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By the Shores of Silver Lake Part 1

CW: Pet Death

With the advent of both Nellie Oleson *and* a plague of locusts last time, I ended up breaking my Little House notes into two parts, and I think I’m going to continue that. For one thing, the books get longer here. For another, there are more distinct and ongoing plot threads in each, rather than Stuff Happens, Other Stuff Happens, Food is Great.

Boy howdy does Stuff Happen in this one. And before it.

Holy Happy Ending Override, Batman! I guess that happens when you’re writing a long-running series, and more so when it’s based on your actual life, but still, the gap between Plum Creek and Silver Lake really emphasizes it. Everything’s looking up, no more grasshoppers, OH HELLO SCARLET FEVER ALSO THE LAND SUCKS NOW FOR SOME REASON.

(It is not known whether that reason is white people or not, but…probably?) 

It actually seems like there are two…quadrologies?…here: Woods through Plum Creek, where there are definitely problems and occasionally the horror that is Nature, but simpler, and then Silver Lake through Golden Years (whoa, see what you did there), where adulthood hits like a brick to the back of the head.

And there’s no better way to express that than having the dog die! Apparently Laura put that in as a deliberate transition–probably not the first instance of Death by Newberry Medal, but a fairly early one nonetheless. At least he dies of old age rather than some horrible prairie mishap.

Still, though: “There were so many times that she might have petted him without being asked, and hadn’t,” JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WILDER.

To sum up: everything sucks, and then Aunt Docia arrives (these people had relatives at some point, remember, or at least Charles did) to offer a job doing administrative stuff at a railroad, and Charles is all, hey, we can also grab yet more land! So they accept and then Jack dies.

“Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up.” Ooof.

In addition to that bit of 19th-century coming-of-age, this book involves probably the least food porn in the series. (The Long Winter doesn’t count: there’s no food half the time, but when there is it’s so damn lavishly described that it’s almost worth South Dakota Fimbulwinter.) It…makes up for that?…with the most detail about engineering and, specifically, TRAINS.

(Pre-1950s libertarians seem to generally be very fond of trains, which is weird considering the amount of shitting on public transportation they do these days.)

Wilder has a talent for describing mundane modern stuff in ways that make you realize just how non-mundane it was at first. White sugar and lemonade were those things in earlier books. Trains are, big-time, in this one: they’re really fast! Often they crash and people get killed! It’s quite a contrast from my life, where I–and I am in favor of public transit–mostly think of trains as a workaday system of being constantly late and full of noisy people.

On the other hand, the Wilders’ train has red velvet seats, and this was before cell phones were invented, and both of those things probably helped the general experience.

They arrive in a town, to find that OH NO people are filking a hymn to be about HAM AND EGGS oh my god the SCANDAL.

I’m not kidding. The term “shocking words” is used with no irony whatsoever. I try…okay, I don’t so much try to take historical concerns seriously as I acknowledge that historical people (especially white Christian people) were concerned with some incredibly ridiculous bullshit, and most of the time that doesn’t surprise me any more. And then there’s this sort of thing.

Fortunately, there’s a sympathetic dishwashing girl in the hotel who lets them use the parlor–and honestly I want to know more about *her* story–and they all spend an incredibly boring-sounding afternoon while Grace naps, and then Pa comes so they don’t have to hear any more distressingly mildly irreverent songs.

Oh, yeah: Grace exists now, because historical novels about girls absolutely have to have four of them, and reality itself will enforce this. Mary and Laura are Ladylike and Tomboy, respectively, of course, while Carrie and Grace conveniently take on the Sickly and Bratty roles. Grace is never as bad as Amy March, though, for which we can only be thankful.

I Have Opinions. Here They Are.

Well, it’s been A Time. A time in which TERFs argued with Terry Pratchett’s daughter about whether he’d have been in favor of trans rights, and with Neil Gaiman about whether…Neil Gaiman was in favor of trans rights, because a talking detached face speaking for the Moon once told a trans woman she wasn’t a woman. (Which, that particular arc is–as Gaiman admits–very Of Its Time, but maybe detached faces are not generally great moral authorities?) A time in which the RWA gave an award to an “inspirational” romance in which the “hero” was a war criminal.

No, another one.

Seriously, I was explaining this to a friend and mentioned that they’d done it before with ex-Nazis, and went to look it up, and was reminded that no, not ex-Nazis, *current* heads of concentration camps and the prisoners thereof. 

Bethany House: Wholesome Family Values!

Plus there was some other, fanfic-adjacent Discourse that I missed about to what extent character flaws reflect the writer. Cue the usual jokes about Stephen King actually being an extradimensional clown.

So of course I need to give my opinion.

And my opinion comes down to:
1) It’s not the faults themselves, but how the author treats them. 
2) This applies to metatext, too.

To explain the first, I’m going to start with the time I was reading the first book in a fairly popular romance series. There’s a bit of setup in which the hero is brooding because of something military that happened, and then he sees the heroine at a bar. He tries to chat her up. She’s clearly not interested. He thinks it’d be funny if he kept trying, so he does…

…and that’s when I decided that even if I lived a thousand years, life would be too short to keep reading that book.

Because unless the blurb is a fakeout and the next scene is the heroine stabbing the guy because the story is about her life as a much-needed vigilante warrior, that is a) a horrible “hero” and b) clearly an author who thinks public harassment is, if a flaw, a funny/endearing flaw, like Darcy refusing to dance. 

And, dear reader: fuck that entire noise.

See, the character flaws that indicate authorial stances are never the big stuff. Despite their fanboys, Durden and Caufield and Bickles and the Joker are intended to be fucked-up assholes, not fonts of modern wisdom, and anyone who doesn’t read the text through incel-colored glasses can see that pretty clearly. Various Emo Skywalker Boys may get more chances for redemption and narrative focus than any white cis dude with parental issues has ever deserved, but the shit they do is portrayed as being pretty damn horrendous. Lucas has his flaws, but I am under no impression that he thinks killing kids or blowing up planets is okay.

The tells are always little. They’re the “funny” flaws, or the “endearing” faults, or the quirks that the characters never face consequences for–or if they do, those consequences are a difficult conversation, at most. The transphobia in Ready Player One. Fucking everything everyone does in Twilight and 50 Shades. Xander. Riley. The sitcoms where guys wig out about almost kissing other guys. Those are the indications.

How does War Crime Inspie fit in? Well, I mentioned redemption above, and I’ve ranted about it a fair bit here and on Twitter, but: Blue Force Ghosts aside, redemption for the Skywalkers meant death. Redemption for other ex-villains has meant walking the land, trying to make things right, giving up titles. Usually, they aren’t the main characters. Almost always, redemption means more than “finding Jesus and Caucasian tits.”

Also? Said ex-villains have notably not committed atrocities against actual groups of people who still face oppression today, which is another big difference.

A lot of discussion in romance lately is about who gets a happy ending–that the recent expansion of the genre gives HEAs (Happily Ever Afters, and I have Some Thoughts on those, but they’re not pertinent here) to people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQA+ people, etc.  Great!  There is an associated discussion about who doesn’t get them: your serial killers, your rapists, etc, sure, but there’s been considerable controversy over whether, say, people who cheat should get HEAs. 

I think it would be difficult to publish a romance novel through Bethany House featuring someone who’d been unfaithful, even if blah blah Jesus blah blah redemption. I very much doubt it would win the inspirational category. 

The tell here is that Bethany House, Karen Witemeyer, and a proportion of RWA judges think that war crimes against Native American people are…y’know, on par with cheating at cards and  drinking, maybe some backstory premarital sex, definitely better than getting a little strange now and again. 

And that says something.

Okay, so: on to metatext!

Back in The Day, The Day being 2018, someone extremely gross wrote basically a romanticized version of the Larry Nassar story (gross) and published it under “taboo romance” on Amazon. People, accordingly, were all “…the fuck? NO,” to which the author very maturely threw a shitfit about censorship and Puritanism and how we were denying the multifaceted nature of love, and also had all of her fans attack people on Goodreads.

All of this is gross.

And yet, at the same time–because Twitter is not just people being awful but thirty-seven distinct yet oddly related people being awful–there are apparently a bunch of people saying that if you write romantic fanfic about bad characters or fanfic about types of relationship that would be horrible in real life, you are a Bad Person and a Corruptive Influence and blah blah blah, and this…is also gross, and bullshit.

Because…sometimes people enjoy characters who they wouldn’t like at all in real life, or relationships that would be horrible push people’s buttons. The reasons don’t matter–you don’t need an excuse for liking what you like. All of us, I’m guessing, have a trope–sexual or not–that we love in fiction but would be fucking awful in reality. I have read both Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain multiple times, and the only way you would get me to spend a single night without indoor plumbing is to threaten my loved ones. Even then I’d have to think about how much I really loved them.

Characters do not necessarily reflect the author. Plots do not necessarily reflect the author. 

The distinction, the thing that makes fanfic fine while Jesus Redeems War Criminals and Coach/Underage Gymnast Twu Wuv are vile, is self-awareness.

Your average fanfic writer* knows that just because they like imagining a better version of a villain, or a still-bad-but-sexy one, doesn’t make that canon. Just because a particular type of relationship gets their motor running doesn’t mean that relationship is in the same time zone as healthy or, sometimes, consensual. Thus we get labels like “darkfic” or “underage” or “noncon,” labels that signal the author’s self-awareness as well as informing potential readers.** 

(Fanfic also has the thing where you’re working with established pairings and characters. If you want to read about Rupert Giles having het sex, your choices are limited re: women his age–Jenny dies, Olivia’s in two episodes, and Joyce sucks out loud, SORRY NOT SORRY. If you see a dynamic between two characters, eh, that’s a thing. It’s different than sitting down to create a whole new work and deciding that you’ll make one of the main characters fifteen and one thirty.)

A lot of the discussion around Creepy Gymnast Romance was, basically, label your kink, lady. Yes, leaving it unlabeled–or vaguely labeled, q.v. “taboo romance”–means you can post it on Amazon and sell more, but…cutting vodka with antifreeze means you sell more vodka. It’s still a bad move.

Would that have helped with Bethany House’s…masterpieces? Ugh, I don’t think so. “Anyone can be redeemed if they just love Jesus,” may indeed be the fundie version of Omegaverse knotting physics, but it’s a lot harder to sell when you’re talking about atrocities carried out against actual people. Maybe, *maybe* if a Native American or a Jewish author had written the books in question…but they didn’t, and there’s a reason for that. 

I dunno. In summary: Your Kink Is Okay, Except, If Your Kink is Nazis, That’s Deeply Unfortunate and I Don’t Know What You Should Do, Except NOT PUBLISH IT AS INSPIRATIONAL ROMANCE.

* Like, not the fans convinced that Villain Dude was actually for serious a woobie and it was a Total Betrayal when he didn’t get to settle down and have Space Babies with the main character, and definitely not the ones who harass people about this. Don’t get me wrong: some fans are shitheels.  
**Given certain tendencies among cis het men of a certain age, I am coming to think that we need a “douchebag narrator” label, but that’s beside the point. 

Interview

So I’m over at Fresh Fiction talking about Blood and Ember, bad drivers, and my influences: https://freshfiction.com/page.php?id=11415

And Now, A Book!

Blood and Ember, the third book in the Sentinels series, is out today: Amazon.com: Blood and Ember: Fantasy Romance with a Touch of Heat (Stormbringer Book 3) eBook: Cooper, Isabel: Kindle Store or Blood and Ember by Isabel Cooper, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com).

Owls

Blergh argh probable head cold. Have a blog dedicated to hungover owls, who feel like I do but at least got to drink beforehand: Hungover Owls (tumblr.com)

More Aleister, More Crowley: This Time There Are Aliens

Having decided to spend last night getting lost on the way back to my own house from the train station, I am in the perfect headspace for More Drunk Occult History! Mildly Hungover and Sleepless Occult History, in this case, but you can’t be picky at these prices.

By now we’re up to 1914, when Crowley has just had a breakup with extra cursing. Maybe it took, because he’s basically broke, so naturally he goes to the Alps. Wiki says “During this time, the First World War broke out,” in case you were raised on Mars. Crowley goes over to the US–on the Lusitania, weirdly enough.He lands in New York and stays there, writing freelance columns for Vanity Fair and doing bespoke astrology *and* messing around with sex magic, and getting paid for two out of the three. First of all, not gonna lie, #lifegoals, and second…okay I read a lot of Wodehouse short stories, a subset of which involve Bertie Wooster’s friends trying various weird ways of making it in New York, and it seems like there’s crossover potential. Or maybe my brain has melted. It’s very hot here, again.Then he becomes a spy, which has a long and semi-lustrious history of entanglement with the occult, pretending to be pro-German because he’s suddenly Irish. Some people claim that he was behind telling Germany to blow up the Lusitania for Spy Reasons, which seems like a fairly ruthless dick move and also the sort of thing he’d do.Crowley’s Sex and Drugs on the West Coast Tour commences. Unsurprisingly, this includes Santa Cruz, LA, San Francisco, and Seattle; somewhat more surprisingly, it also involves Detroit and Vancouver. He goes back to New York, knocks someone up, goes to someone else’s cabin in New Hampshire, does a shitload of drugs, and decides that his new shiny magical name is “Master Therion.”If I ever feel really organized, I will go through these blog posts and note how many different names Crowley gave himself.So then “Master Therion” bounces around cities, sleeping on friends’ couches and being mixed up with “Scarlet Women” and unsuccessful magazines, boldly forging a path that every cis man who ever listened to Nirvana would follow eighty-some years later. During this time, he contacts a being called “Lam” or “the Lama” who…may have been an alien? Or maybe a self-portrait wherein Crowley was exaggerating the dimensions of his head to show how Very Very Smart he was and was also kind of a shit-tastic portrait artist? Like, I have no great abilities there, but the pictures I’ve seen are all Fourth Page of a DeviantArt search.  Or he may just have been fucking with people? Or all of the above?Also the ritual that resulted in talking to “Lam,” may or may not have opened a portal to other dimensions and that’s why we have alien sightings today? Seriously: occult blogs are a trip, alien blogs are a trip, if you start getting into the combination it is…probably best enjoyed with some recreational chemicals.So okay. At this point–which is not even to Later Life in the Wiki–I invite you to guess what Our Putative Hero did next.Those who picked “went on another physical and probably chemical trip” (this one on an island in New York somewhere) “accessed some sort of mystical identity” (in this case about four past lives, including a pope) “then went back to the city and found *another* woman to whom he totally had a Very Deep Magickkkkkkal Connection You Guys” (oh my God if the Quilting Society of Women Who Fucked Aleister Crowley wasn’t a thing in the 1930s it should have been) (I mean also men, obvs, but the parade of Thelemic Soulmate Chicks is…a whole thing) “and started YET ANOTHER FUCKING ZINE,” please send me shipping and handling for your prize.I mean I honestly can’t even be mad at Crowley for this stuff. Generally an asshat though he may have been, and forgive him for the “magick” wankery though I never will…dude, if I could make an entire living bouncing from retreat to self-indulgent editorial and fucking my way through a major city in the process? I am there, y’all. 

In Which Our Dubious Heroine Returns to Her Garrett

Yep, I’m back in MA, in a third-floor apartment that thank God has air conditioning. MA isn’t as bad as the West Coast, but it’s not great, especially in an ex-attic for which the previous builders didn’t exactly prioritize cross-ventilation.

Train travel is largely the same as it was, except a) with masks, and b) with none of the good food places open at 30th Street Station. If I’d wanted Wendy’s or McDonald’s, I’d have been set. As it was, I had the last pretzel on the pretzel cart, which as a result of being the last pretzel could have been a decent melee weapon. Such were the trials of my journey–well, that and being delayed for an hour and a half because we had freight ahead of us, but that’s basically just how it goes between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

My apartment was still standing and miraculously whole, except for the kitchen sink. Mysterious sinkly underpinnings had rotted out there, causing a leak that dismayed my downstairs neighbor–sorry, Downstairs Girl! Um, nice to meet you?–but the landlord very quickly put new ones in.

Landlords, I will note, are among those from whom you don’t really want to hear “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

So now I’m hanging out here, enjoying the AC and eating about three thousand times the recommended daily amount of Fla-Vor-Ices. Next week I’ll see how well the liquor cabinet has made it through, and likely write more about Crowley.

Try not to melt out there!

Video!

Okay, so I have been up a couple nights running with a nervous dog, and I’m running my PCs through the probable finale of ilithid-hive infiltration tomorrow, so no blog post today. Instead, Strong Bad takes on shapeshifting: Lappy 486 – Sbemails 192 – shapeshifter – Homestar Runner

Plum Creek 2: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST MINNESOTA

The other really notable thing about Plum Creek is this: whereas Big Woods and Farmer Boy certainly had Do Not Fuck With Nature as a message, the books from Plum Creek onward took it to the next step. Nature Can, and Will, Fuck With You, and generally in some goddamn terrifying and unexpected ways.

Not that Charles doesn’t spend half this book tempting fate. Like every third line of his dialogue is about how they’ll be so rich when they get the wheat crop in, they’ll have candy and horses and glass windows and oh, he’ll just buy this lumber on credit, funny how the guy who owned the land before them didn’t have a bigger crop isn’t that weird? Pity the guy only speaks Norwegian so he can’t explain his reasoning but it’s probably just an odd personal choice he made, hey, did I mention how rich we’re going to be?

CHARLES. CHARLIE. CHUCKLES. I realize that horror movies did not yet exist, and you can’t learn from the kids who think how gee-whizz strange it is that Camp Crystal Lake has been deserted, but READ EVEN ONE GREEK MYTH I BEG YOU. 
There’s other bits here that could be either deliberate foreshadowing or just very resonant atmosphere, like a lot of description of the water and the plants talking to themselves–very pretty, but also gives the sense that humans are intruding on a place that has its own thing going on–or the first guy they meet, whose eyes are “so pale they looked like a mistake,” thank you On the Banks of Silent Hill. They’re finally around enough cows to stampede, which of course they do, and said cows get described as this disarticulate mass of “rolling eyes and tossing horns” like a Gibbering Cowther, and aforesaid cows make the roof cave in while the family is still living the Hobbit Life in a sod house.

And Laura nearly drowns twice.  

The first time isn’t super near, to be honest–she starts to go to a swimming hole she’s not supposed to go near, and is saved by a badger that shows up and terrifies her, and honestly you could do worse than Guardian Badger Angels in terms of both tenacity and scariness. 

The second time, though! It rains hard, the creek rises, Laura decides to mess around with it in a dumb kid kinda way and basically avoids drowning by hanging on to a log with her fingernails. Ma doesn’t even punish her because she’s been so freaked out, as well she might be–there’s a whole paragraph about how the creek didn’t care if she drowned and nobody could make it care. “Laura knew now that there were some things stronger than anybody,” and if that isn’t a good thesis of these later books, I don’t know of a better one.

(That moment when you’re a kid and realize that, actually, adults can’t fix everything? Fucking terrifying. Like, I keep circling back to cosmic horror in these posts, and I think there’s not enough written about everyday cosmic horror as coming-of-age story.)

Around and on top of this, there are really incredibly beautiful descriptions, though. The new house is gorgeous, the cows are great and the family gets lovely horses for Christmas. There’s an entire plum orgy in the first spring and flowers and golden wheat and plenty of fish. If you’re young and don’t have a grasp of foreboding, you might not see what’s coming.

WHICH IS A GODDAMN LOCUST HORDE.

Let me break this down:

The chapter where the grasshoppers arrive is downright apocalyptic. The light changes because there’s a cloud blotting out the sun, and then the cloud descends and grasshoppers begin eating everything in sight, like, holy Tyrannid invasion, Batman. There should never be enough insects in one place that you can hear them chew. A couple of summer LARPs had audibly-chewing masses of caterpillars, and it was enough to make me go Full Saruman on the subject of Nature in general. Also they cover the ground! The whole ground! GAH!“There was nothing anybody could do about it,” oh hello again man’s helplessness in the face of an uncaring and gross-insect-filled cosmos.After all that, they spit on Mary and Laura’s best dresses, too. I realize that insects lack sapience and cannot be malicious but fuck it: grasshoppers are complete dicks.Even their reproduction is disgusting! Grey egg sacs like “fat worms” in little dirt pustules, ew ew ew ew. WHY EVEN ARE THESE THINGS?(That said, I would play a Stardew Valley variant where the later years were complicated by locust hordes or blizzards or whatnot.)

So okay, Pa goes off to get work elsewhere, leaving Ma and the girls behind to wait out first a heatwave and then endless gloomy rain *and* a neighbor with…

…okay. So Anna Nelson is not per se bratty, she’s like two, it happens. But Mrs. Nelson? Don’t let your kid destroy other people’s belongings! It’s called “parenting,” woman, and the fact that you and Caroline leave it up to eight-year-olds to parent without being allowed to set any kind of boundaries…

…which, uch. Ana Mardoll has covered this in more depth, but the whole ideal of being completely and infinitely unselfish to the point where you have to give Random Neighbor Demonspawn your personal toys and then be happy about it? Awful bullshit. Zero things *excuse* becoming a libertarian, LAURA, but I can sort of *understand* it as a reaction to this fuckery.

Reading the Anna-and-Charlotte bit as an adult, I also perceive a whole new dynamic. Namely: Mr. Nelson is richer than Pa and Pa is probably in considerable debt to him. How much of Ma’s prating about unselfishness and how the Nelsons are good neighbors is standard Good 1800s Female Christianity Nonsense, and how much of it is reluctance to stand up to someone whose husband holds *her* husband’s IOUs? I don’t know, but I *do* know that Mrs. Nelson is an asshole for not saying “of course we’re not taking your doll, don’t be silly.” 

Anyhow, Laura gets Charlotte back after Anna basically dismembers her and leaves her in a frozen puddle, all Sid-from-Toy-Story, and then Pa gets back, and then the grasshoppers…leave. But they even leave in a completely creepy way, just walking over everything INCLUDING CARRIE OH MY GOD.

Carrie becomes sickly later, and the Long Winter gets much of the blame, but TBH I don’t know how enthusiastic I’d be about life if one of my formative experiences was being walked on by a frillion bugs. There is not enough “ew” in the word “EW.”

Is Nature done fucking around with the Ingallses? Spoiler, it never is, but also not even in this book. No, now we get blizzards where Mary and Laura have to get all the wood inside so they don’t burn the furniture and freeze to death (as kids apparently did) and then blizzards when there are voices in the wind, oh hello there Ithaqua, and then blizzards where Pa is theoretically “in town” and Ma puts a lamp against the window and tries to play it off like it’s just so pretty against the snow so her kids don’t know she’s trying to keep her husband from wandering off into the blizzard and dying. 

And Charles, at the end is STILL TALKING about how awesome next year’s crop will be now that the grasshoppers are gone. 

Mr. Ingalls, you’re a good guy and you play the fiddle well, but I’m gonna need you to hush. Like, now. Before you create a volcano.