Actually Gunpowder Boy this Time Oops

I guess you could say that last post I went off ...

...

half cocked.

Front Matter

This time, however, we (dogs, of the road) actually are reading "Gunpowder Boy"!

This seems like the absolute most-Dorley chapter of Dorley so far. A vertical slice of the thing. Greaves jumps perspectives maybe more than usual or maybe just for really high-impact effects. That stylistic choice is really paying off I find.

I can't think of many authors who do that kind of frequent perspective-jumping (if you know some, suggest them to me please), and it's such a good compromise between omniscient narration and the "perspective chapters" you get in a lot of novels. Or, I can't think of an author who does that in fiction. It's all over the kind of pop narrative topical histories I like. No wonder I liked the chapter, it's a little bit like Deborah Cohen.

Recap Notes

Adam and Edy

Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it.

We haven't spent that much time with Edy, or really with Adam. Right off the bat we get that Edy's conscientious (she silences her alarm before it can wake Maria,) and a relatively early riser. Greaves is really spare with words there but it's an effective characterization.

She didn’t tell him she already knew it.

I’m not sure why Edy had to hide her proverbial light under a bushel instead of Bearing Witness and tracing a shiboleth with her foot or something. My first instinct was that she was missing an opportunity but it's doubtful, but as I just said, she's introduced to us as conscientious and diligent. I wonder if it's to let Adam pass something onto someone before he blooms. Maybe that's important to him, or Edy thought it would be. It's a deeply kind act of her though, to join him like that.

I looked very briefly for the prayer prayer on the internet, and only found Dorley so I wonder if it’s lightly edited, or if I’m just not doing a good job of looking. Maybe it's a Catholic thing? That doesn't seem likely given Adam's Evangelical coding. In any case, not one with which I'm familiar. The closest thing I got to was a Pauline epistle, 2 Thessalonians, with a warning against idleness. Apparently there’s some debate as to its authenticity. That's a far stretch as to the source of the prayer in question. Paul was a dick. I don’t expect Dudeley House to be like, of any theological value to anyone, but guy was a fucking dick, I'm saying.

One Precocious Trans Girl

Bea worries about how Steph will impact the programme with her presence. Edy tells her not to. I think Bea should be worried, that Edy’s wrong here.

Stef is an existential threat to Bea’s iteration of Dorley, even if only because she's bringing such a different frame of reference to the place. Steph could be kind of a revolutionary herald for the programme. She comes as an audience representative, and is maybe the only person so far in this series to even hope for an informed level judgment of Dorley as an institution. She's getting hers out of it, and she can also apply the logic of Dorley to the place Dorley in a strange way. Steph actually had to interact with the system outside Dorley (like e.g. Lorna) but she also experiences the programme and the recruits and the other Dorley girls, all firsthand. So, if she does have big ideas about a second round of Dorley reform, she both has special knowledge and lacks the personal experience of needing to be reformed in the same way as the other recruits.

Later we see Lorna trying to empathize with the Sisters and swinging between her conflicting ideas. The Sisters themselves are all highly suspect because they're part of Dorley. Too many of them are true believers and the rest are sort of escapees who, I'm not sure if that means they're going to backslide or if they really are happy to be women or some other third thing.

Whereas, yes Steph has a different perspective inbound, but she also can't have her guilt weaponized to the same effect. She's a (relative) innocent in a very odd situation, and so she brings a different perspective to the place.

Playing Dress Up

Paige makes up and dresses Christine. This is one of the ways she takes care of Christine, also is a softly dominant thing or else I'm really misreading the tone of "Please do what, Christine?"

It reminded me too of something Em said, "transition by force or accident is an ideal fantasy because it's socially acceptable. You get to be a girl, and also have everyone around you understand that it was done to you not by you."

I think the scene's placement before Aaron and Steph's semi-chance encounter has an extra effect as well, in priming the reader to think of "taking care" as a romantic deed.

Meet cute

Aaron is nasty. Wash your ass man.

Our favorite grody boy finally decides to seize some of the available dignity on hand and clean off the crust of person-grease, and immediately bumps into Steph. He Tex-Avery-Wolfs, more or less, and Steph saves him from reusing an ass-toothbrush.

No Gay Stuff

Aaron has some kind of profound crush on Stef seems like. I get why that’d make him uncomfortable: he’s entirely convinced of his own unworthiness. Steph liking him back is the thing that he's flinching away from, because if something good happened to Aaron, he's convinced that it must really be bad, for basically karmic reasons.

This whole scene didn't leave me with very much interesting to say, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy reading it. Aaron's perspective lets us see a different dimension to Steph, one that is easy to miss from other characters' inner monologues. She's doing really well, all things considered, and it's impossible to miss for Aaron.

It's interesting how many people in this book agree with Aaron about his worthlessness. Maria reportedly likes him, Steph does, and we don't know exactly where Will and Adam fall, but everyone else treats him like a toddler (Indira) at best or like an animate sack of mud (Bea, Aaron himself) at worst.

About Last Week…

The two talk through what happened with them last week. I have to remind myself, Steph told him that "[He] was [her] reason" last week largely because of the little Dorley knot weed sprouts coercing her. She probably would have (should have?) waited otherwise. I wonder if that would have been a mistake for her. She needed to tell him, she told him; maybe the proximate reason why is irrelevant and he was always going to act strangely about it. Aaron’s, decent-ish during this conversation, which is a pleasant surprise.

It sucks when a friend wants you that way. It should probably suck less for Aaron since he’s utterly bewitched by Stef. His hangups are still fucking with what could be a good thing. I guess I’m assuming this is all Aaron falling head over heels for Stef, and it could be some other thing, he hasn’t introspected and named his feeling yet. Maybe it's like Steph's alleged crush on Melissa and he feels a sense of sorority towards her.

He misses Maria. It’s sweet but I wonder who's doing the heavy lifting for Aaron: Maria, Steph, or Indira. Maria has a rapport with him that Indira doesn't, and they both have seniority that Stef (who's also still critical of the programme) lacks, but Indira's particular grating daycare-worker attitude might be the kind of unpleasant that drives Aaron forward.

Mouser

'Right, um, you know when you catch mice? Like, the humane way, not with traps. You get a tall bucket and a long ruler and you put some peanut butter on the end of the ruler and when the mouse runs up it to get the food the ruler tips over—' he mimes it, pivoting his joined arms at the hands, '—and the mouse falls in the bucket. And then you get out of bed and reset the ruler for the next mouse. Anyway, in the morning, when you come for the bucket so you can take them out of the house, and you look down to see if they’re okay, they do this thing where they run around, testing the walls to see if they can climb out or otherwise escape, and they constantly stop what they’re doing to check on you, to make sure you’re not a threat. Like, scurry, look, scurry, look.' He mimes that, too. 'That’s what you were like when you got here.'

Interesting/surprising that Aaron didn’t kill the mice. I wonder if he’s just a sweetheart underneath the layers of learned bad habits and harassment.

Maybe Britain killed all the kestrels or something, but Aaron, sweety, baby, those mice all got degloved by an old cat named “Bobby” who has sired 86 million kittens or something, unless small-farms are very different to small farms in New England.

Egg Soufflé 2025

Fucking terribly. It’s like I can feel these fucking tits growing, Stef.

Well this specifically really undermines my specific theory from last chapter.

And I know exactly what that means, because like a fucking idiot I asked: they’re going to take my fucking balls, Stef, and when I close my eyes that’s basically all I can think about.

So maybe I was wrong. A lot of my “Aaron is a girl” stuff was founded on the lack of visceral body horror he seemed to experience.

if I’d been just a little bit less of a prick, if I’d kept it in my fucking pants, if I’d kept my head down, some other poor fucker would be down here and I’d still be walking around out there, not a care in the world

That’s just objectively true. Also the lack of legibility kind of means that Dorley can’t be a retributive mechanism in any real way, huh. It's not like Aaron knew there was a plausible risk of basementing. It's too secretive to be a deterrent influence, there's no multiplier to it. I wonder if that's partly why they go after the upper crust and the wealthy -- maximum leverage from a small operation.

Take away the bad shit and there’s nothing left.

That rhymes with Martin a little bit. Also what an awful way to feel! God, Aaron's family really fucked him all up.

That’s why he bought into his trolley problem bullshit; the women around here are simply too nice to him, whereas the men are sub-fucking-par. It’s too easy for him to see men as the failure state.

That’s an interesting line of reasoning from Aaron’s perspective. Stef’s approach to the basement looks a lot like Stockholm Syndrome from the outside because she is aligned with the kidnappers. Also, "failure state" and "sub-fucking-par" kind of tie into the fact that Aaron was in a pattern of failures before (of upper class masculine performance, of social decency, &c.)

Anyway, who knows what Aaron's deal is exactly. Still/again not me.

CHRIST, JUST FUCKING KISS ALREADY

I lied, it turns out I had plenty to say about this.

The awkward little “Oof”s, and “I’m stuck in the couch”es are very cute, and are kind of “first kiss”-y. It’s all very sweet. I am Kathy Geiss impatiently going "kiss kiss kiss." I think these two crazy kids can work it out just as soon as they castrate Aaron.

Dira

Mug that just says “Transaktion” but it’s got a pink and a blue flag like the Antifaschistische Aktion symbol.

Indira’s a real pickle for me. She’s sweet and all, but then you imagine her threatening Aaron with forced feeding. The whiplash is astounding. Also, I really am trying not to fixate on it, but I'm having a difficult time with the forced feeding stuff, so I'll do my best to quarantine it to one little chunk in the future if it keeps coming up. I hate that detail and I hope it recedes to the background at some point. It's not a total deal-breaker for me reading the book, anyway. I understand that it's probably silly of me to be like "ah sure, castrations but what's this?!? A tuuube?!?"

I think here's what it is: the forced surgeries that are voluntary surgeries for trans women don't feel as bad because I know the recruits end up being trans women after all. So, it's like, sure they're being forced, but only sort of, and there's no book without it. They're like a future contract, and there's a lot of tension there, but it's less horrifying to me because we have so many characters saying they're happy it happened. The forced feeding just hits me differently.

Paige Plays Dolls Again

I never would have expected you to like him.

This from while Paige is doing Stef's makeup. Stef made up seems like she really gets shit done. It's great to see her being a force in the world instead of a victim of it.

Stef and Aaron really are pretty similar, though. A couple of twitchy misanthropes making good. They share old senses of emptiness, class identity crises, childhood Virgin Mary figures to look up to, and a strong bond of shared trauma.

Just as Planned!

Melissa still doesn’t know about Stef. I’m sure that will cause no problems whatsoever and everyone will be totally fine.

One of us will try to befriend them, steer them gently towards better outcomes. Find them a therapist, pay for it if necessary; we have access to all sorts of very believable fake grants.

That’s important information for a “Dorley: intolerable evil or not?” line of inquiry.

Stef as Redeemer

Despite her supposed role as a liar with boots on the ground, Steph spends most of her time telling the truth to the other recruits, for their own good. It's not very different from the outside, but the way she came into her womanhood here matters. Bea's regime is a kinder gentler torture dungeon, but she's still reenacting the torture that she inflicted. That's not a moral judgment, it's just a note. I'm putting a lot of my chips on Steph's mode of entry changing Dorley permanently for good.

Steph, in contrast to Bea, came in as a gift and a volunteer, incidental kidnapping aside. Hence, I think, her eagerness to help first Aaron and next Will. I'm in a mindset to read Dorley focused on religious structures, given the last chapter. And so we must return to our Lady and Savior Stephanie Riley. She's supposed to be a judas, per her deal with Bea, and is also our innocent. She's kind of a human sacrifice at the outset of the book, basically born to die of neglect. But in her moments when she's most her she's just and merciful. Anyway, good character, Steph is.

Lorna as a Threat

Christine really should learn to drive, and then she wouldn’t have to keep roping Paige into these things

(Judgmentally) Mmmmhmmm.

I can. I won’t show it, but this is her mess you’re stuck with — and it’s our day together she’s intruding on.

Paige da best, obviously. I mean, really, she is. She’s being very supportive here, in consistently the minimally harmful ways plausible for her. But she’s not faffing around pretending that this is good, actually.

A fundamentally nice person who is convinced that Christine and everyone else involved with Dorley — with the sole exception of Vicky — is complicit in kidnapping and torture. Which, once again, yes, but it’s not that simple!

For what it's worth, it's exactly that simple. Cool reason, still a torture dungeon.

Lorna and Vicky’s Appartment

Ah yes. A gordian knot of trans-on-trans conflict and coercion that surely just needs me, the RA of Dudeley House’s first fucking floor, to solve with my keen masculine insights and the cold dollars-and-cents logic of manhood. Allow me, ladies, this should go swimmingly.

Before she said some really messed up stuff to Christine, I think Lorna was pretty on point. Vicky shouldn’t have texted Christine. There is an implicit threat (and then an explicit one) here, if she takes what Vicky is saying seriously. Bringing in Dorley Sisters as backup is a self-defeating measure, as far as the larger argument goes. The logic of bringing them in as rhetorical backup is the logic of coerced silence. And this thing about Karen and Declan is cop logic pretty much.

Then Lorna says that Christine is still the man she was before. And that's pretty foul on her part. But I don't know where it leaves the fact that Christine actually is in a position of technical expertise that she's eerily willing to turn into records-falsification-plus-kidnapping. Like, for my lunkhead eyes it's calling her the same boy, not the same person where the offense resides because Christine is actively engaged in violence, notably including two distinct instances of kidnapping of a trans woman in the last 8 weeks. That's not beating the allegations exactly.

On the Other Hand

I’m conflicted here. Christine’s current role as an apprentice to the torturers' guild is bad. She’s embodying bad behavior and doing wrong to people who don’t deserve it at a pretty rapid clip over the last couple months. So, I’m sympathetic to Lorna’s initial line of argument, honestly.

Greaves is working with a theme of zealotry in this chapter; Christine is a zealot as much as Adam, wound up to cause harm for the cause. Just because there are redemptive aspects to the cause doesn’t imply that the harms in its name aren’t, you know, harms. It’s tough to tease apart a few things here.

Christine (as a figurehead for Dorley in Lorna’s case) made herself (and Dorley) vulnerable in service to this coercive methodology. It’s a shame she feels so bad now, but the chain of events here is absurd. She lightly kidnapped Stef, and then Lorna, and now here she is mucking around in what amounts to a lover’s quarrel. Just, I can feel myself lurching towards missing the point here, but her behavior is beyond the pale awful in even showing up today.

And Paige, having never wanted to be part of this machinery, is now making threats too. Dressing them up a little bit with the rhetoric of "it's not a threat it's an outcome," but still making threats.

Lorna’s saying that Christine was no different than she was as a boy, is a low blow though, callous and objectionable.

Then though, we get, “trans collective guilt.” That puts the whole scene into a very different light. I've never heard that term but duh.

I’m not threatening you.

If you have to say that... Christine was absolutely threatening Lorna with being disappeared or murdered. Paige is threatening her even when she says "I'm not threatening you." You don’t blow into someone’s flat and start telling them about how your boss will kill them without it being a threat unless your threading a very delicate needle, and Christine was not doing that.

Some kind of bizarre, generational Omelas where everyone takes a turn at being the child at its heart, and comes away full of praise for the experience.

Yeah, pretty much. Also describes a bunch of horrors, so not really breaking the mirror to society that Dorley is in Dorley.

Paige’s Closet

Paige steps in once Lorna crosses the line. Here I think I should take a step out from the concrete events or else I risk missing the point entirely.

This feels like it's really an analogical argument about whether or not one should try to pass and/or assimilate.

I'm well out of my comfort zone here, but Paige's reasons for living as a cis woman seem fine so far as they're Paige's reasons. I think where she gets into trouble is in extending them normatively to Lorna. Likewise for Lorna's reasons as applied to Paige, actually. There are broader implications for either of their choices, but I don't really see an uncontroversial ethical judgment that either approach has the standing to make against the other. Except for the torture dungeon part, which I'm setting aside.

Zooming Out a Bit

Because, on the concrete level, Lorna’s just right. It is bad to take away people’s bodily autonomy and do a torture to them. It's very bad to disappear people and subject them to credible threats of forced feeding and the implied threat of death. It's extremely bad to kidnap Lorna and read her into such a crime, thus making her complicit against her will. That's all true, but sort of inertly.

On the satirical level, this is a pretty great encapsulation of Dorley’s what-if-trans-but-cis metaphor (which, does anyone else buy that at all or is it a "me" thing?) Part of being in good standing with Dorley is being willing to inflict the requisite coercive violence on other people. Sort of the same as, part of being part of patriarchal structures in good standing is passively allowing the harm that they do to others (speaking of religion, think about all of that "leading the household in faith" stuff about men from nondenoms.) Even for Paige, at the fringes. Even for Vicky (and even for me by analogy; I'm not a nondenom but I am a man &c.)

At the fringe of a system like that, you present the reasonable face of a violent social tendency that you can and so might fall back on. At the warm gooey center of the universe, true believers like Christine don’t even associate what they do with the idea of violence. She’s currently averaging about 1 kidnapping incident per month in this novel, but we still love her.

Last up, some news for me in the whole argument. The idea of “trans collective guilt” is one I haven’t heard but it’s of course apt once I saw it in print. Every time a right wing mass shooter decides that they don’t like Mondays, a hateful corner of the world double-checks that they’re trans and therefor inherently guilty. It's one of the weirder things about the current right wing. Bear with me. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes a prior system of half-guilts and half-proofs and half-punishments, where the lines blur. But in the contemporary RW, being punished is proof that the victim deserved to be punished more. Shot to death? Well that was a "crisis actor", literally un-person-ed. Now, in Dorley, in Dorley, a question might be, is reform punitive or not? The subjects brought in rely on half-proof (which is why Christine can manipulate the system, and why the system is unreliable.) That half-proof implies the quasi-punishment of the basement. But their presence in the basement implies that they are each as monstrous as the worst one might have been. On the other hand, coming out of Dorley, the recruits are better off. They've met a terrible fate, but they get security and comfort in exchange for their compliance. So, I dunno. Something to chew on. Is Dorley an archaic or contemporary house of punishment or discipline?

Guy who’s only read Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny: Getting a lot of Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny Here

Sorry, but I am. There’s a troubling little bit of “but I haaaaave to” coming out of Dorley Hall as a way of escaping culpability for the crimes. Stef has had trouble seizing her own agency at times, but she can recognize that she has moral capacity and moral weight in this moment. There’s a strange alchemy of blame for a lot of the Sisters wherein:

• As men they were blameworthy
• They did not choose womanhood
• And so they take no agency for their particular case of womanhood’s crimes

In a sense, every Dorley girl is a Judas Goat for the system as a whole, and Stef is a lot closer to being one of them than she might recognize from the outside.

Okay, back to the recap though. The argument, it is solved by Fromsoft as all arguments should be. Steph goes to speak to Will. Who, is a pickle.

It’s the Force-Feeding for Me

Forced Feeding is Very Bad

But first an incredibly brief detour into the specifics of the torture, which oof makes me so uncomfortable. The forced-feeding content is making it pretty difficult for me to sympathize with anyone involved with Dorley. Skip to “Will”, if you’re tired of Dudely Presents Forced Feeding Frenzy.

I mean to focus less on the violence, but it’s worth mentioning that forced-feeding doesn’t really work that well on prisoners. They don’t get enough calories, they tend to destroy their esophagus, sometimes they still starve to death, and it can cause horrific psychological effects like very nasty, very intractable eating disorders later in life. The reform part of Dorley is really undercut by the forced feeding in a way that it isn’t by the threat of tasers or any of the other methods.

In some cases, you have to beat someone to force-feed them. People can lose teeth on such a diet at a rapid clip. Just, this is a sticking point for me, and it puts an icky filter on the characters in the book. It’s also a subjective thing, I know that it’s a torture basement not a spa. It’s making me far less Dorleypilled though, just, as a matter of fact. So, to avoid yet more endless lecturing on the crime against humanity of it all, I guess, let's talk about prestige and forced feeding for a second.

Famine is policy, usually imperial policy, at this point in history (almost at any point. Not during, say, the Bronze Age Collapse or whatever, but we’re pretty good at calorie creation.) Forced feeding, it occurs to me, is a strange inversion of famine. It’s specific where famine is pervasive. The victim is highlighted, often selected based on their visibility and the weird semi-invulnerability it grants them. It’s injective instead of digestive, obviously. I think, too, that it's more about the observer and the jailer than the victim, in contrast to famines, which are foremost in my mind a method of genocide. Forced-feeding still at root an assault on some of the most basic autonomy, turning the body into its own betrayer. And it's done to specific people for specific reasons that have to do with the political needs of their captors. So it's a perfect torture for Dorley when taking Dorley as satire.

The forced-feeding is designed to pacify the jailers and admin more than the prisoner. People would get upset if someone died of a hunger strike. That’s the point of a hunger strike.

Anyhow, onto breezier shores.

Will

Will’s on the end, in the cell Stef first woke up in.

Steph takes Will's confession, is how I'd put it. Will beat his brother, and was on an increasingly violent and provocative path. He was self destructive and generally in a destructive rut.

This encounter was pretty damn inscrutable for me until I reread it a couple of times and, uh, adjusted my priors about Will. I didn't get why Will was telling Steph about any of this. My first thought was that Greaves needs Steph to hear about it for the reader to read about it. But there's a lot of work to get Steph in the room. So then, Will needs it to be Steph who's hearing it. Given what Will describes (a cultural context promoting his rage, his reason for being in the basement,) Steph is a mirror in some ways. She gained privileges for a beat-down; Declan had it coming, but the similarity remains.

But I know now: you’re like me

Reading it with an eye on that similarity I have come to a different conclusion. Everyone is already trans. All of 'em. Maria? Double-secret egg. She's going to transition again to be some kind of hyper-woman who uses caps locked SHE/HER pronouns exclusively. Paige? She's getting her angel wings surgery next book. Bea isn't meta-trans but only because she's secretly been a sentient novelty mug this whole time. Indira is a literal Cylon.

Stef’s familiar with the wounds, and what’s required to make them.

This whole passage is filled with double-entendres like this. Maybe I'm over-interpreting them, but I don't think so. Anyway, I’m just rake-stepping through the tulips over here. Hopefully I stop speculating on this in the future; it's clearly impossible for me to tell, I'm just wildly pointing at characters. For all I know Ollie likes tube-feeding and is doing it voluntarily.

But here's what I think the deal is with Will (now at this moment). Will needed to fight it before he could accept it, more or less, because he was trained to value physical valor first and foremost. He tried to use outward physical methods (the gym, physical violence, &c.) to fight off an internal and/or hormonal and/or moral malaise. Maria is just the latest case of that physically confrontational approach to the world. It kind of matches his whole sophomore-atheist thing; reduce everything to the consitutent atomic particles by hitting people until they are the constituent atomic particles. Also it would explain why hew knew so much about hormones, right? Or is that just, everyone knows more about hormones than I know. That's less farfetched if he's been in a small room where you keep clothes for awhile.

I also just think, and maybe this is too sympathetic of me, but poor guy if I'm right. His own brother, God. He's going to feel so ashamed for so long isn't he? He really dug a hole and now he's gotta climb out of it and it's going to be so embarrassing for him. That must be a hard part of transitioning too right? You're sick but not in an obvious sort of way to other people, and then you presumably can't disentangle any past mistakes from You vs your massively strained cognitive load pre-transition. That's what Christine is working through right now, in some ways.

He's glad that his assault on Maria didn't "work", and he's finally so unhappy that he must do something else. So, he can acquiesce to Dorley now. Maybe it's another Martin case of "cis by default" and he just got set on a path?

Poor Adam

Your actions are yours alone.

As a quick aside, if only Adam had been raised in a better church, he would've been so much better off. Good kid, modulo the particular brand of zeal with which he's infected.

I never came Because I Never Wanted to Intrude

Funny fucking way of showing it, Christine.

If I killed him, if he’s not a part of me... then maybe that makes me more likely to repeat his mistakes? And I do wonder if I’ve been coming close to that, lately. Once or twice.

The little kidnapping spree has not been great so far.

She wouldn’t have sent the recording to Bea.

So then, it was a threat. They threatened Lorna until she agreed to do what they wanted. Cool cult.

Lorna really crossed a line with Christine, but the Dorley girls have also treated her abominably during recent events. I don't understand how she can be so forgiving here. I suspect that one way Steph's v3-Dorley might differ is in not pulling wildly irresponsible shit like that so often.

Early on, Bea asks Christine if she's backsliding, and now I think that she is, to some extent. But she's doing so entirely at Bea's behest. Paige's methods (light nagging, deep support, practical help) brought Christine out of self-imposed isolation and "vests". Bea's methods seem to be driving Christine directly into her worst instincts. She's overstressed and under-supervised.

Aaron’s Dysphoria Corner

Aaron’s such a gremlin I love him. I also, super can't tell actually, now that he's like, having early-Stef-adjacent feelings about his body's betrayal.

[S]o there he lies, inspecting the parts of himself he can stand to look at in the lamplight and asking himself the same question, over and over again.

VS.

Aaron wishes his cheekbones looked half as good

It’s like, for Dorley to work, every recruit but Steph needs to be kind of a Schrodinger's egg. Or is that how people actually feel in real life? Is it like when you think your cell phone went off?

Stef’s been going non-stop lately, it seems. Best to give him a break.

This is Aaron’s first chance to be generous in a while and he nails it. Very sweet. God, Alyson Greaves has me cheering for an incel troglodyte. It's also a nice inversion for Steph to accept a kindness from Aaron instead of Aaron sleeping on her floor like a dog. Much healthier for the both of them if they're on equal footing, as friends or as whatever.

Errant Thoughts

Tall Blonde Hunter with an Axe Saw

Christine is finally playing Bloodborne. This is good. This will fix what is wrong with her. I'm personally a fan of the whip starter building into the gun-sword if we’re talking weapons because gun blades have been cool since FFVIII if not since the brief experiment of pistol-swords in real life.

Christine made her girlfriend into her character, and that’s a fun echo of Paige dressing her up earlier. I'm trying to think of if there's any kind of reasonable extra interpretation there, and coming up short today.

I guess, Lorna first asked Christine to play that game in "Death by Chocolate", so it's her finally accepting a kindness from Lorna, sort of.

Anyone Else like Dan Campbell?

Totally a shot in the dark, not really relevant, but since claire mentioned liking The Weakerthans, maybe it's worth the asking?

Since about 100% of pop culture that comes up in Dorley is 100% my shit, it seems like it's worth mentioning. He's one of the rare sad-boy musicians who didn't become utterly unlistenable once he got personally happy.

• He has a really good cover of "All Too Well" that isn't like, Ryan Adams making fun of Taylor Swift, it's just a cover that totally fucks.
• He also has a concept album called Clear Eyes Fanzine if there's overlap between Friday Night Lights and Dorley aside from me (there has to be, right? That show whips ass.)
• The Wonder Years (of which he is a member) make stuff isn't really my thing normally but they've got some hits too.

Anyway, "remember some guys" but still living pop punk musicians.

A Black Flag for Edy

I'd like to think Edy would like this anarchist reading of the Gospel of Mark. It doesn't spill any red ink on how much of an absolute shit-heel Paul was (nor does Edy, this is a "me" problem), but it’s a good contrast in where the non-Pauline origins were pointed versus what the whole affair turned into a few centuries later.

Of course, being mad at Paul (for injecting empire into my faith thus corrupting it basically from the jump, whaddyagonnado?) two thousand years later is like thinking that the Bourbon family really ought to have another crack at the French throne, this is all moot, Paul won, as a matter of fact. But, for someone doing what she must think of as a sort of fishing-of-men, I have to wonder what her theology looks like under the hood. Catholic, I guess. She had a crucifix. Maybe it was a Catholic prayer. Again, I'm curious about the rest of it.