disco post-canon fluff crackfic where despite harry's decades-long bender, he and kim have been able to reach their 70s and are living out their twilight years in the very same martinaise that brought them to eachother, it's all very nice and saccharine-sweet, prose covered in waxy residue re: the beauty of wrinkles and shared tenderness and pennyroyal tea or whatever, parallels with the changing face of the formerly-disgraced district brought to beauty by le retour, cuno's there too i guess, and just as theyre about to share a bashful little old man yaoi kiss they get fried by the fuckin nuke
I must stress that Its been a year since I read PJOL so maybe this isn't that accurate. But to me, at its most simplest and stripped of nuance, the Pale is nihilism/individualism/not caring about the world and the people around you. To combat the Pale, you must show compassion/community/care for something.
Of course this is alongside the Pale being a metaphor for nostalgia and the past- not in odds with it. Particularly in regards to this scene:
I always read this as not 'oh Communism defeats the Pale', but rather the thing that wards off the Pale is genuine hope and belief in a cause. Believing in movement and progress and a different world is what defeats the stagnation of the Pale. The Pale is sarcasm, nihilism, irony and unseriousness, and to stop the world's end you must show the opposite of that.
If machine translation did not exist, or even if it was really good, even from low-corpus languages as Estonian, we would never have the in joke of calling Puha ja Õudne Lohn "Holy and Spooky Smell" instead of "Sacred and Terrible Air". Trully we fandommed at the right stage of technological development
[image 1: black text on white background reading, "They evacuate people through the night cities, trying to outstrip perceived horizons of disintegration. These relocation attempts break down as matter ceases to perform. Fuel is water and water is air. Walls are soft. Push a truck until the wheels slough off. Sit on the couch and watch people with a little more energy take your food."]
[image 2: black text on a sepia background reading, "Then, when the stars bend under the destruction falling from above, many can no longer take the phrase “the end of the world” entirely seriously. The panic has cooled. In the strange indifference of the evacuation, whole families stay behind in Vaasa. There they play board games, in their houses, in their spacious apartments. They love vitamin-rich food, and when the pale is only a few days away, it’s always signalled by the same beautiful event. Fruits go mouldy. It grows vigorously on them. Children listen to oranges crackling on the table. Spores sprout from the pulp, apples are hairy with it. If you try to touch them, they crack open. No one knows why it’s like that. But few can muster the energy to be afraid of that time, and that's why I say it's beautiful."]
[image 3: black text on a white background reading, "Vellus and Isidol loot a mansion, kicking through walls like sand. The owner is looking for them with a flashlight, listening for the vibration of their hearts transmitted through the hollow surfaces, hunting for ghosts. They run, bending the taffy bars of the fence.
They scored a jacket and some dehydrated fruit. They curl up together in a funicular stranded on a rusty rail, cozy metal box with ashen windows, seat cushions for pillows.]
[image 4: black text on a sepia background reading, "Nothing seems to stop future ecologically-oriented projects there either. In the very last months, when the pale is creeping across the ocean towards Vaasa, lobby groups against light pollution see their grand dream come true. Industrial and commercial buildings turn off artificial lighting at the end of the working day, and street lamps are shielded with special filters. As the first and last big city in the history of the world, Vaasa completely eliminates light pollution. This isn’t just a measure against bomb raids – it also saves birds who might otherwise get lost in the city's maze of lights, and harbour seals whose mating rhythms are disrupted when the day is too long. You may laugh at this, but in the evening, when the big world in the distance swells into a bloody maelstrom, families come out into the street in Vaasa and are insignificant together. Only distant explosions disturb the deep peace of the winter night, its flawless starry sky. Everyone watches, heads tilted back."]
[image 5: black text on a white background reading, "The sun shines like a sick moon.
Holding hands, feeling her thin and brittle wrist. Rubbing her palm nervously, like you always did, leaves flakes now, ashen thumbprints.
Vellus and Isidol are becoming part of the dust storm."]
[image 6: black text on a sepia background that reads, "Like everyone else, she can't do anything in this extended stay, where one’s sense of the present slowly drifts away. But whereas the others dissolve into their memories, she simply disappears. It’s as if her life had never happened. The past is not awaiting her return. She just wanders around the rooms, adjusts her grandmother's lace doily and bedspreads, arranges the curtains on the rails. And thus, tastefully, she refuses to indulge in those ecstasies which visit the human spirit when the world is disintegrating. Nothing leaves her hands, and nothing returns.
When Katla finally sinks into the pale, Ann-Margret Lund turns, without the slightest pleasure, into a protein mass."]
