Ally > Recent Status Updates

[The internet is up but they need to use a PRIVATE TELEGRAPH SYSTEM THAT SOMEONE HAS LAID CABLES FOR FROM DOHA TO TOKYO what the heck how does this world work?]

Are... we going to deal with this lady STABBING THIS GUY WITH A KNIFE, or is the romance just going to continue like nothing happened!?

[the grandmother being insulted by the suggestion she doesn't take care of her cats is the only kind-of-hint of specificity in any of these characters so far]

It was my mother.

[first sign of a maybe inciting incident at the 40% mark. hate it. no specificity to anything so far. who are any of these characters?]

"I'll join your little group. Queen Phosphorous or whatever."

[uhhhhhh howwwwwww does anyone else know their codename?]

[oh wait, I'm dumb - of course it's not notable when protag shares her backstory with deuterag, deuterag is already targeting her.]

[ok, I'm struggling with some plot holes I think - how does Neville Longbottom know about the poison? How does protag tell deutarag her origin story without deuterag figuring out she's the reason his hand got chopped off?

I *am* loving the emerging transfem solidarity-with-sapphic-subtext between the SW girl & the tech girl.]

"I thought you were supposed to be bi or something? How do you not get this?"

"Sorry, I'm like 'paint-stained overalls and messy ponytails' bi. Not 'bustles and tiny top hats' bi."

[which I guess makes me bi-bisexual?]

"Otherwise known as a butterfly knife. [...] I give code names to all the mercenary groups under my command. Yours is engraved on the side."

[...] Queen Sulfur. The endangered butterfly species [...] The one that could grow huge if it survived to adulthood.

[aw jeez after the great "most caterpillars die" lines we are actually gonna do the trans butterfly metaphor?]

"Branches don't just come with training. They come from personal epiphanies. And true epiphany is action. To grow your codex, you must grow as a person. [...] Magic isn't power. Magic isn't control," he said. "Magic is the art of changing yourself."

"On that day," said Adam, "I had just two shillings and a pencil."

[yep, definitely evil Harry]

"In a few years - it won't matter what body I put myself into - my pith will decay, and I'll be wetting the bed and forgetting my own name. Before long, you'll all be twiddling your thumbs at my funeral."

[I LOVE AUTHOR-IS-AWARE-OF-HIS-EVILNESS DUMBLEDORE]

This would have been my life without my ousting. Hosting events with Samuel. Drawing eyeballs like moths to a flame, devouring their attention. Shaping the arc of history like a knife carving meat.

[PLEASE GOD WHERE ARE YOU EDITOR -- this prose would be totally workable if somebody, anybody was giving line-level feedback, providing any pushback on the busted similes]

And then we run a hot bath and sit in it together: what Jackson calls a Jurassic sauna, with a Sade album on.

["Sade" pronounced rhyming with "aid" -- come on Joel Froomkin, whitest gay alive.]

...we talk also about a companion sculpture. It will be a fish tank filled with bright pink liquid, and inside it we're going to hang a neon sign that says "do you have to let it linger?" in curly cursive, and we're calling that one "Cranberry Squirt!" Usually by the time we get to revealing the name, we're laughing so hard that we're tearing up, but that doesn't mean we're not deadly serious.

[HELLO PUBLIC UNIVERSAL FRIEND]

[...I might have read that energy into the text if I'd encountered it by itself - the thinking is bright and energetic even while the subjects are difficult. The book often avoids violence directly even while it's affecting the conversation (which feels related to that not-exactly-nervous energy). But Froom's voice is sooooooo depressed that I think I'm hearing a lot of this differently.]

[I wonder about how much the choice of the narrator Joel Froomkin affects how I'm receiving this book. He's got this depressed ex-twink voice - it's maybe more appropriate given the concerns of the book than a very feminine voice, but in readings and interviews with Fleischmann, they have this gangly energy, this is-it-safe-to-be-joyful-if-it-is-let-me-bubble-over familiar transfeminine vibe...]

Psyche's quest ends when, at last, Cupid declares his devotion to her, and Jupiter grants the two permission to marry, so long as Cupid promises to fire his arrows at any disinterested woman Jupiter desires.

[what a horrifying metaphor for assimilationism]

But the best known moment in the life of Orpheus has nothing to do with his song. It’s just a man deciding he would rather see his beloved than any future the gods could promise.

While Bow-wow has never been sexualized, then, he does come very close to sexuality.

[this queen sleeps with their childhood stuffed animal and their guy of the night simultaneously... I was feeling very distant from this narrator who is somehow further separated from material reality by their aversion to metaphor, but this detail totally charmed me]

I've been getting bored with metaphors anyway. I've decided that I don't like them because one thing is never another thing and it's a lie to say something is anything but itself. It's ontologically and physically impossible. In fact not even apple and apple can be each other. So the gay mens' sexual walking tour of Manhattan has this additional challenge.

The mother possum had made that crawl when she was young, too, and then made whatever possum life that followed, which I'm sure wasn't easy. Is this what it takes to live sometimes? Digging into a pouch, tossing, rummaging, tossing, and running? Leaving what you love three feet apart? Our own nature can pull us so easily to a horror like this. To throwing to the ground as we flee who we were.

...I was beginning to navigate some of that desire for Simon, which was a quality of loss, as I understand all desire, or rather all the desire I have known. That my want for another body arrived first, with the knowledge that it could not be. Maybe this is what binds the family of men together. The desire for the top and the lack of a top. A torque of specificity and hope.

I'm still uncertain whether these are the experiences I had hoped to find, just as I can't tell whether I am conforming to fill a shape, or drawing its boundaries.

"Since you will soon be dead, I may as well tell you everything."

[hahahahaha yep this queen went to supervillain school]

[spoiler] was sweet gao and lotus tea. She was moonlight and new snow. I laughed a little, and she did too. My heart soared, and I kissed her back. Nobody had ever taught me how. I just did. Maybe it was only natural, an act every girl in Tensha was born knowing how to do.

[this book had up to this point not thrown me any curveballs but I DID NOT EXPECT DOOMED LESBIANISM]

"The ancient poets* say that when we look at the same moon as the ones we love, our hearts are connected through heaven, no matter how far away we are."

[*James Ingram and Linda Ronstadt, "Somewhere Out There"]

He was... is... brilliant. That is no exaggeration [...] Terren was exceptional. We did not know it for a long time. "My brother is the cleverest," Maro kept telling us, but none of us believed him. How could we, when the prince spoke little, hid often.

[not *super* psyched about a sadistic autistic-coded prince in a world of amoral faggoty eunuchs, despite knowing a bunch of people who fit the brief in real life]

[yikes the wooden-ness of Eric Yang, the male narrator, is intolerable]