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Nov. 15th, 2015 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI was enjoying Sergey and Marina Dyachenko's The Scar reasonably well, and then a thing happened and I stopped being able to take it seriously, which is probably all to the good because I kind of feel like the ending collapsed the whole point of the book out from under it. But it's fine, because I wasn't taking it seriously at that point anyway!
Most of The Scar -- an award-winning work of Russian fantasy in translation -- is very tightly focused on Egert Soll: an early modern dudebro extraordinaire whose hobbies include fighting and dueling and posturing and seducing other people's wives and generally committing extravagantly stupid feats of physical courage. Whether these extravagantly stupid feats of physical courage conclude with other people injured or dead is highly irrelevant to Egert. Basically, if you've ever read The Three Musketeers and thought to yourself, "wow, these people are all assholes of the highest degree!" then Egert Soll will seem very familiar.
Anyway, in like the second chapter Egert basically murders a hapless student in a duel incurred because Egert was attempting to seduce the student's fiancee Toria and wouldn't take no for an answer. Exit Toria, grieving and furious; enter a mysterious old man, who decides that Egert needs to be taught a lesson about toxic masculinity, and curses him to be OVERWHELMINGLY TERRIFIED OF EVERYTHING.
Most of the rest of the book is a slow psychological examination of how Egert, Most Valiant Dudebro In Town, deals with his sudden transformation into World's Most Helpless Physical Coward (spoiler: not well). Eventually, in his quest to get the curse reversed, Egert ends up in the same university town as the student he killed, and starts living a sort of weird shadow-double version of his life under the furious eyes of Toria.
As a deconstruction of the swashbuckling action-hero archetype, this is interesting! I generally agree with the project!
The part where I stopped taking the book seriously happens near but not at the end, when a bunch of Egert's old buddies drop into the university town and start mocking and bullying him for being New, Gentle Egert. Egert's FEAR CURSE compels him to do everything they tell him to do ... until the point where they're like, "OK, Egert, next step: FUCK THIS GOAT."
This, it turns out, is the line. Fucking the goat is the ONE LINE that the curse cannot compel him to cross. Instead, his internal conflict is so strong that he passes out!
Please note that earlier in the book, Egert's fear curse compelled him to THROW A WOMAN OUT OF A CARRIAGE TO BE ATTACKED BY HIGHWAYMEN, WHILE SHE WAS BEGGING FOR HIS PROTECTION, SO HE COULD STEAL HER HIDING SPOT. This was not the line! Watching people get murdered: not the line! Egert loathes and despises himself during these incidents, but the curse pushes him through these decisions without running up against internal resistance so strong that he PASSES OUT. A man can probably still be a man if he watches people get murdered and chucks a woman to highwaymen. But definitely not if he lets bullies force him to have sex with a goat.
Anyway, then I hit the ending, when Egert finally does earn his way free of the curse by proving his character development and standing up for the truth despite personal danger and being more afraid for someone else than himself ... and then IMMEDIATELY turns around to save the day by GETTING IN A HUGE SWASHBUCKLING FIGHT AND KILLING LIKE SIX PEOPLE AND BEING ACCLAIMED AS A HERO THROUGH THE TOWN!
No, it's fine! Everything's great! Egert is now definitely a better person and he and Toria live happily ever after!
Like. OK, we've just spent a whole book thinking hard about the consequences of violent swashbuckling without regard for other people's lives, and examining whether courage is really the particular virtue around which we want to build a sense of people's worth, and this is how the day is saved? REALLY? Way to sell your deconstruction, Dyachenkos!
Most of The Scar -- an award-winning work of Russian fantasy in translation -- is very tightly focused on Egert Soll: an early modern dudebro extraordinaire whose hobbies include fighting and dueling and posturing and seducing other people's wives and generally committing extravagantly stupid feats of physical courage. Whether these extravagantly stupid feats of physical courage conclude with other people injured or dead is highly irrelevant to Egert. Basically, if you've ever read The Three Musketeers and thought to yourself, "wow, these people are all assholes of the highest degree!" then Egert Soll will seem very familiar.
Anyway, in like the second chapter Egert basically murders a hapless student in a duel incurred because Egert was attempting to seduce the student's fiancee Toria and wouldn't take no for an answer. Exit Toria, grieving and furious; enter a mysterious old man, who decides that Egert needs to be taught a lesson about toxic masculinity, and curses him to be OVERWHELMINGLY TERRIFIED OF EVERYTHING.
Most of the rest of the book is a slow psychological examination of how Egert, Most Valiant Dudebro In Town, deals with his sudden transformation into World's Most Helpless Physical Coward (spoiler: not well). Eventually, in his quest to get the curse reversed, Egert ends up in the same university town as the student he killed, and starts living a sort of weird shadow-double version of his life under the furious eyes of Toria.
As a deconstruction of the swashbuckling action-hero archetype, this is interesting! I generally agree with the project!
The part where I stopped taking the book seriously happens near but not at the end, when a bunch of Egert's old buddies drop into the university town and start mocking and bullying him for being New, Gentle Egert. Egert's FEAR CURSE compels him to do everything they tell him to do ... until the point where they're like, "OK, Egert, next step: FUCK THIS GOAT."
This, it turns out, is the line. Fucking the goat is the ONE LINE that the curse cannot compel him to cross. Instead, his internal conflict is so strong that he passes out!
Please note that earlier in the book, Egert's fear curse compelled him to THROW A WOMAN OUT OF A CARRIAGE TO BE ATTACKED BY HIGHWAYMEN, WHILE SHE WAS BEGGING FOR HIS PROTECTION, SO HE COULD STEAL HER HIDING SPOT. This was not the line! Watching people get murdered: not the line! Egert loathes and despises himself during these incidents, but the curse pushes him through these decisions without running up against internal resistance so strong that he PASSES OUT. A man can probably still be a man if he watches people get murdered and chucks a woman to highwaymen. But definitely not if he lets bullies force him to have sex with a goat.
Anyway, then I hit the ending, when Egert finally does earn his way free of the curse by proving his character development and standing up for the truth despite personal danger and being more afraid for someone else than himself ... and then IMMEDIATELY turns around to save the day by GETTING IN A HUGE SWASHBUCKLING FIGHT AND KILLING LIKE SIX PEOPLE AND BEING ACCLAIMED AS A HERO THROUGH THE TOWN!
No, it's fine! Everything's great! Egert is now definitely a better person and he and Toria live happily ever after!
Like. OK, we've just spent a whole book thinking hard about the consequences of violent swashbuckling without regard for other people's lives, and examining whether courage is really the particular virtue around which we want to build a sense of people's worth, and this is how the day is saved? REALLY? Way to sell your deconstruction, Dyachenkos!
no subject
Date: 2015-11-16 04:26 am (UTC). . . Welp.
Weirdly, this is very nearly the exact problem I have with the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Hollow Pursuits." [edit] Not the violent swashbuckling, which I feel would have made the episode memorable in the extreme: the part where the redemptive ending totally undercuts the entire point of the narrative up till then and therefore axes the moral of the story.
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Date: 2015-11-17 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-17 08:01 am (UTC)Apologies! I should remember that fluency in DS9 does not automatically translate into familiarity with TNG. Basically, it's an episode I remembered vividly from elementary school, managed to rewatch in 2007, and promptly formed a lot of opinions about. TOTAL AND COMPLETE SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY.
"Hollow Pursuits" is the episode that introduced Lieutenant Reginald Barclay, a recurring fan favorite whose popularity I understand even while I think the show could have handled it better. Unlike just about everyone else we meet on the Enterprise, Barclay is not the top of his field in anything. He's not a type A personality. He wasn't ninety-ninth percentile in his graduating class at Starfleet. At his best, he's a solid engineer, a nonlinear thinker whose impulsive insights can pay off if he trusts himself enough to voice and defend them. Unfortunately, most of the time his inability to cope with his social anxiety renders him awkward and inefficient, leaving him in a self-esteem spiral with an increasing tendency to retreat into a Walter Mitty-like fantasy life on the holodeck.1 He resents his superiors for their disappointment in him—the episode opens with the serious possibility that he'll be transferred off the Enterprise—but rather than refute their criticism with the quality of his work, he fades off miserably into daydreams and avoidance. On the holodeck, he can outfence Picard and outthink Wesley and tell Geordi off to his face. As soon as he steps outside, he's nicknamed "Broccoli" and his coworkers have started to quick-fade when he looks like being assigned to their projects. This is a plausible and fascinating wrench to throw into the regular cast of officers and gentlemen. Even in the shining future of TNG, there are people who are introverts and people who have trouble with social cueing and people who hyperventilate at the thought of parties. There is nothing essentially wrong with Barclay for any of this; his problem isn't so much his brain chemistry as the way he's choosing not to deal with it. But it's a rapidly accelerating problem—the more time he spends with the endlessly accommodating versions of his colleagues, the less able he is to handle the difficulties of interacting with the real McCoys, with predictable consequences for his job prospects and his morale. Obviously, he needs to get his head out of his holo-fantasies and engage with the world around him. We know he's a smart guy; he just needs to do something that counts outside the holodeck. The trouble is that when we reach the redeeming point of crisis, the scene plays like a perfect storm of Marysuetude: there's a computer malfunction pushing the ship's engines past Warp 9, the Enterprise is in danger of being torn apart by its own warp field, and it's only Barclay's last-minute inspiration that averts disaster, all hail the nebbish with the embarrassing fantasy life. And thousands of fans haven't dreamt just this? I was honestly expecting the episode to end with the revelation that Barclay had all this time been playing out another fantasy, just a slightly more realistic one than the program where Troi and Dr. Crusher are his love slaves,2 but no. As a result, it rather kills the point of the story, about the bravery of reckoning with the real complicated world rather than hiding in heroic fantasies. I can see absolutely no reason Barclay couldn't have proven his competence in a situation that didn't involve saving everyone's lives at a stroke. It mars the episode for me. I love that the writers focused a story on a sympathetic, self-sabotaging character instead of the standard-issue well-adjusted types; Dwight Schultz played one of my favorite one-shot characters on Babylon 53 and I enjoy his portrayal of Barclay, which makes a serious minor character out of a comic nerd. I just wish his newfound willingness to face reality had been a little less fantastic in its success.
1. This I have no difficulty believing. It's the fact that the rest of the crew does not need to be hauled out of the holodeck on a regular basis that strains my disbelief.
2. Viewers with embarrassment quick may have difficulty with the scenes in which Barclay's fantasies are found out by the regular cast against whom they were created as defenses. Troi is cool with the whole thing until she finds herself reproduced as the toga-wearing, sexified "Goddess of Empathy," at which point she blows a fuse.
3. The haunted lurker Amis in "The Long Dark" (2.5). The character made such an impression on me that I wrote over 6000 words of, basically, badly-filed-off fic with influence from Joan D. Vinge's Psion. It was terrible. I was in high school. A printout backup almost certainly exists in a box in storage in Medford. I expect this sort of thing is why writers' wills ask their executors to burn their unpublished work.
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Date: 2015-11-17 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-16 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-17 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-17 04:12 pm (UTC)Also, I agree with the others pointing out that while normal people may well draw the line at goat-fucking, that specific sort of character would be more likely to see it as part of a rowdy night out.
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Date: 2015-11-16 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-17 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-16 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-17 06:33 am (UTC)