First Impressions

A lot happened this chapter! I'm glad Lorna and Stephanie (she's trying it out) finally met. I've been really excited to see how those two interact. Lorna was a little too crowded and/or distracted by the circumstances (everyone Vicky knows being the victim-perpetrator of a forced-disappearance cult of violent reform) to have what I'd imagine will be quite a conversation with Stephanie (she's trying it out) at some point. Or maybe I'm being mean-spirited? I'd expect Lorna to be pretty disdainful of Stephanie. It reminds me of, I have a few friends whose families paid for their huge weddings, bought them a house when they turned 30 or got married, &c. I'd expect Lorna to feel like that about Stephanie at some point. "Conflicted and ambivalent" at the absolute best.

I'm enjoying the ride, as we see some of the earlier Stupid-Christine secrets pay off. Also Christine, who is a character I like, is, vexing. I am vexed with her. More on that later, inevitably.

I always write up scattered notes while I'm reading Dorley because I read it before I go running, and my brain needs a kick-start to turn over later. Which I mention because knitting this together, I wrote "A lot of incident in this chapter." like 8 fucking times. "Lot a trans people in Dorley"-ass note-taking.

Anyway mount up road-dogs we ride bow-wow into "All the Little Pieces of Me", a chapter with whose name I am still mulling over, trying to figure out to what it refers.

Oopsie Woopsie!

Earlier this was pointing to Chapter 21 because I've been trying to sandbag a post so that I don't fall behind while I'm out camping the next two long weekends. I'm listening and learning and forgetting and shrinking and growing and twirling, ever twirling.

Recap

Stef is walking the halls thinking. That's nice use of space Alyson. She has a whole 2 rooms of one's own now, and is no longer trapped in some small, perhaps even literal closet-like space.

You don’t have to deserve your gender. It’s just your gender.

She calls back to an earlier chapter, before she was using she/her pronouns. I know this is for trans readers, and probably means more to them, but it's such a good thing for everyone to hear or see now and again. Dad schmaltz inbound, but I hope we make that clear enough to our daughter. She's naturally inclined to some really girly stuff so far (e.g. saw part of Frozen and just spins around tonelessly singing "Let it go, perfect girl is goooone" at least once daily,) but/and I worry about her being trapped by this accumulation of girl-stuff if she ever wants to branch out. Like, I don't want her to think that she has the hyper-girly stuff because we want that for her, versus because she was into it as a tiny tiny person. End of Dad Schmaltz (also Apologies for Dad Schmaltz; like 50% of my reaction to Dorley is just worrying about my daughter lately.)

Thinking a lot about why I’m so ambivalent to Dorley Hall. And, on the one hand, yeah I think there’s probably a lot of folks who could use a little bit of transition in their lives. So, it’s not the fem part that bothers me in Dorley, it’s the forced part that I think I react so much against so often? I know the submission to force is like, part of the appeal here, but I maybe just don't got that dog in me.

SHE'S TRYING IT OUT

I really liked this running gag. I'm assuming that a lot of women do try names out, maybe even a little shyly or self-consciously? The alternative is basically that scene in Conclave where they talk about the Pope-names they picked out.

Hmm. This is gonna be a wild hack of a swing, but is part of the appeal of Dorley for trans women that it has the kind of problematic big legacy structure that often excludes trans people in real life? Like, you can be a trans Methodist (they had a whole schism over it, trans won) but Methodism isn't fun like Catholicism is fun, with the fancy Latin stuff and the Dark Troubled Past. That's a question not a claim; I think "it's a good book" is plenty of reason but you gotta admit it's got a hardcore fandom and successor novels it's spawned in a way that most books don't.

The name is hers, belongs to every version of her, so why would she change it?

Is it easier to transition if you keep a similar name, or harder? If you were named like, “Alex” or something, you could keep going by "Alex", and like, Ste(phanie {who is trying it out!}) stays similarly named at least so far. But then also there's that continuity that, sort of seems like a split for people generally, and trans people especially. Like, in comments on these posts I've read a lot of subtly-or-very different perspectives on the distinction vs extension of a person when they transition.

I guess, clearly the answer is "it's extremely personal," which should be obvious to me because it's a person's name.

Seven weeks to internalise such an incredibly simple lesson

I didn't realize it'd only been a couple of months! How time crawls. This bit reminded me, of course, of a software thing. Some of you I know must have seen Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” (which is too boring for words if you don't care about programming stuff and maybe if you do, clicker beware), and the same thesis applies here. Sometimes a simple concept is much harder to internalize or apply than a complicated mess. Point being, Stephanie (she's trying it out) is in good company.

Waking up Early

There’s something so nice about being up before everything else. The whole day is yours. You get to do the kind of deep thought about your life that Stephanie does here. Or to read and blog about Dorley because that has somehow become your secondary hobby, after trail running.

Aaron, who is at This Point a Largely Sympathetic Character and we Hope she Feels Better Soon.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

Hey, so, I really tried to shoot the moon and start my next post in parallel with this one, which led to this mention of something that's actually from the next chapter. Pobody's Nerfect, &c. That same mistake is also why the post-preview on bluesky reads "Gunpowder Boy"; I could probably fix it by redacting and reposting, but honestly redacting posts isn't part of milkweed and that little cron job is the shoe-string and chewing gum that makes the thing work, so I'm going to just let it be wrong. Anyway, I offer my apologies!

I think Aaron is an egg? He’s having a very hard time still. And, I’m a little iffy on what’s going on with him in total, but this all makes sense. Somewhere in here is rock bottom. Which kind of maybe gets at the name thing I was talking about earlier. Stef has a tricky or complicated question, “how or do I update my name to reflect the person I am?” And Aaron might eventually be Erin or something, but he’s facing down what amounts to a kind of baptism or a kind of death.

I like that, at least metaphorically. Dorley as forced religious conversion. Kind of makes the orchie into a sacrament for the Sisters. That, wait that’s thunderingly obvious isn’t it. There’s all of this evangelicalism (Adam, Stef’s parents,) lying around, and Dorley gets compared to a cult at least once per chapter. Paige listens to podcasts about “the true gender: gender of angels.” It’s all kind of Paul-ine. Swear to God every time I have an idea about Dorley it's something Greaves wrote consistently for the last dozen chapters that finally made it through.

Were you a choir boy?

Yeah so Greaves is doing it on purpose, of course she is. I’ll keep that in mind going forward.

Compare/contrast Martin. Who I think just has major depression and a shitty family life (and some truly ruinous choices around drunk driving which is very bad and dangerous of course. Dudely House has a zero tolerance position on driving under the influence. But for Martin, Dorley is his offramp from trout-fucking. Fine, cool, so far as it goes. He’s basically already gone, so whoever ends up there instead is going to be better off as long as she has something to look forward to. And maybe some serious pharmaceutical interventions.

Pippa is Still Stephanie's Sponsor

And it's very sweet. I wondered if she'd be pulled away, or something, but to the contrary they're closer than ever (because secrets are double-edged at best and poisonous at worst perhaps?)

It’s so sweet that Pippa is trying to be a good sponsor to Stef in her new capacity. She’s doing extra homework and all. And earlier Stef really hated to be perceived, but she didn’t when Pippa saw her appropriately undergarments. That's gotta be a huge relief. It's also, actually, familiar to me as a thing! One of the 2 IRL trans men I know was nonbinary when we became friends (going by nonbinary? Externally regarded as nonbinary?) and was kind of doing a Tilda Swinton thing, for lack of the proper vocabulary. They-at-the-time had a fuck of a challenge at the lake or getting cleaned up after going mountain biking or whatever. Dude just couldn’t stand it, and got so much more laid back once he was a man. Like, he got all of this extra confidence and even stopped fidgeting and twitching around all the time, and could just enjoy himself in a different way. That's an externally visible thing, I don't know how he'd describe it, maybe he just cut out caffein and I'm overrunning the evidence.

Pippa’s “I love this for you, Stef” is really interesting as a double entendre if you wanna torture the text a little bit (which is only fair for Dorley). She’s separated either by it being the past her vs the present her (Pippa recalling the first time she was perceived as a woman and was a woman) and/or by having never quite had that (do the recruits have to dress in feminine attire before they’re women?) I’m not really sure how to interpret the Dorley parts of Dorley sometimes. Like, are the sisters written to be trans women, or AFABasement, or is the basement just kind of an implementation detail. Is the basement just a metaphor? I don't think so, I think it's also a fucking basement. I love that Dorley characters investigate Dorley though, either way. More of that please, all writers.

It’s perfect for you, Stef: it’s right opposite your hair on the colour wheel!

That’s so funny, I never thought about applying color theory to clothing like that. Makes sense. I never went past my older sister telling me that I’m a Summer and pretty much coasting off of that. I’m trying to start, giving a shit about my appearance again. Being a parent, you know, results in your body looking different (first I lost 15lbs then I gained 20lbs then I lost 15lbs but now I have different muscles because of all of the kid-carrying &c.) and also in your clothes being shredded by the time you have the spare capacity to get new ones (that's semi-bullshit because I have time to write this blog. I could be buying clothes on the internet right now. The energy to buy clothes, maybe.) Anyway though, color-wheel is a good trick to keep in mind. Velvette told me to check out Pinterest too, so I’m getting a lot of valuable menswear advice from Dorley.

with a dress and a positive attitude she isn’t the disgusting troglodyte she feared she might be

This too is familiar! It reminds me a lot of the first time I tried to wear an outfit actually, in like, senior year of high school. It was after I lost like, a lot of weight (I don't mean to be fatphobic but look, it was Bush-2-era Texas and my thyroid was fucked before, you do the math,) and gotten my first Adult Haircut instead of just having a kind of a weird blonde mass trying not to be a bowl-cut. It’s scary! You go from either wearing sloppy-shit graphic tees and jeans or your school uniform to Doing Something. It's like, you go from failing on purpose under the guise of "not caring about your appearance" to potentially failing on accident and being a fuck-up who can't even wear clothes good forever (perhaps hyperbolic, I was in high school it's probably a little more measured for adult trans women.)

Voice Training

What’s the deal with it exactly? I kind of figured before that it was like, you take the estrogen, your voice changes, but that’s very obviously not the case if Christine has a notable talent for it and Stef is going to have slower gainz at the soprano gym because she’s checks notes boymoding. See, I learn things. It’s not all garment rending about the fading British Empire and the late 20th c. and the Reform Act of 1832.

Vicky’s Place

Oh shit this is Lorna! I thought it was Christine for a moment there.

Part of what makes the love of Lorna’s life whimper in the dark.

It’s so cool how well Greaves can pull off mood whiplash. We're like 2 seconds out of a clothes-tryon montage.

I'm surprised that Lorna is jealous of Christine too, but I probably shouldn’t be; pretty classic love triangle / best friend triangle stuff.

Dorley Hall skulks in the half-light, a brick monstrosity barely restrained by vines that climb from basement to rooftop, as if the earth itself is trying to drag it under. Vicky said it used to be a private hospital, the sort of place you got sent if you were an aristocratic woman who happened to be inappropriately mad or inconveniently self-interested, and it shows. Lorna, approaching in its shadow, feels as if it might swallow her. -- Lorna

Dorley Hall isn’t of a character with even the oldest buildings, having been here before Saints was Saints; it’s a red-brick monstrosity, crawling with vines and wearing its origin as a private hospital on its sleeve — it looks, quite frankly, haunted — and isn’t actually on the campus proper, being set out at the edge of the grounds, where grassy scrubland meets dense woods, bracketed from the rest of the university by a thick semi-circle of empty land which, mysteriously, has never been earmarked for development. It’s home, and it looms, reassuringly. -- Christine in chapter three

It's finally time (!), welcome to Architorture Hour, the blog within a blog that delves into the banal horror of an old dormitory funded via public-private partnership and the largesse of noblesse oblige!

Resolved: that Dorley Hall is a monstrosity. All in favor say "aye"... the "aye"s have it. It's interesting that a true believer and someone who's double-inverse-secret-transvestigating Dorley Hall both settle naturally on "moster" as a descriptor. The place is monstrous, so, fair play.

I recognized some of what Lorna was thinking about Dorley Hall and wanted to revisit Christine's perspective on the place. I think their different dispositions towards Vicky probably reflect in their attitudes towards Dorley Hall. For Christine, Dorley is basically a coccoon (something something butterflies mumble mumble) where she stopped being a worm-boy and started being a butterfly-woman. But for Lorna, it's a place that chews people up and vomits them forth. Lorna gets disclosed (or is that just for recruits? "Read in" might be more precise) in this chapter and, in a sense Dorley Hall does swallow her. She's now complicit in its human rights abuses, and roughly half of her world (including her access to medical care) turns out to be a cult, more or less.

Where grassy scrubland meets dense woods

That makes sense. My favorite book to read to my kid is The Noisy Puddle (cue The Noisy Puddle coming up in the next chapter I guess) and one of the kinds of meadow that book mentions in its back matter is a transitional meadow.

COINCIDENCE??!??! I think not. Anyway, one thing about transitional meadows is that they display what's called "luxuriant growth." So, putting Dorley Hall in a transitional meadow is, uh, look I know I'm stretching a little bit here but it honestly fits pretty good, it's not my fault I swear.

the sort of place you got sent if you were an aristocratic woman who happened to be inappropriately mad or inconveniently self-interested, and it shows.

Well, one might call Martin an aristocratic woman who happens to be inappropriately mad (despair as a form of madness is pretty well explored in The Canon, I'd argue.) And that last part pretty well describes Stephanie (she's trying it out!). And the "inappropriately mad" part fits Aaron to a "T" (I think it's pretty clear now that Aaron is even more like Stephanie than I thought earlier.)

So, all this emphasis through Lorna’s eyes on the physical place of Dorley. That in contrast to e.g. Stef’s first experience (“You know cells, from movies,” basically, as I recall it.)

Once Lorna's inside, what’s it mean for the Maintenance to be smashed through the old aesthetic? There’s some low-hanging stuff about Bea in there I suppose, the place is updated and adapted on its surface, but still has its old school monster bones, maybe?

just going to the shops had been a terrifying and almost superhuman exercise of will

Another round of Dudeley House blanching at the daily lived experience of other people. Sounds fucked, God bless curbside pickup. Indira’s side of the conversation is very funny. She kind of comes off as a toddler-parent to Christine sometimes. Which makes sense because Christine has all the foresight of a fucking toddler. Just, constantly reaches into her vest pocket and pulls out, what's this? A short-term-convenient lie? Don't mind if I do!

It's funny too that Lorna is the second (confirmed) trans woman we’ve seen get into Dorley hall. Can’t wait for her to meet Stephanie (she's trying it out!)

Water Cooler

Masculinity, for boys like him — boys like I used to be — is an iron maiden. It’s a shell that protects you, but it hurts you as well, and when you’re hurting that much, vulnerability — genuine emotion — is a liability. We can tear away the armour and give him room to breathe, but his wounds have to heal, first

I like Christine but this is a little out of character for her. I don’t think of her as keenly insightful or incisively expressive or having other knifelike qualities. Maybe that's overweighing the recent trail of oopsie-woopsies she's made. Also is this in the print copy? It reminds me of her earlier "double-edged sword" comment. Last time Christine said something like this if I recall correctly a subsequent draft smudged it out.

This iron-maiden-men or driftwood-dudes notion, is that the Dorley recruits are all trapped by extreme circumstances as boys. I think it’s borderline incoherent to wonder which of them are eggs, because it’s a fiction (could end the sentence right there) wherein you can torture someone into being a happy woman.

And, getting a little bit extrafictional, this is a novel for trans women by a trans woman about people living as men who will become women. So, the question is kind of nonsense, in a Wittgensteinian sense. The author, the readers, are trans, and the boys in the basement are effectively going to be trans. "Is Aaron an egg?" is like, almost a deeply mooted point. On the other hand, that argues for a really unimaginative, restrictive vision of what fiction can be. Like, I'm pretty confident that if Greaves were interested, she could write a good Hasan perspective chapter, because she's an insightful and competent fiction writer. So I'd expect her to be able to pull that off well, for instance. I guess I'm of two minds on the subject.

Anyhow, the answers are going to be illogical by outside reckoning no matter what — this kind of torture practice in real life usually ends in extreme violence and/or execution in the heathe while a sad fiddle reel plays in a docudrama, not semi-violent-baking. Of course, all that throat clearing, it says nothing about the ape-brain and its love of gossip and/or fun, so I will be indulging in some ill-founded speculation about Aaron and Martin (and Will a bit).

Iron maidens are torture devices. They’re at best, incidentally protective. So, by that logic you’d have to think the boys trapped in them are not there of their own volition.

Likewise shipwrecks. Nobody’s pleased to be shipwrecked. Clinging on to driftwood is not well regarded on actuarial tables.

So, in Dorley I’m sort of thinking that if all of the men who end up down there end up better off, it really is the research portfolios and it’s only partially about reform for the sake of society versus the sake of the reformed person.

That’s interesting to me; I normally think about e.g. reformative vs punitive jails as a question of what works. Punitive stuff doesn’t, makes us all worse people to be party to it, sours the whole society. Versus reformative jails, which seem to actually work and don’t make us all into monsters-by-proxy. But that equation doesn’t even touch on the moral salvation of the prisoners (“salvation?” What am I, in Victorian times?) which seems to be at the heart of Bea’s Dorley regime.

I’m very curious to see what happens with the boys we don’t talk about as much, Will &c.

Lorna meets Tabitha, who, have we met her before? And, so Tabby keeps accidentally dating trans women? That’s hilarious. Unless it’s a real Serious Problem for Trans Women, in which case it’s still hilarious but I’ll be more considerate about it. I'm listening and learning and growing. But that shit is so funny in the context of the AFABasement torture dungeon book. Love some situational irony, thanks Alyson.

Also, silly question but could they, uh, late-induct Lorna and get her some free medical care? That feels like a slam dunk if she’ll keep a secret after.

Welcome to Building Talk

The place is out of her league

I’m getting some top notes of imposter syndrome here. Rhymes with Stef’s repetition of “You don’t have to deserve your gender. It’s just your gender” earlier on. Although. In Christine’s (and Dorley’s) perspectives you actually do have to deserve some genders? For example, manhood you’ve gotta earn in Christine’s mind.

I hate to be a symbolism-bro but affluence really does seem to signify both affluence (so wise, so deep) and moral corruption in this book. So being trapped in an affluent building like this is genuinely dangerous and genuinely scary for Lorna.

this is Dorley Hall, and it will outlast her by generations.

Christine wants to crack some eggs. Ha. Seems to have done so at least once in this series. Lorna doesn’t take Christine’s bid for breakfast. Christine was a boy if Greaves says so, but, I’m not entirely sure.

I suppose Hasan doesn't know, because it’d ruin Indira’s family relationship. That undermines some of my earlier “Indie is the best case!” spiel, but not by much I don’t think. She’s out as trans to her family, she should be able to be fine I suspect. Or she’ll have a total menty-B at some point. Gosh I really hope Indira ends up okay in all this. She and Paige are my favorites.

Will

The Sisters fret a bit about Will, but I don't get why. Will’s reaction makes total sense to me. He can’t do something about his imminent annihilation and he is displeased as a result. I think the idea of Will is basically "sophomoric bigoted atheist," and maybe he protesteth too much, but he cares a lot about his body being a certain way, and I can't say I disagree. Despair is a rational reaction to his circumstances.

Stef and Pippa have a powwow, and it's quite nice. Electrolysis sounds unpleasant. I believe that I understand why you’d want to do it, but not why, like, biologically do you have to for the facial hair to go away? My token trans man friend grew out a big bushy beard so I’d kind of expect trans women’s facial hair to thin out or disappear by the same (obvs quite ignorant) logic.

They broach the subject of reemerging into the world. Here’s a way that Dorley makes sense to me as a method of reform. You’d have to have a transatlantic trafficking ring to get these guys out of the contexts that made them such shits otherwise. As newly minted women in a halfway house they’ve got a familiar culture and a support structure for themselves.

Reading Pippa’s sense of loss at her missing adolescence, I’m reminded again that UBI is a good great policy no notes (I am the boringest radlib). If trans women could just take 3 years off or part-time in their careers and be professionally trans, for one I’d assume a cottage industry of transition consultants would spring up like there is for immigration (or does that already exist), and for another, all of that logistical hell that those transition journals hinted at would melt away to some extent.

And right on fucking schedule, here’s Christine pulling some bullshit. Look. Christine’s a great character but in her cultist/professional capacity she’s awful actually. From the initial would-be kidnapping to persistently undermining the security posture of the building to now yoinking Stephanie out of her time to grow to take care of a mess that Christine made through carelessness.

Just, frankly she’s not ready for this (for either value of “she” actually, Stephanie or Christine.) She needs to bake a little while longer or something before she can be in charge of this kind of sensitive logistical task.

A Stupid Lie or the Truth

Her safety depends on our secrecy.

I’m not going to do the full blow-by-blow here, but the short version is that Lorna finds out everything and finally meets Stephanie (she’s trying it out.) Stephanie (she’s trying it out) comes in and plays Judas Goat for Dorley some more, now for Lorna as an audience. I’ve been really looking forward to how Dorley handles this.

We just kinda sidestep the dysphoria part, in this room, in this conversation with Lorna. I don’t know if I should read that as an audience (Lorna) viewing a performance (of Christine &c.) or if that’s meant to be taken as word of author. It doesn’t really move the needle for me either way to be honest; for me to enjoy the book I kind of have to turn part of my brain off or into analogy mode, otherwise the torture and coercion are just too heavy a weight for the dramedy and intrigue to carry the day. Hence, past takes like “Dorley is actually an extensive commentary on the Troubles in the tradition of McCabe,” as a sort of off-gassing of my cooking brain.

It’s a good choice for this whole scene to be over Lorna’s shoulder because we don’t know what half-truths and out-and-out lies Christine and company are telling. Paige (da best) says that Vicky was an egg, so I’m choosing to believe that Vicky was an egg the whole time.

But, I don’t know if I completely believe the others. The context makes it kind of impossible to have any real opinion aside from “they claim this and they have reasons both to tell the truth and to lie.”

The Price of Eggs, June 2025

Some of the boys in the basement have reacted in ways that I find odd. Aaron’s preoccupation with the unsafety of being a woman, for example, was a weird primary hangup, versus the incoming castration and his face changing. I like, fucked my face way up hiking a while back and it looks fine and everything, but my brow ridge and forehead are different and my glasses fit differently now and every time I look in the mirror I think about dying because of it. You don't just, get over that shit without being at least partially amenable to it I don't think.

I don’t think “I have tits and my face and hair changed but that’s not what’s bothering me” gets to be 100% reliably true without being a resting state for awhile.
Martin’s thing makes sense to me. He’s at a dead end, self-acknowledged, and any way out is a positive sum for him that even he can see. At worst, he'll die and his body will be reborn as someone else. Does he want to be what he is? Fuck no. So, “not this” is a win.
Will’s despair, again, to me is a sign that he actually is just a cis guy. A bigot, to be sure. But yeah, despair seems pretty reasonable in the basement dungeon.
And the tantrums are kind of null evidence for me. Like, is that a performance or is it authentic for those two? I don't really care about them yet but I'm sure they'll be back in interesting new lights.

Anyway I guess that’s The Price of Eggs, a new hopefully non-recurring segment.

After the Lornaclosure

Stef’s had time to think about what it means to her to finally meet another trans girl and to immediately try to persuade her of the relative merits of the kidnapping ring with whom she has thrown in her lot.

Yeah, pretty fucked up forced crimes your coercive rebel organization made you commit, babe (ed: stop it, we can’t keep doing this. They get it. You linked the Eck paper in like 6 consecutive posts.)

what looks to Stef’s uneducated eye like a nineties Nintendo console

Oh god I’m so old whose hands are these?

Stef plays video games with some normies, Lorna at least is willing to call a truce with Dorley, everyone makes a lot of noises about how this place is saving the recruits from irredeemable alternate lives.

Aaron Perspective! Aaron Perspective!! Little Shit!!!

Names for the person who will succeed him.

This seems like it has to be why the whole Dorleying thing works. The extremity of the force being brought to bear on these guys is just, total. Like, maybe Aaron is an egg. Or, maybe Greaves is writing reactions set in a genre reconstruction of a genre I don’t know for the primary audience of trans women and not men, so his reaction isn’t for me it’s for the primary audience.

But setting him specifically aside, it’s that these men all basically die down there, excepting people like Stephanie (she’s trying it out) and Vicky. And the new women who inhabit the same bodies, really aren’t the same people in a sense. There’s the current her and the past her and then this past him who no longer exists.

I always miss the hormonal and medical practicalities in this story until someone comes and tells me about them later, and I’m sure those fit in here somehow too. It’s kind of an unfortunate implication if Dorley ends up being, well, kind of pro-detransition by accident. But also it’s a novel so I think it’s okay if it takes some license with the way life really works for people, and it's working on different levels of abstraction at different times. The boys in the torture basement don’t all have to be secretly eggs for Dorley to be a good book, it can just be a book.

But, Aaron.

Aaron’s having a classic little shame spiral, well earned. I do think that Stephanie (she’s trying it out!) made a huge mistake intervening with him. Or rather, that the Sisters made an unethical choice in getting her to do so.

You’re my reason. Fuck off! Friends don’t do that to each other. They don’t step over that line, no matter what.

Thing is, that is a shitty line to step over with a friend! And it was so unnecessarily early for Stephanie (she's trying it out) to do. The sisterhood absolutely screwed her and Aaron on that one. When friends have confessed their feelings for me in the past it’s always been really off-putting! Like, were we actually friends or did you just want something from me? It fucks the whole thing up in retrospect unless you thread a very finicky needle.

The funny thing is, now that he’s started thinking about the woman they want to make from him, he almost can’t stop.

God that last line is such a good callback. It walks right up to the line of being a little bit ham-handed to reiterate the “you don’t deserve a gender you have a gender” thing earlier in this chapter but I don’t think I’d have picked up on the symmetry there without it.

Errant Thoughts

Neo-Oldtimey-ism

I have actually caught the Dorley self-improvement bug. All prior protests were lies.

Evidence:

I made a web app. I did a javascript. I wrote CSS. Can't say that Dorley didn't cause that.
Hell, I'm writing things. For fun.
No more boymoding. I am mamdanimaxxing now. I have ransacked a J Crew suiting department and am now cosplaying a white, blonde, Zohran until it gets too hot outside again.

Is “Dawg” Gendered?

I got to thinking about gender (ha) at some point typing the road-dawgs thing. Thinking about guys guys guys (also hey I didn’t know anything about Julia Evans the first time I saw this. Makes sense though, cool,) is "dawg" gendered?

Stephanie (emphasis on “nie”)

So "Stefan." Like Stephen Curry.

The Whole Nutty I Threw About Forced Feeding

I'm having kind of a hard time writing these. Greaves is an amazing author, but that partially means that these things that I've spent, I guess a fair amount of time reading about (anthro-of-violence is apparently a favorite reading topic of mine, who knew) are just applied to these really charismatic characters.

So, that's making me make what I think are 3 kinds of, I guess analysis mistakes:

Focusing too much on the violence
Abstracting too much and going off on wildly unsupported tangents
Kind of wandering off into the tall grass of personal reflection

And, the forced feeding stuff just, I guess pushed a lot of buttons for me!

Heads Up

I'm probably going to be late for a couple of posts; normally I try to get this done on the weekend and to read during the early mornings before my run, but I have 2 consecutive camping trip weekends coming up. I'll realistically get 1 real post done during that time if I'm lucky. If I'm very lucky I'll take the self-indulgent time to write up my "Fallen General" thesis, because, well honestly I'm still thinking about it.