Eclectic Tastes Observed

80% + of porn ‘stars’ are being threatened, blackmailed, or abused. The average age of exposure to pornography in the United States is 11 for a girl and 9 for a boy. 9 years old and they’re having their brains rewritten, their understanding of the role sex has in a healthy relationship warped. All for the sake of the dollar. 

1

Even Nie Huaisang would agree with the general consensus that he’s a useless good-for-nothing, which is why he doesn’t understand everyone’s expressions when he helped out in making dinner when they’re all night-hunting. Scorn he’d be used to, but everyone is just goggling as if he’d suddenly summoned lightning.

“Were you not planning on eating the boar or something?” he asked, looking around in confusion.

“You broke down the entire carcass into edible pieces in less than an incense stick’s worth of time,” Jiang Cheng said, voice a bit strangled. “Not just the meat pieces, but the offal, too.”

Nie Huaisang shrugged. “My clan were originally butchers. It’d be weirder if I didn’t know how to do that.”

“Could you do it to a person?” Wei Wuxian asked, eyes alight with mischief.

Jiang Cheng smacked him.

2

During the preparations for the Phoenix Mountain hunt, Wei Wuxian gets a brilliant idea and starts writing furiously on pieces of paper in one of the Jin sect’s sitting room.

“Can someone get me some blood? Human, ideally, but pig will do,” he asked at one point, having already scabbed up all his fingers in making draft talismans, and when a bowl was put next to him, he doesn’t think too much about it, only happy that it didn’t seem to ever empty.

After a while, he looked up and noticed that Baxia was propped up on the table next to him, dripping blood into his bowl. Definitely human, too. There was no apparent source for it.

He stared for a while, then went to find Nie Mingjue.

“Did you just stab someone?” he demanded, and Nie Mingjue shook his head. “Then does your sword just regularly drip blood?”

Nie Mingjue shrugged. “I’ve stabbed a lot of people. Why wouldn’t it?”

3

“I don’t know what the problem is,” Nie Huaisang protested. “You wanted me to watch him, he was tired, he asked for a bedtime story!”

“You told him the story about people getting made into meat pies!” Jiang Cheng hollered, holding a wailing Jin Ling in his arms. “Right after he’d had meat pies at dinner!”

“It’s tradition to tell that story over meat pies. Don’t you remember the first time I told you that story? You and Wei Wuxian both turned green.”

Jiang Cheng glared at him and comforted Jin Ling to no avail.

Nie Huaisang tapped the child’s shoulder with his fan. “Stop crying. You know what happens to little boys that lose their temper.”

Jin Ling stopped crying at once, his face pale.

Jiang Cheng looked at him, then back at a smiling Nie Huaisang, then back again. “What did you tell him now?!”

4

“Today’s not a good day for a visit,” Nie Huaisang said apologetically. “We get ghosts today.”

“You’re a cultivation clan and you allow ghosts?” Jiang Cheng scoffed.

“They come here to be purified. Anyway, they’re really cute ghosts.”

“…what?”

“Mostly animals,” Nie Huaisang said. “Side effect of cultivation by butchering – at first it was mostly livestock, but after a while we started getting all sorts. Drowned kittens, run over puppies, that sort of thing.”

“…there are puppies?” Jiang Cheng said blankly. “Ghost puppies?”

“Mm, yes. Do you want to pet some of them before they go? They’re usually not powerful enough to take more than a very small amount of yang energy, and petting them makes the purification process easier.”

“Right. Show me the way.”

5

Nie Mingjue was unconscious, having put himself between his sworn brothers and their enemies as they tried desperately to escape the trap they’d been lured into; he’d been stabbed, cut or whipped a number of times before they finally managed to break their way into the cave and escape. Lan Xichen had put him on his back, while Jin Guangyao carried Baxia, his fingers dipping down to caress the blade every few minutes.

“As much as I appreciate dage’s sacrifice, he’s probably the only one who knows his way around this maze,” Jin Guangyao said after they’d been wandering for nearly a shichen without finding anything but more cave, but he settles down a bit after Lan Xichen gives him a look. “I didn’t mean anything by it, erge, you know that. I just meant that it would be nice if we had a guide – ah!”

“What happened?”

“Dage’s saber – it bit me!”

Lan Xichen blinked. “…I’m sorry?”

“The beast head on the hilt! It bit me!” Jin Guangyao took another step, yelped again, and retreated.

Lan Xichen frowned thoughtfully and looked ahead, then turned to go down another fork. “Anything now?”

“No, it’s quiet. Why do you – no. Erge. We’re not following the directions given by a saber! Who would do that?”

“It’s not a saber, it’s Baxia,” Lan Xichen said calmly. “It’s fine. Nie Mingjue always did say Baxia had a better sense of direction than he did.”

“I thought he just meant that he didn’t have any,” Jin Guangyao said. “I didn’t think he meant…”

He trailed off, a strange look coming into his eyes.

“Do you think Baxia took it personally, back in the Sun Scorching Palace, when I said – ow!”

Because like, back in Wardrobe we’re given the impression with the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve drama that the Pevensies are the only humans in the setting. But they’re not; as it turns out the Narnia world is positively chock-a-block with humans. Humans all over the place, although not in quite all of the places.

(I have no idea why Aslan had to resort to targeting schoolchildren with portals when King Lune was sitting right on the other side of a mountain pass with an entire populace. Maybe all the Archenlanders have just enough nonhuman ancestry they don’t count? Frank and Helen’s kids have to have married someone to get that dynasty rolling, did Lewis specifically state it was like. Naiads? I feel like he did.)

But none of the humans are native to that plane. They’re all incomers; Aslan explains when he’s setting up the door back to pirate island for the Telmarines who can’t get on board with Caspian’s partial decolonization policies. He didn’t make any humans in this world. They just. Come in sometimes. Via random portals. And set up shop.

So what is the backstory of Calormene supposed to be? Narnia is on a really compressed timeline, it’s only existed since like. Circa 1900. And Calormene inasmuch as it resembles anything real is derived from medieval Persia. Via the One Thousand and One Nights and associated imagery.

Did Lewis seriously intend to suggest that a bunch of 20th century Persians (or Turks or Arabs idk I’m willing to accept a lot here) went through a magic portal and just. Picked up some horrible bird-god to worship but held onto lots of other elements of their cultural heritage in such a way as to roughly approximate the like 11th century in many respects??? 20th goddamn century.

Or are they meant to be from one of the many other pool-worlds alluded to in Magician’s Nephew? And if they’re not from Earth (the world consistently referred to in the text as ‘England’ lol) are they to be read as human?

Jadis of Charn is part giant, and not a daughter of Eve, but sort of human for all that, before she starts eating cursed apples of immortality and so on.

Like I realize he probably just didn’t think about it because the Orientalism here was so thick he frequently handled the Calormenes as a type of creature like the Harfang Giants while in other places using them clearly as humans, usually for moralizing bits. But the ambiguity of it.

Back when PC was just coming to theaters, I bought all the books in one big volume from B&N and it had this handy-dandy fold-out timeline in the middle.

The Calormene were Archenland defectors. It went something like this: The first king (Frank I) had two sons. The elder took the Narnian thrown; the younger was given land to the south for his kingdom: Archenland. Later on, defectors from Archenland fled the country and went further south, across the desert, until they found a habitable place and set up their own kingdom. Given they were defectors, it stands to reason, then, that they would not have wanted to continue the culture/traditions of the people they left behind, hence a new culture and a new religion that was all their own. I’d have to get it out to look at years exactly, but Calormen existed for, I want to say, at least 700 years before Jadis returned from the west and plunged Narnia into winter, which is more than enough time for an entire culture to take root. (As a side note, the Pevensies enter Narnia in LWW around the Narnian year 1100 iirc.)

As for the King Lune question, it’s entirely possible that his line wasn’t human “enough” anymore, but it’s equally possible that the pass through the mountains was impossible to traverse because of Jadis’ power. In HHB, Shasta traverses a very narrow path between Archenland and Narnia. If Jadis covered it over with snow, then that also explains why they would not have, as allies, gone to join the fight against Jadis either.

As for Tash…people often make gods out of things that aren’t. If stars in that world are real beings that can take human form, I have no doubt that Tash was created by Aslan, but not as the almighty deity the Calormenes believed him to be.

Favourite work of the week, amazing food photography with a space narrative twist!