#my thoughts on fiction

[rachelmsterling]

Things I loved about Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne...

I just finished reading the book and am having approximately 75 different feelings about it simultaneously, so thought I'd spew them here (what follows is less of an actual review and more a disorganized list of things that made my brain light up and go "cool!!!"). Keeping this as spoiler-free as possible.

The romance between Priya and Malini! They spend so much of the book at cross-purposes, and they certainly aren't always kind to each other--and at times, can even be pretty brutal, but despite that, I spent the whole book rooting for them to be together. And just, really, seeing a sapphic romance that isn't fluffy, where there is sharpness and the characters are allowed to prioritize themselves and the things that are important to them without the narrative condemning them as characters or their relationship is just !!! So good!

Priya's kindness. At the start of the book, her kindness and compassion are so loud and come through so clearly (her treatment of Rukh, her reputation among the other children with rot). That struck me as such a unique character detail. Not like there aren't many kind characters, and kind female characters, in fiction, but I often see characters' kindness (especially in women) portrayed as a weakness, preventing them from making bold or lesser-of-two-evils choices. Or, if they're kind, often that's all there is to them? Their journey can so easily become about the other characters in their life. But this doesn't happen with Priya, because...

Priya's fierceness! Priya isn't just a kind person, she is also willing to do whatever it takes to protect the people she cares about and then, later, for all other Ahiranyi, even those whose methods or politics she disagrees with, and even those who actively fought against and hurt her. Priya is willing to fight when she needs to, willing to kill when she has to, willing to prioritize her people over even her relationship. She may be kind, but she isn't soft, and I love that.

Malini's manipulativeness. Unlike Priya, Malini doesn't have magic powers that help her in a physical fight, so she's learned to use the tools available to her, namely, manipulating people. She does this to keep herself safe and to further her political cause. She also uses whatever she can to survive, and that feels so human. But despite how much she has to use manipulation, making herself seem at times pathetic and at times demure, her true character comes through so clearly. And she never really seems to be able to lie to Priya, even when both characters believe she is.

The anger in the world-building. Between the emperor who wants to burn his sister, a woman married to the regent oppressing her people, and a rebel willing to spill as much blood as it takes to root out the empire's control, there is a lot of brutality in the book. The heroes don't always get to do the nicest things, but the powers they stand in opposition against are oppressive and cruel. And the oppression and cruelty feel only too familiar to our own world. It makes the stakes and the world itself feel very real, not always in ways that are comfortable, but in ways that always pulled a genuine emotional reaction from me.

The yaksa are genuinely creepy. I never would have imagined deities with so much flower imagery could be so disturbing, and yet...I certainly wouldn't want to be on their bad side.

Ashok's character arc. I don't want to say too much since I'm trying not to get into super-spoiler territory, but it's so perfectly crafted, the shifts in his relationship with Priya, the conclusion to his deathless waters journey--it all lands so satisfyingly and makes my writer's brain buzz in the best of ways.

Many deities, no single truth. Priya and Maili discuss their different creation myths in a scene that I absolutely loved, but beyond that, there are different systems of belief here, different gods affecting the world, pushing characters toward their destinies. I enjoyed seeing the ways the different religions interacted throughout the story, and I'm very curious to see more of how the various deities might have similar goals or clash completely to further shape the events of the next two books.

[fluorescentbrains]

me reading straight up pornography: hmm… this one just doesn’t have enough accurate character psychoanalysis to get me off

[detectivejay]

Time for a new poll! I'm curious to see the spread of answers on this one (and hear any other series not on the list.) Tried to go for a range of older and newer series on here, more on the older end of the spectrum, but I can't cover everything with the limited poll options here, so I hope you'll share your answers! :)

Please reblog for a larger sample size, thank you!

[egophiliac]

You can’t pick Lilia for this. But who is your other favorite short character in Twst?

I like the angry little king boy 🌹

[artbyblastweave]

I was raised by scientifically conscientious parents, real big on logic and empiricism and all that jazz, and I really took it to heart. So when I first heard about the birthday candle wishes thing, I did what came naturally. I tried to test it empirically. I invited this kid in my first grade class who was kind of a dick, called me names, tripped me when the teachers weren’t looking, penny-ante schoolyard bully shit. And when they brought the cake out, they told me to close my eyes and make a wish, and I did, and when I opened my eyes the kid hadn’t exploded. Not even a little. At this point I was kind of tempted to write it off, but even then I had an eye towards the replicability crisis, and I knew one failure wasn’t publishable. So next year I invited the same kid, wished again, he didn’t explode that year, either. Or the year after that. Or the year after that. I mean I really sacrificed for this project. My parents had a hard capacity of five guests per party, and every year he took a slot that could have gone to a person who wouldn’t declare open season on the other three guests. And even though I don’t even like pottery, I kept asking to have the parties at the DIY pottery place because that was the only non-suspicious way to have get everyone in smocks and googles when they brought out the cake. But one of the really insidious things I had to deal with was the sense of, I dunno, moral corrosion. Because, you invite a guy you don’t even like to a birthday party six years running with ulterior motives, humoring him, making him think you consistently want him around...  you’re leading the guy on! And moreover I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that, I used to get invited to birthday parties because people wanted to copy my notes. And it’s shitty to wake up one morning and realize you’ve become a bad guy in the same creeping way, and that just must be how that happens. I mean right up until the guy spontaneously combusted at the cake-cutting at my cousin’s birthday party in 2013, I genuinely think he thought we were friends. All to say that this is why research ethics courses are, like, super foundational. Can’t cut corners on that!

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[bloominglegumes]

i hope they make earthspark prowl incredibly mean and awful and they talk about him being a cop and he's a big hater of the kids and the emphasis they have on emotional bonds. i also hope he gets a lot of screentime and eventually gets forced into their extended family

[valtsv]

[reverie-quotes]

Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.

— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

[papierfliegerchen]

[hrtmehyer]

a very underused omo trope is the fake pee. someone absolutely desperate to pee, they can’t hold it any longer. so they’re told to pull down their pants, sit on the toilet, and do nothing. after about two minutes they’re told to get up, pull their pants up and move on.

and they’ll complain that “wait, i still need to pee!” no you don’t, you just peed. and you can’t lie to me and complain you need to go. you just peed. your bladder is empty. now go, you need to replenish all the liquid that you lost. <3

[self-shippy]

good morning selfshippers just an ordinary morning post here move along…

JUST KIDDING I cast spell of IMAGINE YOUR F/OS MORNING VOICE

[marlynnofmany]

It’s back!

If you missed it the first time around, the “human are weird” anthology is back for a second printing. (There’s even a new story included: “Black Box” by Dara Brophy.)

Here’s the blurb:

In science fiction, humans are usually boring compared to other races: small, weak, with no claws or tentacles, and no special abilities to speak of. But what if we were the impressive ones, the unsettling ones, the ones talked about by all the other aliens? What if we're weird?

If you’d like a collection of excellent stories about humans inspiring awe, fear, and utter confusion, it’s available everywhere books are sold!

[rillils]

In honor of @catws-anniversary, have some catws-inspired silliness today 💕💕💕

Proof that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is actually a romcom:

err- yes, anyway--

[tzarrz]

to all people who said PART 1 made them laugh - i lov u 💗 this is for u

[beannoss]

Something I think about a lot and wonder if maybe gets overlooked in Twilight’s story and as vitally indicative of his character is actually in the very first chapter:

Anya isn’t needed for Strix. Twilight decides to adopt her anyway.

[Spoiler warning: Mostly this post deals with early chapters already in the anime but there is reference to chapter 62, which has not yet been animated and will be in season 3]

Twilight decides it — “I’m going to rework the mission so it doesn’t involve a child because that’s too dangerous” and he’s 100% right! Donovan Desmond is canonically a far right warmonger with fascistic authoritarian aims. His government made liberal use of the SSS — a group to mirror the Stasi — who continue to operate in morally dubious ways (much more likely they’re actively morally reprehensible, though we’ve mostly only had rumours of that so far). From what we can tell, Desmond is at best an absent father and likely actually worse than that: if that's how he treats his own children, imagine how he might treat others. And the timeline seems to indicate that the experimentation performed on Anya was done under Desmond's government — even if Twilight isn't aware of experimentation on children, he is aware of both human and animal experimentation under Desmond's government. Taking all that and also the complexity of Strix's aims, undoubtedly there were other things that could be done, more straightforward if not necessarily easier.

So. Why? Why entertain the change at all? And then, having entertained it, why go back when the reasoning is indisputable?

On the Doylist level, I think Endo wanted to ensure that Anya had some agency within the set up — Endo also does this with Yor. It would be much harder to be on Twilight’s side fully, or to trust him on an ethical level/take him as any sort of moral authority, if he were just straightforwardly using these two people. To have them be active and consenting participants (arguably to actually be affirming the arrangement: Twilight sets it up, but Anya and Yor actually make it happen) even if the audience only knows the depth of their knowledge/motivations/etc currently, shifts the power dynamic in important ways.

But it also the set up tells us important things about Twilight. He is largely impatient, cold, detached in chapter one. His overarching feelings towards Anya are, I think, real annoyance, real confusion, and real impatience. He just doesn’t understand this damn kid and it turns out she’s a person which is frankly unacceptable — he’d needed and anticipated an automaton, ideally of himself in miniature form. (Though I think one could ponder whether Twilight was, in many ways, an automaton himself at this point, but that's maybe for another meta 🙃)

He’s not entirely unmoved of course — we're given to understand he’s affected when Franky tells him how many times Anya’s been adopted and returned, and isn't amused by Franky's joke about names. Franky's comment — "Just don't get attached" — reinforces this. The prospect of “the future” perturbs Twilight when he’s reading the parenting books. His initial reaction to Anya’s kidnap is horror. All these are true too.

Then there’s also this, from earlier in the chapter:

It’s exposition, yeah, and it’s also exposing. "Hopes" and "joys" are very specific words to describe those events. It could simply have been "A marriage? An ordinary life?" but describing them as such — hope for marriage; joy in ordinary life — expose something of what Twilight feels about those two experiences and, on the flipside, they expose what he deems he's lacking. No hopes of intimacy; no joy in (an ordinary) life. There's an argument as well, of course, that he's being ironic but I don't think that actually invalidates the above analysis. Drawing attention to 'hope' and 'joy' at all are revealing, regardless of Twilight's tone in thinking of them. I think it's also interesting this panel, taken in conjunction with a pair of panels in chapter 62, Twilight's backstory. The above is almost a pulled out version of this below panel of Twilight's recollection of his childhood, and of course the returning image of not just a rubbish bin but a rubbish bin on fire when it comes to disposing of his identity:

Back to Strix. Both his final interaction with Karen and the whole everything of the framing of Strix is making Twilight think (and feel, ahem) things that he hasn't for some time. Twilight decides, I’m reworking this. It can’t proceed this way. Not because Anya is a pain in his ass, not because she’s not as (apparently) intellectually advanced as he’d originally thought, not even because he thinks he can find another child who would better be exactly what mission parameters called for. No:

And what changes his mind is Anya asking to come home.

One of the important parts of this to me is this:

He seeks consent.

This moment is a keystone, I think, to understanding Twilight. It’s also more telling than he maybe realises. Twilight is decisive — we all laugh because he spirals at the drop of a hat when his daughter or wife look even mildly upset but outside those (also very telling) scenarios, he makes decisions and he pursues them. Often he makes decisions quickly. He’s a dab hand at it; it’s a large part of why he’s as good a spy as he is.

He’d decided to change Strix.

Anya asks him, in essence, not to.

So, he doesn't.

But it's wild that he entertains keeping her request at all — why? Why even entertain it? It’s dangerous; it’s impractical; there are too many moving parts outside his direct control; Anya isn’t the sort of child he’d wanted for the mission if he’d spent any time thinking about what a child might actually be like; Strix is in many ways an extremely long shot anyway, Desmond could just stop attending for reasons unknown and unrelated; etc.

So, yeah, why? Maybe because of this —

In conjunction, I often think of this moment in the cruise arc:

Twilight first naming the feeling as lonesome, and secondly tacitly conceding that he perceives Yor as a companion and that that relationship is important to him, something to be missed. What makes this for me though is that Anya calls this out "Papa's you're so sappy" and Twilight's reaction is that of someone caught-out. He doesn’t say “nuh-uh!” but he may as well have. Essentially, something landed a bit close to home, hm? Maybe some of that hope for marriage? A soupçon of joy of an ordinary life?

Twilight’s loneliness underpins many of his decisions with his family — probably without him being fully conscious of it. I think he is at least somewhat conscious of it, but also if he looks too closely... Well, best not to. I could fill this post, I think, with images that demonstrate his loneliness throughout the series; that sorrowful/pensive close-up of his eye(s) is one of the abiding motifs for Twilight throughout. I'd probably start with this one from Twilight's backstory arc:

Anya's request plays directly off his loneliness. Still though, he doesn’t immediately capitulate — he emphasises Anya’s choice. Is she sure? The last day has been scary for a child (and for him, but he's ignoring that part) and Twilight, in his increasing recognition that Anya is a person, is probably aware in the back of his mind that he hasn’t exactly been warm or welcoming or at all patient with her. Things that people respond to — he's otherwise excellent at manipulating people, so of course he understands this. So. Given she'd just had this scary experience, given he hasn't exactly been great with her: Is she sure? She wants to come home — with him?

I think the moment may get a little lost because Anya says something riffing off his own earlier thoughts and self-revelation (featuring that shadowed, lonely eye motif again!)

Were this a post about Anya, I’d talk about how it’s an important character moment for her as well by way both of demonstrating her agency/choice and also that she isn’t nearly as dumb as Twilight thinks (and the audience, maybe, also thinks).

But in my view, she didn’t actually need to say anything about it making her cry. I think she could simply have said yes in that moment and Twilight would have agreed.

Twilight’s an unreliable narrator; he’s disconnected from his heart and that shrouds his own motivations from himself — something he actually also concedes in this chapter!

And it shrouds from us just how much he actually understands himself. He’s also a master of deflection. Easy to assume or say that bringing Anya home is just to align with Strix. Nothing more to see here; nothing else going on. But also that ripping off of the mask in the panel above — and the literal 'riiip' sound effects — also indicate to us that this is an unveiling to himself.

In my view, Twilight agreeing to Anya's request, deciding to go back to original mission parameters, actually shifts his motivations, subtly. Now he’s committed not only to the original mission goals, but also to Anya. He needs Anya to succeed at Strix, not only for Strix's sake, but also because otherwise the mission will end and she’ll have to go back to the orphanage, and he’s just agreed with her not to do that (not right away, in any case). I don’t think at this point he’s thinking it’s forever — his thoughts throughout the manga indicate he still expects the Forgers to be temporary. I don't think the shift in motivation is necessarily even conscious, but given the set up, I think something inside Twilight recognises that agreeing to bring Anya home is a compact, jointly engaged. Mostly all this has become subsumed into Strix: he makes decisions. He pursues them. He deflects, even from himself. Of course it's just for the mission; this saved him the trouble of reworking it, of figuring out something else. Nothing more to see; no need to think any more on it. And to be fair to him, Strix is very high stakes, resting pretty solely on his shoulders, so of course that is, objectively, motivation enough. Why even consider beyond that?

But I personally think that to the extent he's aware of it at all, there is something else going on, that he wants to have Anya for as long as it takes him to work something else out for her. If that's the case, then of course, we have Occam’s razor: the simplest solution may be the best one.

Maybe Twilight should just keep Anya himself, eh?

[Image description: gif from Spy x Family season 1, episode 1. Twilight and Anya have just found out Anya passed her entrance exam and are overjoyed. Celebratory, Twilight picks Anya up and swoops her into the air as they smile at one another. End image description]