Empress Theresa: Chapter Twenty-Five Analysis · 5:44pm May 23rd, 2023
We’re doing things a bit differently this week. Since this series of analyses can be done by Friday, we’re getting one chapter a day now, until the end of this literary travesty. Everyone ready? Let’s go.
After the attention-grabbing opening of the last chapter, we’re getting a complete drag of an opening for this one, where Theresa spends way too damn long shopping for a military uniform at the military base. The only stipulations for her uniform is that she will never wear combat fatigues (because a service uniform stands out so much more), and that she will only wear a male officer’s uniform (because she wants to command the kind of respect that a man gets). These reasons imply that Boutin doesn’t think that women can be respected as women. In his fractured little brain, women must be more like men in order to be taken seriously. No functioning adult would ever think this.
It turns out that Theresa has one more condition for her uniform: she will never wear her hair tied up. Hair as long as hers would prove to be a major problem in a combat scenario for a multitude of reasons. Her hair could be grabbed. It could catch onto something. It could block her vision. There is even the off chance that it could catch fire (It’s happened). Steve and Theresa share meaningless dialogue about how the uniform turns Steve on, then they eat, then they go to the White House.
You may have noticed that I’ve called a lot of dialogue exchanges meaningless throughout the course of this book. That’s because when a character speaks, it is meant to convey something important to the reader. Something about the character. Something about the story. Dialogue is a powerful tool, and a difficult one to master. Some people (Quentin Tarantino comes to mind) just seem to have a knack for it, and use it brilliantly. Boutin is the anti-Tarantino. Whenever a character speaks, reader interest drops to an all time low. Think it can’t possibly be so bad? Go back to my analysis of chapter one and read that sample of Theresa’s word-for-word conversation with Jan Struthers. Dialogue is not something to take lightly, and should be crafted with much more care than Boutin ever does.
We learn that Theresa is to be given complete control over the South Korean forces that are going into North Korea. It is deemed necessary for her to be in charge of the country, because she’s a neutral third party, and a woman. The fact that she’s a woman is important is because she’ll be perceived as kinder, gentler and more easily loved than the current NK leaders. I’m not a woman, but I feel like a lot of women would be offended by the idea that they would only be liked as a leader because everyone thinks they’re so soft-hearted, because they are women. Oh, yes. Theresa is also given the highest possible rank she can be given so that she’ll be respected. After meeting with President Stinson, they have a press conference where Stinson announces that since sensitivity is of utmost importance, Theresa will be made a general. Not just any general. She’s the first five star general since Omar Bradley.
So there you have it. Just like pretty much every other major female character in this story, Theresa, without any kind of merit, background or character development, has just been given a major position of power. And what’s this garbage about sensitivity? How does that have anything to do with Theresa being given the rank of general? Is that just because she’s a woman, too?
Stinson asks Theresa if she wants to explain a bit about herself. Theresa declines, but everyone insists that she takes the podium. Theresa relents and begins to speak to the press about how good and simple she is at her heart. How she is what she does. If that last part is true, she’s some kind of irresponsible child-monster. She also proves that she has no clue about how human nature works or why people join gangs. She closes with a quote from Psalms and steps away from the podium to thunderous applause. Probably because they’re all afraid of what she’ll do to them if they don’t appease her. Theresa says that it was as if she had discovered alien life, and I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a joke or not. Because the world already knows about the existence of HAL. A big deal is made about being what you do for the next few paragraphs. This is the author’s way of acting more sagacious than he actually is.
Seemingly over the course of a single day, Theresa is trained to fly a plane before she is flown off to South Korea. This flies in the face of the months of training that professional pilots are required to take in order to fly even a single engine craft.
Even though she has demonstrated no leaderly abilities at all during the course of the story, Theresa is suddenly able to come up with a plan of military action to liberate North Korea all on her own. And she does it using tactics that no actual military officer would use. We then get an excruciating page and a half filled with numbers about how many enemy weapons are getting destroyed. But it seems that her efforts were for naught.
The North Koreans are determined to attack, even if they’re unarmed. And they’ll send their civilians in as the first line of defense. Theresa laments that she won’t be able to keep her promise about keeping everyone alive, so she locks herself in her room and cries…again. Proof that she really didn’t deserve that five star general ranking, because what do you think would happen if every high-ranking military leader ran away and cried when something went wrong? But a shockingly convenient call from PM Scherzer lifts her spirits after he thanks her for relocating every Israeli citizen to a new island. She then remembers her promise to move Jerusalem along with them (something that she never did), and decides that she’s going to move the North Korean capital city, Pyongyang out to sea. Yeah. That’ll show those bastards.
Surprisingly, it’s pointed out what a pointless idea it is to do something like that. Instead, Theresa studies the islands of the region and for some reason calls Blair to ask him about island nations with dictatorial governments. When she learns that no such thing exists because it would be an economic disaster, Theresa explains her plan to move the entirety of Korea out to sea. She also proves that she knows nothing about how geology or seismology works, as she explains how she can do so without creating massive earthquakes.
We get even more numbers this time as the process is described down to the last pebble that rolls away as the nation drifts out to sea. So many words are dedicated to something so boring, then so few are dedicated to Theresa eating supper in the lunchroom. It is emphasized, however, that nobody spoke to Theresa as she ate, because nobody disturbs the World Empress. Clearly, eating is more pressing to Theresa than demonstrating how likeable she can be as a character by being sociable and amiable. The next day, she keeps moving those islands around, and then recaps a whole bunch of information about things we already knew, just to remind us that she’s always been amazing even before she got HAL.
There is an incredible jumble of words that seem to be describing Theresa’s moving of the entire Korean nation out to sea. It seems that she did so without China or Russia’s permission. At least that’s what I glean from reading the page. But there’s a big stink made about whether what she did was ethical or not. Blair, of course, kowtows to Theresa’s greatness and defends her from all criticism.
The next part of Theresa’s plan is put into effect. Propaganda is spread around North Korea about how great Theresa is. Maybe they were handing out copies of the book that I’ve been analyzing for twenty-five chapters? Seriously, this comes with the understanding that the North Korean people are stupid and impressionable. Just tell them that there’s a greater power, and they’ll worship that instead. Talk about condescending.
The time has come. Theresa enters North Korea with a convoy of military escorts and a whole lot of numbers on her side. The North Korean leaders have already fled, allowing Theresa to approach their podiums uninterrupted to make a speech about how good she is, how America rules, and most of all how France stinks for not being nicer to her. I wish I was joking about that last part, but there it is in the actual book. Theresa then declares the North Korean people free. And just because she said so, they are. And they all praise her.
The chapter closes with Theresa having a translation of the Declaration of Independence read to the Koreans, and everyone praises her again.
This chapter was more of the ‘If I were king,’ sort of fantasy that Boutin’s been living out through this book. However, it’s laid on quite thick here. With absolutely no regard to how military procedures, earth sciences, global politics, or even people in general work, this painfully long chapter was just a way of the author telling everyone how he’d make the world a better place. The man barely has his own life under control, so it’s terrifying to think about how badly he’d mess up the world if he tried to control it.
Boutin’s views on what he thinks women are like are also made all too clear in this chapter. This man obviously has the idea that women are these pure, angelic, soft-hearted creatures that are unconditionally loving and motherly. The reason he’s never been married is because reality struck hard when it turned out that women are not what he thinks they are. That women are individual people who have their own lives, goals, likes, dislikes and wildly varying personalities. Theresa is very likely also a personification of what he wishes women were actually like, and the beta-male soyboy that is Steve is almost definitely a stand-in for Boutin’s perception of his own role as a husband.
Three chapters to go. Let’s keep on trucking here.
Kinda like Chris Chan, really.
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Oh, fucking hell. I can just picture Boutin announcing, 'I have numbers of pairs of DIRTY CRAPPED BRIEFS.'
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It's bizarre how lolcows all seem to have similar basic problems in common.