Excellent dark fantasy about three women trapped in a medieval castle under siege. It reminded me a bit of Tanith Lee - it's very lush and decadent in parts - and a bit of The Everlasting. Fantastic female characters with really interesting relationships. The language is not strictly medieval-accurate but a lot of the characters' mindsets are, which is fun.
All I knew going in was that it was medieval, female-centric, and involved cannibalism. This gave me a completely wrong impression, which was that it was a sort of female-centric medieval Lord of the Flies in which everyone turns on each other under pressure and starts killing and eating each other. This is very nearly the opposite of what it's actually about, though there is some survival-oriented eating of the already-dead.
The three main characters are Phosyne, an ex-nun and mad alchemist with some very unusual pets that even she has no idea what they are; Ser Voyne, a female knight whose rigid loyalty gets tested to hell and back; and Treila, a noblewoman fallen on hard times and desperate to escape. The three of them have deliciously complicated relationships with each other, fully of shifting boundaries, loyalties, trust, sexuality, and love.
At the start, everyone is absolutely desperate. They've been trapped in the castle under siege for six months, the last food will run out in two weeks, and help does not seem to be on the way. Treila is catching rats and plotting her escape via a secret tunnel, but some mysterious connection to Ser Voyne is keeping her from making a break for it. Phosyne has previously enacted a "miracle" to purify the water, and the king is pressuring her to miraculously produce food; unfortunately, she has no idea how she did the first miracle, let alone how to conjure food out of nothing. Ser Voyne, who wants to charge out and fight, has been assigned to stand over Phosyne and make her do a miracle.
And then everything changes.
The setting is a somewhat alternate medieval Europe; it's hard to tell exactly how alternate because we're very tightly in the POV of the three main characters, and we only know what they're directly observing or thinking about. The religion we see focuses on the Constant Lady and her saints. She might be some version of the Virgin Mary, but though the language around her is Christian-derived, there doesn't seem to be a Jesus analogue. The nuns (no priests are ever mentioned) keep bees and give a kind of Communion with honey. Some of them are alchemists and engineers. There is a female knight who is treated differently than the male knights by the king and there's only one of her, but it's not clear whether this is specific to their relationship or whether women are usually not allowed to be knights or whether they are allowed but it's unusual.
This level of uncertainty about the background doesn't feel like the author didn't bother to think it out, but rather adds to the overall themes of the book, which heavily focus on how different people experience/perceive things differently. It also adds to the claustrophobic feeling: everyone is trapped in a very small space and additionally limited by what they can perceive. The magic in the book does have some level of rules, but is generally not well understood or beyond human comprehension. There's a pervasive sense of living in a world that isn't or cannot be understood, but which can only be survived by achieving some level of comprehension.
And that's all you should know before you start. The actual premise doesn't happen until about a fourth of the way into the book, and while it's spoiled in all descriptions I didn't know it and really enjoyed finding out.
Probably the last third could have been trimmed a bit, but overall this book is fantastic. I was impressed enough that I bought all of Starling's other books for my shop. I previously only had The Luminous Dead, which I'm reading now.
Content notes: Cannibalism. Physical injury/mutilation. Mind control. A dubcon kiss. Extremely vivid descriptions of the physical sensations of hunger and starvation. Phosyne's pets do NOT die!
Feel free to put spoilers for the whole book in comments.
Happy lunar new year to everyone celebrating! 새해 복 많이 받으세요!
Here are a few things that I have on heavy rotation.
TWS has released the Korean version of the Japanese debut song: 다시 만난 오늘 [Nice to see you again (Korean ver.). The original Japanese version is one of my favorite TWS songs, so I quite enjoy the Korean version too, once my brain got past the inevitable linguistic confusion of hearing a different version of a familiar song. They did a short round of promos on Korean music shows, and it was fun to see how they added small easter eggs to the choreography for each performance.
Dokyeom and Seungkwan, the two main vocalists of Seventeen, released a unit album last month. It's packed full of songs to show off their voices. The title track is Blue. I also quite like Seungkwan's solo track, Dream Serenade, and the b-side, Prelude of Love.
I've also being doing a deep dive into all of ILLIT's 2025 music, and I really missed a lot! I really love their entire June 2025 EP, bomb, but if you need a more specific starting place, try 빌려온 고양이 (Do the Dance) or bamsopoong.
1. So much rain today. When I went out for my walk this morning, it was just sprinkling very lightly (at times not at all) so that was fine, but I stopped at the store to get a few things and it was raining harder when I came out, then after I got home, it started really pouring and did not let up for hours. It did pause a few times, and I was able to get out to the garage to use the exercise machine and work on my puzzle, and then later I went on another walk myself and then one with Carla, and both times it started raining right after we got home. There's still supposed to be more rain for the next few days, but it looks like it'll mostly be happening overnight, so hopefully won't be too intrusive.
2. When I stopped at the store this morning, they were just putting out the fresh bakery baguettes we like, so I got one of those and some ham to make jambon buerre sandwiches for dinner. The only problem is I still had about half a mile to walk to get home, and the baguette is long and comes in a paper package. But! I had the smart idea of getting a couple plastic bags from the produce area and putting one on each end of the baguette, so it was protected from the rain.
3. I finished up another puzzle today, another 1000 piece one. This one was fun, but I don't think I'll want to do it again, so I'll probably put it out in the Little Free Library for someone else.
4. I cleaned the stove today. It's an old stove (based on the brown color, I assume it and the oven and the old fridge we no longer have were installed in the 60s by the people who owned the house before my parents) and is hard to just wipe clean after using because it has a setup similar to the top picture in the wikipedia page on gas stoves, but somehow even worse? Anyway, if you miss cleaning it after use just a few times, the grease build-up is impossible to take care of quickly and easily and it becomes a huge project of having to take the stovetop apart and scrub all the pieces. Definitely something to be done on a day when I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, so today was a perfect day. I had it on my to-do list but was tempted to put it off to some unknown time in the future, but since I was stuck inside with the rain, I just went ahead and did it, and while the stove will never look actually nice just due to age, it looks presentable and I feel really good about it.
I would like to get a new stove, but because we have a built-in stovetop and separate oven, it's not as simple as just buying a new one, and would require new countertops, and then if you're doing that, might as well replace the awful 45 year old flooring that's peeling up, and the cupboards are pretty dire, too, and it's a whole kitchen remodel, which is not only going to be expensive, but hard on the cats, so... (Someday, but not right now.)
Five high school friends go on a camping trip and find a mysterious staircase in the woods. One of them climbs it and vanishes. Twenty years later, the staircase reappears, and they go to face it again.
I loved this premise and the cover. The staircase leading nowhere is spooky and beautiful, a weird melding of nature and civilization, so I was hoping for something that matched that vibe, like Annihilation or Revelator.
That was absolutely not what I got. The Staicase in the Woods is the misbegotten mutant child of It, King Sorrow, and Tumblr-speak. Every single character is insufferable. The teenagers are boring, and the adults are all the worst people you meet at parties. There are four men and one woman/nonbinary person, and she/they reads exactly like what MAGA thinks liberal women/trans people are like -- AuHD, blue hair, Tumblr-speak, angry, preachy, kinky sex etc. She/they says "My pronouns are she/them," then is only ever referred to as she and a woman. The staircase itself is barely in the story, where it leads is a letdown, and the ending combines the worst elements of being dumb and unresolved.
I got partway in and then skimmed because I was curious about the staircase and the vanished kid.
Downcrawl and Skycrawl, twin toolkits from designer Aaron A. Reed that help you create spontaneous tabletop roleplaying adventures in the Deep, Deep Down and the Azure Etern.
It’s getting harder to find relevant HDM TV moments to screencap for some of these parts. Sometimes I just went “eh, this is very loosely relevant, and Pan is cute, so I’ll go with it.”
Chapter 16:
Back on the bus. Lyra finally remarks “I could do with a phrasebook”! About 30 chapters late, but she finally noticed!
[Future note while editing: …And she still never gets one.]
Watching the spy. I swear we’ve seen him before, but I don’t remember when, and didn’t find him in a quick HDM wiki check.
[Future note: His daemon is a sparrow, I text-searched both ebooks for sparrow daemons…nope, no previous appearances after all.]
Lyra flinches when he looks directly at her. Berates herself for being so obviously startled. Asta: “I should’ve done what Pan would do, and warned you.”
Have we ever seen daemons doing that? They’ve been “voices of caution”, they’ve been “second thoughts”, but this wasn’t Lyra being incautious or thoughtless. It was a physical startle-reflex. Kicked in before any thoughts had a chance to form.
Lyra+Asta bounce ideas off each other to help themselves think. That’s a well-established daemon thing.
[Pictured: little Lyra brainstorming with Pan.]
Bus station crowd is so dense, Asta has to ride on Lyra’s (non-bare) shoulder to avoid getting stepped on.
With some more “oof, that was awkward” feelings after. Good stuff. Practical daemon-world concerns.
And more: They blend into the crowd by helping a local woman with her bags. Lyra doesn’t know any Persian [Farsi], and Asta does, so Asta has to take point on talking. It’s a low-key hint they’re not the same person, but all the travelers are too preoccupied to care.
Back to Alice! She and Ben actually ponder going back to Jordan for a hot second, before realizing “as escaped prisoners, maybe we should stay hidden.”
Alice reflects on the interrogation, the attempt to paint Mal as a predator.
“An accusation like that, you never fully shake off.”
Yeahhh, don’t like that.
To the Trout…which is being taken over by the authorities. To use for quartering soldiers, at “they’re not getting my best cooking for that” prices.
Malcolm’s mom says Alice’s full real name to a soldier, but then gets her inside out of sight. Middling opsec there.
[Future note: Alice did very-gently question the Polsteads about the discord between Lyra and Malcolm. So there’s a bit of nuance here. And it’s valid that she flatly refused to show any doubt while talking to a prison interrogator. Still…the overall vibes are not great.]
Alice plans to relocate to London, get lost in the crowd. The Polsteads give her extra clothes, food for the trip, and a pile of cash.
[Future note: The specific line is “It was a bundle of pound notes and some change.”]
Sp, okay, I would’ve liked a plan for retrieving the possessions at her Jordan residence. (I can accept her living paycheck to paycheck, no savings, but she must have clothes! Not to mention personal items she cares about.)
But the care and support of the Polsteads is heartwarming. Genuinely good parents! Possibly the only ones in the whole series.
–
Chapter 17:
Checking out a new guy, Horace Green, from the address book. Residence is called the Villa Victor Hugo! No indication that AU!Hugo is famous for something different, so please imagine all your fav Hugo novels with daemons in.
[Future note: Hat tip to Meredith for replying with this extremely relevant Victor Hugo line: “From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.”]
Lyra asks Ionedes to wait at a café next door.
Ionedes: You need help, you come running out and I finish my coffee briskly. Or briskish, anyway.
He’s so good.
[Future note: hat tip to Michael Sheen for his narration, because this text on the page really doesn’t convey the wonderful ironic cheeriness he put into Ionedes’ lines. The narration mentions it sometimes, but it’s really special to hear.]
Horace clocks Lyra+Asta aren’t parts of the same person just by looking at them. He’s also daemonless, I can see it being a trait he would pay more attention to, but still. That’s fast.
Mutual recap time. Lyra reflects that she feels like she’s using her childhood storytelling skills again, but this time it’s just to give an artful, effective delivery of the truth.
Horace’s bird daemon just got attacked and dragged away by a hawk. It went for his wife’s bird first, she died of the shock, but Horace survived it. Not clear why his daemon, by definition still alive, never found her way back.
He’s overheard the phrase “Oakley Street” once. In a context that made him think it had something to do with spying. OS’s A+ Opsec Skills strike again.
Hasn’t heard of alkahest, but he’s a bookish guy, so he does the very obvious thing of Picking Up A Dictionary.
[Pictured: young Lyra with Pan, back in their own book-reading days]
It’s right there.
This was treated as such a mystery! Makepeace was all “I can’t give any details”! And it isn’t secret or repressed knowledge in this world at all, it’s in normal dictionaries!
Asta asks about gryphons. Horace does a rapid arc from “they’re wild creatures, don’t have much to do with humans” to “we know so little about them, they’re half myth” to “it’s embarrassing for civilized people to talk about them, like how we don’t talk about ghosts.”
Look, I’ll grant “we don’t know much about them.” Plenty of IRL creatures live in such remote wilds, the line between “reliable documentation of observed behavior” and “third-hand rumors that spread because they’re scary/funny/scandalous” blurs.
But a few chapters ago, they flew over a city, and grabbed whole people out of an Embassy garden. They’re not cryptids, here.
Ionedes notes the building is under observation. Somebody made a note when Lyra went in, another when she left, but stayed on the building rather than following them. All of a sudden I’m worried this building is next in line to get firebombed.
[Future note: It isn’t. Absolutely nothing comes of this.]
On a whim, Lyra hits up a local post office. There’s a package for pickup, sent to her witch-queen alias. She thinks it must be connected in “some Secret Commonwealth way.”
…Thread-eating tangent again.
Remember back in LBS when I worried that Pullman had gone from “critiquing religion” to “critiquing the Wrong Religion, you’re still supposed to have all the same feelings, just about the Right Religion”?
This chapter is hella leaning into that.
Lyra might as well have thought, “I just had the feeling that the Good Lord was pouring into me, and telling me it was His will that I go. And look how it worked out, all because I trusted in the Lord’s plan for my life! Praise Jesus.”
It’s the same sentiment! The Christian words and phrases have been find-and-replaced with stuff from the Ripley Scroll and the Faerie Queene, that’s all. It’s a different coat of paint on the same house.
It’s also such a contrast to…in the original trilogy, especially in TAS, Pullman had this flourish of “repurposing Christian phrases for other things he wants to portray as important and real.”
To continue that metaphor, it’s “This is perfectly nice paint, all right? It’s just not safe when it’s on a rotten house. Let’s take a well-built house with a solid foundation, give it a coat of the lovely old paint — now this is somewhere you could safely and happily live in.”
There’s an echo of this in TSC, when Lyra remembers with shame her “scoffing refusal to go to an exhibition of paintings on religious themes by the parent of a friend.”
My metaphorical paint is also literal paint here, heh. Since Lyra refused to go, we don’t know if this art was any good…but the problem is, she rejected the idea that it could be good. Or beautiful. Or meaningful. Or express something true and real.
(Also, lbr, even if the art is bad, it’s still a kindness to your friend to go. Fill out the crowd at the show. It helps.)
More than half of TRF is left. There’s still an outside chance this is building toward a conclusion I like. But I’m sure not holding my breath.
[Future note: It is not.]
…So, this package. Turns out it was sent to Lyra’s name, c/o the Great Merchant who owns the buses and café and so on. He wrapped that version in a bigger box, addressed it to her witch-queen alias, and sent it to this city. She hasn’t opened it by the chapter end, or seen who sent it originally. My first guess was “the alethiometer mechanism, from Malcolm,” but he hasn’t exactly been able to get to a post office lately. No follow-up ideas.
Either way: this would have been much more satisfying if it was the payoff of careful planning, and pre-coordination between Lyra and her allies. Instead of just “trusting the Lord’s plan” but palette-swapped.
[Pictured: TV director unsubtly framing Lyra with an angel statue. Up to interpretation whether it’s a protective guardian angel, or looming stalker angel.]
–
Chapter 18:
Check-in with Olivier. Funny setup where he thinks of himself as like a prisoner, but the admin of the place would be thrilled if he biffed off.
Does some traditional alethiometry, reference book and all. Narration says it gives him a good idea of Lyra’s journey, but doesn’t satisfy my curiosity about how much he actually knows. Again, I wish we had scenes of Lyra doing this too, so we could compare their skills and approaches.
Cut to a group of Church higher-ups, talking about Delamare’s changes. Rumors of future war plans. None of them are enthusiastic about the idea. One has their own copy of the text of the upcoming Big Speech, so we get another angle on what might be in it. No surprises for the readers, here.
Lyra’s party has made it onto a boat again, long enough to unwrap the package. The OS head sent her the other resonance stone.
In this case, it sounds like she legitimately didn’t have time to write a full explanation. She’s hustling the stone away, and probably other items/docs too, before they can get confiscated.
Why send to Lyra, and not literally any trained OS operatives around the world? Not sure the book will bother justifying that. She’s the main character, of course she gets the things.
[Future note: Yep.]
She writes. Mal writes an answer. Startled Lyra drops her pencil, Asta jumps down to retrieve it for her. Cute moment.
They trade the Oakley Street code phrases before sharing anything else! Actual opsec! <3
A nice touch: while trying to write one of the places she’s been, Lyra realizes she’s only heard it spoken, never seen how to spell it. Relatable.
Another: Lyra ends the exchange by signing “Love, Lyra,” as if she’s writing a letter. Then feels weird about it, but it’s already sending.
I would’ve leaned a little harder into the weirdness of the medium, but these bits were good to see.
Cut to a modest parish priest from the Church higher-ups. His daemon is always nagging him to be tougher and more assertive. She’s a shrew. Hah. (Daemon worldbuilding: we see her eat an ant.)
Seems like more “daemon as conscience.” She’s being the part of him that urges him to do the right thing, even when he doesn’t wanna.
They quietly visit a friend who’s a general. He shares what little he knows of the Explosion Project. Also, a local legend about a “door into fairyland” in the mountains, and how as a child, there were a few times he swore he heard ethereal singing and bells.
The memory makes him tear up. A feeling: “Almost as if everything beautiful was in another world, and there was a doorway, and if only I could find it…”
I don’t know, buddy, I heard somewhere that you have to build the Republic of Heaven right where you are.
(Hey, there’s a phrase we really haven’t heard all book. I miss it.)
[Future note: The phrase doesn’t appear in TRF. It shows up on one page in TSC, where the implication is “Pullman has decided the Republic of Heaven is associated with bad things now, and Lyra getting into the Secret Commonwealth will be much better.”]
–
Chapter 19:
Malcolm gets his wound treated by the witch-queen. (He thinks the bone was chipped, the bullet is still in there, and it might be infected? Buddy, if that’s all true, how have you been walking?)
The actual treatment sequence is very good. Solid drama and pathos. I like how Mal’s general interest in How Things Work shows up in his POV, and I like Pan fetching things as surgical assistant.
(The witches are well-established to have herbs and techniques that we don’t, so no plausibility complaints here. Those work however Pullman says they work.)
…Wow, okay, offscreen death for Serafina Pekkala? More than a year before TSC even started, but Pan only finds out now? And she got murdered by a human missionary, who was mad she didn’t want to hook up? Thanks, I hate everything about this.
(At least Pullman didn’t inflict the “gratuitous SA plot of the book” on Serafina before she got murdered?) (If the book circles back and adds this detail later, nobody tell me, I don’t want to know.)
[Future note: Thankfully, it does not.]
Witch asks how Malcolm and Lyra feel about each other. Pan talks about Mal tutoring them, mentions Lyra “starting to see him differently” when they re-encountered each other more recently. Ehhh. Lyra got some big infodumps, her view of him got broader…but she had too much going on to think about it that hard. (And she left the jurisdiction like two days later.)
Pan also says it’s weird because of the 11-year age difference. This sounds very silly to the 400-year-old witch. I would love more in-depth exploration of her cultural perspective, here! There must be a bunch of nuances! But the book isn’t interested in them for their own sake, only for the sake of “using them to make Lyra/Malcolm look boring and not-at-all controversial in comparison.”
Pan asks the queen for a ride: out of the gryphon base, and to the next place he thinks Lyra is headed. She agrees, but makes him leave a note for Mal, instead of Just Running Off While He’s Asleep. (Again.)
Doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that Pan could just text her and arrange a time/place to meet, instead of hoping to get lucky.
Lyra on the boat at night, feels a Mysterious Presence, and starts chatting to it. This may need a new thread.
–
Chapter 19, the Mysterious Invisible Presence part:
Mysterious Invisible Presence ignores the question “Who are you?”, just tells Lyra, “I know who you are. An angel called Xaphania told me about you.” As if MIP is not an angel itself? (But Lyra calls it one later.)
First reference to Xaphania all trilogy?
Lyra asks Exposition Questions. For once, there’s a good reason beyond “Pullman wanted to reveal this info in this scene.”
She asks about her interactions with Xaphania — because MIP has already talked about those with Xaphania, so it might know details that Lyra still needs filled in. Smart.
We are halfway through this book, and someone finally brings up the “all the windows need to be closed” mandate.
[Pictured: TV Xaphania saying the thing.]
While giving it, TAS Xaphania also said Lyra+Will could learn to reconnect, with a process she called both “imagination” and “a form of seeing.”
MIP tells Lyra this was fake. She made it up to console them, soften the separation so they would accept it.
MIP: If she said the full truth, you would’ve argued, demanded a version you liked better Lyra: We were just kids, we couldn’t argue with a being like her MIP: girl you literally picked fights with every authority you ever met
…okay, that’s very funny. If there was any doubt MIP knew Lyra’s real backstory, it’s all clear now.
(Bottom line, though, Lyra’s right. Xaphania’s mandate was hella unpalatable as-is, and the children tried to argue against it. Didn’t get them a sweeter version.)
Lyra ends up theorizing the opposite: that Xaphania was right about imagination, but wrong about the windows being dangerous. Maybe that part was the consolation. Or: she’s not omniscient, maybe she was Just Wrong.
Lyra has 2 main supports for this idea. 1: the Red Building has a window, probably, and that one’s good! I don’t think Lyra has all the “Why it’s good” exposition, and none about “the other windows doing air circulation”…but she knows the Church hates and fears that building, so.
Support 2: MIP trivializes imagination. Lyra is sure that part is wrong. Because (a) it leads to art, which can be good and true. (Speech about the power of storytelling. Pullman gassing himself up a little, here.) And (b) Pan is risking their life to find Lyra’s imagination, ergo it must be serious. (Zero room left here to consider that Pan might be Just Wrong about anything.)
It is SO conspicuous that we don’t get a single hint about “in all these years, has Lyra ever tried the Visiting Will With Imagination technique?”
If that was in here, it could fix so much! If Lyra tried it but failed, the grief could lead to Pan lashing out with “it’s all your fault, you don’t have enough imagination to let us see him again.” If she used to have the ability, but it stopped working, it could justify Pan’s “you lost your imagination, or someone stole it” theory!
Why isn’t it in here??
Lyra fiercely argues to MIP that the imagination-based Connecting With Will technique is real. But she still doesn’t try it. Doesn’t even consider trying it.
This would be so easy to justify! A fear of “what if I’m wrong? If I don’t test it, at least I can keep holding on to hope” would be very understandable here!
Could also be the reason why she never tried before. It would even tie into Pan’s TSC complaint that she accepted losses like “getting kicked out of her residence” too meekly: afraid to push back, not confident she deserved better.
But no. It just doesn’t come up. There’s not so much as a “Lyra half-thinks about the idea, then her mind shies away, it’s too big to hope for” moment. There’s nothing.
[Pictured: TV-finale Lyra, imagining Will.]
On the same note: She connects “the Red Building’s window seems good” to “maybe windows in general are good, and I want to make more of them.” And, again, never takes the next step to realize “maybe I could make a new window back to Will.”
Look, to be clear…this isn’t about “Lyra/Will should be together forever endgame, otherwise it sucks.” Your first love from when you were 12 doesn’t have to be your lifelong partner. It doesn’t diminish the importance of your love if they aren’t.
But Lyra (and Will!) should, at minimum, still have a feeling of “I miss you. I want to talk again. To hear how your life is going. To know you’re safe and well.”
Also: I like the general possibility of “post-TAS, people find a way to go between worlds that’s safe and healthy, leading to positive exchanges and connections.”
But there’s a reason that, when I wrote that fic, I made it the result of new developments. New research, new tech. No undercutting the weight of TAS’s ending with “lol she could’ve totally just had everything she wanted the whole time with no downside.” The safe option didn’t exist in her time.
One theory: Maybe Lyra has some kind of repression/amnesia going on. Pan too, to explain why he didn’t have any thoughts/feelings about the possibility of a Will reunion during the talk about “tons of windows exist and we should fight to keep them open.”
My only bit of evidence for this is, when Lyra first read the journal entry about the Red Building, it seemed to trigger a memory. She “knew something about” it, without knowing what or how. Compared it to a favorite childhood story, or a dream…both of which are awfully on-theme. In the argument with MIP here, Lyra links both of those with imagination, and defends the value of all of them.
And the wrench in this theory is: if Lyra+Pan had also repressed something about “past experience seeing Will (or trying to?) via stories and/or dreams”…surely one of their encounters in the past book-and-a-half would have triggered that knowledge/memory by now? If the direct, unambiguous discussion in this chapter didn’t do it…what else in the world(s) could?
[Future note: yeahhh, I knew this was wishful thinking even as I typed it.]
[Also: MIP never comes back, its identity is never confirmed, its motives are never explained or connected to anything. It’s like Pullman went “these next few plot points are so obscure, even I can’t accept my usual strategy of Just Have Lyra Ask Whoever’s In The Scene about them. I’ll need to have someone who can realistically do it Just Show Up For No Reason.”]
–
Chapter 20:
Delamare’s big speech! And he opens by…talking warmly about how much he loved his sister. Crowd didn’t see that coming, any more than the readers did.
Tells his version of Lyra’s origin. Waxes poetic about how pure and devoted Marisa was, what a “sexual marauder” Asriel was, how crushed and betrayed the husband must have felt…Not exactly beating the siscon allegations here, huh?
Not sure how much of the rest is Delamare fluffing up Marisa’s image for the public, and how much he’s convinced himself it’s true. How much is the way Marisa personally explained it to him, and how much he discovered (or conjectured) after-the-fact. His POV sections have never dwelled on the topic, so we don’t know his real thoughts, here.
He pivots to the temptation of Eve, blames it for everything from human suffering to entropy, says she put “a scratch in the surface of the world.” That’s not a metaphor used anywhere in Christian scripture or lore. That’s purely invented, first step into a screed of anti-window propaganda.
And what a screed! He plays all the Conservative Fearmongering greatest hits. Dangerous foreign ideas! Loss of traditional morality! Also the mold in your basement and the fact that your kids don’t visit enough, it’s all the sinful influence of those windows! But never fear. The Church is working on it.
Very glad I didn’t spend a bunch of words picking apart how “it makes no sense for Delamare to speechify about how imagination is evil,” because, hey, that doesn’t come up at all. It’s just the same “God hates roses” rhetoric the Magisterium was using last book, now applied to interdimensional portals.
[Pictured: more general Ominous Magisterium stuff. The TV show was good at that.]
Post-speech, our little parish priest talks with his seatmates. Gonna need somebody with an ecclesiastical background to unpack the use of “semi-Gnosticism” in this context.
Cut to Malcolm, reading Pan’s farewell note. He reflects on Pan’s “affectionate half-teasing, like the Lyra he had just begun to know”…Anybody want to go back through their TSC scenes together, and point out when that happens?
Chat with Tiny Gryphon about her curse. A sorcerer’s punishment, for trying to steal his treasure. Turns out a sorcerer of the same name is in that epic rose-garden poem Mal is still carrying around. Takes notes on the guy’s defeat, helps Tiny Gryphon start planning.
The gryphon treasure includes “a gold-silver alloy called electrum.” Wait, are we retconning it so that’s not the word for amber?
[Future note: This never comes up again.]
Back to Lyra. Finds out (a) the ferry turned around, and (b) there’s a crisis. Narration fills us in: the Great Merchant was assassinated, and, uh, apparently he was terrible at documenting anything. A ton of business across the region is now in jeopardy because they can’t find (or…never had??) print records of their contracts with him.
In the real world, I’d say “calling it now, that’s a Ponzi scheme.” Not gonna be one here, though, is it.
–
Chapter 21:
Lyra writing a report to the Great Merchant (still doesn’t know he’s dead), ends up producing a lot of therapeutic journaling.
Riot in the streets, outside their hotel. Asta watching at the window, gets a lungful of tear gas. Lyra gets the window closed, thinks the dense gas will settle toward the floor, scoops Asta up onto the bed!
More daemon touching that isn’t super intimate (yet), but it’s purely out of a caring impulse to keep them safe, when there’s no better way. So it’s not experienced as a violation. I still like this.
[Pictured: TV Will rescuing Lyra that time she was drugged, holding open his jacket, so Pan can jump in and be carried away.]
Knock on the door.
Lyra: Who is it? Ionedes: Personal sorcerer. May I come in?
Best. Character.
He passes on the news that the Great Merchant is dead. Lyra immediately asks if the Magisterium did it.
Ionedes (paraphrased): …now that you mention it, yeah, that checks out
Cut to Mal, finished reshaping the alethiometer case into a gold circlet. Presents it to the Gryphon Queen, with a whole fake backstory, tying all their goals together: he needs to take it to Lyra, and go defeat the sorcerer, and in return the Queen will get all the sorcerer’s gold. Which totally wants to belong to her anyway. It told him so.
It’s deftly done. And, hey, callback to his original “Lyra is a princess” bluff from LBS! That’s a sweet touch.
–
Chapter 22:
Montage of characters seeing press coverage of Delamare’s speech. Hannah Relf reads about it in the Guardian. Alice, in the Daily Mirror.
Olivier is traveling again, foiled when the Great Merchant’s bus company dissolves mid-ride. Very normal thing to happen to a business that isn’t a Ponzi scheme.
Poses as a boring Magisterium functionary, asks for shelter at a local church…priest keeps him talking while the housekeeper calls the cops! So he’s still at large from the Church after all? Had the discretion to use a fake name, but maybe his Wanted photo is making the rounds.
Cut to Lyra, still at the hotel, fretting. Asta mentions the epic poem: “it might be in [Mal’s] mind right now.” Reminiscing about the alethiometer. Briefly considers “If there was a way of balancing the needle so it could move, and you put all the cards around it…” I’m…sorta curious what that would do, tbh.
[Future note: They never try it.]
Also: the New Method didn’t even need her to look at the alethiometer! She just concentrated in a certain way, and got Force-visions.
(Sidenote: Olivier said rose oil protected from the nausea of the New Method. Back at Jordan in TSC, Lyra was gifted a little phial of rose water. Still waiting for payoff on either of those.)
[Future note: There isn’t any.]
Instead, Lyra gets the deck, has Asta pick cards for her to draw, and uses them to tell a story. It’s fine.
Ionedes has arranged an escape! Charming Leila waits near the docks with a boat. Off they go again.
It’s getting harder to find relevant HDM TV moments to screencap for some of these parts. Sometimes I just went “eh, this is very loosely relevant, and Pan is cute, so I’ll go with it.”
It's been so long since I watched a show not just fannishly but in full fannish company that I had somehow forgotten just HOW MANY false positives I end up with when testing out possible vidsongs for zeitgeist-y shows or movies. I get all excited on the start of a walk to work or at the beginning of cooking dinner, and then by the end I'm reminding myself that "song with one startlingly apropos verse" is not the same as "actually workable vidsong." BUT THEN I think about how some of my favorite vids are my favorites because they take a song that is a slightly weird fit in some way and make it feel inevitable, and I start second-guessing myself.
As with so many vid-related things in the last twenty-five years, I blame sisabet.
1. We walked down to Pita House today for lunch, the place where I got the amazing shawarma cheese fries a couple weeks ago when Carla was out of town. We got that again to split, and even splitting between two people we were stuffed! They're so good, though.
2. Sales at the new store continue to be great. Mid week sales were lower this week than last, but yesterday's totals were higher than last Saturday, which was higher than grand opening on the previous Saturday.
3. Multiple times today I had the happy realization that even though it's Sunday I don't have work tomorrow!
Recently Finished Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin I was thrilled to have a new Enola Holmes book to read. I'm not sure if this is the last one (the ending kind of felt like it could be), and if so, I will miss them. This has been such a fun series.
The Age of Miracles I found out about this from rachelmanija's review and was immediately interested. When the MC is eleven, the earth's rotation suddenly slows and the world changes. But even as these big events are going on, she is focused on the big things in her own life: friendships changing, her parents' marriage falling apart, crushes on boys, starting middle school. I really loved the balance between the two.
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body Margaret, having defined herself as a tween detective in middle school, now struggles in high school with how to grow up and ends up developing an eating disorder that lands her in a treatment center.
This sounded very relevant to my interests from the blurb but it just didn't work for me. As someone who grew up around the same time (maybe five years earlier or so) and loved mysteries and series like the BSC, and struggled with weight and being queer in a time before the internet and easy access to knowledge of the fact that people like me even existed, I should be the target audience. But I am not that big a fan of the paranormal and magical realism, and while those elements are not mentioned at all in the summary, they feature heavily throughout, and more and more as the story goes on. I wanted something realistic, and this is not that. It's well written and I love the idea of it, but it's just not for me.
Middle of the Night The MC moves back into his childhood home when his parents move out to a retirement community. Immediately strange things start happening, and he is constantly having nightmares of the night he and his best friend were camping in the yard and his friend went missing and was never found. Now his body has been found nearby, and the MC has to figure out if he's really being haunted or if someone is messing with him, and if they are, are they the murderer? I liked this all right.
The Legend of Auntie Po Graphic novel about a Chinese American girl in the 1880s who lives in a logging camp with her father, a cook. I liked this a lot.
A Map to the Sun Graphic novel about a struggling girls' basketball team. I liked it.
The focus is identifying priorities for future research, specifically related to "non-surgical, transition-related healthcare for people aged 18 and over", and they're starting with a survey.
Funded by Gendered Intelligence, led by a steering group which is half people with lived experience (in fact more than half, as some of the healthcare professional members also ID as trans), one of the two co-leads is a trans woman, and they're partnered with TransActual and GIRES, so this looks like real genuine co-production.
Movie update: turns out we are getting Z1L's new movie next week, which is awesome, but I'm not at all sure we're actually going to make it, given its showtimes and the fact that we aren't entertaining the notion of evening screenings. Alas. (That said, while I would very much like to see it, it doesn't actually look at all like a movie I would see if it weren't for Z1L, so I'm a bit sad, but not crushed.) Reading: A few more volumes each of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and Hikaru no Go (I'm six volumes in on both), and I've started reading Stephanie Burgis' Wooing the Witch Queen.
Most of my reading time this week went to Epic Tomatoes: How to Select and Grow the Best Varieties of All Time (Craig Lehoullier), which I liked so much after reading the bought-on-sale ebook that I've ordered a hard copy. My intermittent low-key obsession with (the idea of) growing tomatoes continues to be mostly just weird, but as far as I can tell this book is a treasure. All other growing-tomatoes books can sit down. Watching: As of this afternoon, we're caught up on The Pitt and still an ep. or two behind on Frieren.
We have two episodes of Midnight Mass to go, and may finish that tonight. It is pulling absolutely zero punches and is very upsetting (although no animal harm/death that I can think of since I mentioned the amount in the first couple of episodes?) and very well done. Wow. It is a LOT. Working: Some potential (probable) impending stress about Dayjob is not doing wonders for my focus or mental health in general. (Nothing to do with Manager or coworders.) Good thoughts very welcome.
Tomorrow is a stat holiday, and then we have a week until the seasonal crunch begins. Whee! I have almost three weeks before my next freelance deadline, but it would sure be nice to get a draft on this rewrite before the crunch. I think I'm about a quarter of the way there.
Down to 1135 fandoms total. (As of this posting, there are 24 total with any tags that need wrangling.)
So, dropped about 50 over the past month. Including almost all the random little fandoms that aren’t “part of a tag tree I’m actively keeping” or “webcomics.”
Haven’t started the planned “another full A-to-Z pass through all the webcomic fandoms.” For the past month-ish, I’ve been using a lower-key strategy of “inviting other wranglers to take whichever half-dozen tiny webcomics got new tags this week.” On the theory that, if the comics are popular enough to have new-fic-writing fans, they’re more likely to have fellow-wrangler fans.
It’s worked for a few! Biggest win: a couple of non-English-language comics, which I was able to pass to a wrangler who’s a native speaker of the language.
I’ve also recently been involved in an effort to solicit wranglers for some of the currently-untouched “Religion & Lore” fandoms. So my giveaway posts are spaced-out between recruiting posts for fandoms that aren’t on my list in the first place. (Some of them are very small, only 1-2 works total, it would take no extra effort to just pick them up for babysitting myself…but that would really offset my fandom-dropping progress.)
Down to 1135 fandoms total. (As of this posting, there are 24 total with any tags that need wrangling.)
So, dropped about 50 over the past month. Including almost all the random little fandoms that aren’t “part of a tag tree I’m actively keeping” or “webcomics.”
Haven’t started the planned “another full A-to-Z pass through all the webcomic fandoms.” For the past month-ish, I’ve been using a lower-key strategy of “inviting other wranglers to take whichever half-dozen tiny webcomics got new tags this week.” On the theory that, if the comics are popular enough to have new-fic-writing fans, they’re more likely to have fellow-wrangler fans.
It’s worked for a few! Biggest win: a couple of non-English-language comics, which I was able to pass to a wrangler who’s a native speaker of the language.
I’ve also recently been involved in an effort to solicit wranglers for some of the currently-untouched “Religion & Lore” fandoms. So my giveaway posts are spaced-out between recruiting posts for fandoms that aren’t on my list in the first place. (Some of them are very small, only 1-2 works total, it would take no extra effort to just pick them up for babysitting myself…but that would really offset my fandom-dropping progress.)
1. It looks like the rain for next week may not be as rainy as originally forecast. At least for Santa Monica it's saying only Monday. And the days I'll be in NoCal are the days with the least rain up there. So fingers crossed.
2. We had a nice time at Knott's Berry Farm this morning. They're having a Peanuts event, so there were lots of limited time menu items. Not sure any of them had any relevance to the Peanuts theme (though there were a handful of peanut butter ones) but the stuff we had today was very good.
3. Tuxie has taken to lounging on our back porch a lot lately, and it's so cute but it means we can't get out the back door lol. This afternoon I actually went out the front door and up the driveway just so I didn't disturb him, but then when I got to the backyard I found he'd relocated anyway.
A couple weeks ago I got an email from Knott's saying they were having their Peanuts Celebration special event in February, and there were a lot of good looking things on the menu, so I've been wanting to check it out but just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Then last week we realized we hadn't put in a reservation for Disneyland this week and there were none available (combination of Valentines Day and Presidents Day weekend, I guess), so rather than keep refreshing the site to see if we could get a reservation, we just decided to go to Knott's this weekend.
We have terrible platforming, shortcut porn, hostile shrubbery, BOXRATS!!!, extremely smashable vases, “amazing chest ahead” (male), “amazing chest ahead” (female), “amazing chest ahead” (mimic), weirdly sexualized moaning (male only), repeatedly falling down inside a giant hollow tree to your death, Moss Lady, a magic medieval snakeskin-covered gramophone, hidden areas hidden behind other hidden areas hidden behind illusory walls, combat skirts (unisex), giant snakes with horse teeth, pretending to be an egg, quite a lot of jank, a very angry elderly cat who scolds you in bad faux-Shakespearian and is also a faction leader, the secret lake underneath the bottom of the world, “jolly co-operation,” chibi mindflayers, clams full of skulls, a trident that lets you do a silly little dance, ridiculous ragdoll corpse physics, a really cool double helix staircase probably based on the Château de Chambord, ball/crab things that turn up unexpectedly in your game and try to magic missile you because somebody in another game lost some stuff, getting punched to death by mushrooms, and Gender.
In the comments of spikedluv's final post, which she made on Feb. 2, there's info saying that she died unexpectedly later that day, with a link to her obituary. :( No cause of death given.
ETA: lunabee34 confirms in comments. ;_; (Note: I'm taking the info in good faith as posted; I don't know the person who shared it, and while spikedluv and I were mutuals for a long time, I never knew her wallet name. But the obit info matches what I did know and she was an extremely regular poster, so even a day or two of silence was worrying.)
If you desire to thank me for the pretend internet magnanimity I show by sharing my important and serious thoughts with you, I accept pretend internet dollars (Bitcoins): 19BqFnAHNpSq8N2A1pafEGSqLv4B6ScstB
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