Ally > Recent Status Updates

[Wait, how did R happen to run into B!?!? How did men attack at exactly the right moment to save R!?!?

What meaning does "slaver" have in the context of a labor monopsony? It feels like we're supposed to be shocked and hate the Screw & Fran but how is assigning residents to manual labor worse than assigning them to "comfort"? Why does the Screw keep this arrangement secret when equivalent power isn't secret?]

[Lee-yo-minster!? LEE-YO-MINSTER!?!?]

"Thufferin' thuccotash! This ith thecond degwee moider!"

[Um wow this passage is so stupid that I can't say anything smarter than 'this is stupid'?]

"I'm going to be a woman here! I'm going to be real!"

[I think we're supposed to hate the pretty girl for being pretty? Or hate the more passable trans girl for being more passable? This trope is gross.]

She could still see the stricken expression on the big one's face after she'd missed Teach, plugging Annie in the shoulder with a three-foot arrow like she was f***ing Robin Hood.

[On what conceivable future planet would TERF militia footsoldiers use she/her pronouns for trans women?]

[...also, what would transition or gender mean anymore, in a mostly all-women world where rich men would be on estrogen & boys get orchis to avoid catching a plague at puberty? I'm a little frustrated by the lack of curiosity in the world-building so far. There's no way Fran & Beth & Robbie don't have complicated theories & feelings about this.]

The plaza was mostly empty except for the dozen or so protesters with their cardboard "NO TERFS" and "TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS" signs...

[It seems like an enormous plot hole to me that five years after societal collapse there are enough trans women left alive for anyone to be trying to protect or eliminate. (Even leaving aside the plague that takes them if they lose access to T-blockers!)]

Boston's City Hall was a brutalist stack of honeycombed concrete cells, recessed windows glinting between its regimented slabs.

[This post-apoc fascist-pseudofeminist Boston feels to me like it's in conscious conversation with Gilead's Boston in _The Handmaid's Tale_.]

[SEUSS-urrus, come on babe, look the two-dollar words up first]

[In some ways this is a fantasy of importance - that after this apocalypse there would be enough trans women alive and they'd occupy enough cultural space that anyone would care enough for us to be a central target of organized violence. Even in 2025 the violence toward us is mostly in service of getting to theocracy, control of queerness and women's bodies more broadly. (Fran's submissive fantasies are meta.)]

Things that will probably come to annoy me: Katra Ariello's bad mic / recording settings, her pronunciations (conCORD, soLdered - though her comes-and-goes NE accent for Beth is adorable), dream sequences, submissive fantasies toward attackers (we got the point already - maybe an interesting thing to explore in the general theme of 'what part of this slur is sometimes real', but not interesting to salivate over).

...and he said briskly, "No thanks. I had the joy of working on a... on a body like yours, the once, and I don't want to repeat the process for anything smaller than a brain hemorrhage."

[I couldn't parse what this was getting at - the literal read is "ick, trans bodies, sooooo gross and weird" but the series is otherwise so happy to mess with gender and so trans-feelings-informed that that seems unlikely?]

I knew no courtly manners for an event like this.

“And I don’t wish you were off to be a witch, but you made a promise […]”

Much of the news was talk of strife[…]

"I'm poor with thanks and worse at goodbyes. Therefore, I won't bother with them. Someday I'll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then. Until then, I'm afraid that I have to live."

["Until then, I'm afraid that I have to live"!!!! TATTOO MATERIAL]

"To be honest," said Abigail, "I'm quite sorry to crash this one, as I would love to see where this mixer goes."

"I, also," said Harrowhark's Cavalier Primary from behind her shoulder.

[MEEEE THREEEEEEEEEEEEE]

The other houses had mingled into a spectrum of colors, into weaving in the dances like a living drift of spangles: clean, cohort whites with colored ribbons, vaunting color on the pips or wrist, long dresses in iridescent white, a simpering tactic, with huge wreaths on the head to denote the house...

[OMG, lesbian necromancer Jane Austen is AN EVEN BETTER IDEA than lesbian necromancer Silver Surfer]

You never could have guessed that he had seen me.

[Despite the many clues that the second-person narrator was inside the narrative, I still genuinely gasped out loud at the first "me" - 33 chapters in!]

...but you focused on the thin cry of violence. You found yourself saying, "Someone's crying, Lord," but he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn't recognize.

[Hahahaha, "Kumbaya," obv - is this extra-textual pun trick, like the Wolverine "snikt" call-out earlier, something that books have been doing forever and I just never picked up on, or a Tamsyn Muir invention?]

But then, isn't it the first responsibility of a child to make themselves matter. That is why we squeal after we are born, an anguished announcement. Where was I?

I couldn't cry when she told me, so I decided to laugh about it instead. To construct a joke and place myself in on it, as I zipped beneath the city listening to an acoustic song with the word 'serotonin' in the lyrics.

[This *has* to be the Girl in Red song because that would be so perfectly gay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKbtE...]

And then I reached 10,000. 10,000 days. It seemed a good jumping off point.

[NO F-ING WAY!!!!!!! I immediately recognized the chapter headers as day counts exactly because I've been conscious of my own days of life since I also marked the start of my medical transition at a (different) 1000 day count boundary. (I do not have the patience Phoebe does and I couldn't delay any longer once I had medication in hand.)]

He had gained a certain personal mythos, the way professionals who spend their days burnishing themselves on social media frequently do. He obtained an instinctive deference from the rest of us. In the world of the blind, the man with the sight pill prescriptions is king.

[love this Dr Powers burn]

And so the vodka drank me in the spring of 2016. I had a need for something, and every interaction I had with the fresh faces around me only served to remind me that I could not find what I was so fervently looking for. Freedom from. Freedom to. Half thoughts with no payoff. Clear liquid on white space, which in time fades back to nothing. A litmus test in want of a procedure.

I had once taken myself for granted. I strode the world as a smiling reflex. It said "How are you?" and I said "Not too bad!" How good is not too bad?Now my desires are a half-written sentence. I know the first few words, but after a swiveling comma, things could go anywhere. It seems the trick to always knowing what you want is never to ask.

[MOOD.]

"The story of my life has been me slowly realizing that these are, in fact, my monkeys. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where the monkeys weren't mine."

[It is slightly unsettling how much of my notebook of random proverbs and facts and short notes on them overlaps with Soula Emmanuel's? This just after Hans Christian Anderson's lovelorn Little Mermaid authorship & the ingredients in Smørrebrød!]

Seen a particular way, "spend time with people who make you happy" is less an invitation than a warning, and that's how I came to agree with it. It is its own triumph to escape the regime of other people and find here a slackness that is all my own. Taken in a certain gossamer light, this space becomes proof of success. Corroboration of an asserted personhood. A woman without a past can be anyone she wants.