schrodinger's chekhov's gun. a detail in a story that looks like it should have some big payoff but it's too early to tell if that's relevant or if the author just has a passion for lovingly describing guns.
schrodinger's chekov's occam's razor: you find an inconsistent or inaccurate detail in a work that would be brilliant if it was foreshadowing a plot twist later on, but it's too early to tell whether the author expects you to be smart, and the simplest explanation is that they fucked up
Preferably as both just a gunblade weapon, and a gunblade metaphor and something else completely inane and something completely important. And, have the audience argue at the end over whether or not it was a gun or a blade or whether it was both a gun and a blade and whether it meant anything at all or whether it was the whole point. Did I put it there to teach you something, or am I just fucking with you?
And then name the story Schrokovam: All or Nothing. (Did you see it coming, or have you always known? Was it even there in the first place?) Or something stupid like that.
Text: We used to talk through the wells, a whisper carrying to every farm that had one. There is no one left to send well whispers, and yet I hear one, on a dark, gray afternoon.
Warning: Blood, self harm, human and animal death, horror themes, discussion of new magical systems.
Note: this started out as a simple creepy story and then the world-building just overflowed.
#
Whispers used to pass from farm to farm, messages that crossed miles, an old magic that no-one understood anymore. Raising the ghost trees requires space, untouched earth, and height. Our farms are hundreds of miles apart, each high on its own mountain. The wells are the only way we can contact each other... or they were.
I'm not sure what happened to some of the farms. I was too young when it happened. I know that some families left, betraying their trust, and some died out, and some just went silent for no reason we ever knew. This is the last farm still being tended, as far as I know, and I am the last farmer.
I need to find someone to help. I know I do. I should find young people to join me, teach them to tend the trees so that they can go to the other farms and re-seed. But I have never left my farm, and the thought frightens me. When my cousin Gilly died, I was so young, only sixteen, and the last. It's been twenty years, and I've kept the farm going, but I have never dared to leave. What if something happens to me? What if I don't come back? These are the last ghost trees. I have to care for them.
Every full moon at sunset, though, I come back to the well. The well that is the heart of the farm. The well whose water glows pale gold in darkness and poisons everything but the ghost trees.... or those who have eaten their shoots.
I feed the spring shoots to my goats and my birds, every year, and eat handfuls myself. They tasted bitter to me, the first year, and the animals that haven't tasted them before have to be forced to swallow. After that first taste, though, we all learn to love them. Bittersweet and rich, they taste like sunset on snow and the smell of spring. I suppose I could avoid the whole process - there's a spring of ordinary water - but it freezes in winter, and why go to all the trouble of thawing tasteless, dull water from the spring when the well water never freezes or even grows too cold to drink safely, when it tastes so much better and makes us so strong?
I drink the well water. And every full moon I come back to the well to whisper news into it, or the names of my family, or of the farms that existed once and are now lost. I whisper, because a voice that's too loud will echo and distort. I think that's why. I'm not so sure any longer.
Then, one evening in early autumn, I hear a whisper coming back. "Antorune... Antorune..."
Antorune is the name of the mountain, and the farm, and though I'm shaking and sick with shock, I remember how to answer. "Antorune is bright," I whisper. "Who are you?"
"Antorune..." The voice is eerie and hollow, and I can't remember if they always sounded like that. It's been so long. "Antorune, they're coming. They're coming."
"Who's coming? Why?"
"Yours is the last farm. The last trees. Do you know how to scatter?"
My mouth goes dry. Scattering is a terrible thing. Gilly told me stories about it. Scattering is the last act of a farmer under siege, the last desperate hope for the trees and for the world. We all know how to do it, and all pray we'll never have to. "I know. Is it time?"
"It is time." The hollow voice sounds very sad. "Be brave, Altorune. Be resolute. You must save the trees."
"I must save the trees," I repeat, and then I pause. "Voice... my name is Tula. I am the last farmer. I... I wanted someone to know my name."
"I will remember your name, Tula." The whisper was fainter now, but I heard it. "I will remember your name..."
It faded away, then. It comforted me, though, to hear my name spoken once more. It has been so long since anyone spoke my name.
I went to wake the goats. The doves slept in their nests, and were probably safe enough, but the goats would be found. Though it was late, they all got up and followed me without complaint.
I gave them all water from the well, and drank myself. The water makes our eyes and tongues glow, but it also makes night as clear as day and gives us strength for the rocky path up to the trees. The goats all follow me up that path, uttering soft bleats from their blackened mouths.
My mouth is black too. The shoots do that. Gilly told me once that we look frightening to other people, with our blackened mouths and glowing eyes and tongues. It was hard for me to understand. I've never seen anyone who didn't look like that.
We were halfway up the path when I heard noises down below. When I looked down, the farmhouse was burning. It would have broken my heart, if I did not already know the time for Scattering had come. Everything I had ever known was gone... but I could still save the ghost trees. And the goats, in a way.
We reached the trees. There are only four, but they are taller than the tallest pines, their long feathery branches reaching up and up as if they would stroke the clouds. They're bigger around than the farmhouse, now, because every year the new shoots emerge from the outside, snaking up the great blackened trunks like vines before becoming part of the tree. That's one of the reasons we eat the shoots - they have to be thinned, or the tree's new growth might choke its heart.
This year's shoots are already darkening, but they still stand out against the black of the trunk like veins. They won't get a chance to blacken in winter, and I mourn them in my heart as I lead the goats towards the great trunks.
I know the ritual. A tiny nick, enough to draw a few drops of blood, on each goat. A tiny nick, enough to draw a few drops of sap, on each shoot. The goats are bound to the trees by magic, and each goes to a spot to lick the sap, then lies down by the trunk.
By the time I have finished with the last goats, and the last tree, the goats at the first are no longer breathing, and the roots of the trees are already creeping up to draw them down. But it didn't hurt them, I know that. It would have hurt them if they'd burned in their shed, or been slaughtered by whoever is coming. The ghost trees feed on death, but they are not cruel. The goats will live again, on some other mountain.
I will live again. I believe this. I know this. I have talked to the trees since I ate my first shoots at the age of three, and heard their keening voices in my mind. Theirs is the power of life and death, but a farmer doesn't fear death. Death and life and death again, that is the nature of farming. Everything dies. But then seeds grow, and eggs hatch, and babies are born, and spring comes.
When Gilly got sick, I brought him up here so that he could die under the trees, and they sang him to his rest and promised him that he would live again, and drew him down with their roots so his bones would become a part of them.
The trees are agitated now, I can hear their keening. They are afraid, but excited too, for they know it is time for Scattering. They are only given living blood when it is time to die, and live again.
When all the goats are dead, I go to the place between the trees where four channels fan out from a central bowl, one running to each trunk. This is the way I give them water from the well, pouring the buckets hauled up on my shoulders or the filled skins tied to the backs of the goats into the bowl and allowing the water to run down to each of them. Tonight they will drink something else.
The trees do not allow me to feel pain, when the blood begins to flow into the bowl. They protect me from it. My blood will give them the strength they need. I hope it’s enough. As far as I know, no Scattering has ever been performed by only one person. A whole family of farmers should be here, giving their lives to the trees. I don’t know if one is enough.
The slow trickles of red have almost reached the roots when the first men come scrambling up the path. They see me, standing among the trees, but I don't think they can see what I'm doing. My blood glows like the well water, but it's a faint glow, like starlight, and the moonlight drowns it out.
"What are you doing, creature?" One of them steps forward. He is holding a great axe, but his voice sounds uncertain. It is strange to me that a big man, armed and armoured, could be afraid of a little creature like me. His face is strange and featureless in the moonlight, with no shadow around his mouth, no light in his eyes. His face is all one colour, flat and plain like a baby's face. I could have laughed, seeing it.
But he asked me a question, and I need a little more time. "I am tending my trees," I tell him, words coming slowly to my tongue. I do not speak often, except to the well.
He looks up at the nearest tree, then shudders and looks away, "The trees are evil," he says, his fingers flexing on the handle of his axe. "These... these *things* are poison, full of wicked magic."
I blink, really confused. "Trees are not good, or evil. Trees are only trees," I tell him, frowning. "Many have fruits or leaves which are poisonous, or roots which strangle other roots, but that is not because they are evil, it is because that is their nature."
"Not these. these are not natural trees, they are the product of wicked magic." His voice shakes a little, when one of the newest and lowest branches moves a little, though there is no wind. "They will burn."
"Yes. I thought you would burn them." I sigh. It's sad. I hate to see something that has spent so long growing, something alive and beautiful, destroyed. But I look up into the branches, and faint, cream-pale lights are beginning to glow among the branches. "But you are wrong, you know. They are not made of wicked magic."
He sounds angry. "Of course they are! Look at them! They are not natural trees, and you. you with your ghost eyes and twisted body and mouth stained with blood, sorceress, you are their keeper."
I want to tell him that I am not a sorceress, only a farmer. I want to tell him that the trees are just trees, and that magic is just magic, and that evil and good are human ideas that mean nothing to either.
I want to tell him that the ghost trees are the conduit by which magic, wild magic, the magic of life and death and order and chaos, enters this world. That they have been farmed for countless centuries because they are *needed*, because their roots hold the world together.
I want to tell him that this is all a mistake.
But his axe drives into my chest, and I cannot tell him anything. I can only fall foreward, across the bowl, as my blood fills it and runs down the four channels into the trees.
The trees do not let me die. The roots rise out of the ground again, wrapping around me and holding me up. They will not let me go. Not until I see what they do to the men, the first and those who follow after, draining the blood from them with hungry roots to feed the Scattering. Not until I see the glowing fruit ripen on their branches and then break away, rising up into the sky like tiny glowing lamps, letting the air carry them away.
When the men are wise enough to stand back and shoot flaming arrows, and my trees begin to burn, the hot air only carries the fruit away faster.
This is Scattering. The last duty of the farmer. Ghost trees fruit only once, at the end of their lives, and their fruits blow away to take root somewhere far from the danger that destroyed their parents. This is why they are called ghost trees, for they need living blood, life's blood, to fruit, and they die of it.
At the last, I look down at the scene. The burning trees, the dead men, and my own body being drawn under the soil away from despoiling hands. Then I am floating away, with the other fruit of the ghost trees, on my way to a new life.
*
Lina had never entirely believed that Gilly really knew where he was going. She was willing to accept that there were ancient springs of untamed magic in the mountains. It didn’t sound any more implausible than the very fact of magic itself. She *had* doubted that Gilly, the half-wild boy a few years younger than herself, who claimed not to be human at all, but ‘a child of the trees’ and whose eyes glowed in the dark, could find one.
But he had. He’d led them there, straight as an arrow, through thick forest and rocky crags, until they found a high plateau not so far below the snowline. It was gone to the wild, now, but there were still signs for eyes that knew how to look. The remains of a low stone wall. A great stone still marked by fire. Plants growing that should not have been there, where a garden had once been. And in the center of the plateau, a well. It looked ancient. The stones piled up into a crude wall had never been shaped, and she saw no signs of mortar, though perhaps the moss and lichen hid it.
Gilly slid down off his pony, looking up at Lina with his bright, strange eyes. “There’s a spring over there,” he said, pointing. “You can get water for yourselves and the ponies there. Don’t go near the well, and whatever you do, *don’t* touch the water. It’s… dangerous.”
They made camp, while Gilly wandered around, grubbing up pieces of charcoal and small stones. Akal wanted to make him help, but Lina shook her head. Whatever he was doing, it was probably important.
At sunset, when the sky was full of colour that turned the snowy mountain peaks pink and orange and gold, Gilly went to the well. Lina followed, though keeping a little distance, and she saw him lower a bucket into the well and draw it up again on a rope. What was in it didn’t look like water - it wasn’t clear but as pale as milk. It glowed like the moon, and when Gilly drank from it the glow of his eyes brightened perceptibly.
Then he leaned forward, laying his hands on the stones of the well’s lip, and looked down into it. “Antorune…” he whispered, such sorrow in his voice as Lina had never heard. “Antorune…”
And then Lina’s very bones chilled, for a voice came up out of the well, and though it was a whisper she heard it clearly. "Antorune is bright. Who are you?"
"Antorune..." Gilly’s voice was almost calm, but when she moved a few steps to the side to look at his face, Lina saw an expression so terrible that she looked away, shocked. How could Gilly, distant and standoffish with everyone, be brought to such anguish by a voice from a well? "Antorune, they're coming,” he whispered. He was holding one of the small stones he’d picked up, she saw, his knuckles white with the force of his grip. “They're coming."
"Who's coming? Why?"
"Yours is the last farm. The last trees. Do you know how to scatter?" Lina took a few steps towards Gilly, but stopped when he made a brief slashing gesture with his empty hand, warning her off. His voice was still calm, but now tears were running down his face.
The hollow voice from the well held what might be a note of fear, but the answer was as steady as the question. “I know. Is it time?”
"It is time." Grief leached into Gilly’s voice now, and Lina’s own eyes stung with tears at the sound of it. "Be brave, Altorune. Be resolute. You must save the trees."
"I must save the trees.” For a moment there was silence, and then the voice spoke again, the whisper fainter. "Voice... my name is Tula. I am the last farmer. I... I wanted someone to know my name."
"I will remember your name, Tula." Gilly’s voice broke. "I will remember your name..."
No answer came from the well, and he dropped to his knees beside it, weeping, clutching the small stone to his chest. It was only after several minutes that he seemed able to speak again. “I left her,” he sobbed. “I left her.”
Lina watched him, and as mad as it sounded even now, she had no doubt. “Tula,” she said softly. “You… knew her.”
“She was my cousin. My family. And I died and left her all alone.” And while Lina was still blinking in shock, he snatched up the still half-filled bucket and scrambled to his feet and towards the edge of the plateau, to what looked like a craggy, impassable cliff face.
But it wasn’t. There was a path there, narrow and winding, a path more suited to goats than men, but Gilly scaled it as if he’d done it a thousand times… and perhaps he had, Lina thought, following him. She tripped and stumbled many times, but he didn’t. Back and forth across the cliff face the path went, and when they came out on the higher place, Lina caught her breath. She’d seen ghost trees - one that had been discovered and burned out when she’d been a child, and Gilly’s own tree, which he had only reluctantly left to help her on her quest. These had to be the remains of ghost trees… and yet they were huge, as big around as a cottage, the shafts of the branches bundled together making a trunk black and broken-looking. When she moved closer, the remains looked more like stone than wood.
Gilly went to a place in the middle of the four great, dead stumps, where the worn remains of a stone bowl lay in broken pieces. He poured out the whitish, magical water on the ground, and then raised his hands. “Show me,” he said commandingly, and then almost pleadingly he repeated it. “Show me!”
And it did show him.
Lina watched, captivated, as the very dust rose around him, outlining shadowy shapes in the darkening twilight. She saw the small, hunched figure leading a trail of goats up to the trees. She watched the goats lie down, and disappear into the ground, and then the figure - a woman, though there was no guessing her age, with a hunched and twisted spine, who stood over a bowl and let her own blood run into it.
Then more figures, shadows of armour and of axes, and she watched the woman - Tula, she deserved her name - stagger as an axe struck her chest, and the twining roots that wrapped around her and held her up.
And then there was nothing, only Gilly, whose face was still wet with tears but who looked strangely, unaccountably relieved. “She did it,” he breathed. “She escaped.”
Lina stared at him. “She *died*.”
“Oh yes. That’s part of the Scattering.” Gilly went over to one of the stony, broken stumps, laying his hand against it gently. “The trees fruit, and die, and the farmers die. But the fruit fly away, to let the seeds grow far from danger, and they take the souls of the farmers with them.” He turned to look at her. “I was human, once,” he said, and for the first time she truly believed that he wasn’t. Not because of his black-stained mouth and strange, glowing eyes, but because of what she’d just seen.
“I lived a mortal life, and died. And when I was dying, Tula brought me here, to the trees of Antorune, which is the name of this mountain and this farm, and the trees took my body and my soul, and the first became a part of them, and the second they kept until the time of need, so that when the seeds were sent forth, as many as possible might have a keeper with them, to be born from among the branches, to tend them, and teach those who followed why the ghost trees are important.”
Lina looked at the broken stumps, and the boy who was not entirely human, and knew in every fiber of her being that this was why she’d been chosen. This, here and now, this knowledge that had been preserved even after death by a poisonous tree, and brought back again. “Tell me, then,” she said quietly. “Tell me why they are important, and what they have to do with the terrible magic that rampages through our land.”
He shrugged. “They are what prevented the wild magic from ravaging all this world, until foolish men forgot why they were important and named them wicked.” He sighed, and then he moved to the edge of the small flat place, looking out over the great valley below them. “And that is why we scatter their fruit, and ourselves with them, so no matter what happens, someone will remember why.”
“How?” Lina frowned. “How can a tree… even one as strange as a ghost tree… change the nature of magic?”
He picked up the bucket. “The same way you change the nature of water,” he said dryly. “They drank it. This water… the wells are places where magic comes into the world. Once, it poured in wild and uncontained, and all the world was as this land has been in the last hundred years. Magical storms, and monsters, and lands breaking apart and seas pouring in. Magic, in its wild state, is as dangerous as lightning, or the sea, and even more so, for it follows no laws.”
Lina frowned. “Laws?” The word seemed incongruous.
He nodded. “All things have their laws. If you plant a seed from a tree, what will grow is the same kind of tree, not a flower, or grass. If you pour out water on a slope it will run down, not up. Water will only harden into ice when it is cold, not when it is hot. The laws of the world are not like the laws of men, and nothing may disobey them… except magic. And that disobedience is very dangerous, for it unmakes the world itself.”
“I think I know what you mean.” She had never thought of it in that way, but… yes, it was a good way to explain the mayhem of the last century. The very fabric of the world being warped, unmade…
“Yes. You’ve seen it.” He tapped the bucket again. “Magic that has passed through a living creature is different. It… it learns the laws. It learns the shape of the world. It is tamed. But there are few living things which can endure more than a taste of wild magic without dying of it. It is a poison to them, as it is to the world.”
“And that is why magicians are dying? And dying so… so horribly?” She shuddered, and tried not to remember what had happened to Cengolant, his terrible screams…
“Yes. There is not much tame magic left. And when they use the wild magic, it unmakes them.” Gilly sounded different, here and now. More confident, and somehow much older. She wondered how old he’d been, when he’d died. “The ghost trees are different. They drink the magic-infused water, and the magic passes through without harming them. They are called poisonous, but it is the magic in them that makes them so, just as mushrooms grown in unclean land are poisonous, but leave the land clean.”
Lina looked at the bucket. “But you drank the water. Why didn’t it kill you? Because you came from a ghost tree?”
“In part. In part because I have eaten the shoots.” He touched the blackened rim around his mouth. “That is the source of this stain, and the light in my eyes and my blood. Those who eat the young shoots of the ghost tree are changed by it, and we, too, can endure the touch of wild magic without harm. We would feed the shoots to our goats, and our pigeons, so that we too could pass tame magic into the world, and prevent harm.”
Lina laughed suddenly, almost hysterically. “I remember once… when we were in that rat-hole city, I saw you piss up against a wall and I was *sure* it glowed.”
He laughed, too. “It does,” he said, amused. “My dung, too. And that is magic, safe and tame, passing from my body and into the world.”
Lina shook her head, still laughing a little. “Like… like running water through sand and charcoal, to make it clean?”
“Just like.” He was still looking out, but when she went to stand beside him he looked up at her. “Lina, lightning is dangerous, but mage-light is not. A tidal wave is dangerous, but water turning a wheel is not. And that does not make the lightning evil, or the tidal wave malicious. It is only… too much. And thus it is with magic. It is not doing all this damage with intent. It is only too powerful, too wild, for our fragile world to hold. Never forget that. There is no malice here, no foe that can be fought. Replanting the ghost trees, restoring the farms, that is what will save us.”
Lina nodded slowly. “It is like a flood, coming down a river,” she said softly. “When there is too much water upstream, and it rages down and washes all away. But the river is not angry, it does not *want*… it just is. You cannot fight it. You can only build better levees and dams and bridges, for the next time.”
“Or plant many mushrooms, on poisoned ground, to draw the poison out.” Gilly nodded. “Which is not to say that fighting the monsters and the mad wizards is not important, any more than rebuilding what the flood has destroyed is not important. But it will not solve the problem.”
She nodded. “So. Where do we start?”
Gilly looked at her. “We?”
Lina shrugged, spreading her big hands and muscled arms. “You’ve been listening to me complain for the last two months about how foolish it was to send a farmer’s daughter, however big and strong, to fight magic. But it wasn’t, was it? This was never truly about fighting. The fighting is only to buy time to grow more trees.” She grinned down at him. “And if there is one thing I know, it is how to grow. I *am* a farmer, and this is the work for me.”
He grinned back at her, and it was the first time she’d ever seen more than a tiny sliver of a smile on his thin face. “We, then. I have some cuttings, live shoots from my own tree. Tomorrow, we will plant them. And then we will begin to search for the other reborn farmers.” His face softened. “I would like to see Tula again,” he said softly.
“She would have been reborn like you, from a ghost tree?”
“Oh, yes. Or will be, perhaps. It takes time.”
“Then we will search. And we will plant. And we will dam this flood.” Lina flexed her hands. She’d wielded a sword too much, these last months. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on a shovel again.
Whenever I think about students using AI, I think about an essay I did in high school. Now see, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I just couldn't do it. I got 25 pages in and my brain refused to read any more. I hated it. And its not like I hate the classics, I loved English class and I loved reading. I had even enjoyed Of Mice and Men, which I had read for fun. For some reason though, I absolutely could NOT read The Grapes of Wrath.
And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.
This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.
And I got an A.
The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.
Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.
But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.
I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.
Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.
The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.
ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.
Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.
However you feel about higher education, I think its undeniable that students using chatgtp is to their detriment. And by extension a detriment to anyone they work with or anyone who has to rely on them for something.
I can remember being in computer class right before history and someone in the last ten minutes mentioned the class presentations we had next period and I was like.. fuck man I fully forgot
So I had a passing knowledge of ww2, as much as anyone, so i figured that I could bluff the context around Churchill and just get some of his details down and I'd be fine.
So I pulled his Wikipedia up and read it. Didn't have time to write a speech, this was gonna be adlib. Then I jumped on google images and pulled a picture that reflected one thing from each of his Wikipedia sections (like, early life (picture of a train set) education (Churchill graduating) early war (you get the idea).
Bunged the pictures into a powerpoint and read the Wikipedia again with the powerpoint alongside, adding subheadings to jog my memory. Pulled a couple links from the bottom of the wiki for the bibliography, opened and skimmed to make sure they weren't wild, and saved the damn thing
We were lining up outside class for history and the guys in the class are telling some classmates about how I'd just smashed out my whole presentation. I asked everyone to let me go first since the knowledge wasn't gonna last long, I was going off having just read Churchill's wiki lol
They all agreed (champions) and one of the girls said she'd read up on Churchill a bit on her presentation about the Queen, so she promised to nod or shake her head if I was completely wrong.
I presented. I know I spent a minute on each slide and spoke relevantly. I remember at one point saying Churchill excelled in school, saw my classmate was shaking her head, and pivoted to say he didn't do well with formal education but got into some of the extracurricular activities that'd benefit him come war time. She nodded. I continued lol. One of the lads complimented me on that one afterwards
I don't think I learnt much about Churchill with this study. But I absolutely learnt about public speaking. I was using skills in research and apply my contextual knowledge. I also learnt to rely on classmates, even tho we weren't friends at all she had my back because it was easy and kind and cost her nothing
I got a B+ and a comment about being one of the more engaging and charismatic presenters (that would've been the adrenaline, and my classmates were watching fascinated to see if I could pull it off lol).
The main perk of my presentation was the energy, which wouldn't've been there if I'd ai'd a script to read. And I wouldn't have this fun memory
I remember getting in a philosophy class in college (one I just took for fun), and realized that there was a paper due that day that I had 100% forgotten about writing. I lied and told the professor that I had forgotten to print it, but I had my laptop with me for note taking, so if he'd give me 5 minutes after class I would run down to the computer lab and print it off and bring it up. He said that was fine, presumably because I couldn't write a coherent paper in 5 minutes.
But I COULD write a coherent paper in 45 minutes, which is about the time it took me to slap together a dirty outline and fill it in, the way I had been taught to do in high school in my writing class. It wasn't gonna win any awards but it meant a B+ instead of a zero, and it meant I had an opportunity to work under pressure and practice skills I had learned. Skills I STILL use to this day, skills I have taught to others. Skills I use to help others edit papers. Skills I would not have and certainly wouldn't have been able to hone if chatGPT was doing it poorly instead.
That's MY B+ bullshit essay. I earned it fair and square, along with the bragging rights to having written it under my professor's nose.
Due to some bullshittery on gofundme's part, Musab has lost access to all the funds they had previously gathered and is one of the many Palestinian who now must restart their fundraiser from the ground up at 0.
( VETTING: #520 on the Gazavetters document )
And due to Tumblr's bullshittery marking multiple posts as "sensitive content" for no discernable reason and targeting Palestinian fundraisers to hide them, I will instead hyperlink to Musab's fundraiser instead of a direct link in order to try get past the flagging.
Please donate if you can here. They're very low on donations.
"Please, save my three daughters. They haven’t had bread in days. I beg you, donate and share this post. My daughters are in danger—because of war and famine."
Also on the topic of my old movies. I rarely gaf about the men when every actress is serving a magnitude of cunt you can only hope to replicate, but sometimes he's a little cutie patootie in his suit and hat. Sitting at a bar and sighing like a previously neglected shelter dog
It's kind of a soil composition triangle. Queen mother/sad dog/dracula have a little overlap sometimes. Morticia Adams is a queen mother dracula for example
It is! It's a parody. Hence we all get to read the word 'chemommy' with our own eyes, I suppose, though it's the one I find so jarring I start circling back to "No hang on what the fuck"
Expository writing is basically the drawing hands of prose fiction; it's clangingly obvious when it's done poorly, but it's even more awkward when you try to avoid doing it at all, and those who are best at it usually got to be that way because they have some kind of fetish.
I’ve just realised that my strategy for both is actually the same.
“Look, we’re both smart people, and simultaneously equally stupid, so we both kind of know what hands look like. If I give you an idea of the gesture - where I’m trying to go with this - could you be a pal and fill in the rest yourself? I’m gonna coast on charm and expressiveness, and ask for your forgiveness. You’re a champ. Thanks.”
Not long after posting this I had a comment on some writing:
you're so GOOD at outlining those observations about social dealings and sketching people's characters, in that nudging-your-readers-in-the-right-direction-and-trusting-them-to-fill-in-the-rest way. like when pictoral art is not, strictly speaking, super realistic, but perfectly captures the ESSENCE and MOVEMENT of something. cave paintings. fashion sketches. you get me.
Been thinking about Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and what makes Death the Wolf such an effective villain, and like… character design and voice acting is certainly doing a lot there, don't get me wrong, but I think there's something else at play.
Death is the most terrifying character in Puss in Boots, because he's the only one playing the genre straight.
The premise of the Shrek films has always been that they're normal, modern people living in wacky fairytale land.
The evil king uses his magic mirror as a dating app. The fairy godmother uses business cards to contact her clients. Her workers consider unionising over their lack of dental plan.
Puss in Boots 1 kinda broke the mould in that— while there are plenty of modern elements to how the characters act and how their world works— it's more specifically intended to be characters from the world Zorro living in wacky fairytale land. But the point still stands.
The aim of the Shrek films and spin-offs is to subvert common fairytale tropes for comedic effect. What if the princess fell for the ogre? What if Prince Charming was an entitled dick? What if Goldilocks teamed up with the three bears and started a crime family?
But Death? Death, for the most part, isn't playing that game.
No character questions why he doesn't just kill Puss outright. There are no gags about him being inconvenienced by Jack Horner losing so many men. Nobody makes any self-aware fourth wall breaking jokes about why he bothers with the whole whistling thing.
We all know why he does the whistling thing. It's the same reason why Little Red Riding Hood has to go through the whole "what big eyes/ears/teeth you have, Grandma" rigamarole. The same reason why the wolf takes care to knock before blowing the little pigs' houses down.
The Wolf is scary because he's the only actual fairytale creature in this entire setting. He's not bound by rules of logic or common sense, or his own will, he's bound by the narrative.
And that's also why he backs down at the end.
The first time he and Puss fight, in the bar, Puss is arrogant. The second time, in the Cave, Puss is scared out of his wits. It's the third time, on the wishing star, that Puss learns his lesson. Of course the Wolf backs down after that! The rules say he has to.
But, on another level, there is also the issue of Puss realising that he wants more from his life than just to be a legend.
They say "legends never die", but the most famous part of any given legend tends to be the story of how the hero finally bites the dust.
And "he was such a great fighter that Death himself had to kill him off, personally!" is just the sort of ending that would fit the legend Puss has constructed around himself. In a sense, the Wolf is giving Puss exactly what he proclaims to want— the chance to go down in history.
Puss realising he doesn't want that anymore is the catalyst for sending the Wolf away. Through his own egotistical and reckless attitude, he turned himself into a story and thus summoned a narrative device. Only by choosing to value his life over the legend is he able to escape that trap.
The Wolf's defeat is both the natural ending of the story that he and Puss have been playing out since the film began, and a rejection of the natural ending to the story Puss has been telling about himself since he first became the hero of San Ricardo.
So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.
But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations.
None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.
It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.
You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.
And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.
aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations
this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:
[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]
why do i bring this up?
because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph
one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.
It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is
But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending
The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them.
But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup
I just wanna say that this mirrors something I got to watch in real life. I fenced as a teenager, with my wife, who continued fencing in college.
But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.
A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.
So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.
Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.
This isn’t JUST a fun plot point and a lovely way of showing social influences and planning and creativity, it’s completely based in real life. Even a shitty fighter can be a problem for a good fighter whose never encountered their style before.
“I know I probably don’t cross your mind much anymore but I hope someday you see something that reminds you of me and the things we use to spend hours talking about at night and then your throat gets tight and your heart skips a beat and you finally miss me back.”
