Merry Christmas, Here's Some Valkyries

Wouldn’t that make it easy? If everyone here was a secret trans girl all along? How… bloodless.

I love how Greaves actually plays with this. I read a review (it was Roz Milner's I'm almost 100% certain, but I can't find the link; sorry Roz!) that mentioned some of the shagginess inherent to serial writing. Again, if I correctly recall. I can't find it so I can't source it properly.

But, it's nice to see Greaves in conversation with her audience like this. The idea that really it's all fine, is such an ironic thing to incept in the funhouse mirror world predicated on the extreme ways in which the real world is not, in fact fine. So grabbing onto that and supposing that the characters inhabiting the doppelganger world would feel that way too is a really cool way to take advantage of the serial format.

I'm on the record as being against the concept of "telos" in real life, but this is, in fact, a novel. And there are some genuinely interesting open questions in a serial novel about, well, yeah, telos. Because unlike in a precompiled text where a character undergoing change can be well said to have been predetermined, or the frothing chaos of real life, there is a tense middle ground in an online serial text. In Children of Ash and Elm (a book that either overromanticizes the Viking Age by reframing Norse people of the time as the antithesis to medieval stasis and/or dehumanizes them by presenting them as ignoble slavers and rapists, depending on who you ask,) the author Neil Price spends a fair amount of time on Valkyries.

Ed: Why, on Earth, are you talking about this? Is this going to stay in?

Author: No, yeah, it's gonna be fine, let me land the plane, man.

Anyway, the valkyries, their collective dominion over fate, telos, and stories.

I think it was Darraðarljóð that Price wrote about that has stuck with me. And the valkyries in the poem are near the fray, wevaing a great loom of who dies and how. The finished product will not be just the aftermath of the battle, it is also the battle itself out of time. The battle as an object that exists as a duration. The battle as a durable narrative.

The great war loom of the valkyries is a maybe-surprisingly-good conceptual framework for talking about online serial trans stories? The loom needs multiple operators, even if there's only one shuttle. And what it weaves is a process as well as a product. The shuttle weaves and the thread has its run through the pattern, but obviously the resulting tapestry is its own distinct form and object.

Greaves wrote the chapters so far published. They exist as text (with the qualifier that they exist in different forms once compiled.) But there's also a process that is the series, and it creeps into the tapestry with the opening quotation.

Anyway, Greaves is the Valkyrie moving the thread-shuttle, I'm saying. She is "weaving the red web of (gender) war" insofar as she both writes, and has written, and has planned for the future. That having-planned-for is an interesting wrinkle for the initial question of bloodlessness.

I'll take it by levels of abstraction I guess.

The Basement of Concrete Events

Are all the recruits eggs? Is it strangely bloodless? No, not bloodless, not plausible as a reader I don't think. The question, "wouldn't that make it easy?" might eventually bloom into a realization thta they've only been picking up eggs through some kind of instinctive Bene Gesserit witchery. But as of yet, there's not a lot of black ink spilled on the matter. It'd feel kind of cheap to me still for it to emerge at this point, because you can ask a reader, to believe in some wild stuff during setup, but once the clock starts it's harder to suspend additional disbelief regardless of the initial outlay.

The Dining Hall of Serial Novel as Dialog

The dilema of Dorley is that it depicts a dystopian world of scheming nobility with unfettered cruelty and an appetite for dysphoric mutilation. That is nonetheless pretty appealing in comparision with, canonically, the NHS, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Dorley as a basically unspeakable evil is awkward if you are not unspeakably evil and would like to join up with Dorley given the opportunity.

So, the readers' interest and the characters' interest dovetail. Like, I'd way rather read the chapter about the party than the chapter about the torture and I'm not even trans -- the incitement to motivated reasoning is a powerful draw.

The Roof of Painting the Picture Frame

"What if it's not actually bad?" is a natural question to ask. The novels engage with that really gamely, and from an early point. So it makes a ton of sense for it to come up; these are smart women who think about gender basically as a part-time job between their other professional concerns. Of course they'd want to think that what they are doing and what has been done to them by people who claim to love them is Right.

Bringing it back to the funhouse-mirror-against-society, you get a roughly 2-decades-ago-retrograde emergent attitude, right? It's not that you wouldn't love your Sister if she turned out to be cis, but it'd be so hard for her. In case there are zoomers reading, that's the polite bigots' defense of their homophobia from the Bush admin. days, roughly.

Maybe this is all misreading or overcomplicating on my part. Or maybe it's emergent to reading Dorley as a cis man? You can't help but consider the parallels in your own coercive institution as you see them outside of their context, or something. But there's a lot to the role of self-deception in these books that deserves attention, even if mine drifted in an odd direction.

I liked this chapter quite a bit. Greaves uses the narrative structure of Stenordale vignettes to draw such a heightened contrast between not-Aaron and Trevor and Aaron and it emotionally heightens Holt's internal struggle to great effect.

2004

Maria's Christmas Eve '04

It’s not that she hates her scars, exactly; Maria is emphatically not what they made her, but what she made herself, and the scars are a record of that struggle, the price she paid. Sometimes she runs her fingers over them, each rough line of closed and knitted flesh another victory. But when she looks at herself she wants to feel new.

[T]he estates of Smyth-Farrow and Lambert are in a state of cold war.

The original Dorley ethics committee. This is fascinating, shows that the ethics-debate is more or less inherent to the entire institution.

We do this: monetary support for life. We don’t: someone else does it anyway, with methodology we don’t control.

Nothing can justify this.

You. Weren't Here.

I mean, all correct. They're kind of talking past one another here.

Layers:

obvious torture crimes layer
what one does to get by
forming an enclave, perpetuating an enclave
motivated reasoning abounds, naturally

How is that not what they wanted?

Trish is kind of the template here. Someone who was violent and got better through Dorley. This ethical question still, of course comes down to choice and choices. Dorley's new cabal justify their actions because of:

their scarcity of monetary comfortable choices
the (im)plausible benefits of Dorley

The latter of which rests on taking e.g. Trish's experience and substituting it for the future recruits' choices in the matter. Yes that's all very liberal.

We’ll be creating a second chance for the kind of young men who need it, but who would refuse it if it were just offered to them.

Right, therein lies the rub. Not as a question of ethics but as a question of motivated reasoning, I wonder if UBI and some fake IDs would persuade Dorley to dissolve?

Also before I forget, does this set Teri up as an enemy of Dorley Hall, or just as a conscientious objector?

Comes from some culty church up north.

Edy?

Except, by 'pick him up' you mean kidnap him, harm him permanently, and hope against hope that at the end of it you have a woman and not a basket case.

Give us credit, We all lived it. We all saw who made it and who didn’t. And we had nothing to do down there but talk amongst ourselves. We’ve got a good idea of what it takes to be suitable.

Here's where the real wishbone for the reader lives. Well said. The logic Maria gives is, frankly, abominable in the real world. So you can either treat the world of Dorley as supernatural in this respect, or you can treat Dorley as a cousin to the kinds of places that use child soldiers. Or both! That's what this blog does, and I think it's better for it. The alternative is too dreary or too facile.

One wonders though, what if Maria's "good idea of what it takes" goes stale? Part of the story of 2024-2025 that I told myself was that I don't know what kids these days are like. Then I went to go look at the stats on how fascist Gen Z men went in 2024 and I hurt my own feelings. Whoops. Appropriately enough, some voter-verified analysis finally came out and it looks like GoP gains with Gen-Z boys were badly overstated in the aftermath. Like, 64% of under-30s men went for Biden, 58% went for Harris (compare 69%-66% for women in that age bracket.) I'll probably have some more thoughts on why that matters someday. The terse phrasing is, the liberal and left narratives around "fash Gen Z" inadvertently support right-wing narratives ("the left hates you", "it's unmasculine not to be MAGA", being exemplars), and it's even worse if Gen Z did not in fact go fash. So I'll be, ah, ammending some past posts with extra context at some point I suppose. Point being, you get older and all of a sudden there's something called "indie sleaze" but I'm pretty sure that was just being a hipster, and cosplaying being a hipster is the most authentic expression of being a hipster so well done everybody. Yet worse, people with bachelor's degrees did veer towards fascism so the usual "we're all naturally unenlightened slop pigs content to devour one another and wallow and grunt" narrative falls apart, too. The kids, as it turns out, are mostly alright and some number reasonable adults old enough to rent cars made deals with the devil because they were tired of using pronouns and wanted to say the R-slur again.

Natalie leaves with Teri. Good.

2019

Bea commands Christine to take 2 weeks off. Good, yes.

Given the support of House Lambert, one wonders if Dorley is so stretched-thin because of the necessary secrecy, or if it's partially Bea's effort to stave off further intervention (or some third thing.)

Teri and Ashley will be at Christmas Eve! That's exciting now that we know who they are a bit.

[T]here really is no way to know whether any given thing around here is part of a fiendishly thought-out and cunningly executed plan to make you into the girliest girl around, or a total coincidence.

I wonder how much of the self-reinforcement is planned at all. I wonder what made Ashley quit. This sort of thing could very well burn a person out I'd imagine. What with The Horrors, and all.

Bummerdale Manor

A Trevor bit. Jake, like Frankie, sounds British in my auditory imagination.

There’s no going back, and I think you know that, but you don’t know it yet.

Contrasting Stenordale with New Dorley's founding injects some residual horror into Dorley Hall, and I think that's good. You get comfortable with all of what they do as a reader, it recedes into the background because the minute details of the torture aren't of that much interest to Greaves. So these little jump-scare sequences, in addition to their inevitable collision with Dorley Hall, serve to keep the reader off-balance. It's a neat trick, and it usually works well, at the cost of momentum.

Dorley has mentioned the possibility of re-transitioning a couple of times lately. I wonder if that's where Trevor is headed, or if he'll die. There doesn't seem to be a 3rd option right now.

Aaron at the Christmas Party.

Yeah. They’re all looking. All the girls and all the women and all the nonbinary people— Because, yeah, that’s what Maria said, that not every Dorley girl remains a girl, and he’s wondered a few times why they okayed her telling him that, why they wouldn’t think he would take any alternative path to the one laid out for him, and he’s come to the conclusions either that they have great faith in him to choose the path that best suits him, whatever happens (hah!), or that they know Stephanie will tell him everything anyway (more likely), or that Maria wasn’t necessarily supposed to tell him but did anyway because Dorley is disorganised as hell and/or because Maria does whatever the hell she wants (bingo).

Redundant, but I really do love the way Greaves writes Aaron and Maria. I don't normally do a whole block quote or anything, but with Aaron it's hard not to do so. Greaves really commits to writing the way these people think discretely, and it's clear in Aaron's case that his frantic mind doesn't always push his intended meaning out of his mouth.

I guess this is meant to be what it's like to be out (and about) early on, and it seems pretty damn terrifying. Aaron thinks on Raph for a bit. The ghost of himself in some ways I guess. "What would the neighbors think?"

Blok(ish)

Right, British.

Wiktionary tells me, of course, "characteristic or typical of a bloke." So, there, clear as day. Chasing "bloke" down next. Ah, yes, "bloke (2): a man who behaves in a particularly laddish or overtly heterosexual manner." So, uh, "laddish: Like a stereotypical jack the lad" - I swear to Christ this is from Wiktionary - "boorish, reckless, inclined to binge drinking, etc." Anyway, that's pretty clear, but if we chase down "jack the lad", we get "An irresponsible young man, seeking personal pleasure without regard to responsibilities. A rogue." So in American that's, like, "fratty", or "bro-y" I guess.

What did Maria Whisper to Aaron???

I hope we find out, but this is Enemies not Secrets so we might just be shit out of luck.

There’s so much he wants to say to her! Thank you for caring for Steph when she was young. Thank you for being her big sister. Thank you for putting her on the path that led her here, to the place that saved her, that allowed her to in turn save him.

It's funny how small-c conservative Aaron's story is in some respects. He fell in with a bad crowd and all he needed to set him right was the love of a good woman.

We’ll try and boost Aaron back up to polysyllables, too.

This chapter is a blast so far. I know the whole book can't just be parties and cakes, but honestly I really like the very online neo-Jane-Austen-core stuff going on here.

After Aaron meets Shahida and Melissa, we switch perspective to Steph. She thinks about how she's only seen him in, you know, recruit clothes.

That speaks to a couple of things I think. First, it really is just kind of nice to get all dressed up and go to a party. I love an excuse to wear a tux, it's basically the perfect menswear outfit. That part at the end of the night when the bow-tie is untied and a button is undone? It feels so cool, can't beat it.

I guess, presumably if you're a woman you feel differently. Or at least you have more options. I have a couple of women friends who wore tuxes to our wedding and I think they, too, felt pretty baller.

Oh, huh. So, I know with casual clothes today there's a lot of unisex stuff. Like, "jeans and a T-shirt" could be anyone's outfit, the very important matter of tailoring aside.

But with formal stuff like tuxedos, is that dysphoria-risky? Like, I know tailored clothes aren't unisex. But does the level of formality or like, what I want to call "ritual significance" of the clothing do something semantically in a different valence than what I'm presuming is a kind of "Oh me? Yes I will be wearing a tuxedo" swagger for cis women? I'd imagine it's like, I wear my slutty salmon-colored shorts now and again (look, I'm in New England, sometimes a guy's gotta go to Cape Cod), but that's not gonna ping my brain in a bad way the way I could imagine it being bad for a trans man? Does that make any sense? Does clothing do that when it sidles up to the gender line, versus when it's just, "jeans?" For that matter, do differently tailored clothes have more of an adverse impact along those lines? Like, did the RETVRN to Jnco jeans briefly give someone the Full Melissa?

Ok. Later it seems like "no." The tux is a tux, and Holt looks beautiful in it because it is flaterringly tailored.

Steph does some heroic girlfriending at this party.

[S]he knows that’s at least partly because it compensates for her still-developing figure.

That's a pretty significant methodological gender difference maybe worth thinking about, right there. And kind of fuel for a lot of the "someone has to do things or they won't happen" motif of the series, I'd hazard. So, if some clothes work for my figure, it's kind of just, my figure. There's no implicit sense of progress there. I'm not like, aiming for anything in that regard. I know there are guys who are way into body-building, and maybe that's the same, or people who have really specific and/or significant weight goals. But for me, I have a sense of maintenance, not a sense of becoming.

So instead of working around a temporary and developing condition, I'm working around a pretty static set of parameters. I'm about the same size and shape that I am. I imagine managing the wardrobe constraints around a second puberty, a total age, and the formality of the occasion, all adds up to a more complicated constraint satisfaction problem.

Steph has help, in the form of Pippa (who really is around more lately than in e.g. the Scribblehub version of Welcome, and is nice to have around.) Beatrice, it seems, does not need help.

It's not where I expected to be spending the academic year, but, it's, uh... it's fine

Beatrice and Aaron are talking. It is excellent. A lot of authors would withhold this encounter I think.

There's a kind of a Final Fantasy villain encounter between Steph, Aaron, and Beatrice. He consents to all of this now, though. That's so difficult for me to conceive of. But like, hey, good for Aaron. He was clearly miserable as a man, and a plague on his fellow humans. A wasted person.

Bea takes hold of his chin and says "you're coming along nicely." Which is pretty sinister. Aaron, in this moment, is almost more ready to change than Steph is for him to change.

Rashochristine

Great party, everyone's here. Christine sees Bea see Aaron and contextualizes it for me, the reader. Thanks Christine. Bea is inspecting Aaron. Sure, yes.

Aaron’s got all that bullshit to come.

And then sees Steph's intervention. Christine plants a seed for us later; Abby is probably not okay, after all of this Shahida and Melissa business.

How are you feeling?

Better than Declan.

I wonder how Aaron will come to view Indira and visa versa. He's really holding his own, considering. That is an occupational hazard of being the chattiest person on the planet, I guess.

In Money Stuff (you'd be better off reading the blog, but the podcast is fine too) they talk about how a lot of professions with agents are sort of abstracted from the vulgar market forces that define money. This in the context of fund managers. The claim under discussion being, hyper-talented artists do art, they don't always have the skill-set to negotiate, whereas you'd think a fund manager would.

How do I put this, taking my balls and forced-transitioning me is of course litereally visceral, but it's also almost abstract because it's so symbolic. It's ideological. It's artists and athletes. Threatening to forced-feed me because I have a rough weekend is firmly under the umbrella of fund manager stuff. Nobody needs to be basemented because they did/n't eat the approved diet during the approved mealtimes. So, call me stuck on it still. That's this post's installment of Dudely's Forced-Feeding Corner.

Aaron meets Lorna, is yet another odd moment for her.

Jodie gives a little speech. And she is right. You wouldn't want to give FFS surgery to someone who didn't want it. One might argue that you wouldn't want to give them "the big snip" either, but that's neither here nor there. I get the sense that she and Aaron could be close someday, but there's only so much room in the plot for them to interact at this juncture.

Are they together? Or is this just coordination for fun?

Sad Abby Internet Christmas

You worry about that too much.

Abby's fixing to get the whole op unwound ain't she? Christine worries about the organization too much (because she needs/deserves a full life and a chance to flourish) but in this case, she's probably right. What does that say about Indira though? She's in touch with her family, can't Abby just take that route too?

Who is every going to believe that we do what we do?

Well, violent internet-cooked morons, for one.

Christine's right about op sec, but wrong that Abby owes contact to Dorley, I think. It's, in fact, okay to leave the violent cult that black-bagged you, even if you rose through the ranks. In fact, I don't think there can be much of an ethical obligation to Dorley Hall outside basic human decency. Recruiter beware.

Christine's reaction here to Abby leaving has got to be dispiriting for Paige, right? She wants to leave, and have a life outside Almsworth, and that seems increasingly incompatible with Christine's expressed attitudes.

The Old Guard

Ashley's conversation with Jane turns a little introspective, and something occurs to me about the renewed focus on Raph and the attack on Maria. Put next to Val it's a very clear foil. So, it's interesting that Greaves has decided to raise Val to the foreground, from that perspective.

I'm so used to these intra-Dorley ethical debates framing the questoin as one of ethics that Valérie's situation feels a little bit orange-and-blue at times. It's a neat bit of irony to juxtapose Valérie, with her tenacious self-claimed womanhood, and Raph/Ollie with their refusal to be transformed. It at least subtly raises the perceived danger for Valérie's burgeoning plan to escape since theirs failed.

Jane feels a sense of duty to keep Dorleying people, which is such an odd attitude to depict as well. Because, there's a lot of good a person can do that doesn't involve mutilating the unwilling and living in a building equipped with a torture basement. Contrast Paige, for example, who wants to do good and well on her own terms.

But nothing lasts forever.

I must say, I still get a real kick out of how much this is becoming a series about an organization instead of a series about Steph and Christine, or even an ensemble narrative.

Aaron and Melissa

sorta platonically hump your leg

You can take the boy out of the gremlin but you can't take the gremlin out of the girl.

I get what she sees in you.

Verve?

Oh wow, Melissa is going to see Shahida's mom again. I imagine that will go well enough; it all fits.

They always say it, but it doesn’t have to be true. Not with work. I’ll help you. You can stay you.

Other Scattered Impressions

No, the second years are just annoying. They keep trying to jump-scare me with the weird shit they leave lying around.

Primo Sophomore behavior.

Authoritarian act

Mother Night would like a word about that.

Confession time for me. This was a very good chapter, but a hard read for me, honestly, because I keep on wanting Aaron to get the fuck out of there. He's reformed, he could dip and he wouldn't do it again, I think that's clear. But also it's me totally whiffing on the point. When Aaron's like, sad or nostalgic about his lost future, or what-have-you, I'm right there like, "yeah buddy, that is a shame, maybe you should go live with Teri?" Which is a funny thing. I have a hunch that a lot of this would have a very different valence as a trans reader. That's a little bit of a cop-out, but it's also true; I have a hard time suspending my disbelief of Aaron's consent. More specifically, of anyone taking that consent at all seriously on a philosophical level.

Why is Greaves giving the reader Trevor after Aaron, Ashley after Valérie?

I think it's at least in part to cast doubt on Dorley and Stenordale. These two organizations are, in some ways, the same institution undergoing a brief schism. It's worth showing that they operate in parallel capacities, bent towards the same coarse-grained behaviors.

So, we can see these huge differences in ideology and in approach. But we also see that these places both run in the same aristocracy-and-authority-shaped groove. That's where I think Teri comes in, too?

The text's relationship towards wealth remains ambivalent. And, somewhat I think Dorley is best taken as a faerie castle or something along those lines. Like, audiences being what they are, and the realities of serial publication, I don't know how or if this story ends. But a plausible end would be Dorley being buried underneath its rubble and everyone moving to more modest accommodations. There's the puritan coming out again, but I think it's a tension that Greaves wants to draw, or else we wouldn't be reading about Stenordale?

Catatonia (as a Radical Life Choice)

Right-o, Right-o, back to Stenordale we go. Frankie takes care of Trevor, muses on how Dotty has lost a step. One thing

Trevor, naturally, is not taking this very well.

Lad, I need to talk to you.

Interesting counterpoint to the mis-gendering (premature gendering?) that goes on with Aaron during the other Christmas party. Frankie acknowledging Trevor's manhood here naturally reads differently than the insistence that e.g. Valérie is a man, which is just vulgar transmisogyny. That's intended as a kindness too, but it seems a bit hostile to Aaron in practice.

Anyway, Frankie reads Trevor in on the broadest strokes of a plan coming together.

Back Rooms

Aaron meets Faye. I'm getting the sense from the number of words on the page devoted to the feelings Aaron is going through that I'm missing something fairly significant here. Is this the feeling of Aaron closing the closet door behind himself? Some other thing?

What fucking idea of himself?

This bit kicks up a lot of sand in my internal dialog about "they're all eggs" vs "no they aren't."

Adam

Adam is playing Fields of Mistra or equivalent, and Edy visits him. She shows him some pictures of the party, which I think has the same kind of an effect in the small that someone earlier mentioned about having frozen sperm so that she could have children later in life if she decided. Edy's giving Adam a glimpse at a future.

If she’d only gotten to him five years ago, none of this might be necessary.

The contrast between Adam's situation, and Aaron's self-dissolution is worth note.

Adam is going to adapt, and evolve, and become a new person who grows out of the old. Edy is part of his traditions and has the tools to help him build a new identity, to reform. And Edy carries with her some of her own reform from those traditions.

Whereas Holt is, in some sense, thinking of himself in terms a lot more like Maria; the old tenant has been evicted, the new one has not moved in. Holt is conceiving of transition as a process of a more revolutionary nature, you might say.

Which is why Steph's help is important here, perhaps? Telling Holt that there is a core of a person in there. An unconstructed identity, you might call it. A soul if you're being Edy-and-Adam about it. Dorley is swimming into deep conceptual waters, go figure.

Abby, Miscellany

England, truly a land of contrasts. I jotted large swathes of this post's outline down in the first reading, and I notice something, more so upon editing. This chapter is kind of sinusoidal. There is a dialectic element to it, in which each character's perspective is refuted by another. Everyone's hemmed in by their subjectivity and in their context, and that's not even a problem for most of them, per se. They're just in different contexts.

Abby, for example, is having Christmas with her childhood family and needs a break from her peer community. That's sad for e.g. Christine but it's a natural thing to want to go lick your wounds in peace at times.

Frankie and Trevor bond a little bit.

For the Last Time

And finally, Aaron (for the last time) gives a little speech. It's a real corker! You can see how much (s?)he's grown up during this text, but also how much the "previous tenant evicted" claim is bullshit. There's a gregarious person in there, just one that's a little bit less horrid.

The speech captures the fundamental conflict of Dorley perfectly. Aaron was a little shit, and they did take him away, and they did not ask. That's a nut the book spends a lot of its time trying to crack, instead of just cutting it off and plopping into a hazmat bin.

Another striking thing is, aside from some gender mistakes (which might have been helped with a pronoun pin? Maaaaybe?) and a terrifying Aung Bea Moment, there's barely a hint of the condescension from earlier encounters with older Sisters here. They're older, they're Sisters, and they're embracing formerly-Aaron in a way that has changed. And the speech really highlights that; Holt gets to talk now, and people listen, fondly and/or affably.

Taking the chapter as a whole, this is one of the first times Stenordale hasn't seemed a little bit, ah, forced, to me. It's in this really great narrative flow that corresponds not quite 1:1 with Aaron's internal struggles this outing. Is womanhood a fun cozy room or an imposed ghoulish indignity wrought by the upper classes?

Trevor is Trevor, not Aaron, but his struggle serves a couple of really useful purposes here I think:

Trevor is a man being forced into this, which approximates the mental ghost of Aaron's sort-of-manhood.
Trevor seems to actually not be eggy, which highlights how much Aaron is not in fact a man.
Stenordale breaks up the overall levity of the chapter in kind of jarring ways and that must be how Aaron feels in this chapter. Rolling along at the party and then a little headache storm from out under the left temple coming to terms with who _ is.

I struggled to get my head around this chapter because I can't really empathize with the sort of masculine facade that Aaron puts up. That meant that I was like, "why not take Teri's offer?!" when the answer is because Aaron wasn't well suited to being a boy. I don't know what that says for Dorley Recruit Egg Finder Theory. I think Teri is load-bearing for that interpretation, is insufficiently available as a resource, just on an institutional level. But it's, you know, not a book about the Dorley Future Perfect Trans Clinic. Having finished it, and kind of re-contextualizing the internal debate running throughout, it's very good work. Good chapter.

Errant Thoughts

Into the Aether

The Imperfect Words of Parasite Eve came up in one of my favorite podcasts. It's well written, and I figured I'd toss it this way in case it finds someone who finds something valuable in it.

Choice and Fate in Dorley Hall

I think I've mentioned Imre Kertész's Fatelessness before? If not, or as a refresher, the key insight that book brought to the table for me was in opposition to If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz (I don't know the orders of publication there, but the books live as antitheses in my mind regardless.) Survival paints the Nazis in a supernaturally evil light. This is fine, morally speaking, because they were literally Nazis. But it's not precise, or accurate, Fatelessness says. The people had a choice. Each one, in a self-imposed or force-imposed feasibility constraint, had a choice. The Nazis chose to behave monstrously with their full human minds. The civilians chose to give up their Jewish neighbors with their full human minds. Imre made choices too, but, he was sent to a fucking concentration camp, so maybe he should go easy on himself. His broader point stands, though, I think. Which brings me to my narrower point: Dorley plays with a world of monstrous men who require external means of redemption to become properly human.

I'm pretty certain that Dorley does not see the world that way, so much as it undermines and subverts that idea, which is more or less borrowed intact from the far right. There are women in institutional Dorley who feel that to be the case but the text spends a lot of effort surrounding them with subtle little counterexapmles. It's slippery for me to get at right now, but for all the indirect reports of the evils of men in Dorley, there are surprisingly few evil men in Dorley, and I think that contrast is probably intentional?

Well, Asshole, What do You Think is Going On with the Preponderance of Bad Actors and their Often Masculine Gender?

Well, uh, Hobbes was right, mostly? We need a better social contract to bind men. I don't even know how much I think Dorley disagrees with that assessment; there's a whole coercive panopticon with financial, social and physical coercion for any "backsliders." The thing is, as a man, I kind of know that I could be way worse and there would probably be no Earthly consequences? And that is not a good thing, I'm saying. Impunity, I think we've seen this last quarter century or so, breeds contempt without limits.

Dorley is Trans. No, like, Dorley the Building is Trans.

Changing bit by bit until it is, one day unrecognisable."

That reminds me of something, but what could it be, hmm?