Okay, book 4, here we go!

I read "Snuff", and liked it.

There are some creaky HMS Surprise-style, long‑running series issues coming, Acheron-like, over the horizon.

But a big portion of this chapter was, in my view, balmy post‑book‑3 friend‑slop, and I'm 100 % here for it.

Even though lots of "Snuff" reads closer to a post‑script for Enemies, we have some threads to follow in the upcoming chapters:

Dorothy's evolution into Grandmother. I will not be sympathizing with Grandmother. Cool motive, still a mass‑murdering torturer.
The fallout from Ollie's grotesque institutional abuse and neglect. I will be hard‑pressed to believe any "self‑actualization" that happens after this.
Trevor's ongoing recovery. I loved pairing Tabby with Trevor; she's a real delight.
The limits of personal freedom vs. personal power: Abby, Indira, Bea, &c. This feels like an act‑1 climax, and I'm excited to see what happens.
Dawn of the Third Day: 24 Hours Remain (until the global pandemic &c. really pop off.) I'd expect this to put a deadline on the series, but maybe not?

As for the postscript, I liked it a lot. Tabby has come into the fore lately, and pairing her with Trevor worked really well, I thought. The question of “meant to be” is classic Greaves irony at work. I think the series had to treat Trevor carefully, or else risk deflating the stakes from the escape—or becoming pointlessly cruel. That landed, at least for me.

I have more character impressions than any real structural thesis here.

There's simply a lot going on at once right now, and most of it felt like it belonged in the last book. That's a serialization quirk maybe?

But it kind of mires the start of the fourth book. Since Maria passes out anyway, I think her recriminations with Frankie would have been a good cliffhanger heading into this book, and would have been terse as such.

Getting Trevor squared away a little bit could have been at the end of Enemies as well.

Christine and Paige's quest to bring Abby in would have fit nicely too; they could have left the last book to bring her in from the cold.

And then we have this little Raph bit that's, fine, sure they're all going to end up being women—I think that's well and good; there are a lot of paths to transition, great.

We have a lot of paths already very well documented as readers, and a pretty unwieldy cast of characters at this point.

That would buy some space for Val and Bea's reunion to breathe a bit more, and maybe to integrate Dorothy's flashbacks a bit more.

First chapter in the book, fast chapter in the book, dangling chads aside.

I love every moment that Val is around.

She, Trevor, and Frankie should drive the Ring Road and do yoga on a rocky beach in a fjord or something.

Road trip! Road trip!

“Solsbury Hill” could play in the background.

Oh look, Lake Myvatn pizza is yummy, but there are so many midges in the geysers nearby that Trevor has a nervous breakdown because they keep flying in his ears.

Wow, what a big waterfall—did you know this is where they filmed Prometheus?

Anyway, bow-wow road dogs, to the tune of "Judge and Jury" by Audiomachine. IYKYK.

Recap

Dot gets a career development opportunity.
Christine and Paige go on a road trip.
Steph repairs a mug.
Amy does a bit of play-acting.
Ollie tries to kill himself.

Tabby

I like Tabby. She's exceedingly kind in this moment with Trevor, in a context where she's got a lot of opportunity not to be so.

Dorothy

Gross! Normally when we get a new perspective character it's to empathize with them, but I don't know that I see that here. I guess we're going to learn throughout Untitled how this scheme came about.

So, Dorothy's the proper one to show us. At the same time, I sense a grim brick joke inbound from here to future-me.

If this is the book to really delve into Old Dorley, then Frankie and Val's homecoming matches up well with a walk through Dorothy's frame of mind. Words can barely express how disinterested I am in anything approaching sympathy for Dorothy, though. One has limits.

Paige, Yasmin, Julia, Weddings, Christine

All the dead trees and such.

Autumn is romantic, but there's a definite risk to an October wedding, that's true as well. Sometimes you catch a dry year and all of the leaves turn and fall early and then you just have mud and sticks. September is a good time for a wedding; you might catch a heat wave, but it's generally unlikely outside of the more sweltering regions.

Either way, seeing Christine and Paige being so drawn into Dorley malarkey while mini-Christine-and-Paige are preparing to move out and all is kind of wistful in its way.

Pretty surprised that Paige is Jewish, I'd have thought that that'd be more prominent in her esoteric-gender-theory-podcast-weirdo moments.

Maria

Maria's had a tough couple of months and now this.

Frankie

Frankie da best. This no‑apologies thing makes sense to me. An apology after you've wronged someone is warranted, but there's a scale at which the thing becomes contemptuous. Maria can infer that Frankie’s a penitent, or she wouldn't be here. Saying anything else is just prompting Maria for forgiveness she may never be prepared to offer.

But Frankie always liked to lounge, to cut her hair short, to emphasise to the poor boys they were making look and dress and preen like pretty young things that she was exempt from all that, that she got to choose.

To return to Development as Freedom, the choice to fast and the fate of starving are quite different. The relative deprivation that the women of Old Dorley underwent could be highlighted very effectively by such a tactic. Demented evildoer shit, of course. Interesting that New Dorley doesn't feature that as heavily. Sure there are grads who end up nonbinary, but the Programme's structure as recursively self-reinforcing doesn't leave much room for a butch or even an androgynous sponsor.

Guy who's only read Doppelganger: Getting a lot of The Beauty Myth vibes from this...

Val

Yes, mostly disgusting English slop, but I can do great and terrible things with a kitchen knife.

Val is the fucking empress of this series, duh and/or obviously.

I have a feeling that there will be some kind of total breakdown later on, or else she's getting the extended dead‑wife edit; for now she's just flat‑out cool.

Her interaction with Bea shows how much Bea has cordoned herself off from herself, of course, and how much Val mattered to Bea this whole time. There's something there for Val as Bea's aspiration toward herself as a woman, almost? They both come from such a dire time and such a specific location that Val is almost Bea's shadow. Just an odd bit of unluck split their fates. The imagined future Bea and Val shared is in tatters; ironically they've both spent decades entirely enmeshed in aristocratic nonsense.

Something that all makes me wonder is, a lot the time you'll hear/see the notion that "transition is a process" as opposed to an atomic action. It's core to the ethic of Dorley, and the distinct ethic of Dorley. But, how do you decide to stop scratching at the scab, basically I wonder? After you get through the “wanting to want” versus “wanting” versus “being” self‑actualization and what‑not, all of that extraplanar semantic “gender of the angels” stuff still leaves you, you know, in your flawed human meat‑body with its weird lumps and whatnot. That's part of the appeal of Dorley right? Everyone knows that passing is not beauty to summarize Lorna, but also everyone is passing if they want to be, and glamourous in whatever valence that they want to be.

There's a huge range of bodies in the world for any demographic. But, there's such a pervasive monoculture of representation, right? Like, even (especially?) with "sport" being basically the only uniting cultural institution left standing, body depiction has taken on an almost desperate level of focus. The term "woman" or "man" evokes an image of increasingly impossible iconography in the zeitgeist, held up as platonist benchmarks. Disciplined benchmarks, impossible benchmarks, whatever, but we know what I think about this from Trevor's jog in the roast-beef-hell-zone's quadrangle.

And Bea is frumpy.

And Val is not.

I mean, she's French for fuck's sake, words have meanings, even in this time of En Marche-- she must be a hotty. That's just the inescapable logic of the anglospheric brain.

What am I even trying to get at?

Like, okay. I have some feminine features (I wanna say my hips? My lips? I don't know, you start thinking about it and it's kind of impossible to come up with anything concrete but surely everyone has some features that cut against type, it's like, inevitable.) But they aren't a bother, they don't have any kind of identitarian valence for me, they're just a kind of fact about my body, because I don't know why, they're just my body.

In contrast, real OG roaddogz might recall that I smashed the absolute shit out of my skull falling down a waterfall, yes? So I have this brow-ridge lump/scar that makes me think about near-death every time I look in the mirror. I wanteded to describe it as "gnarly", but it's not even noticeable to other people. It barely exists unless I touch it and feel the bone mishapen. Like Steph's cave-man face early on. But I see my scar and it hurts me to look at it. Less than it did, but still more than "zero."

What I'm trying to ask is, since nobody's literally the fucking SVEDKA robot, how do you carve out what it means to be you and you in a new gender if the broadcast images of that gender are monomaniacal insanity in the first place? How do you untangle the real article from the marketing artifact?

Bea withdrew from the question itself when she became MILF-coded, it seems like. That makes a kind of sense. It's a little jarring to realize, as you get older, that your wife thinks that Leto is hot in Dune instead of Paul, and you think that Jessica is, as opposed to Chani. Dumb example, just the nearest one at hand.

Maybe this is a poor line of question to follow? It feels almost inherently cis to be like "but how do you know when you've got it?" Because it supposes this polar structure. But like, I can just be like, "yup, 8/10 as always, maybe eat fewer cookies next month and work on those shoulders a little bit, pal." And the same basic kit just works. I have a lifetime of seeing impossible images and shrugging them off because I don't want to be a Rob Liefeld drawing anyway. The activation energy "ante" is low.

For a trans person, you've already crossed what must have seemed like an impossible gulf initially. Is there like, an emphatic embodied semantic claim in how you feel about your body outside of its monocultural gender-conformity?

Ollie

(Skip if bored of old man shaking fist at cloud.)

Ollie has no-one.

The chapter's end occupied a lot of my attention, naturally.

Ollie’s out of his cell, and that wasn’t my idea and apparently it wasn’t Harmony’s, either.

I think it's pretty clear that we, the reader, haven't spent much time with Ollie on purpose; the organization has not spent much attention or time on him.

It's perfectly plausible for me at this point in the series to think that Ollie could turn out to be the stand‑in for an exotic varietal of egg, or something.

Standing where I do today, though, I think it's a lot likelier that he's just sand in the gears of this place during an especially strange time.

Not my job

Scarcity of people has been an ongoing theme for most—if not all—of the series, but this really underlines how bad a system they have in place. Something about Ollie is uninteresting to Dorley and the people who work there. For all of the regimentation and personal authority within the hall, nobody can dictate a programmatic approach to its least‑favorite inmate.

After being force-fed, a lot of people die by their own hand whether intentionally or by "misadventure" (which, look some of those are intentional and we're just not talking about it, right?) Another known outcome is a battle with anorexia. No real other point there, just noting the realism at work with Ollie stopping eating and starting attempting to take his own life. This is something that an ethical torture dungeon would have worked around more proactively.

Not that this is The Jungle for prisons or anything, but near-total isolation, contempt from one's captors, alleged therapists, and supposed peers, forced feeding and strict dietary control, sexual violation, are pretty clear, causally. I'll be kind of turned off as a reader if the aftermath report on this is like, "Oh aye, now I ken that I'm ready to become a woman" on Ollie's part or something. Any level of trust from Ollie towards Dorley in the future is going to have to overcome a huge barrier for me as a reader to suspend my disbelief.

It's Ollie. He's tried to kill himself.

Ultimately, Dorley took on responsibility for Ollie when they kidnapped him. They took away his self-determination, and they had a justification in mind when they did it. It's not one that I'd accept, but their reasoning led them there. And they haven't lived up to their claim on his body under any coherent standard. If the harm reduction was worth it, they should've just killed him if this is how they treat him. If rehabilitation was their actual goal, they should have focused on rehabilitating him with either their usual unconventional definition of the term or some bespoke model that served his particular needs as a "patient." What they've done instead is basically order off of a menu composed entirely of "ways to get someone to autocomplete." It's one of the most obscene things in this series so far (in a series that has fucking Jake) and I don't see how the hall comes back from it, morally/narratively.

Amy

I volunteered

I genuinely hate Amy at this point.

Rachel didn't make any sense in a way that bothered me but worked as a kind of symbol for a lot of bad‑faith faulty‑reasoning in the real world, so fine.

But this gleeful volunteering to be the torturer you want to see in the world is monstrous.

It's different for the actual sponsors because they bring some empathy to the scenario.

I don't condone what Pippa is doing, but I at least understand how she might feel that she has the epistemic and moral right to do it. Amy is just play‑acting.

I was pretty good at laser tag as a kid.

Melissa seriously has the worst friends.

'Jay, that seems kinda scary! Isn’t complete social isolation sort of…?' She mimes stabbing someone, and does the noises from Psycho.

It's actually kind of a mirror for Rachel in that regard. The social isolation here is an active and passive harm to Adam, even though he's very close to Edy. It's been inflicted on him (yes, sure he was in a cult before; they were probably also bad, etc.) But like Rachel saw the Sisters as criminally suspect, Amy sees the basementiers as inherently deserving the harms they suffer. There's a switch that flips, I suppose, in her mind where the recruit disappears and the Sister emerges.

I'm happy for Amy that she's met someone nice, but this gung-ho shit is horrible, actually. Jane can and should look for someone better for herself. And Dorley should know better than to let her do this. They keep falling into this trap of letting horrible outcomes happen because they lack the capability to prevent them, and the fix is to be more capable or to do less terrible shit, not to keep half-assing it until the wheels fall off.

Raph

Raph is kind of an enigma to me, still.

I'm sure this just means that I'm about to witness a great becoming or something, but we've spent so much less time with him than we did with Beth before she transitioned, so I don't buy it as much.

Between him and Ollie, I think these ancillary characters are going to be much more vexing for me as a reader than any of the main‑line ones to date.

Martin aside, of course. I think he's pretty fascinating, has a prima fascia case for getting his identity sanded off and having a new one put in, but that's not how anything actually works. He'll need to become healthy in a way that allows him to actually become someone new; the newness isn't synonymous with health. I'm curious to see how Dorley plays that, because it seems like there's more groundwork laid out there.

Then again, maybe there is with Raph and I just don't see it because I'm not familiar with it. Case in point, Will.

Anyway, Martin, my precious Namako, for best basement-dweller 2020.

Mugwatch 2026

Phew! They put the mug back together, what a relief.

Happy Valentimes

Busy week, short post; needs must.