Agender (they/them/their). An adult. Astronomer. British. Bisexual. Christian. Feminist. LARPer. Writer. On AO3 as Triss_Hawkeye. Here you'll probably find a lot of fandoms, social justice, SPACE!, awesome music, and whatever else I happen to be into at the time. Nowadays there's a lot of C-dramas and video games. Sometimes I give a voice to Birds Rights Activism.
It's been a couple of weeks since I finished Salts of Mercury, and I'm still thinking about why we learn virtually nothing about what Moth thinks about being brought back and the particular circumstances under which it happened.
We can deduce a certain amount—by the fact that she stays, that she doesn't raise a scandal, that she doesn't tell the children just as Vervain doesn't.
But the extent to which she is happy, satisfied, conscience untroubled or not, dysphoric or dysmorphic or not, is invisible to us, and I can't decide whether that's because Vervain does not care to tell Asphodel (and the history books) or because Moth did not care to tell Vervain.
i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.
basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.
but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.
bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.
now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.
anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.
that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.
and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.
and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.
troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.
or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.
i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.
anyway.
this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.
I took an artistic risk with Salts of Mercury. Vervain is difficult. Vervain will present a difficulty for many readers, because you cannot know how to refer to Vervain in a way that is comfortable or clear. Vervain might have any kind of anatomy and any social gender. Vervain has taken pains, as the first person narrator of the story, to ensure that you, the reader, do not know what that anatomy or that social gender might be.
Vervain lives in a gendered world, with men and women in it. Vervain knows people whose social gender and anatomy are at odds, and gives you enough information to infer who those people are. (Vervain could probably accomplish a medical transition, and never mentions it.) Vervain is a powerful wizard who can transmute the human body into something slightly... else... and does. Vervain is writing a confession, using only the pronouns I and me, and even on the way to the gallows, you do not get any answers.
So what is Vervain's gender?
I am writing myself into history, and I am leaving my sex unrecorded. Interpret that as you will.
his dark materials will literally always work bc every small child wants an animal companion that loves you most and goes on adventures with you and every adult wants an animal companion that can shoulder some of life’s immense psychologically damage for you. and you can pet it
triangle is great in humanities contexts but in social science contexts it’s a nightmare. as soon as you have 3 of something instead of 2 of something everything gets infinitely more complicated and you end up having to google shit like “nonparametric equivalence testing for factorial designs”. fuck my stupid baka life
Easily one of the most interesting Faustus interps I’ve seen recently was a local college production where the demons DIDNT just immediately, violently drag Faust to hell in the last scene.
Instead, as the clock was approaching midnight, soft music started playing ((Non Je Ne Regrette Rein by Edith Piaf)), and a spotlight fell on Mephistopheles, who had been standing downstage for most of the scene, hidden in darkness.
He walked across the stage, where the actor playing Faust was. He was kneeling, face in hands, openly weeping, and Mephistopheles helped him to his feet. And then they started to slow dance.
Mephistopheles was clearly leading, and Faust was just kinda slumped over on him, with his face buried in his neck, not really moving as much. And it’s all like, really genuinely tender? You get the impression that Mephistopheles is trying to make Faust’s last moments at least somewhat peaceful.
And then, as the song is getting to the last part, you see this circular red outline appear under them. It starts out really dim, but as the song draws to a close, it gets brighter and brighter. And then, during the last lines of the song, Mephistopheles let’s go of Faustus and steps out of the circle. And THAT is when Faust gets dragged to hell. The red circle starts to lower down into the stage, and you see all these hands begin to reach up and grab at Faust and at the edges of the circle. And Mephistopheles just watches. Calmly.
The stage closed back up. Faust is gone. Mephistopheles just kinda saunters over to Fausts bed and sits down on it. Then after a few seconds, the scholars come in and give their whole shpeal. However, when they go to leave, Mephistopheles gets up and follows them. Just as the Second Scholar is about to exit, Mephistopheles whispers something seductively in his ear. The scholar pauses for a moment, shakes his head, and leaves.
Chorus. End. That’s it.
The entire thing was an odd mix of tender and spooky, and it’s almost hard to get a read on what the director was going for. But I still thought it was incredibly cool.
The manga Space Brothers by Chuuya Koyama ends today after 18 years, 10 months and 46 volumes. Congrats to Mr. Chuuya Koyama and thank you!
[link to tweet]
Morning's cover when the first chapter of Space Brothers was published (2007) to the left and Morning's cover when the final chapter was published (2026) to the right.
Morning is the manga magazine Space Brothers was seralized in.
[link to tweet]
*Bonus*
The cover for Volume 1 and Volume 46 of Space Brothers. The beginning and the end!
[link to official twitter]
Back in 2024 there was an article on how the anime would continue once the manga was completed. Hopefully this is still the plan!
[Link to my tumblr post on the article: Space Brothers Author: Anime Planned to Continue After Manga End]
[ID: Two screencaps from Black Sails ep X showing John SIlver standing alone beneath a skylight in the ship's galley. Captions show him saying "An account of goings-on, volume the first on this 13th day in June". End ID]
You know I watched She-ra forever ago and I still hadn't drawn them! I adore catradora and I'd had these stickers in mind for a long time, just never got around to it until now! Enjoy!
