Dragons and Damsels

my maternal grandfather was illiterate. like. could not read a word. but he had a fantastic head for numbers.

and I bet you all thought this was going to be another post about social class, didn’t you?

Gimli, a dwarf who has lost most of his people’s cultural artefacts: ... I’m sorry Bilbo was given what and did what with it

Frodo, secretly wearing Bilbo’s mithril mail at that very moment but only after nearly 70 years of it sitting in the Useless Dumb Artefacts Museum gathering dust because Bilbo had no idea his cool shirt was worth approximately the net value of their entire country:

when I read A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, I was really struck by his observations about gender. i wish I could remember the quote but he says something like, "do you really have a good relationship with your wife if you aren't almost inclined to call her Brother?" a lot of the things he said seemed like a contrast with the more "gender essentialist" ideas he espouses in for example Mere Christianity

And that's the thing, Mere Christianity and most of his well known fictional works were written before he was married, and the thing about a lot of writers we view today as sexist is that they hardly ever interacted with women as peers.

and like, of course someone would have these ideas about the Nature of Women in contrast to men when in their experience, women inhabit different and in many ways mutually unintelligible social worlds than men.

Quote below:

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

(Nobody should quote George RR Martin’s nearly identical quote “I’ve always considered women to be people” with any pretence at progressiveness without appreciating that Sayers, who was born in the 1880s, wrote this in the 1930s and could write effective male characters having only observed them at a distance.)

Hat tip to @talkingpiffle . After several decades of a fond and intellectual friendship in which Sayers constantly published works stating explicitly that “I am a human more than a woman” and “I prefer to be seen as a self rather than a gender”, CS Lewis, at the very end, was like “Woman friend… complex…. About gender?? But likeable??? We genuinely loved and admired each other… woman friend like man friend. 😭”

When forcibly isolated from each other, the powerful group will imagine a just world gave them that power, and will imagine that the less powerful group must be lesser in other ways.

While the less powerful group will just assume the more powerful group are humans, same as everybody else.

--

Eh. I think it's at least as much about fundamentally seeing all conflict as bad and a sign that something has gone wrong. If you offend someone, it means you have Caused Harm. If even one person out there just plain doesn't like you, it means there's a specific reason and you two need to have it out and clear up the misunderstanding or atone for the mistake.

But of course, in reality, people offend each other all the time or just don't get along. It's a normal part of life and not something to be "fixed".

A lot of people who don't like your book just... don't like it and should be allowed to go on not liking it in peace.

First, these are people expressing genuine pain. It’s just usually not pain directly caused by whatever they’re reacting to, it’s pain and sometimes serious trauma, and lashing out at anything that reminds them of it helps them feel in control. In addition, these groups actively discourage actual healing, because healing becomes seen as a capitulation to the oppressive dynamics of the rest of society. If you don’t stay hurt and angry, you’re no longer reacting appropriately to the oppression you face. And anything that hurts you by touching on your trauma is an act of oppression in and of itself. And because the group is “doing something about it” by fighting back against the causes of that pain, it’s the only safe place in the entire world.

But there are a bunch of problems with that, one of which is that it’s obviously a cult dynamic that demands groupthink. If you disagree that something is harmful, you’ve turned yourself into an Unsafe Person who has to be cast out to preserve the safety of the group. Another is that rejection of healing: these groups actually help keep their members in a heightened state of trauma rather than encouraging any kind of healing. Those two dynamics make them acutely damaging to the people in them.

From the outside, though, the biggest problem is actually that, because anything that hurts them is an act of oppression and must be resisted as such, these groups are utterly incapable of acknowledging competing needs. Competing needs are a thorn in the side of anti-oppression work in general, in my experience, because they mean that no one space or work can be safe for all people. This is also why it’s impossible to create a work that everyone will acknowledge as Certified Not Oppressive. Different people in need different things from representation, and there’s always going to be someone out there who looks at your wish fulfillment character and sees a reproduction of oppressive dynamics or tropes in exactly the parts you love most.

But when you get multiple groups of traumatized people, all of whom are desperate to find work that speaks to them, and those groups themselves have competing needs and a culture that valorizes going on the attack when a work doesn’t meet those needs, you end up with the kind of perfect storm we’ve been seeing for the last several years, because every work can offend someone. And then, on top of that, you get a bunch of “allies” whose received wisdom is that the best way to help is to amplify the voice of whoever is expressing the most pain at the moment, even when the needs of that person are directly in opposition to the one the previous round.

So I'm sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There's an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.

"Simple!" I say. "Let's get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls."

"Good idea!" she says. "But we'll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples."

And as we're debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice...

Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks "HELLO I'M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE"

"Amazing!" declares my colleague. "...Who are you?"

"COME AND SEE IT!!!" he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.

We went and saw it. It's an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We're going to use it to assess microplastics.

And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard' in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE

"Great," he said. "Where is the chemical cupboard?"

"Shrug emoji," his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.

So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch'.

"Right-o," he thought. "No touching that."

But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not "Have a quick look so you have an idea of what's there", it's "These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure," so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.

The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.

It had crystallised.

("It was quite beautiful, actually," he told me dreamily. "A work of art. I wish I'd kept it.")

The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.

The kicker is, Caroline didn't care. She insisted they didn't have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean's office.

"You look like you're having a bad day," she said warily.

"Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found," he said, "but I was very wrong."

Picric acid! That’s the bunny.

The first most of us heard of it was when a group of posh British gentlemen in alarming unidentifiable black riot gear approached a gaggle of us outside a lab entrance, not quite believing the address one of them had been given. The following conversation is HIGHLY exaggerated to give an idea of the context (bonkers), how it was received (incredulously) and what information we were given (none.)

Dashing Captain: hello, sorry, not to be a bother but I’m trying to get to “Professor X’s Laboratory, University of Bristol” for some chemical disposal, but I can’t help but notice but we are, in fact, somehow in a hospital?

Us, a cluster of techs and students, mostly Italian: yes that’s right!

DC: ah, in fact, this chemistry lab is somehow sharing an address with the Bristol Royal Infirmary? which is a large hospital, unavoidably placed somewhat in the middle of the city, next to the largest children’s hospital in the region, both of them quite famously chockfull of patients?

Us: yes, well, technically it’s a biomedical laboratory. We have the seventh floor.

DC: thanks, that’s lovely. Seventh floor of a busy urban hospital, thanks. Any chance of it being separated or set apart in any way from the patient wards, or….?

Us, in a fatally friendly way: no, unfortunately, we’re really right on top of each other - we even share fire alarms!

all of us, overlapping: like when we used to have toasters in our kitchens! Whenever the nurses in the floor below toasted something too much, or vice versa, both floors had to evacuate since we share ventilation and the same alarm circuit, or something? We set each other off, basically. The nurses have little jackets with pockets to carry the babies in - they fill the pockets with the babies!

The rest of us, overlapping: Anyway they took all of our toasters away a few months ago, so that doesn’t happen so much any more.

The Dashing Captain was not pleased with this.

Anyway, when we went back in, the labs were full of handsome SWAT type men in black gear, all looking alarmed in a way that didn’t suit them, and not really noticing us much. Lab workers kept emerging from our usual activities - coming out of darkrooms or tissue culture rooms - and sort of yelping at each other while the Men in Black Bomb Squad said things like “MORE OF YOU?? WHAT’S EVEN IN THERE?” and we’d say, upset, “viruses!” Or “the autoclave!” And the men would sort of repeat it incredulously, as if we’d designed the hospital to offend them, while the tech scuttled off in confusion.

I want to say it was Pirate Simon who had either discovered it or identified the danger. (Pirate Simon was a lab tech who famously had three nipples and played in a band called Scaramanga (?) on the strength of that.) the information filtered through that it was a big fuckign jar of dried picric acid crystals being kept in a sort of non-explosion-proof tin box with a lot of other horribly degraded chemicals with vintage labels, shoved in a corner of a defunct lab and tucked in nicely/disguised in a pile of Useful Bags for Life and bits of unidentified styrofoam packing material next to a hot water pipe, sort of thing.

The handsome SWAT men had decided that given the insanity of the situation, on the seventh floor of the actual goddamn Bristol Royal Infirmary, with nurses having to fill their pockets with NICU babies and choose which elderly people to strap to the evacuation boards, they were first going to rehydrate (and therefore stabilize) the picric acid before moving it. There was a concern whether unscrewing the lid of the massive glass bottle would disrupt dried crystals caught in the screw tracks of the lid, and this was an occupying debate. And then they discovered The Rest Of The Stash; this was only one of many things we’d done terribly wrong or stored improperly, apparently. The dashing men were not very impressed with the academic community that day, we sensed. In fact it was all rather tense. They didn’t seem to acknowledge us much, and we were unclear on what WE should do. Nobody was telling us what was going on. There was a foreboding sense of impending trouble. They were making evacuation-related noises - which we recognised from the toasters - but nothing was moving on, and evacuations were actually quite annoying for us. We all assessed the situation carefully and sensibly.

…From the prospect of the pub across the street, we beheld many, many men in black bomb squad gear filtering around the bustling public and patients and scenes of the hospital: there was definitely a lot of disruption, but nary anything resembling a mass evacuation ever appeared. Lots of interesting vehicles showed up and also drove away. After a while the pub seemed more important anyway and then it was 5 pm anyway, so -

Long story short, it was a surprisingly low-key bomb scare for what it was, which was “a stupid amount of explosive that could explode if bumped, kept carelessly on the seventh floor in a packed hospital.” I swear that we talked about it on Twitter, I know it definitely happened, but there’s no news stories or anything. There wasn’t even a real scold or a Statement or anything else that really happened as a result, even though about thirty Men in Black milled around with ghastly expressions on their faces for about half a day.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned a bit more about how bad it could have been, and I’m not quite sure whether it was good or bad that it was handled this way. I do very much appreciate that the disposal method of choice for the equivalent of “a dirty bomb in a kiddie hospital” was “mostly treat it like the nurses set a toaster on fire again.” And given that the hospital had horrible things occurring regularly like medical waste fluids leaking from the ceilings onto our workbenches (we were told it should be fine, because it had been autoclaved first) it was rather nice to have the attention.

Ah, yes, Darles Charwin. The naturalist, biologist, botanist, and would-be supernaturalist Twitch chat wanted Vlad to have a fling with.

After an illustrious career in advancing the studies of demonic fungi, and a brief and thoroughly intensive study of vampiric physiology, Darles Charwin has retired to his country estate on the west coast of Nevrond where he lives with his life partner and a menagerie of animals.

The pair pass infrequent letters (usually when something exciting happens in the world of botany) with the cordial politeness of those who have seen each other naked but who are far better suited as like-minded colleagues who prefer it that way.

I cannot stress enough that Darles Charwin does not exist in the first book. Twitch chat made me create him during a live stream back in 2018, where they were throwing prompt words at me, and I had to make stories out of them.

However, the ranger has the following information about the beast:

It has black claws.

It has a red coat.

It has 10-pointed yellow horns.

It hunts children for fun.

It jealously guards the resources of the forest.

It doesn’t look like an animal.

It is cruel.

It is bad.

The ranger looks at the king and notices that:

The king wears black gloves.

He wears a red cape.

He wears a gold crown with points.

Further, through the story we understand:¥

He has beaten up a fairly small child.

Her job description is to guard the resources on the king’s behalf.

The beast can take a unexpected form.

It is monstrous (beastly) to ask your employee to execute a child.

Her boss is the real bad guy!!

She replies “I will (kill the beast)” and fires the arrow. We don’t see who she is firing at, but it is implied that she has realized that the king is the beast.

The creator has framed the reveal so that the reader and the ranger come to the same conclusion at the same time. They have deliberately chosen to leave the ending ambiguous - they are not showing the result of the choice. This creates tension. It also means that readers who didn’t get the reveal might be confused and try again, experiencing understanding and satisfaction when they trip the mechanism. Readers like the feelings they get from activating a reveal. Creators like it when people pay attention (the closer the better) to their work.

I made reference to an artwork - “oh, it’s like that piece thats three feet of air above a pedastal that contains a curse or a blessing from a witch.”

I sure baffled a bunch of students, right then.

Tom Friedman, “Untitled (A Curse),” 1992

I have spoken to you all before about the UK Government Whip system. In particular, I explained that there are different levels - one, two and three line whips, which are imposed on MPs to try to make them all vote in lockstep on important issues. Three line whips are rarely used, because if you violate them, you lose party backing and your secrets get exposed and the ghost of Margaret Thatcher personally turns up to your house and privatises your wife.

Today, Liz Truss imposed a three line whip.

On fracking.

Now this is BIG FUCKING NEWS. All UK countries except England have banned fracking, and England is actually very against it too; Tory election promises in general and Liz Truss's promises in particular were that we would not do it again unless an ongoing study into environmental impacts said it was safe. The study has been done! But they blocked it from being released on the grounds that environmental safety would be disrespectful to the corpse of Lizzie Two.

And then Liz announced we would solve the energy crisis by fracking.

Uproar! A broken campaign promise! How very dare they! Labour, naturally, decided to provide a bit of opposition and so tabled a motion to ban it. So it had to go to a vote.

And she imposed a three line whip. Quoth the Deputy Chief Whip, "We cannot allow Labour to be big meanies and say no because then they might get some legislation passed and everyone will see that we're a bunch of pigs in clown suits" (I'm paraphrasing). Tory MPs were suddenly thrown into disarray, actively declaring that they don't understand why a three line is being used on this motion. The vote is literally happening as we speak. I am typing this sentence at 7.02pm. The vote is at 7, and will take several minutes. It's kicking off.

Three Tories have already declared rebellion.

Graham Brady, the head of the 1922 Committee (stars of previous best-selling clownshow The Adventures of Big Dog the Clown) informed Liz Truss that she had reached the threshold number of letters of no confidence to trigger a formal vote of no confidence in her leadership.

NOW DON'T ALL GET EXCITED.

Here's how it works:

If a vote of no confidence is held and the sitting PM passes - wins the vote, as it were, retains the confidence of their peers and allies - they are immune to further votes for one (1) year. This is in fact what happened to Boris Johnson, although in the end, he was brought down within weeks anyway by a grubby sex scandal. Surprisingly, it wasn't one of his own.

HOWEVER.

If the leader is brand new, they are ALSO immune for a while.

Now this is very interesting; because this is not a secret, hidden rule. This is a very well-known rule among people who are actively trying to oust their political leaders. The Tories knew sending in letters wouldn't actually work, because that's the rule. What this therefore means is, Liz Truss is so spectacularly unpopular that they all did it anyway, in a sort of unified conglomerate of desperate misery clinging to "Likes to charge, reblogs to cast" logic in the hopes that maybe TV comedians would stop laughing at them and they could maybe meet their own reflection's eyes again.

So Graham Brady receives these useless letters, this limp and worthless sheets of paper, and goes to Liz Truss, and tells her he's received them.

"These would have triggered a vote," he tells her. "But they will not. You are too new."

And that is that.

...

For about an hour, anyway.

Because about an hour later, journalists report that Graham Brady has taken the breathlessly unprecedented vat of liquid faeces that the Tory party has become, and the soul-hollowing amount of damage that the party has inflicted upon the country, and the skin-crawlingly cringeworthy way Liz Truss delivers speeches, all into consideration.

And he is changing the rules.

54 letters are not enough, he says.

But about half of the party should be sufficient.

And that is that.

...

For about an hour, anyway.

Because about an hour later, journalists report that Graham Brady has looked at the way no Tories remain who can read joined-up writing, and the way Suella Braverman maybe quit but maybe was secretly fired by Jeremy Cunt, and the way Nadine Dorries.

And he is changing the rules.

Actually, he says. I know I said half.

But a third should be sufficient.

...

118 letters of no confidence are all that stand between us and The Second Clownfall of 2022; we have a confirmed 54.

He is rumoured to have received "over a hundred."

5.05pm. Chris Skidmore tweets that as he was the environment minister who literally signed our anti-fracking policy into law he cannot vote with the whip, and shall rebel

Guardian's political correspondent says, this is a senior MP happy to declare they're voting against what is being seen as a confidence vote. Will this open the door to others?

6.55pm. Graham Stewart, Minister of State for Climate, announces that this is not a confidence vote in the government after all, and they all just had their fingers crossed, trololol, it's all fine

7.11pm. This tweet from Lloyd Russel-Moyle MP:

Yes, you read that right lol, these vicious ghouls are physically assaulting MPs to force them to vote for the PM

35 minutes ago. Pippa Crerar announces both the Chief Whip and the Deputy Chief Whip have quit, because they had a massive screaming fight in the Commons lobby about whether this is a confidence vote or not.

Because the Whips don't want to assault anyone else, and want it to not be a confidence vote.

But Truss says it was.

20 minutes ago. David Linden MP (SNP) reports that in the absence of the Whips he just saw the Deputy PM Therese Coffey physically pick up a hesitant Tory MP and carry them bodily into the voting lobby

This is some straight-up Fall of the Roman Republic shit. What the fuck.

Here is a fun Twitter thread, but screenshots here:

The results are now in: naturally, the government has won, given that they're quite possibly holding people's nans hostage. But, 40 brave MPs abstained.