#endetithei

[faintingcouchguy]

Wailmer watching in Shetland for our anniversary! We caught a few Wingull on the shore because @endetithei can’t get enough of them.

(Thank you @realpokemon for the commission!!)

[asexualcorvidae]

☕️ would love to hear about a cool bird or two

My phone did not notify me about this!! My phone hates birds confirmed. I actually haven’t seen very many birds lately? Nor have I heard them. But there are birds that made a nest in the overhang of one of the sister apartment complexes, the one I can see from my window when I sit on my couch. At the beginning of the pandemic, my therapist made house calls early in the morning, and we would sit and talk about the birds sometimes. The grass outside my window is prime grass for nests and we saw quite a lot. Mostly jays and robins and other small-ish birds. I miss seeing them. (It’s all snow now.)

[faintingcouchguy]

everyone's trans in the last unicorn

Oops it's the supermoon and I stayed up all night writing what'll have to be the first of 2-3 effortposts on transness and gender roles in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. This one is about the three main characters' trans-coded introductions, plus Daniel M. Lavery's 2017-2020 writing on transition as intertexts/reception of the book. All the rest under the cut.

"We all know the unicorn and Molly Grue are transgender," I said flippantly to @literarymagpie yesterday, and it turns out maybe we do not all know this, so now it's finally time I write the essays I've been drafting in my head for five years about The Last Unicorn and the things Peter S. Beagle didn't know he knew.

My secondary source for this theme is Daniel Lavery, who, in his 2017 essay on gc2b binders, described the first stages of his transition as follows:

I knew nothing of the subject. I became aware of the subject. I immediately, and carefully avoiding too much direct thought about the matter, sought consummation with it. Since that day, the subject has rarely been far from my conscious thoughts. It has felt, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, thrilling, calming to the point of near-stupor, destabilizing, reassuring, necessary, mundane, intrusive, overwhelming, compulsory, and desirable.

Beagle's last unicorn lives in a lilac wood, and she lives all alone, oblivious and content for over a century. Upon overhearing that there may be no other unicorns left, she considers her identity and questions her place in the world for the first time. Here she is on pp. 6-7, quite certain at first that she belongs in her familiar forest:

"Oh, I could never leave this, I never could, not even if I really were the only unicorn in the world. I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is."

[...]But suppose they are hiding together, somewhere far away? What if they are hiding and waiting for me?

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms.

I'm not even sure I want hormones. I'm pretty sure I don't want them, because I think about going on hormones all the time, and those thoughts always end in some variation of "I can't, not ever," and if I really wanted to try hormones obviously I wouldn't keep thinking about how I can't try them. I think about them all the time and have to constantly stop myself, so I must not really want them. You know how when you're profoundly curious and sick with longing about something, it usually passes pretty quickly.

—Lavery again, from Something That May Shock and Discredit You, "The Stages of Not Going on T" (p. 60).

Speaking of T and not going on it, Beagle's next introduced main character is Schmendrick. Schmendrick is a wizard living in an insecure, stagnant, uncomfortable state that is explicitly symbolized by the fact that he can’t grow a beard and would like to. I don’t even need to make a case here. (I will anyway, though, in another installment.)

Our other main ally is Molly Grue, "a thin thorn of a woman" who stands out as the steel spine of Captain Cully's otherwise all-male, ridiculous crew. She's tough, smart, grizzled, kicked around by life. Her relationship with Cully is ambiguous; her feelings are clearly not warm. When Schmendrick scatters the merry men with a chaotic summoning, Molly's the only one to land on her feet and follow him into the wood.

Then she saw the unicorn. She neither moved nor spoke, but her tawny eyes were suddenly big with tears. [...] "Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn. [...] "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down. "I am here now," she said at last. Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come, why do you come now?" The tears began to slide down the side of her nose. The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world." "She would be," Molly sniffed. "She would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand upon the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you." "Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls." Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said.

(pp. 96-98)

It leaps out to me that the crux of Schmendrick's jealousy is not the wish that he could touch a unicorn. More emphasis is placed on his envy of Molly's emotional experience—the recognition, the sobbing relief. Schmendrick needs this magnitude of affirmation too, but won't get it until the end of the book, and from a different front. More on his weird gender stuff in the second and probably third installments of this that I have to write next.

I'm not the only one to note this scene's transgender resonance. I first got it, once again, from Lavery, who borrowed Molly's despairing cry for a monologue in Something That May Shock and Discredit You. "Do You Know Athena Used to Be a Tomboy?" spoofs transphobic responses to trans men coming out, Greek drama style: the listener is "encouraged" to remain a woman by the goddess Athena (I didn't want to be a girl either, but then I learned to love myself, and to become the tutelary of Athens. Have you tried being the tutelary of Athens?); a Chorus: ("Well, of course we'd all be trans now, wouldn't we? Anyone born nowadays, that's just a given, they just—someone tells you at school, or something—everyone's trans now."); and a Deuteragonist, whose concern-trollish speeches gradually reveal more and more intense personal gender anxieties. From the final meltdown (pp. 188-189):

I mean, if I were thirty years younger—if I were twenty-five years younger—if I were eighteen years younger—God, if I were just ten years younger—if I were a year and a day younger—if you'd asked me just five minutes ago, four and a half even, if I'd picked up on the first ring instead of the third, I'd transition. Hell, I'd transition. Oh my God, I wish I could transition. Ask me again, but sooner. Come back yesterday. Come back a week ago. What good are you to me now, when I am—this? Where were you when there was still summer in my heart? Come back a month ago, a decade, but come back to me before I had to forgive you. Just come back and ask again; I'll wait if it takes forever this time.

I don't have much to add to that, really.

Next post will have to talk about the transformation of Amalthea. I'm not the first to observe that it's a potent dysphoria metaphor, but I've got more to unpack about Schmendrick's perspectives if he's trans, and there's a lot to dig into re. the love story with Prince Lir. I've also got some intense takes cooking on the tower scene with Haggard, if I get there. Anyway, thanks for reading! And thanks @endetithei for sharing this book with me as much as you have. (Sorry that this is how you'll find out I was up all night.)

[faintingcouchguy]

Top five butches

Good lord bro I’m not strong enough

5. Mae Martin

4. Ivan Coyote

3. Alison Bechdel

2. The stranger in the leather jacket @idionkisson and I saw at the train station in 2019. my stone butch blues Rocco moment. Fleeting breathtaking encounter with no words exchanged but I will carry it forever

1. UHmmmm. Let’s practice self love and say me :3

[faintingcouchguy]

Top five choral pieces

5. gabriel fauré cantique de jean racine (real basic but important to me so it stays)

4. Brahms nänie (a new challenger has entered!!hope I get another crack at it someday)

3. Rachmaninoff all-night vigil

2. Benedict Sheehan akathist (guaranteed boutique pick but it’s not every year I get such a career highlight so it’s well earned)

1. Brahms ein deutsches requiem

[chthonic-cassandra]

Re. vampire question: I think there's an element of accepting monstrosity. The vampire is the unacceptable monster whose desires and nature are dangerous; if someone chooses to be with the vampire even so, then that's an intimate thing. Hopefully this necessitates the vampire understanding and welcoming the other person in all of their monstrosity too.

I think this might not be the dynamic you're asking about, though, because the vampire (or whatever) isn't the sire/master. My instinct there is that there's an allure about like... being chosen, being the one special enough to be allowed into the sire's truest heart. Something like that.

Thank you for this! I do think you're right that this is a meaningfully different dynamic than what I'm asking about - what you're articulating is a particular type of gothic romance that I think often shows up in narratives of vampire/human romance, but doesn't map on very well to a maker-fledgling dynamic (though if anyone can think of exceptions I would be interested to hear them!).

The dynamic you articulate here is also one that is pretty specifically not what most interests me in vampire stories, which is one of the things that's so fascinating about questions like these, how personal and specific the answers turn out to be.

[chthonic-cassandra]

you did do an excellent job helping me organize my books, though

<3 <3 <3

(This took me several minutes to get, but once I did it became hilarious.)

[sylvainjosegaytier]

hey, wanted to say i loved ur the ace sylvix fic-- reading it really unlocked some stuff for me and gave me Many Good Feelings. (i'm also um a huge fan of trans felix in any capacity, so thank u for that too)

AAAAAA thank u so much!!!!!!

I’m so glad you found it helpful—I remember reading stuff like that when I was first realizing that I was ace and being like “oh damn, you can have a partner who actually supports you??”

Especially for Sylvain who clearly just has not thought about the fact that it could be okay to not have sex really at all lmao

Felix is always trans in everything I write because I mean Felix just IS trans, I don’t make the rules. I’m currently working on a much much longer piece with them (much, much, MUCH longer… it’s at 90k and counting…) that hopefully I’ll get done and can post soon about their journey of recovery in the wake of the war

Anyway thank you so much again!! Interested parties can read the fic here