In Defense of Being a Pretentious Ass · 6:04pm Oct 10th, 2017
So last night I was hanging out on the FiMFiction Discord chat, and we were discussing Fallout DLC -- like you do. One particular DLC called Lonesome Road came up and I expressed that I didn't like it very much, because it felt overwrought and pretentious. In the wake of that statement, a great silence came over the chat. For half a moment, I wondered if I'd disconnected.
Then the laughter started.
Those are your brand words, filly.
I was informed, at times with good humor, at times politely, and in times rather harshly, that my writing is considered pretentious as fuck. I put on airs. I describe my fanfiction as literature. I literally run a review series on my blog called "GaPJaxie Judges Others." And I put pictures of sexy robot Rarity on poetical, labyrinthine stories that do not actually contain sexy robot Rarity.
And you know, I do put on airs. It's true! But the criticism that was directed against me isn't really about me specifically. It's about an entire genre of writing, as expressed in such works as A Reader's Manifesto. And I think that argument is wrong. The style they label as "pretentious" has real merit. And so I'm going to cross the final line of writerdom.
Writing a snobby rebuke to my critics. That'll prove I'm not all better-than!
Seriously thou.
So what do people mean when they say a story is pretentious? It can mean a lot of things, including just that the author has an unreasonably high opinion of their own work, but it's usually used to refer to one specific set of criticisms. To quote the chat:
But like
Goddamn I come out of this with the impression you were genuinely afraid of being interpreted clearly
You write in a way that is very obviously meant to show off your cleverness, and so when people see those holes in your story they don't think "what's wrong with this" they think "why was I not smart enough to get this"
Which is why you see the kinds of interpretation arguments in your comments sections that you do
It doesn't mean you've written something profound
It means you've forgotten to write a huge chunk of the damn thing
"Pretentious" stories say less. They use dramatic language that actually conveys very little information, so the reader has to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. They're meant to be interpreted. They're about something other than what is literally in the story. They're a towering riddle of clever language and veiled implications that the reader has to decipher before they're allowed to know what the story is actually about.
In short, they're the sort of story that high school English teachers love to assign and that high school English students hate to read. Including me. I despised this kind of story when I was younger. And certainly it can be overdone, or done badly, to the point the story becomes borderline incomprehensible. But I think as a style, it has one great merit.
You can use it to write about experiences that aren't universal.
If I'm writing an action story, and I say that Spike kung-fu chops Spitfire's evil clone, Spitefire, we all know pretty much what to picture. Little dragon, kung-fu chop, whack, pow, boom. Even if we've never been in a fight, we understand the basic concepts, so that works great and it can create a natural, flowing action scene.
But if I say: "And then as Spitefire recovered in the hospital, she experienced a deep pang inside her soul, born of the unique mix of shame and pride that can only be known by a solider of a defeated army who realizes that they were the villain but who still longs for the world where they were victorious." Well, then the average reader will have a slightly different reaction. They might squint at the page, scroll up and down to see if they missed something, and finally come to the natural conclusion:
They've never experienced that. They have no idea what the hell they're supposed to be feeling in that instance, and so the sentence doesn't parse.
If I want that moment in my story, I can't just tell the reader it happens. I have to explain what the hell is going on, and I have to explain it using terms the reader actually understands. I have to construct a picture of this emotion, using only experiences common enough most readers will actually get them.
So, I'll make a metaphor. Probably a metaphor about fishing. People love fishing. I can express that emotion in purely fishing-related terms. And since it's generally bad form to end with: "And Spitefire reflected on how this fishing trip was a really striking metaphor for the emotions she felt in her post-war recovery," that it's a metaphor is going to be implicit to the writing.
And yes, I realize I just described a story about a pegasus fishing trip that's secretly a metaphor for the stress of being a war veteran that nobody understands. I also realize that if that was a movie it would be 100% pure Oscar Bait... but, uh. Well.
Yeah. Some stories are meant to be a fun, rollicking adventure with Magical Lesbian Laser Heroines Lyra and BonBon, and some stories are meant to help you grow as a person. And honestly, it shouldn't be a shock that the second kind of story requires a bit of effort to get through.
Or that writers get touchy about them. We put a lot of work into those stories!
Now, none of the above is to say that "pretentious" isn't a fair criticism of my writing. This style can be taken too far, or you can even like the style and just think I do it badly. My most recent story, The City Upon a Hill is a story concerning pony robots in an alternate-universe Equestria, but dammit the reader is supposed to interpret it and realize it's about child abuse, and that may not be everyone's cup of tea. Also, it contains no sexy robot Rarity.
But sometimes, the story can't be about what it's about, because the reader doesn't know what it's like to be a war veteran, or a teenage girl, or someone with a violent personality disorder, or an oppressed minority, an entitled prick who has never once questioned his privilege. And so to try and show what that's like to the reader, you have to do a bit of fiddling.
And, that's what I try to do, and that's why I think my stories are literature. And I think that's a good and useful way of writing. So.
Have a pony.
You do realize that someone's going to have to write Magical Lesbian Laser Heroines Lyra and BonBon. And that someone may be me.
But yeah, there's nothing wrong with depth in a story, as long as the readers can keep their heads above water. Of course, sometimes that means they need to know how to swim.
So, where on Fimfiction can I find these stories? Were they written by the same person who did deer Twilight?
...So, wait, what does it mean when I read that and think it's perfectly clear?
Apropos of nothing, every time I hear the word "pretentious," I think of George Carlin. "Castrating a guy with a coke bottle in a parking lot is a radical act. Hyphenating your name is pretentious bulls***." (This is funny to me because we hyphenated our names purely out of indecision.)
But anyway. Your pretentious literature is awesome, and you should totally keep it up.
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Yes. You must make this happen.
Pretentiousness can come across in writing, too. Overly dramatic pose can feel pretentious when I read it. You can get a sense that a writer is full of themself from how they write characters: if the protagonist is totally justified, and the antagonists have overly-pronounced flaws and they end up getting put soundly in their place. I remember feeling a touch of that from your "Would It Matter If I Was?" story.
I haven't read much of your work yet (unfortunately, mostly because reading is difficult for me and I haven't been in the same Writeoffs that you have), so my slice of experience is limited. But it's possible other authors' impressions may include aspects of the works you write. There's a lot of overlap between "pretentious" and "self-righteous", in other words: author tracts are pretentious. Sometimes it's important to leave some moral ambiguity for the reader to decide about on their own.
4693719
I was going to ask the same thing.
I love your style of writing it stretches my noodle in ways most stories dont.
Wait, you're in the FimFic Discord?
~Skeeter The Lurker
4693697
Please do it.
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This one?
Else, link please. You made me curious
Hey, I like your pretentious stories. Even when they make us feel the pain of the characters. Actually, specially then.
Your example is undermining your point. You did a pretty good job of conveying the emotion in short form.
I think you're inadvertently highlighting something that often puts people off about this style--it assumes (or appears to assume) that the reader can't "get it" without being led through a convoluted explanation, and then it makes the explanation too obviously an explanation. That makes the reader suspect that the writer thinks he or she is stupid.
I'm not saying that extra layers of meaning are bad--I love teasing them out. I suggest that one thing that leads to a story being labeled 'pretentious' is the second part--failing to disguise that the writer is trying to explain something he or she doesn't think the reader will understand. Stories that escape that label are ones that have an enjoyable/engaging/whatever surface layer.
A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.
I actually often like your pretentious style of writing, if only that there is no true right answer. However, this is only true if I don't then have to turn around and offer feedback, or, you know, write down the meaning.
Heck, this is probably why I didn't like Familiar in the write-offs. I was trying to analyze the story as I read, instead of just enjoying it and letting it cement its own path.
... Also, I freaking love this passage:
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Nah, it's a reference to a panel he was on at last Bronycon. He used a picture someone did of a deer Twilight to discuss a hypothetical story about Twilight turning into a deer.
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My version of this comment would be: There's nothing wrong with depth in a story, as long as there is a story.
Great books work on many levels. (I'm sure you've heard that old assertion innumerable times.) But all great books have something basic in common: they tell a story. Even (Ghod forfend!) Finnegan's Wake, the ultimate in pretentious bullshit literature, actually gives us a complete story arc, for all that it takes forever and is purely internal.
And, just in case that's too direct a statement, try this: A car with raw silk upholstery, seat warmers, and the best sound system that money can buy, isn't really a car unless it's got wheels.
.
4693719
I agree, wholeheartedly! This is a situation that almost nobody I know of has been in, yet it is so perfectly understandable as a very human reaction, that it's hard to imagine anyone with any life experience at all, not understanding it.
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If it's not you it'll probably end up being Skirts if he hasn't written it already.
Oh, I like that.
As for your writing, I can't defend you 100%
I personally don't agree with their opinion... But I can see where they're coming from.
There are fics of that nature I've given up on for that issue and others I've wondered why I'm reading. You've never even triggered a blip on my radar for it.
My suggestion? Keep writing, I enjoy what you write.
I think your stories are literature, but I don't think describing things metaphorically is the cause of English-class confusion.
Literary critics have written a lot about why authors ought to write confusing stories. I'm writing a blog post about it in another tab right now. It's a result of many things:
- early modernist dadadism, which says art must now be anti-art and be incomprehensible and shocking
- Marxist aesthetic theory, which says stories are a tool of the bourgeois and so we must shake the reader out of his complacency by confusing him
- more Marxist aesthetic theory, eg Adorno & Horkheimer, which says art must be about alienation, [insert ten pages of gobbledygook here], and therefore art must confuse people
- reader response theory, which says readers impute their own meanings onto texts, and we should prefer stories with no meanings of their own, so we can more easily impose our own meanings on them
- post-modernist theory, which says that words don't refer to things unambiguously and therefore [bizarre leap of illogic] we should try to write ambiguously
4693719 Obviously, it means you're a Nazi.
(...says the guy who already wrote a story about that feeling.)
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Nazi, sure. Or maybe a Southern boy of 14?
Or a certain kind of leftist hipster or wannabe hipster?
Or maybe just, you know, a human.
Honestly, sometimes I think that style is necessary to the point.
The reason I thought it was thematically appropriate to require interpretation in both Familiar and City Upon a Hill is because these things, in real life, can slip past without notice. And it is indeed a key point of both stories that they did.
4693719
It means you're a minority who doesn't realize they're a minority!
I take full credit for pointing out Spitefire in the Writeoff chat.
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This.
This so goddamn hard. One of the pitfalls of this style of writing is it can come across as incredibly pompous; it can make the reader feel as if the writer is 'talking down' to them.
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But I'm not!
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It might not be intentional, but it's one of the things to strongly keep in mind when writing in such an abstract fashion.
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But where's the shame in your two quotes?
The other part was accepting that achieving that victory would have been wrong but being invested enough to want it anyway.
It looks like you missed half of it and didn't notice.
That’s kind of the exact point being made.
Just because it has merit doesn't necessarily negate the fact that it can--and at times will--evoke a negative reaction.
*cough*
I don't really have anything to say except -
Don't dismiss their opinions out of hand. You have a habit of getting into a righteous, unshakable mindset that's really hard to be around.
4693719 4693790 I'm just kidding!
(Or else a Nazi. I'd better ask my therapist.)
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Cheerio
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No, I'm aware. In fact, that was the explicit point in the second, adjusted version: most leftist hipsters are presumably aware of the fact that although the Bolshevik coup was successful, it led to a ton of terrible things and not much that was good. But one could imagine what if it had brought the beautiful promise of socialism rather than the Soviet Union as it had actually existed?
And even in the Southern case, might even someone who recognizes the fact that the Confederacy was " one of the worst [causes] for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse" still feel a twinge of pining for that personal or sectional glory?
I think a lot of it depends on what one means by "pretentious" and what qualities in a story invoke the dreaded word. For some people, it's anything that aspires to any kind of depth or complexity. Personally, I tend to see it in the root of the word itself: pretend. Something is "pretentious" if it pretends to be deeper than it is, or puts on airs, or looks down on its audience. There's a falseness to it, a lack of authenticity.
I read A Reader's Manifesto recently. A lot of literary types who dismiss it tend to frame it as some statement of philistinism. But it wasn't criticizing stories with depth or even complex prose, but the tendency of recent literary fiction to mask stories (sometimes outright weak, shallow stories) behind gimmicky, affectation-filled prose that's mostly just meant to give the impression of depth, more often than not outright obscuring the story behind literary-sounding prose. And I think that's a valid observation of a lot of contemporary literature. There's a widespread notion in literary circles that if a story is too accessible, too enjoyable, or too easy to understand, it's clearly an inferior product fit only for the hoi polloi. Literature™, they tell us, should be challenging. By which they seem to mean it should make root canals seem preferable in comparison.
Needless to say, I disagree with that notion, with its classist overtones. There's nothing wrong with complex stories with layers of meaning, or even prose that's creative and expressive. Nor is there anything wrong with metaphor, which seems to be the thrust of your defense. But the story should always come first, with style merely as a finger pointing to the moon. If what you're trying to communicate is unclear, and especially if it's trying to be unclear, it's failing in the basic function of fiction as a linguistic medium.
Also, for what it's worth, I've never thought of your work as especially difficult or complex. I don't mean that as an insult. Your stuff tends to be well put-together, but... yeah. I don't see anything that qualifies as "pretentious", unless maybe it's something you, as a person, are giving off, rather than some innate quality in your stories themselves.
Alls I know is I like your horse words and enjoy reading more horse words. I’m a simple guy. Also I would love to read the nonsense story of Magical Lesbian Laser Heroines Lyra and BonBon.
I just wanted to say that Lonesome Road was entirely too pretentious! The Sierra Madre one hit most of the same themes without being as overtly grimdark even by Fallout standards. I think they perfected those themes next game around with the Far Harbor DLC.
I write reviews for every story I read - just for myself, of course. I left this comment to make sure I never re-read one in particular: "Intentionally avant-garde clickbait." To me, that's pretension. It's giving a work only the appearance of depth and layers. The author might want to appear brlliant, or they might embrace death of the author and just want to troll readers over-eager to find depth where there isn't any.
Or the author could be doing this:
i.pinimg.com/originals/70/0e/a1/700ea1b19f049c1bfdc2e08121565879.jpg
I've never even played Fallout. I've played Knights of the Old Republic II, though, and I don't think I'll like Lonesome Road. My problem with KOTOR II wasn't pretence, though: I thought the story was decent and some of the talking (well, one scene off the top of my head) was interesting. I thought it just came off as disdainful and kind of pointlessly bleak. Which can certainly feed into pretense, I admit.
What a twist!
Coming this winter 2017: Spike vs. Spitefire: Kung-Fu Regrets, by GapJaxie!
And stay tuned for its pulse-pounding sequel, Magical Lesbian Laser Heroines Lyra and BonBon, coming 2018 to a Fimfic feed near you!
What seperates literature from good writing, I wonder?
No but seriously:
I both greatly enjoy and am somewhat in awe of what you write. You're like, Roger Zelazny's dead/ Oh no, he's Jaxie/ Roger Zelaznyyyyyy... .
So don't change unless you want to. You're pretentious? Be that thing. Own it. Like the guy who over-wrights FoE fics. There can be merit in pretense.
Yes, but they're dfferent sorts of pretense?
Scotch and bourbon, son. Scotch and bourbon.
I would argue, because of course I would, that the surface layer story still needs to make for a good, engaging story and that the subtext behind it enhances it, rather than justifies it. There's a big difference.
Basically you've just shouted to me: "This story had hidden depth and that made it good!" Which I feel is rather missing the point.
My criticism was you were hiding every bit of the story that was interesting behind obfuscating details that were an absolute slog to get through. It's not just because your style was pretentious; It was the idea that the ideas behind your story made it inherently good regardless of its actual... well, story.
Cold In Gardez writes fantastic stories that you describe here: He wrote a fantastic allegory for freedom of information vs security in a story about Twilight sticking the Necronomicon in the reference section of the library, and Rarity being appalled. The subtext layer was brilliant and cleverly argued, but the surface layer was still an entertaining semi-absurdist comedy with great dialogue and beautiful prose.
The problem is, you don't actually write like what you're advocating here.
That's what you miss. You're so infatuated with your ideas you forget to write engagingly, to me. A story cannot just be a vehicle for the authors ideas, or all you're doing is writing prosaic lectures.
I feel like you didn't actually read Readers' Manifesto, either. It doesn't say literary writing cannot be good. It gave fantastic examples of good literary writing, on top of it. No, what it was calling out for was good writing regardless of whether it's genre or literary. That literary writing has come to mean egregiously obnoxious prose, bad prose that tries to make up in bulk what it forgets to achieve in quality, and the deeper meaning being generally accepted leftist anti-consumerist statements.
Say... "Child abuse and total surveillance are bad, and I'm also not providing a counter-argument against it", for ten thousand tautologically repetitive words?
I repeat:
The counterargument: "But they're not smart enough!" doesn't work when I just explained I understood the damn thing, I just think you presented it badly, boringly, ploddingly and obtusely, and a whole other schlock of adverbs aside.
4693719
Probable something better than the fact I immediately thought of P. G. Wodehouse:
Does not that also run the risk of the metaphor falling flat and the reader left wondering "Please cut the fluff and show me how this affects the character"? Would not a bad/rambling metaphor simply be "telling" with an added layer of obfuscation?
As far as "describing experiences to the uninitiated" goes, I have always enjoyed the late Captain Carroll Lefon's (USN) series titled Rhythms about a day in the life aboard a CVN
One of my favourite chapters is about an emergency night landing in a crippled FA-18. It is very visceral.
I never have and never will experience a night landing on a carrier, but the immediate and direct writing style let me see some soupçon of the pilot's headspace. I got to experience, briefly, his doubts, his nervous focus, and his cool methodical training taking over.
4694004 I call Not It! I'm still working (slowly in the background) on that story that I promised would have Phoenix Shadowblade as a character.
No, as for writing deep, interpretable bits of pure literature (or as I prefer to think of it as litter-ature), my preference is to spoil the mood after a long, long windup with a very unmistakable punch. Alicorns in Spring comes immediately to mind, as well as Tantabus, Do Your Worst. Oh, and parts of Letters From a Little Princess Monster, when she gets all metaphorical and her little friends bring her back down to earth.
A short treatise on the total ignorance of this blog post and its poster
Subtext and undertones and hidden meaning are all worthless on their own: If your core surface story doesn't stand up on its own? You haven't actually written a story at all, much less one that people can bring themselves to care about.
Your stories don't actually help personal growth, and a story doesn't have to be an unlovable swamp of bad word choices and tortured sentences to do so. Pretentious writing doesn't just have no merit, it has an active lack of merit: It detracts from the world around it. You don't create literature, you barely even create full-stop. Owning up to being a particular breed of no-talent halfwit doesn't make you any less of one. Being impenetrable is not a virtue and being fake-sly is not a skill. The only thing this blog does is serve to show exactly how badly you've walled yourself off from the criticisms leveled at you.
Look, you can make up for the lack of sexy robot Rarity simply by including her in the threequel. Easy, right?
There is no way that I am going to regret this request at all.
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She actually is in it.
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i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/284/295/c91.gif
Hooboy...
Come in, old pal, and have a seat. Can I get you a drink? Gin and Tonic? White Russian? I make a mean Sazerac!
...
Comfortable? Okay then...
First, let me say that I do not believe for a minute that your stories provoke discussion because you forgot to include something. I understand that when things are unsaid, it’s because you want them unsaid. Most of the time, though, your stories provoke discussion because they touch on issues that make the reader think, and that’s nothing to apologize for.
That said, sometimes that’s divorced of a stronger narrative. In the worst example, there’s “Would it Matter if I Was?” I think even you know how lousy that story is, but it sure got people talking! “Lies We Tell to Children” is a better story, and it’s still thought-provoking, but it isn’t that strong in terms of narrative either (at least not yet).
But let’s get back to your most recent hit, “Familiar.” I said and meant that it is my favorite of your stories. It isn’t without its flaws, which I mentioned in my review, but they don’t ruin the story. A lot of the story is told in subtext, and that’s okay: it worked for Hemingway, and who am I to thumb my nose at Ernest Hemingway?
Daiquiris! Hemingway liked daiquris. Would you like one, Jaxie? ... Hm? Maybe later? Well then, I’ll proceed...
Much as I like “Familiar,” I interpreted it a bit differently before I read your comment. You know, the one that stated explicitly that Rainbow Dash raped Cloud Chaser, her robot familiar. Now, before I read that, I was okay with imagining that perhaps Rainbow had been neglectful, or that Cloud Chaser did what she did because she realized she was no longer adequate to push Rainbow to grow as a person and saw only one way to motivate her into changing. Your comment changed how I thought about the story, and I accepted it because I believe Authorial Intent should count for something.
But a lot of other people don’t see it that way, and if you subscribe to the “death of the author” school of thought, then they’re within their right to do so. And that’s because - and I want to stress this here - you never actually explicitly said what happened. There were hints, and the sequel makes it a lot more explicit, but one could just as easily take “Familiar” to be a commentary on the obliviousness we have to people at risk of suicide and the need to go forward afterwards. It’s as legit an interpretation as the “canonical” reasoning, especially if you haven’t read the prequel, and not everyone will.
My point here is that your writing is designed to leave some things unstated precisely so it makes readers think, and you’re good at it, but in a lot of your stories, the discussion is more important than the story itself, and in others you tend to think that there’s a “right” answer that “smart” readers will get. And that is... well, a little pretentious.
None of that means that you’re a bad writer. You’re a great writer! Sure, sometimes you’re also a little smug about how clever you are, but as long as the story’s good, it doesn’t really matter. Heck, I write stories that are sentimental and often couched in cliches and references, but they’re damn good stories regardless. And you know what? I’m comfortable with what my stories are because I like to write stories that make people laugh or cry or have some other guttural emotional reaction, even with their flaws.
Likewise, you should take pride in what you do because you’re good at it. You don’t need to defend your style of writing choices, man... you should own it!
...You pretentious bastard.
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I agree with all of this! Far Harbor hit just the right medium. Old World Blues remains my favorite overall though. It had a ton of depth under a campy layer of sci-fi action.
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If I wrote that, it would be from Bon Bon's perspective, and her desperate quest to have a normal life despite them fighting supervillians with lasers powered by shipping.
"Lyra! I sneezed today and shot lasers out of my nose!"
"I know, right? Isn't being a lesbian great?"
"That is not a normal consequence of being in a same-sex relationship!"
4694355
Ruh-roh!
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/2/22/CMC_uh_oh_S3E4.png/revision/latest?cb=20121126005053
Woah, woah. Let me be clear here.
Would it Matter if I Was is awful.
And yes, that point is well taken. While Lies does have a story arc that draws to a clear conclusion, that fact that we're 36,000 words in and haven't reached it yet kiiind of makes it hard for me to claim it has a strong narrative.
I find, as a rule, that if you need to be drunk to read reviews of your story, you probably should not have written that story. Again, like Would it Matter if I Was.
I believe in Death of the Author too, but to an extent, the ambiguity is intentional. The phase I've heard before is: "If you do something subtle, and 100% of your readers notice, it wasn't subtle." The ideal level of subtly in a story is so that nearly all of your readers get it, IE, it's as challenging as it can be while still being noticeable to the majority of your audience.
That's what I tried to do with Familiar. I didn't want the word "rape" to appear in the story because I wanted the audience to connect with Dash's struggle to understand what happened. But now I'm wondering if maybe that was a mistake. It would have been very easy to fix. Just replace "I know what I did -- I have to make it right" with "I raped Cloudchaser -- I have to make it right."
I will concede that my message stories suck, yes.
And... that's fair. And honestly it seems like pretty consistent feedback. People who like my stories like them because they ask questions, and people who dislike them often criticize that they don't provide any answers. Which aren't mutually exclusive.
God dammit stop being the Element of Laughter in real life.
That's actually quite good advice though. I won't say I take criticism poorly, but... I can be a little insecure, let's put it that way. It's easy to fall into that trap of needing everyone to like my stories all the time, which is impossible and will, of course, only make things worse. I think you have the healthier attitude, and that that's something I needed to hear.
Plus, you know, it's fanfiction all the way down.
My writing is not pretentious! It's condescending. Totally different thing.
Thanks for taking the time to write this, man. Reading it really helped. It's good to put things in perspective -- positive or negative. I owe you one. ^_^
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I love me some wacky Robots.
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And that campy layer of sci-fi action just seems realistic, to the Fallout world, to me in a way Lonesome Road... doesn't, really. I'd also call it (Lonesome Road, that is) my least favorite of the four main DLCs. A lot of its problems can I think be explained away by saying that Ulysses is by this point completely bonkers (more than the DLC already portrays him as, that is), but not all of them.
It's also more or less the only part of the game that tries hard to fill in major details of the Courier's past, when up until then the player has been much more free to come up with their own history that might not fit with what Lonesome Road requires. (Though for that, hey, maybe Ulysses actually got the wrong person.) Anyway, that can of course be solved for a playthrough by acting as if Lonesome Road doesn't exist, one of several reasons to do so, but then of course one can't actually play Lonesome Road.
By the way, is anyone else curious about potential tunneller society and culture?
""That is not a normal consequence of being in a same-sex relationship!""
...And what is in Lyra's past that she thought that it was, I wonder?
(As to the actual thrust of this discussion, um... I don't really have anything to say? I mean, there seem to be issues here, certainly, and I can see points on both sides, but I don't think I really have a problem here myself. Glad The Hat Man's post helped you, though.)
Goddamn it... I haven't read your familiar verse yet and you just spoiled the thing you wanted me to interpret from it. Spoiler tag that stuff, man!
4694356
pls jaxie
jaxie pls :C