking brandy and gossipping outrageously about the Feywild and teasing the wizard into fits of laughter.

She’s never told the story of how she met the warlock’s mother, or what debt was owed there, and the warlock doesn’t know herself.  It was never meant to be a debt paid in power and violence and the deft will-sapping enchantments the warlock weaves now, but, well.  The prince wasn’t meant to be cruel, the warlock says.  The palace was meant to be warmer than the fireplace cinders in her stepmother’s house.  The faerie was meant to be saving her from her lot, not throwing her into something worse.  The power’s an apology of sorts.

.

The wizard is awkward and joyful and nervous.  She has no fear of heights or small places, which just stands to be expected, she says, after all those years in that little tower, and she’s got no skill at lying or even edging around the truth at all, which is why she isn’t in the tower any more in the first place.  She says too much or too little or the wrong thing entirely, always, but the most well-socialized member of the whole party is the ranger who walks around with a dire wolf at her hip, or maybe their mute bard, so who are any of them to judge.

There was nothing to do in that tower but read, and brush her hair, and sort through the witch’s endless stockpile of dried herbs and potions ingredients, and watch out the window as woodcutters and hunters and princes rode by, and dream.  The reading was more interesting than the dreaming, most of the time, and the witch didn’t mind it as much when she talked about it.  She never bothered to actually use any of the magic in the witch’s books until the thing with the prince and the haircut and the desert, which she’s told them all about in all the detail they could ever ask for, but most of the girls get uncomfortable when she starts talking about princes.  It’s a little easier if she just starts rambling about conjuration and abjuration and illusion theory, about the 400-year-old history of a city that doesn’t exist any more, about the proper grammatical structure of Celestial, until maybe one of the quiet ones finally answers back.

Her hair is too short.  She keeps an illusion up over it whenever she can, while it grows back slowly, tickling the side of her face and the back of her neck and leaving her head too light and unbalanced.  

.

The ranger doesn’t care about princes, which makes one of them at least.  Then again, the ranger doesn’t trust anyone, really, prince or no, not wolves or monsters or the men who kill them.  She more or less trusts the rest of them by now, mostly, when the wind blows in the right direction.

She wears bright red in the middle of the woods and it shouldn’t help her slip into the shadows half as easily as it does, but most beasts can’t see color and red’s just another shade of gray if the light’s low enough.  She never uses her axe against trees.  She doesn’t need to.  She can find a path through any brush without it.  She picks flowers when she finds them, and tucks them into the other girls’ hair.

Her wolf’s mother killed the man who taught her to use the axe, and the man who taught her to use the axe killed that wolf’s mate before that, and the mate had an old woman’s blood on his teeth when it happened.  The ranger’s blade found the wolf’s mother’s throat.  The ranger’s mother sent her out into the woods in the first place.  It’s not as though anywhere is really safe, cottage or forest, axe or teeth.  One of these days maybe her wolf will turn and go for her in return, and maybe one of these days her axe will be faster and maybe it won’t.  In the mean time, there’s flowers and berries and pastries and enough game to keep everyone sated, for a little while.

.

The paladin’s hair is raven black and her skin is chalky as a corpse.  She’s not undead, mostly.  The undead are her job.  She knows that much.

She was sweet, once (they were all sweet, once) but apples are bitter now and so is she, and there’s judgment to lay out in the world.  Her grip on her warhammer’s all wrong–she holds it like a mining hammer, but it hits as hard as it needs to.  Her armor’s all dwarven make, and her shield’s black and red and white like snow.

She was sweet once, and frightened, and when she says it quietly around the campfire in the night when none of them can quite make out the glimmer of understanding on each others’ faces, everyone still nods.  She took a bite of poison and somebody left her a full year in a glass coffin of Gentle Repose, dangling on the edge of the Raven Queen’s domain while all the other newly-arrived dead passed by and faded away.  She woke up to somebody’s lips and hands and skin on her lips and her hands and her skin.  She doesn’t like princes.  She doesn’t like necromancers.

She likes sunlight, and summer, and colors that aren’t black and white and red.  She likes the way the bard grins when she whirls into a dance, and the look in the warlock’s eye when she sets her feet to say no, and the wizard’s laughter on high with a Fly spell, and the ranger’s gentle fingers braiding flowers into everything she can touch.  

[joumiwrites]

They got together and chose a new one

All the folks got together to choose a new one. It was the time of the cycle where they did that and every last one got up and laced up their sneakers tight. And walked out to decide on a new guy.

All the folks had agreed that there should only be one guy who was theee guy. The guy would then get to decide. Get to decide all the things that folks used to bother with. Nothing wrong with bothering with things, except we all decided we didn’t want to anymore.

Now once a cycle we pick a new guy. It’s a tough job. Deciding on everything. But he’s got the resources to do it. The one the folks decide on gets all the money, army and a big house. when it comes down to it you need to make some tough decisions. And sure after you’re done being the guy you get thrown into an active volcano. But that’s part of the job, right.

Now I have my guy and folks think he’s great, and there’s another guy who’s awful and the folks who like him are fools. If I met this guy I’d probably kill him. But! If he gets decided on to be the guy I am ok with him making all of the decisions. That’s the way things go. That guy gets to decide everything and then after we throw them into a volcano.

It’s the throwing them into a volcano part that makes the system us folks created so perfect. Because whomever we folks pick, we’ll throw em in the volcano wether we love them or hate them. And I can put up with some bad decisions if they know the consequences for getting to make them is having your last moments being the slowroasted of your carnal body parts and evaporating soul.

[joumiwrites]

You work as the minor villain every new hero has to beat for their first battle.

[joumiwrites]

https://m.tapas.io/series/Kissing-The-Moon/info

No pressure or anything and this definitely won’t be for everyone but if there is anyone interested in reading this here you go! Come and join me as I have fun with writing a genre I’ve never touched before and try to get out of my writing slump ✌︎('ω')✌︎

I hope you all have fun with my poor spelling, grammar mistakes and weird sentence structures ;)

[joumiwrites]

Last line tag

Thank you @milothenovelist for tagging me!

Here is the last line(s) from yesterday translated into English (hope there are no mistakes):

The leaves on the snake’s body fell down as it began to move. The coils tightened, and the trees started to break under the pressure.

I tag @xianaii, @h-brook-writes, @nya-is-typing and @nightskywriter!

[joumiwrites]

Introduction

Welcome to my writing blog!

After months of lurking and procrastinating, I’m finally ready to start posting something.

Here are some facts about me and this blog, in no particular order:

• I’m Italian, English isn’t my first language. I write both in English and Italian, usually not on the same page.

• This blog will mainly be about writing, and books in general. I’ll probably also talk about shows and videogames and other things that make me want to share my opinions and feelings with the world.

• I write a lot of fantasy and some soft sci-fi. I’ll write more about my active projects soon, but I’m currently working on the fourth draft of a fantasy novel in Italian and a webserial in English that will start... I don’t know when yet. But Soon™.

• I love languages, both learning and creating them. I’m studying Russian, hoping to get to an high intermediate level soon. Maybe I’ll talk about my conlangs someday, either here or in a dedicated blog. But they’re still works in progress, so I’ll keep them to myself for now.

• I also love programming. I have a degree in Computer Science.

• Joumi isn’t my actual name (shocking, I know). I chose it because my nickname in real life sounds like “Jo”, so I wanted to keep that. I made it up by stringing together sounds that I liked. Hope it doesn’t mean anything weird in some language I don’t know.

I’m... not used to interacting online, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve decided to start this blog. I need to leave my comfort zone a bit for my own growth, and it’s much easier to do it online, at least at the beginning.

That’s it, for now!