10.09

He wakes up in a room covered in shitty sixteen year old poetry.

On one closet door was scrawled fate decides. On the other, it said until challenged by the fated. Up and down the door I could see the words desperate / relentless / condemned / empowered.

So, Lena’s room.

She looked back at me, and I curled my hand around hers until I was holding it in mine. A random crack in the old plaster in the corner behind her seemed to grow, until it curled its way across the ceiling, circled the frosted chandelier, and swirled its way back down. It looked like a heart. A giant, looping, girly heart had just appeared in the cracking plaster of her bedroom ceiling.

I actually quite like the idea of magic people just doing stuff to the world by virtue of existing, but it’s so lackluster and obvious here that it’s just filler to me.

I’m a whole storm system, out of control.

Hello POV issues!

He’s been constantly referring to her as Hurricane Lena, and apparently independently she’s adopted the exact same metaphor. Metaphors should be chosen to reflect the character’s viewpoint.

Most Casters can control their gifts by the time they’re my age, but half the time it feels more like mine control me.”

It’s cuz you’re a girl.

She explains that everyone gets stuff like telekinesis, but mostly it’s more individualized. Her aunt “reads time” which means she sees a place as it is today and as it was ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago, at the same time. Kind of like when we touch the locket. That’s why she’s always so confused. She never knows exactly when or even where she is.” which does indeed seem like a shitty power. Especially if it’s literally seeing it five ways each a decade apart.

“Ridley’s a Siren. Her gift is the Power of Persuasion. that apparently is only a thing for women because that sure is a gendered term for it right there now isn’t it. Lena says that Ridley can tell someone to jump off a cliff and they’d do it, to which he immediately denies it.

“You would. You’d have to. A Mortal man is no match for a Siren.”

That’s right, the other capital letters getting everywhere wasn’t enough, now being mortal’s worthy of it too. There doesn’t seem to be any sign they’re not just as mortal either – Ridley has three siblings all around the same age, so if they’re breeding at that rate and immortal, the planet would’ve collapsed under the weight of them long ago. Pretty Suit also seems to have had a father who died at the usual time and is expecting his own death at some point.

But anyway the point is he’s special too, and although he’s only saying this for bullshit reasons (I searched her eyes for some kind of sign that maybe she was feeling the same way I was. “You can’t jump off a cliff when you’ve already fallen off a bigger one.”) it’s presumably actually true because he kept secret the dream connection. So even in a story about some super powered witch, the mundane boyfriend isn’t actually mundane.

“So what’s Reece’s superpower?”
“She’s a Sybil, she reads faces.

Again with the gendered names!

“Larkin’s an Illusionist. It’s like a Shifter. But Uncle Barclay’s the only Shifter in the family.”

Hey look, the boys have gender neutral terms for their powers.

“Larkin can Spellcast, or make anything look like anything he wants, for a spell—people, things, places. He creates illusions, but they’re not real. Uncle Barclay can Shiftcast, which means he can actually change any object into another object, for as long as he wants.”

So basically Larkin has the shit version of the power.

Also hey, Barclay, science would really like it if you could get your lazy ass over there and help them out with some stuff.

She adds that her grandmother says this is a matter of the powers being “too close” which happens in families. She adds that They’re too much alike, so they’re always fighting. but I’m not sure if that’s what her grandmother meant when she implied it was a bad thing to have people of similar ability around each other.

Ryan’s power is unknown because she’s too young, and Pretty Suit is just… Uncle Macon. There’s nothing Uncle Macon can’t do, or wouldn’t do for me. I spent a lot of time with him growing up.” that somehow no one in town ever noticed. But okay, so you’ve outlined the rules of magic and then a few sentences later explained that the other major magic user doesn’t even follow those.

“I’m a Natural. At least Uncle Macon and Aunt Del think I am.” A Natural. I was relieved. It didn’t sound as bad as a Siren.

Nothing about Sirens sounds bad except the judgemental title. Being super persuasive isn’t inherently evil, it’s all about what you use your power for. I mean, hot people are generally more persuasive just for that reason than other people, you don’t think oh who am I kidding that was the real reason the book went on about how hot she was in the first place wasn’t it?

Anyway, a Natural is just the term for overpowered. Their ability is to have a lot more abilities than others.

More. I wasn’t sure how I felt about more. Less, I could have handled less. Less would’ve been good.

Yes, that’s always what the response is when it’s a woman with power. Edward starts going on about how he’s a vampire uberman, and it’s all DO ME NOW but Lena is even awesomer than most awesome people and it’s all oh no if only you sucked instead!

“But as you saw tonight, I don’t even know what I can do.” She picked at the quilt between us, nervous. I pulled on her hand until she was lying on the bed next to me, propped up on one elbow.
“I don’t care about any of that. I like you just the way you are.”

You literally just thought Less would’ve been good. you little fuck.

She then explains that in her family, no one knows their birth name until they’re sixteen, because they are hardcore Homestuck fans. No, really, it’s not a magic user thing in general, no one else does it but them so that’s the only possible explanation. Also she knows nothing about her dead parents but that supposedly it was an accident (named Voldemort) and there’s no graves she’s ever seen.

“And that monster downstairs, that—witch, who almost killed you? Believe it or not, she used to be my best friend. Ridley and I grew up together living with my gramma.

It’s really unclear exactly what that almost killing involved. He seemed to be generally trapped by her power, but honestly it kind of looked like he was being collateral damage to whatever force was trying to hurt her in the first place.

Also stop fucking saying that, you just got through witch being a dumb name but now that there’s an evil women that all flies out the window, cackling, on a broom. If she’s a monster, call her a monster.

In my family, you don’t live with your parents. It’s too dangerous.”

Because of the too-close magic thing doing something bad?

“Ridley and I were like sisters. We slept in the same room and we were home-schooled together. When we moved to Virginia, we convinced my gramma to let us to go to a regular school.

So this went badly. Also, Lena was lying about having been to lots of schools and realizing there’s no point in trying to fit in, she’s apparently only been to one.

“Ridley started acting strange, and then the same guys who had ignored her started following her everywhere, waiting for her after school, fighting over who would walk her home.”
“Yeah, well. Some girls are just like that.”
“Ridley isn’t some girl. I told you, she’s a Siren. She could make people do things, things they wouldn’t normally want to do. And those boys were jumping off the cliff, one by one.”

That’s metaphorically, mind you. In the literal sense it doesn’t seem anything at all happened to the boys beyond the fighting over her. This is not a good use of her power, but with all the emphasis on cliff jumping, I was expecting to see her getting revenge on the bullies by actually harming them.

Also, why only boys? He does make a reference to the power getting used on her little sister, so it’s not like it actually only works on guys, it’s just apparently only used on them because ???

“The night before Ridley’s sixteenth birthday, I followed her to the train station. She was scared out of her mind. She said she could tell she was going Dark, and she had to get away before she hurt someone she loved. Before she hurt me. I’m the only person Ridley ever really loved.

So we can add lesbian subtext to our list of evil things, right next to hot girls and the Union. (This also doesn’t seem right – her hurt at her family’s general response to her, her anger that her beloved uncle was snubbing her for Lena, and her scene with her little sister suggest she did care about all of them.)

Anyway, so, it seems being a good enough person to want to protect others doesn’t prevent you from going dark, and apparently once you do it eats your mind and makes you hurt people. Does going light produce a similar mind eating? I’m also not seeing anything from Ridley that can’t be explained by being hated and feared by family she used to care about.

“In my family, when you turn sixteen, you’re Claimed. Your fate is chosen for you, and you become Light, like Aunt Del and Reece, or you become Dark, like Ridley. Dark or Light, Black or White. There’s no gray in my family. We can’t choose, and we can’t undo it once we’re Claimed.”
“What do you mean, you can’t choose?”
“We can’t decide if we want to be Light or Dark, good or evil, like Mortals and other Casters can. In my family, there’s no free will. It’s decided for us, on our sixteenth birthday.”

Okay this is getting into Calvinist bullshit. Ridley was doing bad things and seemed aware that she had gone down the wrong path and that’s why she would end up dark. She then further confirmed that this is how it works, or at least her understanding of it, by saying that the fact Lena’s breaking windows and stuff means Lena will end up dark too. Getting your allegiance locked in based on who you were at the moment of your sixteenth birthday is pretty rough, and if it’s true then you don’t have any choice after that point but there’s no sign here you don’t get the initial choice.

And given that, it’s unclear why they let their kids do stuff that stresses them. Lena shouldn’t be allowed within a thousand feet of a school or other kids given that apparently being around dickish sixteen year olds is what drove Ridley around the bend. And this can’t be a surprise so they really should have yanked both girls from school as soon as there was trouble, especially when they were already homeschooling and the school thing was a new thing they were just trying out.

(Also, what happens if you just dope them up at the last minute so they’re full of love for all humankind when the magic number hits?)

Also, my inbreeding joke is sounding less like a joke by the minute. Everyone in their family is a castor all of whom have the exact same sixteen-claiming thing going on, even though that doesn’t even happen to other castors. So either marrying a non-fucked-up castor from another family does nothing or they’re all marrying cousins. (…and the way it’s talked about sure makes it sound like it’s something that applies to all her current extended family, even though half the married adults should be from other families…) I mean, I guess this could just be a family line curse, but in that case the other castors should be shunning them because if this hits anyone of their blood, no matter how dilute, then if other castors marry in it just means eventually all castors end up like this. In fact, this seems like a pretty decent reason to go on an outright crusade against them – their blood is both tainted and infectious.

Anyway, this and not the similar powers thing is why they don’t live with their parents.

if a Caster went Dark, they were supposed to leave their home and their family, for obvious reasons.

Note we still have not been told what the actual light/dark thing amounts to.

Also, maybe they’re so nasty because as soon as they were picked, they were forced to leave their home and family. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that doesn’t usually make people very charitable.

But anyway, a few generations ago someone didn’t do that and kept her daughter in the hopes she could “fight” it and again, the book still hasn’t explained what being dark even is, beyond presumably bad in some way, but anyway that was as stupid as keeping your zombie kid around in the hopes they’ll get better.

“Althea was an Evo. They’re incredibly powerful. They can influence people like Ridley can, but they can also Evolve, morph into other people, into anyone.

First off, this would be the most broken RPG ever. I’m just saying. You can be a siren, or you can be an evo where you have can turn into anyone ever PLUS you’ve got siren powers, or you can be a natural and have even more powers than that, or you can be whatever Pretty Suit is which may or may not involve even more powers but definitely involves being generally godmod.

Also, where the hell are these names coming from? The word evolve not only doesn’t fit what you’re talking about but also hasn’t even been around that long!

Anyway apparently only parents really love you so the parents send the kid to some relative because obviously if you give birth to a kid you can’t possibly send them away but if you adopt them five minutes after their birth you’re able to murder them with an ax without blinking. Remember kids, if your parents gave you up or died, no one else will ever love you!

“Then why does Ryan live with her parents?”
“Ryan is… Ryan. She’s a special case.” She shrugged. “At least, that’s what Uncle Macon says every time I ask.”

So there’s all these rules except half the time they’re not true. Do you know what that makes them? Why yes, it makes them not actually rules. (I’d like to guess here that Ryan is just whatever Pretty Suit is, because she’s describing him as his own thing and that should mean he doesn’t need to worry about the light/dark bit, but that would make his special snowflakeiness is possible for a girl to have too, so…)

He then asks about her parents despite her already saying she knows all of jack and shit about them. She elaborates on the only thing left she can, which is that she figures no one talks about them because they were dark, except unless they had her before they were sixteen, they’d have already been dark when they had her, and in that case why wouldn’t they raise her themselves – or, if they have a similar kick-out-any-kid-on-the-opposing-team thing, give her to another dark relative? Also, this appears to be proof that both parents were related.

So he says she’s great anyway and kisses her, presumably not doing the same incest math I’m doing. It’s great, then she stops for an emo session about how maybe she’ll turn into a monster, but he’s not listening.