#the biggest monster in the book was a penis | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shiorimakibawrites · 1 year

Text

Fantasy (Part 9 of Alley Cat)

Image Credits: kissthemgoodbye.net / Amber Kipp / Nathan Dumlao

Pairing: Matt Murdock x fem!Reader

Word Count: 3108

Summary: Reader is feeling anxious about upcoming discussion with Daredevil and needs to relax.

Warnings: MINORS DNI - EXPLICIT SEXUAL CONTENT. Masturbation. Vaginal Fingering. Fantasies about oral sex (female receiving and male receiving), penis in vagina sex, and implied unprotected sex. Reader being anxious.

Can also be read here. The Masterlist for this series can be found here

Author’s Note: While trying to write the conversation between Reader and Matt, the muses informed me that was another chapter before that one could happen. A chapter involving smut. I have never written smut. I've read it. Never written it. Until now. Hopefully it isn't terrible. I now have increased respect for writers of smut. It is (hee) hard.

Fantasy

by Shiori_Makiba

You were waiting for Daredevil (who was probably Matt Murdock) to show up. At least you thought he would be visiting you tonight. There was no way to know for sure. It wasn't like you had set up a meeting with him. You just assumed that he would want to have a discussion with anyone who had discovered who he was under the mask.

Assuming you hadn't completely misinterpreting everything. You were pretty sure that you hadn't. He hadn't been subtle with his hints. At all. The only way he could have less subtle was if he had walked in and said 'I am Daredevil.'

You were ninety-nine percent certain that Daredevil and Matt Murdock were the same person but that little sliver of doubt was enough for anxiety to latch onto and make you start second-guessing yourself.

There were reasonable explanations for every hint or clue that didn't involve Murdock being Daredevil. Yes, all of them together stretched plausibility but sometimes improbable things happened. Ten years ago, if you had been asked if it was possible for a World War II soldier, a billionaire, a monster, an archer, and a lady assassin to stop an alien invasion, you would have said it was not. And yet, that is exactly what happened.

The biggest thing that was making your brain run in circles was simply that it was a very serious accusation to make. An accusation for which you had absolutely no proof. Your case was built entirely on guesswork, assumptions, and personal opinion. Any defense attorney worth their salt would able to shred it to pieces with ease.

If you were wrong, the best case scenario was that Daredevil and Murdock would find your crazy theory that they were same person to be funny. You'd be embarrassed but everyone would have a good laugh and move on. Worst case scenario? Daredevil would be offended that you would accuse his blind friend of breaking the law and violating his oaths as an attorney. He ends your friendship and you never see him again outside of the news. And you would need a new legal team because such accusations would be completely justified grounds for them to sever the attorney-client relationship with you.

You tried to distract yourself from such anxiety-fueled thoughts.

You started with Houdini. Who deserved some extra attention anyway. He gladly accepted a session with the fishing pole toy. It was always fun watching him chasing after, jumping at, and pouncing on the dancing ribbons. When he started to tire, you put the toy down and gave him some treats.

Feeling more relaxed, you made yourself comfortable on your couch and decided to continue reading your book. A fantasy romance novel that you had picked out because the swashbuckling hero in the cover art resembled Daredevil from his The Man In Black days. The plot was a little formulaic but you liked the characters and the sex scenes were steamy.

And honestly, it was far less embarrassing than the other novel you had recently purchased. A superhero romance whose half-demon hero the Red Devil was very obviously inspired by Daredevil. You hoped Daredevil never found out that you had read it. And it's two sequels. And pre-ordered the fourth and final book in the series. Because you had gotten invested in the story. And the sex scenes were really hot.

As soon as you started reading, Houdini made himself at home on your lap and started bumping your hand with his head. You took the hint and starting petting him with one hand while holding your book with the other. It didn't take long for him to start purring and then fall asleep.

You thought you had successfully headed off that anxiety spiral until the sun started to go down and that discussion with Daredevil became imminent. Soon you were too anxious to sit still and had to get off the couch. Houdini appreciated neither being woken up from his nap or being moved when he was comfortable. Which he informed you of. Loudly. Before curling up in the warm spot you had been laying in and going back to sleep.

You started pacing around the apartment and knew you were too keyed up. You needed to relax. Normally you would cook but the marinara in the slow cooker didn't need anything except to be turned to the keep warm setting. You already had enough homemade pasta in your freezer to feed several people. Which also had an ample supply of soups, sauces, and other make-ahead meals for the upcoming week. And then some. You always seemed to make too much food for one person. Granted your friends were usually happy to take your overflow. Especially Jo since she can't boil water without burning it.

Maybe that was for best. You were jittery enough that maybe handling a knife was a bad idea. Kneading bread dough was great stress relief but you were still working through the results of your last stress induced baking spree.

You needed something else. Maybe a shower? A shower sounded good. It had a lot of benefits. It would relax you. And ensure that you didn't stink when the man with the bloodhound nose showed up. Mind made up, you headed for your bedroom to grab some fresh clothes.

You were debating about what to wear – what was the appropriate attire for secret identity discussions – when your eyes landed on your copy of The Red Devil. Which was on the floor along with a couple of other books that had been in the bookcase. The cleared out space was suspiciously Houdini sized. You rolled your eyes. It seemed that you had found his new napping spot which rotated every couple of days and had included the places like the breadbox on the kitchen counter. And the molded shelf in the shower stall. His favorite seemed to be your underwear drawer. And like with the bookcase, he wasn't afraid to dump some of your panties on the floor in order to make room for himself.

You picked up the fallen books and stacked them in another spot in the bookcase. There was no point in putting them back in their shelf until Houdini got bored of napping there. He would just push them off the shelf again. Looking at the cover art of the Red Devil books with its titular hero in skin-tight red leather, you couldn't help thinking about your vigilante in red leather and Kevlar. You blushed a little remembering how many times you had re-imagined the sex scenes with Daredevil instead of Red Devil and yourself instead of the journalist heroine. The memory alone was enough get you a little worked up. Which only made you blush harder.

You shook your head and decided firmly that you were at least going to be comfortable during your potentially awkward conversation. Besides he already been exposed to your sleep wear. It wasn't going to horrify him now. So you grabbed a pair of thin sleep pants and an oversized tee shirt along with clean underwear and socks. Then headed for the bathroom.

After depositing your clothes on the counter, you reached into the shower stall and twisted the knob. With a loud hiss, the shower sputtered to life. As you waited for the water to heat up, you stripped out of your slacks, blouse, panties, bra, and socks. You tested the water but it needed another minute. Which left you with nothing to do but stand there naked in the rising steam and think.

Your mind tried to retread the same anxiety-filled spiral but you pushed away those thoughts. You were supposed to be relaxing. You needed to think of something else. Anything else.

The something else your brain finally settled on as you entered the shower stall and slide the door shut was sex. Specifically sex with Daredevil . . .

You flushed and tried think of something else. You needed to be able to look Daredevil in the eye tonight, possibly very soon if he decided to talk to you before his patrol, and that would be impossible to do if you had just been picturing him naked and getting off to it. The fact that Daredevil was probably Matt Murdock who was blind and (probably) wouldn't know that you were avoiding his eyes was irrelevant.

But your brain had decided on what it wanted to latch onto next. And that thing was imagining Daredevil naked.

His Daredevil suit wasn't skin tight but it fitted his body close enough to give your imagination a good starting point. You pictured broad shoulders, solid pecs, and abs that you could bounce a quarter off that tapered into a trim waist before flaring out into the finest ass on the East Coast. Possibly the world. Thick thighs that would encourage your legs apart whether you were on your back or straddling his lap. Powerful arms that could easily hold you up against the wall or pin you down the bed. And, through it might be setting you up for disappointment later, a big dick, long and thick enough to make you feel the stretch when he entered you, that you would feel full when he was inside you.

Your cunt began to throb with need just at the thought of him being inside you. You leaned against the wall of the shower, hissing as the coolness of the tile touched your warm skin. Using your back to brace yourself against the wall, you spread your legs. You reached a hand and was unsurprised to feel that you were already wet. What surprised you was just how wet you already were. You gasped when your fingers grazed your clit and began to rub gentle circles.

You pictured a kiss. One that started out like the one of your cheek. Just the gentle press of those soft, pink lips against yours that soon deepens into something firmer, something hungrier. You imagined those hands, rough with calluses, roaming over your body. Followed by his lips, creating a trail of fire with alternating kisses and little nips down your neck to the tops of your breasts. The light scrap of his beard scuff causing the skin to sing with sensation that would leave you squirming against his body.

You started moaning his name as your fingers increased their pace on your clit, picturing those clever fingers teasing your nipples until they tightened into stiff peaks. You would cry out when he latched onto one of the stiff peaks and sucked, arching your back to press more of your breast into his mouth.

You whined as your cunt clenched around nothing. You slide the fingers of your other hand along your soaked slit, coating your fingers in slick. You started panting as those fingers rubbed against your entrance and then began to dip inside. Soon you were pumping that finger in and out. It felt so good but not enough. You wanted more. You needed more. You quickly worked in a second finger. Which was better but you wished it was his fingers, thicker than yours, that were inside of you. But you made do and once you had a rhythm, your other hand resumed rubbing clit.

Soon the tension inside of you began to coil tighter and tighter . . . until it shattered as you came with a guttural moan. Legs trembling, you slide down the wall to sit on the floor of the shower. You felt more slick coating your thighs as your cunt clenched and twitched. You leaned your head back, closed your eyes and tried to catch your breath.

Well, you were definitely more relaxed now. And as much as you would like to sit there and enjoy your post-orgasm bliss, you needed to finish cleaning yourself before you ran out of hot water. You pushed yourself up onto still wobbly legs and reached for the soap . . .

*****************************************************************************************

Matt hadn't been trying to be a voyeur. Honestly. He had come to your apartment with the intention of speaking to you before starting his patrol. Otherwise he would be distracted and being distracted while fighting would lead to injuries. Which would annoy Claire who had been running off her feet caring not only for the civilians at her hospital who had been injured during Tuesday's attack but also the vigilantes who had responded. He made a mental note to talk to Danny about buying her a day at the spa or something. Didn't want her thinking that they didn't appreciate all of her hard work.

Furthermore, especially after his stunt at the office today, if he showed up at work tomorrow injured because he was distracted by a pretty girl, Foggy might actually kill him.

At first, his timing had seemed perfect. He had caught Houdini in the act of making his way down the fire escape. The cat made a spirited attempt to evade capture but ultimately failed. Not that he accepted his defeat quietly as Houdini immediately started monologuing at him. And squirming as soon as he started to scale the fire escape.

Which rather distracted Matt as he didn't want to accidentally drop your cat. A fall from this height could be lethal. Which would upset you greatly. He knew how much you loved your cat. Such an occurrence would also upset him as Matt had grown rather fond of Houdini.

The result was that he didn't notice the situation until he was standing on the platform by your bedroom window. But once he did, he immediately froze and didn't even notice Houdini taking advantage of his suddenly slack hold to slip out of his hands.

The scent of your arousal hung heavy in the air, stirring his cock to life. He couldn't stop himself from inhaling deeply, his tongue from sweeping out to taste the air. He wished he was in the shower with you, his nose nuzzled against your neck. Filling his lungs with your pheromones and the sweet, sweet smell of your body getting wet for him.

Or even better, laying you down on the counter and burying his face in your cunt. He wanted to feel the muscles in your thighs twitch and tremble under his hands as he licked up your slit. To hear your panting moans as he lapped at and sucked on your clit. Or started fucking you with his tongue. He hoped you would pull his hair, gripped tightly in your hand, as he drew you closer and closer to release . . .

Then he heard something that only made his twitching cock harder. You started moaning his name. Daredevil at first but soon you were also panting out Matt. Confirmation that it was him you were fantasizing about while you touched yourself . . .

It took more willpower than was pretty to leave. And even more to stop listening to you get off. One day, he promised himself. One day, if you agreed to it, he would replicate this moment but this time, he would get to participate as something other than an accidental voyeur. One of a growing list of fantasies that he hoped you would be agreeable to fulfilling someday.

But not today. Regardless of the outcome of your discussion tonight, sex wasn't happening. He wasn't going to fuck you without taking you to dinner first. He had at least that much class.

His patrol was going to be delayed. He was even more distracted now then he was before. His erection was refusing to be willed away. His cock knew what it wanted. To be buried in your sweet cunt, to feel you gripping him tightly with each thrust until he spilled himself inside you. It would have to settle for his left hand.

Once back to his apartment, Matt wasted no time stripping off his suit and pushing down his boxers, hissing with relief at the cool air on his aching cock. Your apartment wasn't very far from his but it was long enough that the silk of his boxers rubbing on his erection was starting to make him oversensitive. That same sensitivity made him sit on his impatience and retrieve the lube. It didn't smell anywhere near as good as your slick but it would have to do.

“Fuck,” he grunted as he gripped the base of his cock and began to stroke the length. He tried to imagine that it was your hands wrapped around his cock but the sensation wasn't right. Your hands were smaller than his. Softer too. He vividly recalled the feel of your hand against his when he shook your hand after signing the retainer agreement as well as your cheek under his lips.

He was looking forward to discovering if the rest of your skin was just as soft. How your curves would feel under his hands. How your breathe would hitch when he cupped your breasts or grabbed a handful of your ass.

The pace of his hand increased as his mind flicked between all the things he wanted to do with you. He wanted you to sit on his face. Gripping your hips as you moved against his mouth, chasing your orgasm. Licking and sucking you afterward until you are squirming and whining from overstimulation.

His hips gave an involuntary jerk at the thought. Another fantasy rose to the surface.

You on your knees in front of him sucking his cock. He groaned at the thought of his cock engulfed in the tight, wet mouth of your mouth. Your tongue licking his length and discovering every sensitive spot, teasing him until he begged for more. Your lips closing over just the head and sucking. Your nails digging into his thighs, the little pain adding a sweet edge to the pleasure you brought. Would you moan as he fought not to start fucking your face? Would you let him come down your throat? Would you keep sucking and licking after his release until he also started whining from overstimulation?

That did it. He swore as he began to cum, coating his hand and abdomen in a sticky mess. He worked himself until it was too much. He needed to be spent before he came near you again with your arousal lingering in the air. Or he might given into temptation and take you on your kitchen table. Even after all that, his cock still gave an aborted twitch at the thought.

He cleaned up himself and was getting the suit back on when he heard the first signs of trouble. He growled. Looks like your conversation would have to wait until after he put the fear of the Devil in some people.

Ending Notes:

The first romance novel Reader mentions is basically Stardust if Tristan was Zorro / Dread Pirate Roberts.

The Red Devil ones are basically a original novel version of Falling For The Devil (Daredevil fic by BellaGiornata here on AO3 – go read it. Yes, I know it is at current point 79 installments long. Read it anyway).

The Devil books are quite popular. There might be a screen adaptation in the works. And I may have cast Charlie Cox as the lead in said screen adaptation.

#daredevil #the alley cat series #fan fic #matt murdock x fem!reader #matt murdock x fem!reader smut

49 notes · View notes

feywildfiction · 11 months

Text

Mid-Year Book Freakout 2023

so i was tagged by @violaeade (my main was tagged but its book-related so its going here)

1. Best book you’ve read so far this year

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi: My favorite book and poetry collection of the year by far. I was barely 1/4 in it when I could tell it was going to be my favorite book. It's a collection about environmental racism, climate change, xenophobia, police brutality, girl it had everything. I decided to read it because an article recommended it for people who enjoyed the science fiction novel How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu and I agree; if you liked that book, you'd enjoy this poetry collection.

2. Best sequel you’ve read so far this year

Mysteries of Thorn Manor by Margaret Rogerson: A novella that sorta kinda operates as a long epilogue for the previous Sorcery of Thorns book. I enjoyed that first book - and I love that we got a tall girl, love that for us. It was a fun time for those of us who enjoy fantasy romances (or romance fantasies??).

3. New release you haven’t read yet

Maroons by adrienne maree brown No One Will Come Back For Us by Premee Mohamed A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Erin Sharkey

4. Most anticipated release for the second half of the year

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

5. Biggest disappointment

Entranced by the Basilisks by Lillian Lark: I didn't find the throuple compelling at all. Jasper felt like someone in his early 20s even though he's the director of the library. Ari and Emilia connection was based on...her being turned into a monster and him seeming inherently alluring I guess? I will say this book taught me that I don't like reptile monster sex. The hidden penis situation does nothing for me.

6. Biggest surprise

Release by Suzanne Clay: I was surprised to find that I enjoyed an age gap, employee + boss romance. It helped that the female lead is 32 years old and the man's like 55. I think the author did everything in their power to make sure male lead was super aware of the power dynamic and gave the female lead space and security in her job (because this is a complete fantasy). And they're bi4bi so that was the icing on the cake.

7. Favorite new author (debut or new to you)

Kimberly Lemming: She's a new romance author to me. I found all her stories to be fun and erotic in the best way. A true monsterfucker who understands there's not enough monster romances that involve women of color.

8. Newest fictional crush/newest favorite character

Unfortunately, I haven't obtained any fictional crushes or favorites.

9. Book that made you cry

Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco: Poems by K. Iver: Okay I'll be honest, it didn't make me cry. But out of everything I've read so far this year, it made me the most emotional. It's a collection of poems where many of them are addressed to or at least speaking to the author's dead friend who committed suicide.

10. Book that made you happy

Animal Castle Vol. 1 by Xavier Dorison, Félix Delep: a graphic novel that is in a similar vein to Animal Farm but the animals aren't becoming human, it's more of a story that is so blatant in its metaphor of how exploitative capitalism is. It's some good communist propaganda and I can't wait to read the next volume.

I'm tagging: @readingrobin, @somewherereadingg, @bibliophilecats, @logarithmicpanda, @bookish-brews, @amongtomesandtales, @the-knights-who-say-book, @thebookbud, @foxingfae, @bookphile, @jorammiireads and @crookedreads

if you've done this before or don't want to do it, feel free to ignore the tag. if you want to do this but i didn't tag it, do it anyways and tag me so i can see your answers

#jericho.txt #tag memes #its called a freakout but im chillin over here

9 notes · View notes

transporttoanotherplace · 2 years

Text

1 out of 5

I rarely and I mean RARELY ever do not finish a book but I felt so uncomfortable with the content of the book. Part of its on me because when I read the synopsis the dubious consent issue should have been apparent.

Premise: Angelika Frankenstein agrees to help her brother with his science experiment to reanimate a dead person made up of different body parts so long as she gets to create her match. Angelika, despite being the most beautiful woman around and a rich heiress, isn’t like other girls and at age 24 she’s unwed because she’s too independent. Of course, for the times this means she’s too old and is doomed to become a spinster aunt. Maybe the answer is that the right man isn’t out there for her and she needs to make (literally) her dream man who will instantly see her and fall in love with her! 🤞

Look I’m going to spoil stuff because I have to process this. The first few chapters Angelika and her brother Victor are literally looking through a morgue for bodies and her primary reason for selection is of course looks. Then I’m put through a rather uncomfortable conversation between her and her brother talking about what the man’s cock size is going to be. Something I could not imagine ever talking about with my brother the way they did and I’m pretty open with my siblings. Anyway, she chooses the biggest cock (the amount of time spent on this man’s penis size had me cringing) they have and it hits me how if this were the other way around people would be crying sexism and objectification. When her monster wakes up he’s horrified and in so much pain and all she can think about is how pretty he is. I kid you not it takes likes less than a few minutes for Will (his temporary name as he had no recollection of his memories) to become physically aroused by the sight of her in pants 😑He’s horrified because mentally he doesn’t want to be and is upset about not knowing who he is but his damn dick just can’t help it. The man has to be almost physically dragged up the stairs because he’s in so much pain and she’s more curious about the bath he’s going to be getting.

Will is struggling so much explaining to her that he feels wrong. That his body doesn’t feel like his own and he’s uncomfortable by how physically responsive he is to Angelika. For her part she is automatically disheartened to realize that he doesn’t instantly fall in love with her. She can’t understand why he can’t be grateful to be alive again and just want to live with her where she can spoil him rotten with her money and just accept the sugar baby life. I have never hated a protagonist so much. She makes Bella Swan look amazing. Worse, before she’s even said a word to this man she starts calling him “my love.” I just felt sick at how his wishes weren’t being respected, the pressure he was facing, and how all of these issues were being excused by she has a good heart 🙄 I kid you not the first day after the reanimation her brother asks her “if it was everything she hoped for,” meaning did she finally lose her virginity? Will hasn’t even been undead for a full fucking day and already there’s this expectation that Will should be putting out. There’s a scene where Victor tells her that she needs to tell Will he might have been married as when they found the body he had a ring on and she outright says no because then she’ll lose him. Laughable since she tells Will several times that she will let him go whenever he wants. She does eventually thankfully but damn did I want to punch her in the face.

I had to stop there. I skimmed the book and the little I read just got worse. Some weird religious undertones, a damn love triangle that is beyond dumb because clearly the other guys isn’t a contender at all, smut that I’m thankful to have missed because I will forever be creeped out by the power imbalance of the relationship. I am questioning everyone who loves this book because it’s absurd, weird and creepy. Stockholm Syndrome at its finest.

I give it only a one because the first chapter was good and some of the banter was pretty good. But I have to think Mary Shelley is rolling around in her grave.

#sally thorne #Angelika Frankenstein Makes her match #2022 books #book reviews #frankenstein

11 notes · View notes

biglisbonnews · 1 year

Photo

Duck Hats, Penis Tops, Reality Stars: Inside London Fashion Week After Queen Elizabeth II's funeral proceedings upended London Fashion Week last year, where many shows were rescheduled and parties were canceled, this season's edition was back to business with a jam-packed schedule featuring exciting new names and important mega-brands alike. Below, a roundup of the biggest moments that stood out.A She-Hulk Transformation at Natasha ZinkoA She-Hulk Transformation at Natasha ZinkoA She-Hulk Transformation at Natasha ZinkoA She-Hulk Transformation at Natasha ZinkoA She-Hulk Transformation at Natasha ZinkoRipped skirts, ruptured seams, six pack abs, tattered tees, knocked-over eyeglasses: Natasha Zinko looked to comic books this season, particularly the Hulk and She-Hulk characters of the classic Marvel franchise. Her woman — corporate, clean-cut, professional — belies a monster within, which the Ukranian designer says is in all of us. Green skin-tight tops and corsets peek out from baggy denim, furry coats and structured suits, giving a sinister new meaning to power dressing.Di Petsa's Debut Runway ShowDi Petsa's Debut Runway ShowDi Petsa's Debut Runway ShowDi Petsa's Debut Runway ShowDi Petsa's Debut Runway ShowDimitra Petsa was positioned in the middle of the runway on top of a rock narrating the show while dancing languidly and pouring wine on herself. The Greek designer was inspired by female archetypes in mythology, particularly the story and growth of Persephone. Her signature wet-look illusion dresses were rendered in dark silk fabrics and she also introduced bridal this season. Other new techniques include custom leather corsets made out of mushrooms and food waste.Gemma Collins' Surprise Front Row CameoAt Julien Macdonald's show, his first in nearly three years, Essex royalty and reality TV star Gemma Collins had everyone at Freemasons' Hall freaking out when she arrived and took her seat. The Big Brother UK alum is a big fan of Macdonald and was in the crowd to support the former Givenchy head designer, known for his ultra-expensive party dresses and couture sequins and feathers. The audience was filled with the designer's clients and features confetti and fog machines.Burberry's Big DebutBurberry's high-stakes, big-pressure show under Daniel Lee began with guests being served vegan hot chocolates under a tent at Kennington Park complete with blankets and hot water bottle covers on top of each seat. The cozy, protective air continued into the collection, which channeled the brand's outdoors-y heritage with roomy car coats, trapper hats in faux fur, duck prints and Wellington boots. The colorful plaid section was definitely the standout.Lisa Rinna's London Fashion Week TakeoverLisa Rinna's London Fashion Week TakeoverLisa Rinna's London Fashion Week TakeoverAfter playing it safe in New York, attending just one show (Michael Kors) in a classic red coat, the reality star turned up the heat in London starting with Harris Reed and experimented with more avant-garde silhouettes at Richard Quinn and Dilara Findikoglu. She also hit up the party circuit attending the ES x Perfect Magazine and Netflix's BAFTAs afterparty events. (Her daughter Amelia Gray Hamlin was also in London to celebrate her Perfect cover.)JW Anderson Revisits His Greatest HitsNot one to look back often, Jonathan Anderson delved into his 15-year archive for his latest collection and remixed imagery and memorabilia (including a large penis motif that was erected onstage) from the Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark. "At its core this is a collection about fandom," Anderson said. Fandom is a funny thing: completely personal, frequently irrational, often embarrassing. As I looked back through my own archive for this show, resurrecting elements from each collection of the last fifteen years, Michael let me rifle through his. It helped me pinpoint my own obsessions."Mowalola After debuting her first solo show during the men's shows in Paris last June (following a three-year runway hiatus from her last group show with Fashion East), the Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi returned to London with a 10pm show in Marylebone that showcased her knack for high-energy and provocative pieces, including reworked corporate parody logos and New York sports teams emblems on baseball caps, jersey tees and leather bags. An "Insert Disc Here" top with an arrow pointed suggestively at the model's crotch referenced the collection's theme of conflict between people and technology.Moncler Stages a Massive Presentation for 10,000 PeopleMoncler Stages a Massive Presentation for 10,000 PeopleMoncler Stages a Massive Presentation for 10,000 PeopleMoncler Stages a Massive Presentation for 10,000 PeopleMoncler Stages a Massive Presentation for 10,000 PeopleFKA Twigs, Justin and Hailey Bieber, J Balvin, Serena Williams, Pharrell and about 10,000 people who signed up for free tickets attended Moncler's "Art of Genius" presentation which included a performance from Alicia Keys and activations with Mercedes-Benz, Adidas, Palm Angels, Rick Owens and more."In London we showed a vision that further expanded our universe of fashion collaboration to a platform of co-creation across different industries," said Moncler CEO Remo Ruffini. "We have seen the coming together of diverse sectors expressing themselves and creating a language that defines a new way to experience the brand: music, design, art, entertainment, sport and fashion have brought their unique codes and their energy together shaping memorable moments for our communities." https://www.papermag.com/london-fashion-week-fall-2023-2659452239.html

#London fashion week #Fashion #Natasha zinko #Di petsa #Gemma collins #Burberry #Lisa rinna #Mario Abad #PAPER

0 notes

devil666lovesblog · 2 years

Text

Between me and a young prostitute in China

I haven't called a prostitute for a really long time, it is since last 4 years that I had a gf then breakup with her, I lost a lot of interest in sexual matters. Then I imagine what I could have done in the past to make my life more interesting and happier than now. It was before I met any of the girls and any ONS, occasionally I would go to Communist China with my father in Canton province where my father was born to stay over for two or three days. Without phone and Internet connection my only entertainment is eat, sleep, drink and fuck young girls in the hotel. There was such a time when young prostitutes would knock at the hotel rooms to look for their customers, there are others who are controlled by gangster and corrupted officials in CCP which we have a number to call. Having paid sex is illegal in Communist China, but who really cares when almost any man in Communist China break the same law? There who survive stiff competition are usually those who have the 'hardest' background, high ranking officials with the biggest gang providing the youngest girl. Most of those girls claim to be over 16 but some of them are barely 14, but it is already mature in a sense that other men look for girls below 12. I really don't understand nor appreciate how one could be aroused by a female who has absolutely no sexual reaction to a man's sexual approach. That to me is just pure sexual exploitation, they want to see how a girl whose vagina is barely one finger thin forcibly enlarged by a penis much bigger than this width. They felt aroused when thinking of themselves as a monster who is fucking a granddaughter, then they have the sense of security when that female will never be pregnant with their sperm . i.e. They got away with the crime of abusing a minor. In a sense the child's innocence is 'lost' once again that night. To me, the risk of impregnating a girl is where the excitement is, she knew the risk but her still developing womb and vagina can't resist the charm of sperms. That really is the lessons of basic human sexuality. Be you a saint or a monster, a gentleman or a cock, the basic setting of the sex game between man and woman never change. At that time I learn the lesson on how to fuck a young girl without condom and spill my seed in her young womb as her first time with a Hong Kong man. She is a virgin in this regard since she doesn't seem to know much about sex. I can tell by her awkwardness when we are taking a shower together, she doesn't know how to do body massage with her boobs and would withdraw her body instinctively when I touch her sensitive labia. That doesn't look like playing hard to get to arouse the beast in a man. She also looks shy when I observe then touch her little mangoes. It is as if when I am strong enough then I can hold both of her hands with one hand then forcibly penetrate her womb right in the shower, then the water would wash all the cum that I shoot outside her body. She has no way to protest against my sperms inside her vagina and womb. That is part of the occupational hazard. It is what a girl's womb is built for: To make men spill all their seeds inside her yet to be fully developed womb. So that night we stayed in that infamous Crown Hotel because it is cheapest with most rooms available. Me, my bigger brother and my father and my half brother booked two rooms. I share my room with my bigger brother then there are two beds. As the night came we knew that is the time for action, my bigger brother asked me if I wanted any entertainment then they arranged a girl for me. Luckily I got this girl in the first round of selection, then my bigger brother went to the other room and she is all mine. One can choose to go straight into business or one can start the night 'romantically'. I paid for two rounds of sex or they call it conveniently a night's service. So I choose to start the night off when she is surfing the Internet by my guidance, I also gently message her from the ankle to her thigh, from her left leg to right leg. She is touched and says: No customer has ever done that to her. So then I take the opportunity to rub her left breasts then right to further arouse her with her clothes on while kissing her behind her ears. I said I once had a gf who looks just like her and I really missed the day when we are almost dating. I hint to her that she could play the same role if I get the same feeling from her. i.e. I implied that if she goes out of her way to please me in bed then she has a chance to be a Hong Kong resident. She asked me for the details of that girl while I took off her clothes while rubbing her labia. She probably never 'molested' by a man while surfing the Internet, and had her genital region carefully examined by a stranger. Nor does she have the taste of a man kissing her opening of vagina when I try to stick my tongue inside. She felt she is a dirty girl who doesn't deserve a man who treats her with gentle and kindness. It is like all her past customers are the type that would roughly rub all her breasts right after she arrives, then throw her to the bed and stick their half stiffen dick inside her cunt. It is usually such a case that those men wouldn't last for more than ten minutes. So including the second round the whole process wouldn't take more than one hour, then she are left in the cold while the customer is sleeping exhausted. It is if they are just dumped toys. I can tell she felt very excited when a man rubbed her cunt with tongue then started fingering her in and out. It is only until this moment I carry her to the bed and take off all her clothes and dress. I then ask what she can do for me, she smartly picks up my dick and sucks it like ice-cream while I am testing her vagina's elasticity on many different angles. One can tell she is new to the dick-in-the-cunt business when her cunt is not darker than her nearby skin. A girl without much skill in dick sucking could also be pleasing to the man if she tried her best. That experience is so exciting and new to her and the time passes by very slowly, it is like she wants to savor her happy moment as much as she can. My dick remains stiff in and out of her mouth so many times, I bet her cunt is never so wet before. I ask if she is ready for something more pleasurable than my finger, then I ask her to masturbate in front of me when I switch my head to the other side and carefully stick my penis in her tunnel of pleasure to the deepest level. Then I grasped her by her developing breasts and thrust my manhood in and out of her mouthwatering cunt without any protection. She is thinking with her vagina now and cares much more of getting the maximum pleasure via my dick than the risk of getting pregnant. Thus after we tried the missionary position then I tried the doggie, she sat on top of my dick and rotating clockwise and anticlockwise, and she bent over with a different angle to get a taste of my dick. It is as if she is measuring my penis via her vagina. Then she fixates on face to face with me when her legs are crawling on my back and her arms encircle my neck, kissing me passionately while she pushes her vagina in and out of my dick. She probably never experimented with so many different postures with other customers since she had no feelings with them, but somehow she can sympathize with my 'breakup with gf' and imagine herself as the substitute of my ex. She is there to compensate for hurting my feelings and communicating with me using our most sensitive area. Soon enough I felt her vagina start contracting and my dick swollen to its maximum size, then I felt my dick explode in her vagina with a lot of juice rushing out from my dick. Her nipple stiffened and her face bright red. She was first stiffen throughout her whole body then lay back on the bed with eye half opened. I take a small break of maybe half a minute when my dick is still in her cunt, then without utter a word I start penetrating her vagina once again. She can't resist the urge of having sex with me again in this state. There are rules saying that one customer can only have maximum two sexs with one girl. I don't fucking care then I ejaculate inside her womb five times that night when she offer little or no resistant with the immense pleasure coming out from her womb and its associated tunnel. I have assured that she is willingly to be impregnate by me, and the last time she moan so heavily that I thought I may just fucking killed her by climax. Next morning I gave her my email and phone number then extra 200 bucks for excellent service, she never contacted me later. Girls like her are doomed to be impregnated by one customer or another, their role is to provide sexual service to the customers in whatever way they pleased. Sex and love in many sense is really just a game of roleplaying. Lest when she becomes invasive to my life and wants to be my real girlfriend, then the game ceases to be interesting. A bad girl makes a man remember her by granting a man all he wishes and enjoying it, then a good girl would not ask too many questions on details of a man's innermost thoughts and feelings. All they can ever have, if they are lucky, is my stiff dick in their cunt and spilling all the lovely juicy inside.

0 notes

impalementation · 4 years

Note

I have a question about 'Reptile Boy'. I’m not jewish and not knowledgeable about conspiracy theories, but the episode makes me think of some anti-semitic jokes and conspiracy theories. The whole ‘reptilian conspiracy theory’, where these people are controlling the world from the shadows, (I think) has some antisemitic tones to it. I know in the episode none of the frat guys are coded as jewish (to my knowledge) but it was something that just made my flags go up. Do you have thoughts on that ep?

honestly? i highly doubt that was a factor. reptile people have existed in pulp scifi since at least the 20′s, so the show could definitely have been making some sort of cute reference to that. and that trope did inform eventual conspiracies. but the book that popularized reptilian conspiracy stuff (the biggest secret), and made explicit connections to jewish people in power, wasn’t published until 1999, and reptile boy aired in 1997. so the likelihood that it was done with any antisemitic implications is very low, to me.

i think the main reason that the monster is a snake is because snakes are phallic and the whole frat boy thing is basically a metaphor for date rape. keep in mind the show’s many other snake/phallic monsters—lurconis, the mayor, the cobra demon in ‘shadow’, the penis head monster in doublemeat palace. i also think it’s relevant that reptiles are “cold-bolded”, because so much of the season is concerned with passionate, hot-headed behavior. so it’s in contrast to that. the idea of a charming boy concealing cold-blooded menace is very much in keeping with the rest of the season. say, ted’s charm concealing a robot—which is cold and inhuman the way a reptile is. or of course angel, whose souled self will eventually be burned off to reveal the cruel and unfeeling demon beneath. vampires, being dead, are cold too. i’d have to rewatch before i made a more detailed analysis of the episode as a whole, but that’s what i think the use of a reptile demon is doing specifically.

#s2 #i’m only half jewish but my grandfather on that side used to mention being rejected from frats for being jewish #so the idea of frat boys being members of a jewish conspiracy is kind of hilarious to me

15 notes · View notes

uncle-eliot · 5 years

Text

100(I know I said 20 uhhh) incredible things about Quentin Coldwater

(I meant to add gifs but I WILL NOT be limited to 10 so)

He looks gorgeous in a man bun.

He has a nerdy "hip thrusty" dance he made up with his best friend.

He sits like the bisexual icon he is which means he doesn't

He loves magic a lot and believes that it changes things for the better

He is extremely honest about the things he loves! For example: magic, people and books:)

When his best friend lost her goddess powers he called her a high level X-Men(!!)

He looks adorable holding a teddy bear

His true drunk response to having his wine taken away was "those grapes died for nothing now" (fhfxh)

He wishes magic could run on love (or cocaine) instead of pain

When his hair is down it's beautiful and floppy and iconic

His first power move on the show was probably singing and dancing to taylor swift's 'shake it off' in order to get a psychic's attention

He's bi and it's the "only thing he isn't anxious about"

It's a deleted scene, but while working on the first years test with penny and that other guy Q got frustrated and said "Jesus why are we using candles there are literal lights"

Q is so soft and pure that days after getting his heart broken by one of his best friends he still invited him to go on a magical boat quest together

He is "Jesus, I'm not a virgin"!!

He is nicknamed "the fool" around the kingdom and owning it

His reaction to penny yelling at him was to hide behind a tree

His mom has a girlfriend

He solved multiple problems just by remembering random parts from his favourite childhood book

While singing taylor swift, he did a HAIR FLIP and BLOCKED penny's way to the door

While he was high he grabbed penny's mouth while claiming that it's HIS MOUTH

His answer to "you haven't even touched your penis" was "I had a ton yesterday"

Within the first minutes of the pilot, he was seen sitting on the floor at a party hiding behind a plastic cup hjfhc

He is gorgeous with longer hair- but also!! With his shorter hair in season 4

He got poppy a bag of sand so she could feel like she was on a beach!!

He says "um so" like A LOT

In order to get into brakebills, he built a giant house of cards and then fainted

He wore a CARDIGAN in 4x10

He legitimately asked if magicians could die from eating oreos

Q made himself a quesadilla, then held it without a plate and burnt himself, only to drop it when jennifer jumpscared him

Q attacked penny and lost the fight lol.

When he was at a party and found out he could do magic again, he made A FLYING SHIP made out of weed smoke

According to the library's prediction system, his most likely death is getting distracted by talking about dogs

He was hella hot as the beast

His reaction to being called 'not fun' was to lie on the stairs with julia and drink champagne

He always wanted to be a dad, and he was, and then wanted to do it again

His mom has a strange hold over him, because once when he was a kid he broke an ashtray and now she still thinks he breaks everything

And he believes her

Until!!! He found out that his biggest talent is to UNBREAK THINGS

When Q's nervous, he runs his hands through his hair.

When they were kids and Q had a one sided crush on julia, he never said anything because he values their friendship

His reaction to being rejected by someone he loves was WIPING A TEAR whadkdmnxndns

Somehow his best idea to unite all his friends was to sing a freaking bowie song together

He was SO EXCITED about the possibility of Eliot choosing him to become a king too

He is such a nerdy bitch when Margo told him she loved the fillory books his reaction was to raise his eyebrows and say "..you did?"

When confronted by pretty boys, his reactions are reduced to: "uh huh."

"I didn't know you liked any of the quentins"

In the beginning of season 3, he was SO HAPPY about having a freaking quest

His iconic answer to "you're dying" is "aren't we all"

He never expressed ANY SHAME about his interest in men or his experiences with men

All vests look the same to him!

His first reaction to being told to blow a horse is to look at the horse's face. (What a gentleman!)

When he's wearing a man bun he leaves strands of hair to frame his face (they're TOTALLY long enough to fit in the bun sorry)

He high-fived Julia on screen at least twice

When he had to make up a mind prison for himself, he decided that both of his current crushes should be there and constantly hit on on him

The thing that made him lose trust in Alice is nothing but the fact that she couldn't trust the fact that he loved her

He told Julia that a hot boy is "sweatin' her"!!

He likes to read books under a tree in the middle of campus like a freaking fanfic girl

He has a hard time taking off sweaters jxbx

Hearing Eliot say that him and Margo should come to Julia's birthday party so he could find his way back to brakebills after made Q smile SO BIG

A chandelier nearly fell on his head and killed him, and his reaction was "Jesus shit"

Alternatively, his reaction to being abused by a depression monster was "Jesus fuck"

He's an easy target because he's honest about what he loves!!

He believes in magic, and loves it pure and simple

After only knowing Eliot and Margo for a couple of weeks, Q hugged Margo and promised that they were going to do whatever they can to help Eliot because he's been sad lately

While taking a tour in Christopher plover's house, he stopped to take a selfie!!

Q can't have a sex dream without his brain reminding him that he's not passing the bechdel test

Q jumped over a couch to get to Margo quickly

He used to describe himself as a nothingmancer

He looks very cute lying on the floor covered in ropes

His version of seducing is mouthing the word "fuck"

He doesn't have brain cells to spare!!

His reaction to Alice complaining about the cold is to zip up his own jacket

His reaction to past!alice aggressively trying to have sex with him was "oh god okay"

Followed by "i forgot condoms" (Which were on the nightstand right next to him)

Followed by running out of the room

After getting burnt by a hot dagger, he sucked on his thumb sadly looking at penny making the same mistake

He met three dragons and he's done with them

"You let go of Falkor'"

I still can't remember why he danced in a circle after Alice died while Eliot and Margo are watching but he sure did

That smile before dropping the towel when he was with emily sjdbb

When he realized that the arrow was from fillory and confidently said "we can do this"

"Royalty bitches" (!!)

Q tried to copy the answers from penny while taking the test to get into brakebills

His answer to "feel anything?" straight up was "super stressed out"

The idea of fillory saved his life

"Honestly, fuck fillory" jxbx

He voted to test the magical knife on plover!!

His smile to learning Margo's in love and still a bitch!!

That shot of him struggling with his sweater behind Julia looking gorgeous

"Phosphoromancy bitches!"

He loves card tricks so much jgcv

"Hey, I, mm.." (you know)

"Why the fuck not?"

Him smiling at Margo and Eliot barbecuing from afar, because he knows he found his people and his place.

He just LOVES wine

Not really a scene but that one pic of him on the mosaic passionately talking about something despite Eliot looking at him with confusion

"Not everything has to look like something, ELIOT."

Q accidentally killed the physical kids' immortal puppy by trying to cure him. "Oh no." "You killed cancer puppy."

when he gets back from brakebills South and sees Eliot made drinks so he says THANK GOD and takes them smndn

Bonus: he is definitely a huffelpuff

#the magicians #quentin coldwater

487 notes · View notes

ebaeschnbliah · 4 years

Text

PAIRS … TWINS … DOUBLE OHs

________________________________________________________________

Twins? … It’s never twins! … But there's always two of us! Two of us against the rest of the world!

There is something about the number 2 in Sherlock BBC, which is impossible not to see after the course of thirteen episodes. And a lot has already been written about it by various people. ‘Two’ and several names which are also meant to express a number of ‘two’ - like double, couple, pair, twins - turn up time and again throughout the whole story.

A summary and some musings on the topic below the cut ...

The two beginnings

First of all, Sherlock BBC is a story with two starting episodes, which in itself isn’t unusual. And yet, if one takes a closer look, there are some things - just minor details - that seem to be a little bit strange after all. The two points of beginning are:

THE UNAIRED PILOT - a 60 min episode called ‘A study in pink’

A STUDY IN PINK - the 90 min official first episode of S1

An extension of 30 min naturally leads to differences, as does a change in directing. The unaired PILOT was directed by Mary Rose Helen Giedroyc, Lady Bowyer-Smyth, known as Coky Giedroyc. The BBC decided not to broadcast the episode because they wished to change the length to 90 minutes. The PILOT was released on the DVD of the first series, and it proved to be slightly different from the final 90 min version, directed by Paul McGuigan.

However … there are certain changes between PILOT and ASIP which seem … odd. Most of all though, some seem quite unnecessary.

Angelo went to prison for car-jacking in PILOT ... for house-breaking in ASIP.

Sherlock can identify (by looking at the hands) a retired plumber in PILOT … an airline pilot in ASIP. (plumber/water, pilot/air … an interesting change)

Northumberland Terrace in PILOT changes into Northumberland Street in ASIP.

The barking dog can be first heard at the end of PILOT and at the beginning of ASIP.

Sherlock and John meet at 221b for the first time on January 14th in PILOT … on January 29th in ASIP (according to John’s blog). The victim prior to the lady in pink dies on January 27th (stated on screen).

The visual appearance changes from natural, vivid colours in PILOT ... to pale and cold colours in ASIP. Especially Sherlock looks like a marble statue in some scenes.

The attraction between Sherlock and John is a much stronger one in PILOT than in ASIP. The PILOT episode isn’t called ‘gay pilot’ for nothing.

Virtually all the scenes from PILOT which have been taken over to ASIP are shot mirrored. The brilliant video Mirror Mirror Mirror by @kateis-cakeis shows this in detail.

If anyone is interested, @callie-ariane did a wonderful script comparison of PILOT and ASIP, side by side, on a download PDF here. This comparison reveals that the biggest parts that have been changed for ASIP are:

the addition of a fifth victim

a short description of the victims

the visual introduction of Mycroft

the (very early) intoduction of Jim Moriarty compared to canon

the transfer of the showdown between Sherlock and Jeff Hope, from the Baker Street 221b living room to the Roland-Kerr Further Education College

All of these are understandable decisions. Even the different visual appearance can be easily explained by the work of another director …. though regarding Sherlock BBC, an amendment like this would largely depend on the creators themselves, I guess.

What’s really odd though are all those little, seemingly unnecessary changes listed above. What makes the difference between car-jacking and house-breaking … between terrace and street … between plumber and pilot … between January 14th and 29th? And the mirrored shooting of almost all the reused scenes. Doesn’t this need a rewriting of all the shooting scripts in question? This seems to be a load of unnecessary extra work for an extension of 30 min .. Anyway, be it coincidence or purpose, there are a lot more ‘2s’ interwoven in this story.

Playing with contrasts happens regularly … red&blue, fire&water, burning&drowning, high above&deep down, no-one&anyone, big&small, consulting criminal&consulting detective ...

Playing with the meaning and double meaning of names and words is also quite common in Sherlock BBC … John/Hamish, sister/nun, brother/monk, beech/beach, rooster/cock, cock/penis, game/game, Underground/underground ...

A choice between two possibilities happens several times …. good bottle or bad bottle, saint or sinner, James or John, forwards or backwards ...

Two twin-houses

Roland-Kerr Further Education College is the place where Jeff Hope takes Sherlock for his ‘good bottle-bad bottle’ game near the end of ASIP. The Cardiff Univerity main-building had been used as film-set and for this scene the building was altered and mirrored to give the appearance of two identical buildings. (Cardiff University (x) (x) (x)

Twenty-three and twenty-four Leinster Gardens ... the empty houses ... appear in HLV. They are Sherlock’s property and Mary’s face is projected on them when Sherlock compaires her to a facade. Originally, there was only one ‘empty house’ in canon, situated opposite 221b Baker Street. Strangely, the place from which John shoots Hope in PILOT would conform to the empty house from canon. (Empty houses The impossible house)

Two high security facilities … with several levels below ground, are visited by Sherlock

Baskerville, the military compound where the fear inducing HOUND aerosol is created. Skulls and crossed bones are displayed on the danger signs.

Sherrinford, the special prison where Eurus, the sister turned into a ghost story, is locked up behind elephant glass. Two ‘pirates’ enter the island.

Two landladies rent a flat to a male couple

Mrs Hudson rents a flat to Sherlock and John and asks them if they will be needing two bedrooms.

Mrs Turner, next door, rents a flat to a married couple. Mrs Turner appears in ACDs story ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ as landlady of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

Two skulls reside in the 221b livingroom. The inflexible bone skull on the mantlepiece next to the statue of the ancient Chinese bowman and the changeable blue skull painting on the wall behind the sofa next to the equally changeable yellow smiley.

Two palaces with partly similar looking interior …. Buckingham Palace and Sherlock’s mind palace (x)

The secret code in TBB is written in ancient cyphers which always come in pairs. The numbers are references to specific pages of a book and to specific words on those pages.

Two neat plans and two rehearsals

The flight of the dead - code 007 Bond Air from ASIB & the similar project of the plane crash in Dusseldorf prior.

The attempted murder of Major Sholto - room number 207 from TSOT & the rehearsal of it involving Private Bainbridge prior.

Two '00′ (double oh) can be heard related to the ‘neat’ plans (x)

In ASIB the number ‘double oh seven’ uttered by Mycroft, refers to the plane he intends to use for the ‘flight of the dead’.

In TSOT the number on Sholto’s door reads 207 - ‘two oh seven' - Mary calls it.

Doppelganger bodies appear conveniently and seemingly out of nowhere to cover up the fake deaths of Sherlock, Irene and Emelia.

Janus Cars … is the car hire company; assiciated with Jim Moriarty, who helpes clients to fake their death. In ancient Rome Janus was the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He usually is depicted with two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past.

And there is also the not very subtle sexual double meaning hiding in plain sight behind the name of this car hire company ... J-anus C-ars … which basically are two different names for roughly the same area. :)

Two explosions hit 221 Baker Street. The first one, in TGG, comes from the outside. The second one, in TFP, comes from the inside.

Two countdowns from 10 to 1 happen ere someone is in danger to die.

The first one happens in TGG related to the fake Vermeer painting and the kidnapped child who wears a vest full of explosives. It’s he fourth cold case Sherlock has to solve.

The second one happens in TFP when Sherlock aims a gun at himself. It’s the fourth task Eurus has set up for him in Sherrinford in which he should choose between Mycroft and John.

Two ‘falls’ from great heigth come to pass in two episodes:

In TRF Sherlock throws himself down from Bart’s roof - to save his friends - after Jim Moriarty shot himself in the head.

In TAB Sherlock throws himself down a waterfall - without being forced - and follows Jim Moriarty into the abyss, flying and smiling.

Two reddish balloons represent ‘quite the guy’ John Watson in two episodes - TEH and TST.

Two roosters/cocks appear in two episodes which also contain two serial killers with certain similarities. In ASIP the cock is linked to John Watson. In TLD the cock is linked to Culverton Smith. (x)

Felines and canines appear in two different versions. One is harmless, like cats and dogs. One is dangerous, like lion and monster hound. (x)

Two pet animals of two children are taken away by a family member. Sherlock misses his dog Redbeard. Kirsty misses her rabbit Bluebell. (x)

Redbeard and Yellowbeard are the names little Victor and little Sherlock invented for themselves when they played pirates.

Two occurrences define Sherlock’s personality - Carl Powers and Victor Trevor:

‘It’s where I began’ … that’s how Sherlock describes the Carl Powers case about a drowned boy and his missing shoes.

‘Every choice you ever made; every path you’ve ever taken – the man you are today ... is your memory of Eurus’ … that’s how Mycroft descirbes the Eurus case about a drowned boy and a missing dog.

Two serial killers appear, who deem themselves nice. They like to talk to their victims and have quite noticeable teeth. Jefferson Hope in ASIP & Culverton Smith in TLD.

Two stillborn children play a role …. Rachel Wilson, her first name turns out to be the password of the pink ladies pink phone and Mary Morstan, whose identity was stolen by the woman who later becomes John’ s wife.

AMO & AMMO ... two almost identical words for love and explosives

Codename ‘AMO’ … is used by two different characters. Legally by Lady Smallwood & illegally by Vivian Norbury.

Two times Rosamund Mary …. the same name for mother and daughter

Two times Charles

Carl Powers, from TGG, is the boy who had a fit in the water and drowned.

Charlie Welsborough, from TST, is the boy who had a fit in a car and burned.

Two times Faith … Culverton Smith’s daughter, mirror for John, is envisiond by Sherlock as two different persons. (x)

Two variations of the name James … Jim (short for James) Moriarty & John Hamish (Scotish for James) Watson.

Musgrave and Trevor … Reginald Musgrave and Victor Trevor are original characters who appear in two canon stories (Musgrave Ritual & Gloria Scott) which are the only ones linked to Sherlock’s time at university. TFP combines those stories and connects them to a trauma Sherlock might have experienced in his childhood..

Two problematic sisters

John and Sherlock, each ot the two men has a ‘problematic’ sister. John’s sister Harry is an alcoholic and Sherlock’s sister Eurus is locked up since childhood in a high security facility because she is a dangerous genius.

Eurus is revealed on screen only by the end of the (for now) penultimate episode. Harry has still no visual appearance at all.

There is hardly any contact between the siblings during the majority of the story. They ‘don’t get on’ with each other or are completely forgotten at all.

Harry is listed as potential pressure point for John by Magnussen, while Eurus is a potential pressure point for Sherlock, used by Mycroft.

Both sisters are called by male names

Both sisters are mistaken for brothers by Sherlock as well as John, when they are first mentioned in their presence.

These are enough similarities between those mysterious sisters to call it quite strange, I think. Mycroft’s advice for Sherlock comes to mind:

SHERLOCK: For one person to be in both groups ... could be a coincidence. MYCROFT: Oh, Sherlock. What do we say about coincidence? SHERLOCK: The universe is rarely so lazy.

As much as Harry and Eurus seem to have in common, there’s one big difference. While Eurus lives her lonely life mostly behind elephant glass, Harry had been married with Clara for some time. But three months before John and Sherlock meet, the women split up and got a divorce.

A Catherine hiding in plain sight

As @shylockgnomes pointed out in her post about the 'High incidence of Katherines’ in Sherlock BBC, the name Clara basically has the same meaning as Catherine … bright, clear, clean, pure. Clara seems to be a Catherine hiding in plain sight, one might say.

Catherine is of Greek origin and became later, in the early Christian era, associated with the Greek ‘katharos’ … meaning ‘pure’. Earlier derivations list as possible roots for Catherine the name of the goddess Hekate and the Greek name Hekaterine ... meaning ‘each of the two’.

And this is the point where especially one possible meaning behind the name Catherine ... ‘each of the two’ … becomes highly interesting for a story packed full of pairs, couples, double ohs and twins.

Each of the two - what might this mean?

Does it refer to two autonomous characters like Sherlock and John or does it refer to two different versions of one and the same character. What if we are dealing with two John’s in this story (alongside with two Sherlock’s)? Two of a kind for each of the two ... but not twins.

John Watson seems to be the character everything else circles around inside Sherlock’s mind palace. But there is a great difference between the John Watson of the PILOT and the one in ASIP. While PILOT-John seems to have not much problems to show his romantic interrest in Sherlock, the same character is much more restrained in ASIP. This attitude grows constantly over the course of the story, until it reaches an absolute low point in TLD. John claims again and again, in almost each episode, that he’s not gay. He downgrades Sherlock’s introduction of him from ‘friend’ to ‘colleague’. He tries to teach Sherlock the appropriate interaction with other people and the correct social behaviour … even when it is quite clear that Sherlock doesn’t like it. He jokes about some of Sherlock’s special characteristics with mutual friends and even tells him to ‘be not himself’ and demands that Sherlock should ‘hold himself to a higher standard’ because of the people who read the stories. And alongside those repeated verbal rebukes there’s also a constant increase of physical violence.

For more than a century the friendship and love between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson is known to be among the most famous in literature. It hardly ever happens that the one appears without the other. Not one of the many adaptations I ever watched, depicts the ‘good doctor’ as someone who behaves like John Watson in Sherlock BBC. This John Watson becomes more and more out of character as the story runs along. Sometimes it’s almost as if this man isn’t THE John Watson at all.

‘When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains must be the truth’ … that’s a main principle of Sherlock Holmes. If this John Watson is so very much OOC, perhaps this is so, because he isn’t THE John Watson?

Viewing all the characters on Sherlock’s mind stage as aspects, as certain opinions he has on various matters, and not as autonomous real-life people, it could be entirely possible that Sherlock tries to analyze his attitude towards a romantic/sexual relationship by creating different ‘editions’ of John Watson. The special attempt of a genius brain to fathom out his own feelings, desires and fears. If so, are there any indications in this story that more than one John Watson is present?

Two times John?

As mentioned in this post, there exists a scene in PILOT in which John appears twice in one single shot. It happens during the taxi ride to the crime scene of the pink lady, when Sherlock explains his first deductions about John to John. In one of the flashbacks John can be seen entering the lab while he is already inside, offering Sherlock his phone.

Recently I discovered that a similar shot exists in ASIP as well. It’s also in one of the flashbacks during the taxi ride to the crime scene of the pink lady, when Sherlock explains his first deductions about John to John. ‘Wounded in action, suntan – Afghanistan or Iraq’ … that’s the exact point when it happens. This time though the appearance of the ‘second John’ is rather colourful. One might even say … rainbowy. :)

Hope and Faith

The Lying Detecive is the (for now) penultimate episode of the story and very closely connected to A Study in Pink. Each of the two episodes is about a serial killer who deems himself 'verging on nice’, loves to talk to his victims and displays quite noticeable teeth.

Jeff Hope from ASIP has two bottles to offer, good pills and bad pills full of ‘chemistry’, from which Sherlock is expected to choose one.

Culverton Smith from TLD has a daughter called Faith. With her bad leg and the cane, she’s very obviously a mirror for John. The included flashback to John limping away from the pink lady’s crime scene and also the scene in which Faith’s gun gets thrown into the Thames (like John’s in PILOT), underpins the mirroring even more. Faith is displayed as two similar looking but entirely different persons.

As it turns out later, one of the two Faith’s is actually Eurus, Sherlock’s 'other one’, his sister who gets mistaken for a brother (like John’s sister Harry). Eurus represents Sherlock’s emotional side … especially with regards to his feelings for John … hence Faith’s display as John’s mirror with cane and limp.

TBB and the theory of two John’s

The Blind Banker has proven again and again that this episode is the user manual for Sherlock BBC. If there are indeed two different John’s - respectively Sherlock’s - put into this story, TBB should confirm this theory. Are there two John’s/Sherlock’s included in TBB? Yes, surprisinly, there are.

In this episode John as well as Sherlock are presented as double mirrors. Due to several random and minor incidents, General Shan mistakes John for Sherlock.

Debit card, name of S. Holmes.

A cheque for five thousand pounds made out in the name of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Tickets from the theatre, collected by you, name of Holmes.

We heard it from your own mouth. “I am Sherlock Holmes and I always work alone …”

And so, in General Shan’s view, John becomes Sherlock and Sarah - the ‘pretty doctor companion’ - turns into John. Basically, in every scene in which those three characters interact with each other, there are indeed two John’s and two Sherlock’s present ‘on stage’. It seems the theory that both main characters are represented in two slightly different versions is not that farfetched after all.

That’s not the John Watson I know

There’s this short dialogue from ASIP, the first official episode of Sherlock BBC, (it doesn’t show up in PILOT) ... could it be another piece of evidence that there’s more than one John Watson in this story. Is this a classical case of ‘we told you, but did you listen’?

Two Johns? Two differnt aspects represented by the same character? One positive, one negative? Like Jeff Hope’s good and bad bottles? And also two Sherlock’s?

The concept of an inflexible, unchangeable relationship between ‘eternal’ just-friends, the same as it has been for over a century. A version that will slowly kill Sherlock internally until he ends in the solitude of the Sussex Downs all alone with his bees? Again ...

And the other concept … a finally changed 'new’ friend, a different John, who falls in love with Sherlock Holmes at first sight and never leaves him again? And a Sherlock Holmes who gives in to the softer emotions and his neglected ‘transport’. A man who finally drops his facade to accept love, romance and sex in his life?

The detective and his doctor who, at long last, leave their crime scene and have dinner with each other (fulfill their desire) at a lovely Chinese (emotional) restaurant. :)))

More about pairs: Things coming in pairs Couples & Pairs Double oh 7 - Bond Air is go

I leave you to your own deductions. Thanks @callie-ariane for the scripts.

December, 2019

#pairs Twins double ohs #pairs #twins #double ohs #sign of two #couples #metaphorical reading #sherlock bbc #two concepts #two versions

21 notes · View notes

hamboneandcheese · 5 years

Text

Real quotes from the kids in my class.

“this book is boring - not at all like the mommy bloggers, its like three women, three blogs, so many lies.” CH

“this monster [locaha] has a foot fetish” CH

“I’m going to eat my muffin now. don’t tell.” CH

“cracking a cold one with the grandfathers” NP

“Trudy does kind of sound like a stripper name” CH

Trying to explain the difference between a woman and a lady “A woman has a man in it” JM

“I used to have a crush on Isaac at the start of the year, but then i found his Spotify playlist and realised i had made a mistake.” “Really? what does he listen to?” “Aww you know, Britney Spears?” NW

“get roasted” turns around to friend” is that the right usage of the word nina?” CH

“frick off” ”hey thats not nice” TO

“hot take: is squidward fucking spongebob?” “yeah, but what hole?” “all of them - he’s a squid for a reason.” SY

“i like big boys, itty bitty big boys, missisipi city boys wait are you filming stop” JM

“if you don’t get skin cancer before age twenty are you even Australian” AH

“everybody! everybody! gang gang! fam fam!” CH

“You’re a bone” TO

“Why is my skin so fat i can’t write on it.” NP

“Yo, I’m writing left handed” “Yo, you’re a god” NP

“you’re gonna be a wrinkly prune” CH

“Charlotte, I’m allowed to have a personality” TI

“I’m a caps-lock boy” NP

“can you hold my book i need to eat a pickle” CH

“our class is not going to be prematurely aged” CH

“he got tricked into suicide””wow, get pranked by prank patrol” BOBBY THATS NOT A PRANK”

“Toby you look like a barista. It’s a look.” CH

“No one sucks the back of my neck” NP

talking about penis size “one a scale from one to ten, with ten the biggest and one the smallest, its sixty-nine” NP

“Don’t mess up my hair before business” CH

“Fred was a youtuber back in the olden days.”

“You know, when the turtles die, we will all oop.” TO

*In the middle of an exam* “I hate ooshies, they’re so ugly.” CH

“Syntax error, lets goooo” NP

“I’m not nice I’m spice.” CH

“Sebastian cares way too much about his education to be in this class” ES

“Rohan’s brother is a mummy lover” CH

“My eyes hurt from rolling them too hard.” NW

“Dude, i’m literally an octagon right now.” SD

“I feel like if someone’s too short, you can’t trust them. its like what are they hiding.” CH

“I’m literally a circular prism.” CH

“stop summoning the devil in this classroom. that’s an outside activity.” CH

takes earphones out in the middle of a song “[whispers] tilly they said a bad word.” CH

“i’m sure elon musk will make a car that can go to the sun soon enough.” CH

“you’ve mentioned elon must twice in the last five minutes””i did a powerpoint on him this morning.” CH

“Stop destracting us charlotte” “I’m inspiring you.” CH

“guys, youth is just a social consturct made to sell more face creams.” HW

“when i feel sorry for people, i like them more, because its like im superior.” NW

“you’re very edgy. youre a veggie. haha get it a veggie? i made that up just now!” CH

“Eww.””Did you say my name?” NP

“my ear is infected but my music is dope.” CH

“My nan says she doesn’t permit us to get a tesla. its very upsetting.” CH

“Kanye West needs to take a Kanye Rest.” SY

“no i don’t like sksksksks. it sounds like my tinitis.” CH

“do you have a weed dungeon?””no I’m not Elon musk.” CH

#public school #quotes #inspirationalquotes #elon musk

9 notes · View notes

thisislizheather · 5 years

Text

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West - A Review

I’ve been waiting for this book of essays to come out for months and it was so, so worth the the wait. I know it’s asking a lot, but can this woman please just write a book every year? Or every six months? That’d be great, thanks. Favourite parts ahead!

“This moment in history is about more than individual interactions between individual people. Those matter, too - it matters how you made your subordinate feel with that comment, and it matters quite a lot that the woman on the bus went home and sobbed after you groped her - but, as Rebecca Traister wrote in December 2017 on The Cut: “This moment isn’t just about sex. It’s about work.” It’s about who feels at home in the workplace and who feels like an outsider - which, by extension, dictates who gets to thrive and ascend, who gets to hire their replacements, who gets to set their children up for success, who gets credit and glory, and who gets forgotten. It’s about who feels safe in public spaces and who doesn’t. Which is to say, it’s about everything.”

“We gobble up cable news’ insistence that both sides of an argument are equally valid and South Park’s insistence that both sides are equally stupid, because taking a firm stance on anything opens us up to criticism.”

“We kept letting Adam Sandler make more movies after Little Nicky, because white men are allowed to fail spectacularly and keep their jobs.”

There’s literally an entire chapter on Adam Sandler movies that is perfection. You have to read it. Seriously, just pick this up at a bookstore and read that one chapter, if nothing else.

I loved all of her points about how there was endless discussion about The Ted Bundy Tapes when it came out earlier this year and how we debated whether this murdering monster was handsome or not. And how that same type of debate is somehow in the same arena as when people debate whether Elizabeth Warren is “likable” or not.

There’s a part in the Ted Bundy special where the judge sympathizes with Bundy and goes on a ridiculous tangent about how it’s “such a shame” that he turned out that way when he had so much potential, it’s truly disgusting to see a judge commiserate with a rapist and murderer, but it happened and it’s wild to see. “That anecdote is often held up as evidence of Bundy’s charisma - even the judge sentencing him to death was seduced by that smirk, that finger wave. But it is the most blatant, overwhelming evidence we have for the opposite. Men don’t need charisma to succeed. It doesn’t matter if men are likable, because men are people who do things, who don’t have to ask first, whose potential has value even after it is squandered.”

“Chasing likability has been one of women’s biggest setbacks, by design. I don’t know that rejecting likability will get us anywhere, but I know that embracing it has gotten us nowhere.”

Absolutely in love with the fact that she loves the movie Clue as much as I do.

I really liked the chapter that she discussed Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, even if I did wish that she went in on her/the brand harder.

So in love with the chapter where she talks about South Park and its creators. I’ve always hated that show, it’s never been good, and I can’t understand who the hell would be into it. It’s never been funny, edgy, smart. Insane that it’s still on.

Maybe I’m really reading into it, but there’s a tiny part where she mentions that PETA sucks and I can’t stop all my little inside screams - it’s hard to find somewhere who dislikes all the same stuff as you.

“Men think that misogyny is a women’s issue; women’s to endure and women’s to fix. White people think that racism is a pet issue for people of color; not like the pure, economic grievances of the white working class. Rape is a rape victim’s problem: What was she wearing? Where was she walking? Had she had sex before?“

“Whenever talk turned toward solutions, the panel came back to mentorship: women lifting up other women. Assertiveness and leaning in and ironclad portfolios and marching into that interview and taking the space you deserve and changing the ratio and not letting Steve from accounting talk over you in the morning. During the closing question-and-answer period, a young woman stood up. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice electric with anger, “but all I’ve heard tonight are a bunch of things women can do to fight sexism. Why is that our job? We didn’t build the system. This audience should be full of men.”

“Sexism is a male invention. White supremacy is a white invention. Transphobia is a cisgender invention. So far, men have treated #MeToo like a bumbling dad in a detergent commercial: well intentioned by floundering, as though they are not the experts. You are the experts. Only 2.6 percent of construction workers are female. We did not install that glass ceiling, and it is not our responsibility to demolish it.”

When talking about what men can actually do to help women: ”“Do you ever stick up for me?” sounds childish, but I don’t know that gussying up the sentiment in more sophisticated language would enhance its meaning. It isn’t fun to be the one who speaks up. Our society has engineered robust consequences for squeaky wheels, a verdant pantheon from eye rolls all the way up to physical violence. One of the subtlest and most pervasive is social ostracism: coding empathy as the fun killer, consideration for others as an embarrassing weakness, and dissenting voices as out-of-touch, bleeding-heart dweebs (at best). Coolness is a fierce disciplinarian. A result is that, for the most part, the only people weathering those consequences are the ones who don’t have the luxury of staying quiet. Women, already impeded and imperiled by sexism, also have to carry the social stigma of being feminist buzzkills if they call attention to it. People of color not only have to deal with racism; they also have to deal with white people labeling them “angry” or “hostile” or “difficult” for objecting. What we could use is some loud, unequivocal backup.”

“I know there’s pressure not to be a dorky, try-hard male feminist stereotype; there’s always a looming implication that you could lose your spot in the boys’ club; if you seem too opportunistic or performative in your support, if you suck up too much oxygen and demand praise, women will yell at you for that, too. But I need you to absorb that risk. I need you to get yelled at and made fun of, a lot, and if you get kicked out of the club, I need you to be relieved, and I need you to help build a new one.”

The entire chapter about the complications with Joan Rivers is such a great one.

“You can hate someone and love them at the same time. Maybe that’s a natural side effect of searching for heroes in a world not built for you.”

Okay, so the only thing that we strongly disagree on is her previous love for Adam Carolla. Always hated that man.

““Common sense’” without growth, curiosity, or perspective eventually becomes conservatism and bitterness.”

“There are pieces of pop culture that you outgrow because you get older. Then there are pieces of pop culture that you outgrow because you get better.”

“Art has no obligation to evolve, but it has a powerful incentive to do so. Art that is static, that captures a dead moment, is nothing. It is, at best, nostalgia; at worst, it can be a blight on our sense of who we are, a shame we pack away. Artists who refuse to listen, participate, and change along with the world around them are not being silenced or punished by censorious college sophomores. They are letting obsolescence devour them, voluntarily. Political correctness is just the inexorable turn of the gear. Falling behind is preventable.”

Talking about Ricky Gervais:” “People see something they don’t like, and they expect it to stop,” he said. “The world is getting worse. Don’t get me wrong, I think I lived through the best fifty years of humanity, 1960 through 2015, the peak of civilization for everything. For tolerances, for freedoms, for communication, for medicine! And now it’s going the other way a little bit.” “Dumpster fire” has emerged as the favorite emblem of our present sociopolitical moment, but that Gervais quote feels more apt and more tragic as a metaphor: the Trump/Brexit era is a rich, famous, white, middle-aged man declaring the world to be in decline the moment he stops understanding it.”

“Adam Carolla isn’t angry because he’s being silenced; he’s angry because he’s being challenged. He’s been shown the road map to continued relevance, and it doesn’t lead back to his mansion. He’s angry because he’s being asked to do the basic work of maintaining a shared humanity or else be left behind. He’s choosing the past. Gervais and Carolla are not alone in presenting themselves as noble bulwarks against a wave of supposed leftwing censorship. (A Netflix special, for the record, is not what “silencing” looks like.)”

Talking Louis CK: “Less than a year after his vow to retreat and listen, CK made the laziest and most cowardly choice possible: to turn away from the difficult, necessary work of self-reflection, growth, and reparation, and run into the comforting arms of people who don’t think it’s that big a deal to show your penis to female subordinates. Conservatives adore a disgraced liberal who’s willing to pander to them because he’s too weak to grow. How pathetic to take them up on it.”

“Like every other feminist with a public platform, I am perpetually cast as a disapproving scold. But what’s the alternative? To approve? I do not approve.” - This is probably my most favourite line in the entire book

“Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it.”

“I’d been taught that when ordinary people try to do activism, they look stupid. Of course now I know that there is no effective activism without the passion and commitment of ordinary people and it is a basic duty of the privileged to show up and fight for issues that don’t affect us directly. But maintaining that separation has served the status quo well. It keeps good people always just shy of taking action. It’s tone policing. It’s the white moderate. But it’s changing.”

“Diet culture is a coercive, misogynist pyramid scheme that saps women’s economic and political power.”

Definitely the best thing I’ve read all year. GO BUY!

#The Witches Are Coming #Lindy West #this is liz heather #Liz Heather #book review #great book 2019 #great book fall 2019 #feminist #feminism book #feminism

1 note · View note

onlywhenitsraininglove-blog · 5 years

Text

The Carnage Chapter One

Note: Adult Content, Adult Language and Graphic Violence is used in this story. The adult content is not is NOT pornographic nor will it ever be. Adult language is what it is and the violence is graphic with some detail. Reader beware. If you are underage you should not read these stories!

These are Dark stories, meaning that the hero does not always win. I hope you enjoy and please feel free to comment what you like about it and don’t like about it, but please be respectful. Just saying you don’t like it or like it, does not help a writer.

These will be posted under the title and chapter and by chapter since some of these will be very long stories having many chapters.

These are a work of fiction and copywrite by the writer Michael Metzger Please do not copy but feel free to share by keep my name in each chapter which will be located at the bottom of each chapter. Thank you!

One:

True terror penetrates deep into the soul and portions out its depth of trepidation and anxiety in swells of apprehension and uncertainty. It berates the soul till it surrenders to the inevitable conclusion of its demise and true terror is what Tommy thrived on. It wasn’t sex or the overwhelming need to assert absolute control that drove him to murder but their absolute terror of him, of what he would do next. He fucked and tortured every single person he killed, not because the blood was a turn on, but their fear moved him deeply.

Tommy murdered his first person when he was only thirteen years old. It had been a messy kill, but he had learned much from it. It had been a homeless drunk that he had found sleeping in an old abandoned shamble of a building in Detroit, Michigan. The old drunk had put up a good fight at first, but eventually the razor sharp edge of the knife had started to have an effect, weakening him till he dropped unable to defend himself any further.

When the homeless man finally fell to the hard concrete, his knee’s buckling with pops and creaks of age, Tommy held out his small knife to his victim.

“Small cuts muthafucka,” He had said calmly to his victim. “It weakens you quickly, but doesn’t kill you.”

The homeless man, wondering what he had done to enrage this young man so much that he wanted him dead, looked up into the eyes of a devil. His fear seized him, oozing out his brown, alcohol blood shot eyes and saw a monster, but with the sweet innocent smile of a kid. That was when the torture started and he started screaming. He hadn’t even realized he was screaming until the smiling boy told him that no one was going to hear him.

With all the strength he could muster he spoke a single word, “Why?”

“Why?” The boy replied innocently, “Why will no one hear you, or why am I doing this to you?”

The boy had moved and was now lying directly on the man, seeing his face so close to his caused his breath to catch in his already tortured lungs.

“The answer is simple for both questions. The first being that you did this to yourself because you wanted to be so far away from everything else that now, your screams cannot be heard by anyone outside this building. Sorry, ole chap, but its a matter of opportunity. For the second question, well, why not?” Tommy smiled at him.

Then there was more screaming. Tommy took his time with his first victim. He wanted to relish this moment and remember it forever. He liked it when the guy screamed, it excited him immensely. So much so, that he orgasm’d in his pants three times.

When Tommy knew the guy could take no more, he tied a rope around his neck and hung him from a large concrete frame work in the center of the building. He masturbated as the guy kicked and bounced till his neck snapped and Tommy orgasm’d again. It had been a wonderful first experience for him, but he was covered in blood and the cops would be able to read this crime scene like the cover of a match book, only in the end, all of their conclusions were wrong.

The news media had called it a brutal murder and the police chief had eventually asked for the public’s help in apprehending the murderer or murderers. They suspected the killer was an older male, who had military training in hand to hand combat, was exceptional with a knife and who would be big enough to overwhelm the victim with ease. Tommy had got away with it. He was in the clear. After all, he was only thirteen and not old enough to have military experience.

As he sat watching the news again for word of his latest kill and reminiscing about that first time twelve and a half years ago when a new idea entered his mind. It wasn’t the news caster that was talking currently, but rather the one from that long ago time in his head. He had said something interesting. Why had Tommy not thought of this before? The news caster had said that the community was in fear that a brutal murderer was out walking their streets right now and no one knew who it was.

“The community was in fear,” He spoke it out loud, savoring the taste it produced in his mouth as if he were actually sitting at a fine dining restaurant right now having a nice Beef Wellington and making his mouth water. His penis was growing hard with excitement too and that was always a good indicator he was onto something.

He had heard those words before in other news casts, but this time it harmonized in him the way a good Beef Wellington would. He let the flavor of the idea transcend his conscience mind and take him to where it wanted to go. Then he got it. In all the thirteen years he had been killing people, he had never earned a name.

To date, he had killed twenty two people and the cops had never come close to discovering who actually killed them. But because he didn’t only kill in one place and in fact always traveled for his kills, no one actually knew there was a serial killer on the loose. The media had never given him a name because they had always considered the event to be a single event. He had never killed in the same place twice.

The truth was Tommy didn’t want to be caught. He liked killing and wanted to continue for many more years. Those who communicated with police or media were asking to get caught and that wasn’t for Tommy. The B.T.K. killer could have died of old age without ever having been arrested if he hadn’t written notes on cereal boxes to the cops and letters to the media outlets. It was a fool’s path.

But a name would imply more fear. His victims would know who was killing them and why. Tommy not only wanted, but needed a name and that would mean some changes. He needed an idea that he carried around with him and one that would let the cops and media know he was out there. It would certainly make the killing more interesting. But what would he do?

The realm of possibilities was immense. He had almost already killed at least one in every category he could think of. Children were always good because they produced the most fear for him and that was a requirement. But only focusing on children was not just dumb, it was out right asking to get caught. Go kill a bunch of kids as see how fast the law would invest in your capture! It would only take one child getting killed to cause this as he had seen on the two children he had killed already and those had been thousands of miles apart and completely different in the methods they died.

What was funny was that the murder he committed of Ethan Creon, a twelve year old, good looking boy had been pinned on another child killer who took over killing children in that county after Tommy’s own was broadcast all over the media. His focus had been on boys, namely blond haired boys who were good looking kids. The idiot should have considered that before he took over on the murderous spree that lasted almost six months before he got caught.

The girl he killed remained unsolved and the cops had actually given up on trying to find new clues. But when Tommy committed the murder of a child, he was sure to leave nothing. Not a part of his flesh touched that child and if it had, their bodies would never have been found. It would have negated any pleasure for him due to the high risk of killing children. He loved the fear they produced, but not the risk.

So Tommy eliminated children off the list quickly. The elderly followed soon after since they hardly ever produced enough fear to even stimulate him. The elderly had already lived a full life and, well, in Tommy’s mind, just gave up. They accepted their eventual deaths and died much quicker then he wanted. So they too could be removed from his list.

Those with sever mental retardation were just out of the picture entirely. They were unaware of the eventuality of death and while he had never killed on from this group, he also had no desire too. The mentally ill was always fun. Some of them were real fighters and held onto life as long as possible, but there was an issue with them too.

First, they above all other groups required additional research. The reason for this was clear. Some mentally ill people actually wanted to die and one such victim had actually thanked him for saving the poor sucker from having to do it himself. Tommy had never repeated that mistake. Even if it meant breaking into a counseling office to look at his possible victims records to make sure they were not suicidal. It had been one if his biggest disappointments to date because the guy seemed to be vivacious and high spirited in his every day life.

The second issue is that society as a whole did not consider the mentally ill to be a category. Hell, not even the cops did. It was like they all just missed that huge category completely. Tommy didn’t want to have to do so much research either. That took time and trips to the victims city or town and Tommy would not focus on his local area. It was the golden rule for him. Never kill in the city, town or county you live in or the neighboring counties. You leave space between you and your kill.

Like a car, you allow yourself cushion around the other cars on the road. Cops were a lot less likely to discover who you were if you never lived in that state or even county. If you were smart enough to not leave DNA, then you wouldn’t have to worry about the CODIS hits either. It would never be found in the system. Even with touch DNA, if your skin didn’t touch them you wouldn’t leave those trace amounts and it had been apparent to Tommy early on that this would eventually become the case.

What Tommy needed was something that would set him apart from anyone else. A focus no one else had and with all the murderers there had ever been in the world there wasn’t much left that would be considered unique.

Tommy had been sitting at his desk in front of his laptop watching the news from Butler County Missouri where is last victim apparently still lay in a heavily wooded area off county road four twenty five. Tommy had found a small, old dirt track that went up the hill to an old mine. He had heard of people dumping bodies in those but he would never to that unless it was someone he didn’t want found.

He always monitored the news from the local communities where he committed his murders. It did a lot for him mentally. He liked hearing the first reports because it was always there that the words used to describe his brutality were the best. If a media outlet was exceptionally explicit and palpable in those choices it had the effect of putting a smile on his face and a bounce in his step.

As he sat there considering his options a new bleep occurred on the news papers website. It was a video. He clicked the play icon on the screen and put it to full screen view. At the bottom of the video was a red banner that said “Special Report” in bright gold letters. The screen flashed to a man wearing a dark blue suite with a deep melodic voice.

“Good afternoon, I am Miles Vallen with breaking news coming out of the Rolling Hills Mine area. The body of an unknown male has been discovered off the old mine road and had apparently been discovered by a couple of kids who were reported to have been walking up the road toward the mine. We have Millie Farr live on scene.”

The image changed to that of an older woman with straight black hair running past her shoulders and wearing a blue top. Her hair was starting to gray at the fringes and she looked slightly rushed. Tommy never could figure out why in such a small community where the nearest competing reporter was at least fifty miles away, they felt the need to rush things, but he was also glad they did. It was these rush jobs where he got the best descriptions. He listened.

“That’s right Miles. The body of a male was discovered about twenty minutes ago by Butler County Sheriff Deputy,” she paused to look at her note pad, “Deputy Jim Carneada who was first to arrive on scene. The Deputy had this to say.”

The image changed again to a tall slender young man, Tommy would guess was in his early twenties, with very short blond hair, blue eyes and a semi hawkish nose. He was clean shaven and the look on his face was priceless. He looked disturbed and disgusted, which pleased Tommy greatly.

“Yes we found the body of an unknown male just off the path to the mine.” The deputy was saying.

“Is there anything you can tell us Deputy? What kind of shape was the body in or hold old the victim is?”

“I can tell you its bad.” He swallowed hard and pursed his lips obviously reliving the nightmare scene. “Don’t know anything else, once I saw the scene I just backed out and ran to my car to call it in and get the tape to close it off.”

“Have you seen things like this before?” The reporter asked sounding concerned about how well the deputy was doing with this.

“I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies before, especially in Afghanistan, but I ain’t never seen anything like that. It’s bad.”

“Can you describe the scene to us deputy?”

He turned to look at her as if he was seeing her for the very first time.

“Why the hell would I do that? No, anyone who doesn’t need to see this doesn’t need it described in detail to them,” The deputy snapped. This excited Tommy even more.

“Can you tell us who the detective in charge is?” The female reporter asked, doing her best to sound concerned and interested in the facts.

“Do you see any detectives around here lady?” The deputy walked off in complete disgust.

The camera switched back to Miles in the studio.

“He seemed a little upset!” Miles suggested to the audience.

“Well from what I have been able to gather is that the crime scene was savagely vicious and it has obviously bothered this young deputy greatly.” Millie said unperturbed.

What she did was give back the attitude in order to save her reputation with not only her public but also other possible law enforcement officers who ever thought she would just take a criticism like that without rebuke. Tommy knew it was done specifically to help prevent it from happening again.

He loved the word she used too, “Savagely Vicious!” It just had a peculiar sound in his ears and a taste on his tongue that was sweet and wonderful. He liked this reporter. He thought it would be wonderful to pay her a visit. But he knew he would not.

“It sounds like a gruesome scene,” Miles said thoughtfully.

“The reaction of the deputy really brings it...” Millie turned as some woman in the background started to scream.

“My boy! That’s my boy!” The elderly woman screamed as other people gathered to take hold of her.

The camera started moving forward and focusing on the poor woman’s grief stricken face. Tears glistened in the daylight and she collapsed into arms that were holding her. After the camera got the episode on live television the camera panned back to Millie.

“It appears Miles, that one of the victims family had arrived...”

Tommy lost all recognition of the news broadcast. “Family!” He turned the word over in his mind several times, not realizing he was speaking out loud.

“Family!” A frown started to appear. The lines in his facial features deepened as the frown turned into a smile. “No one had done families before!” He had never heard of a serial killer whose primary focus was more then one person at a time. That was usually what they referred too as spree killers now. But families! It was the best of all killing! And the fear it would cause! Tommy came in his jeans.

copywrite Michael Metzger 2019

1 note · View note

preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

Text

It's Not Easy Being Green

by Dan H

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Dan gets his Minority Warrior freak on, big time~

So here's the deal.

Once upon a time, a heterosexual, white man from Oregon wrote a book dealing with complex issues of race, sexuality, imperialism, slavery and Otherness. Then a heterosexual, white man from Oxford read that book and decided that the heterosexual, white man from Oregon was Doing It Wrong and proceeded to complain about it on the internet.

This is one of those iffy things where I'm trying to defuse my own hypocrisy by drawing attention to it but I do genuinely feel that it's a problem when white people use racism as an excuse to score points off of other white people, or when men use sexism as an excuse to score points off other men (this last being one of my major issues with a lot of later Joss Whedon). This of course creates a bit of a paradox (paradox (n): convenient excuse for behaving like an inconsistent jackass) because you can't say “this guy is trying to use sexism to score points off other men” without doing the exact same thing yourself.

So umm ... yeah, that's what this article is going to be about. It's going to be me trying to score points off a guy called Jay Lake by complaining about the fact that he's trying to score points off me, while criticising his work as being skeevy on a variety of levels.

For what it's worth, part of the skeeviness in Green involves a certain amount of discussion of rape so: trigger warning.

Also spoiler warning, but you should expect that by now.

Where to begin:

Reverse Racism

One of the many quite positive things to come out of Racefail '09 were some interesting essays/articles/blogposts on the concept of “reverse racism”. Broadly, as far as I can tell, this was a reaction against a lot of discussions along the lines of, well, of the introductory sequence to Everyone's a Little Bit Racist where the white puppet “exposes” how racist the monster puppet is being for not letting him come so their Monster's Support Group. It's the sort of apologist claptrap you get all the time where somebody “insightfully” points out that having – say – an award for Music of Black Origin is racist because you couldn't have an award for Music of White Origin.

On the other hand there's another side to the whole “reverse-*ism” issue which is just as pernicious as the first.

A little while ago I had a trawl through the archives of

Girls Read Comics (and They're Pissed)

and found a post about a guy who had shown up and complained that they felt that female superheroes didn't make sense. But wait, they weren't being sexist, oh no. Because you see the thing is that they thought that women were too sensible and mature to be superheroes. Because you see superheroes are basically just adolescent power fantasies, and isn't it just us silly, silly men who need to dress up in tights and have fun beating up baddies. Aren't women so much betterthan that, with their caring natures and their ability to listen. Needless to say the girls at Girls Read Comics... were not amused.

Green reads a lot like that guy. All the bad guys are men. Most of them are white men. This wouldn't be a problem in itself, and I most certainly am not suggesting that it's “racist against whites” to have the bad guys all be white people. Rather the problem is that the whole book is shot through with some slightly creepy, faintly Victorian attitudes to women and to non-white cultures. Bad guys all white men? Fine. Bad guys all white men because they're the only people that appear to have volition and agency, while everybody else just kind of sits there quietly starving, not fine.

So anyway, I'm six hundred and something words in, and I'm still ploughing through disclaimers, I should probably start actually talking about the book. As always this isn't really a review, it's a response. The rest of this article is basically going to be in four parts. I'm going to take a look at the overall plot, then at the way the book deals with sexuality, then at how it deals with gender, then how it deals with race and the trappings of Empire.

The Story

The story of Green is as follows. Green lives until the age of three in somewhere that is vaguely like India. It isn't spelled out at the time, but she basically lives a life of grinding poverty and desperation. She is sold by her father (her mother and grandmother have both died – this is the start of a long sequence of Green suffering misfortunes because of Men) to a man named Federo, who carries her across the sea to Copper Downs. There she is raised at fantastic expense as a courtesan on behalf of somebody called “The Factor”, while Federo and a catgirl “dancing mistress” train her up to be a kickass ninja assassin.

At the age of twelve she escapes from whore school amidst much angst (there's a lot of angst in the book) but is still recruited by Federo and the Dancing Mistress to take out the immortal Duke who has ruled over Copper Downs for four centuries. This she duly does, before fleeing over the see to Selistan, her homeland.

She returns to Selistan, and finds her father's farm, only to realise that it's a horrible poverty-stricken wreck and that being a slave was probably the best thing that could possibly have happened to her (the “being enslaved and oppressed was the best thing that could happen to these people” theme is a recurring one, and one of my biggest sources of trouble with the book). Then she hangs out on the streets of a big quasi-Indian city, gets recruited by a temple of all-female death-worshippers wherein she has sadomasochistic lesbian sex. Then she gets sent back to Copper Downs to fight a God, where she has more lesbian sex. Then she has sex with a man and gets pregnant. Then she kills a god, and makes her father's ox into a new God of Patience. Then she settles down to raise her kid. The end.

It's three hundred pages long. It feels longer. Which is odd because not much actually happens in it.

Anyway, on to the things that I want to score points over.

Sexuality

Green has a whole lot of lesbian sex. Like a whole lot of lesbian sex. It starts at the temple in Kalimpura, where she leses up with the other initiates and the older “Mothers.”

Couple of things about this.

First off, at the time she is in fact somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Again, I know that gender reversal isn't always the best way to judge these things (again it comes down to the reverse-ism problem) but for a book that is so preoccupied with notions of sex, slavery, sex slavery and rape it's a tiny bit problematic that it completely glosses over the fact that it's not okay for forty year olds to shag fourteen year olds, even if both parties are women.

Now I know that Green is set in a pre-industrial society. I know that most fourteen year old girls in such a society would already have been married off but guess what: the text is very, very clear about the fact that this is bad. But apparently all these issues of consent, power, society and duty of care evaporate like spit on a soldering iron the moment it's time for a bit of girl-on-girl.

Ages ago I wrote an article about

Nice Guy Syndrome

and pointed out that Nice Guys and a certain variety of feminist-identified-man go to extraordinary lengths to demonise male sexuality. Green only “lies with” one man in the entire book, and he's a priest who normally takes it up the arse:

“You re my first woman.” Something in his voice grew very shy. “My first entry, in truth. I have only been the vessel, not the seed, within the temple rites.”

You later meet his high priest, and he's obviously evil, and gloats about priest-dude's tight arsehole. It's a theme that's repeated throughout the book: penetration is evil, but being penetrated builds virtue through suffering. Green encounters literally no heterosexual men (okay, tell a lie, there's one one-legged cook) who are not either rapists or would-be rapists. The fear of rape is something that dogs Green from the first page of the book to the last and rears its head every time she talks to somebody with a penis (unless that penis has been rendered safe by a good buggering).

Again (you see now why I put that long disclaimer at the start) I'm not claiming that this is “reverse sexism” or “reverse homophobia”. I'm claiming that it is regular sexism and regular homophobia.

Here is Green on the discovery of a gay man aboard a ship:

Love between women I could understand, but men were such careless brutes that I did not see how two of them could love without someone to dampen the blows and soften the curses. This opinion was a legacy of the Factor's house, I now know but some of those habits of thought were years in the erasing.

Two things. Firstly in the Factor's house, Green met literally no men. She was raised and trained entirely by women, many of whom beat her at the slightest provocation, so how she came to those conclusions I have no idea. Secondly that simply isn't a woman's perspective on gay sex. Not even a gay woman's. It's a heterosexual man's opinion, forced uncomfortably into the mouth of a young girl. It's an attitude grounded in the idea that women are the natural objects of sexual desire and men the natural agents of it.

Green has a lot of sex, but she never really has sexual agency. Yes, most of the time when she has sex it's because she chooses to, but what you never get from Green is the sense that she is, for want of a better term, horny. She never actually gives the impression of experiencing sexual desire, of looking at somebody and just plain wanting to fuck them. Much like Inara in FireflyGreen has sex as a kind of benediction. She has sex with the women in the Temple as part of an all-girls-together bonding ritual. She has sex with priest-dude because he, in essence, proves himself worthy by talking to her about mythology (and what gets fantasy writers hotter than their own mythology).

Lake's demonisation of male sexuality and valorisation of lesbianism reaches its height in the confrontation against the Big Bad. The villain has captured Green and the catgirl Dancing Mistress, and is getting ready to cut them both into pieces so that he can reclaim the last shards of the power he needs to become a full on god. How do Green and the Dancing Mistress get out of this situation? Why they les up! And the truly stupid thing is that it works. It works so well that the Big Bad actually stops torturing the two of them to death and – I shit you not - sits down and starts masturbating. Here's how it plays out:

I crawled back up to nuzzle her face. “Oh please,” I moaned, “kiss my thighs.” My voice would have had the Lily Blades falling out with laughter, but Federo just echoed the moan. He was the rankest of boys. Facing Federo as I sprawled on the floor, I ran my tongue across my lips. Mistress Cherlise had shown me a number of such little bits of playacting that would arrest a man's attention. The Dancing Mistress gripped my thighs hard and kissed me back and forth along the inner line of each leg, working down towards my knees. When she reset her grip to my calves and eased herself further away I nearly shrieked. Instead I rolled slightly to my left so Federo could see my right breast. He wasn't looking any more. His eyes were closed, his back arched in his chair as he stroked himself very hard. Outside, thunder rolled almost continuously.

If this was just stupid, I'd let it go. But it's not just stupid, it's stupid and it's sexist. And just to be very clear, to say for the third time something I am sure I will say again, I don't mean that it's “reverse sexist” or “sexist against men” I mean it's sexist. It's an offensive, patriarchal stereotype which harms women far more than it harms men.

The attitude expressed in the passage above, and repeated throughout the whole of the book, is that male sexuality is intrinsically corrupt, fundamentally violent, and ultimately controlled by women. While men (white men at least) are morally responsible for all of the evils in Green the practical responsibility lies always with women. When Green returns to Copper Downs, it is revealed that after she killed the Duke, the Factor's house where she was trained was destroyed, the remaining Mistresses killed, and the girls who were kept there raped to death. And who was responsible for the girls being raped to death? Why they were of course! Once the Duke was dead, there was nobody to restrain the guards, and so they did what all men will naturally do when faced with beautiful women, they raped them until they died. “Because of their beauty” as Green herself puts it.

This is a world of not okay. Yes, the novel is written in the first person, and Green's perceptions are likely to have been shaped by her extremely fucked up upbringing (although if that was the case, you'd expect her to be more comfortable with the notion of being sold into slavery, since it was all she had known) but the text routinely operates from the assumption that men are Slaves to Their Lusts, that when faced with a hot woman, men will completely lose their reason and cease to be responsible for their actions (if you want an example, scroll back up and read the boss-fight-wanking-scene again, is that the description of a man who is in control of himself?). Green's attitudes are not deconstructed or shown to be false or harmful, quite the opposite. By the end of the book, Green is assumed to be in possession of a true and accurate understanding of the truth about men and women, at least as Lake sees it.

This is wrong. Rape is not some kind of natural disaster, something that just happens like a hurricane or an earthquake. It is not an occupational hazard of having a vagina, and it most certainly is not a fucking compliment (“because of their beauty” my arse). By the same token, lesbian sex is real sex, and lesbian sexual abuse is real sexual abuse. An institution in which forty year old women fuck thirteen year old girls is exactly as abusive as one in which the forty-year-olds are men.

Gender

I've touched on this already, but I'll just go over the basics again.

Men = bad people who have nasty things like ambitions and desires and sexual appetites.

Women = good people who have nice things like patience and wisdom and did I mention patience?

Again, I should come clean here and mention that the reason I'm so profoundly sensitive to this kind of thing is that I really do appreciate the temptation of this line of thinking. It's amazingly comforting as a man to bury your sexist, patronising bullshit under layer upon layer of “well really, I think women are superior to men” but sexist, patronising bullshit it remains.

Green (the novel) is preoccupied with Women. Green (the character) is preoccupied with Women as well. Unfortunately neither the novel nor the character are actually interested in women. For the benefit of those who don't have the patience for my smug games with capitalisation, the distinction I'm alluding to is between “Women” with a capital “W” - a broad impersonal concept chiefly designed to allow men to score points off of other men – versus women with a small w, actual people with names and personalities. Again this is something I've been guilty of myself, allowing my very real concern for the way that Men treat Women to blind me to the way I personally was treating actual people.

Green is obsessed with women, and in a peculiarly self-conscious way. She habitually uses the word “woman” to mean “people in general” (and even more peculiarly, sometimes uses “girl-child” to mean “children in general”). Now in all seriousness I do get that there are issues with using specifically masculine pronouns to describe people-in-general, but Green was born in one patriarchal society, and raised in another, where did she pick up the habit of using feminine pronouns?

Similarly she spends the entire book talking, talking, talking about how badly she wants to protect Women and children and did I mention Women. The problem is that she never actually does anything about it. Now I know she's only fifteen by the time the book finishes, but we spend the entire book being told how utterly precocious and omnicompetent she is and you can't have it both ways. Either it's a book about a powerful, independent woman who triumphs in the face of the horrors she faces, or it's about a broken woman who is destroyed by the people who enslave her and remade into their image. If she's as awesome as everybody says she is, she should damned well do something about those injustices instead of just talking about them.

It doesn't help that while Green goes on and on and on about Women and Girls, there isn't a single woman or girl she actually displays any compassion for or indeed interest in. Green as a character is relentlessly self-absorbed. One gets the impression that we are supposed to take the mere fact of her being a woman as evidence of virtue.

This is, in itself, mildly irritating, but it's so all pervasive in the text that it goes beyond “irritating” into “faintly skeevy”. Green (the novel) consistently refuses to allow women to be responsible for their own actions. Green herself never actually makes a decision, she gets bought at the age of three, and is then controlled entirely by the Factor, then by Federo and the Dancing Mistress, then by the Lily Goddess. Worse, she makes up for this by beating herself up about things that she has no control over whatsoever (like the aforesaid raping to death of the girls in the Factor's house). It all contributes to a worldview in which women are seen as incapable of acting for themselves, or controlling their own destinies. Even when female characters do things which are genuinely morally repugnant (violently beating a twelve year old girl, engaging in sexual activity with minors in their care) those things are either assumed to be acceptable (see “sex, lesbian”) or blamed on Men (see “beatings, violent”). Even Green's decision to cut up her own face is explicitly taken away from her and given to the nebulous They.

Basically Lake is so fixated on making the book about Women, Women, Women that he completely forgets to include any well-realised, sympathetic female characters.

Green (the book) is full of Goddess imagery. There are constant references to the obligatory maiden, mother and crone, and it is I think deliberate that Green starts the book as a child and ends it as a mother. Similarly virtually all of the female characters fit somewhere into the Triune – often explicitly, such as in the Lily Temple where the initiates specifically progress to being “Mothers”. Of course the problem with this is that it essentially reduces all women everywhere to three archetypes, and worse because it romanticises those archetypes it fails to recognise how limiting and constricting they are. It puts women in a box, then puts the box on a pedestal.

Race and Empire

This is the difficult bit. As ever there's nothing more dangerous than invoking the spectre of (whisper it) racism.

Once more I should say very, very clearly that I'm not actually calling Jay Lake a racist. He did sit down and write a book about a pseudo-south-Asian protagonist (although she is, of course, white on the cover) and much as I like to complain, the pseudo-Indian city of Kalimpura has as much imagination invested in it as Copper Downs. The book deals with some extremely complex, extremely sensitive issues, and if I were feeling like less of an asshole I'd probably give it some major points for trying. But I'm not, so I won't.

Green deals with some extremely complicated issues such as slavery, abuse, imperialism, and human trafficking (much like Dollhouse in fact). One of the most difficult things to deal with when handling the subject of abuse is the extent to which an abuse survivor is shaped by their experiences, the extent to which they – to use a loaded term – owe who they are to the events that shaped them. Post-imperial or post-colonial cultures have a similarly difficult relationship with their past, an occupying force brings stability and infrastructure and the removal of that infrastructure frequently causes as much trouble as the imposition of it. When a great injustice occurs – either to an individual or to a people – it can sometimes be hard to tell how much of what follows is because of that injustice, and how much is in spite of it.

Green beings the book being sold into slavery by her father. She observes, early on, that the food she is given by Federo is better than any meal she has had in her entire life. This itself isn't a problem. It's entirely reasonable that the food available to a rich human trafficker will be higher quality and more abundant than the food available to a subsistence-level rice farmer. To begin with, the issue of contrast between her old life and her new life is handled with sensitivity, Green seems genuinely conflicted about the fact that she is, in many ways, better off in Copper Downs. This feels believable and relatively respectful to Green, her culture, and her circumstances. She obviously feels a lot of guilt about finding some aspects of Copper Downs better than her old life, and the things she prefers are basically issues of material comfort.

It gets worse, considerably worse, when she returns to her home. Suddenly Copper Downs goes from being not merely more affluent than her homeland but objectively better. Green states, quite clearly, that:

My captors had been right. Rather I should have been on my knees thanking the Factor for what he had taken me from.

Now I know that this is partly Green giving in to despair, but nothing in the text challenges this conclusion. It's rather an object lesson in the dangers of taking on too many genre stereotypes at once.

Had this been the story of a white man who was taken away from his pseudo-European farming village and conscripted into the armies of the Dark Lord of Evil then I would have been overjoyed to find him returning home to realise that his long lost homeland was a poverty stricken shithole and his father was a bastard who never cared about him. It would challenge the assumptions of a genre that frequently glamourises poverty, and it wouldn't have any creepy overtones (unless you want to make a big thing about militarism).

Make the white man a south-Asian woman, however, and you start getting into difficulties, because now you're not saying “being poor sucks” you're saying “being foreign sucks”. Turn conscription into slavery and you're not saying “you might be better off in the army than on a farm” you're saying “you might be better off as a slave in Europe than as a free man in your own country.” Add in the courtesan angle and you're saying “it is a good thing for south-Asian women to be sold as sex slaves to European men.”

I hope I don't need to point out that this really isn't okay.

Green (the book) takes another hop, step and jump closer to a pit of utter fail when Green (the character) notices that her father's Ox – an image she clung to from childhood – has grown old in her absence:

He was a beast too, of course. Though somehow less animal than Papa, now.

That's right folks, the book directly compares poor people from hot countries to animals(compares them unfavourably to animals, in fact). Now to be fair her father has gone mad by this point (mostly it seems in order to conveniently prevent Green from finding out her birth name) but that only makes it ablist as well as racist. Sorry, I mean “possible to interpret as racist” because while comparing brown people to animals is dodgy, suggesting that a white man might be prejudiced is unforgivable.

The fucked up imperialist dogma actually reaches its peak, however, with the treatment of the “pardines” - the race of cat-people of whom Green's Dancing Mistress is one (the pardines do not tell their names to outsiders, much like the jellyfish dudes in Mass Effect). Now an early plot point in Green is that the power which allowed the Duke to maintain his immortality had been stolen from the pardines, much to the detriment of their people.

At the end of the book, Green confronts the ghost of the Duke (who was also the Factor, by the way) and he explains to her that actually stealing the power of the pardines was the right thing to do:

“Your crime,” I growled, “was to strip power from a peaceful people and bind it to yourself.” “How peaceful were those people?” Now his face flared with passion to match my own. “Do you know of the last war this city did fight? Under me, as a living man? We battled the pardines. In their time they were terrible hunters and raiders. Others followed them, thinking by their appearance that they were wise and powerful. The shared path they have instead of souls lent them a strength in this world that could not be matched. Over a thousand men were lost wrestling them down. I took what they used to wreak the death of farmers and children and traders, stripped it from them, and made peace for Copper Downs. I even made peace for them.”

Now as the subjective self-justification of the ghost of a tyrant, this is all well and good, but the problem is that it isn't. It's a pure statement of fact. Green accepts it as gospel and – and this is the really weird bit – so does the Dancing Mistress, who had up until that point been specifically trying to recapture the power of her people (as well she might).

Indeed the conversation between Green and the Duke's ghost seems – in the eyes of the text – to objectively redeem the Duke from all possible sins. It is even revealed that Green was being educated as a woman of four centuries past because the Duke was lonely and desired companionship of the sort he remembered from his youth. I get the distinct impression that we are actually supposed to sympathise with this (again this calls to mind Dollhouse and its seeming belief that it's okay to rape somebody if you pretend they're your dead wife). It is, in essence, a plot twist in which it is revealed that the Duke who Green thought was evil in fact is not.

Here is Green's summary of the story of the Duke and his theft of the pardines' collective power, as she relates it to an angry mob who have just torn apart a mad godling:

“Let me tell you a story,” I repeated “about a people who gave up their power long ago. A city man took it from them. Some agreed to this, but not all.” The silence held, I continued: “The man made himself prince of his city. He ruled for generations. There was peace, prosperity, a time of quiet. The gods fell quiet for the power was like a blanket to them. This took the soul of the people, for what are gods if not the sum of everyone who follows them? Choices fell away, as the power cares only for itself. Even so, the bargain was good for most.”

First of all, how the fuck does Green get from “I stripped them of their power and made it my own” to “a people gave up their power, the bargain was good for most”?

Second of all, I'm sorry but that's really fucking offensive.

I have no idea how deliberate this is but what you have here is a relatively modern culture which owes its strength and prosperity to resources that it took by force from the people who had them originally. People who, according to the guys who took those resources in the first place, were basically a bunch of raiders, hunters and savages.

Doesn't that sound rather a lot like the history of America?

Imagine, for a moment, Green standing up and making that speech (substituting, if you wish “land” for “power”) to an audience of Native Americans.

Umm ... pretty fucking offensive, isn't it.

Now I know, I know, I know that this is a fantasy setting, and the pardines are a fantasy race, but in a book which engages so directly and specifically with issues of race and imperialism you cannot avoid drawing parallels with the real world. Green's apologia – substituting “bargains” for conquest and talking about people “giving up” their power - is exactly the sort of historical revisionism that goes on with stories of the American West.

Ironically for a book all about a non-white gay woman, the whole thing is positively dripping with white male privilege. It's fantastically easy to make big speeches about how power is bad and corrupting, and how really people are better off without it, when you're part of the group that already has all the power. It's easy to praise women and non-whites for what you perceive as their superior qualities of patience and endurance, when you haven't had to be patient or endure, because you live in a world where you can get what you want when you want it. It's easy to write about how people should never try to change the way things are when the way things are primarily benefits you and people like you.

And breathe.

Taking a step back, it is possible that Lake is aware of all of these issues, and that the whole book is working on a much more subtle level. It is possible that the extent to which Green internalises the prejudices of her captors is supposed to be her final tragedy. The only way I could ever find this out, however, would be to read the two sequels which Lake is apparently working on and that I most assuredly will not be doing.

In Conclusion

Green engages with a variety of complex themes, but there is a fine line between engagement and apologia.

Earlier I mentioned the Avenue Q song Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. Some people (I know Rami's one of them) are big fans of this song, because it's really important to recognise that racism is pretty much endemic in society, and nobody is entirely free of it. It's also important to break some of the taboos surrounding racism, specifically “accusing” people of racism.

On the other hand, the song puts just slightly too much emphasis on the “racism” of non-whites. The whole thing is started by a white guy as a means to deflect an accusation of racism, and it works.

Green has similar problems. She starts the novel abducted and enslaved by a western imperial power, but the book focuses so much on the negative aspects of the life she would have had otherwise that it winds up justifying, if not glorifying, her initial enslavement. It's the same issue of uneven historical accuracy that leads to so many skeevy gender issues in Fantasy. Because the western imperialist culture is, to an extent, romanticised – we see very little of the grinding poverty that existed in nineteenth-century England for example – and the eastern agrarian culture is not, you wind up with a situation where Green's only protection from marital rape and early death is to be taken as a slave by a more “enlightened” culture.

So yeah, Green. Not something I'd suggest reading. It's ponderously written, pretentious, boring and full of fail.

And Finally...

Fantasy Rape Watch:

Number of Women Raped: Innumerable, possibly “every woman born in Selistan” depending on how you read the text.

Number of Women Raped to Death: Twelve

Proximal Causes of Aforesaid Raping To Death, According to Green, by importance:

Green's Failure to Save Them: 60%

Victims' Own Beauty: 20%

The Nature of Men: 20%

Actual Decisions Made by Rapists, Over Which They Had Ultimate Control and For Which They Bore Ultimate Moral Responsibility: 0%

Number of Times Heroine “Raped”: 0

Number of Times Heroine Engages in Sexual Activity to which She Does Not and Can Not Properly Consent for Reasons of Age and Power But it's Okay Because it's With Other Women: Countless, over the course of several years.

Number of Times Heroine Threatened with Rape: 3

Number of Times Heroine Meets Heterosexual Men other Than Federo: 3

Themes:

Fantasy Rape Watch

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Minority Warrior

bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit

~Comments (

go to latest

)

Wardog

at 10:36 on 2009-11-17I really rather wish I'd had the bollocks to say all this in my SH review but I felt I couldn't accuse a writer of this degree of fail on somebody else's website.

Green was astonishingly terrible book, and I hated and despised it.

Also what's with the cover? Why is she upside down and devoid of trousers?

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 14:45 on 2009-11-17That looks painful. It's funny how the author, coming from a completely different angle, seems to have ended up portraying a situation remarkably like the

Gor

novels - in which men are violent and brutal and forceful and dominant, and women like it that way because of their intrinsic urge to be enslaved. It's just that John Norman celebrates this idea whereas it seems like Lake is trying to condemn it. In a sort of half-hearted fashion involving porno-style lesbian scenes.

But Dan, surely the inclusion of a catgirl was the warning sign that something was awry? I've never seen fantasy/SF authors use catgirls for anything but suspicious and unsavoury purposes.

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 14:46 on 2009-11-17Wait, I tell a lie, there's a short story by Gene Wolfe about a man who gets really creeped out by his friend buying a genetically engineered anthropomorphic sex pet. The moral of the story being "Jesus Christ guys, what is it with you and the catgirls? I'm almost ashamed to write in the same genre as some of you."

permalink

go to top

Sister Magpie

at 15:55 on 2009-11-17Wow. This book sounds like it could win some kind of award if they gave awards for things like this.

permalink

go to top

http://fightsandtights.blogspot.com/

at 16:11 on 2009-11-17Yikes. Sounds like a very uncomfortable read all round. Is it just me, or does it sound like a deranged and sexist rip off of the Assassins of Tamurin? Green certainly sounds like she couldn't hold a candle to Lale Navari, though...

permalink

go to top

Rami

at 16:55 on 2009-11-17

Earlier I mentioned the Avenue Q song Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. Some people (I know Rami's one of them) are big fans of this song, ... The whole thing is started by a white guy as a means to deflect an accusation of racism, and it works.

Right at the beginning, Princeton does admit "I'm sorry, I guess that was racist". Which isn't entirely a deflection. But the song does derail the conversation entirely, I will admit. Part of the reason I like it, and like to refer to it, is that it provides a convenient lighthearted reference I can make to defuse privilege-born defensiveness.

you're saying “you might be better off as a slave in Europe than as a free man in your own country.”

Unsurprisingly enough that really gets my back up. If we're reading it generously, I could see it as internalising her oppressors' cultural imperialism, which would be extra-tragic (and not uncommon; hell, I'm guilty of it myself) but that's something that readers are really rather unlikely to see in it IMHO.

permalink

go to top

Melissa G.

at 21:03 on 2009-11-17Yikes. Just yikes.

That whole seduction to win the boss fight thing really irks me. First of all, it just seems utterly ridiculous and probably some of the laziest writing I've ever heard of. I can't even take it seriously; it's just comical.

And although I'm a woman, I find it extremely offensive to men to suggest that no matter how determined, focused, etc a man is, if a woman starts touching herself or each other, he'll just fall apart and forget all his plans as his jaw drops open and he just yelps "BOOBIES!". I mean, come on.

I'm sure that my rage is also compounded because I just had a conversation with my friend about "girls (in comics) in refrigerators" and how women are poorly treated in comics and there are a lot of similarities to how this man seems to want to portray women in his book.

Also, and I can't help but to add this as I just received another rejection yesterday, but HOW is sh*t like this published while I am sitting on my ass waiting for rejection after rejection to roll in on my own novel? It's just damn frustrating!

permalink

go to top

Melissa G.

at 21:18 on 2009-11-17Excuse the double post, I just thought of something else about the deus ex seduction that bugs me. It also implies that sexuality would be the only possible way for women to win fights against men. Which, yeah, fully pisses me off.

permalink

go to top

Rude Cyrus

at 21:21 on 2009-11-17A lot of people have some seriously fucked up trains of logic. What's scary is that many don't realize it.

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 22:24 on 2009-11-17

It's an interpretation I'd considered, and there was always a nagging sense that maybe Lake was making a really subtle point and that I wasn't giving him enough credit. The problem is that I think you consciously have to read it into the text. Part of the problem is that Green is at least in *theory* supposed to be narrating the series from a position of maturity and strength so when she says she "realises" something you don't really have much room to disagree with her.

Which makes it a bit fucked up.

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 22:28 on 2009-11-17

It also implies that sexuality would be the only possible way for women to win fights against men. Which, yeah, fully pisses me off.

Yeah, it's one of those nasty bits of sexism that cuts both ways. Although as ever I rather suspect that it's the ladies who come out worst. It basically gives us guys carte blanche to act like douchebags because we totally can't control ourselves.

permalink

go to top

Viorica

at 00:13 on 2009-11-18It ties into the "Well, she was wearing a short skirt/walking alone at night/drinking" defence you see in rape cases. It's always something the woman did; the rapist just couldn't help himself.

permalink

go to top

Guy

at 02:40 on 2009-11-18I think there's something interesting in the question about sexism/"reverse sexism" and racism/"reverse racism". It makes me think that what's happening is a sort of... reversal of terms that are already based on a set of binaries or polarisations and all that happens is a switching around of the moral weightings or moral judgements that go with them. So if we think of "classic sexism" having an ideology along the lines of "Men are vigorous and active (and this makes them good), while women are docile and passive (and this makes them bad)", then the kind of "revised sexism" (revised rather than reversed) seen here just switches the part in brackets; men are vigorous and active, which makes them bad, &c &c. An adherent of this kind of "revised sexism" may believe that they've overcome their patriarchal prejudices, when actually all that's happened is that that prejudice has taken a different form. I would argue that these kinds of diminishing-identity-constructions are an inevitable consequence of identity-based logic, and that no matter how carefully you work to ideologically perfect such a logic then some form of diminishment or deformation creeps back in... but I suspect that's a topic for another post.

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 11:53 on 2009-11-18

An adherent of this kind of "revised sexism" may believe that they've overcome their patriarchal prejudices, when actually all that's happened is that that prejudice has taken a different form

Pretty much, and the scary thing is it's terrifyingly easy to do.

Although ironically I don't even think there's change in the moral judgments attached. "Classic" sexism doesn't actually say women are *bad* for being docile and passive, quite the reverse - feminine virtues are usually considered extremely important, look at Victorian England - so it's not even "revised" sexism really, it's just sexism repackaged.

The same is true for the race issues. The concept of the noble savage goes back centuries and still exists in one form or another today.

Basically it all falls under the broad heading of "fetishisation of the other" and it's a horrible, horrible minefield.

permalink

go to top

Robinson L

at 22:02 on 2009-11-19Wow! And I thought I'd set a pretty high standard for Minority Warrior with my first contribution. Should've known you'd top me, sooner or later. Fantastic article; probably one of your best.

I remember Ptolemaues reading one of Lake's books a year or two ago. I think by the time she reached page 30 he'd already overheated her clichédar. Apparently, she never finished it.

I remember that Girls Read Comics post. One of the earliest ones, I believe. Well done on distilling the logic of that argument.

This tactic of putting Women on a pedestal is actually a long-standing mechanism of patriarchy. Howard Zinn discusses (in a chapter about the oppression of women in the United States after the war of independence) the ideological underpinnings of the double standard in treatment of men who sleep around/have premarital and extra-marital sex and women who do the same.

As Zinn explains, while such sexual behaviors were and are looked down on by the mainstream culture, it was taken for granted that men are base and incapable controlling their own sex drives, so they get a pass on sexual "immorality." Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be made of purer stuff - they're not even supposed to enjoy sex anyway. Thus, when a woman does indulge in "immoral sex" it means she obviously is not a proper Woman, and deserves to be persecuted.

I imagine attitudes were similar in Victorian England, which you've alluded to a couple times now, Dan.

a pseudo-south-Asian protagonist (although she is, of course, white on the cove

Of course.

Melissa G.: Also, and I can't help but to add this as I just received another rejection yesterday, but HOW is sh*t like this published while I am sitting on my ass waiting for rejection after rejection to roll in on my own novel? It's just damn frustrating!

Law of inverse quality to publishing. Think Rowling, Meyer, Salvatore, etc. You can do this, just keep working at it!

Basically it all falls under the broad heading of "fetishisation of the other" and it's a horrible, horrible minefield.

That's fetishisation of the

Other

. And yes, yes it is.

permalink

go to top

Wardog

at 23:32 on 2009-11-19I would rather prefer you boys could contain yourselves from quite this degree of wanking self-congratulation over your minority warrioring, a title I bestowed upon Dan in recognition of his sense of self-irony.

This tactic of putting Women on a pedestal is actually a long-standing mechanism of patriarchy

Good heavens, is it really? I'm stunned and appalled.

permalink

go to top

Melissa G.

at 23:51 on 2009-11-19"Law of inverse quality to publishing. Think Rowling, Meyer, Salvatore, etc. You can do this, just keep working at it!" (Can't get the quote thing to work 'cause I'm dumb)

Thanks Robinson!! :-)

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 23:54 on 2009-11-19

I would rather prefer you boys could contain yourselves from quite this degree of wanking self-congratulation over your minority warrioring, a title I bestowed upon Dan in recognition of his sense of self-irony.

Umm ... yeah, I was about to say. The title "Minority Warrior" is an ironic one which we use quite specifically to say "we are aware that this actually strays quite close to being fucking patronising". It originally started as a private joke between Kyra and I, we'd be watching Buffy or Angel, and there's be one of those awful bits where Joss Whedon says Something Very Serious About Being Black or A Woman and we'd shout "Fear Not Ladies! I Am Joss Whedon! Minority Warrior!"

I *actually* feel really bad about laying into Green as badly as I did, not because I feel bad about Jay Lake (dude wrote a boring book) but because I feel genuinely uncomfortable getting on my high horse about these sorts of issues because as I say in - in fact - the start of this article, they often stray dangerously close to me using issues of race and gender as an excuse to score points off of other white men.

This is *not* a game of "more feminist than thou". I'm *not* in a competition to see who can spot the most racism. I'm *not* trying to set standards. You might have noticed that in a lot of my posts about race and gender issues, what I tend to say is "these attitudes are very common, and I understand why they are so common because there is an extent to which I share them".

This is a *world* of not about keeping score.

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 23:58 on 2009-11-19I'm just glad Robinson clarified the capitalisation of "Other".

Clearly an important and relevant aspect of this discussion!

permalink

go to top

Robinson L

at 00:30 on 2009-11-20Okay, yes, on reflection that was rather unnecessary and patronizing for this site. My apologies.

My comment about other/Other was intended mostly as a joke, but I can see now that doesn't come across at all, and it's still rather smug. Again, sorry.

@Melissa: it took me a while to figure out as well.

The standard html tag

for quoting is "blockquote," but I usually just use "i" for italics.

permalink

go to top

Melissa G.

at 00:31 on 2009-11-20

it took me a while to figure out as well. The standard html tag for quoting is "blockquote," but I usually just use "i" for italics.

I got it! Thanks!

permalink

go to top

Wardog

at 09:30 on 2009-11-20Alternatively you could just use the handy 'quote' function. Highlight any text any where on the page and click the 'quote selected text' button in this comment form. Try it today! The handy in-built quote function! 9/10 users recommend it! New from Rami Industries!

permalink

go to top

http://oiooo.livejournal.com/

at 10:51 on 2009-11-20Yr cmmnts bt sxsm wld wrk bttr f hdn't jst rd th rtcl whr y cm ff lk th whnst f Slythrfn whl tlkng bt crtn "smg btch".

Editor's Comment: This comment has been disemvowelled. We welcome your comments here at Fb but if you disagree with something please address the article or the comment in question, rather than the style or nature of the writer.

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 11:16 on 2009-11-20For what it's worth I do actually realise that referring to J.K. Rowling as a "smug bitch" is, in fact, rather sexist. I'm afraid that I sometimes allow my sense of rhetoric to override my sense of what is appropriate.

However as the editors have pointed out, this comment is not really pertinent to the article or the arguments presented within it.

I would genuinely be more than happy if you were to leave a comment on the original article pointing out that my use of gendered insults to attack a female writer is not okay because it is, well, absolutely not.

permalink

go to top

Melissa G.

at 13:36 on 2009-11-20

Try it today! The handy in-built quote function! 9/10 users recommend it! New from Rami Industries!

mwahaha! Is that how it works? I kept trying to select text that was already in the comment box, haha. Thanks!

And sorry to clutter the comments section with this stuff but I want to say a proper thank you. ^^

permalink

go to top

Viorica

at 23:14 on 2010-08-30I thought Jay Lake's name seemed familiar when I read this article, but I couldn't remember where I heard it until I was linked to

this

. Turns out he was

involved

in RaceFail (on the Elizabeth Bear/Will Shetterley side, natch) and subsequently refused to attend a con because he thought that he would be "unsafe" there as a white, male author. So, yeah.

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 01:19 on 2010-08-31Tempest's blog post is awesome. It's amazing how quick people can go from "Behold, I am Jay Lake, Minority Warrior!" to "It just ain't safe for a white male author at a con these days."

permalink

go to top

Wardog

at 09:17 on 2010-08-31Gosh, is he terrified of all those angry black people resorting to violence?

permalink

go to top

Michal

at 02:50 on 2011-06-19Ho boy. I read Lake's Mainspring, and in the first few pages I had this creeping feeling and a voice in my head kept saying "put this down, don't waste time on this, it's not worth it", but then, in my idiocy, I picked it up again. By the time I got to the part where my inner critic was screaming at me to stop, I was already too far and in my stubbornness ended up finishing it. It's only later that I found out he started Racefail, but my impressions from Mainspring were not at all good. For instance, I giant wall separates the northern and southern hemispheres. And when the main character finally crosses that wall into sub-Saharan Africa, instead of interesting cultures allowed to develop without European influence, we get ape men and evil black sorcerers. My jaw dropped.

Then the main character has sex with an ape-woman.

Then he saves the world with the power of love.

Yeah.

Looks like Lake continues on the same path in Green.

permalink

go to top

https://me.yahoo.com/a/0txE6GYMzdiwjPOqDTwLdeHMvOdijS5Jm1c-#9995a

at 03:32 on 2011-06-19You know, on one hand I feel that the entire "women are purer than me" should be a compliment to women. On the other hand, it's the same old tactic of "put 'em on a throne then stab 'em in the back" as with the supposed glorification of women, whilst surreptitiously ridiculting the notion.

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 04:02 on 2011-06-19The thing about defining some other category of people as being purer than you is that it simultaneously lets you off the hook for your own bad behaviour ("I'm just a stupid ol' man, how can I be expected to behave differently?") whilst simultaneously lets you hold that category of folks to a higher standard - and therefore get correspondingly nastier with them when they fail to meet the standard you've imposed. ("I'd have expected that from a man, but you, I thought I could trust you to do better. What sort of woman are you?")

It's basically yet one more flavour of creepery that needs to be pointed out for the creepery it is.

permalink

go to top

Wardog

at 19:31 on 2011-06-19@Michal

Youch. I remember tying myself into knots of pure anguish trying to review this thing for Strange Horizons - I genuinely felt uncomfortable barging onto someone else's site and yelling that this white woman thought this dude was being a big racist, so I ended up talking about his creepy creepy attitude to sex instead. So this review from Dan, racefail and further commentary on Lake's general skeeviness has been, in some ways, quite cathartic. Sounds like Mainspring is continuing in the general Lake tradition of fail fail fail though.

Incidentally I just re-visited the cover of this book - just because she's upside-down doesn't detract from the fact it's basically fantasy crotchshot #27362. Not that I'm blaming Lake for his cover art or anything but just ... sigh.

permalink

go to top

Cammalot

at 21:46 on 2011-06-19"And when the main character finally crosses that wall into sub-Saharan Africa, instead of interesting cultures allowed to develop without European influence"

Does anybody write this? Seriously, could somebody direct me to a place where this exists and is well written and I can have lots of it, please? Because my beloved Jacqueline Carey kind of falls on her face on this score, Stephen Barnes demonstrates homophobia in his modern-set works that makes me afraid to try his version, and everything else I've encountered has been about subjugation and death of such culture, not flourishing, and I get enough of that on my own planet, this is supposed to be fantasy here. Basically I resort to watching a bunch of historical KBS dramas for a non Western fix.

permalink

go to top

Cammalot

at 22:00 on 2011-06-19(Speaking of which, I always thought the girl on this cover looked far more like a cross between Choi Jung-Won and Kim Sung-Eun --heavier on the

Kim Sung-Eun

side -- than any white girl, though that still doesn't really fix its problems--still wrong ethnicity/skin tone and yeah, the crotch thing...)

permalink

go to top

Michal

at 22:08 on 2011-06-19Imaro is your answer, Cammalot. Imaro, by Charles R. Saunders. 4 books of sub-Saharan sword & sorcery without a white person in sight.

permalink

go to top

Cammalot

at 22:16 on 2011-06-19Fantastic. :) And again the Ferreters deliver with speed and quickness. Love this site so much...

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 22:23 on 2011-06-19I've wanted to read the

Imaro

stuff ever since I read a Saunders quote saying that his main inspiration for writing the things was wanting to see a black hero who could kick Conan's ass. And goodness, the sword and sorcery subgenre direly needed one.

permalink

go to top

http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/

at 22:43 on 2011-06-19Imaro is fantastic stuff; I have a spare copy if anyone wants it, actually. It should be noted that there are two substantially different versions of the Imaro books floating around: the original Imaro book from 1981 had a section ("Slaves of the Giant-Kings") which Saunders removed from the recent reprint because it paralleled too closely the events of the Rwanda genocide and he didn't want to be seen as profiting from that tragedy. So much of the series, and the relationships of some of the characters to one another, changed subtly because of the alternate chapter he used in the reprints.

permalink

go to top

Michal

at 22:58 on 2011-06-19

I've wanted to read the Imaro stuff ever since I read a Saunders quote saying that his main inspiration for writing the things was wanting to see a black hero who could kick Conan's ass.

Actually, Tarzan's ass.

Saunder's hasn't been too skimpy on

praising Robert E. Howard

, but with obvious reservations. Imaro is a great retort to the charge that fantasy/sword & sorcery is inherently racist, and I wish Saunders had more publishing success than he did (he's still having a bitch of a time with it).

permalink

go to top

valse de la lune

at 18:25 on 2011-06-21I just learned from a friend that Lake wrote

Green

for his daughter. His adopted

Chinese

daughter.

Oh god no.

permalink

go to top

Michal

at 18:40 on 2011-06-21

I just learned from a friend that Lake wrote Green for his daughter. His adopted Chinese daughter.

You're not the first person to be a bit squicked.

permalink

go to top

valse de la lune

at 19:15 on 2011-06-21Oh, found a whole new reason to hate this book and Lake:

I enjoyed seeing the Southeast Asian-inspired part of Jay Lake’s world in the second arc.

Die in a fire.

permalink

go to top

Wardog

at 19:48 on 2011-06-21

I just learned from a friend that Lake wrote Green for his daughter. His adopted Chinese daughter.

I believe remember reading somewhere that was part of Lake's justification for why everyone's criticisms were wrong.

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 19:49 on 2011-06-21Did this justification go "I'm not racist, I allow a Chinese person to live in my home?"

permalink

go to top

Tamara

at 20:19 on 2011-06-24My boss had us let off steam a while back by having us make a giant list of all the phrases/words/terms that we thought were sexist and wished would go away, everything from "bitch" to "soccer mom" to "I want to have your baby." I threw out "the world would be a better place if women ran it," and my boss actually vetoed it. Basically, I wonder if it might not be a generation gap to some extent - i'm 24, she's in her 50/60's. To me thats obviously a continuation of a harmful dichotomy, de-individuation of women, patronizing, etc, and she just said, "Women never have run the world, and I do think it will be a better place if more of us did." And honestly i'm not sure what to answer to that. (This is entirely tangetial to the book, I suppose, which seems to be more concerned with the possession of power than with the use of it.)

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 21:22 on 2011-06-24

To me thats obviously a continuation of a harmful dichotomy, de-individuation of women, patronizing, etc, and she just said, "Women never have run the world, and I do think it will be a better place if more of us did." And honestly i'm not sure what to answer to that.

I think you might have been talking at slightly cross-purposes here, from her response it's possible that she sees "if women ran the world" as being a hyperbolic way of saying "if women were as involved in running the world as men are". It might also be a generational thing, my Mum was also fond of women-are-better-than-men rhetoric.

(This is entirely tangetial to the book, I suppose, which seems to be more concerned with the possession of power than with the use of it.)

I think it ties into the same set of assumptions. Certainly one of the things that squicked me out most about Green was the fact that there was no engagement at all with the fact that the Lily Temple basically sexually abuses Green, because the assumption seemed to be that in was a female-dominated institution serving a female divinity and it was therefore *utterly impossible* for it to be harmful to individual women.

permalink

go to top

Arthur B

at 21:33 on 2011-06-24But Dan, it's OK, Jay Lake spent several years living in the temple of an all-female child abuse cult.

permalink

go to top

valse de la lune

at 20:48 on 2011-10-25Amazon has notified me that the sequel to this book will be out on 8 Nov.

Take one for the team, Dan? :D

permalink

go to top

Dan H

at 22:30 on 2011-10-25

Take one for the team, Dan? :D

I think I might actually prefer to mutilate my own face.

... d'you see. Because the heroine in the book mutilates her own face...

I actually found the original so *utterly* boring that I'm not sure I could be arsed. I think my terrible-book-reviewing career is likely to be on hiatus until the conclusion of the Kingkiller chronicles (because having read two thirds of the damned thing, I'm going to *have* to finish that fucker).

permalink

go to top

Robinson L

at 18:30 on 2013-05-11According to a recent post in a fiction group I'm part of, Jay Lake has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. That's pretty grim.

#Ferretbrain #Green #Jay Lake #Minority Warrior #Fantasy Rape Watch

3 notes · View notes