#The Borrowed Hills

[justforbooks]

In 2015 James Rebanks published the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life, a seasonal account of a year in the life of a small-scale sheep farmer in Cumbria. He wanted, he said, to put “the working-class nobodies – our people – back into the books”. In one of the most unforgettable sections, he recalls the epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease that ravaged the UK in 2001. A “contiguous cull” required all sheep within three kilometres of a known outbreak to be slaughtered. Rebanks watched as the animals he had bred and raised were shot, one after the other. “When the last wagon had gone, I went into the barn … sat down in the shadows, held my head in my hands and sobbed.”

Foot-and-mouth devastated Cumbria, wiping out the livestock and livelihoods of nearly 900 farms. That devastation sits at the heart of The Borrowed Hills, Scott Preston’s blistering debut novel. Preston was a boy when the epidemic hit. Like Rebanks, he grew up in the Lake District, where his father was a dry stone waller. He too was frustrated that nothing he read told the story of the land and the people he grew up with in a way he recognised. The Borrowed Hills is an explosive bid to right that wrong.

Steve Elliman is the son of a tenant farmer in a fictional fold of the fells called Curdale Valley. When his father falls ill he chucks in his job as a lorry driver and goes home to help. The smallholding is “scarce a thumbprint” on the valley and rapidly falling into disrepair. Their flock of just 200 sheep live wild on the open fells 1,000 feet up, “higher than where the flycatchers and doves roosted in cragfolds, and higher than where falcons nested watching their dinner below”. When rumours of foot-and-mouth start to spread, Steve isolates the sheep but he cannot save them. The sickness has taken hold at a neighbouring farm and orders are clear. Every animal must be eliminated.

The massacre that follows is unsparing in its matter-of-fact violence. Steve’s first-person narrative is written in his distinctive Cumbrian voice, a vernacular stripped to its bones that encompasses stark prose and sudden startling flashes of poetry. Rifle muzzles are “placed between [the sheep’s] ears and the bullets lined along their backs so each bang stayed inside their heads”. The sheep panic. The squaddies sent to dispatch them panic in their turn. The result is half Tarantino and half pitch-black northern realism, an absurdist horror that slides under the skin and lodges deep.

Later Steve fetches up on his neighbour William Herne’s farm, where the outbreak is rumoured to have started. The sheep that William tried to hide out in the fells have been seen from a police helicopter and gunned down from the sky. The fires incinerating the dead animals burn day and night for a week. “We had burned through everything, even what we’d no right to, rubbed out the stars and hid the moon, and if the night sky wasn’t already black we’d have had a good go at making it.” When the job is finished Steve leaves the valley and goes back to driving lorries, but something in him has changed. He can’t stay away. When he finally returns, William has a plan to get back on his feet, a plan that will push both men into a spiralling nightmare of violence and bloodshed.

Despite the wild beauty of the landscape, there is something claustrophobic about Preston’s novel: the tyranny of a place that demands relentless back-breaking labour and will never pay back what is given. Steve and William’s increasingly feverish venture is not a quest for new frontiers but a frantic struggle to claw back a life that was already falling apart. “That’s what I like about you farm lads,” a man tells Steve. “Know what it is to raise something to be killed.” But like the slaughter of foot-and-mouth, the violence that enmeshes the two men is not heroic. It is ugly and senseless and it destroys lives. It offers no redemption. The best one can hope for is the restoration of a precarious equilibrium, a return to the harsh hardscrabble of before.

This is a sucker-punch of a novel, a viscerally vivid portrait of desperation, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty, but there is little hope in it. Angry as it was, Rebanks’s book was a love letter to Cumbria. The connection to the land goes just as deep here, but, bound to a place that demands so much in return for so little, it is a more dysfunctional relationship.

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[elizabugz]

[barnabyboppins]

Hopefully lukewarm take (i haven’t checked)

I recently finished reading the Heroes Of Olympus series (having read pjo immediately prior) and I think it’s pretty shitty that the worth of all of our good guy characters are, to a notable degree, measured by their ability to find and engage in romantic relationships and are then greatly defined by those relationships. (Disclaimer; I don’t think I’m in a justified position to discuss lots of the racial criticisms for HoO but I do agree with a lot of em and that aspect does factor into this topic)

7+ important recurring characters is quite a lot of people to balance, even in a five book series and all of the non-pjo characters suffered immensely for it. But one character arc I anticipated over and over again that never ended up happening was any one character finding fulfillment from the non-romantic relationships around them by de-prioritizing the idea of a perfect someone in favour of accepting the support of their friends/comrades/campers/family/etc. (Second disclaimer: I don’t expect a novel saga from 2010 to have characters declaring their orientations (or lack thereof) aloud but the idea of a character learning to define themself by or through something outside of romance isn’t a new one)

I think Percy and Annabeth are very cute and work well as a couple (are they the only white couple?) and I don’t really see any chemistry between Piper and Jason (I feel like they’re on very different paths from each other and Piper stagnates greatly in favour of supporting jasons development) but I think literally every other Good Guy character had the potential to not need romance in their arcs. Frank could have been raised to praetor by consensus and recognized by his peers and grandma, actively validating his growth rather than him achieving great feats and no one noticing or really caring except for Hazel. Hazel could’ve been shown learning about the modern day with Frank and Nico during downtime and reconciling her identity and trauma with the diversity of today while discovering a new freedom in acceptance (from the Seven) of who she is from back then and who she may yet want to be (and also not dated a 16 y/o at 13).

Leo, Reyna and Nico were the main ones I was thinking would forgo the need for a partner at least as a necessity for their growth/healing as all three have severe familial trauma, are distanced from other demigods socially somehow, and all were explicitly ousted from conventional romance in-writing.

Initially with Leo I had hoped he would confront his struggle being the “seventh wheel” by expressing how he was feeling overlooked as a friend (and as the ONLY shipwright) in favour of everyone’s romantic interests, which would lead into further emotional vulnerability in the party but, that never happened save for a few stoically non-communicative gestures of support to Frank and otherwise weird hang-ups on Hazel before he fucked off to Calypso, letting his friends think him dead for weeks. Leo lacked connection and felt inferior and less important than the rest of the Seven and the narrative validated that by only fulfilling him through an a Rapunzel-like hot babe trapped on an island who is physically dependent on his emotional dependence on her. That’s not a recipe for healthy relationship! I related to Leo initially as an aromantic person with 9 siblings, half of whom are already coupled so it was very disappointing when I realized by the third book that RR just didn’t take what was to me the most obvious arc for a character who is vitally important to a team but least noticed. Also the Hazel-Frank-Leo pseudo-love shape didn’t need to happen, at least in the way it did, and I think the Leo-Hazel-Sammy weird love thing was stupid.

I think Nico and Will are a very cute couple and I’m looking forward to reading their book when I come around to it but I felt unsatisfied that the thing that got Nico to stay at camp after 5 books was a guy who had little significant presence until the last book and not like, any of the other deeply important connections he made during his journeys? Nico’s been talking about never returning to either camp for a while and none of the Seven or Reyna (I think) thought to check in with him? I get that Will is supposed to be like the first person to insistently want Nico around but if Will really is the first then that’s kinda fucked up given the whole like, eight books worth of people he’s met. It’s a bit fucked up that after years of Nico’s presence, seemingly the first connection to anchor him down is an unspoken suggestion of a romance

Reyna’s character journey confuses me because I don’t if I missed or forgot it but I don’t remember her having a conclusion to her internal struggles. Aphrodite telling her she’s doomed to singledom gets brought up again and again and it’s mostly just to make you feel bad for her. She doesn’t tell anyone else. She doesn’t seek fulfillment in the platonic or familial connections she has. They visit her house, trauma dump about her abuse AND fakeout her sisters + the hunters + the amazons deaths just to have Reyna be even more hurt. Reyna and Nico come to understand each other while they’re travelling but by the conclusion of the series she’s just gone back to her isolating and stressful role as the praetor, but now with more work to do! Aphrodite’s words are never explained and their veracity is never tested and all it serves is to give Reyna more misery porn.

I guess what I’m saying is I think the story would have been better if The Seven & Co had a little more connection with each other and not just with their respective partners and if we could have seen some internal growth come from that.

[chiropteracupola]

been contemplating @werewiire's transfem harris idea...

[marzipanandminutiae]

What gothic lit was hill house based on??

...The Haunting of Hill House

the novel

by Shirley Jackson

from 1959

oh no. do people not know that it was a book first?

(I'm not mad at you; you're one of Today's Lucky 10,000. but I am going to slash Mike Flanagan's tires)

[ceiling-karasu]

Alright! So the dormouse OC was apparently going to happen!

I keep thinking about him, so I'm going to have to turn that Tokgasi mouse deserter from chapter 3 into a new OC, and maybe include him in another chapter before his own AU.

After doing some more research this weekend, I guess I headcanon 'field mice' as being dormice (maybe specifically Japanese dormice). Dormice are more closely related to squirrels and beavers than they are actual mice, apparently.

They are also relatively rare. Which would make the Weasel Unit see them as perfect spies to sneak into Flower Hill disguised as squirrels, since it is unlikely that Flower Hill would know about the species. Any quick check while infiltrating a unit or town would prove that the tails were real anyway, so another dormouse infiltration AU could be a go.

It would easy enough for a dormouse who was used to living in poverty to desert to Flower Hill and try to live unnoticed among the populace, either because of horrible treatment at the hands of the weasels and Tokgasi, or because they are just seeking a better life than what was offered.

As for his name, the alternative name for a dormouse is 'sleepy mouse,' since they hibernate during the winter, so I am naming him Jollin (Sleepy).

Of course, there is the danger of what would happen if someone were to find out about who he really is, or if Tokgasi ever finds him again.

Obviously, I already have Flower Hill knowing who and what he is, and capitalizing on having him continue to receive orders, while sending back some true but somewhat useless information to his handlers.

I see him as having a calm, laid back job as a mail-carrier and supply deliverer between a group of small villages. Kind of like some BBC Masterpiece Theater series with a subplot about the kindly neighborhood fixture hiding a dark past. Which is what I said about the weasel doctor pretending to be an otter, so I might just be thinking about those types of plots a lot.

But Jollin could be good at solving mysteries and disputes between neighbors. He himself is a very frightened individual, and tends to act like a typical scared mouse. Everyone assumes it is some type of trauma from losing his village and family, and try their best to make him feel welcome. Still , he is determined enough to go through with Tokgasi's training in order to become a scout and escape the clutches of the weasels to begin with.

But where do his true loyalties lie? Will he turn against Flower Hill and rejoin the Weasel Unit should his luck change, or if Tokgasi forces him to join again with no way out? Or will he stay in an uncertain future where everyone in his new home may turn against him?

In a remote area, Jollin could listen to all the gossip of the neighbors and also report back on that if he gets any important information. Or, he could be innocent, and desperately trying to avoid attention. Which would allow the Flower Hill Commanders to send dismantled weapons and ammunition to the villages through him, since he would be the only one not to actually inspect why so many packages were going through the area.

Just a fun little AU.

[neroushalvaus]

me: there's time to think in a ski lift :)

me in a ski lift: okay so which downton abbey characters would be the dumbasses who don't wear fucking ski helmets

[starzonez]

jerms sunderland

[friendlyfangs]

i wonder if using the bug motif would be borrowing too much from silent hill 2

[woodcries]

decided on thea's live action fc... what do we think

[elizabugz]

[chirpsythismorning]

Ted Sarandos tries so hard to be like-able and relatable more than any other studio executive I've ever seen.

Like, look at this dude?

Don't you just want to punch him in the face?

And it gets worse...

He might look friendly and charismatic amongst these familiar faces, but at the end of the day, Ted is just another studio executive who is willing to cut costs wherever he can, in what he sees as loose ends capable of saving Netflix millions, but actually does in fact result in devastating repercussions for real people.

And yet still, I question his plan for all of this, as Ted is behind the company that has changed the way entertainment is consumed in the first place, with their company flourishing as a direct result of the 07-08 writer's strike. At first it was slow, but then it was full speed ahead, with Netflix starting a trend of streaming that upended the entire entertainment industry, essentially forcing everyone to follow suit. This has then brought us to a point where the conditions and compensation for workers do not at all match what is expected of them, because it is all based on an expired business model that no longer applies.

And yet, Ted has chosen the route as a CEO to create this friendly mask of familiarity amongst his talent and in the business as a whole, in a way that makes you want to trust him.

When new productions are coming out, he's in attendance making small talk and gushing in interviews about how important it is to tell all these stories, making it clear he's trying to convey that morality and this idea of doing the right thing, is important to him presumably.

But how can he call himself 'a union man', from 'a union family' and push this moral agenda, if he's going to continue to play one of the biggest roles in this strike, with the ability to solve it swiftly by just meeting the guilds demands, all the while tearing down that moral image entirely in the process by refusing to do so?

Because the thing is, this image of morality is him using human emotions that he knows make people fall in love with movies and TV in the first place. He knows that a lot of the support comes from people who give a fuck about human lives and people being treated fairly, especially now in 2023.

So, why in the hell would he expect the people he is presenting this morality to, as a cornerstone of their mission (manipulation tactic to distract from the true goal: exponential growth of profits...), to just sit by and be okay with the writers and actors and anyone and everyone on these movies/shows sets, to feel like they are being taken advantage of and abused because of his working conditions???

In the scenario Ted wins and the writers lose, Ted STILL loses, because this facade is now overshadowed by resentful workforce and an audience that is going to have a hard time getting behind trusting this company long term, eventually leading to their downfall.

You think people want to watch a show where we know the working conditions were awful, with them being on the cusp of changing that, only to be fucked over and have to go right back to those conditions?

The strike is a double edged sword at this point, but there's no denying these executives (esp charismatic Ted) would be much better off taking the -0.3 annual costs and calling it a day.

I guess it doesn't really matter though, because to Ted and all these other executives, the bottom line for investors will always be short term growth. They care about right now, not the future. If they can keep up the act that everything is going swell and convince their investors (and competitors) that profits went up this quarter and are projected to continue going up in the next one, they're doing their job. Even if that means burning to a crisp later on, so be it. It'll most likely be someone else's problem by then anyways...

Regardless, I look forward to seeing Ted succumbing to his inevitable fate of meeting the guilds demands, all while he himself has spent years building up and fostering this friendly image, encouraging this idea that morality is important to the end goal. Who would have thought Ted?? That your facade would contribute to backfiring in a strike for workers rights, supported heavily by the very public your company has spent the last decade providing content to, that supports that very same message?

[chiropteracupola]

sing me silence, my soldier / sing us gently into death...

[frickfrackiwastakingabath]

Hold on I'm so smart I can make gt aus with my dnd characters