Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.04: Garden of Bones

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State of Play
The Choir goes off The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister
The Direwolf, Catelyn Stark
Dragons of Qarth: Daenerys Targaryen
The Mockingbird, Petyr Baelish
Bears of Qarth: Joran Mormont
Lions of Harrenhal: Tywyn Lannister
The Ship, Davos Seaworth
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
The Direwolf, Robb Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Harrenhal: Arya Stark
The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
The Rose, Margery Tyrell
Chains of King’s landing: Bronn
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
Pyke is desolate. Winterfell is abandoned. The Wall is unmanned. 
The episode is in twelve parts. The first is six minutes long and is set at a Lannister camp. The first image is an establishing shot of the camp. 
The second is seven minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Robb to Sansa Stark. 
The third is four minutes long and is in Renly Baratheon’s camp. The transition is by sound, from Daisy’s screams to a horse whinnying. 
The fourth is one minute long and is set in the Red Waste outside Qarth. The transition is by hard cut, from Littlefinger to an establishing shot of the Red Waste.
The fifth is two minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Daenerys to a discussion of how Harrenhal burnt. 
The sixth is four minutes long and is set in Renly Baratheon’s camp. The transition is by family, from Arya to Catelyn Stark.
The seventh is three minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by family, from Catelyn Stark to Arya.
The eighth is three minutes long and is set outside Renly Baratheon’s camp. The transition is by family, from Arya to Catelyn Stark. 
The ninth is six minutes long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by hard cut, from Renly riding away to the walls of Qarth.
The tenth is two minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by image, from the walls of Qarth to a head being fastened to a spike on the wall of Harrenhal. 
The eleventh is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Tywin to Tyrion and Lancel Lannister.
The twelfth is six minutes long and is set around the two Baratheon camps. The transition is by hard cut, from Lancel to the stag atop Stannis’s ship. The final image is of Mellisandre giving birth to a shadowy riddle whose answer is chess. 
Analysis

Three episodes of buildup based around the magical scraping at the edges of the world pay off in several regards. This is signified straightforwardly by the episode’s structure, which both opens and closes with forces within the War of Five Kings being attacked by amazing and uncanny things. At the top of the episode a Lannister encampment is attacked by a direwolf (and note how, by the time the tale reaches King’s Landing it has been elevated to an act of magic, with the Starks turning into wolves and feasting on the bodies), while at the end Mellisandre gives birth to a shadow. 
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Myriad Universes: Thin Ice

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How well do we really know Commander William Riker?

Conventional fan wisdom certainly seems to think it knows him pretty well. He’s the dashing rogue, the adventurous away team leader, the Casanova space age sex tourist. He’s Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s version of Captain Kirk, and he does all the things we loved seeing Captain Kirk do in the Original Series. Though if this is the reading afforded to him by conventional fandom it must be a relatively recent one: Round about the time Enterprise and the final Next Generation movies were being made, Riker was seen as one half of a double act with Deanna Troi and calling them anything other than lovers fated by destiny to be together forever was unthinkable. And when I was growing up with Star Trek, Riker was joked about and dismissed as the pointless guy who skulks around the bridge barking “Shields up, Red Alert!” once an episode.

None of these, I would submit, manage to adequately convey who Will Riker really is. Obviously Will isn’t useless, so I’m not even going to address that one. The Kirk stuff…Just isn’t true. Not even remotely. yeah, there was probably a little bit of that very early on in the show when the lineage to Will Decker and Star Trek Phase II was the clearest (maybe in episodes like “Justice” and “Angel One”), but any trace of that was gone by mid-season. The only episode I can clearly think of where this is explicitly a theme is “Up the Long Ladder”. Maybe some hints of it in later stories like “The Vengeance Factor” and “First Contact” if you want to argue them that way, but “First Contact” at least strikes me as pretty clearly a subversion of the Captain McGoldenPants trope. As for his relationship with Deanna…I’ll actually come back to that a little later on.

“Thin Ice”, DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual for 1991 (not to mention the final reprint in 1994’s The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation), is a very Riker centric story. It is, actually, precisely the sort of thing that we would call a “Riker Story” were this a TV show episode and what we might imagine Michael Piller’s team would be highly supportive of. But the TV creative team has had a very tough time getting a grasp on precisely who its characters are and it’s just now starting to figure this out: On a good day, we might get something like “Sins of the Father” and “Redemption” for Worf or “Data’s Day” for Data, but we’re just as likely to get “The Loss” or absolutely anything involving Geordi La Forge on an off day. Also, the TV team thinks “Remember Me” and “Night Terrors” are rubbish and praises “Final Mission” to high heaven, so that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Michael Jan Friedman, by contrast, has always had a far more reliably comfortable grasp on his characters.…

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Mother’s Mercy

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In case you missed it, I responded to some more stuff John C. Wright has been saying, and pushed Recursive Occlusion to a wider release as well.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of Meereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of Dorne: Jaime Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
The Dragon, Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Burning Hearts of Winterfell: Stannis Baratheon
Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth
Burning Hearts of the Wall: Melisandre
Snakes of Dorne: Ellaria Sand
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Butterflies of Meereen: Missandei
Swords of Meereen: Daario Noharis
Spiders of Meereen: Varys
Chains of Dorne: Bronn
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Ramsey Snow
Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth
Coins of Braavos: No one
With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont

The episode is in nine parts. The first is three minutes long and is set in the Baratheon camp north of Winterfell. The opening image is of melting icicles.

The second is four minutes long and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis to Jon Snow.

The third is eleven minutes long and is set in Winterfell. It is in sections. The transition is by hard cut, from Jon Snow to an establishing shot of Stannis’s march.

The fourth is six minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by family, from Sansa to Arya Stark.

The fifth is five minutes long and is set in Dorne. The transition is by hard cut, from Arya’s blinded face to an establishing shot of Jaime and company boarding a boat.

The sixth is six minutes long and is set in Meereen. The transition is by family, from a wide shot of Jaime’s boat to Tyrion Lannister.

The seventh is four minutes long and is set in what one assumes is the Dothraki Sea. The transition is by dialogue, from everyone talking about Daenerys to Daenerys.

The eighth is thirteen minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from a wide shot of Dothraki swarming Daenerys to Cersei in her cell.

The ninth is four minutes long and is set on the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Cersei to the elevator at Castle Black. The final image is of Jon Snow, dead in the, well, snow.

Analysis

As a cliffhanger, it’s something of a puzzling one. It is, of course, the biggest cliffhanger from A Dance With Dragons. But the reality of television production is that they cannot actually keep us in suspense as to whether Kit Harrington is in the next season. Of course, there are plausible outcomes here that amount to some version of “recast the role,” including replacing Kit Harrington with an actual lost puppy, but… yeah. Really wondering how that’s going to play.

More broadly, taking “cliffhanger” in the sense of talking about where all the characters are, it’s almost jarring to end up so close to the state of play in the books after a season that has felt this defined by its departures.…

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An Open Letter to John C. Wright

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The tl;dr here is that Recursive Occlusion, my interactive occult overview of Doctor Who, is now available for just $8.99 from Amazon and Amazon UK. An altogether more impish version of this announcement follows:

Dear John C. Wright

I don’t think anybody should murder you. I just thought I’d open with that, since it seems like what passes as courtesy in your depraved sickness of a worldview. 

Also, my name is Philip Sandifer, with an I, and not an O, which I can’t imagine you don’t know, despite the fact that spell it as Sandofer literally every time you write it on Vox Day’s comments thread. You might like to know that my full name is Charles Philip Sandifer, and that my actual schoolyard bullies called me Charles. You know, just in case you want to up your game.

Anyway, I just wanted to respond to a couple of things you’ve said on Vox Day’s comment thread, like where you say of me:

As I suspected, he is not a real pagan, not old-school, but one of these modern post-Nietzsche types who regards the gods as instruments to be used, if not constructed out of his own thinking. He is playing with occultism as a diverting bit of entertainment. To him it is an abortive psychic technology: something he wants to get something out of, not something he wants to serve.
He would not die for Odin or castrate himself for Cybele.

Sir, a real pagan would kick your ass.

Mr. Wright, are you completely out of your skull? I mean, let’s be clear here: you are currently condemning me for not chopping my dick off for an Anatolian mother goddess. This is not a normal thing to fault someone for. I am reasonably confident that, out of seven billion people on this planet, you are literally the only one who, on June 12th, 2015, faulted anybody for not castrating themselves for an Anatolian mother goddess.

That said, I will concede the point, there are essentially no circumstances under which I would castrate myself for Cybele, or, indeed, die for Odin, who’s frankly an egotistical wanker better left to the myths. But I want to get at a larger issue here, because I really think you’re just not understanding me.

Of course occultism is not something I want to serve. The whole reason I hated One Bright Star to Guide Them was the fact that it was a heavy-handed and unsubtle paen to blind obedience of unseen forces you don’t understand. That is literally the entire point of why I started picking a fight with you and your overly vocal god: because I think your valorization of obeying orders whether or not you understand them is morally abhorrent.

So no, my occultism isn’t about unquestioningly serving pagan gods. But given that we both agree that serving pagan gods is a terrible idea (we just disagree about whether unquestioningly serving your god is also one), I’m not sure why you’re framing this as a criticism.
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Even Furiosa

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Further to some objections I’ve had to my description of Mad Max: Fury Road as having reasonably good gender politics.  Trigger and Spoilers, obviously.

What Mad Max: Fury Road does – with its depiction of Furiosa – is to refuse to make violence the exclusive province of men, or to make men the only ones who are any good at it.  (Not unprecedented – but quite good.)  Furiosa gets to do all the trad-masculine things that Max does.  She’s just as good at them as him.  This, apparently, is a big problem for those kinds of insecure, reactionary misogynitwits who drivel on about how women are weaker than men.  According to such douchenozzles, this is just a scientific fact, and it’s not a man’s fault if he just repeats the incontrovertible findings of Science.  In actuality, of course, what such bigoted ninnies are actually doing is regurgitating some half-digested sociobiologistic bullshit.  They then accuse feminists (who control Hollywood in their ideologically distorted, bass-ackwards bizzaro world) of playing a dirty, emasculating trick and oppressing men by spreading the vicious civilisation-eroding lie that not all women need a man to open jars for them.

The thing is, there is a rational kernal to some of these complaints (wait).  The complaint comes as a response to a genuine threat (I said wait).  The genuine threat which is correctly perceived by the bawling manbabies is a threat to their privilege.  You see, when Furiosa beats up some man just as well as Max can (including Max himself), or shoots a gun just as well as Max can, or drives a car just as well as Max can, what is being done is that these traditionally masculine behaviours are being completely detached from masculinity.  And what is being detached from masculinity is violence.  So the threat to male privilege is about as primal as you can get: male privilege is threatened with losing its monopoly on violence.  Given that violence, in one form or another, is at the root of how all systems of oppression function, this could hardly be more threatening (at least within the confines of a mainstream popular movie).

This isn’t some submerged theme in the film that you have to hunt about for.  It’s front and centre.  The violence Furiosa excels at it specifically and explicitly a violent response to a patriarchy which itself openly functions through violence.  Most obviously, there is the implied violence of rape (and kudos to the film for not directly and unnecessarily showing sexual violence).  But there is also the structural violence.  The system is literally patriarchal, in that Imortan Joe’s fertility seems to be inextricably linked to his rulership – either materially or ideologically, or perhaps both.  He rules partly through his family.  It is stated that several members of his ruling elite – and his Imperators (bosses-cum-generals) – are members of his family.  Brothers, etc.  Several are sons.  They all seem ‘disabled’ in some way.  One seems unable to breathe without a mask and oxygen tanks. …

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 1: The Friends of English Magic

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Right, so, here we are; a seven week run of reviews of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that you didn’t even have to pay for on Patreon. That said, the Patreon has taken a couple hits lately  (some very generous backers have had to, for entirely understandable reasons, edit back to merely being… still very generous, actually), and I’m not going to lie, the last month or two has already been a bit tight finances-wise, so I could really use to see the number go in the other direction a bit. So if you can spare a bit, please consider backing. Really, even a little bit helps; you can set a monthly cap so that you’re only tossing in $1 or $2 a month, and it’ll still count towards all the goal totals, and it would be greatly appreciated. 
In any case, thanks very much to the kind folks at BBC America, who have provided me with screeners (I’ve seen the first three episodes at present), thus enabling these reviews to go up as soon as the episodes air. Or, in this case, early, since this episode got released on YouTube a few days ago, so there’s no embargo on reviews. Or, if you prefer to watch it on television, it’s on BBC America at 10:00 Eastern tonight.
So, for those unaware, this is the BBC-produced adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s novel of the same name, in seven episodes, all written by Peter Harness (of Kill the Moon fame) and directed by Toby Haynes (of The Pandorica Opens through The Day of the Moon fame). The tl;dr is “this is really quite good and worth following,” which isn’t really a surprise given the pedigree of everyone involved. As for this specific episode…
It is possibly just my own perception, but it feels as though the first episode, as a televisual institution, is an increasingly leisurely affair. This is slightly odd. Ratings-wise, first episodes are still the boffo high points of series. But of course, it is finales where the actual dramatic fireworks go, and the default style of television, especially arc-based prestige television, has become a slow burn towards a fiery and grandiose conclusion.
One can only imagine how much this frustrates the people responsible for publicity on television shows these days. I mean, it’s certainly not that “The Friends of English Magic” is a bad episode of television. It’s quite good and moves at a nice speed through what is, let’s be honest, a tremendous amount of exposition. But it lacks any moment that seals the deal, emphatically communicating what the pleasures of this show are going to be. Instead we have something more like a prologue to a show that seems likely to be interesting at some future point.
Much of this, it must be said, is inherited from Susanna Clarke’s book, which I’ve only read part of, but which is, especially in the opening sections, which take great care to establish the sense of a larger world, digressing regularly into expository footnotes about the history of English magic.
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John C. Wright Has Just Advocated For My Murder

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In the comments over at Vox Day’s blog, John C. Wright posted the following:

The first line is Wright quoting a previous post of mine. The second paragraph is him advocating for my murder. Because he disagrees with my definition of mysticism.

I am, to be clear, not particularly scared by this. I do not imagine that John C. Wright will now be hiding in my bushes, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. This is empty, vicious rhetoric of the sort that Day and Wright specialize in – sound and fury that, while not exactly signifying nothing, is still clearly told by an idiot. Hell, if I were a woman blogging about the stuff I blog about I’d get half a dozen far worse threats a day. The threat itself is not a big deal.

My goal has never been to make the very obvious point that Vox Day and John C. Wright are absolutely terrible human beings. If that’s not obvious to you, frankly, you’re beyond hope. But I have long been interested in demonstrating the depth and nature of their evil, which goes far beyond the most superficial and obvious horrors of what they say.

This is, after all, the man who wrote a story about how one must obey the dictates of god (or at least the dictates of god as relayed by a talking cat) whether or not one understands them or believes them to be right. This is a man who believes in the importance of blind and fanatical obedience. And his god’s dictate is apparently that people like me should be murdered because we use definitions of words differently than him.

So when I say that I believe the god he worships to be a monstrous, vicious tyrant that is nothing more than his own prejudices and hatreds projected into metaphysical grandeur, this is why. This is the vision the Sad and Rabid Puppies exist to advance. This is their true face. Not the constant spew of racist, sexist, and homophobic drivel. Not the Twitter bullying of anyone who disagrees with them. Not the bullshit campaign to fire Irene Gallo for a minor infelicity of phrasing on her personal Facebook page. This: a world in which god demands that anyone who doesn’t think like them be put to death.

In which case perhaps the saddest thing about them is that I don’t have anything to fear. Nobody is going to be showing up on my doorstep with a knife. They serve a mad tyrant who apparently demands that people like me be killed, and yet all they’re willing to do in his name is bitch on the Internet and fuck with literary awards.

We should thank God that such evil should also be so utterly pathetic.…

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Our Skullbabies (The Last War in Albion Part 100: Girls)

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This is the first of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Essentially the entire early career of Alan Moore was covered, save for one work.

“Our skullbabies will always tight the day for peoplekind.” – Alan Moore, Crossed +100

Figure 794: The debut of Halo Jones.
This is The Ballad of Halo Jones, an ongoing strip for 2000 AD published in three separate runs. The first, published as Book One, ran for three months beginning in July of 1984, one month after Moore ceased work on Captain Britain, one before he ceased on Marvelman for Warrior, and alongside the publication of Swamp Thing #29, the infamous zombie incest rape issue. The second launched in February of 1985, the same month that Moore began work on American Flagg and that Warrior ended, and again ran for three months. And the third, Book Three, began in January of 1986, one month after Moore’s tie-in issue to Crisis on Infinite Earths and one month before Miracleman commenced in the US, running until April, two months before Watchmen debuted. 
The strip’s existence marks an obvious and in many regards overdue shift in Moore’s status within IPC’s roster of 2000 AD writers. Of the UK comics companies with which Moore worked, IPC was the last to give him an ongoing, waiting until after he was already writing Captain Britain and winning massive acclaim for his work in Warrior, and even then offering him nothing more interesting than “can you write us an E.T. ripoff,” an unpromising request that Moore shaped into the better-than-you’d-expect Skizz, alongside artist Jim Baikie, one of the many eternal journeymen of British comics. Subsequently, one of his Time Twisters, “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth,” done with frequent collaborator Alan Davis, got expanded to a series of recurring stories. But once Moore started making waves in the US market IPC, mindful of how it had lost both Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons to DC, finally deigned to offer him a relatively free hand to create a concept of his own design.
Figure 795: Call me Kenneth as Jack Kirby
pastiche. (Written by John Wagner, art
by Ian Gibson, from 2000 AD #17, 1977)
Teaming with Moore for the new strip was Ian Gibson, who had worked with Moore on his early Future Shock “Grawks Bearing Gifts.” Gibson’s style was distinctive, mixing a cartoonish and exaggerated sense of figure and facial structure with dense line work. The result was particularly well-suited to humor strips, and indeed, prior to The Ballad of Halo Jones Gibson was most associated with the ongoing Sam Slade, Robo-Hunter strip, chronicling the adventures of a humorously taciturn bounty hunter on the trail of various robots.
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Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 5: Homecoming

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It’s not an epic conclusion to The Star Lost, nor is it an unexpected one. The ship works. Wesley figures out how to pilot it. Worf and Darios bring everyone home, even the “hostiles”. There’s a heartfelt reunion, and the family is “once again whole”. There is, you could argue, a teeny bit of playing for time and space as the ship travels so fast the crew ends up in Klingon territory, unable to communicate their intent and with their engines about to overload. Of course, the Enterprise happens to be the nearest Federation starship and is called in to investigate at the request of the Klingon High Command. But this is a serial, and serials end up getting stretched. It’s fine. It works.

But as we’ve been learning over the past few months, it’s not the plot itself, epic or otherwise, that’s what’s important here. In fact, The Star Lost seems to tacitly play against our assumption that it is-“Homecoming” opens up with the destruction of Lanatos by comet impact. Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher console the Lanatosian governor, who’s still sore about their decision to bring along the Skriiti instead of the Lanatosian monuments. Beverly says that “Planets are balls of mud – things. They can be replaced. When a person is gone, he’s gone forever”. And it’s here I might start to disagree a little bit with the story’s broad-strokes ethics. I get the sentiment Friedman is trying to go for, but from an animist perspective that’s simply an indefensible argument. Land, and “land” can come in many different forms, has life energy and we are all bound to it in some way. You could argue the book tries to hedge against this with the governor’s rebuttal, but he’s a racist and not at all sympathetic.

It’s not a huge issue and I’m surely nitpicking, but it’s not something my perspective allows me to let slide.

That aside, what’s interesting to me is that in any given TV episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that scene on the bridge with Jean-Luc, Beverly and the Lanatosian governor would have been the *conclusion* to the story; the denouement. Here though, it’s just the lead-in and the meat of “Homecoming” is still to come (of course it is, as the Lanatosian stuff is and always has been a secondary story thread). That says something about not just the scope of the story we’ve been watching unfold for the past few months, but also where its heart is. One thing I really love about this issue from this point is where it places its little cliffhanger beats: As soon as the Lanatosian mess is resolved, Deanna Troi politely reminds Captain Picard to promote Data and Burke, the relief tactical officer who has been covering for Worf since the disappearance of the Albert Einstein. He’s interrupted when he tries to do this by the reveal of the plot twist with the Klingons and this is addressed at several points during the story.…

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