A Fractal of Loops

I literally made a Tumblr to store all the things I see on Tumblr, so I could stop bookmarking them.  And we can all see how well that turned out.   Halo Trash for 14 years and counting. I am an adult, in case that influences your following decision, or your comfort with me following you. Also consider this fair warning that I don't agree with everything I reblog without comment, in fact, I don't even necessarily read things all the way through before reblogging them. If you will find this stressful, think carefully before following me.

[prokopetz]

Game where the ancient hero is awakened from the deathless sleep of centuries in the hour of their people's greatest need, only to find that civilisation is thriving and there are no obvious threats on the horizon; the game then becomes a fish-out-of-water detective sim as they try to figure out what woke them up, and also solve other, smaller mysteries along the way.

[nearo]

[boymounter]

[akallabeth-joie]

Musing on the opening sequence in The Goblin Emperor:

What does the existence of the other passengers on the airship mean for Csevet's intended route to and from Edonomee?

Event sequence-wise, the Wisdom of Choharo crashes on the morning of the 20th. The crash is discovered sometime after noon, and the Lord Chancellor writes his letter to Maia informing him of these events before midnight the same day. Early on the 21st (Maia is asleep, Setheris is still awake, and Csevet refers to the crash happening 'yesterday'), Csevet delivers the message to Maia. Their return trip to Cetho takes a mere 2 hours, which would suggests that the ship Csevet took either left very late at night on the 20th/in the first hours of the 21st, or else that it didn't travel direct from Cetho to Edonomee (left sometime earlier in the afternoon/evening of the 20th and made other stops between Cetho and Edonomee).

We hear at other times that Maia has always lived far from all but the smallest villages (though there must be a village of some sort near Edonomee, since the female staff live off-site and there are additional non-permanent-staff workers hired to help with the grounds at times), so the idea that all of these extra couriers/mazei/missioners come aboard in The Village Near Edonomee in the middle of the night seems unlikely. And while I could see an urgent message like 'you are now Emperor because most of your immediate family just died' being delivered in the middle of the night because of urgency, the presence of all those extra people precludes this being a one-off flight scheduled purely to get Csevet to Edonomee with the letter for Maia as soon as possible. Not to mention the fact that "send an airship to tell the VIP what just happened and put it at his/her disposal to come to court ASAP" is a thing that Chavar apparently does for the princes and archduchess, but explicitly doesn't do here for Maia.

This leads me with two possibilities:

There is a regularly-scheduled overnight route from Cetho to unknown points west, and Csevet got on it because it went closest to Edonomee, so they added a stop this time. Since the ship was still available for Maia to commandeer (rather than dropping off Csevet and then immediately leaving), I assume that the intention was for Csevet to get back on the same ship, which would either loop back to Cetho at the end of its run, or else drop him off somewhere else on the route where he could transfer to an east-bound ship.

This was not a regularly-scheduled trip, but since an airship needed to be sent out to Maia at Edonomee, all the couriers and officials waiting for the next west-bound ship got aboard so that they could be efficiently dropped off after Csevet's mission was completed (and, as before, the ship waits for Csevet - though in the absence of regular routes, I would assume this ship loops back to Cetho after dropping off those passengers and picking up any officials with business at Cetho that are waiting other stops along the way).

Of the two, I'm leaning towards the first. In part because airships are supposed to be for fast government business (and just keeping everyone on standby indefinitely seems very inefficient, you'd be better off sending them on ground or water transit unless airships stop by with some frequency); in part because of the reference in The Grief of Stones to an upcoming airship departure from Amalo to Cetho suggests that regular flight schedules are how they operate; and finally, because sticking Csevet on the equivalent of the all-night stops-at-every-little-town bus exactly matches the level of petty stalling and undermining that Chavar displays towards Maia. Constantly.

In the next same vein, how long did the Lord Chancellor wait before sending his letter to Maia? I don't think we can really get this down more closely than 'between noon and midnight on the 21st'. The fact that the initial report only says that the Wisdom of Choharo crashed between sunrise and noon (which is a wide enough time-span that I imagine it refers to the time difference between when the ship left Amalo and when the crash was discovered. They don't seem to have remote communication that would allow a ship to contact ground control, but assuming someone knows when the Wisdom left Amalo (and surely lots of people did) then simple math with the usual speeds of airships and the distance between the crash site and Amalo should give a much narrower window for when crash occurred. Six hours, after all, is three times the travel time from Cetho to Edonomee, and while we don't have a definitive scale map of the Ethuveras, the map and travel times we do hear of suggest that six hours in an airship is a substantial distance relative to the size of the country.

Even so, our two extremes are thus that the Lord Chancellor found out about the crash in the early afternoon and immediately wrote to Maia, or that he wrote the letter very late on the 20 (whether because he put off writing the letter as long as he plausibly could, or because it took that much time to sort out what happened.) Allowing that it would take time for reports of the crash to reach the court, and that the Lord Chancellor would probably want to be very certain before informing Maia that he was Emperor (I can't imagine Verinechibal or any of his surviving sons would look kindly on the Lord Chancellor rushing to act on an incorrect preliminary report which turned out to be wrong). At the same time, given how helpful he otherwise isn't, I could also see this Lord Chancellor taking his time to make absolutely certain that the other heirs are, in fact, all dead--and then a small breakdown coming to terms with the fact that a complete nobody is now Emperor--and then also putting off sending that letter until the very end of the day so that he can avoid dealing with the new Emperor as long as possible without openly causing a deliberate delay.

All that long paragraph is to say: while I think the 'letter written very late in the day' direction fits the story best in the Lord Chancellor's timeline, I think the presence of those other passengers fits marginally better with an earlier time and a regular route. Perhaps an afternoon/evening departing flight that's supposed to take 6 or 8 hours looping through the western provinces, stopping at set places to pick up and drop off passengers (or following a set route and stopping only where a passenger needs to get off, or where some signal indicates passengers to pick up). A not-regularly-scheduled stop at Edonomee near the end of this loop could put Csevet there in the middle of the night just before the ship is meant to return home (and would mean all those passengers where only delayed a few hours on their trip to Cetho, not taken in the wrong direction entirely). If the flight was specifically built around Edonomee, it would presumably be the first (most important, if not closest to Cetho) stop, and all those passengers might well be going back the way they came when Maia gets onboard.

Third and final point of musing is: what would a respectful Lord Chancellor have done in place of Chavar? Based on the reference to airships being put at the disposal of the Princes and Archduchess Nemriän, "send an airship with the news and have it wait to take the VIP and their entourage to court" seems to be the general plan. This is mentioned in Chavar's letter of the 20th suggests that the airships are or shortly will be underway at that time; again based on our rough knowledge of the country's size and few datapoints about travel distances, I think we can expect those airships to arrive at their various destinations sometime during the 21st, and that something between a few hours and a whole day will be needed to get the ship ready for its return flight and for the VIP to get ready for the trip (since the 23rd is the earliest that all these people can be expected to be at court and ready for a ceremony).

Additionally, considering the mores of real-world royals, I'd expect someone of higher rank than 'random courier' to deliver such important news to a new Emperor. Is that the sort of thing that Chavar would be expected to do in person? If he's personally needed to keep the government running at this moment, surely another very high ranking government official would be selected in order to make sure that the message got to the right person and to show respect to his new status: perhaps one of the Corazhas, or a very high-ranking noble at court, or even another member of the Imperial family. For that matter, there could well be a delegation representing the different power centers, all jealous of their prerogatives or eager to make a good impression by being the first to swear loyalty to the new ruler in person. And surely, they're bringing the new Emperor's security detail along to immediately take up their duties. Maybe, if the decision-maker is conscious of the low budget and general living conditions at Edonomee, they even send along some newly-recruited edocharei and a hastily assembled mourning wardrobe to prepare the new emperor for his journey to court.

[hartsnkises]

Alan Turing and Ada of Lovelace did not invent computer science for the girls and the gays to claim they can't do math

[minuiko]

Scene from the end of Lady Knight - Kel digging her own grave 💀

[coquelicoq]

clearly the people responsible for scheduling the nohecharei have never watched three men and a baby....everyone knows you need at least three shifts for round-the-clock babysitting. three pairs of nohecharei and a zhas more like

[maybeasunflower]

IKR?!!! Like, there is no shift pattern involving you working half the time that isn't absolutely brutal and takes a massive toll on you mentally.

The only way I can think it would work is if the night shift is really "one watching while the other sleeps in place". After all, there are also multiple layers of guards in between the outside world and the nohecharei.

(There are 168 hours in a week, so you really need four people/groups to provide 24-hour coverage while working a sensible 44-hour week.)

[dr-dendritic-trees]

Also, who covers for them if any of them get hurt or get sick? Terrible planning, truly.

[coquelicoq]

like what would they have done if beshelar had been seriously injured by tethimar?? it's part of the job description to get injured if necessary...really seems like there should be a contingency plan...

also i lost it when kiru said she could keep doing her cleric thing in her off hours. WHAT OFF HOURS??? how does she have time for anything except working and sleeping?

[coquelicoq]

clearly the people responsible for scheduling the nohecharei have never watched three men and a baby....everyone knows you need at least three shifts for round-the-clock babysitting. three pairs of nohecharei and a zhas more like

[maybeasunflower]

IKR?!!! Like, there is no shift pattern involving you working half the time that isn't absolutely brutal and takes a massive toll on you mentally.

The only way I can think it would work is if the night shift is really "one watching while the other sleeps in place". After all, there are also multiple layers of guards in between the outside world and the nohecharei.

(There are 168 hours in a week, so you really need four people/groups to provide 24-hour coverage while working a sensible 44-hour week.)

[dr-dendritic-trees]

Also, who covers for them if any of them get hurt or get sick? Terrible planning, truly.

[maybeasunflower]

Turns out that one of Edrehasivar VII's lesser known accomplishments was the professionalization of HR.

[paradoxspaceheater]

the little worldbuilding appendix at the end of the goblin emperor is from a travel guide, written by and presumably for pencharneisei. there's some linguistic and cultural assumptions in there, like that readers will not be familiar with the 'zh' or 'kh' sounds but will be familiar with 'j', that the formality structures of the ethuveraz might be confusing, that the readers are not themselves elves or goblins. i'd be willing to bet this guide in full includes a phrasebook, and probably maps of some of the major cities (zhaö, cairado, possibly cetho and amalo...) with notes on tourist attractions, reputable hotels, restaurants, etc.

the fact that it matches entirely in style and translation choice with the rest of the book (eg. there's no especial reason why the address for the emperor ought to be translated to 'serenity' while 'osmer' etc. are left untranslated: that's a translation choice) makes me think the language of pencharn is our stand-in for english, and thus i think we can assume the book itself is probably also the work of a pencharneise writer or translator

this, of course, adds an interesting meta-narrative layer. the aforementioned translation choices, the numerous timeline anomalies, plotholes and things that don't especially make sense, etc. can all be interpreted as either artistic license or mistakes made by the author/translator, in attempting to render this story, probably years if not decades after it would have historically happened, for a pencharneise audience...

[paradoxspaceheater]

headcanon: sometime after the end of the goblin emperor, maia acquires a huge fluffy beast of a cat

it's a rescue, a purebred kitten someone at court (perhaps csoru?) bought to look pretty and then lost interest in and abandoned it when it grew up. this thing is twenty pounds of floof, and it bites and claws at everybody who tries to get close to it—except for maia, who imprints on the thing immediately and gets all sad ears whenever someone suggests it should be found a home outside of the alcethmeret. he calls it 'starlight'

maia can often be found holding the cat in his arms or lap, petting its fluffy paws, letting it sleep in his bed, and otherwise getting cat fur all over the imperial wardrobe. esha has a bitter rivalry with the cat, assuaged only by maia's huge watery eyes when he threatens to put the creature in fluffy baby jail for trying to use the michen mura as cat toys

[muppetebbtide]

I know I've said this but... csethiro has an utterly impossible task to do post-book. it's kinda horrific. of the previous five zhasans, three are dead (at least one, maybe two, in childbirth), one is her barren great-aunt who was relegated, and the other is her childhood rival who was widowed at 22 and lost all her power and security with it. there's also stano bazhevin, whose fiancé died before she could even be married properly (and csethiro came close to that, maia has already survived one coup and one assassination attempt by the skin of his teeth) and then got stuck in limbo and eventually relegated for being complicit in treason. csethiro's mother is evidently either dead or relegated, most likely dead. her namesake from the celehada is also dead. there is not a single success story from the last sixty years, but ceredel still barters her off into the frankly fucking cursed role of zhasan. csethiro, daughter of only daughters, great-niece of the famously barren empress, has to go and 1. untangle all the resentment and paranoia and tension between ceredada and drazhada that varenechibel caused, 2. wrangle the nobility and choke their access to maia as well as 3. managing the social sphere in a way beneficial to the emperor, and 4. bail out an entire ruling dynasty by having sons. alone. there will be no one else even remotely similar to her situation until idra marries, and it's clear that idra wants to be supplanted in his role of heir and she is entering a household dynamic which is already immensely loyal to maia, even more than a typical imperial household. those mad little lads (+kiru) will kill and die for him. for him. where does she even fit into that? does she count at all? and, she has to do it all under a courtly microscope that clearly already considers her to have improper 'notions'. and then any children she may have will belong to the drazhada and the emperor, not her, and so will she; even when she dies she'll still be drazharan. it fucking sucks!!! so much!!!!

but for all of that, she still has the strength of character to surrender her resentment and panic and go all-in on maia anyway. you literally see her decide in real time, when she drops down to the informal at the end. I cannot emphasise how much she did not have to do that. it says a lot about maia's character, but it says even more about hers. she's actively making it worse for herself + maia if she has to be put aside or dies, but she's doing it anyway, bc she thinks he's worth it and is willing to try and do it with him, despite all the obvious pitfalls and horrible bits and likelihoods of disaster. she's so brave I'm gonna be sick #mycsethiro

[goddamnshinyrock]

Preparations for the coronation of Edrehasivar VII Drazhar.

[mxrderscenes]

writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months

[galadrieljones]

Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.

You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.

[xalphafox]

This is GOLD! You just saved me like thousands of therapy costs lmao

[dr-dendritic-trees]

I am a huge fan of just writing [transition goes here] and moving on. When you come back to the scene to edit it in six months you're much more likely to be able to figure out if you need to cut back a bit to a better transition point or add a little time skip or whatever, but you'll have been writing in the mean time.

[coquelicoq]

clearly the people responsible for scheduling the nohecharei have never watched three men and a baby....everyone knows you need at least three shifts for round-the-clock babysitting. three pairs of nohecharei and a zhas more like

[maybeasunflower]

IKR?!!! Like, there is no shift pattern involving you working half the time that isn't absolutely brutal and takes a massive toll on you mentally.

The only way I can think it would work is if the night shift is really "one watching while the other sleeps in place". After all, there are also multiple layers of guards in between the outside world and the nohecharei.

(There are 168 hours in a week, so you really need four people/groups to provide 24-hour coverage while working a sensible 44-hour week.)

[dr-dendritic-trees]

Also, who covers for them if any of them get hurt or get sick? Terrible planning, truly.

[coquelicoq]

clearly the people responsible for scheduling the nohecharei have never watched three men and a baby....everyone knows you need at least three shifts for round-the-clock babysitting. three pairs of nohecharei and a zhas more like

[winterinhimring]

Maia: Beshelar definitely disapproves of everything I do and looks down on me. I'm so awkward.

What Beshelar canonically says to Maia's face one (1) day after meeting him: "But we," with a sudden access of ferocity and the plural to include Cala, "are your First Nohecharei."

Um??? Maia??? This man has taken you as his liege and considers it an honour.

[winterinhimring]

#if you read the book thinking about how much Beshelar loves Maia#all the moments when Beshelar is making cranky noises behind Maia become instead#“noo you're to good and kind to have such low self esteem”#and “you did nothing wrong and you have to stop apologizing for existing”#and “chavar hates you so why are you spending time so publicly with his son?”#(but also hashtagJusticeForNurevis) (via @dont-stop-her-now) YES! With a bonus 'noooo stop going places that I haven't secured beforehand where I don't know the sightlines and can't review the list of guests PLEASE Serenity you're going to get ASSASSINATED SERENITY'.

[dont-stop-her-now]

Exactly.

Serenity, we're all going to have to commit revethvoran because you don't understand operational security.....

[dr-dendritic-trees]

She looked as if she'd just been bitten by a cushion.

As excruciating as this scene is for everyone involved, I really think its actually a very positive scene.

Both Maia and Csethiro are ultimately stuck with this whether they like it or not (currently mostly not). And up until now they have essentially only been able to interact as The Emperor and The Future Empress.

But now things have finally got ridiculous enough that they've finally had an actual conversation! This is finally Maia talking to Csethiro!

[dont-stop-her-now]

It's a great scene because we get to watch Csethiro see Maia the person in real time. Maia seems to hate it because being seen hasn't really gone great for him overall, and he doesn't think he's supposed to have that, though he wants it very badly.

I think this is one of the first scenes where Maia has a "negative" interaction that actually helps him in the long run. He's humiliated by her question, but the fact that he reacts so genuinely to that humiliation shows her that he's not the idiot inbred cretin that the court gossip is making him it to be. The most they'd communicated before that was in his proposal letter and its response, and there's nothing there or in their formal meetings that would have told her the court gossip was wrong.

I really especially love the phrasing of "bitten by a cushion" because it paints such a clear picture of everything that happened in her head before, during, and after he said "we thank you, we know, and we're not stupid." Like, the economy of phrase in that line is so good. It makes it so clear that things will not continue as they have, because the scales have fallen from Csethiro's eyes in a dramatic way.

[baladric]

we rly dont talk enough about what a weird fucking day csevet has at the beginning, like overnight flight bearing the most weighty letter of your life to meet the newly dead emperor's reviled idiot son to tell him he's emperor now, and the house you rock up at is shabby bullshit and the emperor (?) is barefoot and doe-eyed and you have to be normal about his shithead uncle throwing the letter he's snatched out of the emperor's (??) hands back at said emperor (???), and then oh uh okay yeah sure we can all fly back together, haha i do like that you're fucking chavar over, 10 cookie points for you serenity, and then the emperor (????) bites his thumb at the aforementioned shithead cousin by inviting You to go look at the sunset and asking you to show him around and he asks you your name in the informal first like he really genuinely honestly wants to know it, and then three hours later you're the emperor's (!!!?!?!!) secretary. like you woke up in the courier's dorm yesterday morning and now you have a stipend and apartments and a job being catty to nobles on behalf of his imperial meowmeow serenity edrehasivar vii. like "sure i GUESS this is a thing that can happen," csevet says to himself while staring at the massive fucking paycheck he's just been handed

[dr-dendritic-trees]

She croaked a slur of sound that was probably meant to be "Serenity," and Maia said, "Hello, Osmerrem Danivaran. We are pleased to meet you again." ... He frightened Celehar, and was ashamed, later, of having done so, realizing in what a monstrous guise he must have presented himself to make any impression against Mer Celehar's apathy. ... Maia was surprised to learn that this was something he was good at: he was able, in his turn, to ask the right questions to make the matter clear in both his mind and the petitioner's. ... it was simply a matter of listening through the distractions and defenses to what was actually being asked.

Oh no. I've started having to go back and pull things out of order. Never a good sign for the overall obsession level.

I am not really going anywhere with comparing these quotes, but I just think its such an interesting piece of character work. As Maia finds his feet as Emperor, even while he's still struggling intensely to catch up on all the information he doesn't have and to manage his hostile ministers, one of the skills he brings with him to the post is that he's a really good listener, and that he can listen through people's weird and terrible communication.

And we see that "at work" when Maia is hearing petitioners at court. But the other place it shows up, primarily, is not socially, where Maia really struggles, its these intermittent encounters Maia has with people who have actual medical communication problems..