Rogue Archives

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

If it's for an RPG, its purpose is to support the game, and that means all sorts of worldbuilding atrocities and crimes against verisimilitude are allowed, and indeed welcome, as long as they facilitate gameplay. (Standard fantasy examples: universal Common language and universal currency. Doesn't make sense but makes the story go, roll with it).

If it's for a more or less serious attempt at speculative fiction, I want it to make sense, and to be consistent and believable within the framework of its own assumptions.

Being loyal to someone means you'll follow them even when they're wrong. If you only follow them as long as they're right, you're not loyal, you're just being reasonable, and basing your decisions on your own sense of morality. It's bad to follow someone who's wrong, and that's exactly what loyalty demands, by definition.

Of course, millennia of societies featuring

patron/client relationships of all kinds

ruling classes needing legitimacy and some degree of consent from the underclasses (otherwise it's non-stop violence, and that's expensive and dangerous, right?)

warlord arrangements with alliances between them and "favours" to their underlings

related: feudal arrangements with kings, lords, vassals, knights and oaths of fealty

militaries needing to give soldiers incentives that are stronger than self-preservation, and being unable to dangle "personal gain" in front of them full-time

strongmen/monarchs (it's a continuum) needing loyalty to their person, otherwise someone else might take their place

empires needing loyalty to the empire itself, otherwise the population might side with another empire, or go for independence

nation-states needing loyalty to the nation, so that they can effectively oppress, expel, or eliminate everyone else

and gangs (this includes states) needing cohesiveness to protect their turf from other gangs

have produced a GIGANTIC trove of literature, art, law, philosophy etc that paints loyalty as a virtue, often the ultimate virtue.

Some good reasons to accept this at face value momentarily are:

to immerse yourself in fiction and enjoy it

to feel strong feelings

to put yourself in the shoes of the many real people that fell for this in the past, and so to better understand them and the societies that produced them

to put yourself in the shoes of the many real people that are falling for this as we speak, and so to better understand them and be more equipped to argue against this deeply conservative narrative

porn

There are… no good reasons to accept this at face value for longer than that.

Now mind you, I'm not saying "don't be loyal to anyone". I'm not in the business of urging people to be virtuous here. I'm saying, if you are loyal to someone, accept it for what it is and don't pretend you deserve a medal. Own your crimes. Revel in your transgressions, even.

Grimdark fantasy had a real moment in the 2010s, and this book might be the purest expression of it that I’ve yet read. Which is mildly amusing, because one of the perennial complaints about the subgenre is how relentlessly Eurocentric, heteronormative and male it is (2/3 of which are, at least, entirely fair as the critiques of A Song of Ice and Fire they usually are). Black Leopard’s setting is wholly immersed in the cultures and mythology of central Africa instead and the protagonist’s romantic travails are a key part of the plot. Also, it is one of the most relentlessly, brutally cynical works of fantasy I have ever encountered. Great read, though a strong stomach is required.

The book is the testimony of Tracker (who has long since forgotten any other name), a supernaturally skilled hunter and investigator famed for his ability to track the smell of anything he knows across miles and kingdoms. Imprisoned and interrogated by a royal inquisitor, he avoids the question by more or less telling his entire life story, and the dramatic and traumatic tale of the grand quest he was conscripted into and how it led him to such an end.

This is, sadly, a proper Epic Fantasy Tome, clocking in at just over 600 pages of narration that happily jumps across incidents and decades, in the meandering and aside-filled way someone verbally relaying a tale tends to. Overall it was more tightly plotted than it might seem from the outside – a lot of seemingly forgotten plot threads come back up later on, and a pleasant number of random weird anecdotes turn out to have some wider relevance. But in neither case is it anywhere near all, and this is indisputably a book with a lot of flab.

All of which seems like a conscious choice on James’ part. The novel reads as drawing on oral tradition and a folkloric feel, and a degree of meandering and shocking events followed by long digressions to explain them goes without saying. The commitment to the framing device feels a lot more real than most similarly-framed stories I have read, and I can certainly respect it even if it does eventually start getting tedious.

Tracker is a compelling protagonist with a rich perspective and distinctive voice. By which I mean that he is one of the most insufferable, unpleasant-to-be-around main characters I’ve seen recently. Totally incapable of expressing his emotions or dealing with all but about two people as anything like equals, reflexively and thoughtlessly misogynistic, needlessly cryptic while demanding information from everyone around him, you get the idea. There is a soft, loving heart beneath the outer shell, but you do understand why you can count the number of people willing to put up with his shit long enough to get to it on one hand.

Not that there isn’t a reason he’s like that – or, well, several of them. Unhealthy coping mechanisms and trauma responses that just cause further trauma are a consistent theme, and the brutalization that is most of Tracker’s life story is Exhibit A for it. The book is really remarkably and unflinching thorough in showing how his stubborn pride and reluctance to show vulnerability (along with plenty of other charming traits downstream of something or other) only cause further hardship and misery for him or those around him.

Not that anyone really needs much help with suffering. This is a world of casual, thoughtless brutality, of near-universal suffering and degradation where no one is ever really safe. The only major characters who didn’t suffer some terrible abuse in their childhoods are the ones we never get a real backstory for. Something like half the book is dedicated to an epic fantasy quest that turns out to be a shaggy dog story which leaves basically everyone involved far worse off. It’s also just a very vulgar book, not just in the sense of sex (though there’s plenty of that, depicted without much in the way of sentimentality) but broadly; the book and Tracker’s perspective are fixated upon the physical and the visceral. This mostly works, though it spends a lot of time toeing the line between getting across a bleak premodern world and just trying to shock the reader.

Speaking of – I really, truly cannot emphasize enough how much you should not read this book if you are even slightly squeamish about bad things happening to children. One of the first unambiguously noble things Tracker does is help save an albino child who’d otherwise be butchered and sold off in parts for ritual and witchcraft. Different variations of children being exploited, sacrificed, and generally used as tools and resources by the people who should be protecting them recur throughout the book, in both bleakly mundane ways and things like ‘a grandfather’s ghost demanding his descendant dedicate his life to killing and dying in an endless opaque feud to avenge him’ and ‘an ancient witch offering the body of a young girl in her care up for possession to make amends to one of the numerous vengeful spirits hounding her’. Tracker’s consistent affection for and (clumsy, poorly communicated) attempts to care for and protect them is easily his most remarkable redeeming quality, compared to the world around him.

The world all of this takes place in feels genuinely enchanted and fantastical-feeling in a way a lot of modern fantasy doesn’t, which is partly (I’m sure) a matter of drawing on entirely different traditions than I’m used to, but more importantly because of a complete and utter refusal to systematize anything or provide even an attempt to categorize and explain all the monstrosity and weirdness in a neat, coherent metaphysic. There are cursed forests, and blood-drinking monsters, witches and fetish-priests and sagoma, glorious and terrible cities built in the boughs of trees the size of mountains, giants and mercurial river-spirits and a hundred other things besides, and at no point does the book actually attempt to explain any of them. It is simply a demon-haunted world that must be accepted on its own bloody terms.

Common Pocketknife Blades and Tools

source: Ron Stewart, The Standard Knife Collector's Guide: Identification and Values (6th edition, 2009, Collector Books)

(usamerican nomenclature, mostly for 19th/20th century usamerican knives)

And a chaser, for those interested:

My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.

"Object permanence" is the ability to understand that even if you can't see something, it still exists. Most toddlers acquire a thorough sense of object permanence by the age of two. But when it comes to technopolitics, object permanence eludes even full-grown lawmakers. These motherfuckers would lose a game of peek-a-boo.

Over and over again, politicians are warned about the ways that their pet policies will a) produce enormous collateral damage, and; b) be easily evaded by the people they're seeking to control, giving rise to a cascade of ever-more extreme measures. And yet, they swallow a spider to catch a fly and then act baffled and hurt when we tell them it's their own damn fault that they now have to swallow a bird to catch the spider:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

The foreseeable and foreseen consequences of bad technopolicy are all around us, but in the eternal now of a politics utterly devoid of object permanence, no one is allowed to remember what happened the last time we did something stupid, especially not when we're on the verge of doing that same stupid thing again, only worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Technopolitics are defined by Bruce Schneier's "security syllogism," which goes, "Something must be done! There, I've done something." "Something" doesn't have to fix the problem, and "something" doesn't have to anticipate what will happen next. So long as "something" is done, the issue is resolved and the politician can chalk up a win.

This gives rise to some genuinely bizarre consensus hallucinations, in which we pretend that the reality decreed by policy matches up with actual reality. Take "streaming." There is no such thing as "streaming." A "stream" is just "a download that is transmitted to an application that doesn't have a 'Save As…' button":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

Once you decree that there is such a thing as a stream, you must bend heaven and earth to ensure that no "Save As…" buttons are added to the "streaming" program. You have to pass laws that make it illegal to inspect code. To modify code. To report on defects in code. To index information about defects in code. To index information about mods. To link to indices that compile defects and mods. You have to swallow the fly, the spider, the bird, the cat, the dog, and the whole damned horse:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

Then there's that perennial fave, "bans on working cryptography." To ban working cryptography, you have to outlaw free/open source software. You have to inspect every device that comes into your country. You have to erect a Great Firewall that blocks every site that might carry working cryptography. You make it impossible to reliably update the software in pacemakers, anti-lock brakes and nuclear power plants, and you make it easy for identity thieves, foreign powers and corporate spies to raid your government, your corporations, and your households – and it still won't work!

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/

I honestly don't know why we need to invoke hypothetical dictatorships, when vanilla democracies everywhere are gleefully conducting mass surveillance, and no one's stopping them.

Like, this idea that the state shouldn't do blanket searches? The one that the US constitution has an amendment for (and then they made an exception for the NSA and the CIA and the GCHQ and NATO's operations and Five Eyes and Nine Eyes and so on and so forth), and is enshrined in many other constitutions, and is in the Declaration of Human Rights, and is traditionally considered a bedrock of modern legal doctrine (but oh, the exceptions)?

Good Omens had a 3rd person narrative, a clear plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the story was the plot, that's what carried all the themes and ideas. This makes adaptations easy and sequels pointless.

The Handmaid's Tale had an incomplete (it's literally cut short) subjective 1st person narrative, until the very end where we're flung years into the future and everything gets recontextualised [and that's where a solid 30% of the genius of the book lies imo]. And the story is not really in the plot, which is open-ended to begin with. It's in the structure: the fragmented worldbuilding (because until the epilogue we can't know anything that Offred doesn't know) and the Handmaid's voice itself – and how that voice gets recorded, heard, silenced, dismissed.

That's neither easy nor straightforward to adapt. And if you make the choice to ditch the single POV (good for theatre! certainly feasible, if unconventional, in film; but very tricky in long form television) and the epilogue, you automatically ditch the whole structure of the book, the thing that carried the story. So you need to make BIG changes to tell it, you must give more weight to the plot, more meat to other characters, and be more comprehensive with the worlduiblding. Which they did, and some of it was really good. Sadly not all of it.

"It must have serious value!"

Has anyone done some serious research on payment processors and their stupid fucking morality clauses? I'm (almost) entirely certain there's no law anywhere that obliges them to do it, but is there an indirect risk of legal culpability? Is this a Hays Code/Comics Code Authority situation, where self-censorship is preemptively adopted to avoid future censorship from without? (This would imply governments are considering imposing morality clauses on payment processors, maybe there's pressure from religious nutjobs and everyone's wondering which president will cave in to appease them, I dunno, I'm speculating.) Or is this entirely self-inflicted?

I drag my poor legs, and they hurt, and won't bend. And I limp, and I sigh through my miserable life.

Work for food, work for hire. Beatings all day and night. Masters, slaves, they all hit, and they're tight with the feed.

Slog from hamlet to thorp, up the road, down the road, pouring rain, scorching sun, until I couldn't stand.

And at twenty years old, I had carried each stone to erect the new church, and was left in the lurch.

And paired up with the ox, under that heavy yoke, I ploughed and I tilled the landlord's rich fields.

In the war to end wars, machine guns were my load, while men mowed fellow-men to keep masters well-fed.

Victim, hyah! Loser, hyah! Timeless Symbol, hyah, hyah! If you wake up, there's no doubt, the world will turn upside down.

Look! Already, straight ahead others march, horizon's red. And up high, another sun rises o'er another land.

(poem by Kostas Varnalis, abridged, song under the cut)

"Maya angelou's family killed a pedophile that raped her, and that just traumatized her more. "I thought that I had caused the man’s death, because I had spoken his name. That was my seven-and-a-half-year logic. So I stopped talking for five years." Read I know why the caged bird sings."

and here is my comment:

the fantasy of killing a pedophile to defend your child is... an escape from reality. as with all fantasies where a single act of violence stands for a lifetime of effortful care. it lets us off the hook for the day to day labor of actually protecting the human beings around us. it gives us an excuse to look away from what abuse actually looks like.

it allows us to ignore that setting boundaries is a daily practice. it allows us to ignore the subtle ways in which we punish children for having boundaries. it allows us not to think about things we can do, the effort we can put in, in smaller repeated ways, to be kind and caring. to be safe to talk to.

it is a grand gesture that, were you to actually go through with it, would neither prevent the harm that you fear nor help your child to heal from it. it is an idea with no bearing on reality for 99.99% of people, while rape and abuse are a reality for a large fraction of people.

it is not useful to imagine killing a pedophile. it is not useful to claim you would kill a pedophile. it wouldn't be useful to actually attempt to kill a pedophile in almost any situation.

it is useful to think about how you can help your child know they can get help. they can say no. they can tell adults to stop. they deserve to be comfortable. they deserve to be informed.

the entire point of the post is that your child will not be saved by your imagined wrath. the entire point is that your day to day actions, and your attitude towards children as people, are more impactful to your child's well-being. far more realistic. more important.

not least because your child doesn't need you to be wrathful. they need your love. they need care. they need attention.

meanwhile, the public performance of wanting to kill child abusers doesn't do anything to child abusers. most child abusers believe they are doing the right thing for their children.

saying you want to kill abusers doesn't signal anything good to children, either. as others have said, it makes children more afraid to speak up and ask for help. that might be their mom, their coach, their troop leader. it gives those abusers leverage; the children cannot tell if they want things to be stable.

and it makes it harder for adults to BELIEVE children, too! because if their child was really abused, then they've staked their honor on committing that violence, even if it was against their brother or spouse or grandpa or pastor or neighbor or their other kid's favorite babysitter. and if they don't want to do that, well... then they must decide whether they believe completely their child, or whether their child's boundaries must really be respected, or... if maybe it's impossible to know.

how many abuse survivors have tried to disclose, only to be told that so-and-so wouldn't do that, or they didn't mean it, because so-and-so loves you and we all like so-and-so. this dichotomy goes both ways, psychologically. if a child abuser is entirely evil and has to be killed, then someone who's not entirely evil and i don't want to kill can't be a child abuser. this must be something else. there must be a mistake.

For a few years, I lived on the local Vendetta Island, and met a lovely young woman. She was from a small village, all rural and traditional. Her cousin, who lived next door, had been sexually assaulting her for years, from when she was 14 until when she was 18, at which point she left to go to college. She didn't tell a soul. (Except the fucking priest, during fucking confession because it's guaranteed to keep a secret, and the priest's fucking advice was "patience and prayer".)

And the reason she didn't tell a soul was that, if she had, word would surely reach her dad, and her dad would surely kill the cousin, and then he would surely go to prison. And she emphatically didn't want either of these things to happen. Obviously! While she hated her cousin's guts, she didn't want him to actually die, and she definitely didn't want to indirectly cause his death. And of course she didn't want her dad to go to prison, WHY would she want that? It's insane! Oh, and because we were on Vendetta Island, this could start a blood feud, within the extended family which is a whole other thing, and it would be fucking mayhem.

All the instances of "would" in the above paragraph represent her certainty of what would happen. I can't know if these things would actually come to pass if she had confided to her mom or her sister or whatever (there were zero resources outside the family). No one will EVER know. But please understand, for her to be so absolutely certain, that was the culture. The society around her. The zeitgeist of her microcosm, in that small isolated village. I met her dad and he wasn't some macho hardass, on the contrary, he was the kindest, sweetest man ("ask him about the little goldfinch he once saved from a trap, he'll start crying!"). He never bragged how he'll kill anyone who touches his daughters, he never said anything! He was just there, in that environment with that culture, and he was a farmer so he had a gun. That's all. These are the pitiful ingredients of the tragedy which turned one horrific event to 5 fucking years of horror after horror.

It's been many many years and I am still so furious about this, and still feel so fucking impotent, and I understand the impulse. I really do. If you do the dramatic thing, the "avenging" (for whom???), the "just thing" (it ain't), the "honourable thing" (oh fuck honour, at that point we were lucky it only demanded the death of the cousin, a few decades earlier it would demand her death too, why the fuck do people still romanticise this shit, stop it), do the violence, the blood, the killing, and you won't feel so impotent any more, so helpless, so useless.

Well. The sad truth is that by that point, you ARE impotent and helpless and useless. By that point, it's too fucking late, and "the just thing" (it really really ain't) WILL make things worse.

Find and steal the health potion recipes.

Find out which plants for ingredients propagate best via germination (by sowing), and which asexually (by grafting, or growing the cuttings). Sneak in the plantations, and smuggle out seeds/spores or roots/stems/leaves accordingly.

Neutralise the Pinkertons equivalent by robbing them blind. Can't terrorise workers when they don't have coin to pay their agents!