teach me the art of war

Some people like to disappear for a month at a time and come back with nothing but complaints and negativity and that's valid, okay?

Murderbot: I'm a huge fan of the books and was heavily motivated to find the good in the TV adaptation, but I'm honestly so disappointed. It's not just that they've changed things, it's that they've actually turned all the story's meaning, themes and character dynamics on their heads in a way that actually genuinely pisses me off and not in a fun way.

( Cut for grousing )

Andor season 2: I've been putting off writing about this for ages because I honestly don't know what to say. Season 1 was so good with its female characters that watching it go off the rails has been bewildering.

( Cut for more grousing )

Captain America: Brave New World: Okay, I can't actually claim to have been let down by this one, as I already knew I was capital-o Over the MCU and only sat through it for sociable reasons. But it's still a shame to poke my head back in on an old fandom and find there's absolutely nothing left there for me. I truly just don't care anymore.

( Cut for...you'll never guess )

Here’s what you do when your *cough* well-laid plans inexplicably go wrong, okay? There are four easy steps:

1. Throw an absolute fucking tantrum. You’re an important man! They can’t do this to you!
2. When the tantrum fails, dissolve into angst. Bonus points if you can shoehorn in your feelings about Rey and/or your family.
3. Pull it together and do something spectacularly badass to get out of the situation.
4. Learn entirely the wrong lesson from your ordeal and go charging merrily off with renewed purpose and conviction in the most self-defeating direction possible.

( Many spoilers under the cut  )

I’m behind on comments and replies because No Brain, but osprey_archer has reliably informed me that we’re all making book lists to compare with each other. So here’s mine. Come tell me how many we have in common! Then make one of your own and tell me so I have more clicky boxes to occupy my brain-free skull cavity!

Yes, in the year of our lord 2025. There's a chance I'll still be going in another decade from now. He's just A LOT TO UNPACK, okay.

A while ago now, Adam Driver caused a bit of a stir in Reylo fandom by revealing in an interview that Good Boy Ben Solo was a surprise late addition to his character’s trajectory. JJ Abrams originally conceived of Kylo Ren as being Vader in reverse: where Vader began his trilogy fully committed to the dark side and gradually had his convictions dismantled, Kylo was to start out conflicted and grow secure in his villainy by the end. So until quite late in the sequel game, through the whole first two movies, that’s how Driver understood his character: as someone who was basically on a path towards completely snuffing out his own spark and committing himself wholly to the dark side.

I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, because I've always been on Team Kylo Ren Redemption and I generally don’t care about Word of God type stuff unless it happens to coincide with my own opinions. But I hit a bad slump the other day and decided to cheer myself up by rewatching The Last Jedi for the first time in ages, and I was surprised by how many feelings I had about the story viewed through that lens. It’s such a strong, dark, honestly much more realistic take on the nature of evil.

Because it’s still confrontingly easy to relate to Kylo’s motives, if not his choices: he’s angry and in pain and wants desperately to control the narrative, to vindicate himself, to punish the people who’ve hurt him so that no one will ever dare do it again. What makes him seem so redeemable to (at least a decent portion of) the audience is that he so clearly is acting from a place of pain, that he doesn’t enjoy the terrible things he does, that they’re not even getting him any closer to where he actually wants to be. But honestly, setting aside whatever you believe about redemption, that’s pretty much just how human evil works, right? Gleeful sadists exist but they’re not by any means the majority. Most of the shit things we do to each other boil down to “I feel vulnerable in some way and believe I can make myself safer by hurting someone else”. Kylo's evil is the kind of evil that everyone alive is capable of sharing under the right (wrong) circumstances - dialed up to eleven by the lightsabers and magic powers, but at its core, utterly human and far more relatable than most of us would like to admit.

And I think that's probably a big part of why I care so deeply about his redemption - because I need to believe that we're all capable of overcoming that part of ourselves, of learning to soothe our own hurts in less destructive ways, of making better choices even in the face of overwhelming emotions. But I also have to admit it would have been a hell of a story if they'd carried it through to the end. We're seeing it play out all over the world right now: the evil that does the most damage isn't the evil that cackles. It's the evil that truly believes it's the victim, that throws temper tantrums and lashes out when threatened, that has to twist reality in knots around itself to justify its actions because it can't otherwise live with the cognitive dissonance of what it's doing. I think we'd be far better equipped to recognise and combat evil if we all got more comfortable with the idea that a person can have reasons other than malice for hurting others - nuanced, sympathetic, relatable reasons - and still be utterly in the wrong beyond all possibility of compromise.

I will always and forever be glad we got a redemption arc instead of the bleak outcome that was originally planned, but it does make me wish more than ever that TROS had done more to earn it. Demoting Kylo to secondary threat in the face of Palpatine's return was such a moral cop-out. I'd have loved more than anything to get to see him play out his villain arc all the way, to make those terrible choices on his own with no more "the Real bad guy manipulated me into it" to hide behind, and still find redemption at the end, because him being truly in charge of those choices is precisely what means he has the power to make better ones. And this is why no one is ever prying the Ben Solo Lives tag out of my hands. The redemption we got on screen felt like a start, a first taste. It's not enough. I need to see him do the actual hard work of changing his habits and overcoming his kneejerk reactions to any negative emotion.

Thank fuck for fanfic.

After a long creative fallow period, my writing mojo has suddenly come back all in a rush. I've published 32k of fic in the last few weeks, which is more than I've managed in the last three years combined. It feels amazing! And maddening, because I have so many fucking ideas right now and not actually all that much time to work on them. But it's the good kind of maddening. I'm having a blast!

Candy Hearts exchange
My Candy Hearts assignment is what set everything off. 'It'll be fine,' I told myself, signing up. 'My last few exchange experiences have been highly stressful scrambles to get anything written by deadline, but this time I'll take it super chill and write a modest little ficlet for a ship I'm already super confident with. What could go wrong?'

And then instead of doing that I got way too inspired by my recip's excellent prompts and wrote, uh. Nearly 15k of Kylo Ren getting beaten up by a giant slug and having frottage with Finn about it (here, if you're game). The words all just came rushing out, I was writing a few thousand per sitting and having so much fun. My starting concept was 'Finnlo h/c and huddling for warmth on Hoth', but it felt like nerfing Kylo a bit too much to have him rendered helpless and dependent on his stormtrooper escort's mercy by just a wampa, so I was browsing Wookieepedia for inspiration as I puzzled it out and that's how I learnt that these bad boys canonically exist on Hoth (never change, Star Wars). After that everything just fell into place.

After that I thought I was done with CH, but then reveals got delayed and a treat idea came blazing fully formed into my brain. So I wrote another 5k of teenaged Poe, Jacen and Ben getting into trouble at Luke's Jedi temple, all in one frantic sitting the day before work reveals. I was putting in typo fixes down to the minute on that one, lol. Live fast die young. :D

Bad Sex Bingo
I've also gone absolutely mental for my Bad Sex Bingo card. I've been tracking my progress at the linked post, but to summarise: eight fics so far, bingo in two directions, ideas in reserve for every remaining square. Kylo Ren has been having SO much bad sex, you guys. :DDD I'm trying to rein myself in now to save some energy for May the Fourth, but I'm really enjoying having something of my own to just noodle away at.

It's actually made me realise how long it's been since I wrote for myself instead of putting all my effort into exchange fic. No regrets - exchanges have been really good for me for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they seem to have cured me of a long-running insecurity about feedback stats. I'm generally pretty confident about my writing itself (I know my strengths, I'm working on my weaknesses, and I'm good enough that I can always make the words say at least a close approximation of what I want them to, which to me is the most important part) but I used to feel so self-conscious and vulnerable about the social side of things. I felt like I needed "permission" to share my writing publicly, and permission could mean a small close-knit fannish friend group or a bunch of kudos from strangers but it always had to come from other people, if that makes sense. Writing for exchange requests was about the most explicit permission possible, and it seems to have acted as an interim step in weaning me off a need for public approval? Because I've gotten used to writing all sorts of niche stuff that I haven't felt embarrassed to publish so long as one person wants it, and from there it's a much easier jump to "well, I myself am one person, I can publish things just because I want them" and I just...don't feel worried about it anymore? So now I'm posting all this niche Bad Sex Bingo fic written solely to amuse myself, and some of it is attracting lots of readers and some of it isn't, and I'm feeling able to just enjoy whatever feedback I get for what it is without needing it to reassure me that I haven't made a fool of myself by being That Loser Who Posts Fic No One Wants And Who We All Just Wish Would Shut Up.

...anyway. That's me done navelgazing for now. Although, derailing a smutfic project into a big introspection session on my own issues feels very on brand for a Kylo Ren's Sex Life Is an Angst-Fueled Disaster project. The point is I am having a LOT OF FUN and feeling really comfortable in my own fannish skin right now, and it's nice.

Are you not enjoying the consequences of your actions very much? Did your last big decision not go the way you hoped? Try DOUBLING DOWN™. DOUBLING DOWN™ can bring you fast relief from:

• That hollow feeling when power seized for power’s sake fails to make you happy. (Try bullying a junior colleague about it! Really rub your superior strength in his face!)
• The agonies of a broken heart. (You never needed her anyway! You’ve already half forgotten her name! It’s her loss, not yours!)
• Your failure to outrun your own painful past. (Killing your attachments didn’t help? Perhaps you simply need to kill more of them! Kill them even harder this time! It’s bound to work if you give it just one more go!)

Nine out of ten assholes recommend DOUBLING DOWN™ as the best protection on the market from the deleterious effects of self-reflection. Ask your Supreme Leader today if DOUBLING DOWN™ is right for you.



So, yeah, this is the first instalment of a new ongoing series set right after The Last Jedi. Struggling worse than ever after the turmoil that brought him the throne, Kylo Ren goes looking for answers in Vader's life story. Charles Soule is the same author who wrote the Rise of Kylo Ren series, and he has a perspective on the character that I really love. Soule's Kylo deeply feels the weight of his family legacy: he's the son of two heroes, the grandson of a villain, the nephew and prize pupil of a Jedi legend, named after another Jedi legend who he never met. His sense of personal identity is precarious, and he feels as if separating himself from all that baggage is the only way he gets to be a real person instead of just an embodied set of expectations. The methods he chooses are violent, desperate, impulsive, and driven entirely by his emotions - and above all, by self-loathing and fear of inadequacy.

And, yeah, there's a pretty major cascade effect going on in his life. He handles every mistake he ever makes by doubling down on it, which means that the outcomes he ends up fighting tooth and nail for are rarely the ones he had in mind at the start - he goes where the opposition is, basically. (It's an easy way to manipulate him, if you're someone like Snoke or Palpatine who doesn't mind the explosive consequences of winding him up.)

I'm excited for the fun space adventures this first chapter has set up, and even more excited for the promised window into First Order politics. There's a very funny scene in which Kylo more or less openly admits (to Hux, of all people) that he knows next to nothing about the state of the military he just stole; apparently he's spent his whole tenure up till then just doing as Snoke tells him and taking no interest in the bigger picture. (This is very in-character and I absolutely buy it.) But by far the best part of this story is its psychological insight into an absolute mess of a human being who only ever pauses shooting himself in the foot when he wants to fire off a shot at someone else.

And now I have to wait another month for the next one! Life is so hard, you guys. :(

Unfortunately the two are unrelated; I have no heavy metal lesbians to rec at this time. If you happen to have a favourite heavy metal lesbian then please do tell me about her! I wish to know!

Moonlit Cross by The Night Eternal is occult-themed goth/heavy metal with irresistible riffs and gut-wrenchingly emotive vocals. They have a newer album which is also fucking excellent, but I'm linking this one because 'Deadly as a Scythe' has been on loop in my head for the last two days and I honestly don't want it gone.

Bloodmoon by Kerrigan is energetic, catchy, and leans into its heavy metal cheesiness in a way that's honestly just so much fun.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which landed in like-but-not-love territory for me when I read it last year. Despite my mixed feelings on the first book I couldn't get the story out of my head, so I went ahead and borrowed the second from the library. It was actually, I think, a much stronger book. It still suffered from some of the same problems as the last one - slightly weak character voices, worldbuilding that stretched my suspension of disbelief on small details (and thus undermined my trust in the big ones), and prose that is honestly just a bit dull. But I'm inclined to forgive all that for two major reasons:

1) The way the alien species is written is just so fucking good. Several short sections are written from an alien point of view, and their voices are deeply, unsettlingly weird and confusing in a way that I was completely convinced by. They properly felt like an intelligent life form that had evolved entirely without reference to humanity, while still having juuust enough of a fine thread in common with us that (rudimentary, mutually bewildered) communication is still possible. This book healed the part of me that was let down by Leckie's Translation State. It's so well done.

2) The main ship gets a LOT messier in this book, in all the best ways. Book one was quite friends-to-lovers-ish, which is a perfectly cromulent dynamic that just doesn't really quicken my pulse. But in this one they have lots of conflict of the juicy 'you both have a point' kind, are obliged to keep working with each other under extreme high-stakes conditions, and also this time they get to fuck and it's extremely hot! Basically the romance element was just so much more to my taste this time. The book leaves them in a good place but with some tantalising points of unresolved tension, so if a third book is forthcoming I will absolutely be reading it as well.

In the throes of a bad breakup, troubled twentysomething Lennon has her suicide attempt interrupted by a mysterious phone call inviting her to an admissions interview for a college she has never heard of. Located on a magically concealed campus in the US Deep South, Drayton College teaches its handpicked students the art of persuasion, or the ability to psychically manipulate reality. Within a short time of accepting her offer, Lennon discovers all of the following:

• Her power is specialer than everyone else's.
• Her adviser, Dante, is super hot.
• Magic is almost as dangerous to use as it is to have used against you.
• Something deeply sinister is going on with the school, and no one wants her to know the truth about it.

I want to start by saying I genuinely enjoyed reading this book - I mean, it's basically Hogwarts for grownups with gothic vibes, understated horror, and a problematic central romance. There's plenty to enjoy! But it was also frustrating because the flaws were, unfortunately, many and major. I could see and appreciate the book that it wanted to be, but there's a bit of a gulf between that and the book that it actually is.

The single biggest problem is that Lennon is a YA protagonist in a book that's very much not YA. At the start of the book we're given a whole pile of information about her immediate backstory and told what her main character traits are supposed to be, but the backstory is minimally relevant and the character traits are barely apparent in her actual on-screen behaviour. She's bland. Blank slate-ish. Weirdly passive. Other characters are drawn to her for no obvious reason and become deeply attached with little encouragement. The plot mostly just sort of happens to her, and when she does make use of her agency, her motives don't always make a lot of sense.

The second biggest issue is the heavy reliance on coincidences and contrivances to keep the story moving along. The worldbuilding is fun but shallow, and often felt governed by the needs of the plot. None of the supporting characters seem particularly involved in their own lives; they kind of just orbit Lennon, existing only when and how she requires them to. (Here's one non-spoilery example: the school empties out over Christmas break, but when a major incident brings Lennon back to campus early, her friends turn out to have abandoned their own holiday plans for flimsy reasons and are waiting in the dorm to rejoin her adventures.) Multiple cast members become involved in the secret happenings at Drayton in ways that don't make sense and are literally never explained, just so that Lennon can have her big moment of shock and betrayal when she learns what they've been up to. Likewise, there are major plot developments that get dropped as soon as Lennon's done emotionally reacting to them, never to be resolved.

I was also disappointed by the way Lennon's struggle with corruption was handled. This is more a personal taste thing and less a critique of the author's writing skill, but I don't have a lot of patience for stories that sell themselves on a promise of the hero being tempted by the dark side, only to make sure that every dark thing they actually do has a simple reason behind it that absolves them of anything hard to forgive. It's something I come up against quite a lot in my preferred corners of fandom, too, so there's obviously plenty of audience for stories that embrace the aesthetics of evil while side-stepping its ugly realities. I'm just always hoping for something a bit thornier, and it's even more frustrating when a story so particularly rich in opportunities for moral quandary takes the easy way out. This is a book where the system of magic revolves around forcing your will onto others; where students are explicitly groomed for future positions of power, where they can manipulate global events in the interests of the school's donors; where Drayton's whole history is poisoned by a deep, insidious racism to which 'don't worry, our Black heroes one-up the current administration in the end' is only the most partial of antidotes. I don't know. There were a lot of tantalising hints of a genuinely dark and challenging story here, but they didn't amount to much.

I don't know. I feel like I'm ripping this book into far smaller shreds than I actually mean to. Like I said at the start, I enjoyed it. I think if anything it suffers worse for that: if the good parts were less good I'd have moved on without thinking much about the weaknesses, but because there are so many things I really like about it, the flaws are that much more annoying.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt: I was in high school when I first read this book, and my reaction to it as an adult has been very different. It's not that teenage me didn't understand, exactly, so much as that she was too enamoured of the trappings (counterculturally glamorous, slightly-older-than-me people doing dark and forbidden things in a highbrow academic setting) to care about the substance. When you're committed to romanticising self-destruction, there's not much anyone can do - all warnings of the consequences will either become fodder for the fantasy or, as in my case with the ending of this story, be carelessly discarded. Reading the book again just now, the first half was as clear in my memory as if I'd read it only a year ago; the second half was gone almost entirely, save for a vague sense that things weren't going to go well for the main characters and that incest was going to come into it somewhere.

Anyway. Disaffected Californian college student Richard Papen transfers impulsively to a small arts school in Vermont, where he falls in with a clique of deeply pretentious classics students in a tiny department that's run like a cult. Their group bonding takes a sinister, occult-tinged turn that eventually devolves into murder. That's the first half of the book and the part my teen self found irresistible. The second - and ultimately, whatever teen me thought, far darker - half deals with the slow, messy demise first of their friendships and then of their lives as consequences of their crime come home to roost.

The gradual lifting of Richard's idealistic blinkers concerning his classmates is the obvious main theme and a powerful one, but what interested me most was the issue of his own culpability. Richard comes to see himself as having been deceived, which is true; he identifies his own fatal flaw as one of preoccupation with aesthetics ('a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs'), which is also true; but he never really grapples with the utter void of character or conviction that enabled this morbid longing to run away with him unimpeded. Richard never paused to think before involving himself in the murders. The others were doing it, so he did it too - it was pretty much that simple. And it made me think about how few evil masterminds there really have been in the whole history of human wrongdoing, versus how many passive followers who'd have done no such thing on their own but whose complicity has been utterly instrumental. In terms of sheer volume, moral indifference must massively outweigh malice as an ultimate source of evil.

Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch: I did not, as promised in my last post about these books, take any break from the series at all. I tore on through them to the end of Lies Sleeping, which is the seventh book and the big climax of the overall mystery. I enjoyed it all enormously but, as is depressingly often the case for me, the characters I've grown most invested in aren't the ones who look like they're going to have much to do with future installments. By which I mean: ( minor spoilers )

Meanwhile, Lesley IS blorbo and I didn't really get any of what I wanted for her: ( a few more spoilers ) If anyone who's read the books can promise me that any of these things become a factor in wherever the hell the series is going next, then I'll be right back on board, but for the time being I think I'm happy to leave things where they are and let books 1-7 comprise the whole of my personal canon.