Saoirse Stone and her many Gay Little Thoughts

I wrote a book! And you can buy it on itch.io right now, but it’s also going to launch on most other major ebook storefronts in the coming days.

Rondo of the Precipice is the start of my attempt to make an epic fantasy series like the ones I read as a kid, but as queer and politically-grounded as I always wished they were. Here’s the pitch:

When an explosive attack destroys an embassy in the capital of the Accord Occidens, tensions left dormant for two decades threaten to reignite. The leaders of the nations surrounding the Warming Sea begin to scheme, hoping to preserve peace if possible, or come out on top of the ensuing conflict if not. This is not the story of the leaders of those great and powerful nations. This is the tale of people who begin on the margins, left to sink or swim in the changing tides of history.

The first story follows Oscar, an impoverished young man with a remarkable talent for magick healing. Oscar sells himself into indentured servitude to feed his younger siblings, but is appalled to realize his contract has been bought by a mercenary company. His beliefs are tested as he is introduced to the wartorn borderlands between his home country (the Imperium Gran Rus) and the neighboring Accord Occidens. Oscar’s story is about economic exploitation and the things it can drive us to do, while also having a healing helping of high stakes action.

The second tale is about Rhiannon, second child of a noble house. Her world is upturned when her hand in marriage is offered to seal a peace deal between her home (the Conclave of Avalon) and the Accord. When she agrees, sacrificing her own future to prevent full-blown war, she is shipped out on an odyssey across the Accord, ending with her impending nuptials in its capital. Things go awry, however, when mysterious assassins attack her on the way, only for her to be saved by a mysterious crimson-haired songstress. This bard, named Niamh, invites confusion and unexpected longing in Rhiannon, who will soon have to choose between duty and authenticity. Rhiannon’s story is about moral responsibility, neurodivergence, and compulsory heterosexuality.

The final narrative thread stars Ares, a sailor running away from a violent past and truths housed in his own heart. When his brother arranges work on the merchant ship Demeter, Ares unwittingly sets off on a cursed voyage across the Warming Sea. As the ship sails on, his internal struggles begin to be eclipsed by a rising darkness that threatens to claim the lives of the whole crew. The tale of Ares is a story of trauma and transness, and should be entered into knowing that parts will be a tough read. It’s a trans story by a trans woman, and it does not pull punches. But if one goes in with an open mind, I think they’ll find something special.

All three narratives thread together to depict a world on the brink. I put all of my frustrations and fears about the state of the real world into this thing, and came out with a book that speaks to struggle but also resilience.

This is a really personal story for me. Fantasy was a shelter for me, growing up as a scared, closeted trans girl in rural Florida. But I always wished the characters in those stories were a little more like me. As an adult, I can actually do something about it.

I love the three leads in this book. I love that they gave me the chance to allegorically engage with economic exploitation, religion, border disputes, compulsory heterosexuality, hot girls who play music, the existential terror of the sea, the burden and joy of transness, and the feminine urge to burn it all down.

The wonderful folks at Mothership gave me a chance to write about something near and dear to my heart: why the moral choice at the end of Life Is Strange is to save Chloe Price at the expense of Arcadia Bay.

Y’all, I had a weird fucking week.

The Advocate (the queer journalists, not the Louisiana ones) ran a profile of me. It was about being a trans teacher in Florida, and how I just can’t keep doing it. I only got interviewed because they saw my GoFundMe, but they did, so all of a sudden I’m getting interviewed by a national news outlet.

I don’t know what the numbers on that story looked like in the grand scheme of things, but enough people saw it to change my life. Because the thing about Florida education laws is that I was effectively closeted against my will. On the clock, I couldn’t self-advocate for my preferred pronouns at all, and to be safe I needed to avoid talking about being trans in almost all situations at work. Non-compliance meant losing my job and my teaching certificate. And I abided by those draconian, awful measures, for YEARS.

Now people know anyway.

And on the one hand, that’s good! I want to be out, I never wanted to hide who I was. But coworkers and current students and former students and parents of students and old friends and old acquaintances saw this story, and for each of them that saw the story, I will never get the chance to come out on my terms. My coming out to those people has become political, not personal, and I can’t help feeling like I’ve been robbed. Not by Christopher Wiggins, who wrote a great article. But by the fascists in Tallahassee who put me in this situation in the first place. I gave up something in going public with my story, and I suspect I’m just starting to see the full shape of what it was.

The other big thing was that it drove donations to my fundraiser. As I type this, it’s raised a little over $9000, which is legitimately life-changing money for me. Lilly Wachowski donated $5000 by herself (When I found that out, I had to go lie down for a while). Regardless, my wife and I can actually afford to get out of Florida and move to Maryland like we wanted. We were working towards that, but now it’s actually real, so I should be happy about that at least, yeah?

But I’m not happy, at least not entirely. Because like…why do I get to be the lucky one? There are so many other girls (and guys, and enbies) that are just as worthy, if not more so. Probably a fair amount better suited to speak on behalf of an oppressed group. Why me? I’m a good teacher for sure, but it’s not like I’m particularly good at messaging. My most prominent social media post in the past year was about how I thought Ghost of Yotei needed more sapphic smooching. I’m nobody special, just an unserious goofball who was in the right place and the right time.

I believe that everyone is worthy of freedom and dignity, and so I think everyone is deserving of support that will help them actualize those things. But I don’t feel worthy of this.

Maybe it’s something akin to survivor’s guilt. I don’t know. But I do know that now I feel like I have to do something with this chance. I don’t want to just escape and live a quiet little life with my love. I want to escape and then make the world better for all the people who didn’t get lucky like me. I want to make it better for all the queer kids at my school who are about to lose another supportive teacher. I want to make it better for everyone feeling isolated because of government hate.

Because I didn’t deserve to get lucky and get to be the one special girl who gets out. I deserved to have my home state, the state that I love, treat me like a person. And so does everybody else.

It’s a pretty common experience for transfems, all queer people really, to connect to our queerness through the art we engage in, long before we recognize that’s what we’re doing. Trans spaces abound with stories of getting really attached to Sailor Moon, or Bayonetta, or dozens of other fictional worlds and characters that permit an exploration of gender. There are some common ones shared by many of us (looking at you, Jadzia Dax), but there are also connections we made relatively independent of the subcultural unconscious.

For me, one of the most affecting connections was with a secondary character from a Kingdom Hearts spinoff. Xion, from Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, fucked me up in ways I wasn’t remotely equipped to deal with at 16.

Xion is first presented as a faceless entity who also wields a keyblade. Initially stiff and robotic, exposure to Roxas and Axel leads to the development of individuality. She becomes not just a wielder of the keyblade, but a person, a young woman with her own quirks and character. The three routinely meet up to share sea salt ice cream atop a clock tower, giving all three the companionship they desperately crave.

Xion’s desires aren’t that complicated. She doesn’t want more than is reasonable. She’s a simple girl, who just wants to live simply with her friends. Her only real ambition is to understand who she is. And even those simple wants are denied to her.

Xion was created to take the place of Sora as a keyblade wielder. She isn’t meant to live her own life. She’s not meant to be herself, she’s meant to be a vision of a boy she neither knows nor understands. But not even that boy in truth: a facsimile of a boy absolutely loyal to the patriarch of the organization that created her. When she tries to run away to find herself, she is captured, and “fixed” to force her to conform to her creators desires. She is denied autonomy, denied personhood, denied happiness, all to force her to be who her progenitors want her to be.

Needless to say that hit home, even though I didn’t yet understand why. I was already well-versed in denying myself to confirm to expectation, of giving up who I wanted to be to be who my parents told me I was supposed to be. I thought it was normal, just the nature of the world. It took seeing that dynamic removed from my own life to really begin to understand that wasn’t okay.

At 16, I didn’t know I was trans. Not because I was fine, not because I didn’t sense something different about me compared to those around me, but because I didn’t know what it meant to be trans. What I did know is that the end of 358 left me sobbing in a fetal position for reasons I couldn’t yet understand. Xion died at the end. No, worse. Xion was wiped from existence, even from the very fabric of memory, with the friends she had made only able to feel her presence through the pain of a grief with no apparent source. Despite my best attempts to stop, I wept in that tiny bedroom in rural Florida, trying desperately not to wake my family. They would have questions I wasn’t remotely prepared to answer. So I sobbed myself to sleep.

It’s been a long time since I cried in that tiny bedroom. I’m older, wiser, and very much a woman now. And with the benefit of hindsight I can admit that despite its impact on me, 358 wasn’t a very good game. But I’m still grateful for Xion, who let me acknowledge the hidden grief weighing down my soul. And I’m so, so glad that she got her happy ending too, even if it took ten years. Because conformity is artificial, enforced upon a non-compliant world, and the drive towards freedom cannot be erased.

I wrote a novel this year, and it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.

Here’s how it happened.

It’s a terrible thing, to be gripped by the desire to create, to have the skills to do it, and ideas worth using, and to still find yourself powerless to actually do it. To stare at the page, trying desperately to pierce through the roar of dysphoria buzzing in your brain, and to barely be able to get a chapter down. To then throw away that one chapter when the self-loathing hits, when your mind admonishes you for the hubris of thinking you might have something worth saying. So eventually you stop. You stop writing. You stop outlining. You stop even letting your imagination run wild with thoughts of what could be. And you are so terribly depressed from the dysphoria that you barely even feel bad about it. Not sad. Just numb.

Life goes on. And then one day you’ve had enough, and you make the appointment. You go, you get your HRT, and…it works. Not the very first day. But you’re two weeks in and the roar has quieted to a whisper. Your mind is clearer, you’ve gained an ability to focus. And a quiet part of your mind dares to ask if maybe, someday, you might be able to pick up your pen again. You don’t, not then, but the thought is there.

The next two years pass in a blur. You figure out a lot about yourself. The shell of a man that hid you is falling away, and the woman you are has to learn to walk on her own two feet.

You have fun. You make mistakes. You get hurt. But you’re actually living.

You dye your hair red. You get an undercut. Everybody thinks it suits you.

The person you thought was one of your best friends in the world, a queer comrade in arms, outs himself as a manipulative, deceitful narcissist when you become someone he can’t easily control. He hurts you and someone you love immensely, he lies to mutual friends about you, and then he disappears, leaving you to pick up the pieces. It’s only once he’s gone that you realize just how coercive and manipulative he had been.

Your roommate becomes your best friend, and then your girlfriend, and then your wife. The circumstances of this are so incredibly juicy that you suspect you’ll turn it into a book someday.

Your state government changes the law, so everything about being trans gets more difficult less than a year after you started transitioning. You still keep moving. The weight of government restriction feels light compared to the depression and self-loathing you’ve left behind.

You discover so much about what you need and want, and you finally stop forcing yourself to perform masculinity. You let go of so much performative bullshit, from your clothes to your music to even a hobby or two. You don’t ditch it all though. Only that which no longer serves you.

You embrace your femininity, and find so much new to explore. You reteach yourself to cook. You let yourself examine your aesthetic sensibilities. Your living space transforms from a sterile, cluttered bachelor pad to a warm and inviting space. You begin to dress yourself differently, and you like the way you look.

It turns out you’re still kinda butch. But that’s okay.

You get an Audre Lorde poem tattooed on one forearm, and a FFXIV quote on the other. They’re quickly followed by a copy of Nami’s tattoo from One Piece, and Jolyne Cujoh’s butterfly tattoo. Your first instinct is to feel like a dork, but it gets overridden by the realization that you look fucking sick. One night out, a pretty girl with purple hair and a septum piercing affirms your estimation.

In defiance of a world that hates and fears you, you become a giant, tattooed trans dyke. You discover there are sapphically-inclined girls who are very much into that, which does wonders for your self-esteem. For the first time in your life, love actually feels stronger than hate.

And then it’s January 2025, and you finally let yourself think about writing again. You are older and wiser. You wonder if you can really do this. And this time the answer is “I won’t know until I try.” So you try, even though you’re scared out of your mind that you’ll fail to finish anything, or worse, succeed at creating something bad.

You take everything you’ve done, everything you’ve felt. You let it guide you. Your anger and fear and sorrow, but also your love and your joy.

And then it’s July and you’ve written a first draft, nearly a 100,000 words of fantasy, with strains of romance and horror blended in. It’s about queerness. It’s about magic. It’s about alienation and betrayal and suffering. It’s also about the radical act of becoming. It’s a first draft and thus terrible, but it’s better than you expected.

It wasn’t easy. It took focus, discipline. But you did it. You proved to yourself you could do it. And even more shocking…you kind of like it.

Sure, it takes a lot of revisions to not totally suck. But there’s a seed of honesty there. You think you might’ve actually captured something. So you do the next really fucking scary thing, and you reach out to your friends, and you ask them to read the dumb second draft you wrote.

But they don’t think it’s dumb. They like it, not without critique, but they like it. And you kind of don’t know what to do with that. You never expected to get this far.

The best feedback is the stuff you get from your wife. In the evenings, you read it aloud to her. It gives you an incredible sense for the readability of the prose, but you also get to see her emotional reactions to developments in the text. She’s laughing at the jokes, crying at the bits supposed to pull at the heartstrings. When you finish reading her the big love scene, she quietly leads you to the bedroom and pushes you onto the bed, fade to black.

You take all the feedback, and you create a third draft. And this one you’re almost proud of, even if you know an editor will one day work it over.

It’s August 2025.

You realize you’re starting to believe you could be a published author. A month later, you send out your first query letters to agents. Once again, you’re terrified. You’ve put something you love deeply in front of people who don’t love you, and who will explicitly judge the worth of what you’ve made.

Three weeks later, you get your first rejection. A polite form letter.

You expect to be devastated. You expect to feel judged.

But you’re okay. You are okay. And even after a dozen other rejections, you are still okay. Even after a rejection by the world, you still believe in yourself.

It’s October of 2025. You still haven’t gotten an agent. But you aren’t scared anymore. Instead, you reflect on how far you’ve come. You allow yourself a sense of pride.

You wonder just how far you might go. You have a few chapters of a sequel already dive, and an outline for the next book after that. You have a whole file at home with ideas for other books, in other genres.

Do you think Christian thought leaders know on some level that they’re the problem, that decades of declining church attendance weren’t because of leftist colleges indoctrinating their children or whatever, that they were always the problem?

Charlie Kirk has got me thinking about this again, what with how he’s being lionized as a Christian martyr. A vicious, soulless bigot being subsumed under the veneer of loving family man and brave truth-teller. They successfully constructed the narrative of the good Christian being assassinated for his religious beliefs, and they built it out of a much less palatable truth: a noted bigot pissing off a politically-incoherent white kid, in yet another example of young white men being radicalized into violence.

It probably seems like such a propaganda victory right now. But “victories” like these have been sowing the seeds of the American Christian Church’s dissolution for decades, at the least. Because those victories are lies, and you cannot hold up truthfulness as a tenet of your faith while disseminating untruths without consequences.

If you actually talk to young people that grew up religious and then stopped, a common refrain is that while they may or may not have lost faith in their god, they certainly lost faith in the human institution of the Church. A major driver of that dynamic is members of the clergy spouting verifiable bullshit, either through willing ignorance or knowing malice. Christian communities tend to be culturally insular, and there are all kinds of ways in which they push young people to cut off access to the greater world and only engage with approved sources of information. They have their own news media, their own films and television, their own music, even their own cultural heroes. All of it designed to comport with American Christian values. All of it to paint a very specific picture of the world.

Charlie Kirk initially seems like a great wedge to use to further separate the Church from “worldly” influence. The story of Kirk reinforces Christian beliefs that they are hated and persecuted, making the world outside their bubble seem dangerous and unappealing. But that only holds as long as the people under the spell don’t learn literally anything else about Charlie Kirk.

A lot of people grow up in the Church believing everything it says about truth and love and what have you. They aren’t the mercenary operators you see dominating the ranks of the elected officials in the Republican Party, they’re true believers! What do you think happens when they discover their preacher is holding up a man like Charlie Kirk as a martyr of the faith? Sure, some will stick their heads in the sand. But many of the curious, the thoughtful, the kind will suddenly realize that they are in yet another flawed, fallible system. And once that realization has been made, once the spell of unquestioning belief has been broken, they’re sliding down a slippery slope to lapsed faith.

Many of them start by trying to talk to a trusted elder, trying to get their concerns assuaged, so certain they must be misunderstanding. So frequently, that elder responds by telling them to stop asking questions. Another crack in the shield of faith.

They try to do their own research. They find persuasive arguments against dogma, unconvincing ones for it. They discover that their local church might even be at odds with official denominational doctrine. Further attempts to ask about this mark them as separate from the “real” believers.

They are trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, instead of blindly accepting it. The more they push, the more they’re pushed away, and the more they find the previously frightening world able and willing to fill in the gaps.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you’ve heard that the Supreme Court is probably going to destroy what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Not that there was much remaining after the Shelby County decision. Fuck you, John Roberts.

A lot of people are presenting this as the death knell of American democracy. But the truth is more complicated, because the death of the VRA, and the gerrymandering that follows, could end up being just as much an opportunity as a defeat.

If the GOP gerrymanders the shit out of the states it controls, it could, of course, create a Republican supermajority for a generation. But only if we accept that the fight is lost and don’t try to fight back. Because the truth is that the kind of aggressive gerrymandering being proposed would turn the GOP into a paper tiger.

Gerrymandering doesn’t create votes. If you push more votes for one party into a district, they have to come from other redrawn districts. The votes have to come from somewhere! And that means that while you’re creating an advantage one place, you’re weakening your advantage elsewhere. They’re going to be taking R+30 and R+20 districts and D+20 and D+10 districts and mixing them around to create a mass of R+10 and R+5 districts.

Now, under conventional wisdom, that’s pretty fucking safe. Even R+5 is, since it means that district will essentially always fall for the Republican Party…during conventional times.

These are not conventional times. Economic fundamentals matter A LOT in electoral politics. When the economy sucks, the party in power tends to underperform in subsequent elections. And the economy really fucking sucks right now. Not to mention all of the other high-salience issues that are affecting people right now. The tariffs, ICE, the government shutdown, they all chip away at little at those “safe” margins.

Another dynamic to be aware of is that they’re probably going to be doing this off of the 2024 electoral numbers, which saw Republicans gains in a lot of areas and a lot of demographics, including among people who are infrequent voters. What that means is that if there’s any kind of reversion to the mean, then those R+10 districts might secretly be R+5 districts, and the R+5 districts might secretly be R+3 or R+2, before any campaigns get up and about.

Additionally, if the VRA falls, it cuts both ways. Blue states will be scrambling to redraw their districts as well.

The final element to be aware of is that the dissolution of historical safe districts also means that a lot of entrenched moderate Democrats that have been in our legislative bodies for decades no longer have their tailor-made districts to prop them up. That means there’s space for primary challenges from the left in a way that just wasn’t possible before. And the political climate is RIPE for that, because a lot of people are becoming intimately aware of class struggle right now. A wave of young, vital, progressive, socialist voices could overtake the old centrists that refuse to do anything.

It should be noted that this dynamic holds true for Republicans and the general election too. These new districts will not convey quite the same level of name recognition and electoral loyalty that the old ones did. People growing dissatisfied with a party might still vote for their long-serving Congressman because they think that he’s a decent sort even if they’re disillusioned with the party he inhabits. If suddenly they’re thrust into a new district with a new guy, they’ll probably still vote for the guy with the same letter next to his name. But probability is not the same as certainty. Even if a guy like that will still do it 19 times out of 20, well 5% is all it takes to make this a ball game.

If we roll over and give up, we will be fucked. But if we lace up our boots and get in the fucking streets, and run for office, and knock on doors, we could reshape the US for the people. It’s an uphill battle, but it is not what the doomer contingent is claiming.

I’m sure I’m late to the party, but holy shit, Sucker Punch created an all-time yuri dynamic in Ghost of Yotei.

Atsu, a young woman on the road to revenge, sworn to kill the six blades that took away her family.

Oyuki, the orphan shinobi who got in too deep with the wrong people, and wasn’t brave enough to fight back until pushed to kill a young girl.

The shinobi was complicit in the murder of the young woman’s mother, but also risked her own life to give the young woman a chance to live.

The shinobi is punished for her defiance, but begins to plot in secret against her corrupt lord. Before she can succeed, she is betrayed by her student, stripped of her mask, and exiled from her own organization, forced to scrape by as a traveling musician.

But then the young woman resurfaces, having honed her rage and pointed it at those who made her suffer. She kills at least one of the six, before heading north.

When they meet again, neither knows it. They are simply the shamisen player and the onryō. They make common cause in bringing down the men who made them suffer, targeting first the new Kitsune.

But then Oyuki learns Atsu’s name. And she realizes who she is. But even knowing Atsu has pledged to kill her, she remains. The common cause persists, and Atsu has grown powerful. But is that all this is? Oyuki dates to envision a path other than death at the end of a blade, not just for herself, but for Atsu too. It’s something Atsu hasn’t envisioned for herself, but Oyuki dangles it in front of her: a life as traveling musicians, with only each other to rely upon.

But the common cause remains. And in its pursuit, the truth comes to light. Atsu pursues Oyuki with murderous intent, but Oyuki refuses to run. She waits, unwilling to flee even to save herself. She even offers to let Atsu kill her, but argues that this only serves the interest of their common foe. And Atsu relents, even her rage unable to stay stoked in the face of the beguiling shamisen player.

And it doesn’t even end there. But goddamn, what a setup. It’s got everything: age gaps that are just big enough to be extra sexy, enemies to lovers, shared trauma, gratuitous violence.

So fun facts about me: I’m a public school teacher in Orlando, Florida. I teach English. I live just a couple miles from the University of Central Florida. My local social circle is almost entirely graduates of Florida public schools, either k12 or higher ed, usually both. I’m also a transgender woman, and a lesbian. If you don’t already know why these things are all notable and relevant, I invite you to go investigate Florida education policy in the 2020s.

In campaign 4, episode 2, Brennan Lee Mulligan came for my fucking throat.

The Pentaverel is such an apt allegory for education’s current fight with fascism.

Forcing out independent leadership in favor of a mouthpiece for the state? Look at what has happened at so many schools this year, but if you need a specific example, look at New College. And it goes beyond leadership too. If I (or any teacher) affirm a trans kid without state approval, I am at risk of having my teaching certificate taken away.

Threatening the very core of educational practice in a way that effectively destroys it, simply because it’s inconvenient to the regime? I could be referring to the threat to ban the casting of magic in the Pentaverel. I could also be referring to the real-world banning of books that has led to the evisceration of school libraries and the annihilation of most classroom libraries. When they reviewed the books I had in my classroom, all the diversity was stripped away, and even classic such as The Scarlet Letter had to be removed pending appeal.

I think a lot of people really underestimate how dire the state of education is in most of the US. And that’s largely because they think if it was really all that bad, they’d be hearing more about it. But there are five reasons this doesn’t work.

The media does not accurately cover education.

Teachers are legally banned from disruptive action such as strikes in large parts of the country, and several states have engaged in tactics designed to break Teacher’s unions.

The other major group involved in the education system is children, and nobody listens to them either.

The decline of education has been by inches, but consistently so for decades. It’s hard to see in the moment, only obvious if you look at the big picture.

Many teachers are unwilling to threaten the status quo because the dynamic between teachers and the powers-that-be closely resembles an abusive relationship.

As to 1: there simply isn’t a large scale interest in reporting on schools. You’ll see puff pieces, an exposé on occasion, but it’s very rare to see long-term investigative reporting on what’s happening in our schools. The enshittification of the news media has killed most journalism not guaranteed to drive clicks.

As to 2: A lot of people just don’t know that teacher’s unions are frequently precluded from striking. In Florida, union power has been HEAVILY curtailed, and any attempts to organize outside the approved boundaries can result in arrest.

As to 3: When kids try to explain that things are bad, they get ignored. “Surely they just dislike school,” people will say. “Kids have always disliked school.” And serious problems get ignored because children are an oppressed and ignored class. And that’s when the kids even realize what’s actually going on, because let me tell you, a lot of work goes into disguising systemic problems as the personal foibles of individual classroom teachers. I’ve had kids tell me to my face that I’m a bad teacher because of things I was ordered to do and say.

As to 4: Things don’t seem bad year to year. Things only get a little worse. It’s when you step back that you realize the American classroom is unrecognizable compared to what it was 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago. No Child Left Behind is the notable inflection point here, with its introduction of high stakes over-testing, but it’s a multi-headed beast we are facing. “School choice” and voucher programs are another aspect, one that has gutted education funding to divert taxpayer dollars to the private sector. But even that is secondary to how capitalistic thinking has hollowed out the American education system. Education is under-funded, but that isn’t any just because money isn’t being appropriated for education. It’s also that the education budget is ripe with graft and corruption. Why give teachers a raise when instead, they can divert millions of dollars to untested software and spotty “education research” companies.

As to 5: teachers are abused. When a school district or a principal wants to force teachers to take on extra work, they go to a playbook that reads like a domestic abuser’s diary. I don’t make use of the term abuse lightly. I worked in domestic violence law for a time. I’ve been shouted at, then told later that they totally didn’t mean it, they just take their job seriously. I’ve been told my work was inadequate, been told my best wasn’t enough, by people who haven’t been in a classroom since 9/11. When I was just starting out, I had “observers” shoved into my classes for entire days at a time, nitpicking everything I did but congratulating nothing. I’ve been actively gaslit on the job, I’ve had an administrator throw me under the bus, lie about me to my principal, and then have the gall to mark me down on an evaluation of my professionalism because I didn’t just take it. I’ve seen abusive leadership just get shuffled around to another school. Every time I’ve been worried I can’t take on the extra work, that I’ve hit my limit and I’m going to burn out, I will always be reminded how doing so would hurt the kids. How the kids would be let down. How the kids would be sad. How if I reported what was happening, I would just get fired and the kids would suffer. We stay for the kids, and they know that, and they use that to keep us quiet and complacent and COMPLICIT.

Tyranny is a demon. Not a tiefling, a demon.

One might be tempted to assume a doylist business reason behind this. Wanting to avoid writing into Aramán anything too DnD, in case future campaigns in this setting use some other setting (e.g. Daggerheart).

I can’t tell you that didn’t play a role, but if I know a thing or two about Brennan Lee Mulligan (and I think I do), that’s not why.

Brennan fucking loves playing with religion in his campaigns. And the implications of a group of demons sworn to relatively new, post-divinity religion? Delectable. The Candescent Creed is already fascinating for a number of reasons, namely the ways in which it illuminates religion as a function of mortal need for structure just as much as it’s a desire to believe in something bigger.

The fact that Tyranny is a recent arrival to the plane? Even more interesting. There’s space to examine allegorical similarities to immigrant and refugee experiences. Did Tyranny come willingly? How and why? Is her presence contingent on her service to the Creed? What happens if she stops?

What happens if her patron has a crisis of faith and leaves the Creed?

I’m only a few hours in, but I’m really digging Ghost of Yotei so far. It’s a great evolution of one of the best games of the last five years in a bunch of different ways.

As always, the narrative elements are what draw my attention the most, and that’s where Yotei seems to shine so far. While superficially the game seems to present a standard revenge tale, it reveals itself as much more interesting when you recognize it as intertextually conversing with its predecessor.

The central conflict itself addresses several of the legitimate criticisms of Tsushima I saw, namely that it failed to comprehensively critique the samurai as an institution by focusing so closely on Jin’s familial conflict. There’s no such ambiguity here, with the denizens of Ezo stuck under the thumb of one native warlord out of fear of a bigger one. Ghost of Yotei exposes the filth underneath the institutions that claim legitimacy, revealing the violent, brutal heart of the matter.

A large part of the reason it’s able to do this is due to the protagonist and antagonist who both exist in the shadow of Jin Sakai.

Atsu is everything Jin wasn’t. Not a man but a woman. Not a samurai and a lord, but the mercenary daughter of a sword maker. Not a chiseled hero trying to save everyone without giving up his morals, but a woman who has already set herself to the task of murder, who finds herself called by her better angels nonetheless. If Atsu resembles anybody from Ghost of Tsushima, it’s Yuna, the thief.

The even more interesting point of comparison is the antagonist, Lord Saito. One does not need to look too deeply to see him as an erstwhile representation of Jin gone bad. A fallen lord, who surrounded himself with a number of morally ambiguous allies to fight off a massive invading force by any means necessary? That description applies equally to Lord Saito or Lord Sakai. What would happen if Jin had made just a few compromises to many, had failed to shed the classist assumptions of his upbringing before taking charge of the defense of his home.

By drawing that comparison, and making our hero the daughter of a swordsmith, Ghost of Yotei invites us to refocus our concerns on the common people, the regular folks caught up in times of strife. Not as a hero looking down from above, but as a wounded, angry woman who nevertheless has a moral core she can’t shake.

I’m really excited to see where this game takes me next.

Brennan Lee Mulligan is a socialist. I doubt that surprises anybody reading this. Nor is it a secret that Brennan’s politics infuse his work, especially his TTRPG work. From Bud Cubby on, we all knew what the man was about. Brennan Lee Mulligan not only has the inclination, he has read theory, and it enriches his creative work.

This is part of why Campaign 4 of Critical Role is such a fantastic breath of fresh air. Brennan is getting to turn those sensibilities to a world attuned to drama more than comedy, and Critical Role is getting an injection of political thought that enhances its focus on adventure. That’s not to say that the folks at Critical Role don’t have good politics. But there’s an edge and a specificity this time.

I also really appreciate that while Aramán is infused with revolutionary politics, it isn’t something as simplistically gratifying as the story of a righteous revolution. It’s a tale of what happens AFTER the revolution, AFTER the war. It’s what happens when heroes who fought for a better world fail to perfectly achieve. It’s about the price they pay when the new order finds them just as inconvenient as the old one did.