You want to know why Inigo Montoya remains such an iconic and beloved character even 35 years after the Princess Bride came out?

It’s because he’s one of the few characters in fiction who has a story where he has dedicated his life to revenge, his whole motivation is about getting revenge….and he gets it! and then he isn’t empty or despairing! he doesn’t regret it! he’s totally satisfied!

because so many stories about revenge or rage are about characters “seeing the futility of their actions” or learning “their desire for revenge has only made them the monsters they hated” FUCK THAT.

Inigo Montoya kills the man who kills his father, is allowed to live in the narrative after and be happy about it and it is so satisfying. it’s fantastic. it’s iconic.

let more characters rage against the world, bring it down with bloodied hands, and let them be FUCKING RIGHT about it. Let them celebrate their success with sharp grins, and let them live happy, full lives where they always remain proud/fulfilled for what they’ve done

Another thing that set Inigo Montoya apart from other characters with vengeance arcs is that Inigo’s vengeance drove him but it didn’t consume him. He was wronged and wanted - needed that injustice to be corrected - but his vengeance was focused. Rather than taking his pain out on the whole world, Inigo was a charming, pleasant, good-humored person that treated everyone respectfully, even folks he was fighting. He even asks politely to people he meets about any extra digits they may have.

Would a bitter, angry, vengeance-consumed man swear on the life of his father and help a guy he was planning to duel, then give him time to catch his breath? Would he hand his sword over to his future opponent to lovingly show off his late-father’s skill as a swordmaker?

“You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.”

I think part of what makes Inigo so iconic and beloved is because while vengeance was his story, it wasn’t who he was, so when he achieved his vengeance it was less an emptiness and more of a satisfaction, a story completed, a wrong made right, and a man suddenly baffled at the possibilities before him, not sure what his next story would be.

Goths are part and parcel with counterculture movements.

Counterculture movements only occur when the culture has imbalanced itself to favor one group over another.

Ergo, Goths are the cultural canary in the coal mines.

Tweet tweet, motherfuckers.

Okay but honestly with the death of forums and blogs and Yahoo Answers. And the rise of discord. Reddit is the last refuge to get any kind of information about anything whatsoever.

i think being alone and isolated and cut off from support systems has the tendency to make us feel crazy and really weird and vastly different from everybody else in the world and as much as im in full support of being fully cuckoo bonkers and honest to yourself about your own weirdness i think in community we find that we’re not actually as out of our gourds as we feel we are when we do nothing but work and struggle through life. postmodern self absorbed insanity syndrome

you’re not crazy you work 40 hours a week and are still expected to adhere to weird societal standards and you never go outside. this would make anybody feel crazy

throw the isolation of the suburbs and car culture on top o that

Jaakko Pallasvuo

Yeah !!!!! Firefox truly is the superior browser

[ID: Screenshot that says "Edit PDFs in Forefox" and "Say goodbye to the hassle of trying to print or fill out your PDFs in other programs. With Firefox you can easily edit PDFs without switching to another app or program".

Underneath this screenshot is the two-panel meme comic with the character lying down on a couch before sitting up and going "Oh shit, for real?" /End ID.]

When straight society invented the sissy, the faggot, the equivalent in almost every language, to intimidate men and trans women into compliance, they unwittingly created a new gender. It's a lesser, or at least separate class of man, or in many cases not a man at all. Created as an nebulous threat, the possibilities of what it means to be one became endless. Either weak or brutishly strong to the point of unfair advantage, neutered or hypersexual, ignorant bimbo or cosmopolitan intellectual, starving underclass or ostentatious elite, victim or villain, powerless but powerful enough to be a threat to society just by existing. People who would never admit to seeing gender on nonbinary terms still intuitively recognize and treat this class as a distinct, socially recognized gender with its own signifiers. Despite the cruelty behind this category, its defiance of convention makes it alluring even to people who hate it. Those who embrace their faggotry are not putting themselves into a box but tapping into their limitless potential.

lol nah I was wrong like inaccurate about some sleepers never having been to the undersides. I think there’s only one person who wasn’t a jumper in Book 2, who is a sleeper in Book 3.  All the rest of the sleepers were jumpers, and no non-jumpers were sleepers (save one rando whose status could have changed in that time).  So, of all the people who had ever been to the undersides, only Sphinx and Red didn’t choose it. And no one who had never been, went.  I think that the sleepers having been jumpers means that they weren’t able to get to the undersides of their own accord, which is why they needed to be brought - by the “guides” or striders - in order to get there.  

So, that actually makes more sense to me because I didn’t really understand why some people chose to leave on the bus if they were all in such a panic over leaving the house in general.  Or why Smoker is bitter about Sphinx choosing something he thinks he himself had no choice about.  (I still believe Smoker could have had a choice if he had chosen to but that’s a different issue.)

The Florida Project, 2017

“The seeds for that score [in Cowboy Bebop] were sown in middle school and high school when I was a member of the brass band. I’m not sure how it is nowadays, but back then all the songs kids were taught weren’t at all cool, so I made and performed originals. But a part of me was always frustrated because I couldn’t understand why everybody else was content playing the uncool music. I wanted to play brass music that shook your soul, made your blood boil, and made you lose it.”

“This yearning became “Tank!” which was the opening theme. I wanted to make music which would light a fire in me when I played it. Also, when I was “convenient” during my university years, I transcribed a lot of black music. After I began to grasp and understand rhythm I thought, “How is it that they play the drums the same way, but the rhythm is so different between black people and white people?” So I took a trip to New Orleans to listen to jazz and funk.”

You went to America while attending university?

“Yes. I went coast to coast on a Greyhound bus. I didn’t have money to stay in hotels, so I usually slept on the bus. It was something that was possible because I was young at the time. [laughs] There was a person playing a banjo on the street in Los Angeles, which I thought was cool but I began to notice as I kept moving East the groove of street musicians would swing harder. There were kids the age of high school students playing fantastic funk grooves on just one snare drum. It was through this trip I learned that even within a genre there are differences in the style. This was really exciting for me. I learned that the beat is a form of language.”

- Yoko Kanno, Akihiro Tomita Interview, Red Bull Music Academy, November 2014.

Oh no I think we’re talking about different Old Man!  Not the not-here one, but the one with the clocks who who cropped up out of nowhere to explain to Ralph about Godmother.  The other old guy, the not-here old dude, was perfectly in sync (to me) with the rest of the book. But infiltrating a boarding school for god knows how long so as to do god knows what to finagle an estranged child out of his random inheritance is something Voldemort would do.  This is the only point at which the author chooses to explain anything, then proceeds to do so in an excruciating check list of “This Makes Sense.” To be honest it felt like a (relatable) mistake that her editor should have caught and cut.

As for my immediate and perpetually mounting sense of dread throughout the book, I don’t know that I thought - as in theorized - anything so much as just felt what these kids were feeling.  I didn’t fear the house, but I did fear the cult, and I feared the fear that they all felt about the Outsides.  They seemed profoundly unequipped to face it, and I worried about all these little fuckers! About how they were going to feel and think and survive after school. The graduating class before them embodied the worst of that fear, and I didn’t anticipate, particularly, a repeat, because the dynamic wasn’t there (Blind nipped that one in the bud, thanks I guess), but: we also had the Longest Night to contend with.  

I guess the worst case scenario to me would have been the chaos of the Longest amplified by the stress of graduation, leading to maybe a few murders but mostly just further Emotional Damage for kids who had already taken a lot of emotional damage not just from the cult itself but from having been plopped there in the first place, by an outside world that to be fair is often indifferent to their well being, if not at times outright hostile. Like, I understood the allure of the house and that sense of family and belonging, but the price was too steep. (I felt a lot lot those kids might have been healthier in a standard school.)   

I was relieved when it turned out to be a non-issue - and someone ring the bell for Black because he headed off the worst of it with that bus, damn.  And Red co-opting the other cult for resources was a top tier Moment for me. Kudos to that weirdo.

I didn’t feel the ending to be bitter, but maybe bittersweet, if I had to hedge. That’s probably because since the first page, you know you’re not getting a happy ending, right - like, this house is not going to survive the book, and as we learn more, we find that there is no Narnia or that it’s equally as ugly if not worse than the real world.  The only allure of it was that the kids believed themselves equipped to handle the horrors there.  Only Sphinx says “nah fuck that,” and though it hurt to see Blind hurt by the choice, I felt good about Sphinx having made it - and he having even confirmed (to some extent) that “arms are better than legs,” meaning that he in this world has a harder time of it than some of the others who chose to leave it.  I respected that he wasn’t drawn into this falsehood that he could somehow escape hardship or mundanity.  Literally kids be going over there to best case scenario work in a car wash.  

It’s not that I disliked or didn’t respect the other world, I just felt that the cult surrounding it sort of manipulated it into something it wasn’t - at least not for everyone.  For Blind, it really was that place, but for Sphinx it wasn’t. I was relieved that he was able to make that choice for himself - that everyone (except Smoker) was able to make their choice with their eyes open and live with it.

And lord, the interpretation of the ending as though Everything Has To Represent Something Else, I’m sorry but it’s lazy. It’s facile pseudo-intellectualism.  The book is not an allegory, and to pretend that it is in order to reassure yourself that you Get It and that you’re Smart and Deep does a profound disservice to the nearly twenty years of effort that went into crafting this thing.  So, luckily I have not personally read anything to that effect or I would be frothing at the mouth.  

Lololololol I completely forgot about Godmother!! I mean, I didn’t forget. But I was sort of like “huh. Okay,” when it came to her bizarre hatred for her grandchild and the matter of his inheritance. I do think the former principal choosing to stay is like a great unhinged moment, but yes, it didn’t need to be so expository and I think your point is well made that that aspect doesn’t fit.

I find it super interesting that you were like “this is a cult, straight up”! I don’t think you are wrong but I also think I had the immediate sense of simply accepting that the various rituals and rules these kids all lived by were just. More a sort of collective choice, less a thing imposed on them by shutting down their choices. If that makes sense. It reminded me a little of The Egypt Game, which I haven’t read in a long time but which I remember having that element of “reality is what we say it is and we make it together.” and then that isn’t necessarily wrong, even if it was wrong in The Egypt Game.

On the point that they might have been better in a standard school — I think there is a stark throwaway line that even says some of the kids are there for no reason in particular, just because their parents don’t want them. Which I thought was interesting, since it takes the teeth out of the idea that this is somehow about their disabilities being secretly magic or their communal understanding of the House being a way to make their impairments not matter. Like, this population (with some exceptions) maybe is what you would find in a standard school.

I don’t know that I even read most of the main characters as wanting to escape hardship or mundanity, so much as I read them as being consumed by the communality of it all and terrified of losing that (which actually adds to your cult read), but maybe that will change on re-read. I am not an expert. I flatly do not understand The Longest Night! That entire section turned me into Smoker. Wild shit was happening and attempting to process it on a cognitive level only appeared to make my understanding worse.

I am also glad that Sphinx chose the “real” world, though. I was delighted that he has access to the power of…literally subsuming his consciousness into those around him? Becoming other people and letting them become him? Embodying the whole borg-mindset of the House, basically. And he seems horrified by it! Even though arguably the House loves him. He and Blind (and maybe Noble) seem to be some of its strange elect.

Though at the end it seems like maybe he sometimes goes to the underside, so who knows. We don’t! Which I appreciate. And that was my typo above — I did mean bittersweet!

Also, I think I read Blind and Rat as setting Black up to drive the bus away with those who choose to leave but I actually cannot for the life of me remember why I think that and it truly might be based on nothing, lol. I do like Black. I feel that he’s genuinely not loved by the House, by the entity of the House, not just the people in it, and I love an unloved character.

“Best case scenario work in a car wash” made me HOWL!!!

I also still don’t get the underside world and I think I’m not supposed to, but I am tickled by how some kids go there to become powerful woods monsters and some to work in a diner and some people there get de-aged and some people are employed as those people’s live-in nannies and some must find their true selves as world-crossing guides and some are kidnapped and forced to work as slaves. I guess this is where the Maggie and Milly came in for me. Your experience is shaped by where you are emotionally and what you put in, that sort of thing. Which explains why Noble just sort of puttered around as an underemployed teenager for much of his initial time there, because that is exactly what he is.

One thing I think I like about the book is that for all its oddities and for the level of unreality it flirts with, none of it seems to be an allegory. These events are all happening! They’re just not events that fit in your head unless you agree to believe they do.

lol yeah after the “old man” confusion I suspected you maybe wrote that part off to the point of forgetting it, since it was so incongruous and the details exposited had very little bearing on the rest of the story. It’s only because I’ve done that - made that error of judgement so many times myself while trying to write through something the rational part of my brain has convinced me is a plot hole - that in that moment the author’s hand was very visible, which left a bigger impression on me out of commiseration.

I think my reading of it as a cult was elevated because for a very long time - probably the majority of the book - I wasn’t convinced there was any element of fantasy to the story at all.  All of it, up until a certain point, could have been “explained” by a home-grown and profoundly spiritual subculture. This wasn’t out of skepticism, either; I anticipated fantasy, but what I was getting was a cross between Lord of the Flies, Pan’s Labyrinth, and my vague understanding of the Lakota vision quest as put forth in Black Elk Speaks. 

I fully agree that it was a collective choice that determined the “laws” of this subculture, but at the same time, those choices were informed by choices from the generations before them: inherited moreso than imposed.  And I was keenly wary of how this handed down system of beliefs reinforced alienation and fear of the Outsides.  It seemed to me that, stripping away all elements of the fantastic and even removing the physical/visual markers of “different,” any group of average children inserted into such an environment at an impressionable age would develop tribalistic anxiety about the Outside world. In fact,  all throughout much of the first half of the book I was struck by the idea of how true it was about the experience of even the standard American education system: how there are these systems and “laws” in place, and it’s important, and real, and it’s your entire world for years on end - and then you graduate and never think about it ever again.  That full, consuming immersion in the only world you really know - and you don’t have the experience and perspective to question it at all.  

I’m not trying to liken high school to a cult, but I could see how easy it would be, in an environment significantly more isolated, and with significantly more valid cause to feel rejected by the “outside world,” to fall into the embrace of an all-consuming subculture.  But the standard American school system teaches you to anticipate life beyond school, while the sub-culture of the House notoriously circle-jerked itself into a fatal frenzy last graduation. Symbolically, it isn’t just the Outsides and apathy that destroyed the house. The “maintenance” that wasn’t performed was also spiritual maintenance on the governing system of collective thought.  Blind and Sphinx’s class had to be the last class, because the subculture, which maybe originally had been everything it still is to Tabaqui, had deteriorated to a condition that can’t be accepted in this world: mass suicide, violence, and massacre.  It was no longer a good place, and it did have to go.

As for escaping hardship or mundanity, that may have just been my way of putting names to their unnamed fear of the Outsides, but it starts to get murky when it comes to the kids who have physical disabilities in this world but not the other.  I think that there is some aspect that can’t be totally overlooked, of choosing an able-bodied life in a world arguably more horrible and dangerous, vs a disabled life in a world that is mostly indifferent but “would rather they not exist at all.” Blind calling Sphinx an “armless cripple” does speak to some level of escapism from mundane horrors of Reality. This isn’t all of it - I think some of them may feel more fully themselves there.  But I think I would have to reread it in order to get a more coherent thought going on that.  At the moment, when I ask “why choose the other world?” as opposed to “choose to not choose Reality,” I don’t have a whole lot of perspective.  I think that that’s possibly the conundrum Sphinx faced as well.  “why are you making this choice?” For Blind it makes sense; his immersion was complete and he even could not exist in This World anymore, but for the others - for himself - I think he didn’t have a good reason to choose it beyond “arms.” Before being subsumed by the great subconscious of the Other Side, he wanted to experience what it meant to be himself, separate from it.

Anyway, I can feel my thought process unravelling in that last paragraph lol.  

I’ve been loosely exploring what it means to interpret those kids as having “drunk the kool-aid” in its most original sense.  That for al intents and purposes, from the point of view of Reality, they may as well be dead, having chosen the “next life” over this one.  Then I wondered how much of that would track in a different genre; if the “other world” was literally another world in a galaxy far far away, and to get there you had to board a spaceship traveling at the speed of light.  Would people still read that allegorically?  At the end of Lord of the Rings, when Frodo boards the ship for the west, no one reads that as suicide. Why would you? So is it the murkiness of the Other World that lends itself to that reading; wanting to pin it down and examine it, and, failing that endeavor, writing it off as a metaphor?  Not even Smoker is so prosaic.

(On the subject of Smoker, though I think in some ways the narrative was unfair to him for a vast section of the story, I love how his repressed bitterness regarding the Choice Sphinx had was so Smoker.  He did have a choice and acknowledged it literally! And then forgot he did that and got bitter about it!)

You are really challenging me because I’m like “oh god all of this is so well reasoned and makes so much sense!” And yet also very strongly like “that is not the book I read and not the sense I make of the book,” lmao. Which is not to say it isn’t a great read — it is! I just clearly came in very differently from you. I was primed for there to be fantasy. Smoker’s initial section is very “boy who is an outcast in his first environment gets pulled into a more magical environment” (fuck. Does this explain the Harry Potter comparisons? Did those people only read the first hundred pages), and it’s actually pretty stark how I never questioned that something fantastical was going on. My conviction that there was fantasy just started strong and got stronger. When Smoker decides it’s all just a game and a collective invention, I looked at the fact that we had like 700 pages to go and said yeah no, a simple game isn’t it.

I think even thinking about it as a subculture marks the House as a culture subservient to or at least smaller than and confined within the culture of our broader world, which is something Smoker and Black and maybe (maaaaaybe) Sphinx would agree with, but you are showing me that I’m a secret partisan of the kids who would not agree with that! Or, to put it another way, some of the kids are not from “our” world but the other world (Tabaqui, Red, Mermaid at the very least). The House exists in that world (confirmed by Ralph’s ending). The other world is accessible even after the House is torn down (confirmed by Sphinx’s last visit and his puzzling mystery suntans forever after). So why does the House have to be a culture within the culture of our world? Those who buy into it would probably see it more appropriately as a culture within the culture of the other world, forming a bridge into our world but not bound by or accountable to our world in any way.

This is not a perfect analogy but I grew up in a household that periodically uprooted itself to spend summers several thousand miles away in my grandmother’s town in a different part of the globe where things were often much harder and we spoke a different language. In the place we lived in for most of the year, we certainly were perceived as belonging to a “subculture,”sure, but that term itself only worked if applied from the outside. To us, if we were a subculture, we were a subculture of the place we could not permanently access and were always cut off from: the home. The anxiety was not an anxiety of having signs and rituals the “dominant” American culture couldn’t understand, or even necessarily the anxiety of being second class in that culture (we knew we were no such thing as an inherent matter, I really cannot overemphasize the superiority complex in play here), it was the anxiety of losing access to a (more violent, more “backwards,” more doomed, much less structurally favored) place that was more ours than the one we were forced to inhabit, because of the inevitable reality of immersion in the place that was not ours at all. This is a wild lens to apply to a book that has nothing to do with my particular diaspora experience, I will grant you, but I think the perspectives of Blind, Noble, Ginger, Humpback, Tabaqui, and the House’s other partisans so perfectly echoed that lens in parts (even inadvertently), that I ended up completely in the camp of “something is very much lost when you are forced into the world that is not for you at the expense of the world that is more yours.” And so it is hard for me to apply to that an “aha! A damaged subculture” lens, though I think that’s a lens that is completely — maybe even more, lol — supported by the text.

I do read the last scene, the initiation of a new loop, as a lovely scene. This makes no sense, but I really found it immensely comforting when I read it! Looming murders and all! It’s a new loop, anyway! Sphinx apparently has arms in it! Maybe other things will change! Maybe there will be fewer murders this time! Or more! Either way, a redo is a redo! Time loops are usually nihilistic because nothing has meaning if nothing has consequence and nothing has consequence if everything can be redone, but for some reason this time loop feels welcoming, positive, and fresh!!

I think partly because I really don’t at all engage with the dead idea, be it metaphorical dead, may-as-well-be-dead, any deadness, lol. I did read it as a perfectly acceptable fantasy ending: in this loop, they chose to go to the Other World. Remnants of the place that enclosed them here even remained long enough for Sphinx to get pieces of that Other World from it. And also whatever happens as a result of that, well, even Smoker has managed to glean on a subconscious level that more loops are also available. You can’t snuff out the tie to the other world — the House. Even when it’s fated to have a tragic expiration date, there will always be, one or two loops away, a person arriving in the House to be welcomed by the House.

I think if I had seen it all as very like the standard American education system (many education systems, really; I really really like your read in that sense and I think it dovetails in a cool way with what sonntam was saying about this being part of an established genre focused on the rules kids and teens make in a particular kind of unsupervised setting), I would be less accepting of the choice to go to the Other World and would be more inclined to look with suspicion on the society within the House. It’s fascinating and useful to see your take, because you are showing me that part of what I liked about the book was maybe my own immediate identification with that society. I really did look at this book in parts, particularly those parts animated by dread over the loss of all the House offered by way of constructing world and identity and self, and think “yeah, no, I get it, and I too have known those who would rather work in a car wash in a world that was theirs than go to college in a world that isn’t,” lol.

(Also, I love Smoker because he is so disadvantaged the minute we leave his precise perspective! I need to go back and re-read to pinpoint when you mean he gets annoyed about Sphinx’s Choice — he is pretty much annoyed at Sphinx for 9/10s of the book, lol — but my personal favorite Smoker moment is the moment where he decides he’s Team Black because no one else is.)

Likewise - I’m getting beyond the point where I can just rattle off my initial impressions, and have to actually think about what i‘m trying to say! So, thanks for bearing with me, as I do tend to sharpen my opinions on the fly and some of what I say here may be work in progress. 

I think it’s the mark of a rich story that each of us was able to bring so much of our own experience into it and leave with something unique.  You may have come into the story a Milly and left a Maggie, whereas I may have come in a Molly and left a May.  Part of my wariness may have come from having been raised in a sort of a House, by a sort of a Tabaqui - or someone the House and Tabaqui would have embraced with glee.  Because of that, I grew up with a fair bit of wildness; I partook of our grave, childish rituals, I lived by and made up our laws and games. But I also experienced the volatility, the intensity, and the violence; the mess, the double think and the selective blindness.  Of course, this is no way a literal parallel: I had a mostly functional family, filled with music and filled with stuff (so much stuff). But there was no way I could immerse myself in the environment of the House without my prior and formative knowledge of the flipside: that you can get hurt here, in ways that are meaningless to the people around you.

So, even moreso than questioning whether or not the fantasy was literal, I immediately began questioning whether it was good or safe.  To me, whether or not it was literal didn’t matter, because to the people immersed in it, it is real.  It has psychological impact and consequences, and this didn’t change when the magic was confirmed. This reading is also contingent upon having reached a reflective period of life, where those days of heedless whimsy are long behind me, and now I am frequently responsible for the emotional and psychological well being of the next generation, a responsibility I take seriously. I didn’t enter the story as One of Them or seeking to be; I entered it as an adult, observing children make the best of what they had without guidance or discipline. Like Smoker, I wondered how much differently the House would have affected me if I had encountered it sooner? At a time where I wanted to escape something, or be understood by others? Would it have been more like Harry Potter; a fantastical caper wherein Smoker simply doesn’t get it and Blind’s actions are fully, blindly justified and right? I can’t know: I can only know that it would have been different.  (Maybe in another loop!) So for both of us, the mindset in which we entered this story and the expectations we brought and what we needed from it when we found it shape the reality of the story the same way these things, for the characters, shape the reality of the House.

The way your personal experience lines up with the House’s select is a fascinating perspective.  It makes complete sense to me that they were motivated more by fear of losing access to the place that was truly theirs, than by fear of “not fitting in” (or whatever) with the dominant outside culture.  However, I might argue that that really only applies to the select; the jumpers and striders.  The vast majority of the kids in the house have only ever known the subculture, which is not the same as the Underside itself, and is more heavily informed and shaped by the Outsides than they care to acknowledge.  In fact, they deliberately resist acknowledging how much of the Outsides is in the house, in a way that sometimes felt frustratingly obtuse and juvenile to me. Their culture is made possible - it is underwritten, funded, managed, staffed, located in, educated by denizens of This World. I know that sounds prosaic, but it’s true.  This house does not exist separately from the Outsides, as much as they want to believe it does, and their rigorous double-think on this issue harkened to the universal obliviousness of childhood, where the bus just appears to take you to school every day, lunch exists without actual people making it, teachers exist to teach, and vanish afterwards.  This is all true of the child’s experience, but not true of the Truth.  For all they may have been anxious about losing access to the culture of the other side, they were oblivious to just how much of This Side most of them actually were.  How many of them had to be literally reborn on the other side? Only a handful were able to cross over as themselves.

Anyway, I think that doesn’t entirely speak to the point you were making, and I’m just kind of batting ideas around that I’m not necessarily married to. It seems your personal experience may run a closer parallel to Blind, who feels a profound connection to that Other World, whereas mine may run more closely to Sphinx, who was burned by it. When I see people running headlong into it, who have never been there and who have only ever experienced the Undersides Lite of the House, I’m like...”do you know why you are doing this? Are you running towards something, or away from something else? What do you think the Other World is going to be for you that This World isn’t?  Are you sure it is going to be that?” I know I said previously that I was glad most of the kids were able to make their choice with their eyes open, but as I explore it it seems that that may have not entirely been the case for many of them. It’s not skepticism towards the other world so much as skepticism towards their understanding of themselves, which is going to shape what the other world becomes for them or makes them into.  If they are only running away from the Outsides, then they will continue to run away in the other world, and they run a very high risk of having a Very Bad Time over there. It is not a magical solution for their troubles and - being a manifestation of their subconscious as exists within the collective subconscious - it will in fact exacerbate them.

As for Smoker! At the end of the book, Smoker is in a Smokerish snit about how Sphinx has been given a choice - and maybe I’m misinterpreting it and it’s about Sphinx’s possible ongoing ability to choose between worlds (which I’m on the fence about) - but it’s “a choice I have been denied...[and I] can never forgive him for that.”  For me, it harkened right back to the exact moment you brought up: Smoker acknowledges he has a choice between Sphinx and Black - the House or Not the House - and he chooses Not the House.  Even before that, he laments that if he had been raised here, maybe he could have been part of it.  But that’s just an excuse!  He had all the natural tools at his disposal to learn in the same manner from Sphinx as Sphinx did from Ancient, and he chose to not.  And he said as much!  But doesn’t see it that way! 

It bothers me that the narrative dropped him in the second arc because I feel like some aspects of Smoker’s experience were incomplete and needed to be addressed. The story itself felt a little bit at a loss for direction after dropping its “window into the world” character, so I was not shocked at all when I read that interview you posted where the author confessed she had originally totally cut him after his relevant section.  This is another one of those structure things I was keenly tuned to because I think about this stuff a lot, but: the author’s instinct to cut him was correct. BUT, her instinct to keep him was also correct! Both of these instincts needed to reconciled, and they weren’t, which left a fairly big hole in the thematic cohesiveness between start and finish, to me.

After Pompey’s death, by all lines of reasoning, Smoker should have left the school.  He should have wanted to, he had the resources to, yet he didn’t. Why? That choice was never addressed, and needed to be, in my opinion. This means - if it had been explored - that Smoker had another choice, and did choose the house, but still can’t see that. The author’s eventual ambivalence towards Smoker I think was a mistake born of “either/or” thinking, when “both” was correct. Because of this, the middle of the book lacked compassion towards the skeptic, which undermined the true scope of his tragedy: Smoker is cut off from the world he never knew was his, and will always be missing a piece of himself that he will never be able to identify.

Oh no I think we’re talking about different Old Man!  Not the not-here one, but the one with the clocks who who cropped up out of nowhere to explain to Ralph about Godmother.  The other old guy, the not-here old dude, was perfectly in sync (to me) with the rest of the book. But infiltrating a boarding school for god knows how long so as to do god knows what to finagle an estranged child out of his random inheritance is something Voldemort would do.  This is the only point at which the author chooses to explain anything, then proceeds to do so in an excruciating check list of “This Makes Sense.” To be honest it felt like a (relatable) mistake that her editor should have caught and cut.

As for my immediate and perpetually mounting sense of dread throughout the book, I don’t know that I thought - as in theorized - anything so much as just felt what these kids were feeling.  I didn’t fear the house, but I did fear the cult, and I feared the fear that they all felt about the Outsides.  They seemed profoundly unequipped to face it, and I worried about all these little fuckers! About how they were going to feel and think and survive after school. The graduating class before them embodied the worst of that fear, and I didn’t anticipate, particularly, a repeat, because the dynamic wasn’t there (Blind nipped that one in the bud, thanks I guess), but: we also had the Longest Night to contend with.  

I guess the worst case scenario to me would have been the chaos of the Longest amplified by the stress of graduation, leading to maybe a few murders but mostly just further Emotional Damage for kids who had already taken a lot of emotional damage not just from the cult itself but from having been plopped there in the first place, by an outside world that to be fair is often indifferent to their well being, if not at times outright hostile. Like, I understood the allure of the house and that sense of family and belonging, but the price was too steep. (I felt a lot lot those kids might have been healthier in a standard school.)   

I was relieved when it turned out to be a non-issue - and someone ring the bell for Black because he headed off the worst of it with that bus, damn.  And Red co-opting the other cult for resources was a top tier Moment for me. Kudos to that weirdo.

I didn’t feel the ending to be bitter, but maybe bittersweet, if I had to hedge. That’s probably because since the first page, you know you’re not getting a happy ending, right - like, this house is not going to survive the book, and as we learn more, we find that there is no Narnia or that it’s equally as ugly if not worse than the real world.  The only allure of it was that the kids believed themselves equipped to handle the horrors there.  Only Sphinx says “nah fuck that,” and though it hurt to see Blind hurt by the choice, I felt good about Sphinx having made it - and he having even confirmed (to some extent) that “arms are better than legs,” meaning that he in this world has a harder time of it than some of the others who chose to leave it.  I respected that he wasn’t drawn into this falsehood that he could somehow escape hardship or mundanity.  Literally kids be going over there to best case scenario work in a car wash.  

It’s not that I disliked or didn’t respect the other world, I just felt that the cult surrounding it sort of manipulated it into something it wasn’t - at least not for everyone.  For Blind, it really was that place, but for Sphinx it wasn’t. I was relieved that he was able to make that choice for himself - that everyone (except Smoker) was able to make their choice with their eyes open and live with it.

And lord, the interpretation of the ending as though Everything Has To Represent Something Else, I’m sorry but it’s lazy. It’s facile pseudo-intellectualism.  The book is not an allegory, and to pretend that it is in order to reassure yourself that you Get It and that you’re Smart and Deep does a profound disservice to the nearly twenty years of effort that went into crafting this thing.  So, luckily I have not personally read anything to that effect or I would be frothing at the mouth.  

Lololololol I completely forgot about Godmother!! I mean, I didn’t forget. But I was sort of like “huh. Okay,” when it came to her bizarre hatred for her grandchild and the matter of his inheritance. I do think the former principal choosing to stay is like a great unhinged moment, but yes, it didn’t need to be so expository and I think your point is well made that that aspect doesn’t fit.

I find it super interesting that you were like “this is a cult, straight up”! I don’t think you are wrong but I also think I had the immediate sense of simply accepting that the various rituals and rules these kids all lived by were just. More a sort of collective choice, less a thing imposed on them by shutting down their choices. If that makes sense. It reminded me a little of The Egypt Game, which I haven’t read in a long time but which I remember having that element of “reality is what we say it is and we make it together.” and then that isn’t necessarily wrong, even if it was wrong in The Egypt Game.

On the point that they might have been better in a standard school — I think there is a stark throwaway line that even says some of the kids are there for no reason in particular, just because their parents don’t want them. Which I thought was interesting, since it takes the teeth out of the idea that this is somehow about their disabilities being secretly magic or their communal understanding of the House being a way to make their impairments not matter. Like, this population (with some exceptions) maybe is what you would find in a standard school.

I don’t know that I even read most of the main characters as wanting to escape hardship or mundanity, so much as I read them as being consumed by the communality of it all and terrified of losing that (which actually adds to your cult read), but maybe that will change on re-read. I am not an expert. I flatly do not understand The Longest Night! That entire section turned me into Smoker. Wild shit was happening and attempting to process it on a cognitive level only appeared to make my understanding worse.

I am also glad that Sphinx chose the “real” world, though. I was delighted that he has access to the power of…literally subsuming his consciousness into those around him? Becoming other people and letting them become him? Embodying the whole borg-mindset of the House, basically. And he seems horrified by it! Even though arguably the House loves him. He and Blind (and maybe Noble) seem to be some of its strange elect.

Though at the end it seems like maybe he sometimes goes to the underside, so who knows. We don’t! Which I appreciate. And that was my typo above — I did mean bittersweet!

Also, I think I read Blind and Rat as setting Black up to drive the bus away with those who choose to leave but I actually cannot for the life of me remember why I think that and it truly might be based on nothing, lol. I do like Black. I feel that he’s genuinely not loved by the House, by the entity of the House, not just the people in it, and I love an unloved character.

“Best case scenario work in a car wash” made me HOWL!!!

I also still don’t get the underside world and I think I’m not supposed to, but I am tickled by how some kids go there to become powerful woods monsters and some to work in a diner and some people there get de-aged and some people are employed as those people’s live-in nannies and some must find their true selves as world-crossing guides and some are kidnapped and forced to work as slaves. I guess this is where the Maggie and Milly came in for me. Your experience is shaped by where you are emotionally and what you put in, that sort of thing. Which explains why Noble just sort of puttered around as an underemployed teenager for much of his initial time there, because that is exactly what he is.

One thing I think I like about the book is that for all its oddities and for the level of unreality it flirts with, none of it seems to be an allegory. These events are all happening! They’re just not events that fit in your head unless you agree to believe they do.

lol yeah after the “old man” confusion I suspected you maybe wrote that part off to the point of forgetting it, since it was so incongruous and the details exposited had very little bearing on the rest of the story. It’s only because I’ve done that - made that error of judgement so many times myself while trying to write through something the rational part of my brain has convinced me is a plot hole - that in that moment the author’s hand was very visible, which left a bigger impression on me out of commiseration.

I think my reading of it as a cult was elevated because for a very long time - probably the majority of the book - I wasn’t convinced there was any element of fantasy to the story at all.  All of it, up until a certain point, could have been “explained” by a home-grown and profoundly spiritual subculture. This wasn’t out of skepticism, either; I anticipated fantasy, but what I was getting was a cross between Lord of the Flies, Pan’s Labyrinth, and my vague understanding of the Lakota vision quest as put forth in Black Elk Speaks. 

I fully agree that it was a collective choice that determined the “laws” of this subculture, but at the same time, those choices were informed by choices from the generations before them: inherited moreso than imposed.  And I was keenly wary of how this handed down system of beliefs reinforced alienation and fear of the Outsides.  It seemed to me that, stripping away all elements of the fantastic and even removing the physical/visual markers of “different,” any group of average children inserted into such an environment at an impressionable age would develop tribalistic anxiety about the Outside world. In fact,  all throughout much of the first half of the book I was struck by the idea of how true it was about the experience of even the standard American education system: how there are these systems and “laws” in place, and it’s important, and real, and it’s your entire world for years on end - and then you graduate and never think about it ever again.  That full, consuming immersion in the only world you really know - and you don’t have the experience and perspective to question it at all.  

I’m not trying to liken high school to a cult, but I could see how easy it would be, in an environment significantly more isolated, and with significantly more valid cause to feel rejected by the “outside world,” to fall into the embrace of an all-consuming subculture.  But the standard American school system teaches you to anticipate life beyond school, while the sub-culture of the House notoriously circle-jerked itself into a fatal frenzy last graduation. Symbolically, it isn’t just the Outsides and apathy that destroyed the house. The “maintenance” that wasn’t performed was also spiritual maintenance on the governing system of collective thought.  Blind and Sphinx’s class had to be the last class, because the subculture, which maybe originally had been everything it still is to Tabaqui, had deteriorated to a condition that can’t be accepted in this world: mass suicide, violence, and massacre.  It was no longer a good place, and it did have to go.

As for escaping hardship or mundanity, that may have just been my way of putting names to their unnamed fear of the Outsides, but it starts to get murky when it comes to the kids who have physical disabilities in this world but not the other.  I think that there is some aspect that can’t be totally overlooked, of choosing an able-bodied life in a world arguably more horrible and dangerous, vs a disabled life in a world that is mostly indifferent but “would rather they not exist at all.” Blind calling Sphinx an “armless cripple” does speak to some level of escapism from mundane horrors of Reality. This isn’t all of it - I think some of them may feel more fully themselves there.  But I think I would have to reread it in order to get a more coherent thought going on that.  At the moment, when I ask “why choose the other world?” as opposed to “choose to not choose Reality,” I don’t have a whole lot of perspective.  I think that that’s possibly the conundrum Sphinx faced as well.  “why are you making this choice?” For Blind it makes sense; his immersion was complete and he even could not exist in This World anymore, but for the others - for himself - I think he didn’t have a good reason to choose it beyond “arms.” Before being subsumed by the great subconscious of the Other Side, he wanted to experience what it meant to be himself, separate from it.

Anyway, I can feel my thought process unravelling in that last paragraph lol.  

I’ve been loosely exploring what it means to interpret those kids as having “drunk the kool-aid” in its most original sense.  That for al intents and purposes, from the point of view of Reality, they may as well be dead, having chosen the “next life” over this one.  Then I wondered how much of that would track in a different genre; if the “other world” was literally another world in a galaxy far far away, and to get there you had to board a spaceship traveling at the speed of light.  Would people still read that allegorically?  At the end of Lord of the Rings, when Frodo boards the ship for the west, no one reads that as suicide. Why would you? So is it the murkiness of the Other World that lends itself to that reading; wanting to pin it down and examine it, and, failing that endeavor, writing it off as a metaphor?  Not even Smoker is so prosaic.

(On the subject of Smoker, though I think in some ways the narrative was unfair to him for a vast section of the story, I love how his repressed bitterness regarding the Choice Sphinx had was so Smoker.  He did have a choice and acknowledged it literally! And then forgot he did that and got bitter about it!)

Oh no I think we’re talking about different Old Man!  Not the not-here one, but the one with the clocks who who cropped up out of nowhere to explain to Ralph about Godmother.  The other old guy, the not-here old dude, was perfectly in sync (to me) with the rest of the book. But infiltrating a boarding school for god knows how long so as to do god knows what to finagle an estranged child out of his random inheritance is something Voldemort would do.  This is the only point at which the author chooses to explain anything, then proceeds to do so in an excruciating check list of “This Makes Sense.” To be honest it felt like a (relatable) mistake that her editor should have caught and cut.

As for my immediate and perpetually mounting sense of dread throughout the book, I don’t know that I thought - as in theorized - anything so much as just felt what these kids were feeling.  I didn’t fear the house, but I did fear the cult, and I feared the fear that they all felt about the Outsides.  They seemed profoundly unequipped to face it, and I worried about all these little fuckers! About how they were going to feel and think and survive after school. The graduating class before them embodied the worst of that fear, and I didn’t anticipate, particularly, a repeat, because the dynamic wasn’t there (Blind nipped that one in the bud, thanks I guess), but: we also had the Longest Night to contend with.  

I guess the worst case scenario to me would have been the chaos of the Longest amplified by the stress of graduation, leading to maybe a few murders but mostly just further Emotional Damage for kids who had already taken a lot of emotional damage not just from the cult itself but from having been plopped there in the first place, by an outside world that to be fair is often indifferent to their well being, if not at times outright hostile. Like, I understood the allure of the house and that sense of family and belonging, but the price was too steep. (I felt a lot lot those kids might have been healthier in a standard school.)   

I was relieved when it turned out to be a non-issue - and someone ring the bell for Black because he headed off the worst of it with that bus, damn.  And Red co-opting the other cult for resources was a top tier Moment for me. Kudos to that weirdo.

I didn’t feel the ending to be bitter, but maybe bittersweet, if I had to hedge. That’s probably because since the first page, you know you’re not getting a happy ending, right - like, this house is not going to survive the book, and as we learn more, we find that there is no Narnia or that it’s equally as ugly if not worse than the real world.  The only allure of it was that the kids believed themselves equipped to handle the horrors there.  Only Sphinx says “nah fuck that,” and though it hurt to see Blind hurt by the choice, I felt good about Sphinx having made it - and he having even confirmed (to some extent) that “arms are better than legs,” meaning that he in this world has a harder time of it than some of the others who chose to leave it.  I respected that he wasn’t drawn into this falsehood that he could somehow escape hardship or mundanity.  Literally kids be going over there to best case scenario work in a car wash.  

It’s not that I disliked or didn’t respect the other world, I just felt that the cult surrounding it sort of manipulated it into something it wasn’t - at least not for everyone.  For Blind, it really was that place, but for Sphinx it wasn’t. I was relieved that he was able to make that choice for himself - that everyone (except Smoker) was able to make their choice with their eyes open and live with it.

And lord, the interpretation of the ending as though Everything Has To Represent Something Else, I’m sorry but it’s lazy. It’s facile pseudo-intellectualism.  The book is not an allegory, and to pretend that it is in order to reassure yourself that you Get It and that you’re Smart and Deep does a profound disservice to the nearly twenty years of effort that went into crafting this thing.  So, luckily I have not personally read anything to that effect or I would be frothing at the mouth.  

Pensioner sets off on 600-mile pony trek with pet dog in saddlebag

Jane Dotchin, 80, has been making the unusual journey from Northumberland to the Highlands since 1972. (Story from STV News)

An 80-year-old woman who wears an eyepatch is on an annual trek with her pony from England to the Highlands – on a seven-week adventure which began in 1972.

Jane Dotchin packs her saddlebags onto her trusty pony’s back every year, and heads to the hills from her home near Hexham, Northumberland, on an epic 600-mile trek to Inverness, covering between 15 and 20 miles a day.

She set off on August 31 with her steed, Diamond, aged 13, and her disabled Jack Russell named Dinky for company, from the off-grid smallholding where she lives.

She carries everything she needs including her tent, food and just a few belongings – and despite wearing an eyepatch is determined to continue as long as she can.

Ms Dotchin said: “My mother would look after my other ponies but she wasn’t that keen on looking after my Halfinger stallion, so I rode him down to Somerset to see a friend, which is about 300 miles.

“It was a bit of a hard slog, but it was good.”

After that initial journey, she caught the taste for the open road and travelled to visit friends near Fort Augustus, near Loch Ness, every autumn since.

The journey takes around seven weeks depending on weather and Ms Dotchin tries to stop off to see people she has met over the years.

She said: “I refuse to go slogging on through pouring wet rain.

“There are a few different routes I can take depending on the weather.

“I don’t want to go over hilltops in foul weather, but I work it out on the way.

“I don’t bother with maps, I just keep to the routes I know.

“It is nice to go and see [people] again – I ring them up in the morning to say I’m going to be there in the evening.

“I don’t warn them too far in advance, because if the weather suddenly changes or I decide to stop early then they can be left wondering where I’ve got to.”

Disabled Jack Russell Dinky, who has deformed front legs, travels in a saddle bag.

Ms Dotchin said: “She manages fine, when there is a nice grassy track she gets out and has a run, but she doesn’t like stoney ground but she is a nice hot water bottle for me in the tent.”

She said: “I asked for something good and solid in my old age and he got me a cob from Ireland. I struggle to get on her half the time, but otherwise I manage fine.”

Her diet consists of porridge oats, oatcakes and cheese which is bought at local shops.

She prefers to make porridge with milk, but water will suffice.

Ms Dotchin added: “You can always boil it from a stream.”

Her bathroom habits are equally DIY, and she said: “I dig a hole.”

Ms Dotchin is devastated by the littering she has seen over the years and said Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, is somewhere she finds “shameful” due to the amount of rubbish.

She said: “It’s appalling, in particular single used barbecues which are left lying all over the place.

“Cumbernauld is the fly-tipping capital of Britain.

“There are some lovely people there who let me camp, but some of it is so disgusting and shameful.”

Campervans on single track roads have also become a more persistent problem.

She said: “Drivers just didn’t seem to know how wide they were, I was forever just about getting swept off the roads by them.”

The right to roam has helped with countryside access, but she said: “There are still some locked gates or little side gates that you can’t get a horse with packs on through.”

For emergencies she carries an old mobile phone as the battery lasts six weeks.

Ms Dotchin said: “I keep it switched off and just ring out to ring up landowners to get gates unlocked or to warn people when I’m coming but sometimes the trouble is getting a signal.”

During the foot and mouth crisis in 2001 she went on bicycle instead.

She said: “I covered many more miles with the dog in a pannier but it was not the same, I missed my horse.”

In recognition of her independent spirit, and many years of long distance trekking, she received The British Horse Society lifetime achievement award last year, which she said was “a bit of a surprise.”

During her travels she witnesses rutting deer and stags fighting in the autumn, and foxes.

She said: “There is always something interesting happening and there is never a dull moment.

“I will probably be stopped one of these days.”

“In my opinion, camp is simply a matter of doing things as if you are doing them. Diving into a swimming pool? Throw your arms heavenward and give it the full Esther Williams treatment. When you dive into a pool as if you are diving into a pool, as opposed to executing an earnest quotidian plop, the result is magical—that pool is transformed from a grody Band Aid–strewn chlorine bath into a veritable LAGOON! Smoking a cigarette? Perform the action as if you are a French existentialist.” — Simon Doonan, Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock & Loving Lou Reed

that it’s been compared to harry potter is absolutely mind boggling. ngl if I had read the description on amazon without your rec I would not have touched this with a ten foot pole. I’m looking forward to reading your commentary on it as well.  (I’ve been avoiding it aside from the initial posts not because of spoilers (which I’ve never cared about) but because the book gives the sense that you want to go into it as naked as possible.)

Good call — you do want to go in as naked as possible! I also don’t know that my commentary will be that illuminating lmao.

The Harry Potter comparison makes no sense! It does make me wish I had a career in book marketing. When you see the things they get away with!! It makes me envious.

If I had to market art and media to people I too would just go apeshit. I’d be like: “Lord of the Flies is for those who have been longing for an island-bound Winnie the Pooh,” “in the simple interaction of child and monster, Pan’s Labyrinth recalls Sesame Street,” “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is above all a camp novel, and succeeds in echoing that other great camp novel: Babysitter’s Club Super Special #7, Summer Vacation.”

Right?? Like, "magical boarding school" could not possibly have been what they took away from this. Truly one of the takes of all time.