Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 35

August 28, 2018

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 21, The World or “You’re never going to guess where the plot finally shows up.”

This is it, everyone. Exactly one year since we started Chapter 0, we’ve reached the end. This is the final installment of our Handbook For Mortals recap. I want to announce that I’ll be doing a Facebook Live event on Saturday night, 10 P.M. EST, on my Jenny Trout Facebook account, to talk about the acknowledgments section and do some drunk Tarot to get a forecast for the future of the book series and upcoming movie. These are pretty fun to do, because I can talk to you while I’m doing them, so drop on in at any time after 10 P.M. to join the live feed.


Shit, I might even brush my hair or put on makeup or something.


Or like.


Shower that day.


Anyway, I just wanted to thank you all for coming on this journey through hell and scandal with me, yet again. Here’s hoping nobody pulls any bullshit and hits my nasty button for a while, so I can take a vacation from shitty, shitty books.



The chapter starts out exactly like the end of Clueless (as others have noted).


“You may now kiss the bride!”


The Nevada sun shone down on the bride and groom, and the breeze blew her hair as their lips met. It was like a perfect sight out of a magazine,


Or Clueless.


and I was pretty sure I had never seen anything more magical


Except in Clueless.


––and I knew magick.


Not very well, I guess, since you almost died trying to do majikx recently.


After a few moments, the bride pulled back and Charles looked at Dela with tears in his eyes.


So, here’s the thing about this reveal: she’s trying to be like, “Charles looked at Dela with tears in his eyes,” like everybody is going to go, “Oh, it’s Chuck and Sandwiches getting married, not Lazytown and Mac.” But if the fact that the love triangle was completely unresolved at the end of the last chapter didn’t clue you in that Lungbutter and Mac weren’t headed on the road to marital bliss, the POV skew here would. If Laparoscopy had been the bride, she wouldn’t have referred to herself as “the bride” and she wouldn’t have been able to see the kiss. I’m not sure if Lani Sarem thought she could keep dramatically delaying the “reveal” or something by referring to her mom as “the bride” and then saying Charles looked at Dela; it could be that she intended the reader to think Charles was emotional because his daughter was getting married, but it also could be just more bad writing on her part.


She goes on to wing us into another POV skew.


They felt relaxed and happy.


To an outside observer, they can look or seem relaxed and happy. And it could be shown, rather than told: “Relaxing in their chairs, the couple beamed at each other,” or something like that.


So much had happened, and they had come so far.


Look, this is the last chapter of the book and I feel pretty fucking confident in saying that nothing, let alone “so much” has happened. Unless she’s referring to the fact that Dela lied to Charles and secretly used mahjix to separate him from his child against his will for like twenty years, and also lied to her daughter about doing that. Everyone is just cool with that? I guess they are, because the author is insistent that it’s no big deal to have your mind and life violated to the point where you are physically restrained from asking for help by unseen forces.


Zani describes how fun the party is and is quick to point out that her mother is keeping her own name. You know. Because this is a work of sheer feminist artistry and possibly the most important, female-led project of all time. Sandwiches tells Zeda that she’s always seen that she and Charles would get married, but only if he changed.


So…how was he supposed to change? How was he supposed to learn to trust or become a better father if he was ensorcelled for the entire time of his exile?


Dela laughed and smiled at me before getting serious again, “You should learn a lesson from this: always have faith and remember sometimes the darkest moments really do come just before the dawn.”


Huh. I kind of thought the lesson to be taken away here is that if you have majick, you can do whatever you want and rationalize it later.


Of course, Jackson’s band is playing the wedding, and they announce it’s time for the bouquet and garter toss. Mac asks if Lubraderm is going to try to catch the bouquet.


“I don’t believe in those silly superstitions,” I remarked, smiling.


Get it? Because she’s majichk? It’s super funny. Laugh. Please laugh. Lani Sarem is begging you. She’s doing her best, damnit!


Even though Mac tries to “shove” her into the crowd of single girls (yikes, that is not the word I would have chosen), Labrador refuses.


As Mom watched, the bouquet, miraculously, flew past all the women who were desperate to catch it.


See, Lumbar Zuncture isn’t desperate because she’s Not Like Other Girls™.


At the last second I turned to see what was going on, just in time to see it flying at me.


If you weren’t looking, how did you see your mom throw the bouquet or it going above the “desperate” women’s heads?


I was completely startled as it landed right in my arms.


I was not.


“How in the world…? I wasn’t even trying to catch it!” I was stunned, trying to explain to all the women were looking at me in disbelief.


IDK, genius, maybe it’s like, fucking majjjjaeixckkkkx or something.


Jesus Christ, it’s like this book knows it’s ending and is racing to be the worst it can possibly be.


Then I looked over at Dela, who was grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and I knew exactly how it had happened.


How fucking dense do you have to be to––


You know what? Nope. I’m almost done. I just have to get through the next few paragraphs.


Mac tells Zunt that she can’t fight destiny, and even though they’re at the wedding together and she caught the bouquet, I want to reiterate that we still have not seen any explicit resolution of the love triangle at this point. Mac asks Lantern if there’s a book he can read.


“Yeah, you know, like a handbook for mortals, just so I can keep up!”


A scene from Family Guy in which Peter Griffin is in a movie theater. He points at the screen and says,


That would have been as strong a line to end on as Lani Sarem could have possibly come up with, but obviously, her avatar needs to get the last word:


“I’ll try to find you one.”


I can imagine her sitting at her computer, going, “Hmmm…that line about a handbook for mortals is pretty good…but I’m not the one delivering it. The ‘I’ll try to find you one,’ is spoke by me, er, Zade, so it’s obviously better…but how can I really give this ending the punch it needs?


And they lived happily ever after…OR DO THEY?


I’m not joking. I didn’t add that. This is actually in the book, ALLCAPS and all. It’s followed immediately by this text in bold and a larger font:


Can’t wait to find out what happens next? Enjoy this teaser from the second book in the saga due out in 2018!


Nah, I’m good. But tick tock, Lani. Tick tock.


So, remember how I titled this recap, “You’re never going to guess where the plot finally shows up?” Well, I bet you can guess, now. I’m not going to recap it in depth because I have absolutely no interest in the “saga” *Twilight cough cough*, but the teaser starts out literally right after the last line of dialogue, without any break. Which will make the first line of the second book:


Mac had walked away to go talk to someone and, at the same time, my mom walked over to join me and congratulate me on catching the bouquet.


No, seriously. That is somehow going to be the first line of the next book.


So, what happens is that a man in a suit comes up and Dela greets him with “Namaste,” because enough cultures haven’t been ripped off already. Then there’s this whole explanation about how this guy is called Aunt Aldyth because he likes to dress up in women’s clothing and wears makeup and it’s this funny thing because he’s a guy who dresses in women’s clothing and is called by a feminine title, get it? Get it?


So, I guess, yeah, if you’re super into transmisogyny and cultural appropriation, this book is gonna deliver. Big time.


It’s also apparently going to have the fucking plot that didn’t happen in the first god damn book. This totally new and never before heard of but beloved relative tells them that all these various dark and light entities are out to get Zim’s powers because she was a special child foretold by some prophecy that also means she and Mac are not destined to be together. But they might be. But maybe not. Because the love triangle in Twilight stretched out over multiple books, so why not this one? Then, and only then, do they discuss the twice-seen, apparent antagonist of the first book, Lamorghini Girl. And they set some trees on fire.


So, here’s what I’m guessing: either one of the multitudes of editors she definitely, definitely worked with said, “You really can’t have the plot show up in the last three pages of the book,” and Lani though, “Well, I’ll just add ‘And they lived happily ever after…OR DO THEY?’ and say the end of the book is a teaser,” or she realized she needed to have a teaser and went, “Well, I’ll just add ‘And they lived happily ever after…OR DO THEY?’ and say the end of the book is a teaser.”


The remaining two percent of the book is the acknowledgment section:


The thank-yous were, by far, the hardest part of writing this book. I literally edited and rewrote and added to this section the whole time I was writing.


Just imagine if she’d spent any of that effort on the actual story.


And we’re done with Shitbook For Chortles.

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Published on August 28, 2018 13:12

August 24, 2018

The Big Damn Buffy Rewatch S04E05 “Beer Bad”

Heads up: I installed The Good Place extension on Chrome and didn’t realize it would actually *post* the censored swears. So, for those unaware of The Good Place and its swears: Shirt = Shit, Fork = Fuck, Dink = Dick, What or where the hell will convert to What the here/where the here, and Bench = Bitch. Honestly, I could go back and change it but it’s so funny I’m leaving it to be a part of Trout Nation history forever.


In every generation, there is a chosen one. She alone will probably die from injuries caused when a dog she’s stepping over decides to stand up suddenly. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:



Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
Joyce is a forking terrible parent.
Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
All the monsters look like wieners.
If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
Angel is a dink.
Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
Some of this shirt is racist as fork.
Science and technology are not to be trusted.
Mental illness is stigmatized.
Only Willow can use a computer.
Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
Oz is the Anti-Xander
Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
Smoking is evil.
Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shirt is homophobic as fork.
How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
This show caters to the straight/bi female gaze like whoa.
Sunnydale General is the worst hospital in the world.
Faith is hyper-sexualized needlessly.
Slut shame!
The Watchers have no forking clue what they’re doing.
Vampire bites, even very brief ones, are 99.8% fatal.
Economic inequality is humorized and oversimplified.
Buffy is an abusive romantic partner.
Riley is the worst.
Joss Whedon has a problem with fat people.
Spike is an abusive romantic partner.
Why are all these men so terrible?
Wicca doesn’t work like that.
Alcohol is evil.
Head trauma doesn’t work like that.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.


WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that into consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it.



I am super not looking forward to dissecting this episode because, like so many in season four, I’m into it. I love this season despite a couple of major, glaring, totally cringeworthy faults, and this is one of my favorites. But here at Trout Nation, we know that we owe it to our darlings to kill them. So, let’s get hacking.


After a “previously on”, we find Buffy dressed in black leather pants, fighting a group of vampires to Matrix-level techno music. And who cowers in the middle of the fray? That’s right. It’s Stupid forking Douchebag. Buffy heroically stakes all the vamps to rescue him. Romantic music swells in the background.


SFD: “Buffy. I don’t know what to say. After how I’ve treated you… and now I owe you my life.”


Buffy: “It’s nothing.”


SFD: “It’s everything. You’re everything. And I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get you to forgive me. Do you think, one day, you might?”


Then we snap out of Buffy’s fantasy to see her watching, longing and heartbroken, as SFD canoodles with another student in their psych class. Maggie Walsh is teaching about the id, and how said part of our mind wants comfort and pleasure all the time. She asks how we react when we can’t have what we want. Smash cut to Buffy, back in the black leather pants, kicking vampire ash to save SFD, who now has a bouquet of roses and a pint of ice cream.



I don’t care if you had a gallon of ice cream, pal, you’re still not worth my Buffy crying about you.


After the opening credits, we’re on campus, where Buffy and Willow are trying to study and Xander is trying to helpfully light their cigarettes. Which, of course, they don’t have because of #22. This episode draws a clear distinction, however, between what about smoking is evil. It’s okay to be an accessory to said consumption of nicotine. The act of actually smoking the cigarette is the bad part.


Ah, I love myself so much when I’m doing this pointless picky bullshirt.


Xander is trying to practice having empathy and lighting cigarettes for his new bartending gig, which he is certain will grant him entrée into the world of college living. When Willow points out that Xander isn’t old enough to legally tend bar, he produces the obviously fake I.D. he used to get the job. Now, because I am who I am, I have to go through the whole rigamarole where I say that the owner of a bar is going to be good at spotting fake licenses, that Xander would have had to produce his social security number for a W-2 and his employer would get in super big trouble, etc. etc. etc. HOWEVER, this is obviously not a big deal to the dude who runs the bar because he’s your average low-level Sunnydale demonic troublemaker, to begin with.


Buffy says she can’t make up any fake problems for Xander to practice caring about because she has like, real ones? And Xander is super excited to hear her real problems now that they’ll serve a purpose in his life (#5). Willow comes up with a bartender S.A.T. level problem for him:


Willow: “I’m pregnant by my stepbrother who’d rather be with my best friend who just left me with no place to live, no food except for this bottle of Wild Turkey which I drunk all up.”


But Buffy is still stuck on SFD, rattling off a long and complex theory about brain bubbles and SFD coming to his sense and them living happily ever after. Willow, now pretty much sick of hearing about SFD, tells her that there are guys out there for her who are much, much better.


Willow: “There are men, better men, wherein the mind is stronger than the penis.”


Xander: “Nothing can defeat the penis!”


He basically shouts that. And in that moment, I am become Xander and Xander is become me, because I do that shirt all the time. I actually had a guy ask me in the grocery store if I was that woman who jogged around town shouting, “Melissa!” for no reason.


Like, there’s a reason, okay? It’s because I’m lonely sometimes.


Anyway, Buffy tries again with the “maybe deep down, SFD is really good” nonsense and Willow changes the channel real damn fast, telling Buffy that if she wants to talk about SFD, she can talk to Xander. And Xander is like, yeah, because bartenders listen, and we cut to Xander trying to hear a customer’s order over shouting and loud music. He’s overwhelmed and the college students he desperately wants to be a part of are treating him like shirt. Buffy walks in and sees SFD sitting in a booth with yet another girl. She’s trying to spy on them when she bumps into Riley and spills his drink. And of course, because he’s Riley, he jokes it off and takes half the blame, because as much as I end up not liking him, Riley can be a good guy. When his fragile man-baby ego isn’t throwing a huge temper tantrum.


We’ll get to that next season.


Buffy mentions that she just saw SFD.


Riley: “Right. [SFD] and his latest conquest. You know, that boy should have his attention span checked.”


Riley goes on to describe how sleazy SFD is and how he feels about it until he realizes that Buffy isn’t listening to him and is instead watching SFD make out with the girl in the booth. Riley tells Buffy he’s meeting people and that he’ll see her in class.


At the bar, Xander tries his “rough day?” routine on a pretty blonde girl who actually had an awesome day with her sorority. As they’re talking a “college guy” (read: actor who is roughly thirty-six) comes up and interrupts them. And Xander, being Xander and not understanding that his role here includes sometimes not finishing conversations with patrons, tries to reassert his place in the exchange. The college guy then asks Xander what he and the blonde girl were discussing, and Xander says to forget it.


College Guy: “No, no, no. I rudely interrupted. And it sounds like the two of you were having quite the meeting of minds. Possibly debating the geopolitical rammifications of bioengineering. You have a take on that?”


Xander: “I’ve got beer. You want some beer?”


College guy starts throwing around big words about sociological experiments and how they can watch some socioeconomic thing play out yadda yadda, basically, it’s a blatant rip-off of the “How do you like them apples” scene in Good Will Hunting, ramming home how elitist the college kids are and how shirttily they treat people who are beneath them. And I gotta say, I did run into a lot of that when I lived in a college town, but there are a hundred different ways to show this dynamic without a) ramming it down our throats in every episode and b) outright copying a hugely memorable scene from another piece of media.


The one original part of the scene is that Xander is robbed of any sort of triumph. He tries to card College Guy for his beer but forgets that he works for a dude that really doesn’t give a shirt about legality. The owner tells Xander to just shut up and pour the beer, leaving Xander humiliated.


Welcome to the service industry!


Xander sees Buffy sitting at the bar and asks her, for real, if she’s had a rough day.


Buffy: “It’s just…[SFD]’s problem with intimacy turns out to be that he can’t get enought of it. And I knew it. I knew what he was.”


And then she calls herself a slut. This is a rare #33 that both is and isn’t #6, in that the audience knows that it’s not Buffy’s fault that SFD is the way he is and that she was just young and naive. However, it does suggest that if a woman does know that a guy is in it just for the sex and sleeps with him anyway, that makes her a slut. And Xander telling Buffy that she’s not a slut doesn’t erase the secondary implication.


Xander can’t talk too long, what with the being at work, so Buffy leaves as to not bother him. But as she walks away, she bumps into yet another dude and spills yet another beer. Buffy is officially the clumsiest superhero ever. The guy is immediately smitten with her and says she can’t leave without having a beer with him. Then his friend College Guy shows up:


College Guy: “What my friend’s just saying is…you shouldn’t be sad and alone right now. I mean, you’re a very beautiful girl who should be covered with men. And…could we be those men?”


So, apparently, things didn’t go well for college guy even after he humiliated Xander in front of that blonde. By the by, when College guy says “we” he’s referring to him, Spilled Beer, Some Other Dude, and Kal Penn. Like, seriously. Actually Kal Penn. This is the third acting job listed on his IMDB. We saw him before he was The Kal Penn.


Buffy guest star has worked in the White House.


The IMDB also lists his name as Hunt, but I don’t remember ever hearing them say their names at all in this. I assume they’re all some riff on caveman stuff. Like maybe one of them is Club and the other is Forage and the other is Eaten By Mammoth. Or whatever. We’re going to stick to College Dude, Spilled Beer, Some Other Dude, and Kal Penn for clarity.


Buffy is hesitant to take a beer from these guys, which is fair. They’re all wearing oxford shirts and Dockers. They’re like the Stepford Frat Brothers (aren’t they all, though?). But she sees SFD leaving with his latest arm candy and decides, you know what? fork it. I’m going to drink with these guys who are desperate for my attention.


Over at The Bronze, Willow and Oz are having their date night. That is, Willow is watching in horror as Oz and THIS bench eye fork each other.



Her name is Veruca, which is a subtle cue to people who grew up watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that this bench is not to be trusted. Willow totally picks up that vibe and tries to distract Oz, but he can’t tear his gaze away.


We rejoin Buffy at the bar with her new friends, Kal Penn’s unfortunate hair,


I had a high school boyfriend with this exact hair.

a guy who must be related to James Marsters because there is something genetic going on here,



and then the two other guys.


College Guy (the one who looks like Spike) is spouting off something about how if everybody got drunk, the world’s problems would be solved. So, basically, the beer in this episode is standing in for weed. Buffy says her mom thinks beer is evil. Like, hang on, Joyce. We saw you drinking wine with your book club buddy in the episode where Buffy just came back from running away. Remember? That out of control party where minors were drinking in your house while you were also drinking in your house? So, this line makes no sense. Somebody jotted it down as a throwaway line, thinking nobody would notice or care about the continuity.


But I noticed.


I cared.


Anyway, the dude responds by saying:


College Guy: “Evil, good. These are moral absolutes that predate the fermentation of malt and fine hops.”


Then, he loses track of what he was saying and Some Other Guy tries to jump in with something about Thomas Aquinas, which everyone shuts right the here down. Then College Guy goes on to explain that if morality had been determined after beer, there wouldn’t be any good versus evil. So, again, clearly, beer is standing in for weed here. These are weed conversations this table is having.


The next morning, Willow comes into the dorm room mimicking a conversation between Oz and Veruca.


Willow: “‘My name is Veruca, I’m in a band!’ ‘Oh, uh, I’m Oz, I’m in a band, too. Oh, and this is Wil.’ ‘Oh, how fun, a groupie!’ Groupie. Buff, have you heard of this Veruca chick? Dresses like Faith, voice like an albatross?”


One of the things I love (okay, one of the things most people love) about the dialogue on this show is how realistic it is. Everyone describes people this way, to varying degrees: “You know, Pam in accounting? Looks like Cathy from processing?” The fact that Willow references a character who is no longer around but whom they used to know as shorthand for “this girl wears tight clothes” is so natural. It also gives long-time viewers who are familiar with the show a little nod: see, we know all the same people. You’re in on this, too. You’re a part of this conversation. We have a shared history.


And then it all gets blasted away in season five. At least we have this for now.


Buffy is not able to participate in the cleverly crafted dialogue. She is hung the entire fork over, staring blankly at a music video on TV. Willow asks if she’s okay.


Buffy: “I’m suffering the afterness of a bad night of…badness.”


Willow: “You didn’t! Not with [SFD] again!”


Buffy: “No. With four really smart guys.”


And Willow is like, hold up, four? They are not on the same page at all. And Buffy can’t talk in full sentences at all. Willow even has to remind her to get dressed to go to class. But at least they get that whole group sex misunderstanding cleared up.


In Psych, the only class that Buffy apparently takes, Buffy interrupts Professor Walsh and grabs a sandwich right out of another student’s hand and starts eating it. When Willow asks in alarm if she’s okay, Buffy is confused as to why she’s even asking the question. And she keeps eating. Then we cut to a series of tubes:



 


The whole concoction drains into a keg of Black Frost, the brand of beer Buffy and her new friends were drinking the night before. Which is great and everything, but…now the beer is flat. I mean, unless whoever is running Gargamel’s meth lab here is actually kegging it himself. Which, you know, sure. That could be a thing. I’m just a little confused as to why it would be necessary or easier to put the potion in the keg than to put the potion on the glasses or attach some kind of reservoir to the line.


You know what? I’m overthinking this.


Buffy and her new friends are back at the bar the next night, super drunk off the enchanted beer. Some Other Guy tells Buffy to come to their class on “big thinking”. Like, they’re not holding their shirt together at all. And Xander’s keeping an eye on her because honestly, I’m going to give this one to Xander. He’s not being a Nice Guy here, he’s being a nice guy, the way bartenders should be when there’s a very intoxicated young woman hanging out with four equally intoxicated college-aged men. Something awful could happen to her. He’s so focused on Buffy, in fact, that when an attractive woman finally presents him with the opportunity to light her cigarette, he does this and never looks away from Buffy:



Instead of talking about Thomas Aquinas or anything smart-sounding, the group is now drinking beer, pushing each other, grunting, and laughing at nothing. So like…again, is this supposed to be about weed?


Back at the dorm, Oz catches up with Willow and tells her that he’s going to play with Veruca’s band that night and she should come along. Willow passes on watching her boyfriend move on to another chick, which she completely understands is what’s happening and it’s heartbreaking.


Back at the now-deserted bar, Buffy and her new gang are engaged in a rousing exchange of “You stupid!” Xander turns on the jukebox and Buffy is delighted that it “sings”. As she crawls all over the machine, Xander informs her that she’s been cut off and he’s kicking her out of the bar.


Buffy: “Want beer! Like beer! Beer good!”


Xander: “Beer bad! Bad, bad beer. What the here am I saying? Buffy, go home and go to bed.”


They said the name of the thing in the thing!


Once the guys notice that Buffy has left, they’re not happy. Ominous music plays.


Now, I don’t know for sure where the hell the next scene takes place. It’s in some kind of basement coffee bar where nobody works? I don’t know what’s up. But Willow runs into SFD and she is ready to unload all of her frustration not only over him but over Oz’s behavior, as well. She confronts SFD and demands he answer for hurting Buffy.


SFD: “Willow…I’m not sure I need to explain my actions here. But if that’s what you want––”


Willow: “Yes. Followed by an admission of undeniable guilt, but go on.”


SFD: “Some relationships center on a deep emotional tie or a loyal friendship or something. But most are just two people passing through life, enriching or aggravating each other’s lives briefly.”


Willow: “Go on.”


SFD: “Just for one night, can’t two people who feel an attraction come together and create something wonderful? And then go back to their lives the next day better for it, but never over-analyzing it or wanting it to be more than what it was? I have. She should, too.”


Willow: “People like Buffy and, and me, assume that intimacy means friendship and respect. People shouldn’t have to ask first ‘are you gonna be eying other prospects tomorrow?'”


SFD: “People shouldn’t have to preface casual sex with ‘just so you know, I’ll never grow any older with you.’ It takes the fire out of it.”


Ugh, this guy is a diaper load.


He tells Willow that he’s sorry “if” he misled Buffy and “if” he hurt her. But it’s not an if. Willow just told him that he hurt Buffy. And he knows that he misled her because it’s his modus operandi to tell girls intimate details of his life in order to pull them into his confidence and get them into bed. SFD’s thoughts about casual sex aren’t wrong, it’s the fact that he doesn’t inform his partners, with whom he fakes a deep emotional connection in order the manipulate them, that they’re having casual sex.


At the bar, the guys are so drunk that they’re taking their shirts off and handing Xander absolute scads of money, which he has no compunction about receiving since these were the guys treating him like shirt just a couple nights before.


Xander: “You know, I’ve always had a problem calculating the tip and you guys, being so dapper of brain, maybe you can help me out. Okay. Great. See, if your bill comes to thirty-eight dollars and generally people tip, what, aproximately thirty percent? That makes your tip what?”


When the grunting drunk dudes hand over another huge amount of cash, Xander plays along:


Xander: “You are so smart. This is so the right amount.”


Then loud noises of the breaking variety come from the bathroom and an honest-to-god caveman bursts through the door. It’s College Dude, and he has gone full Missing Link. He knocks Xander out and, after the commercial break, is screaming in Xander’s face. Then the rest of Buffy’s new friends start turning into cavemen, as well, growing extra hair, bad teeth, and prominent brow ridges. They surround Xander, who uses his lighter to scare them off with “angry” fire. When they leave the building, he runs to the bar owner.


Xander: “Jack! Jack! We got a problem. The guys…they…they’re…some of your patrons are turning into cavemen.”


Jack: “They had it comin.'”


The cavefrats run around campus in various states of undress, climbing trees and trying to eat leaves. Back at the bar, Jack explains his motive:


Jack: “I’ve been taking abuse from snot-nosed kids for twenty years. And they’re always coming in here with their snotty attitudes, drinking their fruity little microbrews and spouting out some philosophy like it means a damn thing, thinking they’re different than us.”


Xander: “They are now.”


Jack: “They, they ain’t. That’s the great thing about beer. It makes all men the same.”


Xander asks why they’re talking about the beer before he realizes what Jack is saying. Jack’s warlock brother-in-law taught him how to turn people into cavemen, which is a fascinating blend of #8 and #26. Jack is a Sunnydale guy who knows that supernatural shirt exists and is happy to use it because he’s ambivalent to the very real dangers of, you know. Turning people into cavemen. Xander realizes that Buffy has also had the beer and he rushes off to save her while Jack tells him that the effects will wear off after a few days.


The cavemen dudes have no idea how to deal with traffic, and one of them eventually is hit by a car, confirming Xander’s worry that people are going to get hurt. He goes to Buffy’s dorm with Giles.


Giles: “I can’t believe you served Buffy that beer.”


Xander: “I didn’t know it was evil!”


Giles: “You knew it was beer!”


Xander: “Well excuse me, Mr. I-spent-the-sixties-in-an-electric-Kool-Aid-funky-Satan-groove!”


Giles: “It was the early seventies and you should know better.”


I’m not sure Giles’s concern about Buffy drinking is all that strange, actually. I know earlier I said that it didn’t make sense for Joyce to be anti-beer when we’ve seen her drinking before, but that statement is just anti-beer in general. Giles is anti-Buffy drinking beer. And while we’ve seen Joyce drink wine once, Giles is an alcoholic. Like, the show never explicitly discusses it, but after Jenny Calendar dies, whenever we see Giles at home, he’s usually drinking hard liquor, or some kind of hard liquor is visible in a decanter in the background. We know that Giles drinks to avoid his problems, as evidenced in either the end of this season or the middle of the next, because there’s a time when he thinks everything is hopeless and he gets super drunk. So, it makes sense for Giles to not want Buffy to drink alcohol. He knows the terror and the heartbreak that come with the life of a Slayer. They’ve both been unwillingly forced into their roles. He doesn’t want her to have an addiction like he does. P.S. this episode is where I start laying into #2 pretty forking hard for the rest of the recaps. This is where I think #2 starts to develop because he’s suddenly forced to confront the fact that Buffy is an adult now. She’s staying out all night, she’s drinking, she’s living on her own and balancing her college/Slayer life. And that leaves her open to making all the very adult mistakes he’s made and his desire to protect her when he first became her Watcher has matured into love for the woman she’s becoming.


Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.


Anyway, Xander and Giles enter Buffy’s room without knocking because this is TV and people just do that. And they find Buffy drawing with lipstick on the wall, looking like the most attractive cavewoman this side of Wilma Flintstone:



I’m tagging #6, okay? The guys who turned into cavemen had major, major transformations. At one point while Xander and Giles are talking, Xander mentions that Buffy didn’t have as much beer as the guys did. It’s like the episode was carefully crafted so that our hot blonde protagonist never has a moment of ugliness? I don’t get it. They were cool with her turning into a vampire, but not a cavewoman?


Anyway, what I know for sure is that they should have either been more careful with the color they used on the wall or made it much, much clearer that Buffy is drawing with lipstick, because everyone I’ve ever talked about this scene with has agreed that the first time they saw it, they assumed she was drawing with her poop. Anyway, she points to a central figure in the drawing and says SFD is bad.


Back at the weird basement coffee shop we never, ever see again, Willow is still listening to SFD about his philosophies on love and human connection blah blah bullshit bullshit. And it seems like Willow is genuinely falling for his whole sensitive side.


SFD: “Willow…can I tell you something kind of private?”


Willow: “Okay. I mean, I feel you’ve shown me a perspective I hadn’t really thought much about before. What is it you wanted to tell me?”


SFD: “Just that…I’ve enjoyed talking with you. Here. Tonight.”


Willow: “Me, too. With you. You know, I’m wondering something. About you.”


SFD: “What?”


Willow: “Just how gullible do you think I am? I mean with your gentle eyes and your shy smile and your ability to talk openly only to me. You’re unbelievable!”


SFD: “What?”


Willow: “This isn’t sharing, this isn’t connecting. It’s the pleasure principle. That’s right. I got your number, id boy! Only thing you’re thinking about is how long before you can jump on my bones!”


SFD: “Look, if you think that I––”


Willow: “I mean, you men! It’s all about the sex. Find a woman, drag her to her den, do whatever’s necessary just as long as you get the sex. I tell you, men haven’t changed since the dawn of time.”


And right on cue, the cave frat guys crash through the door, dragging some frightened women with them. They immediately club SFD into unconsciousness (#TeamCaveFrat) and set to destroy the place.


I’m gonna tag Willow’s “jump on my bones” comment with #24; the last time I heard anyone say “Jump his/her bones” before this episode aired was in the eighties. And while, sure, Willow would have been alive back then, she would have been a kid, like I was when I announced at age four that I would jump Lionel Ritchie’s bones and that comment has lived on in infamy, brought up over and over at many family gatherings. By the ’90s, we were all kind of shortening it to “bone”. I guess Willow could have reasonably known the phrase, but it’s definitely out-dated by the time this show aired.


Back at the dorm, Giles and Xander watch Buffy spin in a desk chair until she falls off. Then she demands that the TV show her people. 


Giles: “She doesn’t appear to be in any danger. Maybe you should stay with her.”


Buffy “Boy smell nice.”


Giles: “Or perhaps she should be left alone.”


While Buffy sniffs and paws at Xander, he tells Giles that they should find the other cave guys, since they’re on the loose and the beer’s effect will eventually wear off. At the mention of beer, Buffy wants it immediately. Then Giles tells her she can’t have it. After declaring that she’s strong, she gives Giles another head injury and pushes Xander out of the way, leaving them to chase after her.


At the coffee place, the cave guys have knocked Willow unconscious, which, again, the writers play pretty fast and loose with the head injuries. I can’t believe we’ve gotten this far in the show before I added a number for this, but #44: Head trauma doesn’t work like that. I wonder if Giles drinks to cope with his traumatic brain injury.


Anyway, when we get back from the break, the cavemen have realized a major flaw in their plan to barricade themselves inside a building and then make a huge fire inside of that building. Shit is on fire everywhere. And Fire? Bad.


Xander finds Buffy, who’s still looking for beer. He asks if there’s any part of Buffy left in CaveBuffy. When she smells smoke and declares “fire bad!” before running directly toward the danger, the audience gets their answer. No matter what spell she might be under, Buffy is still the Slayer, and she’s still going to help people. Buffy charges into the burning building and grabs a fire extinguisher…which she throws at the fire. She sees Willow collapsed on the floor and makes a flying leap over the burning barricade. Xander tries to follow her inside but is held back by the smoke and flames. In his panicked aggravation, he wonders aloud where Giles is.


Giles is describing Buffy to a random college student. Badly.


Giles: “Blonde. Um. About this tall. She walks with a sort of a…sideways limp.”


Buffy, now trapped in the burning basement herself, spies a window. She uses exposed pipes as a monkey bar to kick the grate and glass out, and the caveguys create a ladder from a bookshelf to escape. Willow and the kidnapped women escape, as well, but Buffy stays behind. SFD is still inside. He screams for help and asks Buffy what they should do. And Buffy comes to the only natural conclusion, which is to bash him in the head with a club.


Xander: “And was there a lesson in all this, huh? What did we learn about beer?”


Buffy: “Foamy!”


The CaveGuys are locked in a car, hooting like apes and pounding on the glass as Buffy watches them from outside.


Giles: “Um…whose van is that?”


Xander: “I don’t know. Wasn’t locked.”


This is one episode where I truly, very much love Xander.


SFD turns out to be fine. Buffy rescued him from the fire and he knows he owes her a debt of gratitude. He comes to her exactly the way he did in her earlier fantasies.


SFD: “Buffy? Buffy, I…I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry for how I treated you before. It was wrong of me and I’m sorry. You were great tonight, really. I might not deserve this, but, do you think you could forgive me?”


And Buffy bashes him in the head with a club again, knocking him out for the third time in the span of like, what? An hour probably? #44 is all the fuck over this episode. We had Giles, who already must suffer from some kind of massive neurological issue from getting constant skull fractures, hitting his head again. Then there are the three times SFD gets a concussion and Willow even gets her melon split in this one. What does this show have against its character’s heads?


I was worried when I started this recap that I would really regret looking at it deeply, but there’s not too much here to complain about beyond the standard Buffyverse treatment of head injuries. It’s just a fun, standalone episode that finally wraps up the SFD subplot for once and for all.


Probably because he’s dead now.

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Published on August 24, 2018 09:52

August 22, 2018

I Love This Book

In an effort to promote work I love (rather than just tear apart that which I hate), I introduce to you this book that I love: Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar.


My Kindle Paperwhite propped up on some rocks on my dining room table, with a mug of coffee nearby.


 


If you’re unfamiliar with the subject matter, the Dyatlov Pass Incident was a tragedy that claimed the lives of nine experienced hikers on an expedition in the Ural Mountains in 1959. Searchers found the party’s tent slashed and their campsite abandoned. The bodies of Igor Dyatlov, Yuri Doroshenko, Lyudmila Dubinina, Yuri Krivonischenko, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Rustem Slobodin, Alexander Kolevatov, Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles, and Seymon Zolotaryov were found over a period of two months and in varying states of injury, mutilation, and radioactivity. The botched and secretive investigation by Soviet authorities led to half a century of cover-up allegations about everything from Big Foot to nuclear testing. The investigation’s final conclusion––that the hikers died due to an “unknown compelling force”––only fueled further ghoulish theories, and we still have no idea what happened to the hikers that night.


I’ve been obsessed with the Dyatlov Pass incident for a long time, owing to my inclination toward the spooky and weird. Despite how much I want to believe in creepy, otherworldly things, I had already accepted the practical and realistic explanations for the “mutilation” of the hikers’ bodies (naturally occurring decay and scavenging), the fact that some of them weren’t properly clothed (paradoxical undressing) and the slash made in the tent (they had knives, duh). But I’d never found a satisfying answer to the biggest remaining question: why would a group of skilled hikers abandon the safety of their camp, taking no supplies or proper clothing? What made going unprotected into the mountains at night seem less dangerous than staying? 


I went into Dead Mountain expecting to be disappointed by the totally rational explanations that would be offered by a serious book. I came away from Dead Mountain more terrified and unsettled than before.


Eichar writes about the hikers as the complex, vibrant people they were in life in a way many accounts of the tragedy ignore. Eichar makes it clear that this isn’t a ghost story or a conspiracy theory playground, but an event in which real people with family, friends, and loved ones were lost in a gruesome and horrifying way. He accomplishes this by mixing details of the investigation with a painstaking recreation of the group’s journey up the mountain that would ultimately claim their lives. When you reach the climax––and see Eichar’s hypothetical account of what could have happened––it makes this loss of life all the more terrifying.


After reading Dead Mountain, I’ve come to accept Eichar’s theory as the most logical and likely. And I really, really wish I didn’t. Whether you’ve never heard of the Dyatlov Pass incident or you’ve spent hours combing message boards and conspiracy videos, this book will stay with you for a long, long time.

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Published on August 22, 2018 10:44

August 16, 2018

Jealous Hater Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 20 Judgement or “Aptly named, considering what I’m about to do to it.”

UPDATE: I should have remembered this in the first place, but thank you, everyone who has tipped me through Kofi, not just this week and last week but all the weeks. Book sales are down and you guys really help me out.


No news this week! I wonder if all the exciting media buzz is under embargo. Because, you know, surely with a movie and book this spectacular and eagerly anticipated, it must be kept under wraps.


Oh, but there is a gross and bloody gif in here. Heads up.



Lugnut opens the chapter by saying that she basically slept for two weeks until she was strong enough to hear about what happened to her. Of course, Charles has stayed by her side this whole time, contradicting the author’s “The Show Must Go On Even If A Performer Is Seriously Injured” insistence.


At least we find out that Lasagna hasn’t been non-consensually mind-reading for the last hundred or so chapters:


All three of them wanted to tell me the story on their own, but I found there were so many gaps, and I really wanted to know everything that happened in detail, so once most of my strength had returned I asked if I could pull their memories. They all gave me permission, which is really the only way to do that easily.


How about instead: All three of them wanted to tell me the story on their own but there were too many gaps. I really wanted to know everything that happened in detail. Once most of my strength had returned, I asked if could pull their memories.


Take a fucking breath. Someone has to narrate the audiobook.


Anyway, at least we know she isn’t violating the privacy of their minds or anything.


I started with Mac, though he made me promise I would only pull memories from the time when I passed out until the moment I woke up. My mom and Charles didn’t make me promise, so I decided to peek into a little more than just the accident––just a few other things I had always wanted to know.


Oh. Well, scratch that earlier comment, then. When Chuckie and Sandwich agreed to let their daughter pull the memories of the incident that just happened, that’s what they were agreeing to. Simply saying, “Well, they didn’t specifically tell me not to go rifling through other things,” is the telepathic equivalent of, “You said I could use your bathroom, but you didn’t specifically tell me not to go through your medicine cabinet or steal your hair products.”


Except, you know, worse, because mind reading is a profoundly deep invasion of privacy. And the off-handed way Sarem is comfortable with her character––the idealized version of herself––admitting unapologetically to that invasion of privacy due to a technicality that probably never occurred to either party (because she trusted them) is chilling. “It’s okay to do this thing someone would automatically trust me not to do because they never said not to do it,” is a red flag of epic proportions. And it added nothing at all to the story. We never needed to see how Chaz and Pastrami met. It has absolutely no bearing on the plot or anything in it.


Zarlon Lando talks about how the process works (arduously and over a span of days), during which we get this gem:


I wondered if I could find a way to do it easier, and better, without asking for permission. Having spent so much time on it, I decided that I was definitely going to try to look into it later; someone in the magick world might already have perfected the process in a way I didn’t know.


Remember, the only way to pull someone’s memories easily is to ask permission. Now, we’ve got Laffy Zaffy wondering if she can find a way to do it just as easily without permission. Meaning that the only reason she asked permission was that it made the process less of a hassle for her. If she’d been able to do it without their permission she would have had no qualms about doing so, I guess? And she’s even planning to read people’s minds without permission in the future.


Charles and Mac stayed with me at my mom’s house while I recovered and, back in Las Vegas, the show went on hiatus.


Um, excuse me, Lani Sarem. Excuse me. You said in your badly-disguised comment here a few months ago:


Injuries happen during the shows all the time. We are doing crazy stuff and it’s dangerous that’s why people pay a lot of money to see it. People get injured during the show and you don’t even know and we keep going. We don’t stop the show. The one and only time someone fell to their death was actually during KA. DURING A ACTUAL PERFORMANCE IN FRONT OF A AUDIENCE. They witnessed it even…I think the show was back in a day or so. Accidents that happen during rehearsal that only leads to injury an injury like this, wouldn’t even stop the show that night. The show must go one is a real thing in our world.


Now, the official announcement of why the show is going on hiatus is not “a performer was dying” but that the theater is having new sets put in.


After one performance of the brand new show, which they just debuted.


Yeah, that’s not going to look bad for the show at all. Nobody is going to write about how suspicious it is that the fully overhauled show closed for another complete makeover after one performance.


I don’t think I was the only reason Charles didn’t want to leave, though. I noticed that he and my mom got cozier as they days went by.


Has he broken up with Sofiaieio yet?


When I was a kid, I had had odd fantasies about my parents getting back together. It was something I had always only slightly hoped for as I really never thought it could happen. As I watched them during my recovery, it looked more and more lik a real possibility. It was too bad it hadn’t happened years earlier.


You mean those years that your mom used majihick to keep you and your father apart out of spite for him cheating on her after he found out she used magic on him for years without permission? Why would you want Charles to get back with her? Why are you even speaking to your mother at all at this point?


Mac tells the cast and crew not to try to visit Lunky Zewster at the hospital. It doesn’t matter, because they don’t have time, anyway; they have to build the new sets.


Like, I can’t get over the fact that Charles is actually overhauling an entire Las Vegas show just so he doesn’t have to say that it’s because a performer was injured? I feel like someone on the show could easily call OSHA on this. “Hey, we had a performer who collapsed with severe bleeding and we haven’t seen her since. Our bosses are trying to stop us from going to the hospital to see her, so we don’t even know if she’s alive. Also, they immediately shut down the show and asked us to make all these really sudden changes,” is the kind of thing that OSHA would want to know about.


Ha ha, silly Jenny. OSHA doesn’t exist in Las Vegas. A real life Vegas Olympian told you so!


A lot of the cast siad they wanted to come but I think it was more something to say. They were, for the most part, easily talked out of it. Some didn’t care about visiting me at all, though they enjoyed the paid vacation they had been given.


LOL, excuse me.


You can either have everyone on the show head-over-heels in love with Lavinia or not. If they’re all as invested in her as previously written, they should be holding a fucking candlelight vigil and weeping in the god damn streets.


Jackson was the only one who put up a fight about it


Of course, he was.


and was going to come, but then a quick tour opening for Imagine Dragons came up that timed perfectly with our break and his band had to take that.


Click this link. You’ll be shocked, I tell you.


The amount of starfucking and name-dropping in this book is so sad and desperate, my second-hand embarrassment has second-hand embarrassment.


The gang realizes that they need to have an excuse for what happened to Zillard:


It took some googling, some illness-researching on WebMD, and a couple of conversations with a doctor my mom knew before we came up with a story that sounded like it made sense. We told everyone I had a combination of ailments, including double pneumonia––which supposedly is why I couldn’t breathe and what caused me to pass out––and something called “Osler-Weber-Rendu syndrome.”


Hey. You know what you can’t do with that disease?


Scuba dive.


Like she did on the camping trip.


Yeah. I’m going to be that petty and nitpicky.


Massive hemorrhage from a perforated ulcer would have been a better choice since HHT (what they call the syndrome now) causes visible lesions on the skin. It’s also hereditary: Charlie would also have to have it in order for Zung to be affected. They both would have visible symptoms of the disease.


You know what would have been a lot more believable? Massive hemorrhage from a peptic ulcer.


gif of Lord Grantham on Downton Abbey puking up blood all over the dining room table and everyone else.


Anyway.


The possibility of having both illnesses together was an almost impossible feat,


Impossible means no possibility, and it’s not a “feat” to have comorbid illnesses. You didn’t accomplish anything. A feat is an impressive achievement of some kind.


which is how we explained why the doctors in Las Vegas had been so confused.


So, the doctors at a hospital in a major city were so stumped by her illnesses that they had no choice but to take her across the country to a one-horse town in Tennessee to be treated? And this all made perfect sense and didn’t seem hinky to any cast, crew, or staff?


Charles and Mac explained to everyone I didn’t want to talk about it because I was embarrassed and upset that I had collapsed in front of so many of my friends and co-workers.


Keep this one in your back pocket.


After a paragraph break, we’ve returned to Las Vegas for some acrobatic feats of word rep. Emphasis mine:


When the big day finally came, Mac and I were walking towards the front of the doors of the theater. Right before we got to the doors, Mac stopped right where the carpet changes patterns. We were holding hands and he had his fingers wrapped around mine so tightly that when he stopped walking his hand pulled tightly on mine and soon I had stopped walking, too.


Look, everyone! It’s a rainbow of failure! That somehow couldn’t be caught by THREE paid editors!


Let’s try to fix this mess, shall we?


When the big day finally came, Mac and I walked toward the doors of the theater. He stopped where the carpet changed patterns, his tight grip on my hand holding me back, too.


Now, I’m not saying that’s the best sentence anyone ever came up with. But is it better than a full paragraph devoted to repeating the same words over and over? Yes. Objectively, yes it is.


So, Mac asks Zani if she’s ready to go back to work, which like. You’re already there, so that’s your answer. It’s been a month now since the incident, so the show that would never, ever close


Will Ferrel in Stepbrothers saying


has now been closed for a month because a secondary performer was ill. But this book is super accurate and I have no idea what I’m talking about.


Zani tells Mac:


“Thanks for not running for the hills when you found out everything. You handled it better than Charles did back in the day. That’s impressive; he can handle anything.”


And Mac is like:


“Well, I’ve grown pretty fond of you, Magi Girl. I would go to Hell for you if it needed to happen.”


Both of you can go to hell, honestly. Take your author with you. Because all three of you have sent me there. Sent me into a living hell, a waking nightmare from which I cannot escape so long as this book trashes up the earth with its presence.


Mac then makes sure that gonig to hell isn’t something he’s going to have to do, and then it’s time for Lani Sarem’s patented “comedy”:


“Guess you’ve come over the dark side?” I poked, teasingly.


“I heard you had cookies,” he replied with a grin plastered on his face.


I can just see Sarem strolling the aisles of Spencer Gifts, notepad in hand, scribbling furiously.


Now, one might assume that the book would end here. It feels like a natural ending. The romance is resolved, things are returning to normal, the story (what little there was of it) is over. So, the words “The End” come next, right?


Nope. First, we have to have Zamboni and Mac’s embrace “comically” interrupted by Tad, who warns them they’ll be late to rehearsal. Then Tad tells her he’s “ecstatic” (and yes, that’s the word used) that Zuppa Loscana is back. He actually tells her how glad he is twice. And then Mac says:


“No, we got back day before yesterday, but we were running around with all the wedding plans,” Mac said, almost rolling his eyes. Guys never seem to understand the importance of all the details for a wedding. I’m pretty sure Mac would have worn his show blacks if he thought I would have let him get away with that.


“The hardest thing was this one, finding a dress,” Mac said, pointing at me. “It’s one day for heaven’s sake.”


“It is one day––but a rather important day for me,” I said firmly.


“So…did you find a dress?” Tad asked, looking directly at me this time.


“Finally,” I answered in exasperation. “I think we went to every store from Tennessee to here.”


Before I explain the biggest what the fuck about this part, let’s remember that one of Zug’s defining personality characteristics that Sarem has rammed home with all the subtlety of a bulldozer is that Larvae is Not Like Other Girls™. You know. Because she hates shopping so much. Yet, any time there’s been a whiff of shopping in the air, she’s doing it for hours. Now, men don’t have any idea how important weddings are…garsh, Lani, it sure sounds like you––sorry, your fictional character––aren’t as special and not-girly as you took such pains to insist you––sorry, she––is. It’s almost like having any interest in any activity that’s traditionally coded as feminine is only bad when it’s other women doing it. They are frivolous and silly for liking shopping and weddings and makeup and male attention. When Lorthless does it, it’s fine.


But here’s what’s the most wrong with that excerpt above. It’s an attempted misdirect to make the reader believe that Zoey L0L is getting married to Mac. She’s not. She’s talking about her parents getting married.


Once again, for anyone who may have missed this throughout these recaps:


YOUR FIRST PERSON POV PROTAGONIST CANNOT WITHHOLD CRUCIAL INFORMATION FROM THE READER TO SET UP PLOT TWISTS LATER BECAUSE WE ARE INSIDE THAT CHARACTER’S HEAD AND PRIVY TO ALL OF THEIR THOUGHTS THE REST OF THE TIME.

Leorge Zazenby has already mentioned once in this chapter how it would be a big deal to her if her parents got back together. She’s not going to not react to that internally when she’s talking about their wedding. This is the culmination of her life-long hope and her yearning for a real, “normal” family dynamic. Her father, who has been kept from her for her entire life, is now back and they have a relationship and her parents are getting married! She absolutely should be having some reaction where she’s telling us, “I couldn’t believe that after all of these years, blah blah blah,” and how happy she is, and that reaction has to be present the first time the topic comes up.


“Well, this was adapted from a screenplay, so it’s clearly a case of the dialogue not working when it’s been rewritten as a––” Let me stop you. This scene isn’t in the screenplay. At least, not the version I’ve got. A lot of this book was clearly written not as an adaption of the screenplay, but an adaption of the screenplay with added scenes that are meant to be a part of the screenplay adapted from the book. She wrote this thinking only about how it would look on screen, how clever it would seem to the audience, without realizing that in prose, it’s just another mistake to throw on the mountainous pile of fuck-ups in this book.


Tad opens the theater doors and Zailure thinks about the first time she went through those doors, right before her audition, and how this is such a big parallel to then. And it’s clumsily spelled out for us because we’re too stupid to detect literary parallels on our own. And then the book is over, because that’s yet another place where it could end and feel complete, right?


NOPE! Not enough people have fawned over how amazing she is yet. She goes in and the theater is completely dark because the whole cast and crew has assembled for a surprise party:


The area right inside the doors in the theater had obviously been decorated for a party.


As opposed to when you decorate for a party in an imperceptible way.


Several balloons were floating around me and they all said “Welcome Home.” Everyone was staring directly at me, smiling and yelling “Surprise!”


And then the whole bus clapped.


Clearly, the book couldn’t end with just two people telling Zohn Lacob Zingleheimer Litt how loved and valuable she is. No, we have to have the entire cast and crew do it, too.


The entire cast a crew who didn’t want to see her in the hospital and were easily dissuaded because they didn’t really care.


Oh, and take that earlier thing out of your back pocket. The entire cast and crew knew that she was super embarrassed about the incident and didn’t want to acknowledge it, so…they threw her a party?


All the (male) characters hug and kiss Lump and tell her how glad they are to have her back and Jackson, of course, calls her beautiful. God forbid a single scene goes by and a man doesn’t praise her wondrous beauty.


I was wrong when I said earlier that Sofia never shows up in the book again:


The biggest surprise may have been when Sofia came over, gave me a hug, and told me she was glad I wasn’t dead. Hey, I’ll take that as progress.


Um, didn’t they work all their shit out earlier in the book? Is Sofieoeoeo mad at Lunt again because Charles is marrying Deli? Is she even aware that’s happening? We’ll never know because Sofia is a woman who isn’t Lani Sarem’s avatar and therefore we shall waste no more time upon her. She doesn’t even get her own dialogue.


There’s a paragraph about how everyone in the whole cast and crew hugs Zanzibar and tells her how happy they are that she’s all right and she thinks about how they’re not strangers anymore, they’re family, etc. and the book ends.


PSYCHE! We haven’t seen Zex Zuthor in bed with Mac yet. And of course, as they lay in what I assume is post-coital bliss, they talk about Jackson and how Mac seems to be okay with him.


I kinda thought that after everything we had just been through Mac would have been pushing for commitment.


Wait, Mac just told you he would go to hell for you and that’s not enough of a commitment?


“I’m just glad you’re okay. I think this has taught me that whatever’s supposed to work out, will. I think Jackson and I have an ‘All’s fair in love and war’ approach to this.” Mac paused for a moment and then continued as if he had needed to think about his next words. “Actually, I know we do, because he literally said it a while back. I know he’s kinda there waiting to sweep you off your feet, and he’s more than welcome to hold that broom for as long as he wants. If I have my way, he’ll be holding it for a very long time.”


The love triangle. Isn’t. Over.


“Interesting. I wonder if he’d still feel that way if he knew everything.” I thought for a moment about the possibility of Jackson knowing everything that Mac knew.


“You could ask your cards,” Mac said, obviously trying to play the conversation very cool.


She did ask the cards. It said not to be with both of you. I made a rambling, forty-minute video about it.


Lurgid Zember says that she would check her cards, but she’s busy right now, and they kiss “passionately” because everyone in the book kisses either “passionately” or “lightly on the lips.”


I think that feeling was the happiest I’ve ever been.


Yet Sarem still won’t resolve the love triangle! While trying to mislead readers into thinking Mac and Zunt are getting married? You know, your incredible misdirect that will have us all chuckling at how clever you are? It doesn’t work if you specify that Mac hasn’t asked for a commitment and if you’ve got Zander Larris sitting there playing coy about whether or not she’ll go after Jackson after all.


But at least the book is finally over, right? I mean, clearly you’re going to end the book on that line?


Ha ha ha, of course not. There’s another chapter. God save us all.

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Published on August 16, 2018 13:16

August 10, 2018

The Big Damn Angel Rewatch S01E04 “I Fall To Pieces”

In every generation, there is a chosen one. No, shit. Wrong show. What am I supposed to do, now? I guess I’ll just have to recap every episode Angel with an eye to the following themes:



Angel is still a dick.
Cordelia is smarter than everyone.
Sex is still evil.
Sunlight isn’t nearly as dangerous as it was in Sunnydale…
…but its danger is certainly inconsistent.
Vampire/demon rules aren’t consistent with the Buffyverse.
Xenophobia and cultural stereotypes abound.
Women are disposable and unrealistic.
Vampires still @#$%ing breathe.
Some of this stuff is still homophobic as fuck.
Blondes, blondes everywhere
Smoking is still evil.
A lot of this shit is really misogynistic.
Some of this stuff is ableist as fuck.

The Big Damn Angel Damsel In Distress Counter: 8


Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.


WARNING: Just like with the Buffy recaps, I’ve seen (most) of this series already, so I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So a blanket spoiler warning is in effect.


CW: There’s a suicide joke. It’s pretty dumb and throwaway, so if that kind of thing bothers you, heads up.



NOTE: I hate doing this, but if you appreciate the recap, think about tossing a little money my way via the Kofi link on the right of the page if you can We’re in a little bit of a (temporary) bind due to unforeseen bullshit. No pressure.


The sun rises over Angel Investigations, where Cordelia is ranting about the bills that are due and Doyle is casually sexually harassing her. He tells her she doesn’t look like she’s missing anything and calls her princess. Then she talks about needing a raise and this conversation ensues.


Cordelia: “A person needs… certain… designer things.”


Doyle: “Personally, I don’t think you need much in the way of clothes. But you are right and I do agree; Angel needs to start charging. He just hates bringing up the finances with the clients. He likes playing the hero. Walking off into the dark, his long coat flowing behind him in a mysterious and attractive way––”


Cordelia: “Is this a private moment? Because I can leave you alone.”


Ha ha. Doyle sounds like he thinks…an attractive man is attractive. It’s funny because that would be gay. #10 and holy shit, how do straight men make being straight seem so fucking exhausting? I don’t know if David Greenwalt is straight, but we know Joss Whedon is and they wrote this episode together. There is so damn much “No Homo!” in Angel and Buffy The Vampire Slayer overall, but it seems like the Joss-insert characters are extremely, extremely No Homo. And coupled with the relentless #13 when we’re literally only forty seconds into the episode?


We get it, Joss. You’re a big ole macho manly manly man man.


Anyway, Doyle is quick to disavow his attraction to Angel, stating that he’s talking about the persona Angel projects, which is a persona that doesn’t include asking for recompense for good deeds. They both decide they’re going to stand up to Angel when he gets to the office. He comes in, complains about the coffee (which he apparently needs to function, so it’s good to know that when I finally get turned into a vampire, I’ll still have a reason to drink coffee), and immediately says no to asking people for money when they’re in trouble.


So, I kind of agree with him and also I kind of don’t. I get not asking people in trouble for money, especially when he knows it’s his cosmic calling or whatever. But…he lived in a mansion in Sunnydale. He has a ton of random weapons and artifacts. He has a classic car. Plus, he’s lived for a long time and he’s pretty much been rich the whole time he’s been a vampire. He’s had nothing but time to save money and money has never seemed to be a problem for him. I mean, we’ve seen him buying blood on the sly, we’ve seen his big ass house full of amazing stuff…so why is he relying on Angel Investigations to pay his employees a fair wage? If his principles are going to prevent him from making money, he needs to make personal sacrifices to compensate Cordelia and Doyle for their work. Or else #1.


At the very least, his principles need to not make him unable to invest in a high-yield savings account specifically for these types of reasons.


We’re at almost seven hundred words in this recap and two minutes of screen time. You might wanna brew some coffee of your own.


Anyway, Doyle gets a vision of a woman working in an office building. Melissa Burns, who works for a paper company. Congratulations, Melissa, you are number eight on the Big Damn Angel Damsel In Distress Counter.


After the credits, a woman in an office is complaining about the birthday cake she ordered. It’s supposed to say “Penny” but instead, it says “Benji.” She decides she’s going to fix this cake…


…which she is feeding to the entire office and the birthday person…


…by LICKING HER FINGER AND TRYING TO SMEAR THE B INTO A P.


Now, I’m not criticizing the show or the writing or anything. I’m just issuing a blanket statement in case anyone decides to get me a birthday cake and the writing on it is wrong.


It’s okay if my name is misspelled.


It’s not okay to STICK YOUR SPIT ALL IN THE FROSTING.


Anyway, they light candles and present the cake to their coworker who makes a wry comment about how great it is that her co-workers remembered her birthday and almost her name. The cake-spitter receives a huge bouquet of flowers with a note that says, “My Undying Love, Ronald.” And it freaks her out. She asks her co-workers to watch her phone and goes to the bathroom, where she takes a handful of pills. Then she heads to the parking garage alone, where Angel is lurking in the shadows. And like, I get that he’s a vampire and all, but maybe lurking in the dark and approaching lone women with a line about needing your protection isn’t going to inspire much confidence. Melissa takes his card but tells him she can’t afford private security, then quickly gets into her car and drives away.


Back at Angel Investigations, Angel can’t figure out why his approach didn’t work.


Angel: “I scared her.”


Doyle: “Sounds to me like she was scared to begin with.”


Angel: “Am I intimidating? I mean, do I put people off?”


Cordelia tells him to consider a new sartorial approach. Because…the black clothing is what’s putting women off?


You wanna know how I can tell that this episode was written by men who probably didn’t listen to the women who told them Cordelia would know that the clothes aren’t the issue?


You can probably get to that answer on your own, so I won’t waste your time.


Angel asks Cordelia to approach Melissa, and Cordelia is like, yeah when I’m getting paid to do so, I totally will. Angel says they need to be involved in this woman’s life right away and that it isn’t about money. Doyle agrees, but frames the money issue differently. The way he sees it, if Angel does stuff out of the goodness of his heart, people are going to feel indebted to him. If they pay him for his service, they can easily walk away when the service is completed. To which Cordelia responds:


Cordelia: “You’re a lot smarter than you look. Of course, you look like a r—–.”


We’re gonna add a new number here because while I don’t remember liberal dropping of the r-word in this series, I do remember a lot of ableism. So, #14: Some of this stuff is ableist as fuck.


At the ATM the next day, Melissa is surprised to get a message saying her PIN number is invalid. A man in a suit steps up from out of nowhere and tells her he’s changed her PIN number to the day they met. It’s Ronald, the stalker who sent her the flowers. She tells him to stop bothering her, but he says he’s just looking out for her. Like when she’s in the bathroom taking pills, for example. He asks her about the supplement he prescribed her since it’s clear the anti-anxiety meds she’s taking aren’t working.


Melissa: “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”


Ronald: “How can two people in love leave each other alone?”


Melissa: “In love? Ronald, we had one date!”


So, maybe this is directly contributing to Melissa not wanting to talk to weird dudes in parking garages. Ronald tells her that he’ll see her later that night and tries to kiss her. Cut to Cordelia answering the phone.


At the office, Melissa tells Angel, Doyle, and Cordelia about Ronald. They met when she was his patient and he treated an infected nerve behind her eye, saving her sight. She didn’t want to go on a date with him, but she felt obligated. Seven months later, he’s in full-blown stalker mode, demanding she marry him and constantly following her around. She mentions that she can feel him around her and that he can see things that happen to her when she’s alone.


Like, I know that the police are notoriously bad about dealing with stalkers, but I kind of feel like there should at least be some mention of a PPO or bungled police involvement here, considering how blatant this dude is about his stalking. This is merely from a storytelling perspective; I, Jenny Trout, viewer, know that in the real world, it’s entirely likely that this guy could easily dupe the law into believing that he’s not a danger, he’s an upstanding neurosurgeon who just wouldn’t even have time or interest in stalking a patient. However, Angel isn’t set in the real world, it’s set in its own world and we need detail to suspend disbelief––and to clue in people who fully believe that a simple call to the police will solve every problem. Angel Investigations helps the hopeless, right? So, we need to see why these people who are utilizing their services have reached hopelessness, even if that answer is often, “the system sucks.” Because the system does, indeed, suck, and that’s the theme of like, the whole entire show.


Angel says he knows Melissa needed help because he has a friend in the police department. So, right there would be a perfect opportunity to note the holes in the safety net, right? “If they know about it, why won’t they do anything?”


Anyway, Doyle takes her home (after Cordelia not-so-subtly broaches the topic of payment), and Angel and Cordy get on trying to figure out Doctor Ronald, Medicine Stalker’s deal. Angel theorizes that maybe he’s got a ghost or some kind of invisibility power, while Cordelia suggests it’s a hidden camera of some kind.


The first time I watched this episode, I thought figured it out the moment Melissa said that Ronald operated on her eye.


Here’s another thing that’s kind of clunky. Cordelia says that not everything has to have a supernatural explanation, but Angel reminds her that Doyle had a vision about it and therefore it probably is supernatural. I feel like a show that’s about supernatural crimes shouldn’t have to explain that it’s about supernatural crimes? Like, why was this an important detail to give viewers of a show about vampires, but not a detail like, “The police won’t do anything?”


Melissa goes home to her apartment alone, which kind of makes me wonder why Doyle didn’t stay with her. I mean, Ronald said he’d see her that night. Wouldn’t it be easier and safer to leave someone posted?


So, remember how I said that the first time I saw this episode, I thought I had it figured out? I was like, “Oh ho, it’s so obvious that this ghoul is looking through the optic nerve he enchanted during the surgery or whatever. He’s seeing through her eyes!”


And then we get this shot, interspersed with Melissa undressing:


Ronald's eye appears to be just an empty, glowing red hole.


And I was like, “Fuck yeah, I knew I was right! I’m always right! I am a god among men!”


But then.


Ugh, this is the worst.


Ronald's actual, physical eye is floating the air in Melissa's bedroom. Are you kidding right now?

No, Ronald isn’t seeing Melissa’s day through her eyes. He’s sending his actual, physical eyeball floating into her apartment where she doesn’t notice it.


I don’t care who you are, how busy or distracted you may be: if you can see, you will spot a floating god damn eyeball. It’s too obvious. Too jarring. Our brains are not going to drift over an actual, physically present floating eyeball and miss it. Maybe once or twice. But not over and over and over again. This has been going on for seven months. Eventually, you’re going to notice the damn eye!


Angel goes to the police station in the middle of the bright sunny day to try and get Kate’s help. He tells Kate about Melissa, and Kate suggests Melissa may have already reported her stalker. So, we’re getting closer to a reason why nobody has done anything about this super awful guy.


Doyle goes with Melissa to her job and just intends to follow her around all day. And her boss is cool with it, I guess? Doyle tells Melissa that she doesn’t have anything to worry about, Angel has done this a lot.


Doyle: “There’s been, uh, four? And three of them are very much alive.”


And Melissa’s face goes like this:


Melissa's eyes are super wide in horror.


To change the subject, Doyle points out the picture of Melissa bungee jumping. He tells her he didn’t see her as a bungee jumping kind of person and she’s like, well, funny thing about being terrified twenty-four seven in your own home. You don’t feel the need to go out and take needless risks anymore.


I mean, she doesn’t say that, but the way the actress delivers the line, that’s what she says.


So, how does Doyle reassure her?


Doyle: “Don’t you worry. When Angel’s finished with this case, I guarantee you’ll be wanting to jump off a bridge again.”


Good job.


The suicide joke…eh. Like, it’s not all that funny, but also I have a dark sense of humor so it’s possible I’m only looking at the failure of the humor element and not finding it that offensive in another regard? I don’t know where the line is on this so…I don’t know. What do you think? Is this joke inappropriate? No big deal? Hash it out in the comments. I’ve got no strong arguments either way.


Anyway, back at Kate’s desk, Kate tells Angel the bad news. Melissa did report Ronald, but his lawyers are sleazebags:


Kate: “His lawyers. Wolfram and Hart. You know the name?”


Angel: “I’ve heard it.”


Kate: “Yeah. They’re the law firm that Johnny Cochran is too ethical to join.”


TIMELY!


And like, I don’t mean the joke dated itself as the show aged. I mean, the joke was dated when it aired. This aired like eight years after the O.J. trial. Get it together, Kate.


Ronald not only denied everything, but he turned it around on Melissa, said she was stalking him, and got a restraining order against her! See, this is what I’m talking about! These are the details I wanted earlier in the episode! Maybe not that in-depth, but even just, “What did the police say?” “They don’t believe me. And he has lawyers.” That’s enough for viewer!Jenny to feel like the writers have got the bases of reality covered.


Kate says she can spare an officer to sit outside Melissa’s house that night, but it’s not going to be a long-term solution. Kate makes a little speech about how it doesn’t matter if Ronald goes to jail because as long as Melissa is scared, he wins. Melissa has to be strong and Ronald took her power away and nobody can get it back for her but her, etc. Which I guess would be inspirational if it wasn’t coming from a public servant who’s supposed to help her get that power back? It’s a very Lifetime Original Movie monologue but like…Kate. You’re the police. You can’t just shrug and be like, “Well, it’s all up to her.” You’re the people who deal with this. So maybe, “Oh, even if he goes to jail it’s not going to make a difference,” isn’t a great tactic. It’s like if you said, “Well, even if we catch this murderer, the victim will still be dead, so what’s the point?”


So, Angel goes to Ronald’s office to check things out. The dude has a framed picture of Melissa on his desk. And Melissa is weirdly wearing the exact same outfit from the previous scene:


Melissa is wearing a blue cardigan/sweater combo that she's wearing in the scene she's in right before this.


Like, if it’s not the same outfit/different lighting, then at the very least the costumer for the show went to Dress Barn one day and these were on sale and she got one in every color.


Angel finds a book on a shelf called “Anything’s Possible”, a New Age-looking self-help book signed by the author with “Thanks for having the “nerve” to believe.” This is what he’s looking at when Ronald comes in and demands to know what Angel is doing in his office. Angel says he doesn’t have time to make an appointment, and while Ronald is about to call security, Angel tells him:


Angel: “My wife has a malignant tumor pressing on her occular cavity. She’s going to die unless someone has the nerve to operate.”


That’s really smart of Angel to use “have the nerve.” Manipulating people is one of Angel’s better skills.


Ronald goes:


Ronald: “What you’re talking about is a very difficult and dangerous procedure. I could lose my license.”


I just wish the writers would bother to go into any detail, any at all, that would make this show plausible. Like, dude. You don’t know what kind of tumor it even is. And your lawyers are from a demonic law firm.


Oh my god, this episode is so bad. Like, I’m not looking for perfection here. I’m just looking to only have to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the supernatural elements. Don’t ask me to suspend disbelief that a neurosurgeon would be like, “Whoa, removing risky tumors? That’s above my pay grade, pal. I just let all my patients die.”


Angel picks up the photo of Melissa and asks if that’s Ronald’s wife or girlfriend or whatever. He’s like, yeah, she’s my fiancee, but hedges when Angel asks about the wedding date. Angel gets super intense about his fake wife, saying he would die for her and he’ll pay Ronald whatever it takes.


Meanwhile, Cordelia interviews another doctor about Ronald, claiming to be writing a piece for a medical magazine. Apparently, Ronald has been profiled in a lot of magazines. This doctor informs her that Ronald started out as an Orthopedic surgeon. If I have any doctors who read this blog, can you tell me if switching between those two specialties is believable? Because to a layman, the idea of someone going, “I’m good at bones, now let’s try brains!” seems…IDK. Like, when I worked at the hospital, we had trauma surgeons who changed their specialties to general surgery (one took a softball-sized tumor off my spine, thanks a bunch, Dr. Jefferson!) but like, this just seems like too big a leap? But I’m not going to hold that against the episode because ultimately, this part is written much better. Like, there are medical specifics about the fact that Dr. Ronald developed techniques that give surgeons more time between a limb being severed and successfully reattached. Cordelia, being Cordelia, then asks the doctor (who is a woman) if Ronald ever came off as a creep, and the doctor is like, uh, what kind of article are you writing?


Cordelia: “I’ve got to be honest. Uh, it may not be a very nice one. I don’t like the way he treats women. I’ll keep your name out of it, but just between us, what is the real dish on this guy?”


See, this is a part that I think a woman stuck her hand up and said, “Hey, you know, women warn other women about this kind of thing, so maybe Cordelia could look into it?” Because I don’t foresee this as being a conclusion Joss “Casting Couch” Whedon or David “Fish Rape” Greenwalt would have arrived at by themselves.


The doctor tells her:


Doctor: “He’s not very generous. He doesn’t share his techniques with the medical community at large, and a lot of what he claims he’s done is pretty radical.”


Back up. A minute ago, this doctor was like, oh, he’s made all these important advances. How did he do that if he didn’t publish his work? Like, you can’t have this renowned surgeon who has done all this good and developed all these important techniques to the point that various medical journals have interviewed him and then be like, “Oh, but he only claims he’s done this stuff and he won’t show anyone how.” That doesn’t work.


Back at the ranch, Cordelia tells Angel what she’s learned about Ronald.


Cordelia: “I don’t get it. This guy has a lot to lose. What is it about Melissa that’s got him going all O.J. here?”


What is it with all the O.J. references? This is so weird. Like, Writing Tip: Don’t use outdated references to build your joke, and don’t use the same outdated references twice in the same episode in totally unconnected ways.


Angel explains to Cordelia that Ronald isn’t infatuated with Melissa. He’s infatuated with the Melissa he’s created. Eventually, he’s gonna see the difference, get disappointed, and then she’s really in trouble. Angel has been researching Dr. Vinpur Natpudan, the author of the self-help book he found in Ronald’s office. Natpudan conducted a seminar for doctors and spiritual healers before having serious mental health issues that resulted in hospitalization. Angel emails him saying he hopes Natpudan has the “nerve” to help him with some trouble Angel is having with Ronald.


Natpudan meets with Angel in his…I don’t know, I guess I would refer to it as a luxurious castle/throw pillow showroom? If the filming wasn’t so dark, I’d screencap it so you could see what I’m talking about. Basically, it looks like Pier One and World Market crashed into each other. Angel tells Natpudan that Ronald is going to hurt Melissa, but Natpudan is reluctant to get involved. He eventually admits that he put Ronald in contact with “psychic surgeons” whose techniques Ronald was quick to learn and improve upon. Natpudan says he got out of the psychic surgeon business as a result because Ronald made him “believe completely.” But we get basically no detail as to what Ronald’s powers are, what he’s capable of, or what his weaknesses could be. It’s just, “Oh yeah, I made this guy into a monster. That was me.” If you removed this scene from the episode, the episode wouldn’t lose any important information.


Outside of Melissa’s place, Ronald is standing in the bushes, just staring through the fence. Inside, Melissa is asleep. A cop sees Ronald and tells him to put his hands up.


Ronald's hands are gone. There are stumps like he's been amputated.


Where are the good doctor’s hands? I bet you can guess.


That’s right, they are straight up assaulting Melissa in her sleep.


The officer, seeing that this dude doesn’t have hands, says he’s sorry and that the guy he’s looking for is someone else. Which, you know. Fair. If someone tells you to be on the lookout for a dude and also he’s a surgeon, you’re going to rule out the guy with no hands.


After the commercial, Melissa wakes and finds the hands feeling her up. She screams and the police officer hears her. he breaks into the apartment building and comes to her rescue, but doesn’t find anything wrong in the apartment. While he’s talking down to her like an asshole, the hands jump up and strangle him. Melissa flees and is intercepted by Angel in the courtyard. She tries to explain what’s happening, but Angel tells her that he already knows what Ronald can do. Ronald gets his hands back and we cut to later, where more officers are on the scene, included Kate, who says they don’t have anything to put Ronald at the scene of the crime. She says they’ve pulled fingerprints and if they match she can charge him. Doyle points out to Angel that it won’t matter if Ronald goes to jail because he can just get out, anyway. He also makes a remark about it being lucky that it was just Ronald’s hands but like, dude. The hands are bad enough. Don’t take me there.


Angel points out that Ronald’s willingness to kill means he’s becoming more obsessed.


Doyle: “Not putting too cowardly a point on it, but if this guy can’t be contained and can’t be killed, what are we going to do?”


I’m confused at how we arrived upon “can’t be killed.” Because I don’t remember that ever coming up. Maybe they should have included that in the scene with Natpudan.


I think my biggest issue with the writing on Angel as opposed to the writing on Buffy is the fact that it just feels like they take for granted that viewers of Angel will go along with whatever they come up with because they already know that the villains are unkillable or difficult to kill, so it can just be stated out of nowhere. But I want to know how Doyle has that information. It’s powerful information. Ultimately, I would have liked to hear it from Natpudan, a former victim whose experience will hold more weight than Doyle casually dropping “can’t be killed” into the middle of the sentence.


Angel comes up with a convoluted plot to kill Ronald: cut him to pieces, keep the pieces separated until they die.


“Excuse me, Mr. Whedon, Mr. Greenwalt?” I ask raising my hand timidly. “If the guy’s power is psychic, why not just shoot him in the head? If his brain is destroyed, he can’t use it to heal himself.”


“Security!” roars Joss. “How did this person who can see our totally bizarre plot choices get in here?”


Anyway, they take Melissa back to Angel’s apartment and seal up all the nooks and crannies so Ronald can’t get in, and Angel gives Melissa a similar speech to what Kate said earlier, that she has to be strong, not afraid, etc. Then, Angel goes upstairs with Cordelia, who wants to lecture him on how dangerous Ronald is. The phone rings and Cordelia answers the “special line” as Jensen Holdings, the company Angel made up to fool Ronald. Like, this is such attention to detail, right? So why can’t they do this in an evenly distributed way throughout the whole episode?


Anyway, Ronald tells “Mr. Jensen” that he’ll do the surgery on his fake dying wife, but they have to leave the country and he wants $100,000 upfront. Angel says he’ll bring it right over. He goes to Ronald’s office, only to find that Ronald has discovered that Jensen is a fake identity. He shoots Angel in the neck with a tranquilizer dart.


Ronald: “You’ll feel a slight sinking sensation. That’s your heart slowing down as the paralytic takes effect. Eventually, it’ll stop all together.”


What happens next? Well, while Ronald monologues about how Melissa is cheating on him with Angel, Angel struggles to breathe (#9), collapses, and the soundtrack plays the dire thrum of a failing heart.


Does anyone who works on this show know what a vampire is?


This directly contradicts the vampire lore already established in Buffy. Vampires don’t breathe and have no pulse. We know that drugs affect vampires, but how can a drug meant to stop someone’s heart hurt a creature whose heart doesn’t beat at all? This doesn’t make a lick of sense.


Back at Angel’s apartment, Ronald’s creepy fingers punch their way through a duct-taped over hole or vent or something while Cordelia and Doyle talk about doomed relationships. As much as I hate the Nice Guy trope, I actually do kind of ship Cordelia and Doyle, for reasons I’ll probably get into when Doyle dies. Anyway, Dr. Potatohead is scattering his parts all through the apartment. He lets himself in while one of his hands causes a distraction. Then he slams Cordelia against a wall and drags Doyle into the sewer before collecting all his pieces up and confronting Melissa. He’s furious that’s she’s cheating on him and tells her he’s disappointed. Then, she does the thing where she takes her power back and tells him he knows she could never love him and that he’s turned himself into a freak. And of course, it stalls him because he’s so hurt and upset.


This is another one of those major differences from Buffy. In Buffy, a long speech like this would have resulted in the killer straight up murdering her. That show turned tropes and cliches on their heads for the most part. This show falls back on them.


Anyway, in comes Angel, not dead or paralyzed at all. So, was the falling on the floor, struggling to breathe thing all theater for Ronald? Or did Angel process the poison really quickly? We’ll never know because the show assumes that we’re not going to see this as a flaw but insert the details ourselves.


Ronald throws his teeth at Angel and they fly out biting like a pair of dentures or those windup gag teeth which is NOT HOW TEETH WORK AT ALL and uses a detached hand to try to strangle him. Then, while Ronald is telling Melissa how happy they could have been together, his ear falls off. Again, why? Why is this the moment that Ronald starts to lose his powers? What is making his neck go all weird and wavy? Why is this super powerful character who can’t be killed conveniently falling apart right now?


Angel manages to get free and then hits Ronald super hard with some kind of object, knocking his head off. And that solves the problem and makes everybody safe, for the moment.


On another day, Cordelia complains about having to recycle coffee grounds (because Angel apparently won’t even supply coffee for his employees, let alone a salary) and asks if they’re sure Ronald isn’t going to put himself back together:


Angel: “He’s in twelve steel boxes buried in twenty cubic feet of concrete in L.A.’s newest subway stop.”


Ronald’s story is over and we still have no clear idea what powers he possessed or what our heroes were up against. Therefore, the conclusion is ultimately unsatisfying and none of the extreme danger we were supposed to be worrying about seems as dangerous anymore. But whatever.


The next day, Melissa comes by with a plant and to pay Angel for his services. He says he didn’t do it for the money and she tells him that he earned it. After she leaves, Cordelia and Doyle head off to cash the check and celebrate. Cordelia thinks Doyle should hurry up and have another vision so they can get paid again, and as they argue their way out of the building, Angel gazes upon the plant fondly.


So, I’m really disappointed in this show. And here’s why I think I wasn’t disappointed in it the first time I watched it (aside from the fact that at the time, I wasn’t breaking down media for fun on a daily basis): because I was one of the viewers that the Angel writers managed to dupe. I was so deeply attached to Buffy, so in the grips of fandom, that I didn’t see flaws that are completely obvious in hindsight. I was so hungry for more of the world that I could let things like, “Hey…what are this guy’s powers really?” slide. Now, I look at “Hey…are this guy’s powers really?” and I follow it up with, “Because on Buffy they would have explained all of this.” The nostalgia I have for Buffy isn’t translating into nostalgia for this show. It’s just highlighting the shortcomings. On Buffy, we would have seen Angel get up after Ronald left, clearly demonstrating that he was faking it all. On Buffy, someone would have proposed the steel box idea only to have someone else suggest shooting the guy. On Buffy, someone would have explained why just shooting the guy wouldn’t work and it would have been an opportunity for more exposition about his powers.


I have two theories about this decline in quality. One is the aforementioned “we don’t have to try”. They knew they had a built-in, loyal audience, so why bother putting in the effort? The other is that in trying so hard to be different from Buffy, they cut all the wrong things loose. They kept the casual misogyny, the Nice Guy™ character, the spooky supernatural elements, but they did away with things like…exposition. I feel like this gets better as the show goes on. If it doesn’t, don’t tell me, because I have five seasons of it to recap. But right now, I’m frustrated that incredibly tiny fixes were overlooked in what could have been a really good episode.

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Published on August 10, 2018 16:08

August 8, 2018

I Love This Book

In an effort to promote work I love (rather than just tear apart that which I hate), I introduce to you this book that I love. Meet Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber.


A photo of the book Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber, staged on my crocheted white table cloth with a china cup of tea with saucer beside it, a dried rose resting across it, and a selenite crystal ball looking ghostly and beautiful above it.


Go check it out at Macmillan.com


Now, some background on this book. This is actually an updated volume that contains two books, The Strangely Beautiful Tale Of Miss Percy Parker and The Darkly Luminous Fight For Persephone Parker. Anyone discovering this gaslight fantasy series now is super lucky; they don’t have to wait for the sequel (like I did). They can just get it in one book.


I read The Strangely Beautiful Tale Of Miss Percy Parker in 2009 when I received it as a freebie at a convention. I fell deeply, deeply in love with it. A gaslight fantasy about a mystical task force, The Guard, who protect Victorian London from restless spirits and supernatural dangers, it hit every one of my reader sweet spots. I fell in love with the heroine, Percy, a young woman who’s more like a living ghost, with moon-white skin and hair and supernatural abilities even she doesn’t understand. I swooned over Alexi, the dark, brooding schoolmaster who leads The Guard. And reading scenes with The Guard? I totally felt like I was a part of them like they were all my friends and I was included in their divine purpose. The writing is lush and the world is rich. The original mythology blends seamlessly with the traditional mythology woven throughout (fans of Persephone and Hades, in particular, will fall in love with this book). It absolutely blindsided me and I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t talking about it and fangirling over it as much as I was.


So imagine how I, a person who generally overreacts to things I like, finally met the author, Leanna Renee Hieber, in 2010 after the release and my subsequent devouring of the sequel.


I was actually pretty cool. “I really loved your book, I can’t say enough good things about it.”


But when she cosplayed as Percy Parker for a party later that night (and stayed in character the whole time)?


I threw myself, practically sobbing, into her arms and cried, “I love you so, so much!”


Luckily, Leanna is as passionate and awesome about stuff she loves as I am about the stuff she writes, so she totally got it. And this particular copy is signed, “Percy loves you so much!” so there, it’s canon, written in the author’s own hand, no take backs.


How much of a fangirl am I for this series (which includes a prequel, The Perilous Prophecy Of Guard And Goddessnow available as The Perilous Prophecy and the upcoming sequel, Miss Violet And The Great Warwhich I am totally freaking out about)? I have every version of these books, from the originals to the releases (all signed, of course) as well as the ebooks because I want to be able to carry them with me everywhere so I can read my favorite parts when the mood strikes me. Which, for me, is saying something, because my stunning array of learning disabilities makes reading super duper hard for me.


I love, love, love these books. I hope that if you read them, you’ll love them as much as I do. But even if you only love them a fifth as much as I do, they’ll still be in your top ten.

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Published on August 08, 2018 11:34

August 6, 2018

The Big Boys’ Table

I’m talking to a male author at a signing event. He writes thrillers and horror and he’s standing in front of tall promotional banners bearing big-name praise for his books. He’s normal and personable and not braggy.


Which is what makes it worse when he says that his first contract resulted in a seven-figure advance.


He explains how much support he’s gotten from big names, the movie and television rights he’d sold. How none of his subsequent advances have been below six figures.


And how he’d gotten a lot of this attention because an indie book he’d published had reached sales figures that are fairly average to midlist indie romance authors.


“Anyone can do what I did,” he says of his marketing tactics at the beginning. He’s a nice guy and genuinely believes his good luck at stumbling upon a marketing tactic that worked is why he’s being handed big checks and bigger opportunities. He wants his fellow authors to succeed. He wants to pay it forward and help them the way he was helped. Because everyone has been so nice to him, so eager to see his star rise. He tells a story about one of the biggest names in the business flying him out to spend a weekend in his guest house and saying, “We’re going to get you a seat at the big boys’ table.”


It’s a story out of a writer’s wildest dreams.


It’s a story out of a male writer’s wildest dreams.


Those words, “the big boys’ table”, undoubtedly thrilled him in the retelling of the tale. Who doesn’t fantasize about having a rich, powerful person promise them that every dream they have is about to come true? But they didn’t have the same inspirational effect on me that he was probably going for. A moment before, I’d been listening to a fascinating story of an author who really, truly believes in himself and the power of our art.


A moment later, I was slapped with a reminder that these wild literary adventures aren’t for me or any other woman. Because there’s no seat for a female author at “the big boys’ table.”


This table, as I imagine it, is more of a conglomeration of high top bar tables crowded together with bowls of peanuts and pretzels and plenty of room for empty beer glasses. For the most part, it’s cis, straight, white men basking in the camaraderie here. They’re in the center. They’re the ones who can pass you the pretzels or the appetizer menu. If you’re not white or straight or cis or male, they have the authority to say, “Grab another chair! Join us!”


But for the most part, anyone outside the demographic will undoubtedly be told that the management asked them not to rearrange any more tables. That the gathering is unfortunately just wrapping up. That they’ve all just asked for their checks. The peanuts are gone and someone spilled their beer into the pretzels. We’ve missed out.


The male author I spoke to, the one who gets six and seven figure advances, the one who gives credit to his marketing and the kindness of other authors for his success, will probably never understand why a female author’s eyes glaze over upon hearing about his invitation to “the big boys’ table”. As time passes, someone will tell him to chalk up our sudden disinterest to envy. He may stop trying to reach out to help anyone who won’t fit in with the crowd at that table, believing all of us too jealous or bitter to help. It’s entirely possible that no one will ever tell him that the only competition he had for his seat was from other cis white men.


Does this mean his books aren’t good? No. I haven’t read them, but I plan to read his next release because it sounds incredible. Does it mean he hasn’t worked for the success he’s received? Not at all. He’s a hybrid author currently working on self-published releases alongside traditionally published ones, which is no easy feat. The problem isn’t this author or that he’s been offered a seat at the big boys’ table. The problem is that when another man is invited to that table, they forget why they’re there. They don’t notice the people who aren’t sitting with them.


And the men who’ve spent a lot of time at that table know this. They’ve carefully engineered the situation to be this way. And they’re going to tell you that it’s your fault that you’re not taken seriously. That if you wrote something more “literary”, if you used your initials or a male pen name, if you didn’t waste time on this or that publisher, there would be room for you. That it’s not them. It’s not the institution. It’s you.


How can we expect to be treated equitably in a business that openly sneers at its best-selling genre simply because of the people who write it and buy it? How can we believe publishers who insist that they’re giving everyone a fair shake while indulging in boys’ club terminology? Why are we told that men who’ve written fewer books and done half our sales have proven themselves and earned astronomical advances that our work pays to provide?


How stupid do you think we are?


As long as powerful people in traditional publishing describes success in such terms, there is no reason for the rest of us to court industry favor. The game is rigged, so there’s no reason to continue playing. No one is going to come right out and say, “You aren’t welcome,” especially when they can still make money from your work. But they clearly have no issue with acknowledging the truth in casual conversation.


There’s no neat wrap up to this post. There’s no call action. There’s just me, a female writer, sitting at a book signing and dreaming of burning a cheerful watering hole full of jovial male writers to the ground.

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Published on August 06, 2018 10:14

August 2, 2018

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 19 Death (part two) or “THAT’S IT I’M SETTING THIS BLOG AND THEN MYSELF ON FIRE.”

In this week’s Jealous Haters Book Club, there is no news about Handbook For Mortals.


Because it’s fading away. But don’t worry. You can still find a copy of Handbook For Mortals at your nearest, cursed bookstore.



Y’all. Guess who the fuck put her books in my store on consignment…..


L*ni fucking S*rem.


— shauna (they/them) (@theb00kwitch) August 1, 2018



In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept of consignment, what happens is that a bookstore and a self-published author or a small press representative make a deal in which the store will carry a title, which the author or small press provide, and if the book sells, the bookstore takes a cut. This is different to how a book that sells enough to legitimately make #1 on the New York Times list would be sold in a store. A book that is actually popular and in demand would be sold to the bookstore at a lower-than-retail price, which they would then sell at retail price. I’m not knocking consignment; I’ve done it myself because what else do self-published people do? But in one scenario, the business is investing in your product. In the other, the business is willing to let you rent shelf space. Twilight wasn’t hitting Waldenbooks on consignment.


In other news, a friend who lives in Las Vegas excitedly texted me, “You’ll never believe who’s on my flight!”


I was super disappointed to learn that it was not Carrot Top.


Linguini is still dying and Mac is still sleeping when we pick things back up. Sandwich is monitoring Zooboomafoo’s vitals and keeping calm:


If she showed a great deal of emotion, it would cause everyone else around her to get worked up––and what good would that do?


Yeah, what good would it do to have an emotional reaction to your daughter being nearly dead?


Since there was a table in front of her, and she decided to lay down some cards.


…did you wanna make that a complete sentence or…?


Chuckie Spellmanfield watches her.


She didn’t even seem to be really looking at them once she laid them down. She seemed to glance at them and then a frustrated expression would spread across her face briefly before she reshuffled the cards and threw them down again almost haphazardly, which was very different from the slower, more precise way he was used to see her read. Then again, he couldn’t remember when the last time was that he had even seen her read cards.


She hasn’t done any readings since they arrived? Sandwich and Zye Lelicia are the type who consult the cards for every god damn thing. I find it absolutely impossible that she hasn’t done ninety-six readings about all of this. Plus, I don’t get why she didn’t do a reading to see how the ritual would go or how it turned out. Many witches consult an oracle, from cards to seven-day candles, to see if the spell took.


David Copperman asks Deli what she’s reading about:


“Nothing, really. I think I am laying down cards out of habit. I can’t pick up anything anyway. They won’t cooperate and read on the situation at all.”


This is super realistic, with regards to just mindlessly laying down and shuffling tarot cards. I know a lot of people who read cards and who fiddle with them like some kind of metaphysical fidget toy. Sometimes, it’s just nice to be around your cards. So, this is, without sarcasm, dead fucking on.


On the other hand, the whole “the cards aren’t cooperating” thing rolls my eyes for me. The cards are a tool, Sandwich. If anything isn’t cooperating, it’s your intuition.


It was a difficult situation for her to be in. She was so used to being able to help everyone. She was used to having power and yet she was suddenly unable to help the one person in the world she loved more than anything––the one person she had been trusted to save, the one she would give her own life for.


The one she would separate from the father who loved her through magical trickery and manipulation.


“This must be what it’s like to be a mortal,” she joked.


Authors really need to stop using “mortal” as shorthand for “non-magical” if their “non-mortal” characters are…you know. Able to age and die. This isn’t a sin Sarem commits all alone. A lot of people use that sloppy world-building shortcut and it makes me bonkers no matter who does it.


Slowly she looked up at Charles, who was studying her carefully. She could see care and love in his eyes and she could feel her own barriers breaking down. She knew he still had the power to make her swoon even after all this time.


Does she know he’s in a committed romantic relationship? I mean, the author kind of forgets as we go along.


“Remind me that I don’t ever want to do this again, will you?” Dela was trying to lighten the mood, as she knew it wasn’t helping either of them to feel so deeply depressed.


Things It Is Okay To Be Upset About:



Fights with your mom
Fights with boys
Boys not liking tarot
Girls being jealous of you
Boys being jealous over you
Not being able to choose between two boys

Things It Is Not Okay To Be Upset About:



Your child possibly dying.

Chuck tells Bologna to take a break from sitting and worrying and tells her to get something to eat. She says she’ll make tea for them and something for Mac to eat when he wakes up. Lucretia explains that it’s okay for Chuck and Sandwich to have the following conversation right next to Mac because he’s really deeply asleep:


“What do you think about him?” Charles asked, drifting to a subject other than whether or not I would ever actually wake up.


“He seems like a wonderful guy. We certainly have put him through quite the test––and he seems to be dealing with it far better than most men would. I’ll give him that,” Dela said, looking thoughtfully at Mac’s face.


“You see this being something that becomes serious?” Charles asked, pointing to Zade and Mac in one swift finger swoop.


Behold, Laudnum referring to herself in the third person for no reason whatsoever.


“I mean…her future is unclear. I see a path that could lead to them being together, but over the past few days so many other paths have popped up. This incident has set into motion something bigger than I know…bigger than I have ever seen. And, based on my readings, I also think she has been hanging out with another guy, who has potential. At this point, though, I’d root for Sleeping Beauty.”


At this point, I’d say you’re correct, given the fact that Inaction Jackson has had approximately one twenty-sixth of the page time Mac has gotten. Can we talk about the fact that it’s gross to spy on your kid’s love life via oracles of any kind? It’s none of your business, Pimento Loaf. Let your daughter just live. Especially since she ran across the country to escape you. If she wanted you to know any of this, she would tell you.


After Deli leaves the room, Chavid Copperman picks up the tarot cards and starts laying them out.


During his years with Dela he had learned what most of their general meanings were and even understood how some of them related to the other ones. He also had learned that it was much more complex than what showed on face value, and that, regardless of the amount of information he had, he still probably wouldn’t know what they could be saying.


Reading tarot isn’t at all “much more complex than what showed on face value.” Literally, the pictures on the cards tell the story of what you’re looking at. It’s how intuitive readings work. Don’t doubt yourself, Chuckles.


Hey, remember how Sandwich is just the conscious avatar for Lugubrious while she’s knocked out? Here’s further proof of that:


He couldn’t help but feel that almost everything that was wrong was his fault––from the failure of his relationship with Dela to their daughter being in this life-and-death situation, both were completely his fault.


Excuse me, but how? His relationship with Deli ended after he cheated on her, sure, but he also cheated on her after finding out she’d been lying about using magic on him for years and her gaslighting fucked his head up. And Zark almost died because she chose to involve someone else in her magic without telling them or asking their permission. There are two reasons for Chuck E. Copperfield to blame himself and both of those reasons can’t exist at the same time.


Reason #1: Sarem can’t bear for either character she’s using as her avatar to be blamed for anything they’ve done.


Reason #2: David Charlesman is so egotistical and selfish that everything, including extremely negative things, has to be all about him.


He also felt he should have tried harder to be a part of my life even though he knew Dela had cast a spell to keep him away. He decided that he should have found some way to fight her on that––he didn’t really blame Dela for why she’d done it, though.


Imagine thinking that your writing is so masterful and your skill so great that you could convince a reader to accept being ensorcelled and permanently separated from your own child as a fitting punishment for cheating on one’s partner.


As I riffled through his memories, I realized that while Charles was sitting next to me as I fought my way back to life, he just felt like he had made all the wrong things priorities in life, and that his life had been mostly wasted.


Either Charles was kept away by a spell or he was kept away by his shitty choices. It can’t be both or else the impact of both is greatly diminished. A reader is going to either think, “Well, the spell doesn’t really matter because he was making shitty choices,” or “The shitty choices don’t matter because the spell would have kept him away, anyway.” The problem here is that Sarem can’t decide if she wants her protagonist to have a fairytale monster of a mother or a neglectful father and she’s trying to have them both while insisting neither of them are bad people because they are totally unresponsible for their own choices. The contradiction in characterization is boggling.


“Oh, Zade, I am so incredibly sorry, will you ever forgive me?” he said as he buried his face in his hands and collapsed on the table. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his emotions started to bubble up as he felt the weight of everything that was happening crashing down upon him. His overpowering amount of guilt washed over him and it caused every part of him to ache inside. Out of all of his accomplishments he still believed I was by far the greatest and most wonderful thing he had done, despite his failures surrounding being a dad.


Man, I really hope that when I take my daddy issues out on my readers, I do it in a way that it isn’t such transparent wish fulfillment. This is some “one day, my dad will be sorry!” shit I could have written in overwrought Labyrinth fanfiction when I was fourteen. And of course, all this regret is loud enough to wake Lolita from her magical slumber.


A cracking soft voice startled him right out of his chair. “Forgive you for what?”


Charles raised his head and his eyes met my weary eyes as they struggled to adjust to the dimly lit room and the dizziness that had hit me almost immediately. This was the first thing I remembered on my own since I had collapsed in the theater. Everything that had happened between then and waking up in my old room I wouldn’t know until later. For the moment, I didn’t know where I was and I was unaware of everything the three of them had been through.


So, we’re back in Zucchini’s first person POV, then, right?


Charles leaned in and caressed my cheek as a huge burst of happiness spread across his face, he responded to me very softly, “Hey, you. You’re awake.” The relief flooded his body so quickly that he practically felt like he was floating and his eyes welled up this time with happy tears.


Is…is that a “no” on the first person then or…


Honestly, my expectations were so low for this inevitable transition that I’m not surprised Sarem can’t keep her own narrative parameters straight for more than a paragraph. I’m just going to go limp and hope the prose thinks I’m dead long enough that it lets its guard down and trundles off into the woods, thus allowing me to make my escape. The idea of telling part of the story through the memories of other characters isn’t a bad one. With better execution, this could have been a unique and interesting storytelling device. The problem Handbook For Mortals has is that its author can’t stay in one POV consistently, let alone juggle several POVs through an omniscient central character. Obviously, a lot of this could have been fixed by avoiding numerous, nonsensical POV and tense shifts, but here are some other ways the “through everyone else’s eyes” part of this story could have been told more effectively:



If Lasagna had been privy to the actions of others through their memories, but not their internal thoughts; the storytelling falls flat when the narrator has to tell the reader explicitly what the characters are feeling.
If it had been formatted as its own section apart from the beginning and end of the story; this would have created an easier transition back into Lumpy’s waking thoughts as first person POV.
If the entire book had been written in the third person; this would remove the need to have Zason and the Largonauts tell a portion of the story she’s not a part of.

And here are the correlating reasons Lani Sarem could not have done these things:



She’s incapable of showing instead of telling.
It would have interfered with her tarot-card-of-the-day chapter format
Twilight was told in first person POV.
It would have required the author to move her avatar slightly out of the spotlight.

The fact that Sarem was willing to relinquish Lubnub’s stranglehold on the narrative any time the reader needed to see how men were reacting to the sight of her nearly nude or dripping wet body only makes this more infuriating. She was fine with having sections where she wasn’t narrating all the action, just so long as she could sexually objectify herself in those sections.


Anyway, the If I Stay section of the book is now over and we’re moving on to more beautiful suffering:


My head was pounding and I kept blinking my eyes trying to get them to focus enough so that I could see where I was. I felt like I had been asleep for years and that I had awoken from a terrible dream. My entire body ached everywhere. My joints felt swollen and painful. My chest felt as if I had been stabbed. My head felt like someone had ripped all my hair out by the roots. My veins felt as if ice and needles were coursing through them and my stomach felt like someone had punched me as hard as they could. I was pretty sure I couldn’t have felt worse.


Okay, but how do you feel? I mean, I can’t get a feel for how you feel at the moment. If only you’d used the exact same word in like seven consecutive sentences so that I would have some idea how this all felt to you.


I couldn’t help but lock one of my legs and grit my teeth in hopes of powering through as a wave of pain crashed over me.


Charles seemed sad, though I wasn’t sure why. “Are you in pain, my dear?”


I bit my lip and shook my head. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad. What happened though?”


She visibly reacts to pain. Her father, watching her, looks sad but she can’t tell why. He asks if she’s in pain. She shakes her head and answers yes. How does someone pack this much failure into such a small amount of text? Lozenge, your dad is watching his kid writhe in pain. That is why he’s sad. And when you answer someone in the affirmative, you don’t do it by shaking your head. You nod your head. This is a concept that admittedly baffled me for a long time…when I was a toddler. The inability to grasp that other humans react to emotional stimuli just like you also react to emotional stimuli (i.e., looking sad when someone is in pain) is also something I struggled with…as a child. I’ve been saying Handbook For Mortals isn’t a YA because its main character doesn’t fit the demographic. What I didn’t realize until now is that it should have been written as a picture book, since the protagonist needs to learn important lessons about how people respond to and deal with emotions.


The last thing I remembered was finishing our new illusion in the theater. And…something had gone wrong. Maybe having him tell me the story would help take my mind off the incredible amount of agony ripping through my body.


Trust me, having someone tell you that story will only increase the amount of agony you’re experiencing. It’ll even heap on some fresh agony as garnish.


Charles begins to tell her the “short version” of the story and I swear to God, if we have to read a retelling of the entire section we just read so that Lutefisk can get up-to-date on shit she’s just going to learn from the memories she pulls anyway I’m going to cancel the Jealous Haters Book Club entirely and turn this into a food blog where I blather on about why fall is my favorite season and how much I love farmer’s markets before giving you an overcomplicated and unappetizing recipe for butternut squash and kale risotto with very, very little seasoning.


Anyway, Charles tells her that “we” had to bring her to her mother’s house.


The moment he said the words “we,” the thought of who that could be flashed into my head. No one else at the show knew anything about who I was. Maybe he meant my mom when he said “we,” but that would be an odd way to word it if my mother was also part of the “we.” I decided to stop the story for a moment to clarify whom he meant.


“We? Who is ‘we’?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.


See that tiny little one line of dialogue there? It could have stood on its own and easily replaced that entire paragraph above it.


Charles tells her that the “we” is him and Mac.


The last thing I remembered about Mac was that he had been furious with me and had stormed off in a fit of rage.


And therefore you probably shouldn’t have gone on with your Khaos Mahjik bullshit? Because you knew that the person you were depending on to make it work was furious with you at best, not even in the building at worst?


Just like with the “surprise” of Zucchini’s parentage, Sarem tried to hide crucial, plot-relevant information from readers despite the fact that the story is being told almost exclusively through that protagonist’s first person POV. Lumber knew that her magic depended on her connection with Mac. When that connection was broken through their violent argument she should have at least had the thought that the spell might not work because of that. Instead. there was the weak excuse that she was distracted by the argument and had to try to make the spell work despite her own lack of focus. But she would have known that wasn’t the issue, and as such, the reader should have been shown that knowledge.


Writing Tip For God’s Fucking Sakes: You cannot let a POV character withhold crucial plot information they possess only to spring it on the reader after the fact.


As I was lying there, I hadn’t yet pulled their memories to understand what had happened; so how he, of all people, ended up at my mother’s didn’t make much sense.


Stephen Moffat has written less confusing timelines than the one in that sentence.


Another wave of pain rippled through my body and I gritted my teeth again and arched my back as I gripped the sheets waiting for it to pass.


You know how on South Park they always make fun of Mel Gibson for his lengthy scenes of being tortured or in pain in his movies?


Writing Tip: Words have different flavors. To say she’s in this horrible pain that’s making her grit her teeth and arch her back, “rippled” is a pretty calm word. If it’s going to be a wave, I would say “crashed over” or “dragged me under,” something to evoke the violence of water. Rippling waves don’t inspire the panic of horrendous pain. My one exception to this would be descriptions of a non-harrowing labor and birth, in which pain is generally described more positively.


Charles tells Lumberzack that the whole story can wait––thank you Jesus––but Mac knows everything about her being…I don’t know. Not a mortal? Have they put a name on what the fuck these people are? We’re 92% into this book. Now might be the time to say “witches” or “immortals” or whatever she’s going to call it. Like, push that button anytime, okay?


Zagamander asks how fast Mac ran away, and then there’s more description of her acting out how miserable she feels so that there’s plenty to put on the For Your Consideration reels. Charles points out that Mac is right there in the room with them.


I could mainly just make out a body kind of piled in the corner. It took his word it was actually Mac.


What a weird thing to lie about. Why would he? “Yeah, that guy over in the corner there is Mac. Ha ha, she’ll never realize it’s not Mac when Doug the next door neighbor stands up and Mac is nowhere to be found.” This book has some of the fucking weirdest responses to situations that I’ve ever seen in my life. Why would you even begin to assume that your dad would lie to you about whether or not that was your love interest sitting a few feet away from you? What could his plan possibly be? Why must you extend the courtesy of belief in this situation? What even is happening?


I forced myself to consider that Mac being there because I was on the brink of death and him being there because he wanted us to work on our relationship were two very different things. I figured that I would find out what his thoughts were soon enough, probably about the same time I found out what he actually knew.


First of all, he knows everything. Chaz told her that. Why is she so quick to doubt Wish Fulfillment Dad?


Now here’s an amazing part of this story:


“Um…I’m pretty parched and could use something for all the pain. Got any morphine lying around?” I asked, trying to be lighthearted, but realizing that if I waited much longer I wasn’t going to be able to swallow at all.


“Oh yes, of course. I should’ve thought of that. I’ll go right now. […]”


Does…does Charles just have morphine? “Oh yes, of course.” Oh yes, of course, I have this controlled narcotic out in the car. Let me just grab it. Or does he mean, Oh yes, of course. I’ll go to the drug store and get some? This is amazing. I cannot wait for the follow-up comment from Real Vegas Pharmacist in which they insist that all the Olympic athletes in Cirque Du Soliel go to Tennessee to get over-the-counter morphine.


Chandler Spellsfield decides to wake up Mac to tell him that Zelda is awake. Like, you know. Don’t yell to Sandwiches to let her know that her daughter isn’t dead. The boyfriend is priority.


He patted my arm briefly before turning around and walking over to Mac to shake him. “Son?


Don’t call me son.


Son.”


CALL ME SON ONE MORE TIME.


My dad’s voice, which had just been a whisper as we talked, boomed into the corner of the room, as he shook Mac.


Damn, Dave. Bring it down. Find some middle volume, for fuck’s sake.


Mac awoke, completely startled.


No shit. I don’t blame him. He’s out cold and his boss starts shouting at him.


Anyway, he jumps up all panicked, thinking something has gone wrong. This is probably the part where he’s like, “I just had the most horrible dream! I was in a terrible book where I exist only to reflect how awesome the protagonist is!”


Charles tells Mac everything is fine and he leaves to get The Lorax some water and to tell Sandwich like, hey, by the way, our kid isn’t dead. Mac rushes to Lart’s side and gives her kisses on her forehead and says:


“You awake is a sight for sore eyes.”


There had to be. I mean had to be. No way there wasn’t. A better way to word that sentence or leave the cliche out completely. There had to be.


Now, remember: Mac was used as a conduit for chaos magic without his knowledge or consent. But our beautiful, magjikkal princess of goodness and light is never responsible for anything she does. See, if she ever did accept responsibility for anything, that would create a plot. A plot would get in the way of pages upon pages of Zob Lombie being not like other girls and being fawned over by every man in the universe. So, what do we do to avoid conflict that would require introspection on character growth?


“I am so sorry,” he said with regret and guilt riddled all through his face. The look he gave me was that of a begging dog when you walk into the room and they’ve knocked over something priceless and important.


That’s right! It’s all Mac’s fault! He’s just going to apologize for his actions having an outcome he couldn’t have possibly foreseen because he didn’t have any idea he was being magically violated by Lazarus. And of course, she has no fucking clue why anyone would be apologizing, because oh, golly gee, she hasn’t pulled anyone’s memories. I’m calling such a monumental pile of bullshit on this. She knew the “illusion” was going wrong. She knew it was going wrong because of Mac. She should have, at that time, in that scene, been like, “oh, this is because I broke my connection with him” or some such other bullshit, because she knew she had to use him to ground or whatever. SHE WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN THE TIME TO USE HIM IN HER MAGIC IF SHE DID NOT NEED HIM AND THEREFORE NONE OF THIS CAN COME AS A SURPRISE TO HER.


But still, when she asks why everyone is apologizing, Mac says:


“‘Cause, your dad and I screwed up––and you were the one that paid the price.”


Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids saying


Princess Bubblegum on Adventure Time flipping a table


Fat Amy from Pitch Perfect yelling


OH MY GOD NOBODY SCREWED UP EXCEPT ZADE! NOBODY! NOT A GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING PERSON IS RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO ZADE BUT ZADE! ZADE DID IT! ZADE DID THIS!

Glittering text that says


God I hate this book so much. I just…


Look. LOOK.

Even if Lani Sarem and Thomas Michael Chad William or who the fuck ever hadn’t scammed the bestseller list, I would still hate this book. Like, the lying, the sneakiness, the generally just being horrible people who think way, way too highly of themselves? That’s just FROSTING on my fucking hatred for this book. They could have been the nicest, most playfair, humble people in the universe and I would still want them jailed for the crime against humanity that is this horrible book. And the thing is, if they were the nicest, most playfair, humble people in the world THEY WOULD HAVE NEVER COMMITTED THIS HATE AGAINST THEIR FELLOW MAN IN THE FIRST PLACE!


So, some other shit happens and Zade says something stupid about how she guesses her inability to open her eyes is what blind people must feel like (I’m not kidding) and lectures the reader on the fact that pain makes people sleepy BUT WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT THE HUMAN BODY’S RESPONSE TO EXCRUCIATING PAIN BECAUSE WE’RE READING THIS BOOK.


But whatever. I’m done with this chapter. DONE.


DONE.
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Published on August 02, 2018 18:41

July 26, 2018

State Of The Trout: “Something Smells Like Corpse In Here” edition

This week will be lean pickins here on the ol’ blog again. This time, because I’ll be…



At Literary Love Savannah in Savannah, GA
Being locked in the Sorrel-Weed house tonight to potentially get haunted
Finishing up a proposal for a really exciting new project that’s going to get to you guys one way or another
Launching a brand new blog––

“WHAT THE FUCK?” you may be screaming right now. I like to think that at least some of you are gnashing your teeth in biblical sorrow. But it wouldn’t be necessary. Trout Nation isn’t going anywhere! It’s just getting a sibling. A weird sibling who talks about auras and how the fae folk stole her car keys. Bewitched Musings is a side blog that will allow me to share metaphysical, new age stuff with the portion of my audience who is cool with it and keep it over-there from the people who aren’t comfortable reading that kind of stuff.


This spring/summer I’ve really had an awakening that was, frankly, a long time coming. After purging myself of the story of The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met, I was slowly able to reconnect with my spiritual self again. And not everybody wants to hear about that shit. But since I share literally everything with my readers, I thought, why not?


So, what to expect at Bewitched Musings:



Ramblings about my own spiritual path
Reviews of metaphysical products and services
Tips for finding/making inexpensive tools or spell ingredients
Interviews and guest posts from other cool people
Hopefully, a robust comments section where people can share their experiences on these topics

I’m really excited about some of the changes that are going on my life right now, as well as in my writing career, and I can’t wait to share everything with you all. All of the fun features here will still go on (including True Blood Tuesday, if I can ever figure out why my recording software is being how it’s being), so no worries at all. I just need to reinvent and redirect myself slightly every now and then. I’m like a beautiful cicada emerging from wherever the hell they come out of (to be honest, I’m not even 100% sure what a cicada is other than a loud noise at night)––


No. Corpse Flower. We’re going with a Corpse Flower. Every few years, I slowly unfurl my petals and release a glorious stink. Gather round. Grab the camera. Let’s get a live stream going. Jenny Trout is slowly unfurling and smelling like a rotting body. Get excited!

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Published on July 26, 2018 07:00

July 11, 2018

State Of The Trout: Pure Imagination Edition

Hey there! Quick note to remind you guys that I’m buried under a mound of props and chocolate this week. Wanna catch a great show? Come out to Center Stage Theater in Comstock, MI, this weekend and next for Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, featuring beloved music from the classic film as well as new selections written by the original composers. Tickets and more information are available at that link.


I’ve got a couple of busy weeks coming up, but I will try to have something here on the blog next week, at least. Definitely, I’ll have more information on an upcoming signing in Savannah, GA. Until then, pray for my fingers, as they have been burned with hot glue so many times this week.


 

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Published on July 11, 2018 09:34

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