The Queue: In The Blood

Since Matt didn’t give me an earworm yesterday, I was forced to go my own way. In this case, someone reminded me that Hades exists, so I listened to that OST a whole lot. I’m just a sucker for modern electric instruments mixed with a full orchestra, and I’m not at all sorry.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and you can run all you like from the place you belong, but it’s always there, it’s in the air, it’s in the blood.

My impression — and I get the feeling we’ll dig more into this as we learn more through this patch — is that this was an experimental starting ground, not so much a fully realized factory for all of creation. This is a primordial soup where the First Ones designed the initial universe and just kinda did whatever they fancied. Of course, through things like the Curse of Flesh, through many millennia, that vision was altered, but there still seems to be a kind of internal logical consistency to the creations. They just happened to leave it on when they left the house, so to speak. And that, to me raises a whole lot of questions. I wouldn’t expect The First Ones to just kinda flake out and forget something like that.

That said, equipped with a creation engine and infinite time, I’d definitely repeatedly make cute robots to try to make the objectively cutest robot. What else are you going to do with those things, make useful stuff? Pfft.

First, I may have chosen this question solely to link Kameron Hurley’s Hugo-winning essay, “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle, and Slaves’ Narrative.” It’s an excellent starting point for thinking more critically about the media we consume, particularly fantasy fiction, which can play heavily into both themes of battles and conquest and tropes repeated through the genre. It always equally baffles and amuses me when authors go to all the trouble of worldbuilding intricate systems of magic and fanciful creatures, but the female love interest is a delicate flower in need of constant rescue.

But Hurley’s essay goes even further, and in some ways ties back into the LeGuin essay as well. The works we see surviving today, both fiction and non-fiction, were created by people, and often those authors were objectively terrible examples of humanity even in their own time, with ideas which are inextricable from their existing works. When you learn about some of Rudyard Kipling’s other works, for example, many of of them were mercilessly lampooned by his contemporaries at the time for being incredibly racist. However, because The Jungle Book is the work that usually survives, its Imperialist subtext isn’t always obvious at first blush. Looking into the motivations of both historic and current figures for writing these works — and also their editors for publishing it — can be a really edifying practice when you start to really consider the content you’re consuming, both for arts and culture and also just the narrative thread of history itself.

My experience with Amazon is that if you start reading a particular genre, eventually the algorithm’ll begin to serve you ads for smut in that genre. No, it doesn’t matter what the genre is, but it goes double if you happen to enjoy a particular subgenre of fantasy, or especially monster type. I guess it’s because that’s what eventually sells in that category, but still, it’s kind of jarring to read a few nonfiction books about Henry VIII and then all of a sudden you’re seeing ads about some dude with six wives.

Blame the people who see the ads, buy it, and don’t have the decency to use their burner account.