neongrey

A lot of this is stuff slated for cleanup, too, so there's that also.

Please be advised that this submission is slightly in excess of six thousand words; I do apologize. If that's too long for you to cover, I understand; there wasn't a break-point I really liked for this. If doing a partial's more your speed, right after Maranthe sends Lasila off is probably as close to 5k without ending in the middle of something as can be done. That said, this is a big chapter; this is most of the layout for Lasila's end of the plot, and this is the final nail in Savae's position's coffin; they're going to be in bad shape going into the middle third. That was a bad sentence. Much like chapter 3, I suspect Maranthe's scenes have lost something in downplaying her as mystic, and I think rework will be on those two chapters in tandem; this is in a lot of ways a direct follow-up. Previously: Eshrin escorts Lasila to the party; she meets Rienri, Iluya's intended, and Iluya is quite happy to see her. Senator Melqueth never quite keeps his hands to himself. Savae sees their plan to poison Senator Riruna with some enchanted earrings is going quite swimmingly, and hands off a decoy 'token' to Aserahin, to get back to Varael. Last time: Lasila gets into a conversation about taxes at an orgy. Savae does something stupid. This time: Three different people kiss Lasila. Savae does something *really* stupid. Next time: Did I mention my protagonist is bisexual? Through no fault of their own, Savae gets in trouble. ... but actually I'm going in for rework on History before I do that.

Closer, yeah; if Lasila had a better standing as a lawyer (indeed, as she intends to, by her poising herself to work for listed nobles), there wouldn't be anything particularly abnormal about them going somewhere together even unmasked. Makes Eshrin somewhat less condescending, I think, too. A little of that probably, but probably mostly Savae's bad pacing and chapter spacing. Aserahin's angling to take Riruna's Senate seat once he's disposed of. This hasn't come up since, like, chapter two, so it's probably a bit too long there. Savae originally was using the bracelets to sneak out a bodily fluid from Riruna, because they were playing nice with Varael's plan originally rather than try to do their own thing, yeah. It's still in because the red herring in Savae's plot is something else (it's the poison earrings); here Savae is doing a very, very unwise thing in using their own glass for what they're handing off to Aserahin. quite simply, Savae is lying, at least by omission, in implying it's Riruna's backwash. There isn't a real connection.

Yeah, if it's the skull mine i think it's mostly just good for iridum. I understand the Done Thing is to pack a pile of staircases and bombs and just go crazy.

I thought that one was infinite? Either way, no, I've got the key but I don't have access to the place yet, hehe.

I'll take that fifth slot after all, I should have this done if I can keep my fingers off of Stardew Valley until I finish. e: yikes, this is going to be really long, I might need to break it up, actually. We'll see what the final count is, when I finish incorporating this old scene.

Sure, go for it, I guess. Thanks.

I'll give it some thought.

No, I understand what you're saying, and part of the problem is that you're assuming that if you just say what you're saying in the right way, everything will be all right. The fundamental premise of what you are saying is not okay. It's based on the premise that sexual harrassment is in any capacity defined based on the victim's reaction. This is not the case, and this is a huge contributor to the stigmatization of sexual harrassment victims of all genders, and a primary contributor to why it's an ongoing issue in workplaces. And I don't think you realize that any of this is wrong, because you're so critically focused on the presentation of what you're saying, and so very certain that there's a 'right' way to put it. There isn't. This basically has nothing to do with the submission at this point (the warning was still called for) at this point, it's that I'm not sure I'm comfortable associating with you as a person.

Look, to be very very very very very very very very very clear: someone not reacting forcefully to unwanted sexual aggression does not mean they are okay with it, and it does not mean the act is not sexual harrassment. I apologize for asking for clarification; my need was to ensure my messaging is coming through as is intended and as of my original response, I believe that it is. Sexual harrassment is a specific thing unto itself. It is different from harrassment. Please, if you ever, ever in your life, in any context or situation, fiction, non fiction, ever, if you ever find yourself saying in any capacity that a person may want a sexualized contact "even if [they] might not admit it", that a "strong enough character" will only react in certain ways to unwanted sexualized contact, or that simply standing beside a person with whom one has had a sexual history is an invitation to unwanted sexualized contact, please, please stop what you are doing. For the sake of the people around you. I am not being hyperbolic. I need to seriously consider if I'm going to be continuing submitting my work here. I'm feeling really uncomfortable with this situation at this point.

Um. At this point I really, really, really, really, really don't want to hear any more at all about why you don't think my content warning on this piece wasn't called for. I'm not talking about the submission here at all at this point. What you're saying isn't okay. It really isn't.

Straight-up, I will drop a book if they do very many of the said-bookisms. I'd actually be incredibly wary of advice to do otherwise-- though I suppose I am not the one paying you here. The gist of it for me is thus: they're very telly, and they show a lack of confidence in one's own writing, and a lack of respect for the reader. Above all, to me they read clumsy, and they read amateurish. It's not a never ever thing, sometimes there's not a reasonable way to place the weight of how something's being said within the dialogue, but said-bookisms belabour the point and they sort of really awkwardly hammer in their intended meaning. The thing is, if the intended takeaways are present, are properly conveyed through word choice and through narration, they are only ever redundant. So if they're still there despite that, that's telling me that either the writer isn't sure that they got their point through, or they don't expect that the reader is going to get the point. And I don't want to read that.

Ah, so I think here the issue is conflating competence and good judgement. Savae is absolutely competent, and nothing bad that happens to them is going to be because they're incompetent, it's that despite that they make bad decisions, and had a bad habit of antagonizing people who they really shouldn't. Thanks, this'll be helpful to keep in mind when I go back here. I mean, Savae's had, at this point in the story, two POV chapters and presence in a third. We haven't seen the result of any decisions they've made, In their fourth chapter where they get POV, (where third and fourth are both half-chapters worth of POV or so), they hit consequence country. Savae's pacing is badly out, and that's one of the things I'm looking at when I go back on them, but here I'm wondering in terms of storyline development, how rapid a pace your expectation is set at, because I do need to gauge accordingly. Oh, good, I'm glad this one works mostly as-is; I do have a lot of feelings about this one. Varinen definitely does love his sister, more than he should. And Lasila does love him, if not enough. But it's complicated, of course. hehe.

Thanks for going back on this. So yeah, my concern from your initial reading there was a lot that these two's reactions were appearing as a unit, when they both have very different opinions on what's going on here and on that contract. This, though, oh, gosh, um. It seems like most of what i was wanting to come through in this scene is doing so so that's good on my end (that these two have a lot of baggage, that Adrichel is pleased and expects Eshrin to be pleased, but Eshrin is not) but some of the conclusions you're drawing are definitely making me uncomfortable. So I mean this is kind of up to the level where we're looking more at readings of the text rather than things to be corrected in the work, but, um. Because the conclusions you're drawing here are making me so uncomfortable. Just for clarity. It seems like your primary reasoning for why Adrichel's not sexually harrassing Eshrin here is that the two of them have a clear sexual history together and Eshrin's not physically removing himself from Adrichel's touch? That's, um. Respectfully, I need to ask you to consider why it is necessary for Eshrin to physically fend off Adrichel in order for you to consider this scene as depicting Adrichel engaging in sexual harrassment. So Eshrin hasn't physically removed himself from the contact and they appear to have been in a relationship, therefore he must secretly want it. That because Eshrin's response to unwanted contact from an apparent long-term lover is to physically go nonresponsive and think of other things, Adrichel is not behaving inappropriately in this scene? There is some play with reader expectation here, to be sure-- I suspect this scene might not feel so ambiguous to you on this level if Eshrin were a woman or if Adrichel were the physically more imposing of the two, but with all due respect, I think you might want to consider the attitudes that lead to you drawing these sorts of conclusions.

This isn't pursuant to this scene so much in particular and I think I'm gonna hold off on going too far in depth on this sort of thing re messaging with Savae because I'll want to go over it when I finish (probably) 12 and go back for cleanup on the first part, but do you mind going off the top of your head what you felt presented Savae as having good judgement? They are a character who does stupid things because they figure they can deal with any consequences; their first scene is them relentlessly mouthing off to a mob boss (who was just beating someone half to death with his bare hands); that's about where their judgement is supposed to come off in general. You're not the only one who's sort of read Savae as being far more sensible than they actually are. They're smart, they're skilled, but they act on impulse a lot and make some terrible decisions as a result. If they're seeming otherwise, that's something that I'll need to deal with on rework.

never mind

Thanks! My concern here is really that Eshrin should at no point come off the slightest bit okay with literally anything Adrichel's saying here. He is a man whose gruntle has been loose for quite some time and is finally becoming disengaged.

This is one of those things I generally have an eye to when I go to redraft, not just with these two. Recent... current events have generally gotten it through to me that if characters are perhaps a little less concerned with opsec it won't strain credulity; the aelin do love being oblique but neither do they have a culture of surveilance. That said there's definitely aspects of this conversation that are simply avoiding maid-and-butler dialogue; they know perfectly well what they're talking about. Like this one-- so you have read everything fairly close together fairly recently, so did you feel it wasn't sufficiently reinforced up to this point, that Iluya's mandatorially polyamorous, and that Rienri's aware of that and okay with it? I felt this was covered fairly thoroughly in 5 and 6. Also, goodness, if you get the chance, do you mind going back and calling out more specifically what makes it seem like they're both pleased? That should definitely not come off that way. Adrichel's pretty continually invading invading Eshrin's personal space, touching him in sexualized ways, etc, persistently despite Eshrin's nonreaction; it's harrassment, not assault.

I'm glad these scenes seem to ring through to people who're familiar with these types of proceedings. Guess doing my homework pays off! A bit dense is something I'm okay with in general, I think, to the rest. Yeah, it absolutely should feel uncomfortable, so that's good. The fact that Adrichel continually sails across the boundary of what is appropriate is an absolutely critical takeaway here. Thanks!

I'd also really recommend We Are All Wasteland on the Inside that came out right at the end of last year too. She's a really fantastic short fiction writer. e: Yes, what I linked was a complete short.

yeah, I do that, obviously, lol. thanks I'm actually really surprised by how well the tension in this bit seems to work for people just because of how much of a paper threat it really is from my end, but you know, I'm not complaining. yeah this story's relationship to physical violence is, hmm. Savae's story treats it one way, Lasila's another. Hers is not one where the primary threat to her is physical harm. And how the violence is addressed is done so accordingly...

I mean I think the fundamental thing is to be really aware of who you're reading and whose voices you're prioritizing-- like here the fundamental issue with the books that he's bringing up here is that they're stories in large part about racism from the point of view of a character who is treated as an analogue for a black human being, written by a white person with neither any personal experience nor any understanding of the sociological and societal causes of discrimination. To that end the best thing I can recommend-- as I discussed above, is to seek out authors who are writing from a different lived experience from yourself. Seek out authors who have been marginalized, who do experience life in ways that the system disfavors. NK Jemisin does some good stuff that interrogates race through the metaphors of genre-- I couldn't get into the Inheritance Trilogy personally and I haven't tried Dreamblood, but do look into Fifth Season, it won that Hugo for a reason. Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death is a challenging read but well worthwhile. Saladin Ahmed's novel Throne of the Crescent Moon is quite fun, but I like his shorts better on the whole; I believe his collection of them, Engraved on the Eye is freely available, and it's in his shorts you'll find stuff that's more about these subjects; he's also done a fair few essays for news outlets over the years. In terms of shorts, Benjanun Sriduangkaew is doing some genuinely fantastic work (and has one novella out, one coming later this year) that interrogates colonialist narratives; I'm hugely fond of her recent The Universe As Vast as Our Longings, which deals with that sort of well-intentioned patronizing racism. ( @kaisa will enjoy her body of work, I think) I should hardly need to mention this but I feel like some people often have the wrong impression about these things, but all of these works are written to be, you know, good to read; they're not didactic texts. In terms of nonfiction, let's see, King Leopold's Ghost is a solid overview of the sorts of horrors that were perpetuated in colonized Africa in the late 1800s; what was done there and elsewhere nearby is still having impacts on the region to this day. Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is a valuable look into how we as a society look at violence. I'd suggest looking at the history of the North American internment of Japanese people during the Second World War, the Canadian residential school system. Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is an incredibly important book. Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me is good, and the kindle version of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists is on deep discount on Amazon right now-- that's a great book for anyone to read, I think. That's just kind of scratching the surface and both with a pretty narrow focus on the fiction and a pretty broad net on the nonfiction. I can absolutely recommend more if you've got a more specific topic you're wanting stuff on. I also don't want to be overwhelming here-- I'm already thinking I probably recommended too much stuff, but I think anything at all would be great to pick up. The fiction's narrowed to genre fiction since that's kind of the focus of most of our interests here but it's good to read outside that too and I can do recs more in that direction if people would like. e: hell, Quinn Murphy, who I specifically mentioned in my original post, did some neat articles on coming up with a non-racist version of the rpg classic dark elves, just google for that and you'll get it.

Yes, actually, and your clear assumption that you're somehow levelling the playing field by doing this is a pretty obvious show of why. The plain fact is that publishing is an industry that overwhelmingly favours white people. White authors are categorically more likely to get published, white authors are better marketed, and white stories are prioritized. It's very easy to think that you are, in fact, choosing for youself this sort of thing when almost all of the decisions are made long before you're getting to this point. So yes, it absolutely is important-- critical, even-- to pay attention to who you are reading as much as what you are reading. It's not even a matter of comfort zone, because I guarantee you that there's diverse authors who are producing the sort of content that you want to be reading but are floundering because you and countless people like you believe they're engaging in a meritocratic system when they're really just acting entirely based off of their own privelege, and unconsciously prioritizing people like them. The system is rigged and it's rigged in ways people like you don't ever even perceive. As clearly you do not. So you're making an assumption as you condescend to me here and it's one that you probably shouldn't have made. You're doing a thing that's called mansplaining right now. I'd rather not get into gatekeeping so if my pretty direct and specific edition references and comprehensive awareness of the books you're talking about weren't sufficient markers for you that I am within roleplaying circles and have been for decades, let's just leave this part of it at that. Okay, so, let's unpack this, because if this was somehow unclear to you before now, yes, I am extremely familiar with these books. First off: the author is the creator of all the words on the page. The author is responsible for all the words they set on the page. This goes for any words anywhere, for anything. Second: let's talk about power dynamics in the scenario you describe. To the first, going by the location (fairly close to where Drizzt emerges from the underdark) this village has likely been repeatedly victimized by drow. Therefore, yes, it is reasonable for any such villager upon confronting any drow to assume they are faced with one of their oppressors. To the second, even in your summary, Drizzt is the one with the power over the villagers: he's at no real harm from them and he begins by displaying his power over them by showing them that he could handily murder them if he so chose. Even in the end of the vignette, the dichotomy is not between himself coming to harm or fleeing, it's between him murdering these people or fleeing. Is he cognizant of how he's participating in the oppression of these villagers? No, of course not: and the fact that he is not, that he does not consider the system of power in place here is a pretty clear outline of privilege at work. You are holding him up as praiseworthy because he does not use his power to simply murder people. That is a lesson that the very text you're bringing up does give us: that we very often don't see the ways in which we bring harm to others, that we very often don't have the tools with which to realize how we harm other people, and that we are still responsible for the ways in which we bring harm to others. You're choosing to discard that in favour of a reading that reinforces the existing biases that you took into your reading and one that is fundamentally unempathetic to the pain of others. You are not, then bring this back to the topic of the thread, reading like a writer, you are very much reading like a reader: you're nodding your head at the things you come across that you already agree with, and not interrogating the text further. No, I'm assuming you're not aware of the ways in which you're participatory in a fundamentally discriminatory system. I have made these assumptions based on your words, the positions you are taking, and the general lack of awareness of systemic oppression which you consistently display when this is brought up to you. I am assuming that you lack a basic awareness of the ways in which media, the media we consume, and portrayals in media affect the society in which we live. I make this assumption because you aggressively resist the very concept despite this being very thoroughly trodden ground. Why is this a thing that you, a person who does not suffer systemic oppression in your life, are in a position to decide for the oppressed? What I'm talking about is as much authorial construct as any other aspect of the book. Everything interacts, and none of this is in a vacuum. These are things the author wrote and he's as responsible for them and they're as much a contributor to the ways in which these books reinforce the pattern of a racist system in both the genre and in the tabletop industry (and you will note that I do not further elaborate on the fundamental racism of the design of the drow in the game, merely that which is relevant to these particular books and events depicted within them). This is part of the work. The author is responsible for it. Because media does not exist in a vacuum. We're discussing a series of books written by a white man in which a large theme of them is-- and indeed the very reason you stated for bringing them up-- a member of a visible minority group confronting the author's vision of racial discrimination. What I am discussing, and the reason why I object to you holding this up as an aspirational standard is because it does so without knowledge of prejudice and systemic oppression, it does so without understanding the ways in which it participates in racism, and it does so unaware of the inherent privege displayed in this portrayal. It is complicit in a racist system. I bring up racism because racism is intrinsic to the work; it perpetuates racial stereotyping and it does so with the thoughtlessness of a priveleged person who believes in all their condescension that it is their right and their place to co-opt the stories of the oppressed. This is a position borne out of fundamental privilege. It is a racist position. It is a sexist position. It is a homophobic position, and it is a transphobic position. This is a position that only someone with the privelege of an oppressor has the luxury to take. Your world is not defined by the fact that the systems in which you must participate consider you non-normative. The lives of the people that you are stating it is wrong to acknowledge are defined by the ways in which society works against them. This is a difficult thing to learn to understand, because it involves learning to see the ways in which the world is shaped to cater to your own needs, and the ways in which it siphons power away from those who are outside this societal norm. But by being complicit in our society, we are complicit in the ways in which we oppress other human beings. When one buries one's head in the sand and ignores that, one allows oppression to continue. And if your principles demand that you do this, your principles are fundamentally oppressive. This character is written based on a position of fundamental privelege and is built on fundamentally racist roots. The character is written from a place of white privelege and displays this fact constantly. It may have been the intent of the author to decry racial prejudice, but by doing so without confronting the nature of privelege and oppression, the result was a character and narrative that is complicit with white supremacy, rather than tearing it down. This character's narrative is entirely structured around the racist stereotype of him being 'one of the good ones', a real stereotype that does real harm in the real world, and you cannot divorce this from the character because the entire reason why the story portrays it as wrong for other characters judge him. Like, it's very clear that you've deeply internalized that it's wrong to treat someone differently based on the colour of their skin, but the problems here are are in just leaving it at that, because there's long-term systemic power imbalances involved here and systems of oppression that privelege some people over others, and this must be confronted in order for people to get the fair shake they deserve. You are not doing anyone any favours with what you are doing. Defeating racism or any other systemic oppresion isn't as simple as stating 'we're all human beings', it's about confronting a system that has been constructed to dehumanize and degrade other people, and it is about recognizing the ways in which we participate in that system. It's about confronting our own internalized biases and learning to behave in ways that recognize that the world does not treat us all identically. And even if it were fundamentally possible for anyone within an oppressive system to act without regard for the metrics that system oppresses by (such as race, gender, etc), the fact remains: even if for argument's sake, you "don't see colour", other people do, and they disadvantage people accordingly.

Okay this is a pretty great example both of why we desperately need PoC voices here, and also why we don't have them. This is a little something I like to call well-intentioned white guy racism. Which is racist as all bloody get-out but it's veiled under ... well, like the above. And yeah, I'm not gonna beat around the bush here: the above post is racist, and it's recommending racist tropes as something to be aspired to. No, you didn't intend it to be that way. You don't have to intend to be racist to be racist. I have to ask, @aeromancer, what was the last book you read that wasn't written by a white person? And yes, since I know you're going to say it, I know you don't check that sort of thing before you read the book. The question stands; it's something you definitely should consider. Let's get back to reading like writers though, because this requires us to take a critical lens to the work and really consider what's actually being said. So for at the very least the past ten years D&D (and subsequently Pathfinder) discourse has involved people trying to hammer it through the frankly excerable tabletop gaming community's heads that yes, in fact, the all-black, all-evil dominatrixarchy that are the drow are ludicrously racist and sexist. This was likely not the original intent (the original designer was, in the most charitable assessment, just really into BDSM, because inserting your fetishes into your RPG settings is just the done thing in the industry) Quinn Murphy's discussed this pretty thoroughly elsewhere and given he's actually black I'm gonna defer to him there; he's a really valuable voice in the industry. So let's talk about what it means when we define something as being 'evil'. It should not be particularly troublesome to consider that this is a term with some baggage. You can't say things like 'both sides are equally bad' when you're naming something as being existentially evil. When looking at dark elf society, as portrayed in both the D&D settings of the era (as well as going forward, but the society as portrayed in this series dates to first-edition Advanced) and in this series in particular, we've got outright torture practiced as a matter of course, unprovoked violent assaults against other sapient people (other elves, gnomes, etc), practice of slavery, etc, etc. This is presented as the norm and this is presented as the natural way of being for these people. This is why you need to be really careful of your metaphors when writing. You can say Drizzt is metaphorically affected by something akin to real-world prejudice but this neglects structures of power, of violence; drow are not and have never been systemically oppressed by anyone except what they perform on their own underclasses. The people Drizzt encounters have deep and legitimate fears of the drow. And they aren't afraid of the drow because of the colour of their skin. They aren't afraid of the drow because of centuries of systemic inequality leading to a deep societal fear of them excelling. They're afraid of drow because drow actually do kill babies. (etc) To present Drizzt's experiences as being representational of real-world racism shows a pretty fundamental lack of understanding as to how racism works. Drizzt in particular is presented from the get-go as basically having been 'born different' from the evil people he's surrounded by-- to an extent shaped by the one positive influence in his life but the text makes pretty clear that his father is not the cause of his being not a cariacture of evil, merely an influence that allows him to actually survive to adulthood. Thus, his goodness is an intrinsic difference. He's a good drow because he's not like the drow. And it goes on like this; basically he fulfils the monstrously racist 'one of the good ones' function that is used in the real world as a hammer with which to oppress. (in sexism, this is frequently 'not like other girls'). He is perpetually an exception, presented as one of a handful of exceptions. I'm just scratching the surface here; the racism in this series is bone-deep, and I can go on, and on, and on. Salvatore doesn't intend it to be, but it doesn't really have to be intentional in order for it to be harmful and contributing to the racism problems both in tabletop gaming and in the fantasy genre as a whole. I would rather you consult with actual people of colour rather than myself, but in the absence of any here, I cannot in any way let the notion that this presentation is aspirational stand. And this is, I note, another great reason for why ownvoices writing is so very critical-- we have a white man using a black character as a mouthpiece to speak about race and racism in ways that are fundamentally unrelated to the actual experience of any sort of marginalization. That's pretty gross, dude.

in a series of points. 'architect' is absolutely a verb and has been used as such since at least the early 1800s. First known citation is a letter from Keats, as it happens. That said, one should always been incredibly wary of such pronouncements that something isn't a word, and not just for the reasons given in that blog post-- incepting a word where one did not formerly exist is quite literally how language works. In this case, the connotation of purposeful and explicit construction, that does not have a derogatory implication to the one who created the plan, that suitable for use in an informal-polite conversation in ways that 'created' (lacking the sense of deliberation), 'hatched' or 'schemed' (negative implication), 'spearheaded' (suggests a more direct action than appropriate, not within register for the conversation), 'devised' (more cunning than I'm needing)-- all of this is satisfied by 'architected' in a way that is not readily satisfied by other worse, and 'architected' does satisfy these needs in a clear way; there is no obfuscation as to the meaning. Basically, one shouldn't have to cite Keats or the OED in order to justify one's usage of a term with a clear meaning used in an appropriate manner. Linguistic perscriptivism is a cancer that strangles language. In fact, this line is the foreshadowing. Otherwise, yeah, this one in particular is definitely a problem chapter-- Savae in general has been plagued by plot issues. I've cracked the nut now, but especially over here, boy howdy were there problems.