sagevalleymusings

[sagevalleymusings]

I want to talk about Sinners but it’s so good you have to see it first so I’m even dropping the title of this essay under a cut

Sinners came out on April 18, 2025 and I’ve seen it, in theaters, twice already. Moreso than any other piece of media I’ve written about, I’m just going to go ahead and say: if you haven’t seen Sinners yet, don’t read this. Drop everything you’re doing, go to the movies, and watch it right now. Then drag a friend to it next week, because this is not the kind of movie you can just see once, and if you’re like me, you’ll be desperate to talk to someone about it. Sinners is a masterpiece. It’s one of the best movies of the 21st century and that is not an exaggeration. It’s full to the brim with symbolism, has masterful audio, and despite being categorized as a “supernatural horror” film is not so frightening that it alienates the non-horror audience. And it has Michael B Jordan. I don’t think I need to say more. But there’s one specific thing that I want to talk about publicly so if you’ve seen the movie, let’s talk.

Do Stack and Mary have a happy ending?

That might seem a bit trite for a movie this heavy in racial metaphor, and okay, yeah, it is. But part of why I would say that you should 1) see the movie yourself and 2) see the movie with a friend is that you should be having a lot of these conversations in person, with people you trust. It can be very difficult, for anyone of any race, to have conversations about the oppression of Black Americans in a country where this topic has been so politically charged for the entirety of our existence as a country. And because of the lack of standardized education on these topics, a lot of us are coming from well behind the curve when it comes to having this conversation. Did it come as a shock to you that Black Mississippians in 1932 would still be trapped on plantations nearly 70 years after the end of the Civil War? If you’ve never heard of sharecropping, this was probably a confusing movie to go into, and one of the many reasons this movie is worth a re-watch. Slavery is a much more complicated topic than you were probably taught in school.

And that’s just one example in the first five minutes of the movie why having any kind of a nuanced conversation about Sinners is going to be difficult. There’s a book length dissertation you could go on just watching Sammie pick cotton as a sharecropper in Mississippi in 1932. I’m not writing a book this time, that book has already been written, by people far more qualified than me. I’m not unpacking all the racial coding in this movie, I’m not explaining what it all means. We’re assuming that if you’re reading this, you’ve already talked about this movie with a friend, and come to unpack some of the more basic metaphors and deeper meanings. The “devil” in this movie is assimilation. If this is news to you, I would say go see this movie again and bring a different friend this time. This is not the essay where we unpack that metaphor.

And now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m going to talk exclusively about the ten minute scene we see while the credits are rolling with Old Sammie and the return of Stack and Mary.

The reintroduction of Stack and Mary is a powerful moment. It’s shot in such a way that could imply that a threat is walking through the door, starting with the deep bass note of the final showdown with Remmick, But very quickly – the moment we actually see who has come through the door - the music that’s playing is far closer to the Delta motif (but in a minor key) than it is the electric sound of the vampires. The sounds of this shot say to us that this is Sammie’s relatives come to visit, not two vampires tracking down an escaped victim.

And the framing quickly catches up. They talk casually, Sammie even plays for them, and Stack and Mary are wrapped up in each other romantically, enjoying the music.

And then they leave, Stack dropping a couple hundred dollars in tip. Stack and Mary are alive, still in love, still together, and doing incredibly well financially. They got a happy ending… right?

Let’s talk about want versus need. Establishing the wants and needs of a character is foundational to good writing of any kind, and pitting those two foundations against each other is a common way of creating conflict in a story. This can also be painted as external goal vs internal realization.

Mary is pretty explicit that what she wants is to be with Stack. As a counter to this, Stack wants Mary to be safe. His broader want is to open the juke joint, obviously, but let’s focus on the relationship for now. At the conclusion of the movie, Mary and Stack have both achieved this want. Mary can never die, so is safe forever, and they’ve outlived the miscegenation that would have led to one or both of them being killed over their relationship anyway. Mary gets to be with Stack for all eternity.

The problem is… getting what you want in a story is a terrible conclusion. The goal isn’t to get what you want – it’s to get what you need, and, maybe, to become the person where what you need and what you want become the same thing.

What does Mary need? What does Stack need? I’d argue that for both of them, the answer is the same, because the needs of our characters is the main thesis of Coogler’s movie: community, not assimilation.

Mary goes to the juke joint seeking community, says straight to Stack’s face that she didn’t want a white husband and to pass as white, because she sees the people she’s with now as her family. And Stack returns from Chicago – disillusioned by the Northern city. “Better the devil you know” – with familiar faces and familiar friends. We see Smoke reaching out to Annie, but Stack goes all over the city collecting people to come to their juke joint, to help them build it.

I could talk more broadly about community as a theme, but as I discussed at the beginning, we’re not talking about the movie as a whole, we’re just focusing on this one ten minute sequence. So do Mary and Stack get what they need? Do they achieve community?

When Stack and Mary are re-introduced in 1992, they’re dressed for the times. But it isn’t just that their wardrobe is updated – it’s cutting edge. In a way I would call it camp – there’s a specific level and kind of opulence on display. When I saw Stack, my read of this wardrobe said to me “music producer” and not musician. It’s a lot of little things, most of which I couldn’t necessarily pinpoint. I could be misreading this – thinking of the even more hyperbolized performance of hip hop of the aughts and reading that aesthetic backwards. But it also tracks with what we know of Stack as a character – a businessman, not a creative. And it also tracks with the metaphor that Coogler is telling. After all, vampirism is a metaphor for assimilation. And even if Remmick is gone, Mary and Stack are still vampires. They have been assimilated.

What, in this context does assimilation mean? If Stack is a producer instead of a musician, it means he is continuing the tradition of exploiting Black music for personal profit. This is why I think it’s interesting what Coogler and the costume design team meant with this look, whether it was simply representative of the hip hop of the 90s or if they were going for something more capitalist than that.

Assimilation in this context means that Stack and Mary are isolated from their community, both literally and metaphorically. They still can’t ever see the sun, can’t associate with others except at night. And, metaphorically, the way in which they have embraced capitalism – potentially through the exploitation of their own community – places them in closer conversation to whiteness through class. I’m trying very hard to stay on topic here but if you want homework FD Signifier has a lot of very good essays about music, race, and class etc.

Stack and Mary’s theme I’ve Seen Enough of This Place draws many of its elements from the same songs that play for all of the Delta characters, returning to the acoustic guitar. And full phrases are lifted from the Smokestack Twins theme - but played in a minor key.

Stack lost his family. Mary lost her community. They only have each other – and they’re making it work. They’re successful by a specific definition of success, certainly.

And Stack says they own every single one of Sammie’s albums. But even a recording isn’t as good as “the real.” They’ve been yearning for that connection of community the entire time.

Mary and Stack have a brief, final moment of happiness with their cousin. It’s interesting that “I’ve Seen Enough of This Place” is Sammie’s words about his own mortality, but it’s the title of Mary and Stack’s song. Perhaps they, too, have seen enough, and with a reminder of community free from Black exploitation, are finally ready to rest.

So no. Mary and Stack don’t have a happy ending because getting what they superficially want at the expense of everything they are is the definition of a tragic ending. Yes, Mary and Stack get a happy ending because they have a moment of community in the end. No, Mary and Stack don’t have a happy ending because the vampires are a metaphor did we forget the vampires are a metaphor? What does it mean for hip hop to reach out to blues in that way? At that time?

It doesn’t help that Coogler has deliberately set this scene in 1992, around the end of what most would consider “the golden age of hip hop” which featured sampling from older music heavily. The next ten years would see hip hop become commercialized in what is now called the “bling” era. Hip hop was reaching out to the past, in conversation with Black music and ancestors that had come before. 90s hip hop was far more likely to be political than the music that would come after. Is this what happens when the soul of blues finally passes, and all we are left with is the devil of assimilation?

There are other reasons the music of the aughts was more commercial, more shallow, less controversial than the music of the 90s. But we’re not getting into that because I made certain promises at the top of this and I’m sticking to them this time, god dammit.

Anyway, I wanted to briefly deconstruct this one scene at the end, because I think a shallow reading of the movie could lead one to the conclusion that Stack and Mary have a happy ending, because they are still together after 60 years, and rich to boot. So I guess being a vampire is cool and romantic, right?

And this is absolutely the wrong takeaway, because the vampires are a metaphor for assimilation. Assimilation is usually forced (and in this case absolutely was forced) and the only choice left is how to survive afterward. Do you put on a fake smile and try to spread that assimilation to those around you? Do you become a force of exploitation yourself?

Do you seek quiet moments of community when you can? Do you listen to the blues?

[sagevalleymusings]

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

[sagevalleymusings]

Let’s Talk about Sterilization

I got sterilized this past week. This is a personal medical decision, which I would normally say is Not Your Business, but I think sterilization in specific is one of those things we’re really shy as a culture to talk about, but which we do kind of need to talk more about. I’m going to get into my personal experience, so that folks who are curious about it can get a first-person account, but because I’m me, I do want to talk about politics first.

The only question my doctor asked me, when I went in for a consultation, was “why now?” And although I have the personal reason that I gave, there is of course also a political reason. I live in Trump’s America, and the agenda of the current administration is eroding my rights to bodily autonomy. During Trump’s first term, the infamous Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade, making abortion a state’s issue instead of a legally enshrined right. Some states, including mine, still have legal abortion. But not all states do, and the states that don’t are dangerous for women to live in. Seven states in the United States are attempting to restrict women’s ability to travel to a different state to get an abortion. There have been multiple cases where abortion bans have been used to punish women who had a miscarriage. And pregnancy outcome laws of all kinds have been on the rise.

I believe very strongly in the right to bodily autonomy – of all kinds, frankly. But the right to a woman’s own bodily autonomy surrounding choice and pregnancy has been unnecessarily fraught in the United States. Sterilization itself has contributed to this fraught history. Forced sterilization on anyone for any reason is unconscionable, and it has certainly been used to target Black and Native women, and disabled women in the United States. No one in this country should be forced to give birth and no one in this country should be forced not to – it should be a choice. And that means that I should be able to choose sterilization if I want it.

This isn’t always easy for women. Many young women report being denied this care – being told that they’re too young, or that they should have children first, or that they need the consent of their husbands. This is a permanent decision, and one that does have a high regret rate. So to some degree, the reluctance among doctors to perform this procedure at a young age is understandable. But that conversation is starting to shift, for a lot of reasons.

For starters, doctors are receiving more than double the number of requests in a post-Dobbs America for sterilizations, particularly among younger people. Younger doctors are more receptive and have more feelings about bodily autonomy. And the procedure for women in particular is not the same as it used to be. It used to be that one would get their “tubes tied” which was usually a stapling shut or something similar. The risk of pregnancy was lowered to the same rate you would get with an IUD or the patch, but it would come with the risk of ectopic pregnancy, so in many ways an IUD was safer.

That’s not the case any more. Doctors now remove part of the fallopian tube in a procedure called a salpingectomy, which is more permanent and when performed correctly carries statistically no possibility of pregnancy, ectopic or otherwise. It also reduces your risk of cervical cancer. The salpingectomy, for those who are absolutely certain they will not change their minds, does now edge out long-term birth control like the patch or the IUD as both safer and more effective.

Of course, none of this is medical advice and I don’t say any of it to try and convince someone to do this. But if you are a woman and it’s already something you are thinking about, here’s how it went for me.

I should preface this by saying that I am in my thirties. Everyone says trying to have this conversation in your twenties is a non-starter, so I did wait, and I think waiting helped. As I said before, the only question any doctor asked me about why I was making this decision was when my surgeon asked ‘why now?’ No one asked me why, no one tried to change my mind. I received the consultation in mid March, and had an appointment for surgery scheduled by April.

Because this is the US I live in, and this country sucks, I should mention that this procedure wound up costing me more than four thousand dollars. Maybe some day that won’t have to be a factor for anyone in making this decision, but that’s not the world we live in now. And the fact that this would have been considered elective and therefore not covered by insurance at all in a world without the Affordable Care Act absolutely also contributed to my decision to not wait, even with the hefty price tag. Better four thousand dollars now than twenty thousand dollars if/when Donald Trump wrecks yet another pillar of our nation.

This experience checked off a lot of firsts for me. I’ve never had stitches. I’ve never been under general anesthesia. I think I’ve technically never had a surgery of any kind. So I was a little nervous going into it. But it wasn’t as scary as I was expecting it would be.

Day of, a bunch of people came and talked to me. My surgeon asked how I was doing and if I had any questions. My anesthesiologist double-checked whether or not I had any illnesses that would complicate the anesthesia. Another anesthesiologist came to check on me. A nurse prepped me with a saline IV and then the OR nurse asked me the same set of questions everyone else asked.

Then I walked from the prep room to the OR, where there was already a bunch of people standing around. They strapped me to the table – I would discover later from my after care notes that this is because the procedure involves flipping the table at a 45 degree angle with your feet facing up. I remember someone saying they needed to lift the table up a little higher for the anesthesiologist and then next thing I knew I was waking up in recovery.

I know people say you don’t remember falling asleep to anesthesia or anything that happens while you are unconscious but it really was like that. It was as though no time passed. The only real sense I had that time had passed at all was that my throat was rough and scratchy and I had known going in that I was going to be on anesthesia, so waking up somewhere else was not unusual.

I remember asking for water before I even opened my eyes, and the nurse giving me ice chips to chew instead. I remember trying really hard to remember her name. I remember that my partner was not there right at first and arrived a little later. I don’t remember a lot of what was said or how I acted. I felt very awake and alert, and I remember saying “I feel great” and “when can I get out of here” but the entire rest of the day was a blur. I would start to nod off but never actually fell asleep and spent most of the day energetically trying to do things and being told to go sit back down. Turns out I was high on three different kinds of pain medication and two muscle relaxants? Anesthesia is intense and there’s a reason they tell you to take it easy the next day. Nothing hurt and I felt totally fine and was also dizzier and weaker than I realized and injured myself within an hour of getting home.

One of the most unpleasant things was actually the iodine. It was tough to rub off in the shower, particularly because I was worried about jostling my stitches. A salpingectomy is usually laparoscopic, which means that a small incision is made where a camera is inserted, and then another incision is made where long, flexible tools are inserted and you do the surgery by camera. This kind of surgery tends to be much safer and less invasive than open surgery, though sometimes salpingectomies are done open if there are complications.

But in my case, this meant that I only had two small cuts to worry about – one so close to my belly button that you literally can’t see it, and one further down above my pelvic bone. They were stitched closed and then glued shut.

You can shower afterward, but you’re supposed to be gentle of the stitches until the skin has time to work its magic, so I was being ginger with the entire area, and even five days later the iodine they used as disinfectant is still sticking to my skin.

I was never in very much pain, though they did give me pain medication for after and I have been taking it as prescribed – maybe a little less often than prescribed. This has largely not interfered with my day-to-day life, though I understand that folks with a job that requires heavy lifting would need as much as a week off compared to my two days.

I’ll admit there was a moment afterward where I freaked out a little. I never wanted to get pregnant, but now I can’t and what if I change my mind… but that moment was fleeting and quickly replaced with the more solid reassurance that I never wanted to get pregnant and now I can’t. I feel better in my body in a way that’s hard to describe but is if I had to guess probably the same feeling as gender euphoria.

I would discover later in my aftercare notes that the surgery itself only took 45 minutes. I spent 20 minutes coming out of anesthesia, another 45 minutes getting prepped to leave, and by the time I got home it was still the morning. 10/10 would do again if I had more reproductive organs to cut out.

I should mention that although the salpingectomy is extremely effective at preventing pregnancy, it actually doesn’t affect your hormone cycle at all. You will still menstruate. Some reports suggest it may reduce menstrual cycles, but otherwise there should be no change. This is largely a good thing - there are a lot of side effects to meddling with your hormones and is something that should be done with care and intent and avoided where unnecessary. In any case, I can already attest to this, because I happened to get my period the day before my surgery, and it returned the day after (I’m not 100% sure why I wasn’t menstruating right after my surgery – to be honest I suspect they sponged the blood up while they were working, which is kind of unpleasant to think about, but I’m sure doctors have had to deal with worse).

And that’s it, that’s the whole story. It’s been five days and I am trying and failing to remember to take it easy. The only thing I have to worry about now is infection. At some point I’ll have a follow up with a doctor about how my healing process is going.

I can recognize that I have essentially broken the curve for sterilization in women. I asked a doctor for it and within two weeks it was done. I didn’t have to spend years being rejected, or look up a list of doctors who will do it. But that’s also why I felt like I should talk about it publicly. I was discouraged for years from bringing it up with a doctor because I didn’t want to have to go through a fight. But I didn’t go through a fight. My entire care team was very chill the whole time and no one, at any point, ever asked me ‘why?’ I was never at any point invited to justify the choice about my body I was making. And that’s the way medical care should be.

[sagevalleymusings]

NJ Democrat senator Cory Booker takes the floor in protest of Trump/Musk, "saying that he will keep going “'as long as I am physically able'.”

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said at the outset of his remarks. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy. “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.” -source

I am posting this at 2:30am EST. He has been speaking since 7PM EST. This link (at this moment) is to a live stream.

FUCK YEAH, JERSEY!

So very proud of my state at the moment.

[sagevalleymusings]

@saltedweather

im tired of him

[sagevalleymusings]

I get that the OP here was probably responding to Watson/Holmes queerbaiting or some equally similar trash, but I cannot overstate how untrue this statement is.

Something does not have to be explicitly stated to be authorial intent and characters staring at the camera and intoning "I'm gay and this is my boyfriend" is destroying our ability to actually interpret and enjoy subtext.

If it's not stated explicitly in the text, then it's not "representation", that's you finding something to relate to without authorial input & making it look more intentional than it is

[sagevalleymusings]

I initially reblogged this without comment but coming back to say a couple things

they have not made the comments to this document visible. This is the very first time I have ever seen this. It might be good to be noisy about this part too.

Saying that the federal government should defy an EO is a non-starter. Rather than try and keep X on the passport, demand that gender be removed from passports entirely. It's outmoded, it will cause confusion, and it does not identify a person better than a photo ID. Just get rid of it. There's literally no reason not to.

PUBLIC COMMENTS ARE OPEN FOR GENDER IDENTIFIERS ON US PASSPORTS

Right now, you can submit a comment for consideration on the proposed changes to US Passport law that will include requiring a change from "Gender" to "Sex" on all passports and require that people identify with their sex assigned at birth.

THIS IS THE LAW THAT WOULD BAN TRANS PEOPLE FROM UPDATING THEIR IDENTIFICATION

Please take a moment to click through and submit a comment. This kind of thing is fast, easy, and is one of the many ways to show your support of the trans community to the people that need to know how many of us there are.

[sagevalleymusings]

reblogging for some absolutely sick beats

bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

[sagevalleymusings]

An Overly In-depth Analysis of Spinning Silver Many Years Late

`When I first started writing this in 2022, I had recently finished reading Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver for the first time. I wanted to remember a particular quote in the book, and stumbled upon some reviews from 2019, when the paperback was released.

The quote I was looking for: You will never be a Staryk Queen until you make a hundred winters in one day, seal the crack in the mountain, and make the white tree bloom.

The reviews: 

…read Temeraire and Uprooted at least ten times, but couldn’t reread this. The relationships between the two main men and two main women are abusive. Certainly, there’s trauma involved, but it’s not a woman’s job to heal men’s trauma through sacrificing themselves…

…I adored Uprooted (had some issues, but still loved it completely), however Spinning Silver just felt off – not as magical, terrible “romances”, too many POVs, etc. All in all, it just wasn’t as gripping. I liked Miryem’s character, but the other two protagonists were very bland “strong female characters…”

I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate this enough that I’m going to write an excessively long post defending Spinning Silver for three years. For everyone that doesn’t want to read a masters-student dissertation of an essay or who hasn’t read the book yet and wants to go into this spoiler free, here’s the TL:DR version. There are no romances in this book. The two reviewers above are trying to apply the enemies to lovers tropes they loved so much in Uprooted to a grimm fairy tale about politics, feminism, and Jewish persecution. There are no romances in this book. This is hard to grasp, because two of the main characters are married, and that marriage is a major part of the plot, but no one in those marriages including the men wanted the marriage in the first place. To call it “abusive” is to read modern expectations onto a historical political marriage that, while not inaccurate, fundamentally misunderstands the point and the context in which the story takes place. 

Also, I would recommend the audio book, if you have trouble with multiple points of view. They are all in first person, and although it starts out with just two, we add more and more POV until there’s 5 or 6 total. The reader Lisa Flanagan does an excellent job distinguishing POVs which will make this aspect of it easier. Read the book, particularly the audiobook. But if you are reading this book looking for romance, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s still one of the best if not the best re-imagined fairy tale I’ve ever read. Here’s an excessively long post about why.

The Introduction

The very first thing we’re introduced to is Miryem as our narrator explaining that stories aren’t about “how they tell it” but getting out of paying your debts. So how do “they” tell it? The introductory story is about a girl having sex out of wedlock who is left in the lurch because the “lord, prince, rich man’s son” has a duty. 

It’s about saving yourself for marriage. Even in how “they” tell it, who the man is doesn’t matter and no one is in love. Your duty to your family comes first. 

This story is not about romance. The story this story is subverting is not about romance. Even in how “they” tell it, romance isn’t a good thing. 

In actual fairy tales, not Disney princess stories, romance often has nothing to do with it. These are stories for little children to get them to obey their parents. Rumpelstilskin is about ingenuity and perseverance. Even in a story like Cinderella, the romance is entirely incidental - the story is about hard work, strength through adversity, and moral superiority. The marriage itself isn’t romantic in the sense that the two main characters fall in love. These stories are older than the modern concept of love. For authors with a strong sense of familial duty and nationalism, writing about something as subversive as romantic love would go against their goals.

This is the setting that Spinning Silver takes place in. It’s a modern fairy tale set in a regency era. The fairy tale Miryem tells in our introduction paints romance as a bad thing. You marry out of duty. 

But Miryem from the start tells us that filial duty isn’t what the stories are really about. They’re really about paying your debts. Within the first 2 minutes of this book, it’s already told us three times that this story isn’t about romance. Once in the setting of a fairy tale about filial duty, once in the denial of how they tell it, and once in the revelation of the real interpretation.

The Power of Threes

The power of repetition and specifically of threes comes up over and over again in the book. In many cultures across the world, three has special significance. From the fairy tale side of it, Rumpelstilskin itself contains layers of threes within threes. Rumpelstilskin makes a bargain for the miller’s daughter on the third night. The queen has three days to guess Rumpelstilskin’s name, and guesses three names each day.

It’s likely that these repetitions of threes in fairy tales come from the Christian backdrop they were written in, which at times focuses on the third path in the middle of two binaries, or the significance of building power, though it’s difficult to make any sweeping, central claims about why three is significant because fairy tales are so widespread across countries, time, and religion. But it’s important that Novik is writing this from a Lithuanian Jewish perspective, so there’s a subtle shift in the interpretation and meaning of the rule of threes. I’m not Jewish, so what specifically this is as grounded in Novik’s ancestry is something I can’t be clear on.

During my research, one explanation that seems to resonate with the symbolism of this book is a Chabad interpretation. From chabad.org: The number three symbolizes a harmony that includes and synthesizes two opposites. The unity symbolized by the number three isn’t accomplished by getting rid of number two, the entity that caused the discord, and reverting to the unity symbolized by number one. Rather, three merges the two to create a new entity, one that harmoniously includes both opposites. 

Lithuanian Judaism is majority non-Hasidic, so this is just one tangentially-related explanation of the importance of threes. I’m sure there’s other interpretations I’m missing because I can’t possibly begin to know where to look. But I like this explanation for grounding the story because I think it fits well with the symmetry of our protagonists and their husbands (or lack thereof), and the way the story is building to their creating something new.

So when the very first thing we are shown within the first two minutes of the book is a thrice denial of romance, we need to take Naomi Novik seriously when she says that the book is about getting out of paying your debts. Or, at the very least, this is what Miryem thinks the book is about. The way in which the characters grow and change does reveal some of the original cynicism in this thesis, but ultimately this is a story about what we owe each other, and how that debt comes for us if we don’t pay it. And on top of that, Miryem describes the love interest of the miller’s daughter as “lord, prince, rich man’s son” (3 possibilities). Who this love interest is doesn’t matter in the slightest.

All this to say that within the first two minutes of the book, if you are still reading this expecting a romance, you aren’t listening to the author.

Jewish Heritage

Also within the first few minutes of the book, we learn that Miryem is a Jewish moneylender in a fantasy version of Russian-occupied Lithuania some time in the Middle Ages. I’m not going to get too deep into this. I am, as I said, not Jewish, and these characterisations edge very close, on purpose, to deeply anti-Semitic tropes. But understanding what Novik is saying about her heritage and her family’s persecution is critically important to understanding the book. 

Naomi Novik is a second-generation American. She’s Lithuanian Jewish on her father’s side, and Polish Catholic on her mother’s side. In many ways, Spinning Silver has been treated as a spiritual successor to Uprooted. Uprooted is set in a fantasy version of Poland, Spinning Silver is set in a fantasy version of Lithuania. Both stories are about Novik’s heritage, and the stories from her ancestors. Spinning Silver is a lot more obvious about this, but there’s a non-zero amount of Catholicism in the way the Dragon structures his magic, and in the older folk magic that lives in the trees.

Spinning Silver is much more explicit, and Novik has said as much, that Miryem’s family is supposed to reflect her father’s family and his experience as a Lithuanian Jew.

Our book takes place in a fantasy version of Lithuania in 1816. That’s a very specific date I’ve picked out for a book that otherwise appears to be ‘the ambiguous past.’ How did I come to that conclusion?

I did a little bit of research to try and determine when and this is what I came up with: Lithuania didn’t exist until the 13th century. Lithuania didn’t have a tsar on the throne until Russian imperialism in the late 1700s. Restrictions on Jews’ ability to work in craft or trade began around 1100 in Europe, and began to wane around 1850. In Lithuania, this fluctuated depending on the specific time period, so we can a little further narrow the timing down to after the mid 1600s but before the 1850s, probably during early Russian imperialism. Leadership is religious, either Eastern Orthodox or Catholic, who at the time believed that charging interest was sinful, so employed members of other religions, specifically Jews, to do their money lending for them. Because of the association with sinful, dirty work, and previous oppression as a religious minority, this led to a significant rise in anti-Semitism, coming to a head with a series of Jewish pogroms in Russia from (officially) 1821-1906, leading millions to flee and thousands of deaths. So we can narrow our estimation down to about 80 years, between 1820-1900.

Then my historian partner started reading it with me and exclaimed, "is that a reference to the Year Without A Summer" so actually 1816, but you can also see how easy it is to narrow that date down even as an amateur just by examining the exact flavor of anti-Semitism in the text. Which is why, even after I learned about the year Without A Summer, I left my aimless searching in.

Most audience members probably don’t know this much detail about history, but Spinning Silver is very clearly written with an audience understanding of this history in mind. We’re supposed to see the rise in anti-Semitism throughout the book which adds a layer of tension because at any moment, the politics in the wider world and rising anti-Semitism might catch up to our protaginists, and Miryem and her entire family could be killed. 

That’s it, book over. Anti-Semitism sweeps through, destroys everything it touches, and none of the clever problem-solving of any of our heroines matters. It’s over.

This dark possibility looms over the story like a storm cloud the entire time. The most explicit reference is when Miryem uses the tunnel her grandfather dug.

“I pulled it up easily, and there was a ladder there waiting for me to climb down. Waiting for many people to climb down, here close to the synagogue, in case one day men came through the wall of the quarter with torches and axes, the way they had in the west where my grandfather’s grandmother had been a girl.”

The fear of persecution isn’t just something of the past. It is something that people in this community are actively thinking about and planning contingencies for.

We’re five pages in and I’ve barely gotten through the first five minutes of the book. I could do this for literally the rest of the book if I wanted to - five minutes later, Miryem as narrator starts talking about a festival at the turn of the seasons between Autumn and Winter, which she calls “their festival” and resents the townspeople for it because they’re spending money they borrowed from Panov Mandelstam on it. Meanwhile, Panov Mandelstam is lighting a candle for the third day of their own festival, when a cold wind sweeps in and blows the candles out. Her father tells them it’s a sign for bed time instead of relighting them, because they’re almost out of oil. Panov Mandelstam is reduced to whittling candles out of wood because, “there isn’t going to be any miracle of light in our house.” I didn’t catch this the first time around, because I’m an ignorant goyim I wasn’t thinking about this book as an explicitly Jewish fairytale. But Novik is obviously making a reference to Channukkah, and the fact that Panov Mandeltam doesn’t relight the candles for Channukkah is powerfully unsettling. And then on the eigth day, Miryem takes up her father’s work and collects the money he’s been neglecting, and there is light in their house for Channukkah after all, but the miracle is hard work, not magic. The entire book is like that, layers upon layers of meaning with every sentence. Subtle clues before the curtain is pulled back. I want to teach a seminar using only this book on the definition of “show, don’t tell.”

Good and Evil

But at some point I’m going to have to move on, and so let’s talk about trauma, poverty, and morals.

Novik introduces the townsfolk as Miryem sees them, but not all the townsfolk. Each person introduced by name winds up coming back later, enacting some kind of harm. But it seems to me that this harm is foreshadowed in each instance.

First, we’re introduced to Oleg. Oleg’s wife is described as being Oleg’s “squirrelly, nervous wife.” This isn’t the only time it occurs to me to wonder if Oleg beats his wife, but I think the description is intentional. Oleg eventually tries to murder Miryem, for explicitly anti-Semetic reasons, but I think this violence is foreshadowed in the way we see him interact, in brief flashes, with his wife and son, and how they’re always described as being a little withdrawn, a little afraid of Oleg, and not very sad that he’s gone, except in the part where this is going to be a financial burden on the family.

Next introduced is Kajus. Kajus who had borrowed two gold pieces to establish himself as a krupnik brewer (the krupnik he brews would lead to Da’s alcoholism). His solution to Miryem banging on their doors is to offer her a drink. Clearly getting people hooked and indebted to him is a tactic he’s used to success more than once. 

The last person introduced in this sequence is Lyudmila. Again, we are given a set of three. Lyudmila is different. Lyudmila never borrowed money. She doesn’t have a direct reason for despising the Mandelstams. Or at least, she shouldn’t. And yet, her distain jumps off the page. Lyudmila is the quiet, insidious voice spreading lies and rumors about the Jewish family in town. Her violence is not explicit. But it is the same.

The last person we’re introduced to, given an entire separate section to his own, is Gorek.

Good and Evil part 2 - is Wanda’s Da an evil character?

Gorek, who’s better known for the rest of the book as Wanda’s Da, is also introduced to us first as a borrower trying to get out of paying his debts. Gorek is a violent drunk. This is established repeatedly. Gorek is not a good man.

But is he evil? Certainly he seems to be the antagonist of Wanda’s story, and there’s no love lost when he dies. But I think it’s interesting that even Gorek, in many respects, is sympathetic. He’s not very different from any of the other men in this town. Oleg is violent. Kajus profits off the many people in the town that drink their troubles away. Gorek is not uniquely awful even if he is particularly awful. And even for Gorek, the text takes pains to remind us that he buried his wife and five children. His life is hard. Their plot of land is sat next to a tree where nothing will grow. How much rye did they waste before they learned that lesson? And when Mama was alive, they had enough to eat in the winter, but only because she was very, very careful to divide everything up. On his own, Gorek couldn’t make that math add up, even before he started drinking his troubles away. Gorek is facing a life where unless something drastic changes, he and his children will slowly starve to death, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

So he sells his daughter for one jug of krupnik a week. Gorek has made his bed; he doesn’t want to keep living. He’s drinking himself into the grave he dug for his wife. But in the meantime he does still need to take care of his children.

I don’t say this to forgive his actions; I do think Gorek’s actions are unforgivable. Some people cannot be redeemed, they can only be defeated, and Gorek is one of those people. But at the end of the book, Wanda and Sergei and Stepon still bury him when they go back to Pavys, next to the rest of their deceased family.

Gorek is a product of his environment, and that environment is cruel and cold. The people it produces are by and large cruel and cold. No one in the town bothers to bury Gorek. No one stops him from hitting his wife and children. There’s nothing at all strange, according to the rest of the town, about his selling his daughter for drink.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Gorek is not evil, but I also think that this book is taking pains to present with sympathy the kind of environment which creates people like Gorek. Like our Staryk king, who was entirely prepared to force himself onto Miryem even though neither one of them wanted it. Like Mirnatius, who did not himself commit any acts of violence, but who was perfectly willing to benefit from the violence being committed with his face. The world is cold and cruel, and it is very, very easy to become cold and cruel from it.

The Power of Threes revisited: Miryem’s magic

Even Miryem says that she’s had to be cold and cruel to be their family’s moneylender. We don’t see very much of this. But she does after all agree to have someone work in her house for essentially no pay. We don’t necessarily realize it, because it comes at our own turning point, but Miryem has to learn empathy just as much as her Staryk king does. When she agrees to allow Flek and Tsop and Shofer to help her with her trials.

I read Novik’s new anthology Buried Deep and Other Stories and in that collection she says it’s a line from the Staryk king about Miryem’s magic that made her want to expand what was originally a short story into a full book. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.”

Fairy tales are about hard work. This line from the Staryk king isn’t just a way of constructing magic, it’s just literally true. If I get a job as an accountant, despite not knowing anything about accounting, and I don’t fail, then by the end I will be an accountant. I love this, that the magic in Spinning Silver is just hard work.

Miryem’s magic is another rule of threes. The Staryk king challenges her to turn silver into gold three times, to make the magic true, and she does it – with mundane means, through ordinary hard work, but it’s done. She barters freedom for a day by turning three storehouses to gold, and she does that too – with wit and hard work, but it’s done. The Staryk king challenges her that she’ll never be a Staryk queen, unless she can do three feats of high magic, and she does each one. Or rather, each one gets done, and Miryem has a hand in it. But the first feat of high magic requires the assistance of one other person. The second – the assistance of three. Much like each trial before it grew in magnitude – first 6 coins, then 60, then 600 – so too do all three stories grow in magnitude. It would stand to reason then that the third test of magic would require at least three upon three people. But Miryem is not the only protagonist in this story.

Circling back to Romance: Arranged Marriage is Bad That’s Obviously The Point

In addition to the rule of threes woven repeatedly in Miryem’s story, the entire story itself is a Triptych. One story is the story of the girl who could turn silver into gold. One story is the story of the children who find themselves lost in the woods and stumble onto a witch’s house full of rich food. One story is the story of the duke’s misfit daughter who marries a prince. They are all of them different fairy tales. And at the end of the story, they all come crashing into each other. The white tree belongs to Wanda’s story, bought with six lives.

Three sets of three people in each story

There are many, many examples of threes woven throughout this story, but it was only three years into writing this essay that I realized that the marriages themselves are a set of three as well. After all, only Irina and Miryem get married, right?

But Wanda is offered a marriage proposal. In a story with less magic, Wanda would have married Lukas, and been yet another generation of poor, miserable women that died in childbirth. But Wanda says no, a thing entirely unheard of in this era. Women didn’t say no to marriages arranged by their fathers.

And at the end of the story, Wanda is still unwed, with absolutely no indication that this will ever change. Wanda’s agency, this rejection of marriage, is treated with the same weight as the marriages themselves. Saying no is just as valuable as Irina’s political marriage, or courting for a year and a day and marrying for love, as Miryem eventually does.

And Miryem does marry for love. She originally has no choice in the matter, but that contract is rendered void when the Staryk king is forced to let her go. We don’t see the year’s worth of courting because it’s not relevant to the story because this is not a romance but I really don’t want to lose this point because I think Wanda’s story sometimes gets forgotten precisely because it doesn’t have a marriage. But Novik is explicit about this through Wanda’s story. Irina had no choice, not really. So it never occurred to her to say yes or no. She kills the man who sought to marry her – Chernobog wanted to marry Irina, not Mirnatius. Irina murders her would-be husband, Miryem divorces hers, and Wanda says no. Yes, the arranged marriages in this book are abusive – Novik knows that and tears them down one by one and rebuilds them into something with far more agency, that our women protagonists chose.

The Story

So we’ve come all this way and learned that Spinning Silver is not a romance, not really. The married couples in the story do come to love each other, after a fashion. But that love blooming was not the point. The point was…

Well it was about getting out of paying your debts, wasn’t it? Novik told us very explicitly that it was about getting out of paying your debts right on the first page. It’s not how they told it. But she knew.

Miryem spends the entire book making her fortune from nothing. Wanda takes over the work from her. Stepon takes over after Wanda. The debt that the town owed to Josef was a major thread over and over again throughout the whole story. Oleg tries to kill Miryem over it. The Staryk king seeks Miryem’s hand because of it. Raquel had been sick because their dowry had been spent. Wanda comes to their house to pay off the debt. Nearly everything in the book can be traced back to the debt against Josef Mandelstam.

And then, in Chapter 25, Josef sends Wanda with many letters to the people of the town forgiving all the remaining debt that was owed. The people of Pavys get out of paying their debt.

But… how do they get out of it? Not through any trickery of their own, not really. There is a stated implication that fear was a big part of it. Sending Wanda with letters of forgiveness would mean that they would not be harried or harmed while they were wrapping up affairs in the town. But Josef also doesn’t need the money. They have a home of their own, many hands to make light the work, blessings from the Sunlit Tsar to establish their place in the world, and blessings from the Staryk king that will ensure their safety even through a hard winter. They want for nothing, so they do not seek to reclaim what is theirs.

And in a way they got all those blessings through paying their debts, but in a way they did not. The Staryk way of paying their debts teaches us something very important about what a debt really is. The Staryks don’t keep debts. They make fair trade. And if they can’t make fair trade, there is no deal. Or at least, they say they make fair trade. They didn’t trade for the gold they steal from the Sunlit world, though I suspect they would argue that the pain that is caused to the people of that world is trade for their putting a monster on the throne. And Miryem rightly points out that they had been raiding for gold and raping the people of Lithvas long before Chernobog sat on the throne. They make fair trade. But only with those they view as their equals.

But the Sunlit world is even worse. The Tsar doesn’t make fair trade. He spends magic like water and steals the lives of people that didn’t bargain with him to pay for it. In the Sunlit world, people take as much as they can with as little return as they can get away with. Not everyone, of course. But it is of particular note here that in this story, Jews are vilified particularly because they ask for fair trade in return. And the people they loan money to don’t want to give it to them.

But fair trade can only go so far. The Staryk king is trying to make a road back to his kingdom, and he can’t, because there is nothing of winter that they can find in the warm summer day. And he cannot take Stepon’s white tree seed, because it was bought with six lives, and given to Stepon alone, and there is nothing that the Staryk king can barter with that would measure against a mother’s love. But Stepon wants to see the white tree grown, so they find a way to plant it. Irina digs hard soil in apology, and the Mandelstams sing a hymn to encourage growth, and although none of this was done for the Staryk king, he still uses the work to create his road.

Sometimes, fair trade isn’t enough, and one must trust that it is to the benefit of all to aid each other.

The truest way of getting out of paying your debts… is to abolish the concept of debt.

That’s right, motherfuckers, eat your kings and burn the banks to the ground, love is the anti-capitalist manifesto we made along the way!

This section was going to be a little bit of a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it really isn’t. Miryem’s magic makes wealth meaningless in its magnitude. Wanda’s magic is having food and shelter to spare. And Irina’s magic is having just leadership that rules for the people, not for power. Novik’s fairytale ending is collectivism. She tells us three times, through three stories of hardship. And it isn’t even about becoming a princess, because Wanda marries no one, and lives in a magical house that seems to always have everything they need. So long as they do what they can to take care of it.

The real magic is community. Doing for yourself what you can, and reaching your hand to another when you can spare, so that they might do the same. And so long as we all do that together, the darkness cannot come in to feast.

[sagevalleymusings]

I hear a lot about how fatness is a "risk factor" for certain illnesses and diseases. I don't hear much about how so are age, socioeconomic status, experiences of abuse, starvation, sex, race, queerness, and so many other aspects of a person's life. And that's because the world already for the most part accepts that a lot of these factors cannot be changed and that many of these factors are not what actually causes an illness or disease.

You don't develop a medical condition because your bank account suddenly shows a different, smaller number. You developed that medical condition because poverty means unbearable stress every day, less access to healthcare, worse housing, inability to clothe yourself for protection from the elements, having to overwork yourself to be able to afford your basic necessities, going without food, and so many other aspects of oppression. You don't weigh your wallet to measure your health because the amount of money you have is not what actually causes a medical condition.

But no one wants to look at the studies with legitimate methodology and admit that fatness is also in this category—that fatness is not something that we can just choose and will away, that fat people face immense systemic oppression just like any other oppressed group, that the correlation of fatness and illness is not some simple relationship of causation. And that's because doing so would mean no longer making hundreds of billions of dollars off of fat people's oppression and having to admit it's not actually okay to treat fat people as an acceptable punching bag.

When I look at medical information for whatever illnesses, see the risk factors laid out, and the only risk factor the website says to change is fatness? I think about all of the research I've read that shows actual permanent weight loss is as likely as finding Atlantis. The amount of hypocrisy at not telling someone to drink a youth potion as a form of treatment at the same time as they lose weight becomes so palpable that I can taste the dirty money being made off of this website telling people to "just lose weight, fatty." It's as cruel as selling an ill person a random crystal that you tell them will fix their health, which they then rely on instead of actual medical care, causing them to get worse and even die. And if you think that comparison is a stretch, you do not realize how many people die every day because they were told weight loss was the answer or were forced to lose weight before the doctor would actually respect them enough to run tests or so much as touch their fat body.

We live in a world where people with PCOS are told to "just lose weight" to solve their infertility, where that is the very first bullet point listed on a website about a medical condition that makes weight loss even more impossible than the already 95% failure rate for the general population. A world where fat people have to stick their own fat bodies with needles during a doctor's appointment because the doctor is too disgusted by fat rolls to even look at the person's body to give them a shot. A world where fat people with eating disorders are encouraged, applauded, and told to keep going while the thin person with an eating disorder has the "luxury" of receiving help, compassion, and a diagnosis that isn't separated in the DSM with the word "atypical." A world where a fat person accidentally given chemotherapy is told by the doctor "At least it helped you lose weight!" A world where weight loss corporations are making the exact same promises they did in advertisements from 1910, yet somehow over 100 years later we have an "ob*sity epidemic" because diets, weight loss products, and exercise regimens "Really work!!!"

If this single "solution" to ill health has not worked despite well over a century of desperate, constant attempts, maybe we should stop trying to jam a triangle into a square hole.

-Mod Worthy

[sagevalleymusings]

Quietly losing my mind over the fact that Elon Musk has straight up orchestrated a coup of our executive branch and like....I don't even know what, if any, system we have in place to fix this. Like... He's just taken control of the money and locked out the actual appointed officials. What the fuck.

[sagevalleymusings]

I know I normally post essays and leftist trash, but I just had to share that I got so excited about that cathedral skirt that I bought it within 8 minutes of drop. If you're femme, add this company to your roster. They are extremely worth the money, size inclusive, designed by a queer independent artist, and ethically sourced. Go get one... or three.

✨️THE CATHEDRAL SKIRT IS HERE!✨️ Today's skirt drop includes my highly anticipated Cathedral design, Sergle's meadow design, and a restock of Rii's blueberry design! Plus, Rii's gummi bear design on a button-up shirt! This drop will be available in Canada in a few weeks — there was a shipping delay and we decided to split it up to keep things moving. More photos should be available by this weekend as well! store.mayakern.com

[sagevalleymusings]

dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.

[sagevalleymusings]

Kaos and the Fall of Media Literacy

In my junior year of high school English, my English teacher gave us two poems side-by-side to analyze. He said specifically that the poems were challenging to analyze and had a deeper hidden meaning that we might not get right away. The poems were “Douglass” and “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

I still remember this many years later, because I sat up with my brother and my mom for hours on end trying to figure out what the deeper meaning was, since “racism” was the obvious interpretation, so that couldn’t be what my teacher meant by a deeper hidden meaning. I looked up the biography of Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist. I looked up the biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a turn of the century African American poet one generation removed from slavery. I analyzed every single word and beat. My handouts were black with scrawled ink on every available surface as I tried to puzzle out what other than racism this poem could possibly be about.

The deeper hidden meaning was racism. I wasn’t supposed to have instantly known that Douglass was a reference to the famous abolitionist. I wasn’t supposed to have looked up the author, realized he was a Black American with parents that had been enslaved, and read the poem through his eyes. I was supposed to have looked at it, as a white teenager in suburban Ohio more than a hundred years after the ratification of the thirteenth amendment, and assumed that “the mask” was a more generalize-able social face than racial code switching.

“We Wear the Mask” taught me something very important about media literacy. It taught me that most people are terrible at it.

Most teenagers are terrible at everything in fairness. But the fact of the matter is that when our English teacher prompted the class for analysis, there was a pregnant silence before I timidly ventured that “Douglass” was obviously a reference to the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I didn’t say much more than that, though, because I felt like I had missed the mark. I couldn’t figure out the deeper hidden meaning.

I was the only one who’d made the Douglass connection. And if you don’t know that, if you don’t know when Dunbar is writing, it could be easy to miss that this is transparently about race.

Sometimes, in order to understand a piece of media, you have to have a little bit of background knowledge. Knowing these things can lend to a deeper understanding of the true intent of the media. Now that people know that both Wachowskis are transgender, it is transparently obvious that The Matrix is a trans allegory. It’s something that was always true, and people have been telling us it was true for a long time. But knowing the context makes it that more clear that it wasn’t even meant to be a hidden meaning. That was the open interpretation, and we just needed to know the context to know that.

Kaos’ premise is a modern-day Ancient Greek myth, complete with the Olympian pantheon, famous names like Minos and Orpheus, and with locations like Troy, Crete, and Athens. In order to truly understand what the story of Kaos is about, one would have to know a great deal about Greek mythology, so that you could see where the stories are remaining faithful and where they are deviating.

Or at least, that’s how it should be. Instead, the entire show is heavily narrated over, telling you exactly where they remain faithful and where they deviate. Part of the reason why seems to be that they’re not especially faithful to the original source material. The Tacita, for example, draw their name from Dea Tacita, a Roman god of the dead. The Greek interpretation of this seems to be a nymph named Larunda, but in either case, Tacita is not the name of an adherent of Hera.

So even knowing a great deal about Greek mythology, which I cannot claim to, this show could still be meandering and confusing. They change perspective repeatedly through the course of the show, weaving back and forth in time and location to spin out a complex tale with some familiar faces. And the tactic that Kaos decided to take in order to simplify this complexity is a narrator.

Narrators can be useful. But they can also be the bandaid of poor directing. One of the most repeated rules of any kind of storytelling is “show don’t tell” and a narrator is diametrically opposed to the concept of “show don’t tell.” Their entire purpose in a story is to ‘tell’ the audience complex or historical concepts that would be difficult to explain through subtler means.

In moderation that’s extremely useful. If your entire show is narration, that’s a bad sign.

And the worst part is that I appear to be in the minority on this. I’m reading a review on IMDB that says that this show doesn’t “spoon feed” the audience, and actually I would agree. It feels less like spoon-feeding and more like the writers parked a backhoe named Prometheus right on top of my jaw and are burying me alive in irrelevant world-building.

I see a lot of people calling the editing sharp, calling it fast-paced, maybe saying that the first couple episodes are a little slow but things change so quickly that you’re never bored… but the thing is, the first couple episodes are a little slow because someone is explaining the plot to you in painstaking detail the whole time. “Remember her, she’ll be important later” makes me want to claw my own eyes out.

One example I can think of which makes this even more noticeable by being an obvious attempt at subtlety is the “mark” on Orpheus’ hand. In this version of events, Prometheus and Charon were lovers long ago, and Prometheus, who is already plotting the fall of Zeus, has to kill Charon for some reason (I guess so that he winds up in the Underworld in a prominent position? Whatever. A lot of the plot is shockingly irrelevant to the plot.). And before Prometheus kills Charon, he makes Charon promise that one day, there will be someone Charon needs to protect and that “you’ll know him by the mark.” Fast forward to Orpheus who is trying to get into the Underworld. One of the Fates, Lachy, stabs his hand to get him to fess up to complicated plot things (again, honestly not that important) and then some time later (only a few scenes in this sequence, but spread out because of the way the story keeps jumping around) we are shown the bandaged hand as a reminder that Orpheus was stabbed, and then we are shown in the Underworld that Orpheus takes the bandage off and the wound has healed into an X scar. Okay, we’ve been shown, we’ve been reminded, we know that this is the “mark” that Charon is looking for, and we are expecting the payoff to be Charon noticing this mark at some point, we just don’t know how yet.

So we get to the expected scene, and we see Orpheus wrestling with… some guy, honestly I don’t remember or care. And he’s flailing his arm in an obvious ‘hey notice my mark’ way and you’re like, okay this is it. So far, an easy, satisfying plot point with a clear payoff that the audience can follow. Up to this point I don’t have a complaint with how the story is playing out.

But then. Not only are we shown this flailing again at a different angle, but the whole scene slows down as Charon fails to notice once, twice, finally realizes. And then a flashback happens about how he’s looking for a mark. And then Charon asks explicitly where the mark came from and if you hadn’t put two and two together the first time, the answer is “Fate” which Orpheus says not once but twice. And then Charon literally out loud says “This guy? Seriously?” And then we see a message scratched into the sand by an eagle which is literally signed by Prometheus (okay, it just says P but come on it’s literally signed) and then we cut away to Prometheus smiling down at Charon so that you know he absolutely did write that, just to hammer home… Seven. Separate. Times… that this is definitely the important guy and that’s definitely the mark.

That’s bad directing and worse editing. The idea that there’s a mark and that this comes to pass thousands of years later, that Prometheus is doing what he can at a distance and is watching events unfold, all that works as storytelling. It’s an interesting twist of narrative that the way Orpheus was supposed to have gone to the Underworld was the complicated way that led to him being stabbed, so that Charon would know to support him. It ties Orpheus’ story into the broader plot against Zeus in a satisfying way. But they hammer home the points of their story over and over again, a shocking achievement for a story which actually does have a pretty breakneck pace.

The watch is another one. Zeus pauses to say that his watch from Hercules is ‘lucky’ and we slow down to watch it hit the table. We see Zeus take the new watch off but we don’t see him put the new watch back on which is enough to clue the viewer in that it’s important that he didn’t put it back on. Dionysis sees the watch, puts it on, so far I don’t really have any complaints. We know this is going to come back, we just don’t know how yet.

This gets lampshaded to absurdity, however, when we see Zeus quizzing and murdering all his staff over this watch, Hera calling Poseidon who calls Dionysis, we spend so long belaboring the point that Zeus is very upset over this missing watch and then we are told again that it’s Hercules’ lucky watch. Every single story beat is told to us at least twice if not three or four or seven times just to make sure we’re following along exactly.

If I actually sit with it, I like the writing. The watch being missing and then traded to the Fates so that Dionysis couldn’t give it back is an interesting way to treat that thread. There’s some changes to the story that lead to interesting and different outcomes. For example, Orpheus and Eurydice’s relationship. In this version, Orpheus is so in love, so obsessed, that Eurydice has started to pull away. It feels too much. She feels like she isn’t as in love as Orpheus is and that disconnect leads her to feel less and less connected in their relationship as the guilt eats what feelings for him she did have. Cassandra calls her out on this, and we think that we understand that Cassandra is prophesying a breakup, which would be a sharp change from the original story. But turns out the “leaving him today” meant dying (which, we didn’t need Cassandra to be literally standing there explaining that as she’s bleeding out on the road, but whatever. Directing problems). That’s an interesting and new way to get Riddy into the Underworld.

Orpheus might be able to sense the pulling away and is clinging on even more tightly. The song he sings at the concert about sucking up her every breath is peak toxic co-dependence. I don’t like Orpheus for her. So it isn’t really a shock when it turns out that he stole her coin for passage into the Underworld, which winds up keeping her in the Underworld long enough for him to rescue her, a thing which otherwise in this version of the Underworld would not have been true.

That’s just one change that winds up having interesting implications for the story they’ve written. There’s plenty of others. The setting is a good one – I like Kaos.

But the directing and editing make this story feel force-fed for most of the show. It gets a little better as it goes on and we run out of things we need to catch the audience up on. But as late as the last episode of the season, we have a voice over saying “a line appears” while we watch a line appearing just you know for sure that this one this time is the line they’re really talking about.

But at the end of the day, I’m not sure I can even blame them. I haven’t looked into it too much, but I do wonder how a pilot of this show would have tested with audiences, if people who didn’t know anything about Greek mythology found the storyline confusing and meandering, if they came away frustrated rather than intrigued. Maybe the narrator was a late addition, to fix editing problems that led to an unwatchable show. But if that’s the case, then it absolutely is the bandaid I mentioned at the beginning, and that’s not a good reason to have a narrator. I’ve written about this topic before, but I think pop media and the decline of media literacy education have been feeding into each other. Creatives make simple, easy to follow stories because audiences haven’t been trained on media literacy and find it frustrating in ways that an older audience would not have, audiences become used to simple, easy to follow stories and balk at anything else, rinse repeat until you get a show whose premiere episode is 40% narration being called “not spoon fed.”

I want to come back to “We Wear the Mask.” When I was in junior year of high school, analyzing this poem and struggling with my mom and my brother to figure out the meaning, there was no Wikipedia. There was no SparkNotes. I had a full set of encyclopedias from the 60s and dial-up internet. Googling “We Wear the Mask” now gets you an immediate and in-depth explanation of the meaning. But it’s been my experience that the kinds of people who do Google the answers rarely actually read those answers. And most people don’t bother. And that’s assuming that Google doesn’t just lie to you, which it’s now doing with increasing frequency. The internet has any answer to any question we could think to ask at the tips of our fingers and it’s increased media literacy not one iota.

[sagevalleymusings]

They're Taking All the Girls Away

I’ve spoken about this before but I want to give this topic a closer look, because I’ve noticed it’s something that’s resonating with folks particularly now. Gender identity has been changing rapidly in the past ten years, and this has led to push-back. To some, it can feel like a concerted effort to confuse teenage girls being pressured into an ill-fitting stereotype to reject their womanhood altogether. ‘Trans activists are taking all the girls away!’ they say! And of course the response is, ‘no that’s not happening, TERF, now fuck off.’

But… isn’t it? I’m in a group totally unrelated to gender and in that group, one of the members mentioned they were having confusion about their gender, where they felt ‘femme’ but not like a woman, and there were over 70 responses on this one post, almost all of which were other people saying they felt the same way. Increased visibility of non-binary and trans as identities has caused a lot of people who would have otherwise lived comfortable lives as cis women to second-guess themselves and their feelings. They know they aren’t women in the way we expect women to be… so does that mean they’re non-binary? And if they would have previously been fine with calling themselves women but now they don’t, couldn’t you call that “taking the girls away?”

Is that a bad thing? 

Let’s take a step back. This is a personal subject for me. It’s a personal subject for a lot of people. It’s difficult to divorce the facts at hand with our opinion of what is correct because this is a very subjective issue. Yes, there are facts that are part of it. “Science is real” is a catchphrase because it is true. But people weight scientific fact with their opinions - the opinion that gender does not exist and people are male or female based on biology with no alternative options is as based in science as the opinion that gender is very real and a wider spectrum than just men and women, with some basis in biology which is also not a pure binary of one or the other with no overlap. 

So when I talk about this subject, I think it’s important to bring to the table my perspective and my opinion as informed by that perspective, because arguing semantics on this topic is simply ineffective. When facts become informed by opinion to the point that they stop mattering, attempting to argue based on the facts simply gets nowhere.

Where am I coming from, then? Well when I was 14 I started to realize I was attracted to women and not men. I responded to this with inching dread and a sudden inexplicable crush on one of the most unattainable boys at school. It had the benefit of sounding true while being impossible to actualize on. At 16, I came out officially as gay without having made a conscious decision that “gay” and not “bi” was the correct label.

When I went to college, I decided to remake myself in the way a lot of baby dykes remake themselves, and I cut my hair off and started shopping in the men’s section for more masculine clothing. In my sophomore year, I enrolled in a Women’s Studies 101 class which asked us how we describe our gender, and I chose to write about being gender non-conforming.

I talked about how being butch was a kind of woman - a subcategory that described a masculine woman as separate from the normal expectation. I talked about how I thought gender was more complicated than the rigid boxes that defined what was expected of me because I happened to be born female, and how I had no desire to follow those expectations.

It’s a perspective which I think a lot of radical lesbians have experienced themselves. In fact, some of the most anti-trans people I know are butch women who believe that someone transitioning is an affront to their decades long struggle to fight to be whatever kind of woman you can be. Have short hair, grow a beard, use a strap-on - you can literally be as masculine as you want. The thing that you are born with may be female, but that doesn’t need to define you. 

It’s honestly a perspective I understand. But what I don’t understand is why this has historically been so incompatible with trans rights. To me, they aren’t just two sides of the same coin, but the same side of the same coin, just viewed at different times. 

The first person I heard vehemently arguing that gender wasn’t real at all was a non-binary person, but the idea that gender is made up is the very basis behind the gender critical perspective. The same people who claim that they/them pronouns is going too far were standing with me identifying as gender non-conforming ten years ago. Radical lesbians believe that you have a right to be whatever kind of woman you want to be, and that the sex you are born into does not define who you are and what you are owed. Trans activists believe the very same thing, but with the added layer that you can be whatever kind of *person* you want to be, even if that person is not a woman.

When I was a kid, this perspective wasn’t really very wide-spread. Trans people existed, but mostly in the abstract. I and many others only really understood transness through the lens of someone with deep gender dysphoria. And in a case like that, you could say the person doesn’t really have a choice - this is something they need to do to treat their psychological distress. 

But as time passed, definitions around what it means to be trans shifted. You don’t need to have dysphoria, you don’t need to treat it with surgery or hormones, and you don’t even need to be binary. Now, there is an understanding of gender which is more nebulous, where a person can be neither a man or a woman - not based on their biology, but simply based on their feelings. 

A lot of people rigidly reject this notion, but the reasons for this rejection vary. I’ve heard the argument, “it’s just basic science” but the fact of the matter is that sociology is also science, and sociology stands by the notion that gender is something which is not rigidly based on biology. 

I think for many people who vehemently reject non-binary identities in particular but trans identities by extension, “science is real” is the fact that they can justify their beliefs with, but ultimately the belief itself is deeper. I suspect it has a lot to do with the way it leads to questioning of one’s self, which is why I want to couch this in terms of my journey with myself. Once upon a time, I used terms like “butch” to describe my gender and called myself gender non-conforming. If I had been born ten years later… Would I have transitioned?

I’m not the first person to bring this up. JK Rowling said the same thing in her infamous essay, that perhaps she would have become “the son my father always wanted” rather than continue to be a woman. And I went through a period of time where I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, and embodied a kind of masculine gait, with a zigzag in my step, shoulders broad and back. If I had a better understanding of what it meant to be trans when I was in my early twenties, would I have taken that phase to a different conclusion? 

I genuinely don’t know, but I do know that for me, it was a phase, and I settled on something much more femme as I aged. But most of the time I don’t really think about gender at all, and that’s something that I think bears noting. 

I’ve heard plenty of reactions to Rowling’s statement about whether or not she could have transitioned as a young woman, and most of it boils down to this: Rowling saying she might have transitioned because she self harmed, or had an eating disorder, or had anxiety as a teenager, misses the obvious point that trans men who transition do so *because they feel like men* and the depression and other mental health symptoms are a symptom of the way they’re treated because of that feeling. 

If you don’t feel like a man, the trans argument goes, then you are not one. But there’s a problem with this explanation. Most cis people have a very loose if not nearly non-existent feeling of their own gender. They don’t feel like a man. They don’t feel like a woman. I am a woman because I have a vagina and I have been told that the term for people who have vaginas is “woman” therefore that’s what I am. If I had been told the term for people who have vaginas is “man” I would be a man. For most cis people, it isn’t any deeper than that. I am not a woman because I feel like a woman. I’m a woman because that’s what society decided for me is true, and I’ve never had reason to question it.

Though, that’s not quite true for me personally. I have had reason and opportunity to question my own gender. After all, in my early twenties I was butch. I was deliberately fighting against gendered stereotypes of what a woman is supposed to be and playing with notions of masculine and feminine. This play did not disrupt my sense of my own womanhood at the time because my sense of gender was separate from my sense of gender stereotypes. 

But I’m willing to admit that recently, with the trans discussion in the forefront so much, I have started to question my own gender, in a way that’s confusing and disjointed and uncomfortable. 

I haven’t been sure what to do about this new uncomfortableness. I’m discovering that a lot of people, particularly women (or at least AFAB persons regardless of how they identify now) in their 30s feel this same way, that they are a woman because that’s what people call them, but it isn’t something they have a comfortable amount of ownership over. Anna Myakushina on TikTok has described it as being a woman in the way that a dandelion is a weed. It’s technically true, but not quite right. A dandelion is a flower that we call a weed because it springs up unwanted - so too gender. 

And this is something that at least 70 people in my Facebook group resonated with enough to say that they felt the same way. Some of them called themselves women, some of them called themselves demigirls, some of them called themselves agender, some of them called themselves lunarian, or librafeminine, or girlflux, or non-binary, or genderfae… They called themselves all sorts of things, but what it boiled down to was a resonance that the thing they had been told they are -a woman -was ill-fitting, so they had to find something that felt like it fit better. 

There might still be a few gender critical folks in the crowd who are thinking: “why do you need sixteen different words for the same thing? You’re all women! You can be whatever kind of woman you want to be!” Those folks may also be thinking a lot of very uncharitable things about trans activists, and their quest to “confuse girls” into transitioning when they don’t want to. After all, if everyone feels the way I do and no one has a concrete sense of their gender, then it does seem like someone could trick you into feeling a way about yourself that isn��t true to who you are. 

There’s a couple of issues with this. Firstly, when Rowling talked about transitioning because of feeling disconnected to the expectations of a teenage girl, it was in the abstract. Descriptions of girls being convinced to transition are by and large in the “might have been” category with less than one percent of one percent of people in the world actually making a mistake with their transition. 

But when these 70 people in my Facebook group talk about their gender journey, it’s a real person experimenting with what they want gender to look like for them, and in no case is that person on hormones or altering their body irrevocably to become more androgynous. They’re just using a term other than woman and a pronoun other than she to describe themselves. 

This is why I see  the gender critical perspective of being whatever kind of woman you want to be and the trans perspective of being whatever kind of person you want to be as exactly the same. Ten years ago, when I started using terms like “butch” and “gender non-conforming” that *was* me acting out a kind of non-binary identity. I just didn’t have terms like that for it. But they’re the same thing with the same goal: the expectations for people based on whether or not they are perceived to be a man or a woman don’t fit most people, and we need language to talk about that. 

I have heard some say that if non-binary was real, then everyone would be non-binary because no one fits the stereotypes of man and woman perfectly. And, yeah. I think they have a point. But I also think that in a lot of cases, people are not completely rejecting their maleness or their femaleness. They’re doing what Anna Myakushina or these 70 people in my Facebook group are doing. They’re enacting a kind of gender presentation based on stereotyped traits that appeal to them, and then picking what they want to call it. I did the exact same thing when I wore masculine clothes and called myself butch. 

I think you can make the argument that a lot of younger people are flocking to non-binary language because the stereotypes of gender are so outdated as to be useless, and that does translate in very real ways to more people identifying as non-binary, including people who genuinely wouldn’t have ten years ago. I wouldn’t have. I still don’t. Because as much as “woman” feels like a pair of socks that are both too small and not stretchy enough, non-binary feels like I put my shoes on and forgot socks altogether. But maybe if these terms had been around sooner, I would have felt more comfortable trying them out. I don’t think there is a word that describes my gender perfectly because our gender system sucks. It’s based on garbage, and it doesn’t work for most people, and regardless of which line in the sand you are on, that’s something we all agree on. There have been valiant attempts made to try and talk about gender in a way that feels more personal and more comfortable. But I also know that my gender is not my own. It isn’t just how I feel about myself. It’s also how people interact with me. Women are treated differently by virtue of being women, and if I decide to start calling myself lunarian but no one knows that, they are going to treat me as a woman no matter what I call myself. I can tell people this is how I feel about myself, and ask them to treat me differently based on that feeling, but there will always be strangers who have no reason to respect me who ignore that request. 

But at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who feel the same way I do about themselves but who have decided that they do want to call themselves non-binary, or agender, or what have you, and who do use they (or she/they) pronouns. And maybe they wouldn’t have ten years ago. So in some very real ways, the feeling that more people are identifying as non-cis is in fact real. Where I differ from the gender critical perspective is that I struggle to see how that’s a bad thing. After all, you didn’t think it was a bad thing fifty years ago when the lesbians were wearing suits at the bars. You didn’t think it was a bad thing when you were refusing to wear bras in the 80s. It wasn’t a bad thing to challenge gender when challenging gender stereotypes but ultimately leaving the concept of gender intact. 

If it wasn’t a bad thing for me as a baby butch to cut my hair short and wear masculine clothing, I can see a world in which someone now does the same thing, but also says that he’s a demiboy that uses he/him pronouns. 

Let the kids play with their gender for heaven’s sake. You already don’t like the system of gender we have in place, it feels hypocritical in the extreme to get upset that someone else is breaking a system you don’t want.

[sagevalleymusings]

Been reading Feminist Mystique lately and for a book written in the 60s it's shocking and disappointing how true it still is today. In this specific context, I'm struck by the reality that most people recognize the problem. Many, many fanfiction authors, a group which is disproportionately queer women, already know this is the truth of the situation we find ourselves in. I write M/M ships and I'm a lesbian. But people who get published on the matter skirt the obvious truth, come to a faulty conclusion, and describe it as a strange catch 22, or double bind (or mystique) that queer women are uninterested in writing with female characters. Female characters created by men whose primary purpose is to serve as set dressing. The creators of the show are left largely untouched in this discussion unless they are notably or loudly misogynistic.

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?