Witch Way is Left

To start off with: The recent backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid as hell — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there is still a baby somewhere 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 1: "Mary Sue" is a valid criticism to the extent that a character like that can create the problem of excessive match between the challenges of a plot and the strengths of a character. That story is always going to be completely lacking in tension and excitement. If Jim is the world's best wizard ever to wizard, and now there's an entire book about Jim using wizardry to solve wizard-related problems... Yaaaawn. No challenge for Jim means no uncertainty, no investment in the character.

Example of this problem*: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. A very cool premise, that a human gets forcibly turned into a self-replicating android and sent to the edge of space to save humanity, became (for me) a fairly boring read. Because it becomes clear about 15% of the way in that Bob will more-or-less effortlessly solve every challenge that comes his way, using his superior intellect. I don't hate this book; it's a fun thought experiment. But it didn't exactly suck me in, because Bob gets set a series of tasks and then solves them in a fairly predictable fashion.

Counter-example: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Similar concept, that one lone super-genius gets sent to the stars under similar circumstances. BUT the challenges that Grace has to solve are almost all (the horror!) interpersonal communication. We don't know if he'll ever make it back to Earth, and we don't know if he'll get eaten (or impregnated) by aliens for 90% of the length of the story. Hence, this book's well-earned reputation as a page-turner.

Tl;dr: the "Mary Sue" character can be a serious problem for a story because a character extremely well-equipped to solve their own plot problems will pretty much never create tension or interest for the audience.

Pt. 2 | Pt. 3

Hmm, I feel like I wouldn’t describe Grace as a super genius who would easily know how to solve every task in that way. He’s really smart but, like, he messes up science related stuff too

This is why I consider Grace a perfect counter-example! He is superhumanly intelligent, but in such an elegant and subtle way that Weir gets away with it. All the stuff with him timing how long objects take to fall and giving Rocky useless visual information at first and duct-taping his astrophage incubator — that's what helps sell us on him being canonically the best biologist in his world, and a world-class linguist/engineer/physicist/chemist as well.

It's the way that Iron Man (2008) makes the sci fi nonsense feel real by showing us Tony hammering the individual components of his armor into place and stress-testing all those iterations. By showing us the effort (and failure, and wrong turn, and playfulness, and memory lapse) that goes into genius, Project Hail Mary makes a man smarter than any that has ever lived into a relatable guy we'd love to get to know. I know just enough psycholinguistics to spot that Grace engineers a translation process in days that in real life takes whole teams of people decades to accomplish, and I'm 99% sure there are cleverly-concealed impossibilities in the other sciences as well. The cut from "Tony overpowers his jet pack and bounces off the ceiling" to "Tony correctly powers his jet pack and flies like a drone with it" seems logical to those of us who don't know jet packs. Grace is doing the same thing.

At absolutely no point in the book re we lead to believe that Ryland is hypercompetent. He is competent; he knows astrophage well and has experience researching them and storing power with them, and made the breakthrough on their reproduction before anyone else did. (This does not mean he's a genius, it was an extremely simple and logical breakthrough and some other lab would've made it very shortly after if he didn't.) But he's not exceptionally competent or overcompetent for the task. He is very much in the realm of Ordinary Scientist and very appropriately powered for the story. There were at least four of him in my lab at uni, and at no point in the story is there any indication that he's supposed to be unusually intelligent for a biologist.

FAKE RELIGION: 1st-7th century abrahamic religions based on chronologically diffuse fragments from various near eastern temple cults that also got steamrolled by the Roman empire.

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

we are not just backsliding, we are back at the milquetoast assertation "love is love." for the record: when people ask us why we need pride this is literally fucking why. when other queer people ask me if we really need all the rainbow shit, this is why. when we make a fuss about so many shows not having any positive queer rep: this is why.

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This is the miniature @wildgingerofnyc is talking about. The manuscript (containing Evrart de Conty's Problèmes d'Aristote, as they said) was created in Paris, c. 1400.

Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Ms. El. f. 81, fol. 2r.

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!