(SPOILERS for The Gate of the Feral Gods)
Okay. Okay, okay. Okay….
…
Loita. Gods, what a toxic bitch. At some point I was thinking, “Loita, why do you hate fun?”
Then we got the scene where Carl asked her why she was so unhappy (thank you, Carl, I was wondering the same thing), and the spiel she just went off with was so vile and hateful, I actually felt a tiny grain of concern. Not sympathy, don’t get me wrong, but all that hate is not even slightly healthy. And she was so wound up in it and believed it all … Lady, if what you say comes to pass, something else will take its place and you’ll have the same amount of stress and bitterness dealing with that. You’ll never be happy. Aren’t you TIRED?
That’s to say nothing of the obvious—how fucked up a threat the Bloom ideology is and the things they’re doing to realize it. It’s sick. And … disturbing to remember that there is a not-insignificant number of people like that in the real world. The kind of thing that keeps you up at night to consider, let alone live around.
And in the book, Carl, Donut, the other crawlers, and people like Zev have to live within it, and be subject to it.
It was a good scene, and I like the effort put into her character. She’s loathsome, revolting, but not in the trying-to-be-shockingly-unpleasant way. She’s genuine. She works as a good (read as well-done) character. I Don’t Like This Lady.
So the scene moved on; Carl told the soot-covered toy Donut to stay by Zev, and it repeated the line cooperatively. Right then, I was thinking it would be the funniest way to troll this bitch. Here’s my depiction of them on the sofa:
|___🐟🐈_|
|_🐟__🐈_|
|_🐟🐈___|
Loita scooches away from the toy. The toy follows her. Loita goes somewhere else in the room. The toy follows her. We see none of this, but when Carl and Donut come back from the show, she is LIVID, even though they did nothing wrong. Like, “What’s wrong, Loita?” 🙃 Loita: 😡
That’s what I imagined happening.
Then I heard the next paragraph from the Cookbook, about the crawler putting the explosive paste in his shoes, and EVERYTHING made sense. The tag, the toy knocking the smoke bomb off the table, Carl’s concern about the safety of the room they’d been teleported to (understandable, given that they’d almost been assassinated in one before), the “command” … Fuck, but that was brilliantly played. Elegantly too. Well-camouflaged.
I just finished the chapter, so Loita just died. Man, that whole bit was cathartic.
This whole sequence of scenes were shockingly rich.
Also, not super important detail in all this, but I loved the bit where Donut and Carl exchanged a look with each other at that one show host saying exactly why they advertise children’s toys with adults rather than kids. Not a biggie, but I love it when Carl and Donut communicate via expression.
