It's a Tumblr, Harold

I should probably put something here, right?

[hawkwinglb]

163. Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World

Piracy and anti-piracy? No black flags here… The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. (Alternately, you can always drop a penny in the bucket through Ko-Fi.) You can also find me on BlueSky. If you enjoy reading…

[coriphallus]

Postmortem of Gender Under the Qun

I. Introduction: A Question of Language

Now that the Qunari have been thoroughly butchered, I wanted to compile my thoughts on gender under the Qun into a more comprehensive 'essay.' This is not primarily an essay about politics, identity, or even gender in the contemporary Western sense. It is an essay about language.

More specifically, it is about what happens when we attempt to understand a foreign culture through English.

Whenever discussions surrounding the Qun arise in online spaces, one phrase inevitably dominates the conversation:

"Under the Qun, your gender is your role."

Most players interpret this quite literally. If someone is a warrior, then they are a man. If someone fulfills another social function that's conventionally feminine, then they are considered a woman. The conclusion appears straightforward, and I suspect it is also the interpretation the writers themselves ultimately settled on.

I intend to dismantle it for my own amusement.

Not because I believe the games secretly intended something else, nor because I think this interpretation is objectively incorrect, but because I approached the Qunlat from a linguistic background fundamentally different from that of English. My first instinct was not to ask, "What does the Qun believe about men and women?" My first instinct was to ask, "What does the Qun mean by gender?"

This analysis is my attempt to explain why.

My native language lacks gendered pronouns. There is no equivalent distinction between "he" and "she." At first glance, this seems like a language where gender is largely irrelevant.

Counterintuitively, that is very much untrue.

The absence of gendered pronouns does not eliminate gender from a language. Instead, it changes where gender lives.

II. Where Language Stores Gender

English speakers constantly encode gender in ordinary conversation without consciously thinking about it.

"I saw her yesterday."

"He said he would arrive tomorrow."

Before these sentences can even be spoken, the speaker must already know which pronoun to choose. Gender becomes one of the first pieces of information retrieved when referring to another person.

This process is so automatic that most native English speakers never notice it.

Turkish works differently.

The sentence Çöpü attığını gördüm simply means:

"I saw them take out the trash."

The sentence contains no information whatsoever regarding whether the person observed was male or female. In fact, depending on context, the subject can even remain ambiguous between 2. and 3. person singular. The information simply is not grammatically required. It is not exposed unless it's required.

It does not mean Turkish speakers are incapable of perceiving gender. It means the language does not force speakers to encode that information every time another person is mentioned whereas English requires it.

Now consider Czech.

Viděl jsem ji vynášet odpadky.

Before we even reach the object of the sentence, the grammar has already revealed something about the speaker themselves. The viděl tells us that the person speaking is male.

Spanish encodes something else.

La vi sacar la basura.

The pronoun identifies the observed person as feminine while la basura independently marks the noun "trash" as grammatically feminine.

None of these languages have more or less genders than the other for both the object and the subject. They simply distribute gender differently.

Some require information about the subject.

Some require information about the speaker.

Some require information about inanimate objects.

Some require almost none at all.

Every language obliges its speakers to express certain kinds of information. English demands tense where Mandarin often relies on context. Japanese frequently encodes social hierarchy where English does not. Czech marks grammatical case in places where English instead relies on word order.

These are not merely quirks of vocabulary, they shape what information speakers must continually keep available while communicating.

Linguists sometimes refer to this as obligatory grammatical information. A language does not necessarily determine what its speakers are capable of thinking, but it certainly determines what they must routinely express. That creates a substantial distinction.

Popular discussions often invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought, as though speakers of different languages possess fundamentally different thought patterns. Most modern linguists reject that for various reasons.

Language does not provably constrict thought. It can, however, influence it by making some distinctions obligatory while allowing others to remain optional.

An English speaker cannot naturally produce the sentence "I saw..." without deciding whether to continue with him, her or them. A Turkish speaker can. That information is stored in the previous context so they fundamentally ask different questions.

III. Gender as Grammar

This brings us to grammatical gender.

One of the most common misconceptions among speakers of languages that lack variety of grammatical genders is the assumption that grammatical gender must somehow reflect biological sex.

It rarely does.

A French speaker does not believe a baguette is female. A German speaker does not think a girl is literally neuter because das mädchen happens to use neuter grammar.

The grammatical category exists independently of biology. Its purpose is structural. Gender in language determines how words behave, which articles accompany them, which adjectives agree with them, which suffixes they receive, how they are declined (or not)...

Gender, in other words, is less about describing reality than organizing it.

A noun belongs to a category because the language requires it to belong somewhere to function.

Native speakers rarely question why a chair is feminine or why a bridge is masculine. The categories simply serve as a part of the language's internal logic. Trying to explain grammatical gender to someone whose native language lacks it often produces the infamous question;

"But why is the chair female?"

The answer, of course, is that it isn't.

The chair is not female.

The word belongs to a grammatical category that English simply lacks (i.e. Masculine inanimate as a grammatical gender carries more information about the state of the object than its 'sex'). The confusion arises because learners instinctively attempt to translate one conceptual framework into another. What if, I began to wonder while playing DAO, the same thing was happening with Qunlat?

What if "man" and "woman" were not 1=1 translations?

What if they were approximations?

What if the game's medium of English language was doing the only thing it could do; mapping an alien system of classification onto the nearest concepts available?

Whether that was the writers' intention is beside the point. I think the possibility itself warrants exploration. Because if the Qun's concept of gender functions less like biological identity and more like grammatical classification, then many conversations throughout the series become open to entirely different interpretations.

This is going to be a long read.

IV. The Qun as a System of Classification

The crucial question is not whether Qunari have gender. They clearly do. The more interesting question is what kind of category gender is within Qunlat.

Most discussions assume that Qunari gender categories are equivalent to human concepts of male and female. The games often encourage this reading, especially in the last installment, but the broader structure of the Qun suggests something else.

The most important thing to understand about the Qun is that it is not primarily a moral philosophy. It is a taxonomy.

Everything under the Qun has a place.

Every person has a function.

Soldiers belong to the Antaam. Spies belong to the Ben-Hassrath. Priests belong to the priesthood. Artisans belong to their craft. The Qun is obsessed not with individual self-expression but with correct classification. A person's value comes from occupying the role for which they are best suited.

Once viewed through this lens, the statement "your gender is your role" begins to sound less like a claim about masculinity and femininity and more like a claim about grammar.

The moral legitimacy of the Qun rests on the belief that disorder arises when things occupy the wrong category. A baker pretending to be a soldier is not merely inefficient; they are violating the proper order of society.

This resembles grammar more than it resembles bioessentialism.

Grammar does not ask what a noun “really is.”

It asks how that noun behaves within the system.

Likewise, the Qun appears less concerned with what a person “is” in some metaphysical sense than with how that person functions within the social order.

Under this framework, gender ceases to be primarily anatomical, it turns into a designation of social behavior and purpose.

That is a subtle but enormous shift.

An English speaker hears “warriors are men” and naturally interprets it to mean “people with dicks are warriors.”

But a Qunari speaker might mean something closer to “the social category associated with warfare is translated into Common as ‘man’ because the people who express warrior-like qualities (aka masculinity) in South are referred to as man.”

The distinction sounds small until one realizes that the second statement does not actually define the category by anatomy at all.

Imagine a language with six grammatical genders:

warrior

priest

artisan

teacher

merchant

caretaker

These categories would not describe anatomy. They would describe function.

A person assigned to the "warrior" category would receive the grammatical markers associated with warriors. A person assigned to the "teacher" category would receive its respective markers. Native speakers would not experience this as strange any more than an Italian speaker experiences the gender of a noun as strange. The category would simply be part of the language.

This is the conceptual leap that I believe many players never make, because English encourages us to treat gender as an identity rooted in gender expression. The Qun may instead be treating gender as a functional classification.

V. Rereading Sten

This is why Sten’s infamous line in Origins has always fascinated me.

"You look like a woman. But you are a soldier. One of those things can't be true."

For many players, the line immediately establishes Sten as sexist. The implication seems obvious: women should not fight. That is certainly a possible reading.

But it is not the only one.

Imagine a speaker whose native language organises people according to functional categories rather than biological sex. Now imagine that speaker trying to communicate through a language that lacks those categories and instead forces every distinction into “man” and “woman.”

Suddenly the sentence becomes less straightforward.

To illustrate the difference, imagine someone saying:

"I am a tailor." "Then why are you commanding an army?"

Under a linguistic (and cultural) reading of the Qun, Sten’s question can be understood similarly.

Notice he starts with "I don't understand. You look like a woman."

This can be a context-seeking question if we go with the assumption that he's not being condescending. He remarks that the Warden looks like someone that should not swing a sword. They are not conforming to the self expression of a sword-swinging role.

"You are a Grey Warden, so it follows that you can't be a woman."

He has not denied the player their role due to their sex, he has denied them their sex due to their role. The role takes precedence. The role is not in dispute. The wording is precise and it is fundamentally very revealing. It doesn't mean a person's sex is an assignment like a profession, it means a person's profession is as predetermined as their sex.

“You identify with category A. Why are you performing the function and expressing the characteristics associated with category B?”

The confusion is categorical. In this sense, it emphasises Qun's strict adherence to roles. Why appear as something you're not? Why express yourself like a priest and fight like a sten? What are you?

The face value interpretation is of course that his assumption that someone can't simultaneously express femininity and also adopt a masculine role is an indicator of how conservative Qun is.

Now contrast this with areal-life experience I've had learning Czech.

In Czech, grammatical gender is not optional, and it cannot easily be avoided without making language itself unnatural or incomplete. Over time, I found myself running into a recurring issue: speakers struggled to consistently apply feminine forms to my name as its phonetic structure was perceived as categorically "masculine-sounding" within their system.

Rather than assigning a gendered grammatical form, people would restructure sentences in ways that bypassed agreement entirely. The result is something comparable to constantly replacing a possessive structure like "Clair’s computer" with the clumsy "computer belonging to Clair" or even "Clair computer" in certain odd cases. It is noticeably strained in everyday use.

At various points, I explicitly stated that I didn't mind being referred to with masculine forms. From my perspective, this was a simple matter of grammatical convenience rather than identity. Yet many speakers still refused to make the shift. This was not a rejection of my gender identity, had I came out as a man I know that these people would have obliged. They thought of it as insulting to me, that I simply lack the lingual framework to understand the distinction. And to a certain degree they are right. As a non-native speaker, I will never experience grammatical gender in the same intuitive, automatic way that native speakers do. I won't feel like I'm being denied femininity simply because of a suffix even knowing it's meaning.

One particularly revealing example was the naming of my cat. Despite her name ending in -o, which in Czech often aligns with neuter grammatical patterns, speakers around me consistently opted to modify the name with the feminine -a ending in order to maintain alignment with the animal’s biological sex. In doing so, they effectively modified the linguistic category of the name itself, prioritizing grammatical and social coherence over morphological expectation.

What this illustrates is not simply a preference for consistency, but the degree to which grammatical gender is treated as a system that must remain internally stable. Even when exceptions are technically permissible, speakers often adjust surrounding language to preserve categorical alignment. This is not because they are consciously thinking about gender at every moment of speech. It is because the language demands that such distinctions remain continuously operational.

Sten, effectively, struggles with the same concept. He wants to hear that -a. He needs it to process the information he receives from what he sees in opposition to what he hears. He prompts the Warden with the same question; If you're a woman, if you wish to be referred to and seen and understood in the social sense as a woman why do you refer to yourself as a man?

This interpretation also explains why his dialogue sounds awkward in English. He speaks as though he is translating concepts that do not map neatly onto the language available to him. The result resembles the discomfort many language learners experience when dealing with grammatical gender.

“Why is a chair feminine?”

The native speaker shrugs because the question itself misunderstands the category.

Likewise, Sten may be encountering a person whose social designation and observable function do not align according to the framework he expects.

Whether the writers intended this nuance is very unlikely. What matters to me personally is that the early lore allows it.

VI. Translation and Approximation

This brings us to one of the most debated terms in the series: notorious aqun-athlok.

We usually treat it as a direct analogy for “transgender.”

That translation is understandable, but I think it may be misleading.

If gender under the Qun is fundamentally a functional category, then aqun-athlok does not necessarily describe a person changing from one biological sex category to another. It describes a person whose social designation has been reassigned.

A useful comparison is professional rather than anatomical.

Imagine a cashier who demonstrates extraordinary aptitude for masonry. The state formally redesignates them as a mason. Their category changes because their function changes. Their pronouns change.

That does not mean they have become physically different. It means the system now recognizes them under a different classification.

Viewed this way, Iron Bull’s explanation to Krem becomes particularly interesting.

Bull understands Southern culture. He knows that the people around him think in terms of men and women as sex-based identities. So he translates the Qun into concepts they can understand, he does this quite frequently.

He tells Krem that his society assigned him one role and that he fought to attain another. That is the closest Common equivalent available.

This is not a lie. It is fundamentally what a translator does for colloquial speech. When a concept has no exact equivalent, translators choose the closest available approximation. English lacks a ready-made set of social-gender categories detached from sex and/or gender expression, so the dialogue maps them onto the familiar binary of "man" and "woman."

We already accept this process everywhere else in fantasy. When a character says "barbarian," we do not immediately assume there is a Greek language for the onomatopoeic term to be coined. When a character says "god," we don't assume their theology matches Christianity. We translate "Yes" as oui or si respectively from the context clues derived from previous information the question provides.

Under this reading, aqun-athlok becomes less “a transgender person in the Western sense” and more “a person recognised under a category different from the one originally assigned to them by the Qun.”

Before discussing disaster that was Veilguard, I want to make one final distinction.

Throughout this analysis I have deliberately avoided claiming that the Qun "has no gender." That statement would be obviously false.

The Qun has gender.

What I question is whether those genders are equivalent to the ones we instinctively imagine.

Translation being an act of approximation, there are words that simply do not survive intact when carried from one language into another. Each translation captures part of the meaning while leaving another part behind.

We accept this instinctively when discussing vocabulary. Oddly, we abandon that generosity when discussing cultures.

When a Qunari says "man," we assume they must mean exactly what an English speaker means by "man."

Why, though?

If the Qun genuinely organizes society according to principles foreign to Southern Thedas, why would we expect one of its central concepts to map perfectly onto Common?

Perhaps it does. It looks like it. The expression of hypermasculinity is certainly the same.

But perhaps "man" is simply the closest available word. This would hardly be unusual.

Sten's earlier confusion also indicates that a person with female features is not exempt from this category of "man", they are exempt from 'womanhood'.

Every translator eventually reaches a point where perfect accuracy becomes impossible. One must choose between preserving the literal words or preserving the underlying concept.

Bull translates the Qun not merely linguistically, but culturally. He knows when to omit details that would only confuse his audience. He knows when to substitute familiar concepts for alien ones. Above all, he understands that communication is not achieved by literal accuracy but by producing the same understanding in another person's mind.

When Bull explains aqun-athlok to Krem, he is not writing a philosophical treatise. He is explaining his culture to someone who lacks the conceptual vocabulary to understand it directly.

That conversation therefore deserves to be read as a translation rather than a dictionary definition.

VII. Why This Reading Matters

At this point, someone might reasonably ask whether any of this matters if the writers themselves probably intended a more conventional interpretation.

It does to me.

Because the value of a fictional culture is not limited to authorial intent. Sometimes worldbuilding accidentally creates implications richer than the story that contains it.

The Qun was designed to feel alien. Ironically, the most alien aspect of it may be one the games never fully explored: the possibility that its concept of gender is not a biological binary at all, but a system of social grammar.

And if that is true, then the later portrayal of Qunari gender becomes much more complicated.

Because a society that classifies people by function would not necessarily experience gender variance in the same way a society that classifies people by anatomy. A society without binary gender also lacks the conceptual absence of binary gender. This may be difficult to imagine because English constantly defines concepts by opposition. Terms such as "stay-at-home spouse" immediately evoke "wife" precisely because the expected word has been omitted, which makes true gender ambiguity an impossibility.

If this interpretation is accepted, then Taash's story in Veilguard raises a serious internal contradiction: a character who is unquestionably a warrior is nevertheless treated by their mother as though biological sex overrides the very system of role-based classification that earlier Qunari lore appeared to establish.

VIII. The Problem of Taash

Taash is not where my interpretation begins. It is where it begins to break.

Under the framework established throughout the earlier games, there is remarkably little ambiguity regarding Taash's social role.

Taash is a warrior. No one disputes this. Not Taash. Not the player. Not their mother. Not the Qun.

Had Taash been raised entirely under the Qun, they would have been a part of Antaam, the dialogue explicitly states this. Their unique talents would've landed them the role of the warrior.

Within the framework the games have outlined, this should already determine the relevant "gender."

If gender corresponds primarily to social designation, then Taash already belongs to the soldier category. By the internal logic established earlier in the series, Taash is already what Common translates as "a man."

This is precisely where Shathann becomes frustrating.

She is portrayed as someone deeply committed to preserving Qunari customs despite living outside the Qun. Much of her relationship with Taash revolves around those expectations.

Yet she consistently refers to Taash according to biological sex.

That strikes me as profoundly strange.

If anyone should instinctively categorize people according to the logic of the Qun, it should be Shathann.

Instead, she appears to do the opposite.

She acknowledges Taash as a warrior.

She never argues they lack the temperament for combat. She never insists they belong in another profession. She wants to encourage them to learn more about their own culture but it is not portrayed as pushing them to scholarly duty due to their physical characteristics. She is even suspicious of the notion of them adopting said Qunari customs.

Yet she continues to categorise them through anatomy.

Ironically, the character presented as enforcing the Qun becomes the one behaving least like the earlier games suggested a Qunari should.

The narrative frames this as a mother attempting to impose biological gender upon her child. If anyone should instinctively think in terms of Qunari categories, it is Shathann. And yet her language appears to prioritize anatomy over function.

Ironically, this places her in the opposite position one might expect. She is simultaneously using categories that the Qun itself would never have privileged in the first place, and is punished by the narrative for it. Portrayed as a close minded boomer that needs to listen to their child.

IX. A Quest for the Binary

This realisation led me to what I consider the greatest failure in Taash's story.

The game presents their travel to Minrathous as part of a search for language capable of expressing who they are. That is debilitating. Not because I disagree with the story being told, but because I believe it accidentally tells another story at the same time. A story about the writers and audience.

The story presents this as liberation from rigid expectations.

But under the linguistic framework I have proposed, something almost paradoxical happens.

Taash does not leave the Qun-based teachings to escape an anatomical gender binary.

They leave it to discover one.

Within the Qun, social designation would already provide the relevant category. "Man" and "woman," understood as identities rooted in biological sex, would not occupy the same conceptual space they do in Southern Thedas.

It is only through sustained contact with the South that Taash encounters a society where anatomy itself becomes the organizing principle.

Only then does the language become available to reject it.

Viewed this way, Taash's story ceases to be one of escaping the Qun's categories. It becomes the story of someone moving between two incompatible systems of classification.

The Qun is one of the most genuinely alien cultures in fantasy precisely because it organises society according to principles that often feel deeply unintuitive to modern readers.

Its understanding of personhood is collectivist rather than individual, its ethics are teleological rather than rights-based, its conception of freedom is almost the inverse of liberal philosophy.

Why should its understanding of gender resemble ours?

Why should it use the same conceptual categories at all?

Reducing Qunari gender to a direct analogue of contemporary Western discourse makes the culture easier to understand. And I'm afraid it is the philosophy the writers understand.

X. Conclusion

Ultimately, I am less interested in arguing that this interpretation is canon than I am in arguing that it is possible.

Language is never a neutral vehicle for ideas.

When I first encountered the Qun, this was simply how I understood it.

Coming from a language without gendered pronouns, I naturally interpreted the Qun's statements about gender through linguistics rather than through biology. Only through time, after discussing the series with English speaking fans, did I realize that most people had reached a very different conclusion.

Eventually, I did too.

I learned to read the Qun the way the games increasingly encouraged me to. I had to perform the very act of translation this long-ass post has been describing. I replaced my own conceptual framework with another.

That experience is precisely why I find this topic immensely gripping.

Language does not merely give us words. It gives us habits of interpretation. The assumptions we bring into fiction are often invisible until we encounter someone whose language encourages different assumptions. Whether my interpretation reflects the writers' intentions is ultimately irrelevant.

I am pretty sure it doesn't.

Still it's very compelling what their worldbuilding accidentally made possible.

In the end, one of the most interesting questions Dragon Age could have asked remains unanswered;

What does gender variance look like in a society that never organized gender around biological sex in the first place?

What does it mean to be genderqueer in a culture whose "genders" are functions rather than identities?

And what happens when such a culture encounters another whose language insists upon distinctions the first never needed to make?

Because if the Qun really was conceived as an alien civilization, then perhaps its greatest unrealised potential lays not in reversing familiar gender roles, but in imagining a society whose very concept of gender belongs to an entirely different universe.

That, to me, would have been far stranger. And far more worthy of the Qun.

[hawkwinglb]

162. Halberstam's Female Masculinity and Padilla Peralta's Classicism and Other Phobias

I do wish I were able to get as much out of these books as is clearly in them, but I haven’t done the reading… The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. (Alternately, you can always drop a penny in the bucket…

[hawkwinglb]

161. David Simpkin, The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn

The later half of the 1200s was a busy time for the class of Englishmen who rode horses to fight… The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. (Alternately, you can always drop a penny in the bucket through Ko-Fi.) You…

[whosname]

[id. A twitter post by @/Bennieeexyz Jury duty letter came addressed to my cat. Not a mistake. "Felix Martinez" - that's his full name according to his vet records. My last name. His first name. Somehow he's a registered voter now. Called the county clerk. Me: My cat got summoned for jury duty. Clerk: Is the name correct on the summons? Me: Yes, but he's a cat. Clerk: Is Felix Martinez a legal resident of this county? Me: He's a legal cat. Clerk: Sir, if the name matches our records, he needs to appear or file an exemption. Me: He can't file anything. He has paws. Clerk: You can file on his behalf. Me: Under what exemption? There's no box for "is a cat." Clerk: (pause) Check "unable to serve due to medical reasons." Me: What's the medical reason? Clerk: He's a cat. Me: That's not a medical condition. Clerk: It is if it prevents him from serving. Sent in the form. Got rejected two weeks later. "Insufficient documentation. Please provide medical professional's statement." Took the letter to my vet. Me: I need you to write that my cat can't do jury duty. Vet: Why is your cat summoned for jury duty? Me: Excellent question. No good answer. Vet: This is the weirdest request I've gotten. Me: Can you just write that he's medically unfit to serve? Vet: On what grounds? Me: He's a cat. Vet: (started typing) "Patient is unable to serve due to species-related limitations including inability to speak, read, or comprehend legal proceedings." Me: Perfect. Sent it in. Got another rejection. "Summons is mandatory. Failure to appear will result in contempt of court." My roommate thought this was hilarious. Roommate: Felix is going to jail. Me: This is serious. Roommate: Bring him to court. See what happens. Decided that was actually the only option left. Day of jury duty, put Felix in his carrier. Brought the entire paper trail of rejection letters. Checked in at the courthouse. Clerk: Name? Me: Felix Martinez. Clerk: (looked at the cat carrier) Is that Felix? Me: Yes. Clerk: (long stare) He's a cat. Me: I've been saying that for six weeks. Clerk: Why didn't you file an exemption? Me: I filed three. All rejected. Showed her the letters. She read through them, expression shifting from confusion to disbelief. Clerk: Someone rejected the veterinary documentation? Me: Twice. Clerk: (called her supervisor over) You need to see this. Supervisor read everything. Looked at Felix. Looked at me. Supervisor: How did a cat get registered to vote? Me: You tell me. Supervisor: This is a data error. Me: Took you six weeks to figure that out. They dismissed Felix immediately. Apologized for the inconvenience. Supervisor: We'll remove him from the voter registry. Me: Appreciate it. Supervisor: (pause) Out of curiosity, how would he have voted? Me: Probably whatever party supports universal treats. Got a formal apology letter a week later and a voter registration card. For me this time. Apparently I wasn't registered, but my cat was. Roommate: Felix committed voter fraud. Me: Felix committed nothing. He's innocent. Roommate: That's what they all say. Felix is sleeping on the jury summons now. Fitting end to his legal career. end id]

[hawkwinglb]

160. Power, Exploitation, Identity: David Mattingly's "Imperialism, Power and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire"

Well, June was definitely A Month. Today’s my birthday, though, so celebrate with me by reading a book. Perhaps even David Mattingly’s book, which is the most fascinating of the many fascinating books I read while trying to stay on top of embodiment and its discontents in June. (Collecting minor health issues is starting to feel a bit like the worst card game.) The vast majority of my writing…

[quasi-normalcy]

I actually think that science fiction has done everyone a disservice by presenting escaping to another planet as a remotely feasible near-term solution to problems on Earth.

[quasi-normalcy]

Like, I’m sorry, but if terraforming Mars is an option then why can’t we just terraform the Earth?

[quasi-normalcy]

(I mean, this last bit isn’t actually a great argument, because a lot of techniques proposed for terraforming involve such things as smashing asteroids into planets, blocking out their view of the sun for decades at a time, or seeding the entire planet’s surface with novel extremophile bacteria, which would be unthinkable on Earth; but the point still stands! It would be vastly easier to restore Earth to a healthy climate than to make Mars even as habitable as the peak of Mount Everest)

[quasi-normalcy]

As Mars is fuck-off far away, it’s really expensive to send even a robot the size of a compact car there, half of all uncrewed missions there fail, and we don’t even know how to land a crewed one yet.

[notalittleatall]

They’re talking about a city on Mars. We don’t even have a city on Antartica! And Antartica is 10000x more hospitable, because it at least has breathable air and readily available water. And Antartica can have an actual supply chain feeding the necessary stuff to it rather than needing to plan rockets. But no one ever suggests colonising Antartica to solve overpopulation, because its so obviously inhospitable and it would cost so much to set up a city there. Still so much better than Mars.

Or cities floating on the ocean! Or cities in the sahara desert! Or cities in orbit! These are all terrible, terrible ideas, but each one is far more feasible and practical than a colony on Mars is.

[samiholloway]

Did you see anything about how china returned Przwalskis horses to it’s steppe and effectively halted desertification bc keystone species can do stuff like that? Technically terra forming, perfectly doable to engineer/ restore all sorts of earth ecosystems, and SO MUCH MORE FEASIBLE than anything that can be done on Mars.

[fozmeadows]

The fantasy of colonizing a new planet is the fantasy of a blank slate: imagine what we could do if we didn’t have to take all this existing bullshit into consideration! Imagine if we didn’t have to negotiate with different governments or people and their priorities or contend with our own environment; imagine if, having burned our house down, we could just buy a new one instead of trying to squat in the ruins and fix it! There’s variants of this type of fantasy across all forms of literature, and by itself, there’s nothing wrong with it. Escapism is fun! But for a certain type of tech oligarch - the ones who claim to be inspired by science fiction even as they willfully misunderstand it - the deepest lure of a new planet is the prospect of dominion. It’s not about fixing things or long-term survivability for the human race: it’s the covetous desire to own, wholly and entirely, both the means of accessing our future and the future itself. There are no labor laws on Mars; no charters of human rights or taxes or checks on their power. They’re already technofeudal princelings on Earth; if they can just get that first, crucial toehold on another planet, they imagine, they’ll be emperors. But precisely because they’re princelings - which is to say, spoiled, selfish, egomaniacal sociopaths who combine the short-sighted greed of Midas with the hubristic idiocy of seagulls - the unfeasibility of their desires never occurs to them. In their minds, they’ve already done the impossible, and therefore all other impossible tasks must be equally within reach, provided they have enough money. Which, frankly, would be an insane fallacy even if they actually had done anything impossible, as opposed to engaging in garden-variety exploitation, villainy and corruption at a historically notable scale, but that doesn’t occur to them, either, and for much the same reasons. Namely: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a powerful, amoral man in possession of a cartoonishly large sum of money must be in want of things he can’t actually purchase. This being so, we’re left with a crop of naked would-be emperors tripping over their own exposed dicks while giving 90s JRPG villain speeches about how human water consumption is limiting the potential of AI or how knowledge should be metered out to the proles like electricity or how (and this is a good one) nobody needs to care about the staggering environmental and social costs of allowing billionaires to even exist in the first place because they’re going to build us a city on Mars, guys, MARS, so why does it matter if Earth turns into a wasteland? Why would you try and put any checks on their power when it risks your potential access to a science fictional future they can only provide if allowed to be laws unto themselves? Which is, coincidentally, why it’s relevant that these guys never understood sci-fi in the first place: because men like them with ideas like theirs were pretty much never the good guys. To quote Kim Stanley Robinson’s seminal 1992 classic Red Mars, the first book in a trilogy about what colonizing and terraforming a new world might actually look like:

Nadia pointed at it. “I did that. I did that. You damned radicals -” she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard- “you hate liberalism because it works.” He snorted. “It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.” “Ah, Nadia.” He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again towards base. “Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”

[guerrillatech]

[utah-mountain-drifter-deactivat]

[poorghost]

no one follows the trees warning

[rapidashrider]

You know the parable about how the foolish man built his house upon sand and the wise man built his house upon rock and it’s always about having a sturdy foundation well there is also the fact of location which is that the sand probably used to be rock except it’s been eroded to sediment because it’s a FUCKING FLOODPLAIN

[whereserpentswalk]

flood Plain perfec t size for put town in to b\uild! inside very Soft and Comfort town safe happy put town in Floodplain. Put Town In Floodplain. no problems ever in flloodplain because good Shape and Support for town roads weak of big town citizens. Afloodplain yes a place for a town put town in floodplain can trust floodplain for giveing good place for town. friend flood

[mtf-the-gathering]

"gender is a social construct": fairly easy for leftists to understand

"race is a social construct": a bit harder to swallow for some but still reasonable

"mental illness is a social construct": this one gets you hate mail in your inbox

[thebookewyrme]

Gotta add previous tags on here, because this is gonna live rent free in my head from now on. The stars are real, constellations are not. Damn. Tags by @smoreofbabylon (if you don’t want me to put you on blast like this I’ll delete lol!)

[tanoraqui]

that theory that the Arkenstone is a Silmaril…it’s doubly implausible, but imagine if nobody knew. If the dwarves were guarded enough of their greatest treasure that…you wouldn’t even need to hide it from that many people, honestly. Mostly a few elves, and all wizards.

and then Bilbo sidles up to Gandalf like, “Thorin and all are holed up in the Mountain, but I think they’re being nuts, so I…kind of stole the Arkenstone, I think.” And (it’s been thousands of years since the light of the trees was doused save for the precious brilliance locked away in Feanor’s gems, since oaths and blood and war that raged until the skies cracked and the earth shattered, and the little people of the Shire have no memory of it at all) he pulls out a fucking Silmaril.

[tanoraqui]

Gandalf: *spittake*

Gandalf: *hurriedly glances at Thranduil. the king of Mirkwood’s eyes shine with curiosity and greed, but not recognition, nor the terrible lust that overtook Feanor and his sons. right, right, he was never in Thingol’s court while the jewel that Luthien and Beren took was there. we’re good. we’re good for now*

Gandalf: That’s, uh, nice, Bilbo. Put it away, would you?

[tanoraqui]

Gandalf, telepathically(?): EMERGENCY RINGBEARERS ONLY CONFAB NOW

Gandalf: [mental image of a goddam Silmaril in hobbit hands, labelled “thisfuckingrockagain.jpg”]

Galadriel, who watched 95% of her family slaughter everyone within 100 miles for several thousand years over these things, including each other and themselves: no.

Elrond, who was very nearly one of those people slaughtered, and did watch most of his town be killed before he and his twin were kidnapped for a while: Absolutely Fucking Not.

Gandalf: Apparently fucking yes. The legendary Arkenstone-

Galadriel: You’ve got to be kidding me.

Elrond: Thorin Oakenshield has a Silmaril right now?

Gandalf: No, no.

Gandalf: Bilbo stole it.

Elrond: *wordless sputtering*

Gandalf: @Galadriel [information packet: BilboBagginsoftheShire.pdf]

Galadriel: Oh yes, Belladonna’s boy, you were telling me about him last winter. 

Galadriel: Btw, orc+warg army probably coming your way. Spotted it in the mirror last night. Thank goodness we dealt with Dol Goldur at least, huh?

Elrond: No fucking shit.

[tanoraqui]

Gandalf @Gwaihir Windlord: hey, sorry to bother you again, I know it’s nearly mating season. but we have a situation again

Gandalf: [thisfuckingrockagain.jpg]

Gandalf: [oncomingorcwargarmy.jpg]

Gandalf: [flashbacktobadasseaglesinwarofwrathhinthint.mov]

[avelera]

I mean, given that Tolkien retconned “The Hobbit” so Bilbo’s little invisibility ring became an ancient piece of jewelry that controls minds and drives the mighty mad, one can at least understand why it seems plausible that the other shiny white gem that destroys empires and makes the mighty go mad with greed could be linked from his kid’s book to his gigantic early mythology in retrospect??

[crazy-pages]

You know this actually explains a lot about why Gandalf didn’t immediately raise the alarm about Bilbo’s ring out of an abundance of caution. I mean, what are the odds, what are the fucking odds, that this one little hobbit stole both a Silmaril and the Ring of Power? Like, you are Gandalf the Grey and you have already dealt with the heart attack to end all heart attacks because this little innocent fool stole a world war inspiring artifact once. You still get flashbacks every time Bilbo offers to show you something and have to employ all of your angel’s serenity and thousands of years of learned composure not start giBbERinG “ pleaseletitnotbeanotherartifactpleaseletitnotbeanotherartifact”. And then. AND THEN! One day he’s like, “hey Gandalf let me show you this neat ring I found back on our journey”. And on the inside a tiny part of you is screaming “nottheoneringnottheoneringnottheonering” while a more rational part of your brain assures you it could not possibly be the one- “It’s this plain gold ring that’s very precious to me and turns me invisible!”

AND THEN YOU FUCK OFF AND SEARCH THROUGH EVERY POSSIBLE TOME YOU CAN TO PROVE IT CAN’T REALLY BE THE RING OF POWER, SAURON’S RING OF POWER, THAT RING, THE ONE RING, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE TOME, BEFORE FINALLY FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THIS SHIT IS REALLY HAPPENING AGAIN

[countesskittymeow]

@shewhodoesnotexist what says you? :P

[shewhodoesnotexist]

I’ve never been a proponent of this theory, but I gotta admit the idea of Bilbo finding two world war inspiring artifacts is alluring ;D

Next you’ll be telling me Sting is Gurthang

[abrownpanther]

Sting may or may not be Angrist, the knife that Beren used to get the Silmarill off of Morgoth’s crown

[queenofthequillandink]

“Average Hobbit finds at least one world war inspiring artifact when on a journey” statistic inaccurate. The Spiders Took Family, who find a world war inspiring artifact every five feet they step outside the Shire, were outliers and should not have been counted.

[holymagdalenes]

"There's no hope for the future." And that's how they felt during the Atomic Age, during the World Wars, during the Enlightenment Revolutions, during thr plagues, during the Viking raids, during the fall of Rome.

Yet, we persisted.

[ave-immaculata]

[letmetakeastabatit]

CS Lewis had something to say about this

[angie-words]

Been feeling a bit hopeless of late. Wasn't expecting to stumble across a quote that would fundamentally alter my perspective and make me cry during my lunch break but here we are

[outrageousring5655]

This is an excellent sentiment.

[amuseoffyre]

Nevertheless, we persisted :)

[headspace-hotel]

i have so many thoughts about The Bucky i feel like I need to be on a podcast talking about them like some kind of expert on a topic

[headspace-hotel]

Bucky is a particularly interesting character to analyze in light of the decisions made in Captain America:The Winter Soldier that changed him from the comics winter soldier.

These changes from comics canon contain some of the things about the character that were compelling, and also the things MCU had no idea what to do with in later installments

In the winter soldier comics, (which are themselves a violent re-invention of the character, he was raised on a military base and became Steve's sidekick after Steve had become Captain America, kind of a darker figure willing to do dirty work that Cap couldn't be seen doing

in the movie, he's Steve's closest childhood friend. They only end up paired up and fighting together because Steve goes on a desperate mission to save his life

in the winter soldier comics, he is something like 7 or 8 years younger than Steve and they still have a mentor/sidekick type of relationship

in the movie they are the same age and steve is no longer a "mentor" figure, that dynamic is eliminated

in the winter soldier comics Bucky loses all his prior memories after his apparent death, making him a blank slate to be groomed into a soviet super-assassin. There is no brainwashing.

in the movie they deliberately erase his memories by strapping him into this scary device that fries his brain with electricity. It's clearly torture: he is shown hyperventilating as the restraints close onto his limbs and then screaming in agony as the device activates.

in the winter soldier comics Bucky as the Winter Soldier is capable of independent thought and snark, and is shown questioning and mouthing off at his superiors

in the movie, Bucky is completely passive. He barely speaks at all; when he does, he is almost childlike, meek and quiet in his interactions with the Hydra characters, stubborn and confused in his fight with Steve. The main antagonist slaps him across the face for not answering a question and he doesn't retaliate at all even though he can obviously kill everyone in the room in the blink of an eye. In the same scene he also lets the scientists manhandle him and eagerly opens his mouth for the mouthguard even as his heart rate is spiking on the monitor and he's starting to hyperventilate because he KNOWS the pain is coming.

(side note: he is shirtless in this scene for no reason)

(second side note: the line "who the hell is Bucky?" is in the movie because it's iconic from the comics, but it's arguably super OOC for mcu!bucky)

The long hair and cyborg arm are straight from the comics, but the most striking change to his appearance is his mask: in the comics, he's wearing a domino mask over his eyes, but in the film, he has an opaque black mask covering his nose and mouth that takes away much of his ability to emote and looks strikingly like a muzzle. The comics mask evokes mysterious wiles; the film's mask evokes dehumanization.

basically the films gave him a much deeper and more intimate connection to Steve while putting the two of them on even footing as friends and partners, and changed him from a morally gray character who indifferently kills people and regrets and becomes angsty once his memories are restored, to a tortured and dehumanized human weapon who obeys despite not understanding anything that's going on because he knows nothing but pain and punishment.

The film's version is really much more interesting. Snarky antiheroes who kill indifferently are a dime a dozen; a character who is palpably, terrifyingly dominating and powerful yet completely powerless in the hands of those who control him, who is hollowed out of all personal identity and who has no agency or control over his own body as it is mutilated, reconstructed and wielded as a weapon, is something much more delicious and fascinating.

We watch this guy slaughter people effortlessly with an apex predator swagger that projects pure dominance and prowess, then we watch him meekly accept abuse and torture with soft, confused eyes.

Of course I'm insane about him. There's a lot to be insane about.

[headspace-hotel]

@deus3xmachinablog Peer review

[headspace-hotel]

what gets me is like. Ed Brubaker knew what the fuck he was doing when reinventing The Bucky from tragically killed-off sidekick to reanimated cyborg death machine. Sebastian Stan knew what the fuck he was doing when portraying The Bucky. And I'm sure the other people involved with CA:TWS had SOME inkling, because this compelling portrayal doesn't assemble itself by accident.

The rest of the MCU portrayal of Bucky though after that? Clearly no idea what they fuck they had on their hands or what the fuck they were doing with it.

Flattening his character out into "morally gray depression man and he has Gun." And essentially making his story about shouldering responsibility for what he did as the Winter Soldier. A very flat, "guy did bad thing and now he's angsty and guilty about it and trying to redeem himself" (boring) instead of like. the gut wrenching horror of having your memories burned away and your name taken from you and your body reconstructed without your consent and used against your will.

The horror of being a weapon that was once a person and having your very selfhood irretrievably lost to you.

[headspace-hotel]

this is where the fanfictions pick it up, and I'm honestly pretty sad that fanfictions are still so widely viewed as Not Real Art, when they are closer to how humans told stories for the last hundred thousand years, and indeed to how storytelling works at its best and most alive and thriving.

We could be telling the most brilliant stories about The Bucky, if we all understood the essential principles (that stories are not Owned by anyone, but become Alive when they are told, in the hearts of the teller and the listener, and to listen to a story gives the gift of the power to tell it again)

And if we could all defeat our enemy, the Cringe (which is to say, that which cringes at sincerity)

God, the writers you put on this earth to write Buckyfic are trying to create something "Original" instead

(because originality receives respect by society as real, legitimate art, and is capable of becoming profitable)

[headspace-hotel]

The Hydra Trash Party-goers knew what they were doing, as well.

[bookshelfdreams]

I think, with hindsight, the main problem the post-TWS movies had with Bucky is the torture.

The broad consensus in modern western media seems to be that Torture Is Basically Fine. It works. Torture is an effective way of extracting accurate information. And because that alone isn't enough to make it seem legitimate, there's another failsafe: Torture works only on bad people. Villains crack under torture, and heroes don't.

This is how media creates a culture that finds torture justifiable. Especially media that is largely sponsored by the US military, of course, who in a post-Abu Ghraib, post-Guantanamo, post-CIA papers world has an interest in creating public indifference (or straight up support) for torture, but there's torture in animated movies for children, too. It's ubiquitous.

In real life, torture is horrific violence inflicted on our fellow human beings, that traumatizes both the victim and the torturer, creates heaps of false information, and has no discernible benefits. It doesn't work.

But in fiction, it must work, every time, because if it doesn't, then that collapses the entire structure, doesn't it?

In comes Bucky in TWS.

He's a character who is tortured into complete submission. Who is given electric shocks to the brain to erase his memory, but he still holds onto his own humanity. He is tortured into doing horrible things - the torture works - but it doesn't work completely. He breaks through it. He's beaten, abused, violated on screen, but - and this is important! - because he overcomes in the end, he's not the villain. His story evokes pity and sympathy, not suspicion.

With hindsight, it is clear to me that the mind wipe scene was meant to inspire disgust in the audience. Bucky's terror without fighting back, his defeated acceptance of the inevitable, the slow, lingering pan up his unclothed body. This is emasculating; at the time a lot of meta has been written about how Bucky is shot like a woman in a rape scene.

He submits. This is meant to be suspicious.

But it completely backfires, because what is shown and what follows is the story of a victim of unspeakable abuse finally breaking free from his abuser in a show of awe-inspiring mental strength.

(and also through the power of gay love but let's not get into that)

That's a problem. By complete accident, the film ends up saying Hey, torture is maybe sometimes bad? And that cannot be allowed. There is a more conventional torture scene in the film, where Steve and Sam throw a guy off a roof to get information out of him, but that almost doesn't matter. This is the one instance that makes the whole house of cards come crumbling down. If Bucky is a victim, then torture is both bad and does not work.

It is obvious to me that what followed TWS didn't know how to reconcile that. CA:CW felt extremely jarring because it treats Bucky with so much suspicion; it even retcons in the trigger word nonsense to justify that suspicion. Bucky has to earn trust. He has to redeem himself. From what? Not being able to withstand seven decades of torture?

Well, yes, the film says. Torture only works on bad guys. Bucky allowed the torture to work on him, and so, has proven himself to be untrustworthy. The abuse he suffered sullied him. He has to earn back his moral righteousness.

I want to stress that I do not think any of this is intentional. I don't think there was a meeting in the writer's room where they talked about how they accidentally made it seem like Torture Is Bad Maybe, and how they could reconcile that. If that had been the case, CW would have been a more honest movie. But looking back, it is clear in how the directors talked about the characters after CW came out, and in the baffling writing choices they made, that they were trying to breach this disconnect, without being aware that this is what they were doing.

For the fan spaces I hung around in at the time, where cis men were a minority, this was baffling. There's a reason post-TWS fic almost exclusively talked about Bucky's recovery, not his redemption. There simply was, in fandom's eyes, nothing to redeem him from. CW made clear that w completely misinterpreted TWS.

I'd love to go back in time to observe what the fallout from TWS and CW was in male-dominated fan spaces; how they talked about Bucky in 2015 and 2017.

Anyhow. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to me that no one involved in the writing of CW and what came after took a moment to actually think about the themes and motives of the movies beyond the shallowest surface, and not just with regards to Bucky.

TWS ended up taking the tamest, most inconsistent anti-torture stance possible by complete accident and that could not be allowed. It had to be forcefully retconned. And that's why, in my opinion, post-TWS Bucky ended up being Like That.

[foxglovedforest]

[theriu]

"I don't care if he's hot, you need to FLEE"

[delicatefury]

I appreciate the implication that Best Friend has an equally concerned (yet confused) and supportive boyfriend who is driving her to get the Romantasy lead back from the woods.

[wenevergotusedtoegypt]

Do you think it's immoral to use chatgpt for college assignments? I think it's unfortunately unavoidable.

It is absolutely immoral, completely counterproductive to the goal of learning things, and turns out incredibly subpar work.

As for unavoidable….you understand that the vast majority of people who have ever graduated college throughout history did so without ever once using AI, right? You understand that?

[wenevergotusedtoegypt]

You understand that the point of writing papers isn’t just to have a paper with words on it, right? You understand that the entire point is to do the mental work necessary to put your learning into organized words, such that you actually learn it? And that if you outsource that to AI you are not learning?

[fozmeadows]

Let's cost out the idea of AI use as an unavoidable part of university life, shall we? Imagine the following scenario:

A professor uses AI to generate their lecture outline and slides, because it saves them time; their students then use AI to summarize the lecture, because it's easier than taking notes themselves. The TA, overworked and underpaid, uses AI to generate the class assignments, which the students use AI to answer - and once they're handed in, the TA uses AI to grade them, too. The professor then uses AI to make the final exam, which the students use AI to answer, and which the professor and TA again use AI to grade. The semester ends, and none of the human participants have materially done any work. Who benefits from this? It's not the professor, whose skills begin to atrophy due to cognitive offloading, nor is it the students, who never develop those skills in the first place. And it's certainly not TA, because in a scenario where this level of AI use is normalized - which is what the AI companies want - they've functionally made themselves redundant. If the AI can do a TA's job, then who needs a TA? Come to that, if the AI can do a professor's job, then who needs a professor? And if the AI can do a student's job, then who needs to be a student? Why do any of these people need to be here at all? Why even have a university? To which the tech giants reply: pfft, never mind the ever-mounting financial, environmental, ethical and social costs of AI - isn't using it just easier? Well, yes - in the same way that it's easier to die than live. Death, after all, is a tremendously simplifying affair. You don't need to learn or study or struggle or suffer or love or err or improve or feel or encounter setbacks or wrestle with anything difficult at all when you don't exist - and this, too, ultimately, is the lure of AI: to outsource the fundamental business of being human; which is to say, of living. But as this would make a rather terrible sales pitch, it's presented instead, not just as convenience, but as an exclusive convenience - one whose power is predicated on others being too stupid or moral or Luddite to do likewise. Thus: students are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more quickly progress through their studies, while universities are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more easily manage students. Both groups are told that using AI will help them keep up with their workload while surpassing the competition; that it will free up extra time to do more enjoyable things, and that, the more others use it, the more necessary it becomes to use it yourself. But the implication is still that the traditional professional, social and intellectual systems that AI intends to parasitize will continue to exist - because if they didn't, what would be the point in using AI to cheat at them? The best-case scenario is that life becomes like an Olympics at which everyone is doping - which, as we recently saw with the Enhanced Games, turns out to be a fairly dismal prospect. Counter to the assumption that PEDs would cause the contestants to surpass all previous human limits, only one world record was actually (barely) broken and, in fact, multiple victories were claimed by non-enhanced athletes. In a lesson that AI shills would do well to learn from, it turns out that raw human effort, ingenuity and skill are actually the biggest factors in human success, and that whatever minor advantage you might gain from cheating is annihilated in a context where the whole field is doing it. The worst-case scenario is that we irreparably break several centuries' worth of our most collectively vital institutions, innovations and accomplishments so that a handful of the very worst people on Earth can, briefly, be richer than god. So, no: just because the AI industry has baited a hook for college students with the promise of Finish All Your Assignments Faster And Worse (While Getting Stupider) does not mean you have to swallow it. Use your own brain! Civilization will thank you for it.

[hawkwinglb]

Listen to Foz.

[thundergrace]

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

[ekjohnston]

...amazing

[hawkwinglb]

Oh god I want it. I need it.

[glovedeath]

I saw that post about Kel being a bit Fae and how clearly there's Something going on with her because she gets "chosen".

And so much love to that poster, because it stuck with me, and really made me think about why I find Kel so compelling. And, in thinking about it, I've come to understand that the truth is that Kel doesn't get chosen. She chooses herself.

When Kel touches the door at the beginning of Squire, Neal tells her never to do it again, because the Chamber might kill her. And Kel proceeds to touch that fucking door every fucking year, to the point that the Chamber knows her, and remembers her, and is like, "Girl, you again??" And she's like, "Yep, it's me! Please torture me some more." She keeps coming back because she is afraid that she won't pass the Ordeal, and she keeps touching the door because when Kel can't do something, she works at it until she can. And so, she builds a relationship with the Chamber the way she does with everyone else in her story: by showing up, by being reliable, by having integrity, and by being the best version of herself she can be, every day.

I tend to believe that the purpose of the Ordeal is that the Chamber forces you to change--to realize something about yourself that needs to be faced so that you can become a better person--and that the Ordeal only ends once you've internalized that change. (This is why Joren dies).

Kel's Ordeal ends when she changes the way she thinks about the Chamber: "I thought you would be grand and terrible" she says "I thought you would make us grow up... This is just mean." She had put her faith in the Chamber to show her that she was worthy, but she was worthy from the start. This is what changes about her: she no longer seeks external validation from the Chamber; she no longer has anything to prove. She realizes was always worthy.

And the Chamber doesn't go on and on about how she's special, or the chosen one, or whatever. It just says: "You'll do."

When Blayce starts defying the laws of life and death, there is only one class of knights that the Chamber has access to, and Kel is the last candidate to enter the Chamber that year. She is the Chamber's last chance to enact any sort of will on the world outside its little room. And Kel walks in, and it knows her. She is the one who has been testing herself against it for years, and she comes back and gives it the metaphorical finger and tells it to fuck off. The entity in the Chamber is already searching for someone to do this important thing, but Kel doesn't need some elemental demi-god who exists outside of time to approve of her. She does that for herself. She chooses herself.

The Chamber didn't pick her in advance; it wasn't some mystical prophecy. It was holding a job interview, and Kel showed up and said, "It's me. I'll do it. (Also, go fuck yourself.)"

And the Chamber says: "Yeah, all right. (Thank fuck you showed up)."

What I love about Kel is that she embodies the kind of heroism that is possible for all of us. She is dedicated. She is kind. She is hard-working. She commits herself to the service of others. None of those things are superhuman. They are possible for each of us to achieve.

At the end of the day, being a hero isn't about being blessed or prophesized or having super-powers. It's about showing up every day and saying:

"It's me. I'll do it."

[hilarioushumorfromouterspace]

[charlesoberonn]

I like this meme because the stock photos make it seem like the same woman but 10 years older.