SHE'S GONE WHERE THE GOBLINS GO

“When it was offered me I said no. I tell you I said no. With my last breath, I said no.”

I just love everything about it. It's so important to me. How it comes to the end

SPOILERS AHEAD.

When it's revealed what Good Stab is actually after, how he punishes Arthur Beaucarne, how he leaves his fate to the hands of his great x3 granddaughter.

How at the end, when she sees him and the other Blackfeet people leaving from their memorial, and he is with them, he is with his people. and how she recognizes him, not as a vampire, but as one of his people.

That's what takes Good Stab's story through, that he never stops being Pikuni. He is always Pikuni inside, no matter what he ever looked like, no matter what he turned into. He knew what he was. At some point while reading, I thought that it might end with him eating mice until he turned into one like he kept saying he would, but I realized that for the story structure it would be better if it didn't go that way, and I'm glad it didn't. He lives. He carries all the stories he knew and lived. He is The Fullblood, he is Other, but he is Good Stab most importantly and firstly.

first you have stratt dragging him in front of that stacked audience and making him explain his process for HIS SAKE. she didn't have to do that. at all! by the time he arrives they've reproduced his results and acquired a more in-depth, refined understanding of the process than HE has! his plywood box is yesterdays news. SHE DOES THAT FOR HIM! she makes him get up there and take credit, then takes off the pressure because the point was never the information at all. the point is that she knows a) he left his field with his reputation in shambles and a significant chip on his shoulder, and b) if she's going to keep him on the vat, she needs to integrate him into its intellectual ecosphere. and to make sure that happens, as many before me have pointed out, she puts herself in his corner and makes them acknowledge his expertise.

and then grace more or less does the inverse of this during the "what is project hail mary" scene, phrasing his questions such as though stratt were defending her thesis statement and he's there to uncover argumentative weak points and logical leaps. and the thing is, THEY needled him with questions because stratt INVITED them to acknowledge his expertise; he turns around and needles them because now he's testing their collective expertise. he's questioning their methods and outright going (smug guy voice): "you can't just build an interstellar spaceship." he could rephrase that if he cared to, but he doesn't. he hasn't yet made the leap from we're having a debate to we're trying to solve a problem together, so he's going back to being a contrarian because this is a setting where that's his default. you can't be pushed into defense if you're actively attacking theirs, can you? EXCEPT. stratt doesn't even blink because she's given this presentation a hundred times, probably more, and the final blow completely disarms him: "it's what you americans would call a- long shot?"

and he says, finally, "i get it." because oh! turns out this is not a test and nobody is actually fighting him. the sun is dying and also he lives on a boat now.

What did I say at the start of this, as to the Queen, as to destruction unleashed? Something about the regretful dead and the...hmm, what was it? Traumatized alive. That I had made a contribution. Let me take that back. The fault was mine. All mine.

The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Andrew Tate was being charged with seven further counts of rape, as well as other charges relating to alleged crimes including sex trafficking and indecent images of a child.