24 KiB
[RT][HF] A Practical Guide to Evil: Book 4: Chapter 55: Outskirts
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Author: u/Zayits *
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URL: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/chapter-55-outskirts/
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Score: 76
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Created: 2018-09-12T04:05:43
Post:
Comments:
u/ProfessorPhi [+30] (3 hours later)
On a side note, is the Bard actually a Named? Or the Dead King? We've never seen the Bard use an aspect, and her ability to show up and dodge clearly has it's limits which are almost rule based, not to mention her personal power seems very limited. In her interlude with Black, she was able to dodge 3 times before she was forced to disappear. Furthermore, her cycle of rebirth means that no one else can rise to name of Bard, and the nature of her work in the background means she doesn't really possess the cultural relevance among the people.
Similarly the Dead King never showed evidence of being Named in the flashbacks and again he created the cultural impact and is not something that is repeatable. Like a talented Necromancer is not going to be called the Dead King, especially since the Dead King would still be around. Rules wise, he can't leave Serenity without an invitation.
Now Cat as a Fae also has rules, in that she's bound by her oaths, and she's also being called the Black Queen, despite that not being a historical name and she's not gaining any narrative weight from her title. She was obviously named at one point, but is clearly no longer named and I think it's cemented that she too is beyond Names.
All 3 are clearly immortal (especially with the Dead King's implication) and all are eldritch horrors in their own right. But have clearly have some limits. Which implies that they've transcended the whole Named situation despite having Named like power and narrative weight.
To me, Cat's eventual story will mirror Neshamah's, Callow will end up with portals to Arcadia and while Cat resides in Arcadia as the last Queen of Winter, she can enter Callow at will (maybe as part of the Wild Hunt) and can be called on to protect Callow in it's darkest moments. The Black Queen title is not a sign of her darkness, rather the darkness of the situation to require her.
But Cat's origin story is not over yet.
u/PotentiallySarcastic [+13] (10 hours later)
I think that is why the Dead King welcomed her to their club. He was clearly saying they are different than everyone else.
u/Zayits [+5] (16 hours later)
We've never seen the Bard use an aspect, and her ability to show up and dodge clearly has it's limits which are almost rule based
Well, she did mention something similar in interlude Coup de Théatre:
“Didn’t walk here, sweetling. I try not to think about how that works too much. But you know us Bards,” Almorava smiled. “We Wander into all sorts of places.”
If I had to guess, over the millennia she managed to shift her Role from a religious advisor to something story-related. Black mentioned a Miraculous Ministrel and a Troubadour, so she probably used her awareness to create Names with different focus (Wandering Bard can teleport, Miraculous Ministrel can literally set the tone of a given scene, etc.). Catherine mentioned the Bards in stories being commonly described as inept, so the Intercessor definitely helped to shape that part of the public perception.
I'm with you on the subject of the Dead King, though. He mentioned in his first talk with the Bard that the strife brought by being a villain would kill him just as surely as time, which implies he was looking for other options.
u/earnestadmission [+29] Singular "they" user (24 minutes later)
I'm wondering if this isn't my favorite depiction of mental illness, ever. We aren't bothered by a nagging voice of self-doubt, undermining and defeating all attempts at success. Instead, every validation and suggestion of self worth is categorically tossed aside. Catherine is every insecure classmate that castigated themselves and demanded that I build up their confidence.
Akua is the best thing to happen to the Guide not because she is right but because she isn't a doormat. Masego competes in a different arena than Catherine, he'll rarely oppose her. Archer is just along for the ride. Deadhand is her sworn subordinate. Only Vivi has motivations that conceivably clash with Catherine's, and Vivi's power is to literally disappear.
Akua is the deuteragonist that we needed.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+26] Father of Learning (32 minutes later)
Regardless of whether or not that's true or not, it's still Akua Sahelian telling you everything you want to hear. It's not.... just self-esteem issues causing her to toss this all aside.
Though she does make some damn fine points, and is a lot of what I wanted someone in the story to say (and in such a meta-verse that's a horrifying thought), attacking the argument and not the speaker doesn't really apply when you're across from a Sahelian at your mercy.
u/earnestadmission [+7] Singular "they" user (55 minutes later)
Oh totally. I think that Catherine missed out on (or strategically let pass) the chance to discuss the trope of ruin. Much of what she does brings her to further desperation; I think Catherine has properly identified her story arc as a tragedy. Whether or not she can wrench survival out of any given situation, it is increasingly clear that the universe is not eager to let her thrive.
It would be a good Aspect, if she hadn't cannibalized even that facet of her identity in service of a short-term catastrophe.
u/ProfessorPhi [+9] (2 hours later)
As I've said before, after 3 books of absolutely hating her, I'm hating how much I'm enjoying her this book
u/Mingablo [+12] (9 hours later)
The author is invoking the villainous redemption trope without actually redeeming the villain. This is impressive.
u/NotValkyrie [+1] (a day later)
In science pay attention to what's been said not who's saying it. In politics pay attention to who's saying it.
u/CouteauBleu [+11] We are the Empire. (13 hours later)
... I mean, Akua is exactly right, to the point I wonder what Catherine is thinking or whether she's thinking coherently at all.
Correlation doesn't equal causation. When your country is occupied by an instable neighbor with massive amounts of superweapons, and that neighbor is constantly threatening war with your other instable neighbor, your countrymen are going to die during your reign no matter what you do.
Saying that you plan to abdicate if things get worse when you're the only one who can mitigate the damage is kind of cowardly.
u/Esryok [+14] (17 hours later)
I'm on board with what Cat's doing, mentally speaking. Always good to reflect on your core principles from time to time and ask "Do my actions match my values?"
My interpretation of their dialogue:
Akua: Wtf do you want the drow for? I thought you just wanted Procer distracted, and DK+Malicia have arranged for that.
Cat: I need an army I can control so I can send my citizens back to their farms. Otherwise the economy dies and we all starve.
Akua: ... k, but drow aren't my top choice for "army I can control." There are plenty other options. Black's legions?
Cat: Black's doing his own thing and I'm not going to meddle.
Akua: Arcadia?
Cat: I just snapped my soul in half trying to expunge Arcadian influence. Hard pass.
Akua: Malicia's legions?
Cat: Lol no I'm not conquering Praes.
Akua: That's cute. You're cute.
Cat: Let me preempt you. Literally everyone else in Creation is an enemy or an ally of an enemy.
Nobody: What about the dwarves?
Cat: I'm just saying, if I become a net negative then I'm out.
Akua: Whoa hang on, you do that and Callow ends as a nation.
Cat: Duh, I'm not arguing that, this is only if I become a net negative, at which point Callow is screwed anyways.
Akua: ... Aren't you super-biased on this? I don't think you can evaluate your own net utility.
Cat: I keep making bad decisions. I can't afford not to think about this.
Akua: You've also been incredibly successful. Even your supposed failures were going to happen regardless.
Cat: Some of them. Not all of them i.e. your Folly.
Akua: Okay so my little whoopsie might not have happened if you didn't suck. Crusade would have.
Cat: You're kind of missing the point.
Akua: And you're the only reason Callow isn't a vassal state or a bunch of principalities.
Cat: Still moot, but I'll engage because that statement bothers me.
Akua: Callowans don't agree.
Cat: Democracy is a terrible way to make decisions. It's not implausible for a hero to have done a better job stopping you than I did. That right there's a big negative.
Akua: Aaaaand Callow's independence? Thwarting Arcadia? Halting the Crusade?
Cat: I'm now distracted and fully engaging with your flawed premise. Whoops.
Akua: You're a good person and your enemies are as bad or worse. You're like Eleanor Fairfax. So great. I want to be you when I grow up. You might even be a hero, now that you're all Winterfied!
Cat: ... You will never be my Chancellor.
u/Nimelennar [+6] (a day later)
In the first episode of Sherlock, there was a character who offered the famous detective the following choice:
There are two identical-looking pills on a table. You may choose one pill or the other and consume it, and the character forcing the choice would consume the other. Any other decision would result in you getting shot. The poisoner knows which pill is poisoned.
Let's assume the choice is being offered in earnest. Forcing on yourself a random choice would give you a 50% shot at success. However, the poisoner knows you, knows your pressure points, and is trying to manipulate you into taking the poison. The poisoner also knows that you know this, so you can't just figure out which pill he's steering you towards taking and take the other one, because he will have predicted it.
This is the kind of situation Cat finds herself in. When you're being manipulated by someone who is better at manipulation than you are at resisting manipulation, the only viable tactic is to ignore them completely. In Sherlock's case, he should choose a pill randomly and take the 50% shot (although that's not the solution presented in the show). In Cat's, the best choice is to write off anything Akua says, not as true nor as false, but as an attempt to manipulate. Choosing to believe what she says, or to disbelieve it, is playing into her hands; assign it a T/F value of NULL and forget it. Otherwise, you're gambling that you know your own thought processes better than a master manipulator does, and that's a bad bet any day of the week.
u/None [+2] (17 hours later)
It is still Akua Sahelian telling her exactly what she wants to hear.
Kind of a good contender for the thread created right before this one, actually.
u/Menolith [+16] Unworthy Opponent (4 hours later)
^(Warning: contains grammar fascism)
So, I've been sitting on this for a while, and I really want to talk about the comma use in the story, or rather the lack of it.
The set of English comma rules is a bogmire of exceptions and personal preference, but there's one recurring rule break which is particularly annoying to me. Long story short, if you start with a subordinate clause and follow with the main clause, the two should be separated with a comma. E.g. "Because we went there**,** he saw us."
That comma isn't always necessary, but it becomes problematic if it misleads the reader and so it's become a really annoying grammatical tick. An example:
but if they became an obstacle capture wouldn’t be the objective.
This makes the reader think that the Drow are becoming an "obstacle capture" which is a term of its own. This means that the readers have to stop and backtrack to make sense of it. Similarly:
after the crusaders up north passed through the Stairway the old Lycaonese had begun his march in earnest.
This makes it seem like the passage refers to the Stairway to which the old Lycaonese had done something to. As in, "the Stairway the old Lycanoese had built in order to cross the mountains," and again that interpretation is wrong and the reader has to re-read the passage to get it right. This also causes problems elsewhere:
Ranker had hoped otherwise even after seeing his standard go down, but now that Wekesa’s boy had disappeared the demons scrying links were stable again and confirmation followed swiftly.
Here, with no clarifying commas, there are three ways you can interpret the same sentence until you reach wider context. A comma after "disappeared" implies that Masego vanished, a comma after "demons" implies that he banished them, and no comma at all implies that there's a missing apostrophe on the word "demons'" and that the sentence has something to do with scrying links which belong to the demons.
Additionally, I dislike the overuse of epithets in the story. Epithet is when you refer to someone by their title or other quality instead of their name, such as the Impaler, the Queen or the brown-haired man. They are usually used to refer to people whose names aren't known, such as "the bus-driver." If a character's name is known, they're almost never used in professional publishing. Their use is usually a kneejerk reaction to perceived overuse of the names (which is rarely an issue) or a deeper problem with diction which should be solved with better structuring rather than a band-aid fix.
They simplify characters needlessly and bring in extraneous information into the story when none is needed, and the color of someone's hair, eyes, skin or clothes is utterly irrelevant to almost all cases. Same goes with ethnicity. To me, it reads as incredibly awkward and clunky to slide in those tidbits of information when they are irrelevant and do nothing. In reality, we never think of each other in epithets because they are very shallow and just don't have the same meaning as a person's actual name.
The use of Names as epithets is a bit different beast because Names go a bit deeper than that. If an epithet has become a name in and of itself for someone, it's fine to use it, but generally it feels like they're used willy-nilly with characters hopping from Indrani to Archer and back. Then you have some really awkward ones like "The orc that was the highest-ranked officer in the Legions of Terror waited until the enemy was fully committed" where Erraticerrata is bloating a simple word into a massively long term.
How characters refer to each other is very telling of their perspective, especially in a first-person story. If Cat looks at someone and thinks of them as "the noble," that carries the implication that it's all she cares about. To her, that's all what the person is. If she doesn't know their name, that's just how it is, and all that person is to her is just another noble among hundreds. If she does know the name, it carries a meaningful implication that she just does not care about the person behind the title. Similarly, when regular people look at Catherine, they don't think of her as "Catherine" or "Foundling," because to them, she's primarily neither of those things. To an average Joe, she's "The Black Queen" or "the monster" or "the Queen." Again, that tells a lot about how characters perceive each other.
It's weirdly dehumanizing to see Catherine think of a close friend as "the dark-skinned man" which, in particular, feels oddly racist.
u/ProfessorPhi [+18] (5 hours later)
I will say the typos and grammar have gotten noticeably worse since the 3 day a week schedule, and it's a bit unfair to complain too much about a webnovels grammar due to the lack of an editing process. A lot of this is a first draft, so I do tend to be forgiving of spelling, weird sentence structure and clunky sentences that take a little while to parse.
I definitely agree with you, I've never quite thought about it, but some of the epithet usage is a bit much, though I feel some are used for comedic effect. There are definitely some oddities with the constant name switching in text, but I've kind of associated their Names with their role/powers and their names with their personalities, a la Archer fought with the Saint of Swords vs Indrani produced another bottle of whiskey (I also object with Indrani and Bard having similar vices, if it's not plot relevant I'll be cross. I wish she was a pot head).
Dark skinned man doesn't read as racist in this regards because the text described Sonninke as very powerful and beautiful, but it's weird to describe a friend via physical characteristics.
Overall, a lot of your problems would be solved with a slight bit of editing and a couple of revisions, but the publication schedule doesn't really allow for it. I think we see wtc which doesn't have a fixed schedule has much fewer issues in comparison.
u/Iconochasm [+4] (17 hours later)
Everyone gets referred to by those physical descriptions. Go reread some of the first 15 chapters, Black is constantly referred to that way. I've always assumed it was a deliberate reference to 80s fantasy novels, which were filled with that sort of thing.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+4] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (20 hours later)
Regarding the use of titles or adjective phrases instead of names: It seems very thematic to me. We are in a story where popular epitaphs have power after they reach a certain level of ?renown/notoriety? and settle on a single individual. The little labels that show how the point of view character characterizes another character in that moment, be it as their body, their background, their Name/Role/title, or thier individual name gives a lot of detail shading. It can get annoying if you aren't paying attention and have to go back (I listen to PGTE on my commute or over breakfast) and then the discussion myself.
u/JustLookingToHelp [+2] (9 hours later)
Personally, I would prefer a twice a week schedule with better editing, but I may be in the minority there.
u/Nimelennar [+9] (11 hours later)
I haven't noticed a problem with epithet use, but that's probably because I think it's generally not done enough.
An epithet has three purposes:
First, it reminds the reader who a character is (which is very helpful in a long-running story with Lots and Lots of Characters, ASoIaF being a particular offender with its realistic reuse of the same names). If we're suddenly in a fight between Hanno's party and the Calamities, after spending several chapters with Cat and the Woe, it might be useful to remind readers that two of the characters are sisters.
It also tells you in what context the POV character is thinking of the other character . For instance, "As the massive orc army marched towards us, I turned to my most trusted adviser on orc-human relations," carries a much different implication than "As the massive orc army marched towards us, I turned to my most trusted general," especially if they're the same person. Yes, I agree that it says a lot about how the characters see each other just in general, but it also tells us how they see each other in the context of the current situation. "The orc that was the highest-ranked officer in the Legions of Terror" tells us something about that character's grasp of tactics, as well as telling us that everyone else will probably be taking their cue, for how to respond to the situation, from that character.
Finally, it breaks up a feeling of repetition. You say it's unnecessary, and, with enough other text put between each instance, it probably is, but in quick-fire dialogue especially, how the characters are referred to can change the flavour and pace of the text.
Again, I'm of the opinion that epithets are generally underused, so maybe it's just a matter of taste. But if there is a problem with overuse in PGtE, I haven't noticed it.
But I agree with you completely abut the commas, though.
u/Menolith [+2] Unworthy Opponent (14 hours later)
I feel like epithets are unnecessary in all of those cases. You can introduce exposition without supplanting a character's name with it. With repetition it's somewhat muddier as doing away with them requires the author to frame the scene in a manner where constant referrals to the actors is implied clearly enough, but in other cases it feels like using epithets in a role they were never intended to fill.
As I mentioned in my rant, we humans never think about each other in epithets unless that carries a lot of weight with it. Replacing regular and natural use of names with something else in order to add in information reads as incredibly clunky to me, like using pajama pants in public. Sure, they are pretty much sweatpants as far as form and function go, but it's just not the same.
u/None [+5] (15 hours later)
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u/Menolith [+2] Unworthy Opponent (15 hours later)
I don't really have the expertise to get deep in psychological implications of perspective, but I am certain that I don't think of my sister as "the green-eyed woman" or her dog as "the brown-furred canine." Even if I don't think of them by name explicitly, I think of them conceptually as the person as a whole, and there is no other word for "this person in their entirety" other than the name they go by.
u/Nimelennar [+5] (16 hours later)
Thinking about it, I can't say I agree.
I think of my sister more often as "my sister" than "[sister's name]". Ditto for my mother and father, grandparents, etc. When I think about friends of friends, and relatives of friends, I think of them by their relationship to my friend first, rather than by their name.
For friends whom I'm really close to, sure, the name is what comes to mind first. But for most people, it's... "I'll ask the guy who has the workload I need answers about... The guy in the desk over there... Bald guy, glasses... Tom! That's right! I'll ask Tom." The epithets come first, to give an outline, until my memory can catch up and provide the name.
But then, I've always been bad with names.
u/None [+2] (15 hours later)
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u/Menolith [+3] Unworthy Opponent (15 hours later)
You're right in saying that epithets are not universally bad. They can be a great tool for drawing emphasis on a specific quality, for example if green eyes are a sign of particular bloodline and the PoV character just now realizes that the person they are looking at is actually the long-lost heir. In situations like those, that one quality eclipses everything else for the moment and it can be a clever way of underlining something. However, that's a rather unusual literary device, and overusing those is usually a bad idea, if for no other reason than to keep it from becoming mundane and thus robbing it of its impact.
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (14 hours later)
Agreed. This serial has a lot of typos and idiosyncrasies in its writing, but the lack of periods is the worst.
u/JustLookingToHelp [+2] (9 hours later)
Some typos:
In the quote, "in such exercises of rethoric -> rhetoric;"
Paragraph 1, "a haunting spire of rock beheld -> beholden to no laws but the Dead King's insert comma which had;"
Paragraph 2, "what had once been the lads -> lands of the Kodrog;"