#cockatiel x chameleon

[weaselandfriends]

hey i liked cockatiel x chameleon to an extent. i did want to ask about the george floyd section since it was probably the most effective part in the story for me (i’m black i shouldnt have to say dis) but what was it’s thematic purpose in the story beyond pulling you away from the languid hellscape of suffering people into the real world? i get that gramme was in the protests/riots and went secluded.. but i feel like there was more in that moment.

Thanks for the question. I already talked a bit about George Floyd's inclusion in CxC in this post, and the thematic idea of the "End of History." I recommend reading that post and seeing if that answers your question, but in case it doesn't, I'll approach the question from a different angle than I did there.

In 2013, I wrote an unpublished, pre-Bavitz novel called This Really Happened. It was, at its onset, a surreal murder mystery plot in which a wealthy young corporate heir was framed for a murder of an executive in order for the true culprit to seize control of the company. The heir, a ridiculous weeb named Luxembourg, is harassed by an unstoppable, Terminator-like black detective named Denning. Luxembourg panics, takes his secretary Rachel hostage using a katana, and flees into the Los Angeles streets. (Rachel is, at Luxembourg's behest, dressed in cosplay of the character Rydia from Final Fantasy 4.)

20,000 words into the novel, these three larger-than-life personalities run smack into the 1992 Rodney King Riots, which have just started while all this murder mystery bullshit was going on. The rest of the novel is a beleaguered chase through an anarchic Los Angeles, Denning unable to receive backup, Luxembourg trying to reach his father's mansion on the northern fringe of the city. The murder mystery elements strip away until there doesn't seem to be anything propelling this chase besides momentum, while the story is intercut with transcripts from real interviews taken during the riots and other depictions of things that, as the title claims, Really Happened. The second-to-last chapter of the story is just a transcript of the Murphy Brown speech then-vice president Danforth Quayle gave regarding the riots (a quote from this speech would later wind up as a Chicago chapter title).

To prepare for the work, I researched the riots assiduously. I watched hours upon hours upon hours of on-the-ground footage, I watched documentaries about the causes of the riot, the reactions to the riot, all from different perspectives and angles, I read books on the subject, ethnographic research of the LAPD, pretty much a full-scale immersion into the subject.

Since then, the subject of police brutality has always been one of particular importance to me.

In some ways, Cockatiel x Chameleon is the evolution of the ideas I had with This Really Happened. The collision between fiction and reality, "fake" problems versus real problems, personal desolation and communal. (A minor character from This Really Happened has a small, unnamed cameo as a reporter Gramme encounters at the protest. Gramme also briefly wields a katana.)

The thing that always strikes me about the George Floyd video is how the police officers don't seem like real humans. Not simply in the heinous murder they're committing, but in how they talk and act. The bystanders shout, scream, sputter, fumble their words constantly. Floyd begs for mercy. But Officer Thao talks like an MCU character, like he's always trying to drop a funny quip. "Don't do drugs kids." Chauvin just looks around with one eyebrow raised like he's pulling a sitcom reaction face. At one point, Thao aggressively pushes a bystander, then says "Don't touch me again," despite him being the one doing the touching. It's absurd. I think if the video was fictional, if it happened in a movie, I would roll my eyes and say, nobody is that one-dimensionally evil! But it did happen. It's impossible to deny, and that causes the absurd to turn to disgust, to anger and sadness. I cannot watch that video without being sharply emotionally affected.

One of the books I read for This Really Happened is called Policing Space, by Steve Herbert. It's a work of ethnographic research on the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, meaning the author rode along with LAPD officers and studied them in their typical environment. Herbert concluded that there are a series of ideologies that influence police behavior, and that among the obvious ones like law, safety, courage, and morality, there's one called adventure. Police see themselves as action heroes, like from a movie, and that can color their entire mindset, including their perception of law, morality, etc. They're the hero and their enemies are, well, enemies. They're roleplaying.

If I were a smarter person, I would've thought to make a connection between the outrageous fictionality of the officers' dialogue and the fictionality of the roleplaying the other characters perform throughout CxC. That if "roleplaying" is the only way for Harper, Gramme, Sister, and so on to construct meaning or identities for themselves, then that is also the only way these police can construct meaning for themselves as well, to disgusting results. (The officers in the Floyd video aren't even doing their job. The bystanders are pleading for the cops to arrest Floyd, which they refuse to do.) The culmination of this idea is the LARPing vigilantes with the Punisher logo on their truck that roll up to the protest and abduct Fletch. "Hostile neutralized," they say, completely clownish fake dialogue. Fletch responds by shouting, "You can't arrest me, you aren't cops, you're fake, you're playing pretend!"

I hope either this answer or the other one is satisfactory answer to your question.

[recordcrash]

Long ago, I started maintaining a fiction recommendation list at the Homestuck Discord, after the original comic ended in 2016. We were all desperately looking for more stories like it, because with that awful ending, it hardly felt like we had finished anything. [...]

There’s an interesting disconnect between it and this blog. I’ve reviewed some of its featured works upon reread, but the vast majority remains untouched, to the point I highly doubt many of you know it exists. This post will bridge that gap: I’m going to write at least one short review per work in every category of the list.

Read the full post here.

[stinkybreath]

just finished a book so good that I have to lay down in my bed and read a bad book

[txttletale]

The only result I got for Bavitz novel is "Cleveland Quixotic" on RoyalRoad, is that the novel you were talking about?

cleveland quixotic is good but i think their other original works, modern cannibals and cockatiel x chameleon, are better. all of them are on ao3 under 'bavitz'.

[itsbenedict]

hwough. okay. not sick anymore. no more funerals, no more weddings, no more birthdays, nothing on the calendar until like november. there is nothing standing in the way of my goals except me. let's make a big ol' list of Shit I Could Do Today, and then pare it down:

finish the Tonnera art and post a TFJ recap

call the plumber about replacing this toilet

sketch some character designs for Candi and Dart

implement growths and leveling up in-game in MW

move a bunch of training videos to this LMS site for work

talk to Patrick about full-time employment

catch up on WK reviews

do that SB voice request that's in my inbox

prototype a glossary menu in Ren'Py

exercise

do some planning for the Dark Site Aspen raid

also various media to finish consuming:

the sekimeiya

cockatiel x chameleon

death of the king

quiet and antagonism

time to orbit unknown

failure to launch

today, let's...

do the LMS work thing

finish drawing tonnera

call the plumber

do the SB thing

exercise

[thewadapan]

Irony vs Sincerity in Fight Club

Born too late to fight in the Vietnam War. Born too early to grow up after 9/11. This film is basically just about that guy.

Fight Club, alongside similarly green-tinted 1999 icon The Matrix and American Beauty, is identified by Bavitz as a "cubicle movie"—much like his novel Cockatiel x Chameleon—which depicts a world at the "end of history" where man is left purposeless. To these titles I'd add 1993's Falling Down, American Psycho, and maybe Being John Malkovic; to my understanding, these all seem to be operating in a similar space to varying degrees of success. Of these, The Matrix strikes me as being the most timeless, as its metaphysical themes and sci-fi concepts help unground it from this specific point in history.

Throw yourself through the glass table of that "Keep reading" button below to see what I thought of the film!

The biggest surprise of Fight Club for me was the sheer extent of its stylisation. It's full of heavily metatextual beats, counterfactual imaginary sequences, cutaways, dry novelesque narration (not too surprising for an adaptation of a story like this), and a borderline magical-realist tone. Stylistically, it feels much more modern than it actually is, and I can only assume (as someone who's seen comparatively little pre-2000s media) that this is because of the influence this has had on a lot of newer stuff. I'm now much better able to understand why people rolled their eyes at the general reception to Joker, which is kind of just the same thing but worse. I'm also floored by the extent of the plagiarism committed by the much-lauded Mr. Robot; it was while reading about that show (having given up on actually watching the damn thing) that I unfortunately completely spoiled myself on the big twist in Fight Club.

(Spoilers follow.)

So knowing in advance that the twist in Fight Club was that [secondary character] and [main character] are actually the same person, I was primed to look out for anyone who appeared to be an imaginary friend. And towards the start of the film, I found my figment not in Tyler, but in Marla. Explicitly framed as a female counterpart to our everyman protagonist, Marla is introduced in the implausible context of her dishonestly attending a support group for men who've lost their testicles. The only possible explanation I could think as to why nobody seemed to bat an eyelid at this was simply that Marla wasn't real. She also spends a lot of time standing around in traffic; at one point, a bus appears to go right through her.

But then of course, we're introduced to Tyler, and the narration introduces him using phrasing that deliberately echoes the introduction of Marla. Able to instantly recognise Tyler's bright red jacket from the spliced-in frames of him that would occasionally flicker onscreen before this point, I understood that no, Tyler was definitely the imaginary friend I'd read about. But still the idea lingered: that it was not just Tyler who doesn't exist, but Marla too; where Tyler personifies the masculine ideal, Marla is the embodiment of the feminization believed to have driven the protagonist towards stagnant impotency and dissatisfaction. Tyler and Marla rarely appear in the same scene, and often the direction deliberately creates the impression of one being transmuted into the other; as one leaves the stage, the other enters.

This interpretation has the fun effect of turning the everyman into an incel, rather than the sex god Marla at one point begrudgingly admits him to be. Of course he finds Marla easy to please; these scenes are just an abstraction of him jacking off. This lens is an invention entirely for my own amusement, however. The simplest explanation for Marla's portrayal is that the film is not that there's a second layer of twist bullshit which goes unremarked upon, but rather that the film is carefully establishing a language of hyperstylisation from the outset, so that by the time of Tyler's appearance, the implausible aspects of his character feel like just another part of the film's worldview, rather than signs of foul play. The incel hadn't even been invented back in 1999. I'm compelled by the idea only because of a cultural shift which had yet to occur. Even if it feels like a natural fit for the themes otherwise being explored by the movie, it's not something the filmmakers consciously incorporated into the narrative.

Truth be told, there are many aspects of this film's messaging which feel dated, or at the very least ideologically incomplete. Most obviously, it simply would not have depicted terrorism the same way if it had been written after 9/11. There's a whole idea surrounding this film in the modern zeitgeist that most people misinterpret it, vacillating between viewing it as a fuck-yeah story about some badass redpilled chad, and as a merciless deconstruction of that same archetype. I think this is because the film itself is suffused with irony, making it hard to necessarily extract the intended message; I imagine the filmmakers don't want you coming away from it believing you understand any particular moral of the story.

Nonetheless, I think the film does take a pretty clearly consistent view of humanity, and it is a fairly bleak one. It's strongly critical of consumerism, and it has very strong ideas about masculinity. By the end of the film, we've plunged into this farcical world where every man is a die-hard member of Project Mayhem (there is only one woman in the film, Marla), and I think the film means to suggest that this is the "true" form of man, the "hunter" of "hunter-gatherer society", unbound by fictional constructs such as law or gender. There is a natural hierarchy, and it is one of strength. Most people are happy to believe anything you tell them, even if you don't believe it yourself. Tyler is never really framed as having indoctrinated these people, but rather as having awoken something in then, having preyed upon their true desires. Although Tyler is viewed as monster, he is also presented as broadly achieving noble outcomes through his monstrous actions: it suggests that the clerk he threatens to shoot really will have his life positively changed by the experience, that Bob really was happier at the Fight Club than he ever was at the support group, and that the destruction of the credit card companies' headquarters might really result in some kind of lasting socioeconomic change for the better.

The problem the film identifies with Tyler is less in his beliefs about the prison of American society, and more in his extremism: there is no line he will not cross, nothing he holds sacred. His terrorist acts are framed as the logical endpoint of the childish pranks we see him committing during his introduction, both aiming to transgress the fragile social contract. He wants to burn everything down (good) but has nothing to replace it with (bad); he believes that a face beaten to an unrecognisable bloody pulp is, on some level, the most honest a face can be. If I personally had to identify a thematic throughline in Fight Club, it would probably be this conflict between sincerity (embodied by the everyman, who spends much of the film simply trying to feel a real feeling, and grows increasingly alarmed by Tyler) and irony (embodied by Tyler, who behaves in unpredictable ways just to provoke a response, and is actually an "insincere" element of the everyman's psyche). At the start of the film, our narrator craves the emotional openness of the support groups, because he himself struggles to muster the appropriate emotional response to a burnt-out car wreck full of human body parts. It's only after the death of Bob that he finally feels true grief and outrage. Towards the end of the film, he finds it impossible to communicate with any of the members of Project Mayhem, as his every question is met with answers like "is this a test?" or the parroted phrase "the first rule of-"; they've been primed to give these responses by the fact that it is impossible to have a straightforward conversation with Tyler about anything. The final scene of the film concerns itself with the reconciliation of these viewpoints, as the everyman finally takes personal responsibility for all the actions undertaken by Tyler, and finally appears to "kill" this split persona entirely. To borrow a phrase from the Worm fandom, he seems to do "brain surgery with a bullet", somehow shooting his head at exactly the right angle to destroy the portion of his brain responsible for this delusion, while leaving the rest intact. In practise, it's more that the physical act of shooting himself finally grounds his perspective, as he understands that it was him who wielded the gun, him who pulled the trigger, not this other guy he made up.

The film's final image is of the everyman and Marla backdropped by the spectacle of all these skyscrapers collapsing; visually symbolising the slate being wiped clean, the debts erased. To me, this can only suggest that he and Marla will have a fresh start, and that some form of long-term relationship is finally possible between them. If so, this fairytale ending is pretty rubbish; but perhaps this isn't the film's intention, and I was just missing something.

Regardless of your beliefs on the ideas which Fight Club appears to denigrate or endorse, it's hard to deny that on a technical level, it's a well-crafted masterpiece with a fairly complex story that's unpredictable and entertaining. It's constantly escalating. It's got a fun twist. It's just that the more you talk about it, the more you find yourself talking in circles, struggling to settle on the perfect lens which captures the film in its entirety. So don't talk about Fight Club—just enjoy it.

Rating: 9/10

If you’ve enjoyed this review, you can find dozens of similar essays over on my Letterboxd account.

[lakesbian]

If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the book you’re reading right now?

cockatiel x chameleon, as recommended from a tumblr user txttletale post. it is a particularly dense book, and i am very tired all of the time, which means i had to accept "just read the damn book without forming any particularly coherent analytical opinions on it" as a necessary condition for reading the damn book. not a big fan of shuffling out and saying unconfident and or ambiguous things about books but it is what it is. as of now i have finished the book which means Pact Time is back on after my next sleep cycle. i would not describe it as a flawless book but i would generally describe it as a good book, by which i mean the order it put words in did things to my brain and made me mad that i'm not as good at putting words in interesting orders. i have nigh-endless tolerance for gore and kersplosions and bad and uncomfortable things happening to people in books so i was not bothered by the [gestures at the tags] and did in fact enjoy Horrific Violence as a very bloody representation of How Characters Are Feeling but probably don't go there if you do not also have nigh-endless tolerance for that. primarily i think it is very evocative and visceral about some specific-ass experiences and that is my favorite type of book. up there with the rock eaters by brenda peynado in terms of ability to put very precise words to experiences that are not easy to put words to. this book's mars-bleeding-out red sky Is going to live in a room in my brain. i wouldn't actively recommend it, per se, because i am not the kind of person who recommends things i couldn't issue a perfectly-tailored dissertation on, but if you click either of those links and go "hmm that looks interesting" i wouldn't say anything to stop you

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

cockatiel x chameleon semi-review

i adore modern cannibals. after i read it, i went to check out the author's other work and saw a very intimidating slate of ao3 tags. it sat in the back of my mind until i read low kill shelter, which left me in the mood for similarly messy works. i was still a little hesitant; the knowledge that most of the tags apply to in-universe fiction / roleplays / etc. helped me work up the necessary courage.

i ended up enjoying it, though i have some issues. my immediate comparison is classical music. it's all theme and variation. a motif is established and recurs later. the first half or so is rock solid. it's very good at capturing certain kinds of guy, i really enjoy all the characters. it makes some real interesting decisions (i'm skeptical of including the real world BLM movement in a story like this), but it sticks the landing. the extreme sexual content mostly didn't feel gratuitous, which was my main worry going into it. i'd recommend modern cannibals before i'd recommend cockatiel x chameleon, but if you've read mc, can handle cxc's content, and want more bavitz writing in your life, i'd say it's worth your time.

[nostalgebraist]

Here are some spoiler-ful thoughts on CxC.  This will be kinda scattered, just trying to make sure I get everything noted down

Most of this is negative, so I should say at the outset that I liked a lot of stuff about CxC.  It certainly gives you “much to think about,” as the kids say . . . 

It’s hard for me to assess CxC’s overall quality without using Modern Cannibals as the bar for comparison.

This is frustrating, because “is CxC better or worse than MC?” is not a very interesting question.  What matters is how good CxC is on its own.  But the two novels share so much in common that it’s hard for me to escape this frame.

I liked CxC a lot on the micro level of individual scenes and chapters, but it failed for me as a whole.  Maybe this is why the MC comparison feels so relevant.  The two use a lot of the same building blocks, and feel very similar at close range.  Zoomed out, CxC lacks the larger-scale structures I liked in MC, and doesn’t have its own suitable replacements for them.

What am I talking about?  Stuff like

- Motion, change, momentum.

MC is one thing at the start, and another very different thing by the end, and there’s an engrossing trajectory from point A to point B.  It builds and builds. There’s a continually rising sense of tension.  Innocence turns into experience.  Illusions are dispelled (or reified, depending on your reading).

Like . . . the odd, very specific brand of ambiguously-real half-nightmare-half-Looney-Tunes action that typifies the very end of MC is not there all the way through. The MC world isn’t just “like that” half the time for no particular reason; that stuff is thoughtfully coupled to specific events, themes, beats and characters (specifically Graves).

Whereas in CxC, we start out with one foot in the nightmare waters, right from the very first chapter, with Harper’s emptiness and amnesia.  (”Emptiness and amnesia” are traits a person could simply have in a realistic novel, of course -- but that novel would look very different from the Harper-POV chapters of CxC.  They ask to be read as symbol, metaphor, dream.  She reads like a Kafka character, not a Final Fantasy sci-fi amnesiac, or a real victim of head trauma or something.)

Likewise, the CxC story moves in halts and jerks.  It has a careful formal structure (the three parts, Mimmy’s death at the center, rise/fall of Soviet Union, etc), but while this pattern exists, it’s a pattern made out of not much happening for a while, some laborious foreshadowing (Letters to Mark, Dogshit’s literal Chekhov’s gun), then the foreshadowed thing abruptly happening, then some more not-much . . . 

- Conflict that gets set up and then goes somewhere.  The MC characters want things, and these wants conflict, and things happen as a result.  In CxC, what conflicts exist between the characters are static and basically toothless, and when things happen it is for other, peripheral reasons.

(I realize this is all thematic and deliberate, so I’m not sure this one is really a criticism . . . insofar as it is, I guess I’m saying that the human story felt sort of lifeless even as a story about ennui?  More on this below)

I agree with the related parts of this comment, which says it better than I have here.

---------------

Earlier, I talked about how CxC is mottled over with “ambiguously-real nightmare stuff” from beginning to end, unlike MC where that stuff grew over time.

For me, this significantly dulled the effect of both sides -- of the parts that came close to realism (with Bavitz one never comes more than “close to” realism), and the parts that did not.

Consider the Harper-POV chapters as against the VdG-POV chapters.

VdG’s squalid existence in his freezing Detroit mansion is portrayed in a way that’s arguably over the top but essentially realistic.  The bantering roommates huddling around a furnace are easy to read as just that, actual people in an actual house having the exchanges we see on the page; one could read the house, the furnace, the holster, the figure collection as symbol/metaphor, but this takes some mental effort and feels like going against the grain of the text.  (This is reinforced by the fact that, when we first enter this setting, it’s framed as “the ugly, mundane reality of VdG and Sister’s real lives” in contrast with the dream/fantasy of the Consortium.)

Harper’s setting, when we first enter it, is the other way around.  We could read her as a real-life amnesiac and, say, speculate about the neurology of her affliction -- but that feels like going against the grain, like writing a fanwiki about the legal system depicted in The Trial.

But Harper and VdG come into contact.  And when this happens, VdG reacts to Harper by reading her “literally,” marveling over all the specific things she doesn’t know -- as anyone would, if they met such a person in real life.

This crossing of wires makes it increasingly difficult to wrest meaning out of either character’s situation.  It’s a meeting between two immiscible levels of description, a crossover romance between Josef K and Sister Carrie.  Reading Harper on her own, we might see her as a non-literal evocation of a “bored office worker.”  But when VdG meets Harper, he doesn’t meet an aimless white-collar everywoman; he meets a bizarre, presumably somehow very sick woman who does not know how old she is, who has never heard of Covid-19.

And now we have to take her that way too, as a sci-fi amnesiac or an Oliver Sacks case study.  But read that way, what exactly is Harper’s amnesia/emptiness doing, thematically?  By the end, it felt like the book itself didn’t know what to do with it anymore.

---------------

History has not ended.  Did anyone think it had?

Royce did.

And are meant to think that VdG did, too.  The words “history is ended” are associated with VdG from the start, and recur in his musings on art.  But this is asserted, not really evoked or made real.

This post clarified some things for me, about Bavitz’s intent with the “history is ended” motif.  But I don’t think the novel succeeded at realizing that intent.

Specifically, there is supposed to be a divide between the central pair, cocooned away from time / history / politics / the scraping of the cane, and everyone else, whose existence is inevitably political.  Bavitz writes:

This passage, placed early on, introduces the specter of political and racial violence that affects most of the supporting characters of the story and that does not at all affect the two main characters of the story. Papimon cannot return to Thailand due to the 2014 coup, Sister had to flee Switzerland for an unspecified legal reason, Mimmy is desperate not to get sent back to New Zealand where her abusive mother is waiting, and even Mark, who seems like the whitest, most traditional status quo embodiment in the story, is a Rhodesian who would have been forced to leave the country he was born in when he was a child. The political violence these characters face is often sidelined, mentioned only in passing, because the perspective of the two main characters is myopic and displaced from any sense of time or place, any sense of political reality. Over the course of the story, that myopic viewpoint is challenged, culminating in Gramme’s participation in the George Floyd protests/riots that finally shatter his illusions. (Harper’s illusion, at least in this regard, is not shattered. In the final chapter she plans at length for an idyllic, timeless future even as wildfires encroach upon her.)

This totally makes sense; one can imagine a novel fitting this description; it is not, however, a description of the characters I remember from CxC.

Is Harper’s perspective myopic?  Well, yes, extremely so -- but only via a sort of fantasy illness imposed upon her.  She ignores politics only as a special case of ignoring everything, including simple, brute facts about her surroundings which she has no emotional reason to shield herself from.  She does not flee from the political to the personal -- she doesn’t know the personal either!  She does not know who she is; she lacks ambitions, even myopic or sheltered ones.

Is VdG’s perspective myopic?  In a sense, yes?  We mostly see him working, and thinking about his work.  Either about the actual work itself, the lines and shapes, the hours spent on them -- or about the social and intellectual context of his vocation.

Is he sheltering himself from politics and history here?  The diagnosis feels both too cruel, and simply off.  He lives an economically marginal existence, thinks a lot about how he’ll scrape together the money he needs in the short term, and then thinks a lot about the labor he’ll have to do to make that happen.

When I look at VdG, shivering in squalor with Fletch and Dogshit and El-Marghichi (all of them politically marginal), spending most of his time working to make ends meet -- am I meant to see him as fundamentally like Harper (with her well-paid office job), and fundamentally unlike those shivering next to him?  One could make this case!  But the text of CxC does not, actually, make it.

And like, he’s a porn artist.  By choice, sure, I guess, but he does not seem like a guy who could switch careers safely on a moment’s notice.  The winds of politics, the ebb and flow of puritanism, the evolving public discourse over sex and gender -- surely these affect him, or could?  As with Fletch, he may not think himself interested in politics, but politics is interested in him.

Back to VdG and “history is ended.”  Is this an ideological belief of VdG’s?  A stable idyll, after politics, after history -- does VdG want this, care about it?

Again, this is asserted, but not really shown.  We’re occasionally reminded that VdG makes “videos,” and that he goes on (psuedo-)intellectual monologues in these videos, a la Royce.  But we never see the videos, the way we see so much else.  When they’re mentioned, they feel like tape hastily applied to the novel’s structure, a doomed attempt to secure the teetering “VdG - end of history” association in place.

Like, contrast VdG with Royce!  Royce absolutely does go on psuedo-intellectual monologues, safe in masturbatory (!) isolation from any outside force, even the people he’s ostensibly conversing with.  Cocooned away from any real knowledge of the subjects he opines on.

When we see Royce indifferent to police brutality, we believe it (and laugh, because a wonderful brick joke has just landed).  When we see VdG indifferent to political repression . . . wait, do we even see that?

What we see is, uh . . . VdG helping Mimmy and El-Marghichi escape from it . . . VdG keeping real-life company with people whose existence is political, 100% of his real-life associates fitting this description . . . VdG hearing there are protests outside and racing out to join them . . . okay, yeah, and then there’s the whole bit where he imagines himself a detached observer and then gets beat up.  But by this point, this feels like a long-planned story beat meant for a different character, one that VdG didn’t end up being.

This is weird, but I can’t un-see it: VdG and Royce feel like two halves of a single, thematically consistent character.

On his own, what exactly is Royce doing in the story?  Like, he’s hilarious, but you could excise him entirely and not much would have to change.

But Royce really is the sheltered man -- in whom politics takes no interest -- that the book wants us to think VdG is.  As if the full, ugly brunt of this trait was somehow displaced from VdG onto the harmless surface of a comedic, disposable side character.

When VdG says “history is ended,” he mostly means it in the context of his thoughts about art history.  And can you really blame the guy for having some opinions about the thing he does all day to get by?  While, elsewhere, Royce is having opinions about literally everything, informed by experience about approximately nothing.

---------------

Another instance where the novel feels like it wants to have an MC-like dynamic arc, and doesn’t, and suffers from it: the Consortium.

The Consortium is meant to feel empty at the end, when it’s just Sister and Car circling one another, deserving one another.

But it feels just as empty at the start!  It’s supposed to be an online community, but as far as I can remember, the only people we ever see in it are VdG, Sister, Car, and Alchemist.  (Are there ever any other speaking roles in there?  I’m not counting the receptionist, who I assumed was a bot.)

Mimmy used to be there, but isn’t now.  Alchemist/Harper is a newcomer, viewed with intermittent wariness.  So the Consortium community on the page is really just three people, talking to each other.

When one of these people temporarily leaves, the other two start complaining that it’s empty.  But there was never anyone else there -- no one important enough to get a name, anyway, much less dialogue.

Maybe this was deliberate?  Anyway, it confused me.

---------------

Other misc. stuff:

- This is pedantic, but the book almost never uses the vocative comma, which I found distracting.  Kept wondering if it was on purpose or not.  (I thought that “almost never” was going to be a “never,” but then in Ch 38 we get “Enjoy it, Mark” a few times, right next to e.g. “But something will always be scraping at your back Mark.”)

- The RP scenes were really good!!  I liked how the emotions of the roleplayers would subtly bleed through, which could easily have been overdone, but wasn’t.  And how the scenes were actually hot.  Not as in “I personally found them hot” (I didn’t . . . well, okay, I admit the Xenosaga riff one got me, a bit).  But they felt like authentic depictions of something that someone would actually like, where another author might just have gone for gawking and/or comedy alone.

- There were some really fun bits of foreshadowing, or of information being conveyed first and then cast in a very different light later.  I’m thinking of Mimmy’s offhand comment about “that drafty decrepit Detroit mansion with its upper floors commandeered by homeless people,” after the strange earlier description of (what VdG views as) “creatures.”  (On that note, the weird literal-zombie-squatters thing deserves more comment, but this is already long.)  Also, the guy Mimmy repeatedly notices outside her apartment turning out to be the author of the Letters to Mark.

- Stuff I’m still wondering about:

-- The falling chandelier.  It apparently fell some time before the first mansion scene, but then its fall occurs in the fantasy-RP version of the mansion (transmuted into Villa Diodati), suggesting it had some symbolic importance to El-Marghichi.  What really happened?  Probably unknowable, unless I missed it.

-- The association between office-Mark and Mimmy (names, canes).  Why?  It’s very noticeable, but I have no idea what to make of it.

-- The red text when Royce quotes Jesus.  This is a reference to the Biblical printing tradition where Christ’s words would be in red, but what’s it doing in the book?  I assumed this was important at first, which set me off on this whole thing about Harper being an angel (”Harper Praise”).  I felt clever about this idea but in the end there’s not much else in the book it can make sparks with.

[weaselandfriends]

Me two hours into a three and a half hour deep dive analysis on the Kendrick Lamar/Drake beef getting jumpscared by a shoutout to, of all people, the anime YouTuber who inspired Van Der Gramme

This was originally intended to be a meme post that just mentioned that, but having seen the full video, I strongly recommend it to anyone willing to watch a 3.5 hour video essay on a rap beef. The video really elevates the rap battle into a much larger, more culturally significant struggle between art and commercialism, authenticity and imitation, that strikes a significant chord with me after just finishing The Recognitions which is all about those exact themes.

It's also a topic that fascinates me as someone who once wrote a story that ended with a climactic rap battle, featuring a rapper who was partially modeled on Drake. Anyway, if the topic interests you at all, I cannot recommend the video enough, check it out.

[fipindustries]

Did you finish 'Chameleon x Cockatiel' yet?

Havent even started it yet. I dont know how closely you follow my blog but ive been kind of busy lately working in an animation proyect.

Dont worry ill let you know once i read it

[ifsomeoneasksiwasnothere]

What would their spirit animal be?

Slenderman Owl

Splendorman Hummingbird

Trenderman Peacock

Offenderman Shark

Jeff Hodek Bengal Tiger

Liu Hodek Dog

Jane Arkensaw Raven

Clockwork Squirrel

Ticci Toby Coyote

Ben Drowned Hedgehog

Eyeless Jack Maned Wolf

Laughing Jack Hyena

The Puppeteer Spider

Emra Chameleon

Zachary Gibson Grey Wolf

Jason the Toymaker Cat

Candy Pop Cockatiel

Dr. Smiley Lynx

The X Ferret

Photography Capybara

The Rake (Doesn’t have one. Is basically an “animal”/creature himself).

Bloody Painter Bat

Judge Angels Dove

—

Masky/Tim Otter

Hoodie/Brian Guinea Pig

Skully/Jay Mouse

Jessica Panda

Alex Kralie Bee

[stinkybreath]

hello

do you trust me to recommend you some books

I read ~170 this year and here’s reviews of my top ten, written for fb and crossposted under the cut in case you’re interested

1: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch

-I know it’s not obvious from the way I conduct myself here, but I have a very large vocabulary. I was a kid who read the dictionary and also any thesaurus I had access to. So, that said, consider how much it means to me personally that this book taught me 30-50 new words. This isn’t a huge part of the reason I loved this book, but it is a very impressive fact about it that I think will grab the attention of people who might otherwise not read it. This book changed the way I read, the way I think about literature, and the way I evaluate what I have previously read. It’s offensive to me that I lived 30 years as an avid reader and culture sponge without hearing about this book. I cannot recommend it enough. I give it top spot on this list for a very good reason. I’d like to avoid spoiling any of the plot because while I called the twist easily, discovery of each point was so delightful that I want you to have that same experience.

2: Cockatiel x Chameleon by Bavitz

-You all have plenty of experience with me recommending works of fiction published online in formats that deter most readers. This is a normal Najwa activity. I know how it sounds and I know, therefore, that this plea will go more or less unheard, but I BEG you. Look past the fact this was published on AO3. This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read, period. I mentioned in my worst of how much it bothers me that most writers can’t plausibly write about the internet. This book is the FUCKING ZENITH of writing about being online. It is the absolute peak and I will be shocked if I ever encounter another work that overtakes it. This is a book about people who are so strange they are barely human, but in ways that will be instantly familiar, intimately true, to those of us who grew up on the internet. There is violence and abuse and love and beauty and Chatroulette. There is art and gore and exploration of identity and apocalypse. There is fucking POSTING.

3: Serious Weakness by Porpentine

-Charity Heartscape Porpentine is one of our greatest living authors, opinions of snide Twitter users notwithstanding. I am an evangelist for her Twine game poetry because it is so singular and so affecting. Even a decade on, I can play through Their Angelical Understanding and feel freshly stabbed in the gut. Imagine the thrill I felt when she posted about her completed novel. I would (strongly) recommend this even to people who (somehow) bounced off her games, because her prose style is very distinct from the voice those are in (yet still recognizable). This is an incredibly violent, sick, stomach-turning, difficult, ugly, terrifying book. It’s also ultimately asking the reader a question about love and compassion. If you are sensitive to any trigger in written word about any violent action one person can do to another, skip this book, but if you feel like you have the strength, give her the nine bucks or whatever that she’s asking and devour it like I did. A hook for you: our protagonist has a chance meeting with an embodiment of pain. What follows includes torture, gender, climate disaster, and Columbine. Gorgeous. This book almost convinced me to start doing video essays so I could explain to people the incredible factors at play in it.

4: Negative Space by BR Yeager

-I have been trying to read this book for free for so long that I broke my streak and paid actual money for it. It was one of the better purchases I made all year. Thanks to finally reading some Stephen King this year I now have the requisite foundation to see how heavily his style inspired Yeager in this book, but I would die on the hill defending my position that Yeager does King better than King ever did. There is evil seeping out between the lines of this book. Have you ever had a nightmare that made you feel doomed the entire next day? Have you ever felt you were trapped in your shitty, dying home town? Have you ever been seduced by the excitement of activities that you know might actually kill you? Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and looked at your own dark reflection? Go back to the deepest point of your teenage depression here.

5: We Who Are About to by Joanna Russ

-One of the shortest entries on this list and so one of the easiest sells, but it is just as full of meaning as any other that made the cut. There is so much implied and unsaid about this protagonist. She feels whole, like this is the last chunk of chapters in a series centered on her, but she represents something universal. She is one member of a group from a crash-landed spaceship, a group small enough in numbers that there’s no way for humanity to last on this planet more than one more generation. Any attempts to do even that are so plainly cruel and self-deluding that she wants no part of them, but the others with her don’t see it the same way. Her story is womanhood under patriarchy, it is life and death, it is self-determination. Brutal. I read this at the airport and cried in public.

6: Carrie by Stephen King

-As much as I hate to say it, I gotta hand it to Uncle Steve (or really to Tabitha). This book very nearly justifies the rest of his career on its own. I thought had picked up most of it from cultural osmosis, but there was a truly shocking depth that I couldn’t have found without experiencing it firsthand. Maybe it’s funny to use this word here, but this book is humanist and compassionate and sincere in a way that King never finds again, particularly with the women he writes. Carrie is so vivid that I felt a protective instinct for her throughout the book even though I knew she was about to discover her own power. She reflects parts of me about as well as Lindqvist did in Little Star, which is the work of art that is THE most personal to me. A classic for a fucking reason.

7: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

-This year, lots of the books that I read had strange echoes of each other. In this, I can pick out shades of Carrie, of Camp Concentration, of We Who Are About To, and even of Serious Weakness. Rarely if ever are these references by each author, but it has enriched my experience by having unofficial interlocking intertexts for all of them. This book has been very divisive with reviewers, and I understand why, because it is cruel and the prose is extremely stylistic. This is somewhat experimental and fully literary and sincerely philosophical. I get it. Not for everyone. But it was for me. A clan of inbreds at the end of the world with their eyes on their scapegoat, nonverbal and disabled Dolores. It shocked me and it challenged me and I loved it.

8: The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories by Sam Pink

-These short stories did the exact opposite of the thing that pissed me off about The Florida Project. These are about people who are varying degrees of sympathetic but the same degree of desperately, penny-scrapingly working poor. The easy pull quote is “unflinching,” because it turns an eye on very ugly parts of real life for so many of us. I think people who grew up middle class will find some voyeuristic, prurient pleasure in these stories, but they’re not written for you. They’re written for us, the people who have lived this way.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 9

-I don’t need to tell you how great this book is, because the whole of booktok has told you this all year. Instead, what I will say is that it is much stranger and less tidy than you’re imagining when you hear the blurb. It’s a short read and it is one of the few times I haven’t regretted following booktok’s advice.

Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis 10

-This barely squeaked onto this year’s best of, because I started it before 2022 ended and finished it early in the new year. As I read it, especially in the first 20% of the book, I was confused as to how it ended up on my TBR. But toward the end, and throughout the year as I’ve continued to think about it, I understand more instinctively than intellectually that this is a remarkable work. A short synopsis: in the 80s in the UK, there is an epidemic of suicide, but only by adults. The teens left behind forge their own path.

[txttletale]

So far I've read ive been wormed AND fudge revelated bc of your blog, do you have any other free good online stuff you can recommend?

yeah. modern cannibals is a magical realist novel about teens going to a comic convention to meet andrew hussie. it's a moving coming of age story and bitterly funny and asks really interesting questions about the audience-artist and artist-art relationships. one of my favourite not just web novels but novels, period. if you enjoy it the author also wrote cockatiel x chameleon, a quite novel about internet sex roleplay and patreon porn artists and gender and the military-industrial complex--although the content is considerably more extreme than modern cannibals so Watch Out.

almost nowhere is still ongoing but it's nearly finished -- a really good mind-bending piece of metatextual science fiction that takes the premise of the matrix to its illogical extremes. the northern caves by the same author is digital epistolary fiction about members of a fan forum for a children's book series attempting to read the bizarre, incomprehensible, and morbid final installment. genuinely unsettling in parts, fun exploration of fan culture in others.

there is no antimemetics division is an incredible work of epistemological horror--what do you know? what if something terrible happened and you'd just forgotten even as it marked every moment of your life? lena by the same author is a chilling short story in the form of a wikipedia article.

the magician's apprentice is another short story by tamsyn muir of the locked tomb fame that's available for free online and is an extremely powerful portrait of grooming (and imo illuminating to some of the intertextuality going on in TLT).

finally if you liked worm, the worm guy has another pair of novels that i personally thikn are quite good: pact, about the world's saddest wettest man being put through a nightmarish urban fantasy horror meatgrinder, and twig, about some plucky boarding school mystery protagonists who happen to be biological weapons in a biopunk dystopia where the british empire took over the world with frankensteins. they're not quite as good as worm but i like them both a lot.

hope you get something out of these if you read em! i'm always happy to recommend fun things you can read on the computer

[theothin]

I find weaselandfriends comments on the ending of Rot (and by extent, Chicago) interesting, because it's almost the opposite of what is posited in 'Chameleon x Cockatiel'. If weaselandfriends is to be believed, one of the big ideas in that story is that 'history has ended' is wrong, and by extension, that society follows a preplanned path toward a liberal democracy/ socialist utopia/ what have you. But both Chicago and Rot seem to suggest the opposite: that history will be ended at some point, and that it does follow a preplanned path to utopian democracy. In Chicago, for all the struggle, there is a promise that while not all evil is eliminated, things will get better for magical girls in the long run. Society will be objectively better than it was. And in Rot, it ends with allusions to the renaissance, because if the medieval period comes first, renaissance MUST follow because that's how it went in western history, which to most is the only real history. However, unless you live in a western democracy, this somewhat rings hollow. Sometimes life just changes, and there is nothing you can do. There is no predetermined path. Life just IS. And I'm very curious to see what weaselandfriends thinks of this post.

I'm once again not convinced that's actually what he was saying or why you're sending this to me rather than to him, but I can pass on the message

@weaselandfriends

for the record I haven't actually read rot and I'm only one act into chicago so far

[xenostalgic]

As an Asian American, I actually hated the potrayal of Papimon and found her death horribly distasteful. I'm curious, what did you like about this fanfic?

fundamentally I think I enjoyed how for me it inspired and then rewarded a mindset focused on a sort of puzzley analysis, though admittedly on a fairly shallow level. 

there are lots of motifs to track, there are lots of hooks to allow the reader to assemble all sorts of patterns (is it significant that Harper and Van Der Gramme roleplay x.Nihilo, referencing the phrase "ex nihilo nihil fit", when Harper is so insistently referred to as "nothing"? clearly. is it also significant that it's the sequel to x.Machina, referencing "deus ex machina," when Harper is in some ways a successor to Mimmy, who has "always wanted to be a god"? more tenuous, but plausible, and fun to consider regardless).

but there was plenty that I didn't understand. I had a hard time understanding Papimon in particular, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there was something important to her character that I missed. I'm not sure what could be particularly distasteful about her death, though; it happens offscreen, we don't know anything about the circumstances, and there are so many possible causes set up (car crash, suicide, whatever illness keeps giving her nosebleeds, the recent expenditure of all her life energy on a single glorious work of art) that it seems pretty thoroughly and intentionally ambiguous.