Life is Great

That list might say things like “Paint a picture. Go birdwatching. Finish that great novel I started reading. Call my grandma. Learn to bake a cake. Visit my sister. Play piano.”

I highly recommend it if organizing pretty books for hours seems appealing! I’m really enjoying it. But like usual, this review is going to focus on accessibility. And, sadly, Librarian doesn’t do too well when you consider accessibility.

I don’t blame them. This seems to be their first game. There’s almost no info about them online, but it’s quite possible they’re one person doing this in their spare time. The game’s only been out for a month, and it could get an accessibility update at some point in the future. So, lots of grace!

But.

What we do have is berries. Many many berries. 3 types of cranberries. 2 types of blueberries. Chokecherries. Raspberries and their many kin. Multiple types of currants. Strawberries. Things that only exist here, like saskatoons. Buffaloberries, bilberries, things like rose hips that are only sort of berries - we have SO MANY.

Berries are small, grow quick, and are easy to support on a small plant, making them perfect for our short growing season. Many can grow on terrible soil. They were a main flavouring agent for indigenous food. They don't need a huge amount of care.

SO WHY THE HECK ARE THEY SO EXPENSIVE IN THE STORE?!?

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"The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned." (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, "Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology." Continuum, 2000)

via ThoughtCo

Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

I value the fact that English has two parallel vocabularies ‒ the Germanic vocabulary and the Latinate vocabulary. For example, we have the word 'undersea', and then we have 'submarine'. Or 'underground' and 'subterranean', 'all-powerful' and 'omnipotent'. So we can shift registers. We can say something in a very plain, blunt, Anglo-Saxon way, like "I will not do that" ‒ all Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Or we can say it in a fancier, more distant, abstract, Latinate way, like "I prefer not to permit myself to approach such a notion." Or, in a passage of plain Anglo-Saxon, you can throw in one Latinate word, unexpectedly, to great effect.

End ID.]

I do love this aspect of language! But, unlike what the title of that last quote states, English is actually very normal! Languages absorbing the prestige language of the area happens ALL THE TIME.

Close to 60% of English vocabulary is Latin and French. That's similar to, or slightly lower than, many languages with a Chinese influence (Japanese is the same, Korean and Vietnamese might have more or less, depending on how you measure. Casual spoken forms of languages often have less borrowings, and obscure technical vocabulary will have more.)

We don't know what the spoken language was like, but Old Nubian writing can have so many Greek loanwords it can be difficult to tell if a text is Greek with a few Nubian words, or Old Nubian but mostly loanwords! Ottoman Turkish borrowed so much Arabic and Persian that it was mostly unintelligible to normal Turkish speakers. Only a 1/3 of Yaghnobi words are actually Eastern Iranian, and it's ancestor, Sogdian, was similar - Persian, Turkic, Russian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Greek - it seems harder to find languages that DIDN'T leave their mark!

And borrowing from Latin, and then French, its descendent, is just as normal. Khmer contains a large number of borrowings from Sanskrit and its descendants, especially Pali. Japanese borrowed from multiple Chinese dynasties, and now some Kanji have several similar pronunciations, each based on a different reborrowing.

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And there are languages that go much farther than us!

25% of English is Germanic, including a (possibly) surprising amount of Old Norse and Dutch. That includes most of the core vocabulary and grammar.

Mixed languages don't have a 'core'. They combine multiple languages in more complex ways.

Michif - which developed in central Canada as Cree and French voyageurs (fur traders) worked together and created their own culture (the Métis) - combines elements of Plains Cree, French, and other languages like Ojibwe, Assiniboine, and English. It developed among people who were fully bilingual, retaining complex elements of both main languages. There's more French words than Cree, but it's impossible to say that they're 'loanwords' or 'host language words'.

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Trying to help a teenager work through their horror at the idea that their memory being this bad is NOT an emergency that experts will leap into fixing. That they need to accept living like this, for the rest of their life, and that very few people will ever recognize their pain. Or respect it.

I’ve grieved and accepted my own terrible memory, for the most part. But watching a child rage against the injustice brings up every suppressed pain I thought I’d left behind.

As we watch, a man drops a coin into a container in front of the desk. The marionette looks him up and down, like it's committing his appearance to memory, then dips its brush and continues an image of a woman with a hat that it is painting. The inkwell appears to contain real ink, and the painting is slow, but done well.

pt. 1 | pt. 2 | pt. 3 | pt. 5 | pt. 6 | pt. 7

The backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there's a baby in that bathwater, and that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can still be a meaningful criticism.

Argument 4: "Mary Sue" is still a valid criticism to the extent the "Mary Sue" character tends to start out good at everything... which can end up giving them nowhere to grow. And character growth is awesome. It makes for some of our all-time favorite heroes: Spike, Anya, Castiel, Zuko. Edmund Pevensie. Taylor Hebert. T-800. So on. Watching a character become talented or ethical or powerful makes for a great story. But if a character starts out talented/ethical/powerful, then the story often ends up in a trap of throwing ever-bigger Godzillas at a character we've already seen defeat Godzilla several times.

Effort and struggle tend to be what make a character interesting or relatable. It's the all-important difference between fearlessness (boring) and courage (relatable).

One example of how doing something badly often looks more impressive than doing it well: Captain America. He got widely derided as "useless" in Avengers (2012), so for Winter Solider (2014) the writers didn't make him more powerful... they added visible effort.

The moment of hesitation before Steve jumps, and the moment after he lands where he has to stop and go "ow" for a few seconds, do so much to sell this moment, vs. the unreal-looking way Steve does almost everything without effort in Avengers movies:

Example of this problem*: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Protagonist Ender has so many abilities so ridiculously beyond what real six-year-olds can do I can't list them all, but the point is that as of his first day of school, he's already curb-stomping kids twice his size and scoring better at training games than any other person ever measured. What problems Ender does have tend to come from being too good at things — hence John Sclazi among others deriding him as insufferably perfect.

Counter-example: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Protagonist Jean Valjean is smart enough to invent a new type of fastener, strong enough to lift a carriage unassisted, moral enough that he's literally meant to be a Catholic saint... and the book gets away with it because when we meet him, he has none of that. He'll become the world's greatest dad, but in his first scene he gets in a shouting match with a small child over a single coin and only realizes too late what an ass he's being. He'll end up running an entire town and its wealthiest business, but first we get a long sequence of him unable to get even a chance to earn enough food to survive because of his criminal record. He can go a long, long way (1500 pages!) and the story can still feel coherent, because he starts out with so little.

Tl;dr: Mary Sue ≠ ultra-talented. BUT if a story has a character start out ultra-talented without showing us how they got there, the character tends to stagnate and the reader may lose interest.

My husband almost exclusively reads power fantasies that allow the hero to solve every problem easily through cleverness and kindness. Every hero is overpowered. There's almost no tension. There being no tension despite the ridiculous stakes is the POINT, because he wants to dream that fixing the world without destroying himself is possible.

I just finished reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger and Dragonsong to my teen. The heroine is universally beloved, except when being bullied or abused, and 1/3 of the second book is scene after scene of people telling her the abusers were wrong, and she is good, and talented, and gets to skip all the work other characters have to do because she's so special, etc. (She is SUCH a Mary Sue! Fails half the arguments you gave!) My teen would get so excited that we'd have to pause so they could rock and squeal, because their self-confidence is through the floor and they DESPERATELY need to watch someone learn to believe in herself again.

20 years ago I used to read whump fic (what's now called hurt/comfort) where the main character's 'personality' was 'is a victim'. (My standards have risen since them, but only slightly ;) There was no tension, no drama, just noble suffering and then someone comforting them. Those guys were definitely Mary Sues, but they were also perfect vessels for me to project my pain and angst onto, so I could get some distance and process it.

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'Mary Sue' started as a way of mocking mostly young, mostly female, authours for writing stories that were 'bad'. But usually they were mocking stories where the arc was 'character triumphs over her insecurity and is taught she is lovable and valuable with the series events as a backdrop' by saying 'this story is so bad because the main character acts like a stupid 13 year old and the battles are afterthoughts that are solved too easily'!

Someone has to understand the goals of a story before they can judge whether the main character works.

I can't judge romance novels because I'm a romance-repulsed aroace, and I do NOT understand why they're doing ANY of what they're doing. I can't judge my husband's isekai protagonists, because solving all the world's problems on my own is a nightmare, not a fantasy, for me.

I CAN judge Menolly, from Dragonsong, and she's PERFECTLY designed to find believing she has value a struggle, despite being a once in a generation musical talent. Which is the exact arc that so many 'Mary Sue's get derided for. (She's also written by a talented authour, and those books are great. They're just written for young teens.)

I can also judge Ender. Ender's Game is about how dehumanizing the enemy breaks something inside those who do it, about whether war crimes can be defendable, about how gifted tracks can isolate and warp kids, and a dozen other really thorny ethical problems. It's a tragedy, and ends pretty much identically to The Lord of The Rings - with Ender too broken to return to society and needing to travel across the waters/space. Ender is perfectly designed to headline that tragedy. He's a gifted kid who cares greatly about other people, but with that slight distance that neurodivergent people often have. Which is taken advantage of to twist him into a mass murderer, while also leaving him able to mourn what he's done. Every victory is HORROR, not a sign of how great Ender is!

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I agree that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can be a meaningful criticism. I've dropped a lot of books because I found them boring for that very reason.

But I don't think "Mary Sue" is the correct term for that concept. Because it has, right from the beginning, been about judging characters by the wrong standard. It's about assuming that 13 years have the same level of self-knowledge as adults, and aren't writing 'perfect' characters that people hate 'for no reason' because they don't understand why people hate THEM. It's about assuming that since I read superhero fanfic, I must care about the fighting and powers. It's about assuming that if a character has no challenges in the areas that the speaker cares about, then they have no meaningful challenges at all.

(In reference to my recommendation that people who are forced to tolerate intolerable children’s programming can win some breathing space by insisting it’s only available in a different language.)

Is it normal and okay to demand that a boyfriend move out of his parent's house before you will marry him, or is this controlling and should you accept him as he is?

"But what if people will pretend to need this accessibility option so they can be lazy! People who don't need it will use it!!" - those people probably aren't using it to be lazy, either.

Most people will take the stairs, because they're shorter than the ramp, and that makes them easier. Most people will screw off the cap themselves, because it's easier than finding the grippy pad that helps. Most people will prefer the shower without a chair, because it's easier to move around with more space.

The curb-cutter effect is real - most accessibility aids will help people they weren't directly designed to help - but that doesn't mean that they make things easier for the majority of abled people. In the spring, curb-cuts are really annoying to me - they let the puddles spread out up the sidewalk and I usually skirt around them to where the curb lets me jump over the water.

Most accessibility devices don't actually help the lazy. They're slower than the normal way, they require special devices you need to keep track of, they get in the way. They have a cost. Even for people needing aid, they sometimes aren't worth it. In university, accessibility services offered me multiple supports, and I had to turn them all down, because all of them had more downsides than benefits for me.

Most kitchen gadgets just make the job harder if you're abled - all those fiddly places to wash afterwards - and the ones that don't? Food processors and electric mixers aren't considered accessibility devices. Because they're helpful to everyone. Is it lazy to not whip your cream, or blend your smoothies, by hand?

If translating someone else's notes is more helpful than making your own, you aren't being lazy if you accept a volunteer note taker. (For most people, the main benefit of note taking is in organizing the thoughts yourself and highlighting the ones that will remind you of the rest.)

If using a cane causes less long-term pain then going without, and seems worth the effort of dragging a cane around all day, you definitely aren't being lazy using one! (Canes cause their own type of strain and soreness, and get heavy after a while.)

It's often incredibly difficult to find the right type and dosage for antidepressants. If you're willing to brave possible hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, feelings of emptiness, allergic reactions, weight gain, and dozens of doctors appointments - you probably really do need that medication.

Even if you're using an accessibility option that isn't actually helpful, and is increasing dependence/degrading skills (what's usually meant by 'laziness') it's almost always because you are trying to deal with an issue that DOES need accommodation. You're just currently using the wrong accommodation. That's NOT LAZINESS!

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I dont care if 9/10 of the people who use the wheelchair ramp arent actually in wheelchairs. As long as the 1 person who needs it has access to it.

I dont care if 9/10 people who use the automatic push button on the library door can actually push the door open themselves. As long as the 1 person who the door is too heavy for gets to use it.

I dont care if 9/10 people who buy the can tab opener, or the little guitar clamp that holds the chords for you, or the hand grip that helps you hold chop sticks, don't need any of it and just get it to "be lazy". As long as the one disabled person who needs it gets access to it.

I do not care. Oh my GOD I do not care. As long as there's a disabled person on this planet who the accessibility device will benefit, the accessibility device is necessary.