Anyway! So I wanted to do a little breakdown of a sex scene that I think does an incredible job of advancing the story and revealing what’s going on with the characters. What follows here is a close read of a sex scene from Cecilia Grant’s A Gentleman Undone — what it’s doing, how it’s doing it, and why I think it works. Enjoy!

The context:

Our FMC is Lydia Slaughter, a sex worker and longtime mistress of this ain’t-shit jackass, Edward Roanoke. She’s also an extremely brilliant card shark who counts cards like crazy, and she needs a partner in crime to help her make the money she needs to attain her independence. Our MMC is Will Blackshear, a traumatized Waterloo veteran who’s trying to earn enough money to support a dead friend’s widow and child. After catching Lydia’s eye in a gaming hell, then lightly defending her honor against some ain’t-shit men (including Lydia’s partner/employer), Will enters into a partnership with Lydia: She’ll teach him to win at blackjack, and he’ll invest her funds for her.

The setup:

Lydia and Will have been at dinner with a drunk, jealous Edward Roanoke, who’s insulted both our protagonists and insinuated that they’re having an affair. (He’s not completely wrong, but!) Baiting him, Will tells Lydia to meet him in his room, and Lydia tells him—in front of everyone—that she’ll go to his room, and he can meet her there in thirty minutes.

Will doesn’t think he’s going to Lydia for sex, and he’s not even sure he should have sex with her (she’s had a few drinks; they’re in her protector’s house). But when he arrives at his room, she makes it very plain that’s what she expects and wants.

He’s falling in love with her, but can’t offer her marriage (cause of Society) or take her as a mistress (he doesn’t have the money to support her). She’s falling in love with him, but trying to protect her heart because she knows that they don’t have a future together.

Okay, let’s get into it!

She was watching him, [naked], expectant and wholly without shame, when he turned to face the room. Her eyes glittered, hard and intent.

Now. Four steps brought him to the bed. He set one knee on the mattress and her legs edged apart. Greedy impatient thing. Just for that, she could wait a bit. He bent and pressed a luxuriant kiss to her kneecap.

“Stop that.” Her knee twitched away. “Take off your clothes.”

A dictatorial drunk as well as belligerent. But to obey this command was no hardship.

He pulled off his boots and his hose. Waistcoat, cravat, braces, shirt, all over his head and dropped helter-skelter on the floor. He stood.

She shifted, propping herself higher on the pillows, angling unabashedly for a better view.

His blood thundered like a river’s rapids as he obliged her, turning himself so she could see. One button after another slipped free and the front-fall of his breeches dropped away. He undid his drawers. He looked at her.

This sets the scene perfectly for everything that’s to come. You know from the chapter previous that both of them really, really want to do this. Will thinks he shouldn’t have sex with her for moral reasons; Lydia doesn’t want to be vulnerable to Will for emotional reasons. So they’re each heading into this super horny but also holding back and trying to shape the encounter to fit their needs and their narrative.

Right off the bat, Lydia’s holding all the cards—this was her idea, and she’s the one pushing for it—and she wants to call the shots. Will tries to coax her into a slightly different sexual register by doing something more sweet than horny (kissing her knee), but Lydia immediately yanks it back into the territory where she’s comfortable: She’s in charge, it’s purely about sex, and vulnerability is not welcome.

“I think perhaps…” She bit her lip, still staring. “Um.” Her eyes came to his, soft and uncertain. “Can you go in very slowly?”

It was beautifully done. But he knew her too well. He stepped out of his breeches. “Flattering minx.” He crawled back onto the bed, parting her knees with his hands to find his place between them. “You say that to every man.”

Her concerned expression dissolved into a deliciously wicked grin. “Every man loves to hear it. Even a man who knows it for flattery.”

He couldn’t argue. He couldn’t say anything at all.

I’m obsessed with this. When I was thinking about writing a post breaking down a sex scene, this moment sprang to mind immediately. As before, Lydia’s trying to keep this encounter in a register where she feels comfortable, so she’s putting on her professional clothes (metaphorically) and playing a little game that has worked well for her in her career as a sex worker.

However, we’ve seen throughout the book that Will pays better attention than most men. Here, he recognizes what Lydia’s doing and calls her on it. He does so in a light-hearted way, then makes it clear physically that although he knows she’s doing a trick from her sex work background, he’s not put off by that or her. He thinks she’s smart and funny, and he’s charmed that she tried this on him, and charmed that he caught her trying it.

Then Lydia caps it by calling him on the fact that, come on. It totally still works on him. She’s being really winning here, and she’s also lightly reminding him that he’s not special. Throughout this scene, we’re going to see him trying to get some sign from her that he’s not just interchangeable with every other man she knows, and Lydia resisting.

With all these undercurrents, this exchange is just fun and funny. These are two people who like being around each other, who are having a good time. Sex is fun! It’s supposed to be fun!

*

I’ve not included the full text, to save space, but here follows Will making four attempts in a row to be sweet to Lydia, and she rebuffs him each time. The imagery Grant uses in this passage draws sharp contrasts between what Lydia wants and what Will wants. Her skin is soft, but her eyes “glint like agates.” Will tries to touch her and speak to her gently (“with his voice, too, he could caress her”), and Lydia “swat[s] at his hand” and tells him to hurry up.

“I’ll only linger over the parts you enjoy.” Hanged if he’d let her turn this into something quick and brutish and utterly devoid of meaning.

“I’ve told you what I enjoy. You may believe I know my own tastes.” Her voice was growing thin with agitation. She twitched like a cornered animal. “Don’t dare fancy you’ll be the man to teach me the pleasures of tenderness.” Tenderness was a rat whose neck she wrung with her own hands before hurling it over the hedge to rot with feelings.

And of course he’d fancied he’d be exactly that man. Or at the very least, that they’d do this with some acknowledgment of what had been between them. He’d already had intimacy of her in her confidences on their walk outside, in the way she’d trusted him to comfort her last night in this same bed. What on earth did she expect to gain by treating him like a paying customer now?

They are chasing after competing, maybe irreconcilable desires right now. Sex has been a sphere where Lydia can feel in control, when so many aspects of her life are beyond her control, and she really really doesn’t want to feel vulnerable right now. The dinner they’ve just been at was super humiliating for her, and she had no recourse because of her position in society. Fucking Will, and getting her way, is how she hopes to reclaim her sense of power.

Will, meanwhile, has been stung by the things Lydia’s protector said about him, and he’s worried they’re true, and he’s so worried that he’s a bad, unsalvageable person. He wants to be a person of worth in Lydia’s eyes, not just some interchangeable body. He’s trying so hard to get her to admit that he’s a person to her, and specifically a person she’s been vulnerable with; and Lydia won’t.

It’s fine to want emotional connection during sex! It’s also fine to want fun, impersonal, easy sex! Like, both of these wants are reasonable, in isolation. They’re just not reasonable asks of these two specific people in this specific moment. Which is why this scene is doing such terrific work: it’s telling us emotional information that’s particular to these characters and the journey they’re on individually and together.

He drew back a few inches and saw panic flare up in her eyes. She might want only an impersonal fuck, but she wanted it very much. “I won’t try to teach you anything. I wouldn’t presume.” He bent to kiss one nipple, just to reassure her of his lustful intent.

That last moment is so small and charming, omg.

I like this flash of vulnerability from Lydia. She knows all the reasons sex between them is a bad idea—especially the reasons why Will thinks it would be a bad idea—which means she also knows that she pretty much has this one window of opportunity to have sex with him.

“But surely there’s some ground for compromise between what you want and what I want.”

“Compromise is but an over-nice way of saying neither person gets what they want. Do that again. This time use your tongue.”

Leverage, finally. “I’ll do it as much as you want.” He retreated to knees and straight arms, too far away to do anything but talk. “After we settle how we’re both to come out of this satisfied.”

Her eyes narrowed. They shifted back and forth, reading his face. “You’ll be satisfied. Have no fear on that count.” Half promise and half threat, the way she said it. “And if you find any hungers unappeased, we’ll do it again, to your taste this time.”

It sounded… so much like a transaction. A trade. She would use him, and then he could use her. Any man might have taken his place, provided the cock was to her liking, and apparently she thought any woman would do just as well for him.

Ouch, that last paragraph hurts.

Look how they’re using satisfied here to mean slightly different things. Will wants to have sex that he finds emotionally satisfying. Lydia knows what he means, but she insists on reading satisfied to mean physical satisfaction. He’s saying, I don’t want to feel awful about this. She’s saying, Calm down, you’ll get your orgasm—which isn’t what Will’s talking about at all.

Romance uses a lot of alternating POV, which among other things, allows for the dramatic irony of the reader knowing better than each individual protagonist what’s going on with both of them. It can be done in a heavy-handed way. Cecilia Grant is doing it beautifully. In previous chapters, we’ve seen Lydia recognizing that she’s getting too attached to Will, more attached than feels safe to her, and she’s trying to pull herself back from that edge.

Will doesn’t know that, though! He only has Lydia’s behavior to go by. They’ve experienced what felt to him like intimacy, but the way she’s behaving now makes him question whether that was real, or if her treating him as interchangeable is real, and which one’s realer, and which one’s going to win the day.

He could refuse. He could clamber over her and right off the bed, to where his clothes lay discarded. I’m sorry but this isn’t what I want, he could say while buttoning his breeches over his rampant erection. She would probably throw something at him.

Stop thinking. The woman you want is underneath you with her legs apart. Why in the name of all that is holy do you hesitate? Very well, this round went to her.

Throughout this scene, Grant keeps emphasizing that Will wants Lydia physically but also wants intimacy with her; and Lydia explicitly and implicitly forecloses that possibility. One thing that makes the scene hot is that they want each other so much. They’re each keenly aware of the ways in which this is a mistake—but they’re just really, really, really attracted to each other, and they finally have attained a moment where sex is possible between them.

His eyes still on hers, he lowered his mouth to her other nipple and made a circle round it with his tongue.

She arched to meet his mouth and then sank slowly down, as he followed, until her shoulders lay flat on the mattress. “Yes,” she muttered, eyes fluttering closed. “Good. Now put your cock in me. Anywhere you like.”

Debauched past all redemption. He stroked a hand down her belly, through her maiden hair, to the place where he could make her melt like butter. “Right here is where I like.” His voice descended to a growl. “Where you’re wet for me, and hot. Spread your legs wider.”

She liked that, if he could judge by the shiver that ran through her. And, because she was constitutionally incapable of acceding to any of his commands, she did not spread her legs but rather brought them about, by some miracle of flexibility, until her ankles sat at his shoulders. His cock found the place where she opened to him and he slipped in, all the way in, with no effort at all.

Even when he’s asking her to do something she definitely wants to do, she still can’t be vulnerable with him even to the point of doing it. I love that little moment/detail.

He stayed for a moment, just so. His throat had gone tight and his breath unsteady.

Nearly a year, it had been. Some camp follower in Belgium would have been the last, an anonymous and forgettable encounter that left him vaguely ashamed and not at all satisfied. Then had come that feeling of unfitness; the fear that his darkness, his corrupted soul, might somehow leach out of him to contaminate any woman he touched.

And maybe this was what he’d needed all along. Not a pure-hearted woman who could lift him out of darkness, but one who dwelt there herself. Already corrupted to such a degree that nothing remained to ruin. Incorruptible, now, more incorruptible than the most virtuous maiden.

SUPER HEALTHY, WILLIAM.

The two elements of a sex scene are what’s happening physically and what’s happening emotionally. Grant does a stellar job here of writing what’s ultimately quite a traditional sex scene—they’re having missionary PIV sex!—in a way that’s emotionally messy as hell. Will wants to be a hero and save the day for someone. Lydia sees that so clearly in him and doesn’t want it to be the grounds of their relationship.

One reason she’s resisting intimacy is that they’re coming off a fight with her protector, and she doesn’t want to be part of a story where Will is rescuing her from another man. Who would? That story fucking sucks.

A furrow traced itself in her brow, above her still-closed eyes. “Hurry,” she said.

He could do that. He half withdrew, and pushed in hard. Her lashes trembled as her hands came up and took hold of his biceps. Again. She tipped her head back, exposing her throat. Once more. Her lips parted and he heard her harsh breaths as he worked to find the right rhythm.

“Lydia, open your eyes,” he whispered on what breath he could spare. “Look at me.”

“No. Harder.” Her lip drew up at one side to show her teeth, again the cornered animal. Her fingers dug into the bunched-up muscles of his arms.

Here we’ve got a straightforward narration of what’s happening physically, capped by Lydia again refusing a more intimate connection. Notice that where Grant zooms in on physical details, they’re almost tangential to the sex: eyelashes, biceps, throat, teeth. It makes the sex scene feel vivid and sensory without having to deal with the problem of what words to use for sex organs.

He thrust on, but desolation began to trickle through him in chilly drops, one by one from that icicle of desolation he kept somewhere inside. She didn’t care to look at him, to be with him. He’d thrown away whatever remaining claim to honor he had in order to bed this woman, and he might as well have been with a camp follower again. An imperious, ill-tempered camp follower who meant to leave no doubt of her contempt for him.

“Faster. Don’t slow down.” Her eyes half-opened and glared at him, from between her ankles, without the slightest glimmer of warmth.

Confound her drunken hostility. He would stop this. He would haul himself out of her and flop down beside her and tell her: I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you.

Any minute now, he would do that. For now he clenched his teeth to hold back the tide of pleasure and made his strokes swift and shallow.

Look how Grant is keeping us, the reader, from fully diving into this as a sex scene. This is a close close third person, and she wants our reading experience to mirror the experience Will’s having. Grant spends some time on physical pleasure, in the previous passage, but then pulls us back to Will’s mental state, which is miserable. Trickle, chilly, and icicle are all very unsexy words (no matter what Bella Swan might think). “Without the slightest glimmer of warmth” calls back that set of imagery, so Lydia’s behavior matches Will’s interior state.

The recollection of the camp follower again speaks to the idea of interchangeability that Will is trying to escape.

“I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you” lays out the stakes of the scene explicitly. Again, Lydia’s coming off a really risky decision—telling her protector that she’s having sex with another man—which she knows will probably lead to him withdrawing his financial support. She feels vulnerable on that front, and vulnerable because she really likes Will, and so she’s trying to keep the sex on the impersonal, adversarial territory that feels safe for her. This isn’t a true representation of what they are to each other, though, and “I won’t play that part for you” makes it clear that Will understands what Lydia’s doing (or trying to do).

Again, this works because it’s specific to them! From the very first moment he sees her, Will has seen Lydia (“Three of the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth.”). His awareness of who she is cuts through all her pretense. It’s crucial to their romance overall, and crucial to this scene.

“Harder. Hurt me.” Her voice was a feral snarl and her face half contorted with loathing.

“I can’t. I don’t want to.” There was a way to ask for such things, and it wasn’t the way she’d just done. He’d tell her so afterward, if she was still inclined to speak to him then. At the moment he couldn’t spare the breath.

She writhed under him and took a new grip on his arms. “You said you’d do what I wanted. My way first, your way after. We agreed.”

His patience snapped, then, and with one monumental effort he halted, half inside her. Her narrowed eyes flew wide with outrage.

Please note that Will did not say he’d do what she wanted. They did not agree. That is untrue. Lydia said they’d do it her way first, his way after, and proceeded as if that had been agreed upon. It’s another way she’s exerting control over this encounter.

“Listen to me.” His chest was heaving, and one wrong move would make him spill, but he kept his voice steady. “Against my better judgment and all my principles I am fucking you under your protector’s roof.” One great swallow of air. “I’m plowing you harder than I’ve ever plowed a woman in my life. I’ll probably end with bruises and I won’t be surprised if I make myself ill.” One more lungful. “I’m sorry it’s not enough for you, but this is all you’re getting. I suggest you find a way to like it.”

Her eyes flicked back and forth on his face, as though he were some new adversary whose measure she must take. And devil take her, she got hotter for him. She took her legs from his shoulders to wrap them round his back and tilted her hips to take him deeper. Her whole body roiled under him like molten metal in a blacksmith’s cauldron.

Hell. She’d wanted rude handling and she’d goaded him into it. She had what he wanted and he had… his cock in her wet quim. And he was too near his crisis now to complain, particularly as she’d set some muscles in there to doing things he hadn’t even known a woman’s body could do.

This is such a smart alignment of what’s happening physically and emotionally! As they’re getting close to orgasm, they’re also hitting the emotional endpoint of the scene, the thing it’s been building to all along, where Lydia “goad[s] him into” playing the “adversary” role that she’s been angling to put him in all along.

Sweet holy mother of… He wasn’t going to last. He would disgrace himself, and leave her wanting. He squeezed his eyes shut, and slitted them open again to see how she arched and gritted her teeth on his every thrust, to see the face that went with those rapturous sounds she was making in her throat. “Come, Lydia. Hurry.” The words rasped out like a death rattle. But at least he was speaking her peremptory tongue.

And this command, thank the fates, she obeyed. She whipsawed under him, head thrown back, and snatched her hand up to her mouth, sinking in her teeth to stifle her cries.

Not a second too soon. Two more thrusts he gave her before climax seized him in its unforgiving talons, bearing him up and away with no regard for his sensibilities, his better nature. This coupling had been so far from what he’d wanted, and pleasure swamped him all the same. He pushed up on straight arms, his head thrown back, and spent himself to the sound of Miss Slaughter’s muffled cries.

“But at last he was speaking her peremptory tongue”: Will recognizes that he’s lost the fight they were having about what this sexual encounter was going to consist of.

“Miss Slaughter” is so interesting. For the whole course of this sex scene, Grant hasn’t used Lydia’s name in the narration at all. Will has called her by name a few times, always in moments where he’s trying to entice her into greater intimacy. The use of “Miss Slaughter” in the narration in this moment emphasizes the distance between them—distance that she has worked hard to put there.

He’d never spilled in a woman before. A gentleman always withdrew. This ought to have been…uncharted bliss. Unlooked-for privilege. Something, anything, more than it was.

Pleasure left just enough room for that thought to sidle through. Then pleasure rolled out like a spent ocean wave and nothing rolled in to take its place. He lifted his body clear of hers and settled to the mattress beside her, limp and unspeaking and utterly barren inside. The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away. She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.

He lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, breathing slowly in and out. He had nothing to say.

I love “sidle through”! That’s a clever choice of words.

“Utterly barren inside” is doing some heavy lifting here: Lydia has been described as “barren” before, and her infertility is top of mind for Will at this moment, since he just came inside her. “Barren” also works as a contrast with the image of a “spent ocean wave” in the previous sentence, as Will contemplates how empty this all feels.

“She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.” I’m not sure Will’s gloss on the fist thing is correct! As we know, from being inside Lydia’s head in previous chapters, she resists letting on that he’s particular to her because that would be emotionally risky.

“The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away” is such a good and devastating line!

*

Why this sex scene works:

• It is incredibly specific to these two characters. From Lydia we’re seeing her enjoyment of impersonal sex, her fear of intimacy, and her need to assert control any time she feels vulnerable. Will wants to be a hero and fears he’s an awful person, and he’s certain he’s not a hero, and feels the allure of being an awful person; we’re seeing the push-pull of those things throughout. All of their actions, every single thing, arises from and reinforces what we know about who the characters are and what they need from each other at this point in the story.
• What’s happening physically is put into really nice alignment with what’s happening emotionally. The sex is building in tandem with Will’s frustration and disappointment. The idea that Lydia smothers Will’s name in her fist when she comes is a perfect encapsulation of all that she’s been holding back throughout the scene.
• Grant is doing some smart things with word choice. She chooses physical details that create a sense of immediacy and make the sex feel explicit even when she’s not being You’ve got water imagery (river rapids, dripping icicles, ocean waves) at the beginning, middle, and end. You’ve got a bunch of imagery of Lydia as a predator animal, including the “unforgiving talons” of Will’s orgasm. It all works together beautifully.
• The scene advances the story and the relationship, and more importantly, it leaves the characters with somewhere still to I get frustrated when sex scenes don’t do any narrative work. This one speaks volumes about where Will and Lydia are, and it sets up a ton of possibilities for where they can go next. In the next chapter, they’ll have a better sense of how to navigate each other’s desires and boundaries, and they’ll end up having more mutually satisfying sex.

This has been: Anatomy of a Sex Scene! Stop by the comments with additional thoughts and ideas about this scene, or let me know if there’s a particularly great sex scene you’d like me to cover next. I am thinking about making this a series!

The post Anatomy of a Sex Scene: A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant appeared first on Reading the End.

To have a deeper discourse, we also need to talk to and with each other, not simply at one another. We need to hold space for disagreements and different readings of a text. We need to be better about showing our work and backing up our claims. And more critically, when we do talk to one another we need to do so from a place of compassion, empathy, and good faith.

When I feel nostalgic for the heyday of blogging, the thing I feel nostalgic for is the ability to talk to and with people whose opinions I came to know and respect, even (well, mostly even) when we disagreed. There was something really magical about those moments when everyone on your blogroll was reading the same book and having opinions about it and chattering in each other’s comments about why this or that element worked better or worse for you or them. I loved the way blogs could be a space for thinking together, a collaborative and communal exercise in understanding books and how they work.

Every take I ever see about book reviews agrees that the true solution is MORE. More reviewer spaces, more types of reviews, more cheerleading, more flaw-finding, more long-form analysis that doesn’t worry about spoilers, more spoiler-free overviews that help you decide whether to pick up that book or not. Yet the problem with asking for MORE is that the things we want already exist; we’re just not spending time on them. It’s all well and good to say that we want in-depth criticism, but the cold fact is that listicles are getting all the engagement and all the pick-up, and it’s exhausting to pour hard work into a piece of writing and then feeling like you’ve cast that hard work into a void.

MORE isn’t enough. What we want isn’t just the MORE, but the things that ideally would go along with MORE. If the value lives in the exchange of ideas, then it doesn’t help to have MORE ideas all sitting quietly on their separate, distant shelves. This is a criticism of myself, by the way. I’m talking about me. I miss out on, conservatively, 50% of what’s being written by critics I admire, and when they’ve written something I like, I’m fearful to start a conversation about an aspect of their piece that I’d like to think through more fully with them, because who am I to presume they want to think together with me?

I mostly save it for group chats. I do excellent together-thinking in my group chats. Other people’s brains—did you know?—have completely different thoughts in them. It’s rad.

You can’t think together without some level of trust in the other guy; and you can’t trust the other guy when it’s the internet. As I’ve been writing this, I keep going back and taking out sentences that smack of Twitter brain, that impulse to write against the hostile assumptions of the worst-faith reader I can imagine. (How dare I say we piss on the poor?) Somewhere along the way, I came to think of that worst-faith reader as the default one, and the thing is that I am not even wrong. The less aligned your identity is with the white capitalist heteropatriarchy, the more that worst-faith reader really is your default reader; the more numerous they are; the less grace they’re inclined to give you; the more they’re willing to stomp into your mentions to tell you all about it. Because social media is the place where obnoxious people come to pick fights, and there is no place where well-intentioned people go to learn from each other, it’s really hard to abandon the default assumption that any specific disagree-er is there to pick a fight with you. (And well-intentioned people who want to learn from you also get very exhausting at scale.)

These are not circumstances conducive to an open and generous exchange of ideas. These are circumstances conducive to certainty and consensus. They’re circumstances conducive to proving you’re not an obnoxious reply guy by being warm and positive and cuddly with a new mutual for a good four years before you consider venturing a minor dissent (regarding a low-stakes matter that neither of you cares that much about).

All this contributes to a reviewing environment where the goal isn’t thinking together so much as affirming shared values. I love affirming shared values, don’t get me wrong! It’s just that values aren’t the only thing reviews can speak to. And if one of the shared values is “good books from a diverse range of authors continue to get published”—a value I hold very strongly and sincerely—then it’s hard to make a case for saying a book is bad. Would my time not be better spent in touting the joys of the books I do like? If I indeed want books like this to continue to get published, might I simply keep my low opinion of this specific book to myself?

But! If there is a moral reason for my dislike of a book, then a new set of shared values comes into play. I am now no longer making an innocent author sad for no reason, cruelly. This is a whole other thing! I am protecting other readers now! From harm!

As is probably obvious, I think this is a bad, reductive, exhausting way to understand book criticism: promotional until the author does a Transgression, at which point it becomes a righteous obligation to Name the Harm. At its worst, this is a framework for book criticism that grants permission for social media pile-ons of authors whose work has been judged harmful. Should reviewers talk about it when a book fails on moral grounds? Hell yeah. Should they feel free to consider an author’s utter shittiness as a human being when they’re reviewing their work? Absolutely; I do it all the time. I just don’t want the morality of a book to be the only thing about it that matters.

If reviews are understood as a straight up-or-down vote, then reviewers aren’t starting a conversation. We’re finishing one, and slamming the door behind us. Like everyone else, I’m hungry for MORE, and the more I want is the space to think together about interesting media with smart people I admire.

The post The Value of Criticism Is Thinking Together appeared first on Reading the End.

Except I immediately knew it wouldn’t. There are several reasons, I think, why it wouldn’t, but the big reason that jumped out at me right away is that I used to dislike spinach. It is a great misfortune to dislike spinach! Not only is spinach very healthy for you, but it is found in many delicious restaurant dishes and home cooking recipes that I might care to try. So one year, ages ago, as a New Year’s Resolution, I decided that I was going to eat a whole lot of spinach until I liked spinach. “That is crazy, Jenny,” I hear you say, but what I say to that is CRAZY LIKE A FOX, because for one thing, spinach is delicious and green leafy vegetables are the best vegetables; and for another thing, the plan totally worked. I love spinach now. I can’t believe I ever let cultural stereotypes of spinach prevent me from consuming the third-best vegetable there is. (First best is potato; second-best is Brussels sprout; I will not be taking questions.)

What I’m saying is: Sometimes you have to teach your brain how to like a thing.

In 2012, I decided that it was snobby and bad of me to refuse to read romance novels, perhaps in fact a betrayal of feminism. I had read one romance novel in its entirety at this time (The Bride, by Julie Garwood), in the very unpropitious circumstances of reading it onto a CD for my grandmother, who was blind, because she couldn’t find an audiobook of it and she really loved it and wanted to reread it. There are exactly five sex scenes in that book. I am scarred for life. I had also poked my nose into a old-school few romance novels with titles like Savage Desire (the word Savage in the title signified that one of the protagonists was going to be Native or half-Native or adopted by Natives) and found them to be about as retrograde in their attitudes toward race and gender as you’d expect with titles like that. But in 2012, I had heard enough people insist that there were good romance novels out there that I was willing to give the whole genre another go.

Here’s the thing. I did not exactly have to kiss a lot of romance novel frogs before I found my romance novel prince, but I did have to give three stars to a lot of books I didn’t know enough to appreciate yet. Or — a scenario that absolves me a little more — I didn’t know enough to guess whether I’d enjoy a given book or not based on its blurbs and comps and covers. The only variable I was actively trying to control for was feminism. I didn’t know that books could be categorized as angst or as fluff. I didn’t know about the sunshine one and the stormcloud one. I didn’t know about the Chaos Muppet and the Order Muppet. I didn’t know about the Big Mis.¹ I was like, “why are these books talking so much about the heroes being Large?” I did not have the vocabulary to describe a second-chance romance or an enemies-to-lovers romance. I didn’t have the experience to recognize that when the protagonists got to a hotel room to discover there was Only One Bed, it was both a gift and an elbow-nudge from the author.

It turns out that these things are pretty important to the experience of romance novels! There’s a reason that romance readers are fucking voracious, and the reason isn’t just that there are a metric fuck-ton of romance novels out there for us to feed into our hungry maws. The pleasure of reading romance is heavily iterative: it’s fun to discover the myriad of ways different authors have found to play with the same tropes, to subvert them or play them straight, to find new twists on them that make the reader say “oh that’s clever.” When a pair of romance novel protagonists falls asleep on the Only Bed in their hotel room, there’s a specific delight in knowing that they’re likely to wake up twined around each other and feeling some kind of way about it.²

The risk here is that treating a book like an unwanted vegetable course can be a deeply ungenerous way to read, and in the long term, it only works if it works. I have been lowkey trying to brute-force my way into enjoying the mystery genre for like five years now, and I have made very little progress. With a very few exceptions, it’s been three-star reads all the way down. I also haven’t been trying that hard, because it doesn’t mean much to me to be a mystery reader or not a mystery reader. I’d just kind of like to be able to swap book recs with my mystery-loving pals, which I can’t currently do.

By contrast, I was and am a lot more motivated to get myself into World Literature, including but not limited to literature in translation. The wonderful Meytal, founder of Women in Translation Month, helped me to be less intimidated by translated literature, while at the same time her efforts, and those of many others, contributed to producing a richer, more vibrant pool of translated literature to choose from. I used to have to be pestered to death to even consider reading a book in translation, and it was the exact same problem as I had in my early efforts with romance. Other countries, other cultures, other languages simply have different storytelling conventions, and I had to teach myself to understand and enjoy them, as well as how to identify translated works that are most likely to delight me. (I love the tradition of absurdism/surrealism in East Asian literature, but I don’t think I’ll ever love noir, no matter what language it’s written in.) I’ve plowed my way through a lot of three-star reads because the goal I’m pursuing is “comfort with a lot of different ways of telling stories,” rather than “falling madly in love with as many books as possible.”

Do you read to try stuff, or do you read to love stuff? Or something else? Or different things at different times? (Reading to get away from it all has been a significant feature of my reading life, especially over the last six years. Sob.)

The post What I Get Out of Three-Star Reads appeared first on Reading the End.

My frustration with Loki is partly a bigger frustration with the trends in TV. Around the time of your Mad Mens and your Breaking Bads, we as a culture recognized that not every television show needs to run for twenty-two episodes per season. Hooray! Good point, us! As we rounded the corner on your Game of Throneses, we acceded to the premise that good television should have shorter seasons and that should be the move and that’s what we’re doing now.

It turns out I really hate this and I want to go back to before.

What I love about TV, and I’m discovering it’s kind of a major thing that I love about TV, is that its format makes space for weirdness and experimentation. TV shares this trait with comics, actually! Comic books get to tell big, weird, sprawling stories with detours and cul-de-sacs and bottle episodes and one-offs that they never have to explain and we don’t even care. There’s a playfulness that’s possible in long-running comics and television shows that you don’t get in other formats. I’m thinking of the Hawkeye comic from the dog’s point of view, or the WicDiv that’s all magazine profiles; the “Midnight” episode in Tennant’s run on Doctor Who, or “The One Where No One’s Ready” on Friends; “The Zeppo” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

These episodes and issues are often created for practical reasons such as Catherine Tate is exhausted and needs a bit of a rest, but the results can be absolute magic. Because they don’t need to move the story along too much, these stories can dig their teeth into the characters and relationships. The payoff is deeper immersion in the world or the characters; and besides that, going on these little detours are just fun.

I know that short seasons are the fashion now. I don’t even necessarily object to it in some cases, because some stories just do make better sense in six or ten or twelve episodes. But other stories, particularly when they involve a gradual shift in the protagonist’s character, require more space to breathe. Loki on Disney+ should have been one of those. (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier should too, but if I wrote a post about that one it would just end up being a list of St. Bernard Parish-specific topics I believe the show should have covered, and I admit that my curiosity about Sarah Wilson’s views on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project and its impact on the fishing industry is, um, niche.)

What Actually Happens in Loki

Here’s a quick rundown of what happens in Loki, with spoilers: Loki from 2012 steals the Tesseract and goes on the lam. A mysterious agency called the Time Variance Authority nabs him and brings him in; their job is to ensure that the main, preordained, least-chaos timeline is preserved. The TVA’s best soldier, Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), and their judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), want to disintegrate him. Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) wants to use him to find a time terrorist who’s killing all the TVA’s soldiers. Why? Because the time terrorist is another variant version of Loki, and Mobius thinks they can use Loki to find Other Loki.

Loki figures out that the Variant is hiding out in times of disaster, and he tracks her down. The Variant is a woman version of Loki, called Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). She and Original Recipe Loki team up, sort of, and go on the run and develop a grudging respect. Sylvie reveals that the TVA has been lying to its employees, who are all variants nabbed from different points in the timeline and wiped of their memories.

Loki meets a whole bunch of other Loki variants, and he and Sylvie find a way to get to the person who’s really pulling the strings at the TVA. He (Kang) offers them a choice: They can kill him, ushering in entire chaos, or they can become the new rulers of the TVA, ushering in a new era with similar rules but maybe different policies? Loki wants to do new policies, which Sylvie takes to mean he wants to Rule Everything. They fight; she stabs Kang to death; and Loki ends up in an alternate universe version of the TVA. Roll credits.

This is. a very good cast. The episode where Sylvie and Loki form a grudging respect as they work together to escape a doomed world is top-notch, mostly because it actually gives these characters some room to breathe. Tom Hiddleston and Sophia Di Martino are great together! I actually really felt it in the following episode when Loki thinks Sylvie is dead. I felt an emotion. It is the only emotion probably that I felt throughout this whole godforsaken series, which I’m mad about because it’s a whole lot of fun and I liked it, but then also it’s a bowl of piping hot nonsense and it didn’t have to be.

Loki spends virtually no time on its characters, assuming–I guess–that we’ll be sufficiently charmed by Owen Wilson’s broken nose and Tom Hiddleston’s big sad eyes and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s everything that we won’t notice they’re ciphers. In the rare instances that the show needs a character to have a motivation for a thing, it carefully explains to us, in dialogue, the type of person this character is and how that has led naturally to what they are about to do. Why do Hunter B-15 and Mobius care that they’re variants? What sort of life does Loki want to lead, ideally? Both the MCU and Loki the show give us some hints of the answers to these things, but that’s all they are: hints.

What Could Have Been

In an eighteen-episode season, we’d start the same way this one starts, with Loki getting recruited to the TVA to hunt down the other Loki. The five episodes following the pilot could function like procedurals, so we’d get a sense of how the TVA functions on a normal day and also how Loki functions on a normal day. How do they win fights? What are their weak points? What things is the Variant doing that’s really fucking them up?

The gift of serialized television–and it’s weird that Marvel doesn’t seem to know this because it’s kind of central to the genre–is the ability to make a single episode do double duty for you. Every episode should do at least two of four things: advance the plot; explore the world; build the characters; advance the relationships. These first six episodes would be the ones where we get to know Loki, Mobius, and Hunter B-15, and you could slide a lot of exposition in there without, like, scenes and scenes of Mobius sitting at a desk explaining things. Have one episode where the disaster-of-the-week hits Hunter B-15 in a personal place. Have one episode where Renslayer has to come back for one last job and we get to see how she and Mobius used to work together in the old days before she got promoted. Show us why the TVA trusts Mobius enough as a company man that they’re letting him take Loki along for the ride.

End the sixth episode with the Sylvie reveal. Episodes seven through twelve are dedicated to the build-up of Sylvie and Loki’s relationship. One of these episodes could also be a Sylvie-centric episode, where she’s running through space and time doing chaos! You’d love that! It could even be a mirror episode to something from the first set of six episodes. Like maybe in episode four, we saw the TVA come very close to catching her but they’re always one step behind her; now let’s see those same events from her perspective. Build in some lovely parallels between her idealism and Renslayer’s, build up their enmity so the internet can write some real good enemies-to-lovers fic about it. Then on to the stuff where Loki and Sylvia are on the doom planet trying to get off the doom planet before doom o’clock.

Back at the ranch, spend a lil time with Mobius and Renslayer working on that relationship, which we also do actually need to care about oh my God this show makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. And the driving force for Hunter B-15 to realize she wants to break free from the TVA is sitting right there! Why didn’t they use it! If we’d just spent six episodes learning that Hunter B-15 will do anything to protect her fellow TVA soldiers, it would make a ton of sense for her to be bewildered and angry to lose C-20 in such an unceremonious, unexplained way. Have her start digging into what happened there, maybe find a few hints that all is not well. Toward the end of this run of episodes, Sylvie can tell Loki that the TVA staff are all variants, leading us into:

The final six episodes! Wherein things come to a crisis point with Mobius and Hunter B-15, Loki and Sylvie figure out next steps, and they use the encounters with the other Lokis to learn more about the TVA and who might be pulling the strings. You know, foreshadow the ending instead of making poor Jonathan Majors deliver a twenty-minute monologue in the final episode. Imagine the comedic potential of a whole episode watching variously long flashbacks of various Lokis getting variously closer to figuring out TVA stuff. Ironically, the alligator gets the closest. Then have the Loki/Sylvie betrayal and the fracturing of the timeline. The end.

Why Would You Waste a Time Loop Like This?

If you have managed to sense, over the course of this post, my frustration with Loki and its goddamn six-episode length, please know that it came to a head in episode four, when they wasted a whole time loop premise on some nonsense with Sif’s hair. I fucking love time loops. I love them. Imagine a proper time loop episode where Sylvie and Loki are both stuck in time loops where they actually get to figure out some stuff about themselves, instead of Loki just twiddling his thumbs until Mobius swings by to save him. I cannot abide a wasted time loop, and this, somehow, was my breaking point.

Much as I love things about living in the era of Peak TV, I do wish that writers and showrunners and, like, conglomerates would keep in mind that the point of television isn’t meant to be a mad assembly line of as much plot as possible delivered at breakneck speed. (I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe this is what Marvel has driven me to. Y’all don’t know how much I love plotty shows. If everything could be as much like season 2 of Vampire Diaries as possible that would honestly be great for me.) As it turns out, character development is necessary scaffolding for plot! If all you’re doing is dumping a bunch of hot charismatic action figures into a box and shaking the box, don’t be surprised when the result is lifeless.

The post Loki, or, A Requiem for Filler Episodes appeared first on Reading the End.

Before anything else, both of these authors have tremendous passion for the work. Though Emezi’s memoir ranges widely through years of their life and numerous places they’ve lived, the constant in good years and bad is their (sometimes single-minded) commitment to their art:

People can say a lot about me, but everyone knows the work is my beginning. I work myself like it’s a madness and maybe it is. It’s how I world-bend: it is my hammer, my heated metal, my anvil, my forge, my weapon.

(And yes, as you can see, Emezi’s writing continues to be truly gorgeous.)

In an early chapter of Dear Senthuran, Emezi says that they are going to describe the spell they have cast to achieve the success they’ve achieved. The spell is to believe in themself and keep doing the work, and when they achieve one of their dreams, they set a new dream and work like hell to achieve it. They make full use of the flexibility of the word “work”: “work” as an action verb for the effort and drive they put into creation; “work” as a noun that describes the product of their creativity; “the work” to encompass both.

Prescod-Weinstein similarly radiates her love for the work that she does. I have to admit that I…. had a harder time understanding some of what she was talking about (extremely science) versus what Emezi is talking about (litrature and mental illness and relationships). Surprise! I do not 1000% understand theoretical cosmology and astrophysics. Who knew! The first half of The Disordered Cosmos covers Prescod-Weinstein’s work and the questions she’s trying to answer, and they are about ten miles above my head. I read this portion of the book feeling more like I was weaving a brand new net than capturing knowledge in a pre-existing net.

But! What’s very clear, both in the early parts of the book where Prescod-Weinstein is talking about science, and in the second half where she’s talking about the profession, is how much Prescod-Weinstein loves her field. Even when I didn’t understand the science, her devotion to and enthusiasm about it shone through every word.

I still like math and the potential it holds to help us craft a compelling cosmological tale. I still think the times table is a miraculous thing, thirty years after I first learned it. I still love that we can use math to understand and describe the history of the universe itself. And I want little children of every shade, gender identity, sex identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, (dis)ability, and religion to have access to that cosmos, to have fun with it, to find joy in it…. Access to a dark night sky — to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is — should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.

Perhaps in part by virtue of being marginalized in their chosen fields, Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein are both keenly aware of the importance of different modes of knowing. For Emezi, this centers very much on their physical body and spiritual essence. They identify as ọgbanje, a kind of Igbo trickster spirit that is born into the body of a human child. They feel particularly close to the world of spirits and gods; at times closer, it seems, to that world than to our physical world, where they are read through lenses that do not pertain to them. At times this way of knowing themself can lead to an instrumentalizing view of other people that I found hard to read, in part because I often struggle with the genre of memoir and the way it (perhaps necessarily; certainly often) transforms the people in the writer’s life into side characters in the writer’s story, rather than full protagonists of their own. For instance, in a story they tell about traveling home and being taken to the shrine of the deity Ala:

Back at my human father’s clinic, the pastor exulted over how the day had gone. “God opened the way for us,” he said. “We encountered no problems! I am sure that our purpose was to speak about Jesus to that woman.” I remember marveling at his vision of the story. These four men — my father, the red neighbor, the pastor, the contact — they had all been moved by my deitymother, pawns in a mission they were completely unaware of, thinking they were serving their God when really they were carrying out Ala’s will. The contact had kicked up a fuss when it was time to pay him, emphasizing over and over again that he wouldn’t usually do anything like this, he was a Christian, he didn’t like these fetish things.

I thought, What else could my mother do for me if I asked? Who else could she move, so smoothly that they would have no idea they were even being used?

A theme throughout The Disordered Cosmos is the validity of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge, which Prescod-Weinstein asserts ferociously from within a field that resists any kind of knowing that doesn’t come through white Western male intellectual history. She uses the example of the Native Hawaiians who have, for years, resisted observatories that have been placed on Mauna Kea, without regard for the indigenous traditions that hold that land sacred. When she was offered an opportunity at a year-long job at Mauna Kea that would have positioned her to get into a good PhD program, counterbalancing her mediocre grades that came as a result of the structural challenges faced by many marginalized folks at universities, Prescod-Weinstein turned it down in solidarity with the Native Hawaiian protestors. Her recognition that other modes of knowing than her own are valid–indeed vital!–and her pursuit of that truth at the expense of her career prospects are examples I hope to always carry with me and aspire to.

Regrettably, trauma has played all too large a role in the lives of both these authors. Prescod-Weinstein speaks with eloquent rage about her own rape by a more senior person in her field, and the lasting damage that experience has wrought on her career and her psyche.

I want to have the power to eject this memory: to force it far, far away from me. By that I mean I would like to have the power to eject this memory into the nuclear inferno that is our sun. The sun is, effectively, a series of nuclear explosions, mostly converting hydrogen into helium. Better this memory blow up inside the sun than inside of me. But this memory is written on my body so instead I have to trace the lines of force that are available to me. I look to see what work is possible. For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present.

Emezi is often oblique about their trauma, but they are explicit about its impacts: dysphoria, chronic pain, recurring suicidal ideation. Dear Senthuran is grandiose at times, and at other times it speaks of so much pain that it is very nearly self-annihilating. But it’s clear that Emezi is claiming the space to be grandiose in ways that have rarely been tolerated by people like them–Black, trans, immigrant–though white straight men are given all the latitude in the world to self-mythologize.

In the dark of night, my demons don’t tell me I’m worthless. They tell me I am too powerful, that no one will ever want me for it, that I don’t deserve love or happy endings because I chose too much, I ate too much of the world, I refused to starve and as punishment, I will be starved.

Dear Senthuran (I keep writing Death Senthuran, which feels apt) and The Disordered Cosmos remind the reading public (I hope) of the fact that society’s exclusionary structures come at a cost: the cost of people who did not, like Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein, have the luck and the wherewithal to keep working and writing in their fields. The cost is disproportionately borne by those for whom the system was not made, but in the end, everyone within the system is the poorer for it.

The post It’s the Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter appeared first on Reading the End.

1) the network that Supernatural airs on

Yup, that’s right! The CW did not exist in 2005! It launched in September of 2006 with a slate of programs gleaned from the newly defunct UPN and The WB, may their memories be a blessing. Every good program that aired in the mid-aughts was on one of those two networks, so it is no surprise that the CW has become home to many of the greatest television shows of our time, by which I mean Jane the Virgin, Vampire Diaries, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

(Ask me about my conspiracy theory that Supernatural kicked up its use of gendered slurs as the CW began to target women audiences more heavily.)¹

2) Breitbart

Remember the Time Before, when Nazis weren’t that big of a thing in America and we could kind of relax about Nazis? I vividly remember going to England and learning about their politics over there and thinking “Well, America’s fucked too, but at least we don’t have literal Nazis in the government.” Now we do, and it’s Breitbart News’s fault. Fuck you, Steve Bannon.

3) Not one not two BUT THREE media formats (HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming)

I recently put the DVD of North and South into my DVD player and watched it on DVD, and I felt as old-fashioned as if I were playing the Cabaret cast recording on vinyl. But it’s worth noting that when Supernatural began, we were not one but two jumps away from our current media consumption habits: DVDs had not yet been supplanted by Blu-Rays, which were officially released on 20 June 2006 and had won the arms race against HD-DVD by February 2008.

But Blu-Ray’s primacy over DVDs, never uncontested by old farts like me who are still using their same $25 DVD player they bought at Walmart in aught-three, soon fell to services like Amazon Unbox (remember that? Ha, what a terrible name), Netflix, and Hulu. Soon I guess we are going to enter into a new phase where everything is just Disney and nothing’s not Disney and we all serve the Mouse, forever and ever, amen.

4) the perma-recession that tanked millennials’ homebuying capability and any possibility most of us had of building equity

When Supernatural began, we thought that if we went to college and behaved in accordance with our parents’ expectations, we would someday be lawyers and own homes. What fools!

But seriously, baby boomers tanked the economy for the rest of us, decimated what little wealth black communities in particular had managed to amass after centuries of oppression, and now want to write articles about how we don’t own houses because we eat too much avocado toast. Along with the hope that Supernatural would ever not kill a lady character, our dreams of financial stability have slowly perished. We’re also all going to drown in the rising seas. This is the world corporations have built, and the wealthy have the only lifeboats.

5) Fiona the Hippo

I mean, obviously. Fiona’s just a baby. But that last one was pretty dark, and I wanted us to have a breather. Look at this lil hippo bb.

6) the Marvel Cinematic Universe

For some reason, this is the one I keep tripping over. The MCU? Did not exist? Before Supernatural? There have been so many movies in the MCU, and I have grown so accustomed to its omnipresence, that I struggle to believe it ever didn’t exist. But I have fact-checked this claim repeatedly, and I am now prepared to share the results of that fact-check with you: The MCU began with Iron Man One, and Iron Man One came out in 2008. When Supernatural started in 2005, we believed that superhero movies were over. But see above wherein Disney.

7) Twitter

Yes, Supernatural predates the blue bird hellsite. And most of the other social media used by non-olds to this day. Instagram. Tumblr. Whatever Tik Tok is, with its VSCO girls, whatever they are. The empire of Vine rose and fell whilst Supernatural was trying to decide whether Misha Collins rated being made into a series regular.

The above gif could never have happened when Supernatural was first airing. There was no such hellsite.

8) JK Rowling’s habit of saying at-best-oblivious-and-bigoted-at-worst nonsense that slowly kills our love for her and our childhoods

In 2005, we did not yet know that I WAS RIGHT about Snape knowing Lily and Petunia as children, a high-level act of rightness by me that goes grievously unacknowledged in our contemporary discourse. More importantly, because the Harry Potter books weren’t finished yet, we didn’t have to put up with JK Rowling getting on the internet every twenty minutes to give us retconny updates to make her past self seem woker.

There was no History of Magic in North America. The Grindelwald/Hitler analogy remained reasonably unfleshed out. If you had asked 2005 me whether JK Rowling would knowingly support and defend an admitted domestic abuser, I would have blithely assured you that that would never happen. Ah, for lost innocence.

ETA: This got so much worse since I first wrote this post. JK Rowling had been lowkey seeming TERFy for years, but then she went all in on being a TERF. Support trans authors! JK Rowling sucks!

9) iPhones

Despite being the latest of iPhone adopters myself (I ungraciously accepted a hand-me-down iPhone 4 in 2016 only because I wanted to do group texting; I do not to this day have a data plan), a time without smartphones feels as far distant as, like, moral panic over the invention of the wireless. Nevertheless, and I am sorry if this makes you feel elderly, Supernatural existed before THE TOUCHSCREEN PHONE, of which the iPhone is the famousest. A fun adventures is to watch early Supernatural and confront the fact that Dean isn’t a technophobe—that’s just what phones were like.

(On a personal note, I did not own a cell phone at all when Supernatural premiered. If someone I was supposed to meet up with forgot about it or was running late, I waited twenty minutes and then just went the fuck home.)

10) the Large Hadron Collider

I do not understand what the Large Hadron Collider is. To the best of my understanding, it is a Very Advanced Science Object that bashes two tiny mysterious things into each other, and Science comes out. And maybe God. I include it on this list to commemorate a time when there could be science news that didn’t make us want to crawl into a hole and wait for death to claim us. Now all the science news is just more and more ways the world’s going to kill us. See above wherein: rising seas.

(Not for nothing, when Supernatural premiered, we still had nine planets. My very excellent mother just served us nine—what? Nine nothings. Science was better in aught-five, I think.)

11) AirBNB

I swear I’ll have a happy one next, but remember before when I said that our generation can’t buy homes because of the goddamn recession? Another part of the housing problem we now face is that AirBNB, founded in 2008, has accelerated gentrification while accruing financial benefit mainly to white, wealthy homeowners. In particular, short-term housing like AirBNB has decimated historically black neighborhoods by driving locals out, raising the cost of housing so future locals can’t move in, and generally prioritizing the needs of (largely white, largely middle-class-and-up) tourists over the housing crisis faced by actual residents of those actual cities. When Supernatural first aired, we only had to worry about garden-variety gentrification; now, VC-backed “disrupters” of the hotel/real estate industries can exacerbate income inequality even faster.

EAT THE RICH.

12) The resurgence of indie bookstores

Ready for some good news? Indie bookstores have bounced back massively since Supernatural premiered. Prophets of bookish doom predicted that ebooks would mark the end, the absolute end, of physical book-buying as we know it, especially after Amazon hopped into the ebook game with the Kindle in 2007. But then, in a true underdog story, indies across America grew by 35 percent between 2009 and 2015. I could not have predicted this, but we are all blessed by it.

(My wish for indie bookstores in the future is that they become more friendly to romance readers. Thanks in advance, indies! Love you!)

13) Gifs

Okay, okay, gifs were around long before Supernatural was, and I am, therefore, fudging a little bit. But you know what wasn’t around before Supernatural? Us using gifs. My own introduction to gifs came with a Tumblr blog entitled What Should We Call Me, and it’s been downhill ever since. I thought it merited a mention here because of how ubiquitous gifs have become. It didn’t used to be that way! I didn’t used to use gifs for every damn thing! And I’d like to think that Supernatural, which famously has a gif for everything, was a little part of that change.

This is your periodic reminder that gifs can be an accessibility nightmare. Twitter, for instance, does not have the functionality of adding an image description to a gif the way you can to a still picture. If you’re using a gif, don’t forget to include a description of what’s happening in it so that people with screen readers can enjoy them too!

14) Two entire countries

I take it back, this is the item on the list that surprises me the most. It’s not the MCU. I could have accepted one new country, especially because I was paying a lot of attention to the events surrounding the establishment of South Sudan in 2011. But South Sudan isn’t even the only country that has been established since Supernatural went on the air! Somehow! Montenegro was part of the former Yugoslavia, then part of a state union with Serbia, and only in May 2006 did it regain its status as an independent nation. Way to go, Montenegro and South Sudan! You are of much greater worth than this dumb demon-hunting show that I resent sometimes having feelings about!

(I don’t know anything about Montenegro, really, but I would like to take this parenthetical aside as an opportunity to mention that Grantland reviewed various national anthems for the 2012 Olympics, and their presumptive translation of Montenegro’s national anthem is really great. Go Montenegro!)

15) Archive of Our Own

This one seems wonderfully suitable, doesn’t it? For better or worse, Supernatural shaped a lot of fandom, not least by being ground zero for the Omegaverse, a concept I have now had to explain to more than two adult humans whose good opinions I still crave. The Archive went into open beta in 2009 and has been hosting more and more fanworks ever since then. It’s even won a Hugo, which the World Science Fiction Society wants you to know definitely means that every person who’s ever posted a fanwork on AO3 is now a Hugo winner. Please tell this to all your friends. The World Science Fiction Society really wants everyone to know that all creators on AO3 are definitely, indisputably, 100% Hugo winners.

Mmm, this has been a jolly tour through the past. I think the main thing we’ve learned is that the rich are monsters who would gleefully ascend a mountain made of our corpses in order to sit atop Corpse Mountain on a golden throne. If there is any joy to be found in this world by shopping at indie bookstores, gazing upon a frolicsome hippo, or watching a very dumb show that has somehow lasted fifteen seasons despite having run out of plot sometime in the Obama presidency, we must grab that joy with both hands and wrest the joy-marrow from its joy-bones using teeth made sharp by precarity and terror. Happy October.

The post 15 Things That Are Still Somehow Younger Than Supernatural appeared first on Reading the End.

(Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.)

–what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit it if I didn’t know what Jackson Pollock was on about (which I didn’t then and still don’t), but it has proved to be valuable advice all the same. There’s a particularity to artistic stylization — in modern art, in poetry, in your swooshier prose writing — that requires a resonance between creator and consumer, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re nowhere.

If you’re thinking I have used up a lot of words in a row as a preface to admitting that I didn’t love This Is How You Lose the Time War, you are perfectly correct. But I didn’t love it in a way I find interesting and want to think more about. All signs pointed to me and this book being a perfect match. It’s a semi-epistolary time travel romance about a woman called Red from a sciencey time army and a woman called Blue from a magicky time army, and they do time battles and thwart each other’s plans and fall in love. On paper this should have been great for me. I love it when a murderbird character finds herself in disconcerting possession of an emotion, and this book had two murderbirds.

On the other hand, this book isn’t so much a time travel story or a romance story (although it is both of those things) as it is a vehicle for swooshy prose. Here is what the prose is like:

She stops when she finds the letter.

Kneels.

The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?

The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.

She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.

I am on record as being generally more interested in story-forward books than prose-forward ones, and you may accept that as a statement of my own starting point. But regardless of your feelings about books that have “prose delivery vehicle” as a prominent goal (they are frequently not my cup of tea, Marilynne Robinson), they play a high-risk game in the same way that nonrepresentational art or poetry do. I can appreciate the hard work that went into Jackson Pollock’s paintings all day, but they will never stop me in my tracks the way Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons did at the Tate Modern. I was rocked back on my heels by those paintings. Poetry functions the same way: Whether you understand the sense of it on a vocab-and-syntax level is often irrelevant to how emotionally impactful you find it.

We spoke on podcast recently about how utterly subjective hope is, in books — how the same book can make one person feel exhausted and miserable, and another person rejuvenated and hopeful. I believe that any piece of art that has as a main goal the evocation of emotion and mood narrows its audience, purely because it is functioning on a different level of engagement that slightly bypasses the “interpret the words and their meanings” level and gets into something far harder to articulate.

When a book or a poem or a piece of art works like this for you, it really really works. It feels like something beyond the intellectual experience of reading, or even the typical emotional experience of reading. It’s more visceral, like the book has gone fishing for exactly you and lodged its hooks in your soft tender heart and now you are just being dragged along, willy-nilly, wherever it wants to take you. It’s intense. Maybe you think about it for years and years afterward, like I do about this passage from White Is for Witching:

In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?

The very-very-personal-ness of this kind of writing and how it hits you and how it’s meant to hit you does truly mean that it’s Not for Everyone in a way that can be quite hard to predict. You can appreciate the above passage on a sentence level and a meaning level, you can get it without that passage slamming into you like a freight train, the way it does to me. As I’ve said, This Is How You Lose the Time War described in bullet points is such a me book that it’s almost comical; but you can’t bullet point how noticeable prose will make you feel. I’m not even convinced you can bullet point how it’s meant to make you feel. Leah Bobet¹ said something so sensible about this recently:

Relatedly, I’ve realized after years what it is I *like* about poetry.

There’s a lot of good in a form where our interior lives exist without pressure for explanation or translation.

— I came in like a breaking ball (@leahbobet) July 15, 2019

How can cover copy tell you whether a prose-forward story will speak to your interior life, or a collection of poetry? It’s impossible, even impossibler than marketing materials typically are in predicting what you’re going to like. Self-serving as it may seem to say this in a post about a book I didn’t like that litrally everybody else in the world seems to adore, it also isn’t a case of anybody having messed up. The authors didn’t make a misstep. I didn’t not get it. It’s just that the match between them and me didn’t occur. Their elegant, complicated, weird swooshy writing didn’t resonate anything in me.

Sometimes that’s just how the fuck it goes.

Note: I received an ARC of this ebook from the publisher for review consideration. This hasn’t impacted the contents of my review.

The post This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone appeared first on Reading the End.

Michael Sheen:

They’re both very bonded and connected anyway, because of the two of them having this relationship through history – but also because angels are beings of love, so it’s inevitable that he would love Crowley. It helped that loving David is very easy to do.

David Tennant:

From being the Doctor, I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of various theories being thrown at you. Like, for instance, this romantic theory about Crowley and Aziraphale.

Well, it is a love story, I think. I think every buddy movie, which is what this essentially is, is a love story, subtextually.

Some are more overtly homoerotic than others.

It’s not explicitly stated, certainly. I don’t know if the supernatural beings are sexual in any way, so it’s probably best not judging them on the same criteria where we judge ourselves.

Neil Gaiman:

The TV series gets deeper into Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship. It’ll be canonical for the TV series, and not canonical for the book.

If I were to Pronounce on things that are not explicitly stated in the book, I still wouldn’t be telling you if Crowley was Canonically Gay. I would be telling you what I think, because it’s not canon unless it’s in the book. It won’t be TV canon unless it’s on the screen.

So, do not worry what other people think, and do not worry about what they say. These are not things on which people can be right or wrong, or on which anything can be “settled”.

Make fun fanfiction. Enjoy yourself. Make things up. Share them. That’s the point.

In the wake of Good Omens‘s release, I’ve seen two reactions to the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale. One is “holy shit I can’t believe how obviously these dudes are in a relationship,” of which an excellent example is this Emily Asher-Perrin piece. Very much fanfiction is now being written in support of the view that Aziraphale and Crowley are in love and, also, banging. The other reaction I’ve seen is “holy shit I can’t believe how obviously these dudes are in, specifically, a longterm nonsexual romantic relationship.” I can’t link you to a piece about that in a major outlet because the media lags way behind lived experiences when it comes to (any kind of queerness, but especially) asexuality and aromanticism.

The latter camp points out that the (fandom) assumption that people can’t be each other’s life partner without sex contributes to asexual erasure. This is incredibly true. The former camp points out that the (broader society) assumption that two members of the same gender are always only platonic pals and why are you even talking about sex and romance anyway contributes to gay erasure. This is also incredibly true. Neil Gaiman, attempting to stay out of it, said this on his blog:

Good Omens: a gentle reminder

Your headcanon is your headcanon. The characters in your mind are what they are, and nobody is trying to take them away from you.

This made me pinch the bridge of my nose for two hours, and when I got finished with that, I came over here to write this post.

It’s not wrong, and can be super interesting, for a text to leave room for multiple interpretations. I never shut up about the finale of Black Sails, which leaves it open to question whether a major character lives or dies. (The character lives; fight me.) The uncertainty is the point. Jack Rackham says in the finale:

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born?

That’s a point worth making, and one that Black Sails (I’m sorry to have once again gotten on a Black Sails tangent but I promise it’s relevant) has been making all along,from the very first season. To have the showrunners explicitly adjudicate the question of whether this character “really” lived or “really” died would undermine the kind of story their show was telling.

So on one hand, I agree that it’s exhausting for creators to constantly have to make pronouncements about What They Meant, and at some point we should be death-of-the-author about it and get on with our own interpretations. On the other hand, it’s much more exhausting to witness creators perpetually burying queerness in subtext and then acting surprised when people inquire what, exactly, the subtext was meant to convey. It’s not as simple as it won’t be TV canon unless it’s on the screen when you have Michael Sheen out doing press saying that he was playing it as Aziraphale being in love with Crowley.

Good Omens opens itself up to a multiple queer readings while also leaving it possible to interpret it as not being queer at all — and that’s a problem, in a world where queer stories are (still!) erased and covered up and denied as often and as energetically as possible. I’d love for the show to tell us they’re in love and banging. Or that they’re in love and not banging. Or that they’re queerplatonic life partners. I would be thrilled to see any of those types of queer relationships enshrined in canon.

The relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale is structured as a love story, with an entire episode near-totally dedicated to how they became each other’s more important person. It’s maddening for creators to edge up to the line of queerness, dip one toe in the water, and then run away giggling. It’s maddening for Neil Gaiman to act like it’s childish or ridiculous for queer viewers to crave representation and to seek it in subtext when creators repeatedly fail to make such representation overt. There’s no storytelling goal that’s served by being coy about what Crowley and Aziraphale are to each other. That’s a choice that serves the status quo of keeping queerness hidden.

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