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let me be real with u for a sec: these books have MULTIPLE (!) unhinged murder lesbians in them so as far as i'm concerned they could be actively indecipherable and i would still eat that shit up. it's dire out here if ur a fan of awful women having variously problematic homoerotically charged relationships with each other. i just rly cannot afford to be choosy

having said that: it's fine and understandable if they're not ur thing (especially as things start getting somewhat esoteric from htn onward) and there's certainly things to criticize about them but i personally don't agree that they're "embarrassingly bad" at all. i think gideon the ninth especially is a rly fun, tightly plotted, well executed lil murder mystery and harrow the ninth at the very least succeeds at what it's trying to do even if what it is trying to do isn't gonna work for some people. haven't finished nona yet so i'm reserving judgement on that one.

There’s a serious “take my word for it” approach to characterization. If a character’s supposed to have a certain personality trait, then rather than convey this by having the character actually display that trait, it’s conveyed by having other characters tell us that they have that trait. There’s one in particular that sticks in my mind, where... okay, there’s a common character archetype in fantasy books where you have the arrogant aristocrat who’s confident in their skills because they do well in training or duels but turns out not to be able to hack it in actual combat. And there’s a character in this book (I forget his name) who’s clearly supposed to be that archetype, except... they forgot the part where he actually does anything arrogant! And it isn’t like this is supposed to be a different character, everyone in the story seems to think he’s arrogant, acts towards him like he’s arrogant, but from everything we see he’s perfectly pleasant. And the part about him getting humbled in real battle... we are shown a combat, and at one point the narration says (or Gideon thinks? It’s unclear, and that’s the reason that unreliable narration just might be the explanation) that if Aristocratic Duellist Guy had suffered a similar injury he wouldn’t have been able to take it. And that’s entirely possible! It would not be at all surprising if he reacted that way! But you can’t just assert that -- it’s also possible that he wouldn’t. In general I think “show, don’t tell” gets way overemphasized as writing advice, but there is something to it, from which this book would benefit.

I haven’t watched too many geopolitics space opera but overall there’s more detail than something like Star Trek, where they just have a mix of major empires rivaling the Federation and each other, and planet-of-the-week aliens who never show up again.

The following contains spoilers:

You have to make a distinction between tactical violence and cathartic-but-self-destructive violence, because stuff like running amok is definitely not an expression of power, and I guess there’s also weird stuff like civil disobedience where it’s like, okay I’m going to get my shit wrecked here but it will arouse public sympathy. And of course there are cases where a preemptive strike from a position of weakness is still better than waiting, like if you have a strong belief that you’ll get attacked in a worse position later on.

But okay, those are kind of edge cases. The broader problem you run into is that “position of weakness” is really contextually subtle because it involves a huge number of overlapping and interlocking contexts, and we’re strong in some and weak in others and we may misjudge which of those contexts is more relevant. Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger than society in your house. So even when the principle applies it may not extend to a slightly different context.

More generally, this doesn’t work well as a way to tell whether people are actually strong or weak even in a specific context because it’s actually telling you what they think, which has similar failure states to assuming people know what they’re doing if they act confident. This should be obvious insofar as initiating hostilities is not a great predictor of winning. It’s common for rabble-rousers to motivate people in a position of weakness by convincing them that they have some “secret advantage”, like they have a superior national character or God is on their side or whatever, and honestly people readily come up with those beliefs on their own. But that’s just the really egregious cases; more common is simply that the overlapping contexts are so confusing that nobody really knows where the ultimate power rests until it’s been fought out – there was a case here recently where the city flip-flopped several times on a minor construction issue, with media wars and citizen groups and multiple levels of government involved, and I’m still not completely sure it’s settled; I’ve seen that sort of thing go to the courts or the provincial government. 

…it kinda does mean that, actually. 

Like, sure, it’s a metaphor and the metaphor has limits.  It doesn’t translate to something stupid like “you can take on an arbitrary number of armed federal agents so long as you’re within your home.”  But it does mean that, to anyone for whom “your house” represents an important resource, your opinions matter more in some ways than do the contrary opinions of other people, even many other people combined. 

This is most obvious when you’re talking about children.  A parent with eccentric or widely unendorsed opinions, who is willing to take a hard line on those opinions, can do an awful lot to make his kids suffer if they don’t play along – even if literally everyone else in the world disagrees. 

But it’s also important to remember when you’re talking about normal adult social circles.  Your little band of five like-minded misfits, despised outcasts though you are, nonetheless probably has all the power in an interaction taking place on your turf.  If you want to humiliate someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you probably can.  If you want to scare someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you can probably do that too – maybe in theory he has some kind of recourse, maybe he can call the cops or try to summon up a Twitter mob or whatever, but those are unreliable weapons in all sorts of ways and there’s a reason that people don’t reach for them casually. 

There’s always a bigger fish.  There is also always a smaller fish.  And the relationships are not linear.  Context is king.

But that’s a quibble.

First, it may be that the consequences for avoiding a fight are even worse than those for losing one. The classic example here is Switzerland in the Middle Ages: surrounded by stronger countries it always had to be willing to fight in order to not be pushed around. Similarly, a person in a socially inferior position here might have to be willing to pick fights over minor issues in order to avoid setting a precedent of always yielding to the stronger.

cause just like weeaboos, the thing they’re into doesn’t exist. if I’m obsessed with something I end up knowing a lot about the thing. Teaboos think the average ‘British’ person* eats afternoon tea every day and gives a shit about the Queen.

I imagine Japanese people might feel similar? Like imagine if you had an admirer who was all ‘OMG I love how short you are! And how you are absolutely all about the values and themes of this sexy comic you put on the internet when you were twelve!’ and actually you’re 6′2″ and think of the comic as an embarrassing remnant of your furry phase. That would be weird, right?

*they usually say ‘British’ even though ‘English’ is more accurate to the thing Anglophiles are into

Edit: which is fair, there’s no reason the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish should be associated with this shit. The Scots and (to a much greater degree) the Irish have their own version of this anyway.

Obs is up to Scottish and Irish ppl what you wanna call them. I can’t think of anything like ‘teaboo’ (credit to anon asker) so I’m thinking ‘McWeeaboo’ and ‘leprechaun-fucker’ respectively.

Yes, that means that wasn’t an Irish bar you went to the other week.

a) things that are straightforwardly kinda fucked-up, e.g. 

being the Best at Colonialism

being an Actual Royalist

being so good at cultural hegemony due to aforementioned colonialism that our forms of smug upper-class status signalling are near-universal forms of smug upper-class status signalling (see Fraiser, the global cultural image of Shakespeare, and the general association in US media of ‘British’ with ‘posh and/or intellectual’).

b) things that are, idk, fine I guess, no better than other countries’ stuff but fine if you like that sort of thing, e.g. 

jam, Jerusalem and the Great British Bake-Off

objectively not that good food

the Beatles etc

Shakespeare, yeah I said it

Keeping Calm And Carrying On

The Aesthetic of the Royal Family and associated cultural ritual

fucking cricket

football (no even I am not self-depreciating enough as a British person to stoop to calling it ‘soccer’, what do you think I am?)

 (Perhaps unfairly) I often find something a bit offputting about someone being super into this stuff, whether they’re English or not. Not being into any of it individually, but being enthusiastically into the whole package, with a kind of ‘because it’s English’ vibe. I think there are two reasons for this:

1. (the one more likely with teeaboos) being enthusiastically and unironically into English Things is in itself unEnglish (subculture-dependent) and thus they come off as cringeily failing at the thing. This is unfair because it really is one of those anti-inductive things like class signalling and thus not their fault, but it is still instinctively offputting to me. 

This is also the source of a lot of things that Anglophiles get wrong when they’re tryna ape British people: Displaying a lot of Union Jack stuff - we don’t do that. If I’m in London and I see a bunch of union jack patterns somewhere, I assume it’s something for tourists. 

Yeah, p much nobody under fifty knows the words to that shit. 

2. negative associations created by odious groups and people such as UKIP/BNP heavily associating themselves with I’m So English branding.

I think there is stuff that is British that is genuinely cool? Like 2 of the world’s 4 oldest Universities and an actual ridiculous ratio of good Universities to population size. Shakespeare is cool so long as you don’t mistake him for High Culture. The ridiculous fossilised rituals and weird shit that comes out of having a form of government/law that has slowly evolved over so many hundreds of years is fascinating. We have a lot of history. I think we’re pretty good at comedy. But that’s never like specifically what Anglophiles are into - they’re into ‘British stuff’ and maybe catch some of it incidentally because of that.

Now let’s all sing the song of my people:

…further complications to trying to write non-ridiculous angst into a werewolf story

North American gray wolves have a natural fear of humans and attack people very rarely, really only when threatened or starving.

So like, imagine, like, a divide between people who got infected with Old World and New World lycanthropy.  One makes you this dangerous beast that sees humans as a viable food source an another makes you perceive humans as a threat.  Imagine people getting it wrong!

Some shady paranormal group capturing a werewolf to use as security but it just runs away when people trespass.

Some hunters go deep into the woods to murder a werewolf clan for their pelts but it turns out they’ve isolated themselves so deeply because they have the European strain and none of the hunters survive.

New werewolves are so confused because the websites give conflicting advice:  get yourself to your nearest national park when you’re about to turn and just let yourself run free; if you try to cage yourself the claustrophobia and the smell of people will make you panic and you could really hurt yourself or someone else.

vs

If you’re anywhere near human civilization you must make sure you turn in a closed space that you can’t escape from in wolf form or you’ll definitely kill someone.  Just try to take a nap during the full moon, OK.

Wolves from different geographic locations may howl in different fashions: the howls of European wolves are much more protracted and melodious than those of North American wolves, whose howls are louder and have a stronger emphasis on the first syllable. The two are however mutually intelligible, as North American wolves have been recorded to respond to European-style howls made by biologists (x)

Veruca Salt - greed

Mike Teevee - sloth

Oompa loompa, doopedee dee,

‘Zekial Young should’ve listened to me

When I found out he had a wife,

If you force an introvert into a social gathering they don’t feel comfortable with/don’t want to go to you are responsible for their good time.

You have to include them in conversations or go sit with them when they have no one to talk to.

Because if you can’t do that, don’t make them come. Don’t force them in a situation where they feel alone and helpless and leave them floundering. 

I don’t actually like anything about James Bond.  The franchise seems to mostly differ from completely generic action thrillers by starring a character who lacks the nobility, or the salt-of-the-earth gut appeal, of most action heroes – a cold, suave, cruel guy who’d normally be cast as the villain.  I don’t watch many action movies to begin with, and this is even worse to me than the baseline.

As a former professional comedy writer, my expert belief is no, it would not. The “Bob from Accounting” as is my all time favorite Magic TV ad.

In case, you’ve never seen the ad:

Check out this video on YouTube:

Luke’s already decided violence is an acceptable tactic, based on the dozens of nameless troopers and pilots he’s blasted into subatomic particles, so why would the Emperor be any different?  Killing the Emperor isn’t going to make Luke a different kind of killer just because he killed someone with a visible face, and it’s certainly not going to make him start blowing up planets or torturing prisoners just for funsies.  Luke could have said “Strike you down? Don’t mind if I do,” done just that, and not only would the battle have ended the same way, his dad might have survived.

(And if Vader had survived, repented, and rejoined the Light Side, but retained his influence over the Imperial military, he could have saved everyone a whole lot of grief in the coming years.)

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