Reactor ([syndicated profile] reactor_feed) wrote2025-07-21 04:00 pm
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Superman Embraces Silliness — That’s Why We Take It Seriously

Posted by Sarah

https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/

https://reactormag.com/?p=818479

Featured Essays Superman

Superman Embraces Silliness — That’s Why We Take It Seriously

Leaning into fantasy to outline a clear moral response to real-world issues.

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Published on July 21, 2025

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Sarah</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/">https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=818479">https://reactormag.com/?p=818479</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-horizontal"> <div class="container container-desktop"> <div class="flex flex-col mx-auto post-hero-container"> <div class="post-hero-content"> <div class="post-hero-tags font-aktiv text-xs tracking-[0.5px] font-medium uppercase"> <span class="mr-3"> <i class="inline-block w-2 h-2 rounded-full mr-[5px] bg-blue"></i> <a href="https://reactormag.com/articles/featured-essays/" class="inline-block link-no-animation" aria-label="Link to term or tag Featured Essays 0"> Featured Essays </a> </span> <span class="mr-3"> <i class="inline-block w-2 h-2 rounded-full mr-[5px] bg-blue"></i> <a href="https://reactormag.com/tag/superman/" class="inline-block link-no-animation" aria-label="Link to term or tag Superman 1"> Superman </a> </span> </div> <h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1"><i>Superman</i> Embraces Silliness — That&#8217;s Why We Take It Seriously</h2> <div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">Leaning into fantasy to outline a clear moral response to real-world issues.</div> <div class="post-hero-wrapper"> <div class="post-hero-inner"> <p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&amp;_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/joe-george/" title="Posts by Joe George" class="author url fn" rel="author">Joe George</a></p> <span class="post-hero-symbol relative top-[-2px] hidden tablet:block">|</span> <p class="text-xs uppercase post-hero-publish font-aktiv"> Published on July 21, 2025 </p> </div> </div> <div class="post-hero-caption post-hero-caption-vertical [&amp;_a]:link"><p>Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures</p> </div> <div class="quick-access post-hero-quick-access mt-[17px] tablet:hidden"> <div class="flex gap-[30px] tablet:gap-6"> <a href="https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/#comments" class="flex items-center text-sm font-aktiv tracking-[0.6px] font-semibold uppercase translate-x-[1px] translate-y-[1px]"> <svg class="w-[22px] h-[22px] mr-[7px] icon-hover" viewbox="0 0 18 18" aria-label="comment" role="img" aria-hidden="true" aria-labelledby="icon-comment-quick-access-"> <title id="icon-comment-quick-access-">Comment</title> <g fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd"> <path fill="#FFF" fill-rule="nonzero" d="M6.3 18a.9.9 0 0 1-.9-.9v-2.7H1.8A1.8 1.8 0 0 1 0 12.6V1.8A1.8 1.8 0 0 1 1.8 0h14.4A1.8 1.8 0 0 1 18 1.8v10.8a1.8 1.8 0 0 1-1.8 1.8h-5.49l-3.33 3.339a.917.917 0 0 1-.63.261H6.3Z" /> <path stroke="#000" d="M5.9 14.4v-.5H1.8a1.3 1.3 0 0 1-1.3-1.3V1.8A1.3 1.3 0 0 1 1.8.5h14.4a1.3 1.3 0 0 1 1.3 1.3v10.8a1.3 1.3 0 0 1-1.3 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0.678713 9.41431V6.41431C2.21205 6.41431 3.64538 6.70197 4.97871 7.27731C6.31205 7.85264 7.47471 8.63597 8.46671 9.62731C9.45805 10.6186 10.2414 11.781 10.8167 13.1143C11.392 14.4476 11.6794 15.881 11.6787 17.4143H8.67871Z" fill="currentColor" fill-opacity="0.2" /> </g> <defs> <clippath id="clip0_1051_121783"> <rect width="17" height="17" fill="white" transform="translate(0.678711 0.414307)" /> </clippath> </defs> </svg> </a> </li> </ul> </div> </details> </div> </div> </div> <div class="post-hero-media "> <figure class="w-full h-auto post-hero-image"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="740" height="423" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-740x423.jpg" class="w-full object-cover" alt="Close-up of Superman (David Corenswet) in Superman (2025)" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-740x423.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-1100x629.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-768x439.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-1536x878.jpg 1536w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet.jpg 1750w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" /> </figure> <div class="post-hero-caption post-hero-caption-horizontal [&amp;_a]:link"><p>Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </post-hero> <div class="wp-block-more-from-category"> <div> </div> </div> <p><em>Superman</em> is a very silly movie. Within its first five minutes, <em>Superman</em> tells viewers that metahumans have existed for three centuries and then introduces a quartet of robots and a super-dog with a little red cape.</p> <p>For many fans, writer and director James Gunn’s embrace of the goofier parts of Silver Age comics is exactly what makes Superman so special. Not since the 1978 movie starring Christopher Reeves has a non-comic book Superman story so openly embraced the character’s pulpier sci-fi aspects.</p> <p>In fact, it’s so silly that some might wonder why the movie has become such a political flashpoint over the past week. For as much as bad faith cable news channels and social media commenters are quick to read real-world politics into all aspects of pop culture, we have to acknowledge that this is a movie about a space alien in bright colors who spends a lot of time rescuing an adorable super-dog.</p> <p>And yet, viewers aren’t wrong to find political relevance in Superman—relevance that becomes more clear precisely because of its silliness.</p> <div style="height:10px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Arresting Imagination</strong><strong></strong></h3> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="688" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Nicholas-Hoult-1100x688.jpg" alt="Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) in Superman (2025)" class="wp-image-818496" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Nicholas-Hoult-1100x688.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Nicholas-Hoult-740x463.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Nicholas-Hoult-768x480.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Nicholas-Hoult.jpg 1280w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures</figcaption></figure> <p>Midway through <em>Superman</em>, it appears that Lex Luthor has actually won. Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) takes Superman (David Corenswet) to a secret prison hidden between dimensions, pausing to reveal a team of super-smart chimps he created to wage an internet campaign against the Man of Steel. When they reach their destination, Luthor deposits Superman in a cell with Metamorpho the Element Man (Anthony Carrigan), who uses his powers to create kryptonite, rendering Superman powerless.</p> <p>That plot sounds like it would be right at home in a <em>Superman</em> comic from the 1950s, where writers such as Otto Binder and Cary Bates crafted tales around wild, audacious ideas, with no regard for realism or even internal plot consistency.</p> <p>Yet, if framed in slightly different terms, that plot sounds like something from a gritty realist film, if not from the pages of the daily newspaper. It involves a millionaire who secures a government contract for his off-site private prison, where political prisoners are secreted away and where a lack of oversight allows for all manner of torture and human rights violations.</p> <p>The absurd elements highlighted in the first description are not diminished by the abuses highlighted in the second description. In fact, they’re clarified, brought into focus. No, we don’t currently have super-smart chimps or inter-dimensional travel. But bots do sway public opinion on the internet and nations, including the United States, do regularly violate the most basic human rights in private prisons. Connecting these cold, hard facts to outrageous sci-fi concepts can certainly provide an out for people who don’t want to acknowledge the horrors of our world. But it can also underscore the absurdity and inhumanity of our current reality, pointing out that there are people in places of power who think like supervillains.&nbsp;</p> <p>That’s especially true when storytellers like Gunn are able to tap into real human emotions that go beyond the outrageous situations. One of the most potent examples occurs right before Superman is taken to Lex’s prison, when he surrenders himself to Rick Flag (Frank Grillo) and the U.S. military. In spite of the fact that Superman is turning himself over to the authorities, Ultraman violently detains Superman, slamming his head into the ground, leaving cracks and craters in the pavement. Adding to the complexity is Ultraman’s true identity, the face he hides behind his ICE-like black suit and mask. The more we learn about Ultraman’s origins, the more we see how easily a victim of violence can become the oppressor.</p> <p>Again, we have an outrageous situation, with one super-being pushing around another. But the wince that Corenswet pulls when Superman’s face hits the ground, and his annoyed response (“Is that necessary?”) brings the viewer back to reality. In that moment, we viewers cannot help but think about countless instances of U.S. police and other agents of law enforcement using excessive force against the people they arrest, even when the detainee does not resist.</p> <p>That connection between superhero action and real-world injustice highlights something else a movie like <em>Superman</em> can do: It can provide moral clarity, precisely because of the way it taps into our imagination.</p> <div style="height:10px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>A Powerful Fantasy</strong><strong></strong></h3> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="688" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-4-1100x688.jpg" alt="Superman (David Corenswet) pulls on his boots while a streak of purple energy appears in the background over the city" class="wp-image-818499" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-4-1100x688.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-4-740x463.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-4-768x480.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-David-Corenswet-4.jpg 1280w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures</figcaption></figure> <p>While <em>Superman</em> offers depictions of brutal law enforcers and international conflict, it is in no way a dark movie. Throughout the film, we’re treated to inspiring, reassuring images of Superman saving the day. He shields a little girl from harm with his own body, he pulls a squirrel from the fray, and he repeatedly checks in on the civilians around him. Even when faced with a giant, fire-breathing kaiju, Superman considers ways that he can humanely subdue the beast and preserve its life.</p> <p>Each of these moments show off Superman’s amazing abilities, his super-strength, invulnerability, and x-ray vision. Superman may take a beating throughout the course of the film, but he never looks weak, not even when wracked with Kryptonite poisoning.</p> <p>That’s because Superman is a power fantasy, as are all superhero stories. Whatever else they might do, fundamentally, superhero stories depict people with fantastic abilities who are set apart, and usually above, regular society. Superman and the other costumed crusaders he inspires in the film are exceptional, not subject to the same rules as regular people.</p> <p>That exceptionalism has led many to see a fascist bent in superhero stories. Even before <em>Invincible</em> and <em>The Boys</em> gave us Omni-Man and Homelander, DC Comics put images of Superman sitting on a throne and lording over regular humans on the covers of <em>Action Comics</em> and <em>Superman</em>. If superheroes can do anything, then what’s to prevent them from acting as oppressors rather than saviors, and where are the checks on their power?</p> <p>While those kinds of questions should always be posed to those who hold power in the real world, in the world of superhero stories, it can be easy to ignore the <em>fantasy</em> aspect of power fantasies—but the fantasy at the core of Superman’s character is crucial. Writer Grant Morrison, whose <em>All-Star Superman</em> influenced Gunn’s movie, put it simply in an interview with <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2025/07/09/dc/superman-history-dc-reboot-james-gunn-snyderverse-smallville" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>The Ringer</em></a>, pointing out that while Superman’s morality is a major part of character’s appeal, it’s not simply that he’s a good person. “There are people like that, but they’re not like that all the time,” Morrison observes. “But in fiction, we invented someone better than us.”</p> <p>That last point puts all the silliness of Superman into perspective. Superman is inherently unrealistic, Superman is a fantasy. And as a fantasy, he gives us a way to imagine a better version of reality, to see what the world could look like if we could do better, care more about each other, help those in need—and he gives us an ideal to strive for, when it comes to combating real-world evils.</p> <div style="height:10px" aria-hidden="true" class="wp-block-spacer"></div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Imagining a Better Tomorrow</strong><strong></strong></h3> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="688" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Flag-Raise-1100x688.jpg" alt="A child raises a flag with the Superman logo in Superman (2025)" class="wp-image-818495" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Flag-Raise-1100x688.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Flag-Raise-740x463.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Flag-Raise-768x480.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Superman-Flag-Raise.jpg 1280w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures</figcaption></figure> <p>Towards the climax of <em>Superman</em>, a young child in the impoverished fictional nation of Jarhanpur looks at the might of invading forces of Boravia and prays for help. Holding a tattered flag emblazoned with the hero’s emblem, the boy whispers the name “Superman” again and again, until the people around him, emboldened, take up the cry and begin shouting the name themselves. That transition from desperate prayer to defiant chant captures the power of the Superman story—not because Superman himself arrives to save the day, but because when help does arrive, it’s in the form of the Justice Gang, a trio of self-absorbed corporate heroes who have been inspired by Superman to finally intercede and help when it matters most.</p> <p>What follows is an incredible scene of resistance: Both the Justice Gang and the regular people of Jarhanpur stand up to the Boravian invaders. To be sure, there’s plenty of fantasy elements involved, from Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) using his power ring to knock over the tanks to Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) swooping in to drop the Boravian leader (Zlatko Burić) to his death. But the pleasure of the fantasy isn’t just the action and spectacle that <em>Superman</em> delivers. It’s the belief that ordinary and imperfect people, sufficiently inspired, can come together and fight back against a seemingly unstoppable evil. It’s the hope that justice exists.</p> <p>We could easily dismiss Superman’s resolution to international conflict as too simplistic and too silly, just like we could sneer at the earnest speech that Superman delivers at the end of the movie, in which he holds out the possibility that Lex Luthor may choose to use his talents for good. And it <em>is</em> silly.&nbsp;</p> <p>But in that silliness, we can see through the complexities and absurdities of global geopolitics and systems that allow petty, insecure men to inflict pain and horror onto others. And once we’re reminded, in no uncertain terms, that our fellow human beings shouldn’t be allowed to die in such conflicts, that no one should be dragged away and hidden in off-site prisons, that internet disinformation hurts people, that’s the first step in figuring out what to do about it. That’s how we start making the silly fantasy into hopeful reality.[end-mark]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/">&lt;i&gt;Superman&lt;/i&gt; Embraces Silliness — That&#8217;s Why We Take It Seriously</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/">https://reactormag.com/superman-embraces-silliness-thats-why-we-take-it-seriously/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=818479">https://reactormag.com/?p=818479</a></p>
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Reactor ([syndicated profile] reactor_feed) wrote2025-07-21 03:35 pm
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Kevin Feige Teases Resets and Recasting in the Future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Posted by Molly Templeton

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https://reactormag.com/?p=818657

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Kevin Feige Teases Resets and Recasting in the Future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

A rare interview with Kevin Feige offered a glimpse into the future of the MCU (kind of).

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Published on July 21, 2025

Screenshot: Marvel Studios

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David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, and Florence Pugh in Thunderbolts*

Screenshot: Marvel Studios

Marvel won’t be doing a big Hall H spectacular at San Diego Comic-Con this year, but Kevin Feige has still gotten his say. The Marvel Studios chief held a group interview last Friday to talk about Marvel’s past and future—and, presumably, to inject more Marvel into a cultural conversation that’s presently very excited about the success of its rival, DC Studios, and James Gunn’s new Superman.

But when you dig into what Feige told his group of assembled writers, what’s most notable might be how little he actually said. He repeated the Disney company line about how they’d been making “too much” content, using this to explain everything from why Blade keeps getting delayed to why Wonder Man (due out later this year) and Ironheart (out last month) weren’t released for so long after each series was completed. “I don’t like when things sit on shelves,” said the man who is in charge of Marvel Studios.

Blade, he said, is still happening; the current version is set in the present day. The movie doesn’t currently have a director.

The sheer amount of stuff still on the Marvel docket is apparently when you start trying to whittle down the many reports on the Feige interview (Variety, for example, ran at least three different pieces using bits of the conversation). He confirmed that, after 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, the X-Men will be recast for an X-Men film directed by Thunderbolts’ Jake Schreier.

Secret Wars, overall, “sets us up for the future,” Feige said, going on to suggest that no role is safe from potential recasting. Not even Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. He compared the possible recasting of those roles to the James Bond franchise and to Superman, which is interesting given that the Bond films don’t hew tightly to any sort of continuity, and every new Superman is a reset.

“Reset” is exactly the word Feige used about Secret Wars, saying it will be a “reset” for the MCU. He also used the phrase “singular timeline,” saying they are “thinking along those lines,” which should be a relief for anyone tired of too many timelines and universes in which anything can happen and, thus, very little of what happens has much emotional weight.

Speaking of lack of emotional resonance, Feige also said that the events at the end of Thunderbolts, which affected the entire borough of Manhattan, will not affect the upcoming season of Daredevil: Born Again, which also takes place in New York. Which, for me, raises some questions about exactly when each of these stories takes place in the Marvel timeline. Questions I am not going to even try to answer at this time.

There are a few disappointing bits in Feige’s statements. For one, despite all the setup, Feige said only that “potentially” there might be a Young Avengers project at some point. Also, Miles Morales will not show up in the MCU until the Sony trilogy finishes with Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse: “We’ve been told to stay away,” Feige said.

Feige addressed the situation with Kang actor Jonathan Majors, with whom the studio “parted ways” after Majors was convicted on two misdemeanor charges (assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree, as NPR detailed). According to Feige, Marvel had already turned against Kang prior to 2023: “We had started to realize that Kang wasn’t big enough, wasn’t Thanos, and that there was only one character that could be that because he was that in the comics for decades and decades.” He said he spoke to Robert Downey Jr. about what he calls the “audacious” idea to cast the actor as Doom “even before Ant-Man 3 came out.”

Interestingly, right before Ant-Man 3 came out, Feige told Entertainment Weekly, “For years, we’ve always had the inkling that Kang would be an amazing follow-up to Thanos. He’s got that equal stature in the comics, but he’s a completely different villain. Mainly, that’s because he’s multiple villains. He’s so unique from Thanos, which we really liked.”

Feige teased one more thing about the future of Marvel, beyond recasting potentially everyone and resetting countless timelines into one singular story: “We were talking about a structure of an upcoming post-Secret Wars movie that I won’t name,” Variety quotes him as saying. “But I will say, like Shang-Chi, [it’s] getting back to what genre haven’t we done and want to do and how could this movie be that genre? [We would] focus on a singular storyline by embracing a certain genre we haven’t seen in a while.” Are you waiting with bated breath yet?[end-mark]

The post Kevin Feige Teases Resets and Recasting in the Future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe appeared first on Reactor.

https://reactormag.com/kevin-feige-teases-resets-recasting-future-marvel-cinematic-universe/

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Reactor ([syndicated profile] reactor_feed) wrote2025-07-21 03:00 pm
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Living With Dolphins: Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House

Posted by Sarah

https://reactormag.com/living-with-dolphins-audrey-schulmans-the-dolphin-house/

https://reactormag.com/?p=818653

Books SFF Bestiary

Living With Dolphins: Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House

A fictionalized account of a wild 1960s experiment…

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Published on July 21, 2025

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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Sarah</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/living-with-dolphins-audrey-schulmans-the-dolphin-house/">https://reactormag.com/living-with-dolphins-audrey-schulmans-the-dolphin-house/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=818653">https://reactormag.com/?p=818653</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-vertical"> <div class="container container-desktop"> <div class="flex flex-col mx-auto post-hero-container"> <div class="post-hero-content"> <div class="post-hero-tags font-aktiv text-xs tracking-[0.5px] font-medium uppercase"> <span class="mr-3"> <i class="inline-block w-2 h-2 rounded-full mr-[5px] bg-blue"></i> <a href="https://reactormag.com/articles/books/" class="inline-block link-no-animation" aria-label="Link to term or tag Books 0"> Books </a> </span> <span class="mr-3"> <i class="inline-block w-2 h-2 rounded-full mr-[5px] bg-blue"></i> <a href="https://reactormag.com/tag/sff-bestiary/" class="inline-block link-no-animation" aria-label="Link to term or tag SFF Bestiary 1"> SFF Bestiary </a> </span> </div> <h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1">Living With Dolphins: Audrey Schulman’s <i>The Dolphin House</i></h2> <div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">A fictionalized account of a wild 1960s experiment&#8230;</div> <div class="post-hero-wrapper"> <div class="post-hero-inner"> <p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&amp;_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/judith-tarr/" title="Posts by Judith Tarr" class="author url fn" rel="author">Judith Tarr</a></p> <span class="post-hero-symbol relative top-[-2px] hidden tablet:block">|</span> <p class="text-xs uppercase post-hero-publish font-aktiv"> Published on July 21, 2025 </p> </div> </div> <div class="quick-access post-hero-quick-access mt-[17px] tablet:hidden"> <div class="flex gap-[30px] tablet:gap-6"> <a 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17.4143H8.67871Z" fill="currentColor" fill-opacity="0.2" /> </g> <defs> <clippath id="clip0_1051_121783"> <rect width="17" height="17" fill="white" transform="translate(0.678711 0.414307)" /> </clippath> </defs> </svg> </a> </li> </ul> </div> </details> </div> </div> </div> <div class="post-hero-media "> <figure class="w-full h-auto post-hero-image"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="740" height="407" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/the-dolphin-house-header-740x407.png" class="w-full object-cover" alt="Detail from the cover of The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/the-dolphin-house-header-740x407.png 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/the-dolphin-house-header-1100x605.png 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/the-dolphin-house-header-768x422.png 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/the-dolphin-house-header.png 1400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" /> </figure> </div> </div> </div> </post-hero> <div class="wp-block-more-from-category"> <div> </div> </div> <p>Audrey Schulman’s novel <em><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59147214-the-dolphin-house" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Dolphin House</a></em> is a pretty much straight retelling of an experiment performed on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in 1965. The serial numbers have been lightly filed off, the names changed and the situations played up for maximum drama, but the actual history is if anything wilder than the fictionalized version.</p> <p>In our timeline, a young woman named Margaret Howe followed a rumor to a house by the sea, where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a small company of scientists were studying dolphins</a>. Neuroscientist John Lilly had conceived the project, to explore the then-radical new concept of animal cognition. Lilly was not just trying to understand how dolphins think. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o23O7_0QChY" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">He wanted to teach them English</a>.</p> <p>The director of the lab was Gregory Bateson, Important Thinker and Great Intellectual. When Howe showed up, he invited her to observe the three captive dolphins in the lagoon and record what she saw. It turned out that she was good at it.</p> <p>Howe was not an academic scientist. She had dropped out of college after a year and had been working in a hotel on the island. But she was sharp and observant and she had an intuitive understanding of the animals.</p> <p>She ended up turning part of the house into an aquatic apartment and living there with the youngest dolphin, an adolescent male named Peter. She lived, ate, slept in and just above the water, with a ten-foot, sharp-toothed, sonar-using roommate who learned, over a period of six months, to mimic human sounds using the flap of his blowhole.</p> <p>NASA funded the experiment, seeing it as a possible insight into communication with alien species. The male scientists observed and took notes, but was Howe who did the teaching and training and who learned a great deal about how dolphins live, think, and communicate.</p> <p>It was a most unusual experiment. And that was before it got really weird.</p> <p>Schulman follows the outline and the timeline of the historical experiment, but fictionalizes the characters. Her version of Lilly is named Blum, and his second in command is Tibbet. There’s a third, whose name we never quite get; the protagonist hears it as Eh.</p> <p>The protagonist’s name is Cora. She’s a high-school graduate, a cocktail waitress, and she has a Magical Disability.</p> <p>Cora is hard of hearing. This makes her more observant and more focused on subtle signals, though it causes confusion, as with Eh’s name. It also isolates her from her fellow humans, and allows her to be a kind of bridge between the human and the nonhuman.</p> <p>Because she’s Magic, she can hear much better in water than in air, which means she hears dolphin sounds clearly as long as she’s underwater. On land she wears a set of <a href="https://hearingaidmuseum.com/gallery/General_Info/GenInfoTransEar/info/generalinfo-eyeglass.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">glasses that have hearing aids built into the arms</a>.</p> <p>This ingenious device helps her to hear fairly clearly, but the delicate circuitry is not waterproof. Good thing the magic kicks in when she takes the glasses off and dives in. Kind of like a Clark Kent effect, with water. And dolphins.</p> <p>Disclosure here: I am hard of hearing. I’m quite a bit younger than Margaret Howe, but I remember hearing devices in the mid-Sixties, in between the clunky cigarette-carton-sized thing you wore on a harness on your chest and the tiny, all but invisible digital machines of the new millennium. I had <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f1/03/58/f10358d654d38b901160b91e222cc79b.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a barrette that attached to a plastic tube and an earpiece</a>, and clipped onto my hair. I could wear in the open or I could comb my hair over it. It was the latest technology, and it was a miracle for its time.</p> <p>Schulman writes well and vividly, and she’s done her homework. She does a good job of describing what it’s like to live with a hearing disability; how lipreading works, how a person learns to pick up visual cues and read body language, and how the human world can seem remote or disconnected. She also understands how exhausting it can be to try to meet the hearing world on its own terms, since it’s generally unlikely to go the other way.</p> <p>Cora is as alien to the scientists as the dolphins are. She’s female, disabled, not an academic, and for further Other Points, she’s part Seminole. Blum at one point pontificates about how her &#8220;Indian&#8221; heritage makes her more in tune with nature and more able to commune with animals. Cora keeps her mouth shut, but reflects that her ethnicity has nothing to do with it. She’s a woman, and women spend their lives studying and accommodating men. It’s a short leap to studying animals.</p> <p>Cora’s character is fictionalized, and the male scientists are written to be less than likeable. Blum’s experiments on the dolphins range from abusive to downright horrific. He and his colleagues are arrogant, oblivious, and often patronizing to the little girl without the college degree. But she’s the key to their experiment. It can’t work without her.</p> <p>It all starts to fall apart when Blum gets into LSD (and wants to try it on the dolphins, to Cora’s horror). What finishes it off however is something intrinsic to dolphin behavior.</p> <p>When Cora sets up her live-with-the-dolphin experiment, she chooses the young male, Junior, for her companion. The younger of the two females, Kat, is a more focused and willing learner, but Cora calculates that the scientists will pay more attention if the subject is male.</p> <p>Junior is not an easy pupil. For a while it seems he’s not going to cooperate at all. The breakthrough comes in a way that will cause major trouble, but at the time, it seems logical and sensible. Which, in dolphin terms, it is.</p> <p>Dolphins are tremendously social and very tactile. They’re in constant physical contact. They have sex early and often.</p> <p>It starts fairly innocently. At night when Cora sleeps in her floating bed, Junior takes her foot gently in his mouth and holds it while he sleeps along with her. It’s the same thing a young dolphin does with its mother, holding her fin for support and security.</p> <p>Junior is fascinated by human anatomy. The back of Cora’s knee particularly intrigues him, and the touch of her fingers sends him into a state of bliss. Separate, articulated fingers, separate toes, are completely alien to a dolphin with its smooth, curved body and its solid flippers and tail.</p> <p>The longer he and Cora live together, each apart from their own species, the more Junior pushes the boundaries of physical contact. It comes to a head when he charges her and knocks her unconscious. She comes to with him holding her above the surface as he would an injured dolphin, carrying her to the edge of the pool and keeping her head above water.</p> <p>Cora realizes that Junior needs a release. That release is physical and sexual. When she offers it, for the first time he actually does what she’s been trying to teach him to do for days and weeks. He speaks an approximation of human sounds, in the order in which she’s been trying for days and weeks to teach him.</p> <p>Stimulus-reward. It’s solid practice, but the manner of it is controversial to say the least. Cora knows that. She also knows that it’s getting results.</p> <p>It’s Blum who blows it wide open. Cora tries to conceal what she’s doing, but between professional jealousy and plain malice, Blum extracts the truth. He spreads it to the other two men, and from there it gets to the media.</p> <p>Never mind the rest of the experiment, the demonstration of a dolphin’s ability to mimic human sounds (and quite possibly understand what they mean), the tantalizing vision of communication between human and animal. Human-on-dolphin sex is a massive scandal. It culminates in the cover of a men’s magazine, depicting a woman having passionate sex with a dolphin.</p> <p>The whole thing collapses under the weight of the scandal. Cora tells herself it’s her fault—though it’s really Blum’s, and Tibbet’s and Eh’s. The funding evaporates. The media, apart from the porn industry, cancels its interviews. The project shuts down.</p> <p>For Cora, life goes on. For the dolphins, not so much. Blum has an awakening of sorts, becoming an advocate for freeing captive dolphins and studying wild dolphins in their native habitat. But he’s come to this through tragedy.</p> <p>That’s part of dolphin behavior and anatomy, too. Dolphins’ breathing is always voluntary. It is not autonomous. Every breath has to be made with intention. A dolphin can decide not to breathe. It’s a choice he makes.</p> <p>Most of this really happened. In a concise but comprehensive author’s note, Schulman lists the things that are real, and the things that are enhanced for dramatic effect. Very little of it is truly imaginary.</p> <p>It’s so very Sixties. The far-out science. The drugs. The sex, the sexism. The grand optimism of it all, and the human-centrism, the idea that an animal should learn to speak our language. It took another several decades for the focus to shift and for Dr. Denise Hertzing to try to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/883301238/denise-herzing-do-dolphins-have-a-language" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">discover if dolphins have a language of their own</a>. It seems <a href="https://focusingonwildlife.com/news/first-evidence-of-potential-language-like-communication-in-dolphins-study/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">they might</a>.[end-mark]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/living-with-dolphins-audrey-schulmans-the-dolphin-house/">Living With Dolphins: Audrey Schulman’s &lt;i&gt;The Dolphin House&lt;/i&gt;</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/living-with-dolphins-audrey-schulmans-the-dolphin-house/">https://reactormag.com/living-with-dolphins-audrey-schulmans-the-dolphin-house/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=818653">https://reactormag.com/?p=818653</a></p>
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Kate ([personal profile] kate_nepveu) wrote2025-07-21 11:30 am
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Readercon: The Body (of Work) Keeps the Score: Writing as Therapy

The Body (of Work) Keeps the Score: Writing as Therapy
"Kill your darlings" is a common bit of writing advice. But how about killing your demons? Writing effectively often requires channeling emotional responses and personal memories, so it can also liberate them and be a cathartic experience for the writer. This panel will discuss works where the author was definitely working through some stuff, as well as the experience of using writing to exorcise one's inner antagonists.
Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Melissa Bobe, Noah Beit-Aharon, Scott Edelman, Sophia Babai

panel notes

Barbara: start by talking about story you wrote where you were working through stuff

Noah: in current WIP, working through feelings re: loved one in abusive relationship, what it's like to feel like seeing person love but hearing person they're with through their mouth, so writing dybbuk story

Sophia: very rarely know what working through at time of writing. apologies for geopolitics but am Iranian, half of family is in Iran; writing story with ghosts djinn etc. but in real world in 2026. what I am experiencing now, protagonist did a year ago; helps empathize with protagonist who is kind of terrible, but also having future perspective really helps self

Scott: wrote essay "7 Things My Mother Told Me She Later Denied Ever Having Said" after she died, then realized should be fiction instead. could better work out feelings that way because in reality too worried about accuracy, fiction focused on themes. resulting story is on submission, now titled (approximately) "Inheritance Nobody Wants But Everybody Gets." nonfiction did not bring closure or forgiveness, but fiction did, would have thought other way around

Melissa: like that talking about form, because as thinking about this question, two books applicable are both short story collections, written in 2016 and 2020: something about ability to move through different places, settings, characters in one collection, allowed to explore complicated feelings

Barbara: father had cancer, wrote funny story about cancer; after he died, wrote funny story about death. lot of stories working through changes & losses in family, some of most successful probably because felt them more than just wrote them. question: do you find it's different when writing to exorcise political versus personal demons?

Sophia: personally, no, because have a lot of abstract rage/despair/disapproval, not writing fiction about those, writing threads on internet/news articles/having conversations. writing fiction is deeply personal things. don't really think possible to write compelling long fiction that is big and impersonal, really is about characters. regardless so much of politics is personal, people dying having debt etc., that's what makes a story

Noah: would also say that can be very hard, if even try, to separate between personal and political. writing about abusive people in this, the year of abuse, isn't going to come out apolitical. writing fiction when working through traumas or other deeply felt things, as opposed to nonfiction, nobody can fact-check your fiction. kind of freedom, about your feelings. can say, I think sucks, but not I think you're lying

Sophia: (well they can try to fact check)

Scott: when I write about "relative has undiagnosed anxiety disorder and making my life hell" can give myself closure; but writing about bigger pictures, did not make feel better

Melissa: thinking about some writers who say, want to write in space that's void of politics, because I need a break. do you stop existing as a person when you're writing, such that you don't have a political identity?

Noah: lots of people who don't want to think about politics as such, doesn't mean that their work isn't political, just don't want to acknowledge politics of what doing.

Barbara: if writing about specific person, how much feel need to disguise?

Sophia: wrote recent-ish short story that agent really liked, nervous because when writing, thought was writing about vampires, turned out to very clearly be story about my ex (audience rueful laughter)—yeah, you just learned so much from that sentence. no amount of fictionalizing will disguise that I had been in an abusive relationship, or that people will assume that was autobiographical—almost more nervous about reverse, adding fictional details that people will think are true.

Scott: even if not relatives, think average reader assumes actually happened because don't understand where ideas come from

Sophia: I keep killing sisters, multiple critique partners assumed has one. no: have brother, nothing bad allowed to happen him ever, which is why only nonbinary siblings and sisters allowed to die in stories

Melissa: semi-flippant response: people care about are so humble that wouldn't assume it's about them, and people mad at, are too self-absorbed to notice. discusses readers without boundaries stalking romance authors and something I missed

Scott: my dad did not meet Donald Trump

Noah: my WIP, any loved ones will instantly know what it's about. if and when finish, think I do plan to publish if can, because it's that level of important to me to express, but even if don't, I am doing as description and writing as own therapy, essential to write as honestly as feeling. cross bridge when come to if feelings change in future and edit story as story

Barbara: wrote story once as revenge, did nasty things to character who was doctor mistreated father. had fun writing, looked at, lousy story. other examples?

Melissa: yes, not usually throwaways because doesn't do that, but set aside for long time to get distance, find thread where went off from catharsis to become narrative, pick up from there

Noah: more honest I am when writing, better it comes out for me

Sophia: journals a lot, also first drafts run long. but never had experience of wrote from deep emotion and therefore resulting story not very good; rather, story is too vulnerable for me. sometimes frustrating, don't always want feel like presented heart on platter

Scott: is this a story or just a primal scream that hasn't been transmuted yet? if reader can see that working issues out that clearly, not art yet, just 1:1 of what going through. pause, go to journal to work that out through circular nonfiction criticism of self

Barbara: asking Sophia, is cathartic angle more successful not just for you with editors and readers

Sophia: varies widely. sound like a brag but it's a thing: my prose comes out beautiful, never had to work at sentences; but structure is weaker. so then going to come down to how deeply do you feel the emotions of this. but sometimes anger etc. makes sentences sloppier. however don't go into thinking this is going to be cathartic, see it after

Noah: worthwhile to separate between different kinds of catharsis: saying what really mean and killing stand-in character are not the same. latter not necessarily going to yield something interesting. not same kind of emotional writing which think we mostly mean, writing from deep honesty

Scott: probably most cathartic writing session ever had, flying back from con, upset about bad actors in community, wrote almost whole thing in longhand. "Boiling Point," in anthology Long Division: Stories of Social Decay, Societal Collapse, and Bad Manners. read it out loud at conventions, people come up and say, "I don't act like that," feel like story is calling them specifically out instead of being a general warning. goes back to what Melissa said about people not recognizing themselves

Barbara: ever written more than one story about person/experience/personal demon/political thing, with each looking at it differently?

Noah: multiple Orpheus/Eurydice. as kid story bothered me, some itch have to scratch by retelling many different ways. more recent days, started to feel more like Orpheus, find once again going back to

Sophia: two answers, both answers are yes. am now writing third book in a row in which main character haunted by dead sister, again I don't have a dead sister. completely different every time, what she represents, relationship, but for some reason trope keep coming back to. second, swear do have traumas that aren't geopolitical, but family has survived three separate genocides, except for current book never set out to write about, but turned out to be. at certain point not that trying to process, but that only lens I've lived. personal, non-collective traumas, usually will write about one time and then I'm good, wrote what needed to write about that: not part of worldview, thing that had feelings about. suspect will figure out what dead sister thing about one day

Barbara: was thinking about stories wrote about her/partner's grandmothers experiences, successful stories but sometimes wonder if should not have written because can't possibly imagine what was really like to have lived through that. are there stories that should be told because others not around to tell them, but how qualified am I just by virtue of listening to them?

audience: ever written something in therapeutic mode and then realized something that completely surprised you?

Melissa: feeding into processing Barbara's previous. can't stop writing about witches, think because am the friend you call in middle night to tell worst thing, that has to go somewhere and not comfortable with writing literally about. don't think realized until this conversation

Scott: not him but others, author: "this is story that helped get over X." reader: "this? this is the most depressing thing ever read"

Barbara: funniest stories ever written are about tragedies. partly because both are about father who was very funny man.

Sophia: never done revenge catharsis story, realized that experiences have had with people who caused harm, always writing from their POV. healing from perspective of getting to walk in their shoes, sometimes compassion and understanding and sometimes how awful it must be to be them. sometimes surprised by depth of sympathy experienced.

audience: anyone have safety tips or strategies for navigating writing a story that is kicking you in ancestral memory

Sophia: yes! literally one of things I specialize in. really helps to have rituals before and after, to keep contained experience. closing ritual should help move emotions through body: if can, go outside and shake body. writing is just in your head, so didn't get to express in way that nervous system understands. when getting too much, as Scott said, pause and journal to self, you are feeling sad right now because (or from/to ancestor, like a letter)—in different way than fiction writing, handwriting if can.

Noah: blessed to have number of people can talk to about writing, being able to do that is own kind of talk therapy, and talking about writing is enough removed from trauma itself, not waiting until work is perfect

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Kate ([personal profile] kate_nepveu) wrote2025-07-21 10:50 am
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Readercon: Understanding Originals Through their Responses

I have, let's see, 16 panels to report on from Readercon this year. So let's get started.

(For those unfamiliar: if I'm in the audience, I bring my laptop and I type as I listen. I do not purport to transcribe, though anything in quotation marks is intended to be a direct quote. For posting, I spellcheck, expand abbreviations, lightly format, and add occasional links.)

Understanding Originals Through their Responses
An expected result of discovering books in conversation with each other is that reading the older book illuminates hidden aspects of the newer one. But what of the reverse case, when reading the response tells you something new about the original? Panelists will discuss the deeply satisfying experience of appreciating originals through the responses to them, including examples they've seen, what they learned from them, and how this shaped their experience of both books.
—Greer Gilman, Melissa Bobe (moderator), Michael Dirda, Rebecca Fraimow

panel notes

Melissa: any response or original that made panelists want to be on this panel?

Michael: uncertain about panel's focus, explain?

Melissa: immediately thought of The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (by Kiersten White), fabulous re-imagining of Frankenstein; Hester Prynne's appearance in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (by Maryse Condé), which is brief but great

Michael: thought panel was about reading contemporary works and how affect precursors. essay by Borges, Kafka and His Precursors

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.

(quoted from a PDF article called "Re-reading 'Kafka and His Precursors'" hosted by the Borges Center)

Rebecca: how later memetic impressions affect. adaptation versus in conversation: get different things out of them. adaptation, what someone pulls out from original; go back and see, hadn't noticed that before. conversation, sometimes argument, His Dark Materials v. Narnia

Greer: film script for Little Women turned understanding of book, which has known for so long, on head. script branches Jo into one that's in the book and one who is writing the book Little Women. very odd way makes it science-fictional, branched off

Melissa: holds society in which Alcott was existing accountable in way. Mansfield Park film adaptation, fleeting but powerful moment that contextualizes it re: race & colonialism

Michael: is that unfair in a way? undermining book, making think that it is something that isn't

Rebecca: one of things that's really exciting about reading about books in conversations. reading a lot of Great Gatsby adaptations, now going back to original which hadn't read since high school: what people are pulling out that hadn't noticed when reading at 16. in Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, a character is actually paper: can see how that character in original isn't characterized. also see things that aren't being picked up by adaptations: there are three moments everyone does and some that no-one does, very interesting

Melissa: "fairness," such fraught word, how we dare read or write in these ways

Rebecca: we call it fair use

Melissa: Winnie the Pooh slasher film, definitely not what Milne intended, at same time, for those of us who thought kid in Giving Tree a horror show...

Rebecca: getting mad at responses can tell you something about original as well

Michael: matters what order encounter in. if read Tolkien first, then Old English literature: see where Tolkien got all ideas. other way: Tolkien seems like watered-down Old English Literature.

Greer: speaking of order, read Sir Thomas Browne before Moby-Dick. going back to Browne writing about sperm whale washed up on shore, he's trying to describe first contact. also realized that this is before they know how to use whales, sudden rush into world where weren't hunting

(me, to myself: also Moby-Dick was before Origin of Species, which makes the classification chapter read a lot differently!)

Rebecca: read Railsea before Moby-Dick, which contains riff where all captains talk about their obsessions and understand that white whale is a metaphor and an idea. then read Moby-Dick, yes, whale is a metaphor, I understand

(me, to myself, because I'm like that: yes, but also "for the last time the whale is real and it ate my husband")

Michael: are we saying that shouldn't read in context of time?

Rebecca: put multiple lenses on a thing, very rewarding

Melissa: we are of our own time, never going to be able to put self perfectly in reader of time

Michael: why do we want to do these things? "distort"

(me, to myself: I truly cannot tell if he is genuinely objecting or is exploring ideas)

Rebecca: not distortion to lay two interpretations against each other and see where they differ. new Green Knight movie: half people I know considered it very medieval, half not. thinks movie's thematic concerns points out the (different) ones of the original

Greer: "things just happening" was a medieval structure. very difficult effort to get head entirely Gawain-poet's mind: bits of you that don't fit, weren't educated to have those feelings. can reconstruct them, "that's the worst dishonor in the world," but difficult--wonderful thing to try

Melissa: have been talking very much about contemporary re-imaginings of older texts, but lot of older texts did same with even older

Michael: it's also criticism. T.S. Eliot said (I think) that each new work shifts our understanding of works in the past, that's not static. once Raphael was considered great artist, but sentimental works after him make look him like kitsch

Rebecca: one of reasons excited about revisiting: if only seen kitsch, the shock of looking at original and finding that still has power. reading The Iliad for first time, not at all what expected to be

Greer: always been interested in artistic and literary fakes, constantly true that it looks great--at the moment. Kenneth Clark looked at Botticelli and said, "that's a silent film star," and it was, but at time was the ideal of beauty. [I think these two comments were not connected, since Clark seems to have been a critic rather than a forger.] sometimes places where you're standing, can't see what book or work of art is, have to be in it or further away for it. "the 18th century had some damn weird Gothic," that is what they saw [clearly I missed something here, sorry]

Melissa: Gothic chapbooks, or bluebooks, were frequently rushed copies of original higher-production texts, which permitted accessibility to public which didn't have to original. anyone who went to see Beethoven symphony when he was alive, would never hear again, transience. is that affecting how responding?

Michael: Milton was Christian epic poet, until Blake came along and turned Paradise Lost into romantic outcast story. happens all the time. book about a devastated city [title of which I missed] which turns into climate fiction (to a present-day reader)

Rebecca: also exciting when see thematic affiliation that was always there. Iliad: scene where throw up wall in one night; WWI poets always referencing that in making trenches. then Some Desperate Glory (by Emily Tesh) now is looking at WWI poets.

Greer: sometime an artist will go back to younger self, say, no, that's no longer my world. LeGuin returning again and again to Earthsea, asking self, where is the feminism. TH White returning to The Sword and Stone, now this is about fascism.

Michael: complicated. example comes to mind, Henry James, rewrote story to make much more prolix, some readers think original better. artist can decide what version want to send down to history, but is artist best judge? was LeGuin betraying younger self?

Greer: first three Earthsea books are things of beauty. Shakespeare went back to Lear and made it grimmer [note: I am not sure if this is, Shakespeare revisited King Lear in a later play, or Shakespeare was revisiting an earlier play in Lear, or Shakespeare was making the story of Leir grimmer]

Michael: Tehanu, powerful but didn't belong to the first few books.

Melissa: tension between us as consumers of texts and the rights the artists have to their opinion. never fact-checked professor who said that on opening night of Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht was appalled because audience gave Mother Courage a standing ovation: he ran through audience boo'ing trying to get them to boo

(me: was audience applauding the performer not the character??)

Michael: does that mean he failed as artist, by not achieving his intent

Melissa: but we still read and perform. important: when respond, saying, this exists and should be read. kind of resurrection of work if fallen out of favor/public mind

Rebecca: theater opposed to novel. play always continually reinterpreted, always possibility. don't think that that's as far away from novel as might think. engagement and conversation is always happening, having a text to point you to that conversation is generous and valuable, invitation to join

Michael: are there are certain books that are strong, archetypal, have so many possibilities. The Odyssey. Little Women, so attuned to questions of gender, we want to make these texts fit our views. Shakespeare, should we perform as in Elizabethian times, have we lost something otherwise? very uncertain when came to panel

Greer: (comment about tug of war between something and artist's soul that I could not get down)

Melissa: Michael had asked earlier (in comment I didn't transcribe) if this question was something new, maybe that's what: aspects of text that weren't celebrated at time

Greer: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, turns it inside-out

Rebecca: doesn't take anything away from Hamlet that R&G exists. dream is to watch back to back with same cast

Melissa: Wide Sargasso Sea

Michael: asks Elizabeth Hand (in audience) to talk about her Hill House book, A Haunting on the Hill. what did you think about when decided to do this?

Elizabeth: first thing I thought was, "oh no." told Estate going in that not going to do pastiche, backstory, explanation. wanted to write an Elizabeth Hand novel set in Hill House, is that okay? yeah, go for it. otherwise would not have been able to write, because those characters were Jackson's characters; so was Hill House, but it was also archetype in way that humans are not, because they don't have iconic stature that house did. own characters inhabit House and riff off of Jackson's.

Elizabeth cont'd: listening to panel and thinking, why do we do this? return to work of others we admire? really don't know. fiction in last 20-30 years become much more malleable (like plays) than used to be, artists and writers and fanfic writers. very exciting time, I too enjoy reading all riffs on Great Gatsby

Rebecca: one of foremost ways to keep a work alive, responses to it. le Carré's son just put out new novel about Smiley, father said to him on deathbed, please keep people reading Smiley, so guessed only way to do it is write new one

Michael: Pratchett took total opposite approach

Melissa: q to Greer: did you read Little Women as child?

Greer: oh yes, very picky about it

Melissa; my theory is based on small children. anyone experienced a 3 year old, whatever book they land on, need to have backup copies and will be so sick of by time they're 4. but most comforting thing in world to them.

audience: response to Michael: modern mindset cannot see The Merchant of Venice in way original audience did. that said, The Tamer Tamed, written by Shakespeare collaborator 10 years later: frequently seeing those two performed together

audience: thinking about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and its many responses: works that people find challenging and want to respond to, moves people, makes them want to think, wants to have conversations. hoping to hear about those kind of stories

Rebecca: if come away from book wanting to argue with, feel like has internalized better. thinks why a lot of works are in conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers.

audience: fanfic is entirely in conversation.

Rebecca: some fans of TV show The Terror have become fans of historical polar explorers. fandom helped find bones because read original journals after being mad about way portrayed in show. (note: a quick look hasn't turned up a link on this, can anyone help?) fandom can drive changing responses to original.

Greer: found Richard III, did not change narrative of Richard III in some people's minds

audience: when read good book, look at what author read to write that, works well. (separately:) took 15 years after watching Howl's Moving Castle to know that Diana Wynne Jones existed. as authors, how can we convey importance of works that are adapting. (examples cite are all films)

Greer: talk to Marketing?

(me, to myself: surely this is what author's notes are for)

Rebecca: wish books came with annotated bibliographies. reading about Alan Garner who over course of life, got more and more resistant to mentioning that was responding to something, felt was failure of work. in Owl Service, mentions the Mabinogion, but in Red Shift, have to know it's Tam Lin

audience: thinking about being in engineering school and taking science fiction class, reading "The Cold Equations", other student wrote about how stupid the engineering design was. really think about how see engineering now as opposed to when written. other works like that?

sadly, no, because we were out of time.

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Wind and Truth Reread: Chapters 81-83

Posted by Drew McCaffrey

https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/

https://reactormag.com/?p=818311

Books Wind and Truth Reread

Wind and Truth Reread: Chapters 81-83

Moash, thunderclasts, death rattles… Things are getting a bit dire.

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Published on July 21, 2025

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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Drew McCaffrey</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/">https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=818311">https://reactormag.com/?p=818311</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-vertical"> <div class="container container-desktop"> <div class="flex flex-col mx-auto post-hero-container"> <div class="post-hero-content"> <div class="post-hero-tags font-aktiv text-xs tracking-[0.5px] font-medium uppercase"> <span class="mr-3"> <i class="inline-block w-2 h-2 rounded-full mr-[5px] bg-blue"></i> <a href="https://reactormag.com/articles/books/" class="inline-block link-no-animation" aria-label="Link to term or tag Books 0"> Books </a> </span> <span class="mr-3"> <i class="inline-block w-2 h-2 rounded-full mr-[5px] bg-blue"></i> <a href="https://reactormag.com/tag/wind-and-truth-reread/" class="inline-block link-no-animation" aria-label="Link to term or tag Wind and Truth Reread 1"> Wind and Truth Reread </a> </span> </div> <h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1"><i>Wind and Truth</i> Reread: Chapters 81-83</h2> <div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">Moash, thunderclasts, death rattles… Things are getting a bit dire.</div> <div class="post-hero-wrapper"> <div class="post-hero-inner"> <p class="post-hero-author text-xs font-aktiv uppercase font-medium [&amp;_a]:link-hover">By <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/paige-vest/" title="Posts by Paige Vest" class="author url fn" rel="author">Paige Vest</a>, <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/lyndsey-luther/" title="Posts by Lyndsey Luther" class="author url fn" rel="author">Lyndsey Luther</a>, <a href="https://reactormag.com/author/drew-mccaffrey/" title="Posts by Drew McCaffrey" class="author url fn" rel="author">Drew McCaffrey</a></p> <span class="post-hero-symbol relative top-[-2px] hidden tablet:block">|</span> <p class="text-xs uppercase post-hero-publish font-aktiv"> Published on July 21, 2025 </p> </div> </div> <div class="quick-access post-hero-quick-access mt-[17px] tablet:hidden"> <div class="flex gap-[30px] tablet:gap-6"> <a href="https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/#comments" class="flex items-center text-sm font-aktiv tracking-[0.6px] font-semibold uppercase translate-x-[1px] translate-y-[1px]"> <svg class="w-[22px] h-[22px] mr-[7px] icon-hover" viewbox="0 0 18 18" aria-label="comment" role="img" aria-hidden="true" aria-labelledby="icon-comment-quick-access-"> <title id="icon-comment-quick-access-">Comment</title> <g fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd"> <path fill="#FFF" fill-rule="nonzero" d="M6.3 18a.9.9 0 0 1-.9-.9v-2.7H1.8A1.8 1.8 0 0 1 0 12.6V1.8A1.8 1.8 0 0 1 1.8 0h14.4A1.8 1.8 0 0 1 18 1.8v10.8a1.8 1.8 0 0 1-1.8 1.8h-5.49l-3.33 3.339a.917.917 0 0 1-.63.261H6.3Z" /> <path stroke="#000" 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9.41431V6.41431C2.21205 6.41431 3.64538 6.70197 4.97871 7.27731C6.31205 7.85264 7.47471 8.63597 8.46671 9.62731C9.45805 10.6186 10.2414 11.781 10.8167 13.1143C11.392 14.4476 11.6794 15.881 11.6787 17.4143H8.67871Z" fill="currentColor" fill-opacity="0.2" /> </g> <defs> <clippath id="clip0_1051_121783"> <rect width="17" height="17" fill="white" transform="translate(0.678711 0.414307)" /> </clippath> </defs> </svg> </a> </li> </ul> </div> </details> </div> </div> </div> <div class="post-hero-media "> <figure class="w-full h-auto post-hero-image"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="740" height="407" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/wind-and-truth-reread-header-740x407.png" class="w-full object-cover" alt="Cover of Brandon Sanderson&#39;s Wind and Truth" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/wind-and-truth-reread-header-740x407.png 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/wind-and-truth-reread-header-1100x605.png 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/wind-and-truth-reread-header-768x422.png 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/wind-and-truth-reread-header.png 1400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" /> </figure> </div> </div> </div> </post-hero> <div class="wp-block-more-from-category"> <div> </div> </div> <p>This week’s installment of the <em>Wind and Truth</em> reread isn’t for the faint of heart, Cosmere Chickens. Things are looking Very, Very Bad for our heroes on several fronts, and losses and deaths abound. Moash viciously brings down another founding member of Bridge Four, a Shardbearer falls, and the Azimir dome crumbles. We’ll discuss all this and more as we dive into chapters 81, 82, and 83. Get your beverage of choice ready for some heartfelt salutes to the fallen, and let’s begin…</p> <p>The book has been out long enough that most of you will hopefully have finished, and as such, this series shall now function as a re-read rather than a read-along. That means there <em>will</em> be spoilers for the end of the book (as well as <strong>full Cosmere spoilers</strong>, so beware if you aren’t caught up on all Cosmere content).</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Paige’s Commentary: Plot Arcs<strong></strong></h3> <p>Day 7 continues with chapter 81, “The Scholar With a Spear.” Our Radiants and soldiers are still doggedly defending Narak Prime. The plan is to trick the enemy forces into focusing on Narack Three rather than Narak Prime. They’ve set up a decoy: a Lightweaving of a store of infused gemstones that they only wished they had. Things are getting hairy, and then, amazingly, the singers and Fused head to Narak Three.</p> <p>Then Sigzil gets a message from Leyten that they’ve found him. They’ve found Moash.</p> <p>POV switch!</p> <p>Adolin reveals a massive aluminum chain that he plans to use to trip the approaching thunderclast. He has the wagon on which the chain sits hooked up to Gallant, who is none too happy about it. They head toward the thunderclast, hoping to head it off. Neziham, the Azish Shardbearer who isn’t long for this world, is with Adolin, sent by Kushkam. They hear horns indicating a massive attack inside the dome but Adolin convinces him to stay to fight the thunderclast, telling Neziham where to aim his Blade to incapacitate the beast if they’re able to bring it down.&nbsp;</p> <p>At one point, Adolin conveys to Maya that he might need her. She pleads with him to let her finish her mission, saying she’s almost there.&nbsp;</p> <p>POV switch!</p> <p>We get a short POV from Commandant Kushkam, leading the charge against the Deepest Ones who have literally begun rising up from the stones of the plaza in front of the dome.</p> <p>POV switch!</p> <p>When Sigzil arrives where Leyten has indicated that Moash would be, Leyten and his squires are fighting with no Stormlight and no Surges. Moash has a fabrial that cuts them off and they’re fighting him in the conventional way. Only Moash has access to Surges, and he has an Honorblade.&nbsp;Sig calls for the retreat, telling the others to get out—but he realizes that Moash is using Lashings to keep Leyten and the others from leaving. Then Leyten signals for his two remaining squires—Moash already got one of them—to flee to the sides, and he moves in to distract Moash.</p> <p>Leyten grapples with Moash and a moment later, Sigzil is there and rams his special knife into Moash’s back. Moash turns to look at him and then Sigzil sees his eyes: diamond glowing with Voidlight. *shudder* Sig tries to engage and get Moash talking, telling him that he doesn’t have to do this. Moash claims he’s been betrayed in favor of the lighteyes, and suddenly Vienta realizes that Moash can <em>see</em> her, though she’s hidden. Sig tells her to go but then Moash lashes himself upward and slashes with a knife that bends the light.&nbsp;</p> <p>It’s not Vienta that he kills, but Leyten’s spren. Then he attacks Leyten himself, stabbing him in the chest with the anti-Stormlight knife. Moash—being the coward that he is—then flees as more soldiers approach. Sig cradles Leyten, who gives a death rattle as he dies; Drew talks about it below. Leyten speaks as Sigzil and says that he’s the Scholar with a Spear and that he dies by the hands of a friend. It’s really quite bone-chilling. Though, of course, we know that Moash doesn’t kill Sigzil in <em>this</em> book.</p> <p>Chapter 82, “The Primary Purpose of Science,” opens with Navani, still appearing as Melishi in the vision when the Windrunner stood against the Skybreakers. She’s able to converse with the Sibling in real time, as they share a small Connection with Navani “close” to the tower. The Sibling says that they cannot bring Navani, Dalinar, and Gavinor back to the Physical Realm. They suggest that perhaps one of their siblings might know how, but Navani tells them that the Stormfather refuses to help.&nbsp;</p> <p>They lose their connection. Navani and Dalinar talk about Connection and, in short, determine that they need to Connect to the future vision of the Recreance. Dalinar says that they can’t trust what the Stormfather has told them. Navani says that the Sibling told her to follow the Windrunner, Garith.</p> <p>In the midst of this, little Gav, who had fallen asleep in Dalinar’s lap, wakes to say he heard his father again. Of course, we know it’s not his father, and I begin to feel so much anger at what Odium is doing to him.</p> <p>Navani creates a Connection to the near future of the vision and they appear in another vision, with the Windrunner they’ve been seeking, looking about a decade older—the same age he did when Dalinar first saw him in a vision of the Recreance, which began at Feverstone Keep.</p> <p>POV shift!</p> <p>Adolin does his best to wrap that chain around the thunderclast’s feet, but he’s not going to be nearly as successful as Luke was against that AT-AT. (For anyone too young to know what I’m taling about, see Tom Holland’s Spider-Man toppling Ant-Man in <em>Captain America: Civil War</em>, where he references my Star Wars reference.)</p> <p>POV shift!</p> <p>Kushkam is still outside the dome, dazed after being near the impact of a boulder that had been dropped by a Heavenly One. He suddenly feels a shock of coldness and his mind clears. The young Edgedancer has given him Healing and he orders someone to get her a helmet and to keep her alive before he grabs a pike and heads back into the fighting. Then a group of enormous Fused burst from the dome. Kushkam sends orders to drop the firebombs.</p> <p>POV shift!</p> <p>Adolin runs for the loose end of the chain, planning to hook it around the thunderclast’s other foot. To no avail. The thunderclast kicks and throws Adolin down the street, leaving Adolin lying on the ground, every piece of plate cracked and leaking Stormlight. Then, tragically, the thunderclast literally smashes Neziham to a bloody pulp, breaks the aluminum chain, and continues on its trek toward the dome.</p> <p>Chapter 83, a Szeth flashback chapter titled “Hired Blade,” takes place nine and a half years before present day. Szeth has dealt the killing blow to the Windrunner Honorbearer, Tuko-son-Tuko, who has some interesting things to say before he dies—and I’m not just talking about the death rattle. He says that he knew Szeth would come for him the moment they sent him to train. He calls Szeth one of Pozen’s “glassy-eyed sheep” and predicts that Szeth will be thrown away, too. He urges Szeth to walk away, insisting “[y]ou don’t have to follow him.” And then the death rattle. (Again, see Drew’s section for more on the death rattles.)</p> <p>So Szeth has won and is the Windrunner Honorbearer. He’s annoyed at the other Honorbearers as they seem more intent on congratulating themselves than congratulating him. Then he’s left with Sivi and tells her that they used him to kill Tuko. Sivi says he was sent by the spren; he counters by saying that he was sent by all of them. Sivi admits that Tuko was talking of rebellion, of civil war. Then Szeth says he wants to meet the Voice. She hedges, but then the Voice speaks to them both:&nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p><em>You have all done well. Let him fly to me, </em>then<em> go on his second pilgrimage.&nbsp;</em><br><br><em>Szeth, come to me at Ayabiza and seek the holy grotto beyond it. There, you will know the full extent of Truth—and you will have your answers.</em></p></blockquote></figure> <p>Dun-dun-<em>dunnn…</em></p> <p>Of course, this is what causes Szeth himself to rebel and then be cast out… but we’re not quite there yet!</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lyndsey’s Commentary: Character Arcs and Maps<strong></strong></h3> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1500" height="820" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-81-.png" alt="Wind and Truth Chapter Arch - Chapter 81" class="wp-image-818324" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-81-.png 1500w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-81--740x405.png 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-81--1100x601.png 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-81--768x420.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /></figure> <p>Chapter 81’s arch Heralds are Nale x2 and Vedel x2. Double the hooded Herald, double the… fun? Nah. There’s nothing fun about this chapter. I’d assume that we’re seeing Nale since Sigzil is fighting the Skybreakers over on Narak Prime, and Vedel is standing in for Adolin, as she usually does.&nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1500" height="822" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-82.png" alt="Wind and Truth Chapter Arch - Chapter 82" class="wp-image-818325" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-82.png 1500w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-82-740x406.png 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-82-1100x603.png 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-82-768x421.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /></figure> <p>What a strange assortment of Heralds we have on chapter 82. Ishar at least makes sense, as we do see quite a lot of our resident Bondsmiths Navani and Dalinar, not to mention Melishi. Battah (Herald of the Elsecallers, attributes of Wise/Careful and role of Counselor) seems out of left field, though… as does the Wild Card, whom we usually see in connection to Hoid. He’s nowhere to be seen in this chapter, or anything connected to him… and while I suppose several of the characters could be seen as exemplifying the attributes of Careful/Wise, it seems like a bit of a reach.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1500" height="840" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-83.png" alt="Wind and Truth Chapter Arch - Chapter 83" class="wp-image-818326" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-83.png 1500w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-83-740x414.png 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-83-1100x616.png 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-Chapter-Arch-Chapter-83-768x430.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /></figure> <p>Chapter 83 is a Szeth flashback chapter, so it tracks that Ishar shows up twice in the decaying arch. Jezrien’s presence can be explained by the fact that Szeth wins his Honorblade here, defeating the Windrunner in battle. And Battah of the Elsecallers, our final arch Herald…? Well, she’s not here for Sivi (Willshaper) or Moss (Lightweaver). Pozen, however, who is the guiding force behind a lot of this, does hold the Elsecaller Honorblade.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Sigzil</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>He hadn’t fit in with the scholars at home because he didn’t like sitting in musty rooms reading. He’d wanted to be out doing field research, learning and experiencing. That was why Master Hoid had chosen him as an apprentice. And it was why he was an effective Windrunner.&nbsp;<br><br>And now, why he could lead.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>As I’ve stated before, we’re being given some very heavy-handed signals here (if you know what to look for) that Sigzil’s new-found confidence is about to be destroyed. While this chapter isn’t the death blow, it’s certainly a fatal wound, symbolically <em>and</em> literally.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p><em>Found him. North side.</em><br><br>Sigzil felt a sudden chill. Him.&nbsp;<br><br>Moash.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>This standoff has been a long time coming. The rest of Bridge Four has just as much of a bone to pick with Moash as Kaladin does, now that he’s killed Teft in cold blood.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Adolin</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>He was a common man in a world of giants. Against these things, even Shardweapons were of middling effectiveness.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Adolin underestimating himself once again. He’s anything but a “common man,” but of course we’ll see this revelation come full circle by the end of the book with the Unoathed.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>Was the Plate… worried?&nbsp;<br><br>“Not your fault,” Adolin mumbled, getting his bearings.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Dear sweet Adolin, not even questioning his connection to his “inanimate” Plate, just as he never did to his Blade. He just accepts it, much like how people will bond with pretty much anything if you put googly eyes on it.&nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>A colossal stone fist smashed down on Neziham, crushing him against the ground. Plate exploded and popped in a sequence of spraying molten bits, and the thunderclast’s knuckles slammed into the street. Neziham’s Shardblade clanged free, rolling across the street, and didn’t vanish.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>And so we lose another Shardbearer, and Adolin loses another battle (or so he thinks in this moment) against a Thunderclast.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Leyten</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>His squires ran in opposite directions. Leyten stood his ground to distract Moash.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Leyten proving to be a hero to the very last. He stands his ground in order to allow his squires to reach safety…</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>Moash lightly floated away from Sigzil, easily staying out of his reach, and landed near Leyten. There, he plunged the anti-Stormlight knife straight into Leyten’s chest.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>…at the expense of his own life. And so another original member of Bridge Four falls. <em>::pours one out for Leyten and raises a middle finger in Moash’s direction::</em></p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Moash&nbsp;</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“We were brothers, Sig,” Moash said. “But then you chose the Alethi lighteyes over me—you went to them, after they murdered us, degraded us. After all that, you became hounds in the laps of the Kholins.”</p></blockquote></figure> <p>I’m going to take a step back from my own personal hatred of the character to attempt to provide a more unbiased view of this statement in particular. In a way, Moash is the dark version of Kaladin; a Kaladin who didn’t come to a grudging acceptance of the ruling elite—who turned instead to violent revolution.</p> <p>I can understand his motivation a bit more than I did… oh, let’s say about six months ago, and leave it at that.</p> <p>Moash suffered a great deal under the yoke of the lighteyes, and his actions reflect those experiences. He didn’t befriend them like Kaladin did, he never saw the other side, the <em>humanity</em> of the ruling class. He didn’t <em>want</em> to see. Will his “eyes” ever be opened to this? Will he find redemption?</p> <p>Time will tell.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“I used to avoid emotion. Reject it. I welcome it now.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>An interesting turn for his character. It’s just a shame that the emotions he’s welcoming are all negative ones.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Navani</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>She was quite aware of the injustices done to women by their society. That did not discount the different but still debilitating ones done to men.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>I’m often struck by how mature Navani is, and how deep of a thinker she is. She takes nothing for granted, examining everything from every angle. A true scientist, through and through.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“Dalinar,” she said, “could you please <em>ask</em> before you do something unexpected with your powers?</p></blockquote></figure> <p>And not only does she take the time to examine everything, she <em>communicates</em> her issues calmly and clearly! If every character involved in a love affair in a book would do this, we’d have a lot less novels!</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“She has two children, a boy and a girl,” Navani said. “Like me. She is roughly my age. And judging by her bearing, she is proud, although she walks alone with no husband. As I did for years after Gavilar’s death.”</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Her ability to empathize and form connections is another facet of her thoughtfulness.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Dalinar&nbsp;</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“The man you were can’t fix this, Dalinar. He never could have.”</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Dalinar truly has come a long way from the man he was before. His brute-force approach never would have been able to account for the intricacies of world politics on this scale.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Szeth</strong><strong></strong></h4> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“Honor-nimi,” Szeth said, “you fought well.”&nbsp;<br><br>Tuko spat bloody spittle into Szeth’s face.&nbsp;<br><br>A fair reaction.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>This made me chuckle. Only Szeth would react to someone spitting blood in his face with a “fair, I deserved that.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“Or perhaps someone will kill me in delayed retribution for what I’ve done.” That felt good. Knowing that all of these acolytes who glared at him with such vitriol might someday have their own chance to kill him.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>What a twisted life this poor boy had led, that he welcomes the chance for bloody retribution to be doled out to him.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>Over five years since he’d last seen his sister. And at least a few months since that had finally stopped hurting.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Ouch. I don’t know what hurts more; the fact that it’s been so long since he’s seen his sister, or that the pain from that has <em>finally</em> abated.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Strategy</strong><strong></strong></h4> <p>On the Narak front, we’re seeing the Skybreakers along with the Fused forces attacking Narak Prime. However, they turn mid-chapter to the fake gem archive on Narak Three, just as Sigzil had hoped they would.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="723" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes-1100x723.jpg" alt="Map detail from Wind and Truth. Text: &quot;In general, I&#39;ve left off the new structures on this repurposed map. the coalition added their own buildings and stored supplies mostly on Narak Three and Four, even though there&#39;s more space on Narak Prime, leaving it as a monument to the ancient humans who once lived there. Some plateaus been decimated or have sustained significant damage due to the Everstorm. &quot;" class="wp-image-818390" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes-1100x723.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes-740x487.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes-768x505.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes-1536x1010.jpg 1536w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><a href="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-notes.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>Click to enlarge.</strong></a> Credit: Dragonsteel.</figcaption></figure> <p>Meanwhile, over in Azimir, the thunderclast and the Fused have arrived. The thunderclast begins moving towards the dome (shaded in blue below), and Deepest Ones arise from the plaza surrounding the dome to begin their own assault (represented by red Xs on the map). Things aren’t looking good for Adolin and company… especially when the Thunderclast kills the other Shardbearer, and the Fused crack open the dome like an overcooked egg.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>Heavenly Ones were buzzing high above the city, dropping boulders—artillery that, after millennia of practice, they knew how to make as dangerous as any siege weapon.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Bad news for Azimir all around.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="435" height="648" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Wind-and-Truth-map-detail-1.jpg" alt="Wind and Truth - map detail" class="wp-image-818333" /></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Drew’s Commentary: Invested Arts &amp; Theories<strong></strong></h3> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“The Scholar with a Spear! I die by the hands of a friend! My spren screams in death, and I know that I have failed to lead! I am no captain! I am nothing! Vyre strikes me, and my eyes burn!”</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Moelach’s presence on the Shattered Plains means we still get some new death rattles, and this one of course stands out. On a first read, this appears to be prophecy of Sigzil’s death later in the book… but on reread we know that he avoids it by breaking his bond with Vienta.</p> <p>Now, this would hardly be the first time that future sight is shown to be mutable in The Stormlight Archive. Renarin is probably the most obvious example, when Jasnah elects not to kill him in <em>Oathbringer</em>, but we have other instances as well. This seems to be the latest.</p> <p>But there’s still an awful lot of runway for Moash, clearly. Who knows what lies in store for him in the back five (and maybe after)? Sigzil is obviously still alive in the future of the Cosmere, as we know thanks to <em>The Sunlit Man</em>, but he <em>does</em> have at least one new spren bond in his future.&nbsp;</p> <p>And then again, there’s the name used: Vyre. “Vyre” is a title, and while Moash currently holds that title, who’s to say that we won’t see some narrative echoes in another friend assuming that title much later?</p> <p>I think this death rattle still has a strong chance of being true prophecy.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>Got stopped on my way out of the city. Evidently I hadn’t filled out the proper forms for stealing a map. After four hours of mind-numbing paperwork—and an exorbitant fee—they let me go, map in hand. No wonder there’s so little crime here.</p></blockquote></figure> <p>I always get a nice spike of joy whenever I see Nazh’s handwriting on one of these in-world maps or sketches.&nbsp;</p> <p>For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Nazh has been hanging around for a while now. He works with Khriss (the author of the Ars Arcanum at the end of every book), he’s from Threnody originally, and he’s a sort of Cosmere James Bond. He gets into and out of tight places. Frequently.</p> <p>The idea that Nazh got caught stealing this map and just had to spend four hours filling out forms, rather than being thrown into prison or caught fighting for his life, gives me a good chuckle. There’s a lot more to come with Nazh in the future of the Cosmere—including in the brand-new <em>Isles of the Emberdark</em>, which was just published on July 10. He’s a fascinating character.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“Perception,” she said, remembering the research into spren. “Perception changes Investiture, Dalinar. Wit talked about this place, and how it is a shifting web of Connections.”</p></blockquote></figure> <p>Such a small, throwaway line. But such an important one nonetheless.</p> <p>There are a lot of capital letters in the Cosmere, especially when it comes to the Invested Arts. Thanks to the metals charts in <em>Mistborn</em>, we know of the Spiritual attributes: Identity, Fortune, Connection, and of course Investiture itself. But undergirding all of them is a unifying operative.</p> <p>Intent.</p> <p>The Shards have Intents, the Dawnshards have Intents (Commands), and the utilization of Investiture itself requires Intent. And as Navani so rightly points out, <em>perception affects intent.</em></p> <p>Someone like Hoid, or Khriss, or Vasher, someone who has dedicated long spans of time to investigating the nature of Invested Arts, is much more capable with those powers than even someone naturally powerful, like Vin or Elend. They <em>know</em> and <em>understand</em> the limitations of different Invested Arts, and have spent a long time figuring out how to exploit them.</p> <p>That’s how you have Hoid storing memories in Breaths, preventing himself from being overwhelmed by the weight of all the years he’s lived, or Vasher fueling his Divine Breath and continued existence with Stormlight rather than with a Breath per week.</p> <p>I strongly suspect that the coming conflicts in the Cosmere will be driven by the pursuit of deeper knowledge just as much as they will by access to natural resources like metals or raw Investiture.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left"><blockquote><p>“I climb!” Tuko shouted, ragged. “I climb the wall of grief toward the light, locked away above! I climb, the weight of my darkened twin on my back, and seek the captive! The light I love! I… Storms… the light I <em>love</em>!”</p></blockquote></figure> <p>This is a particularly dense death rattle, without an immediately intuitive meaning. That said, the fact that it’s happening at all is just as interesting to me. This means that there <em>was</em> an Unmade active in Shinovar a decade previously—perhaps just before Moelach was lured to Kharbranth for Taraganvian’s hospital experiments.</p> <p>It goes to show how corrupted Ishar truly was, that he was so ingrained in Shinovar but didn’t take action against one of his enemy’s greatest lieutenants.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-dots" /> <p>We’ll be keeping an eye on the comment sections of posts about this article on various social media platforms and may include some of your comments/speculation (with attribution) on future weeks’ articles! Keep the conversation going, and PLEASE remember to spoiler-tag your comments on social media to help preserve the surprise for those who haven’t read the book yet.&nbsp;</p> <p>See you next Monday with our discussion of chapters 84 and 85![end-mark]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/">&lt;i&gt;Wind and Truth&lt;/i&gt; Reread: Chapters 81-83</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/">https://reactormag.com/wind-and-truth-reread-chapters-81-83/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=818311">https://reactormag.com/?p=818311</a></p>
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Asymptote Blog ([syndicated profile] asymptote_journal_feed) wrote2025-07-21 01:00 pm
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Performances of Masculinity: A Review of Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh

Posted by Bella Creel

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2025/07/21/performances-of-masculinity-a-review-of-rock-paper-grenade-by-artem-chekh/

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/?p=37322

Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, Seven Stories Press, 2025 When men talk about other men in the world of Artem Chekh’s Rock, Paper, Grenade, there is an external sense of kinship coupled with a subtle hostility—a language of insults and mockery that permeates every […]

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2025/07/21/performances-of-masculinity-a-review-of-rock-paper-grenade-by-artem-chekh/

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/?p=37322

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oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-07-21 09:39 am
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(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] coughingbear and [personal profile] kerk_hiraeth!
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Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2025-07-20 10:13 pm
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Summer of Horror and other fun things

[personal profile] summerofhorrorexchange revealed today! I got an astonishing 15K(!!!) Biggles fic (!!!) which I won't be able to properly start reading until tomorrow, but I cannot WAIT, it looks amazing and I'm dying to read it!

Obligatory reminder that I have a fic in the exchange as well. Deeply mysterious, hid my tracks amazingly as usual. And there is a lovely selection of other horror fic as well!

Earlier today, before all of that, I posted yet another Murderbot TV-verse fic, System // Handshake (2500 wds, gen, post-canon). Summary is spoilery for the finale; it's loosely springboarded off another fic I'd read earlier.

There's also this seriously adorable short interview with the whole Murderbot cast (link goes to Tumblr) in which they talk about playing the Bitter/Sweet game from the show on the set. HOW ARE THEY SO CUTE, I DIEEEEEE

And, longer and more serious, but I really enjoyed watching this David Dastmalchian interview; he talks about the show, as well as some of his other projects (Dune; comic book writing) and is so adorably excited about the show and invested in it.
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chestnut_pod ([personal profile] chestnut_pod) wrote2025-07-20 09:32 pm
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kaberett ([personal profile] kaberett) wrote2025-07-20 11:24 pm
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vital functions

Reading. ( Wells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )

... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.

Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.

A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)

Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)

And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.

Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.

Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.

Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.

Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...

Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!

Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.

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oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-07-20 07:44 pm
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Culinary

This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.

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Jesse the K ([personal profile] jesse_the_k) wrote2025-07-20 12:38 pm
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Nifty New [community profile] fan_writers Community

[community profile] fan_writers community -- for meta about writing

Moderated by [personal profile] china_shop and [personal profile] mific

Banner shows busy hands typing on laptop and handwritten edited page

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YOU'RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK ([syndicated profile] myjetpack_feed) wrote2025-07-20 11:11 am
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g_uava: (Timeranger | Naoto x Tatsuya)
Guava ([personal profile] g_uava) wrote in [community profile] fictional_fans2025-07-20 09:33 am
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New Community for Fan Writers!

[community profile] fan_writers comm - for meta about writing



Come on over to [community profile] fan_writers geek out about writing! Some posts shared in the comm:
- "Where I Need to Be": A discussion on your preferred writing environment.
- "Links to Writing Meta": Writing meta from AO3 and Dreamwidth.
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juniperphoenix ([personal profile] juniperphoenix) wrote in [community profile] fanart_recs2025-07-19 06:17 pm
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Narsil by leftenwright (SFW)

Fandom: The Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Narsil and the One Ring
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: stained glass, mirrors, acrylic paint
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: leftenwright on Reddit

Why this piece is awesome: Absolutely gorgeous piece. The simple, elegant lines of the sword and ring are great subjects for stained glass. The broken end is still sharp.

Link: Narsil
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chestnut_pod ([personal profile] chestnut_pod) wrote2025-07-19 03:07 pm
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  • Current Music: the codaaaa
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oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-07-19 03:47 pm
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Some v misc things

The Case of the Missing Romani American History:

The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.

***

A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.

A challenge to a duel was in fact by this time a common-law misdemeanour, and killing one's opponent counted as murder, though apparently there were few prosecutions in either case. It is perhaps disillusioning to the readers of romantic fiction to discover that politics seems to have figured so heavily as the casus belli.

***

Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.

***

Two entries in the People B Weird category:

Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:

Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.

(What next, Wombles porn?)

And

I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):

"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.

We wish to know whether he gets woken up by a siren in the middle of the night to go and huddle in the nearest air-raid shelter. Singing 'Roll out the Barrel'.

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annathecrow: photo of a dark green ocean wave (ocean)
annathecrow ([personal profile] annathecrow) wrote2025-07-19 02:40 pm
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How to pick the ripest blackberries

A (probably useless) tutorial, by me.

I have learned how to recognize which blackberries are The Ripest. I'm very proud of this. This might be common knowledge and everyone can pick blackberries, but do I really care? No. I'm writing for myself and the statistically unlikely person who cannot.

( Read more... )
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mific: (Jack - for crying out loud)
mific ([personal profile] mific) wrote in [community profile] fancake2025-07-19 07:31 pm
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SG-1/Terminator: Temporary Alliances by cofax

Fandoms: Stargate: SG-1, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Characters/Pairings: Jack O'Neill, Teal'c, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson, Sarah Connor, Cameron, John Connor
Rating: Gen
Length: 1886
Creator Links: cofax on AO3
Themes: Working together, Action/adventure, Crossover, Time travel, Teams, Robots and Androids

Summary: SG-1 meets a very intense woman with two heavily-armed teenagers in a warehouse in Modesto.

Reccer's Notes: A short fic about Sarah Connor's team helping Jack's team while on a mission in the past, dealing with a Terminator. Gripping action - and an intriguing and worrying AU in terms of the future of this crossover Earth. As Jack says: "That's just ... great." (Need to log in to AO3 to read it)

Fanwork Links: Temporary Alliances

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