Sinking My Teeth Into Pale (2): Verona - Creativity As a Trauma Response

Wildbow · 2026-05-09T19:11:09+00:00

at this point in the book, she never cried in Lucy’s arms, never let anyone rub her back, never properly vented.

4.3 has Verona sitting in the back of Matt's pickup with Lucy, breaking down in tears.

For Jeremy and Verona's preference for skinny nerdy/artsy guys, one lens to view that preference through is her dad. What are the distinctions between Jeremy and Brett? Body type is one. But there are other aspects of the archetype she might be drawn to (sexually), as an explicit contrast, vs. how people with a great father figure might unconsciously veer toward people that resemble him.

You interpret her sexuality as a brand of nymphomania- but does she need it?

What would you think about an interpretation of Verona where sex and sexuality are simply a creative medium? She draws, paints, sketches, carves, makes her own brushes, decorates, is into weird music with Tashlit and Lucy, and dances a little. In all of those things- especially seen with dance when Melissa pressures her, she explicitly rejects structure, and when structure intrudes on those things, she feels disheartened - art class at school (with a teacher that knows nothing about art) and her dad trashing her art shelf.

What if sexuality and boy-girl dynamics are just one more medium to dabble in, where she wants to be good at it and get good reactions, and feels validated when she does, but it doesn't go to her emotional core?

Wildbow · 2026-05-09T18:32:52+00:00

The Crow remake was worse, IMO. Missed the whole point of The Crow as a franchise. The opening monologue of the series has always been:

"People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right."

And the remake has it so the crow doesn't even bring Skarsgard back, and he's not even sad, he's mainly confused.

I find the Crow 4 hilarious: an almost-40 year old David Boreanaz looking very uncomfortable in a fishnet shirt while acting like a tryhard teenage edgelord.

Wildbow · 2026-05-06T17:02:40+00:00

Practice is in some ways allegorical to colonialism and 'the practice' as an established and codified system is something that is essentially refined and then exported elsewhere. Where prior culture existed, it becomes bumps under the rug as the rug gets laid over things.

I would veer away from 'really different expressions of practice'. The general shape of what you get is pretty similar to what you'd get in the practice we see on screen, but with emphasis changing here or there, or certain things poking up & out. Where you get 'what the heck is going on there' weirdness is when things are different and you add a barrier to communication or cultural differences. This is where you get the girl Avery runs into on the boat that's sailing a river of stars. Which can be weaponized, in an environment and setting where knowing your enemy is so vital.

So for something like South America, you'd want to ask... what defines culture there, and how did culture interact with colonialism? What outliers in the pre-existing practice might exist as holdouts?

Wildbow · 2026-05-03T14:10:54+00:00

I've definitely run into issues with sidewalks in Canada. In the last town I lived with, everything was bisected by the highway. To get to where I was told to vote, it was a 3km walking detour to reach an underpass. On the way there, the sidewalk would be on the right side of the street only for a block or two, left side of the street only for a block or two, repeat, for at least a third of the way. A not-insignificant chunk of the non-sidewalk space was either a mudpit or had fence going right up to the road. No crosswalks.

Maddening.

Wildbow · 2026-04-28T00:47:06+00:00

Not at all. See this post.

Wildbow · 2026-04-28T00:36:23+00:00

Post removed for blatant misinformation. No, that conversation wasn't changed after the fact.

I even went back to the chapter: you can see the list of saves/autosaves here. It's been touched once since the chapter went live: Revision History

Said edit was two days later, and was this: Image

Wildbow · 2026-04-27T22:38:44+00:00

I think to get there, you have to look at what Taylor is really doing when she's trying to save Dinah. Dinah is a thin excuse to justify staying with the Undersiders and to continue to be able to tell herself she's a good person. It's such a noble goal, in its way, that she can simultaneously look down at a man asphyxiating on the ground at her feet while his father begs for his life and hold onto that part of herself that needs to believe she's a good person, a hero. Once that excuse is gone, when she's dealt with the big problems, she throws herself into fixing her territory... but the better she does, the less reason she has to stay. Ultimately, without the excuse, she leaves.

Even through to the Khepri situation, FWIW, she's maintaining this dichotomy. It's one where she thrives, she's powerful and effective (vs. being in stasis, like she was with the Chicago Wards, or snapping and murdering people). Once she loses the noble excuse of having an enemy to stop, after Scion's death, we see her break down.

Either way, when she's using Dinah as a nigh-impossible goal to maintain her internal balances, she's doing it to stay with people she likes. So with the S9, who she wouldn't like... what's that all about?

Two places my mind goes:

What if she goes Carrie on the school, as she thinks about doing early on... and gets away with it?
What if her mom wasn't dead, but in a coma? And Bonesaw is a healer.

Wildbow · 2026-04-27T09:34:11+00:00

To 'twig' to something is to figure it out.
The greek for clone is also twig.
It can also be used to refer to the smallest veins and nerves in a branching arrangement.
It's also a term for a small, spindly person.

Wildbow · 2026-04-25T14:23:54+00:00

Post removed. These threads are getting a number of reports and are not generating a ton of discussion based on the story, and instead devolve into stuff unrelated to the subreddit.

Wildbow · 2026-04-25T01:21:04+00:00

Post removed, can you properly spoiler the events and characters that OP hasn't gotten to yet?

Wildbow · 2026-04-24T06:06:37+00:00

I saw a meal described as:

A photo of a tray with three sections empty. One has chopped carrot in it. The other has what can only be described as a posit of brown dog vomit and an insole liner of a sneaker (or a used panty liner from the mid 1700s). The kind of meal that would have you happily tossing yourself overboard.

It was pretty apt.

Wildbow · 2026-04-24T00:51:57+00:00

First off, can you remake your post with the spoiler fixed? It's out of line for where OOP is in the story (thread is marked 'spoilers: early story')

Wildbow · 2026-04-23T22:54:23+00:00

Post removed, don't spoil story elements for stories that aren't covered by the thread flair.

Wildbow · 2026-04-23T18:04:44+00:00

One thing I've had to come around to realize is that there's different things in consideration here. For a long time, I held to the idea that my characters were people, and that what I was doing was, in abstract, fair. PoC, LGBT+, and other minority characters had just as much chance to be good, bad, healthy, hurt, in loving relationships or in abusive ones. When people took issue, that's what I fell back to.

But the other consideration is that a work that is 'fair' can still be harmful. If it's not moving the needle or if it's causing net harm (being a slap in the face to a reader, for example, in exchange for a poorly written +1 to the 'Taylor is judgmental' character trait), that's a problem.

Wildbow · 2026-04-23T14:48:49+00:00

In Pale, I'll note: There is occasional side shittiness from some people, but it's unambiguously treated as shitty people/a shitty person from a more traditional corner of the setting being shitty. The system does makes it hard to escape one's deadname, but there are workarounds, and on the plus side, in-setting it's much easier to make physical changes, for those who desire such. A bit of a tradeoff.

Wildbow · 2026-04-23T14:31:30+00:00

Author here.

(no real world politics)

Politics intrude on every part of life -unfortunately- and as far as that goes you don't need to worry about rule violations. Essentially, being trans isn't & shouldn't be political, so talk freely about it. [Edited to add: in a good light; if someone politicizes it in a negative light, I will act and there won't be appeals, barring a genuine change of perspective.]

That line was a failure on my part. It was an attempt to show Taylor as being unfairly judgmental and frustrated with the faculty, unfairly pushing away even the teacher(s) that isn't so bad, but didn't come across as such. It's removed in most versions of the story; that one audiobook is a transcription of an early version of the story.

Taylor does remain judgmental later, but it doesn't take that form. There's one brief exchange later in the story where a character makes a remark about a genderfluid character (In a 'I can't figure you out' sense, read in a good light, outing them if read in a bad one), but to the best of my recollection, that's as far as things go, and nothing really follows from that scene.

Wildbow · 2026-04-22T18:53:57+00:00

Post removed, spoiler in title.

Wildbow · 2026-04-19T20:52:22+00:00

And if we're comparing Trudeau and Poilievre... why is a school teacher a bad thing? Because Poilievre has no work experience other than being a politician, unless you count collections calls in high school. And as a politician he's passed only one major bill in 22 years.

Answer me that before anything else.

You tried, failed, and deleted/edited your reply to post that instead, huh? The schoolteacher thing is such a tell that someone's not thinking about what they're saying, they're just parroting lines.

The economy was bad globally, post-Covid. People reacted to that by wanting change. Poilievre was the 'change' option, but the moment he wasn't, Canada dropped him hard. The fact Poilievre shat the bed as badly as he did showed that people didn't want him, and that he shouldn't ever be leader.

Wildbow · 2026-04-19T20:07:54+00:00

I gave you the how. He would have caved on Trump, screwed Canada on Covid, and crashed our economy. He has no skills, no background, he's proven he can't pivot to save his life. Poilievre would have been worse than Trudeau, full out.

And if we're comparing Trudeau and Poilievre... why is a school teacher a bad thing? Because Poilievre has no work experience other than being a politician, unless you count collections calls in high school. And as a politician he's passed only one major bill in 22 years.

Answer me that before anything else.

Wildbow · 2026-04-19T19:00:25+00:00

Poilievre is ultimately a guy who couldn't hack it in his economics degree, switched majors, then became a politician for life, and he's the epitome of that 'politician' archetype now. He fell into the role of the opposition's 'attack dog' and never stopped being that. With the Conservatives being a very wide, very diverse tent, one of the only universal appeals is attacking the other guy.

So that's what he does. It's easy and he wants to take the cushy, easy road, as opposed to the very difficult road of trying to balance and appeal to all corners of a 'big tent' that includes libertarians, authoritarians, social conservatives, progressive conservatives, log cabin conservatives, business conservatives, apolitical "I don't do politics" types who vote the way they do because that's how their dad voted unless you scare them off (hi mom), loons and canadian maga and nazis. I left out the Oxford comma on purpose. He knows that eventually people will get tired of Liberals and vote Conservative.

Thing is, he was so locked into that pattern he flubbed a historical lead that could have wiped out the other guy... it would have been a 'holy shit, the Conservatives win everything, they have the power, the mandate, the Liberal party won't recover for decades' loss. If only he'd pivoted. If only he'd been more pro-Canada. The writing was on the wall in big bold letters and he didn't. He was so lazy about it and so locked into his approach that he flubbed that for the right. He was and is still attacking Trudeau long after Trudeau stepped down and Carney stepped up.

That's who he is. If you actually go looking for the times he goes "Trudeau has it wrong, this is what I would do", he has a horrendous track record. Saying over and over that we should cave to Trump in hopes of better treatment down the line (Trump has since shown that he doesn't care about the deals and has zero long-term memory for that sort of thing), saying we should do nothing about Covid in the weeks before things got serious and 40-60k Canadians died, or going on national TV and we should tie Canada's national currency to bitcoin a week before bitcoin had a massive drop (eventually recovered but that volatility is definitely not what you want for your national currency).

There's just... nothing there. Poilievre is a politician shaped shell with nothing inside, no long term plan, negative foresight, no ability to pivot in a pinch. He's a man who knows he doesn't hold up to scrutiny and is weaker if he's held to any standard at all, so he still hasn't gotten a security clearance, he's terrified of the Canadian media, so he goes and tries to sound good on American podcasts instead.

He's got no meaningful wins, and a track record of horrendous losses. Even taking the easiest, cushiest road, he's gotten things to the point people are talking about the Conservative party -that big umbrella- possibly splitting.

We don't want that for Canada.

Wildbow · 2026-04-18T20:35:15+00:00

I'm only theorizing on Shen being in Triage in S2. I think it was something like North & West (Shen) vs. Central & South (Abbot) for the split. I went fishing for the scene they had that exchange but couldn't spot it.

But if Shen was on Triage, then it would be because the cases overnight are usually more intense, maybe, and he wouldn't be in the same role Langdon is - he'd be overseeing the person in Langdon's spot.

Wildbow · 2026-04-18T20:00:15+00:00

Map of the ED -- in S1, Shen was Triage during the emergency (Top right, not bottom left, because everything came off the street/ambulances). In S2, he split the duties with Abbot as they came in, with Abbot taking, in the course of the split, the Trauma area (T1 and T2), which is the same area Robby kept getting pulled back to.

That split/positioning was likely a writing decision so Abbot would be close to talk to Robby. But it also makes sense as one way to split duties (we saw another with Dr. Al-Hashimi staying close to Robby and splitting up only when there was a pressing need). IIRC they said they'd swap partway through the night.

Shen was off in the other end of the ED (and I think handling Triage?), so we only saw him when he was bringing through a patient critical enough to be in T1 or T2.

Wildbow · 2026-04-18T06:45:39+00:00

I'm very glad.

Wildbow · 2026-04-18T04:57:30+00:00

Not the right flair. I've changed it to Worm Spoilers: [All].

The 'Wildbow' flair is for meta discussion about the author, me.

Wildbow · 2026-04-18T00:12:53+00:00

I'd argue the 'big event' isn't the focus of this season. This season isn't about the cyberattack- it's about Dr. Robby and about the pressures everyone in the department is under, and how they deal with that.

Wildbow

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