Taskmaster s15 finale and Scholomance finale :)
Taskmaster series 15 finale -- well, that was spoilers highly anticlimactic as to the winner, but great fun as far as the tasks. What a great series this has been! I enjoyed the other series I watched live (13 and 14) a lot, but I think this is the one I've enjoyed the most -- series 14 had moments that made me laugh harder (Dara and his disappointing children as a live task team, mostly), but I think this was the one where I enjoyed the contestants most consistently, and/or more, on average. And I think the studio segments of this series were some of the best ever, on par with my very, very favorite series. OK, onto this actual episode:
Oh, first,a comment on the outfits -- this was such a fun decision! I love the garish colors and the random clashing braid and ascots and shit Kiell, Frankie, and Jenny were wearing, but also Mae looked GREAT in their sky-blue uniform -- it is definitely my favorite thing they've worn at any point in the show.
Prize task: This was a fun category in general, Greg Davies merch, and Mae's dad's horrifying puppet was AMAZING! And Greg sitting with it on his knee and being mean to Alex with it was perfect! (Mae said on the podcast that the Taskmaster production team got to keep it, because they have some plans for it, so I look forward to seeing it again.) I'm glad Ivo got 4 points for his well researched cheese puff slingshot (and it got some nice use in the on stage celebration at the end), and Jenny's coffee stencil worked surprisingly wello. I don't actually know what a morphsuit is (I mean, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I *still* don't know XD), and then I got briefly excited when Frankie started talking about a beanbag because I thought that for once he brought it something other than art, but nope, what he actually brought was a series of sketches -- so I think that's ten for ten XD Anyway, Mae's horrible puppet and the story that went with it, about their father turning into Gepetto during lockdown, was a great note to end the series on.
Fill the glass task -- I LOVE that Mae correctly predicted that Kiell would use the hose, and that Kiell felt equally confident no-one else would, and his impressions of everyone were PERFECT! And then he ended up using the hose in a nonsensical way and not earning any points and getting mad at Alex and sulky when Alex pointed out the right way to use the hose for this task. I'm really glad Jenny got another highlight with her darts and water balloon approach -- AFTER losing a bunch of time on the stupidest approach possible, which was trying to run the water through a solid pole, as the editing repeatedly pointed out. And Ivo's needlessly elaborate system almost worked, but then didn't. I wish Greg would have given Ivo and Kiell partial points for their partially/almost filled glasses, but admittedly it's a lot funnier for Kiell with the hose to get zero points. And Frankie tried to argue semantics about his broken glass in the bath having water to the line and being more full than the others because it also had water outside, but I am with Greg in not allowing this, clever and consistent as this attempt to argue was. Oh, and I was 100% convinced several episodes ago that "a yardstick for failure" was going to be another episode namer from Ivo, and sure enough it was.
The "chess" task was amazing! I laughed very hard at several different points, and also it was a great way to send off these guys, because I feel like each person showed a good deal of their personality throughout -- Jenny getting lost in the math and losing all sense of time, Kiell just stealing Alex's code instead of trying to work out his own and randomly having balloon animal skills (I wonder if he always knew, or if he learned e.g. for that Ghosts episode with the unexpected kids party or something like that), Frankie just stomping the box open instead of trying to work out the code and saying his balloon dog had been run over by a car (while Jenny, who also could not make a dog, saying hers was curled up in a basket), Ivo taking some penalties that may have been a good strategic move (the 10 second penalties were quite low relative to the deltas everyone ended up with) but ending up with Vaseline on his hands and rubber bands on his eyes and general carnage (Greg: "There was a moment you sabotaged yourself" Ivo, wearily: "Narrow it down?"), and Mae just... competently doing the thing (but not being particularly funny or memorable, except for the weird chipmunk face they ended up with while wearing the rubber bands).
Lullaby team task -- this was actually my least favorite of the filmed tasks this episode, and I think also my least favorite team task; I think my favorite bit of it was actually Kiell recognizing the gold pen and being like, didn't I already steal this? Anyway, I did not particularly love either lullaby, but the musical tasks tend to be hit or miss for me -- obviously you get glorious things like "Always Seeing You Do Cool Stuff" or "Me, Fren Brady, me, Fern Brady" (justice for Fern's song!) or things that absolutely should not work but somehow do, like "The House Queens", but mostly I tend not to find them memorable. Anyway, I did not especially like either of these; Jenny's list of colors (Sally on the podcast mentioned last week that Jenny went to art school, so she knew what she was talking about) and Mae's gentle guitar playing were suitably soporific, but honestly I expected better from a team with super-musical Kiell on it, and it was merely alright. As for Ivo and Frankie, look. I don't WANT to ship them in some kind of weird dubconny way, but when they do things like have Ivo wear a dog leash to bed, with Frankie holding a lead, it's kind of hard not to think in that direction, after the one-sidedly grudging handcuffed hug. Other than that, I was disappointed Ivo had not been allowed to come up with more rhymes for dog breeds. A great bit of studio banter, though: Kiell: "I was hoping for a bridge." Ivo: "I'd have jumped off anything towards the end." He's so fast!
Live task (stand or don't stand in ice) -- this was definitely anticlimactic, but I'm glad it clinched Jenny a win (post tie-breaker), because Mae sure didn't need another one.
Oh, and the second part of the series outtakes dropped on YouTube, featuring:
- Ivo discovering the shelling machine after he'd gone out of the lab in the egg-shelling task and standing there contemplating it morosely
- Greg and Alex tormenting Ivo with the curse of politeness
- an extended discussion of Mae's Brian Cox poptart, featuring Frankie saying "take it, you bitch" followed by discussion of whether that's something Professor Brian Cox would say
- a semantic discussion of whether Jenny was "on top of the jelly" and/or "on the jelly", culminating in Kiell asking, "Hey, who's in charge here?" and Alex replying, "I think Frankie" -- and Frankie saying she should get 3 points, which both Greg and Jenny thought was too high, and Ivo bringing it home with "Are you on top of your own show or just sitting on a chair near it?"
- a historical digression about pineapples from Frankie and Kiell demanding reparations
- Greg having entirely too much fun with the puppet
Overall for the series: This was so much fun! It's always hard to tell with recency bias -- I think I was "WHAT A GREAT SERIES!" with s13 and s14 aswell -- and I do still think they're great, but subsequent series have eclipsed them, I've noticed. I ended the series with two strong favorites -- Ivo is definitely going on the all-time favorite list, and Kiell is up there, too -- and another favorite slightly lower down (Jenny), and Frankie as someone I wasn't invested or rooting for but who consistently had such funny and unexpected things to contribute that I looked forward to his segments also (kind of like Dara in s14). And Mae was, well, I can't say that I felt entertained by them at almost any point, except the tentative pun or two, but it was cool to watch them compete -- the drawn pineapples were a clever solution, and they were amazingin the escape room/jelly baby task. Mae said on the podcast that they were so focused on doing well/winning that they forgot to be funny -- and, in fairness, this is a tough crowd to compete with.
I can't say I'm looking forward to Mae in CoC III, because, as they themselves pointed out on the podcast, they, Dara, and Sarah Kendall have kind of a similarly direct vibe -- you did have that with Kerry and Ed in CoC II, but at least they could both be counted on to get amusingly angry when things didn't go their way. I guess I'll have to pin my hopes on Sophie.
I don't think I've written about this here yet, although scytale and I were having the discussion elsewhere, but obviously I have to try to sort these guys into Dragaera houses. That was actually relatively hard! So the one I was absolutely sure about from pretty early on was Mae-- Mae is very much a Lyorn: rule-abiding, focused, high standards for themselves and fear of not living up to them, that earnest light in their eyes. I started out with a vague Kiell is an Issola vibe, because of the musicality in the early tasks, and it solidified from there because the man is just made entirely of charm and charisma, and knows it, and milks it -- but he is also weirdly considerate at times. So, yeah, Kiell as a shiny Issola. Ivo gave me some trouble, because he is such a disaster. At first I was considering another Issola, given his eloquence and politeness and the random turn on Kiell during the first live task -- but actually he does not benefit from any of these, the way an Issola would, kind of the contrary. Then I thought maybe Tiassa, because he does certainly have a lot of ideas, including some inspired ones, but with Tiassa I would expect him to follow through on those flashes of bold inspiration, and that is mostly not what happens with Ivo. So I am concluding that he is a Tsalmoth -- a conclusion I came to shortly after finishing Tsalmoth and which has only strengthened since then. Because he starts out doing one thing, gets distracted by a different idea, flails at that, then moves on to something else -- it's really that barrage of uncoordinated approaches, which mostly end in failure, but he keeps trying. Very Tsalmoth! So that leaves Jenny and Frankie. I'm still not really sure about Jenny, but the way she throws herself into enjoying tasks, including tasks she's already been disqualified from, because it might be fun, strikes me as Dzur. There's just a lot of gusto with Jenny that strikes me as a Dzur trait. Frankie was the longest for me to get any inkling of sorting atall, but I think I've landed on Athyra. Which is weird, because my prior Athyra sorting was Rhod -- mostly for the blatant disregard for Alex's safety -- and Frankie is not at all like that as a contestant. But Frankie's tendency to go on journeys about meaning and language seems like one of the contemplative houses, and he is definitely too observant and nitpicky for a Hawk. His "heaviest thing" task was, I think, a very Athyra solution. And I think the way he sort of rides roughshod over Ivo in team tasks is also an Athyra trait, because I think the primary hallmark of an Athyra contestant is that they fail to see the other people involved -- teammates, Alex, Greg -- as people deserving of consideration. So, yeah, I think Mae = Lyorn, Kiell = Tiassa, Ivo = Tsalmoth, Jenny = Dzur, Frankie = Athyra.
Of course, series 16 lineup, though not yet timing, has been announced. I'm back to not knowing who any of these people are, but I did recognize Sue Perkins's name from Mel & Sue (just mentions around the show, I've not actually seen them together in anything), and I learned on Reddit that Lucy Beaumont is Jon Richardson's wife, so I'm curious to meet her (as Jon was my favorite contestant in his series).
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I also read a whole book! O.o
7. Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves (Scholomance 3) -- it took me an embarrassingly long time to finish this book, especially considering that I had borrowed giallarhorn's copy. But it's done now, and, while I don't really have particularly deep thoughts (having been spoiled for all the big things (well, maybe except one, the exact nature of the prophecy about El), so they did not come as a surprise), I did find it to be a satisfactory conclusion. In fact, let me maybe talk about it in terms of those spoilery things, since I don't know how else to organize my thoughts anyway. SPOILERS from here!
El/Liesel -- one of the first things I heard about The Golden Enclaves was that El got a f/f relationship, and my immediate question was, was it El/Liesel? -- because I was kind of shipping El/Liesel on the basis of El's exasperated but grudgingly appreciative POV of Liesel in book 2, which was just about my favorite thing about book 2. So, I was pretty happy that El/Liesel was going to be canon, although also somewhat cautious about how it would be realized. Well, I'm happy to report that I'm fine with the way it was handled in the book. It doesn't make me ship El/Liesel MORE, but it doesn't turn me off the ship, either -- that Liesel first tries seducing El as a way to tie her to London/her plans, but when that doesn't work, she is fine with it just being a friends-with-benefits thing, and that it has value to El even if it's not the love of her life (and for Liesel, it doesn't detract from the 30 year plan she is building with Alfie, whom I continue to like). Liesel herself continued to be great. It was interesting to learn what Liesel's driving trauma was, but even more satisfying to see her let go of her revenge plans to focuson the bigger task. I continue to like Liesela lot!
Mawmouths in the foundation of the enclaves and El thus being the one unknowingly destroying the enclaves as she kills mawmouths -- hm. I was spoiled for this, likeI said, and I do like the setup that El's harrowing, heroic defeat of the most horrible mals is the same act that causes deaths and destruction. I like the way this is foreshadowed, and I like the dilemma it sets up. But it also feels arbitrary in the same way Scholomance worldbuilding in book 1 felt arbitrary to me, less organic worldbuilding and more allegory for the self-perpetuating evils of capitalism, which is always going to be less interesting to me as a mode of fantasy storytelling. But it's a neatly set up allegory, I'll give it that. And I do like that this horrible way of making/expanding enclaves is out there, and attractive even with the alternative of El's smaller but "pure" golden enclaves.
How mawmouths are made -- this was very "Omelas"! Which, I don't think it had anything to add to the Omelas discourse, but it also did not spend too much time on it, and "Omelas" discourse is certainly fitting to what Novik has set up with the enclaves.
Orion being a mawmouth -- I'm curious if I would've been able to figure this out if I hadn't been spoiled for it -- I do think it's nicely foreshadowed. Orion after his time trapped in the Scholomance was very, very creepy, and El's reaction to him (as well as the earlier mourning for him and angst about being the only person who can set him free-- by killing him) was well done, down to her being creeped out by him being immediately OK his golden enclave-fication, and angry about him forgiving his mother, which her mother has to tell her is his prerogative. The thing that didn'twork for me as well as I hoped was Ophelia Rhys-Lake's motivation in making Orion into a mawmouth in the first place. I was spoiled for that being a thing, and it's such a monstrous act, I was hoping the book would actually sell me on that as something I could accept as plausible, and it just didn't. Part of it could be that we are getting everything through El's horrified POV -- she is absolutely not interested in understanding Ophelia'smotivations, which is fine. But I didn't really buy that someone would arrive at the conclusion of making her own child into a mawmouth to fashion a perfect weapon/mana engine for the motivation she does (or at least the motivation Shanfeng explains for her) -- I mean, I do think I could be sold on it in some specific manner, where the character making the choice had a particular mindset and truly felt all the other choices were worse, but I just wasn't feeling it here. (Speaking of Orion being a mawmouth, I remember someone -- Serpents? -- talking about how Novik's love interests end up being immensely powerful and somewhat monstrous (Sarkan, the Staryk Lord) and how in the Scholomance El was the powerful and somewhat monstrous one -- but nope, we went back to that being the male love interest.) Oh, and the other random thing about Orion being a mawmouth, made through the sacrifice of all the Scholomance seniors that year -- that reminded me of spoiler for Locked Tomb of Harrow and the way her parents got her. /Locked Tomb spoilers
How El comes by the Golden Sutras -- the revelation that this is the payoff of her parents' sacrifice, and that she is not payment for it, asshe first concludes, but part of what their sacrifice "buys" -- a wielder powerful enough to use the Golden Sutras, which an ordinary wizard could not do. (This was one of the few things I was not spoiled for.)
The prophecy -- this I quite liked, even though I do think it's hand-wavy in a way things driven by prophecy can be handwavy because the prophetic character can say "as little sense as you may think this makes, I've seen the other alternatives and they are worse". But I do like that El's prophetic great-grandmother was motivated by the greater good, and had to follow that path even though she knew how hard it would be for El (and for her beloved grandson, whom she knew she could not save), and how hard it was going to be for the other members of her family, like the grandfather who was ready to jump off a cliff with kid!El, and does not forgive her. I do like that as a result El gets to actually spend time with that side of her family.
The Scholomance being restored -- I had zero strong feelings about the Scholomance, so I don't really care, but I'm glad Orion is happy XD
The new thing about this book I ended up liking best was Shanfeng, the Dominus of Shanghai, whom El gets to meet and whose backstory we get more info on. He was a really neat character! -- someone incredibly powerful and clever, who accomplished legendary things -- saving his enclave from a mawmouth -- who is generous and kind and tries to do the right thing -- and yet is still complicit in the mechanism of the enclaves, and, as El points out, "he'd known what he was doing" -- having stood inside the mawmouth and felt the endless suffering of its victims -- "in a way that even the worst council member couldn't know" -- that's such an interesting setup! And that he doesn't try to convince El of anything, not really, but tries to give her the information to make informed choices -- I really respect that, even if he obviously does have his own agenda and probably is a good enough judge of character to know that it's pointless to try to manipulate El. So, yeah, I really liked what we got to see of him and would happily have spent more time with him.
Random things other than spoilers:
I really like the way anger is the most consistent thing about El: "But if I couldn't be angry, I didn't know what to be." "I tried to still feel bitter, tried to hold on to that nice small feeling of resentment and spite as hard as I could." "until one single feeling cameup to the surface above all the rest, and if you can't guess which one it was, presumably you've only just started reading at this particular point in the story." "I could have kissed [Khamis] in gratitude, for the single spark of rage lighting up in me, burning off despair in clean hot fire."
Liesel quotes: "How determined are you to be stupid?" "Probably she was making a massive effort to be tactful because Orion had just died and maybe I wanted to waste some of my time being sad instead of following her own highly superior therapy program of meticulously planning out a campaign for victory." "I didn't have any idea what she thought she was going to get out of shepherding me around the world like a wayward hurricane she'd have liked to aim" "Liesel snapped, deeply irritated by my ongoing refusal to negotiate with reality" "Liesel gave up on trying to persuade me to do anything sensible and instead put her brain on solving all the problems she considered unnecessary that I was nevertheless creating for myself and by extension her."
Other quotes:
El in the New York enclave: "The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn't really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do."
Ophelia about El accepting mana from others that was generated by "cheating": "Just because they handed it to you afterwards doesn't make a difference to the universe. It just makes a difference to you."
"I didn't believe [Ophelia would] have made Orion happy if she could have.I could believe, at a stretch, that she'd have liked him to be happy on the side [...] But not that she'd have chosen to make him happy, if it had really been a choice between his happiness and having the use of him." (Ouch!)
"the detritus of a thousand corpses, those lives I'd slaughtered out of Patience and Fortitude, left in a gush on the floor." (EW)
"The story that every council member [tells themselves.] It was their responsibility to do the terrible things for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn't stand doing it, for the sake of those squeamish people."
And this is not a new thing I read, but now that it's out properly, here were my thoughts on Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory (it was lovely to get to discuss it with cafemassolit -- who liked it even more than I did -- in Chicago).
Oh, first,a comment on the outfits -- this was such a fun decision! I love the garish colors and the random clashing braid and ascots and shit Kiell, Frankie, and Jenny were wearing, but also Mae looked GREAT in their sky-blue uniform -- it is definitely my favorite thing they've worn at any point in the show.
Prize task: This was a fun category in general, Greg Davies merch, and Mae's dad's horrifying puppet was AMAZING! And Greg sitting with it on his knee and being mean to Alex with it was perfect! (Mae said on the podcast that the Taskmaster production team got to keep it, because they have some plans for it, so I look forward to seeing it again.) I'm glad Ivo got 4 points for his well researched cheese puff slingshot (and it got some nice use in the on stage celebration at the end), and Jenny's coffee stencil worked surprisingly wello. I don't actually know what a morphsuit is (I mean, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I *still* don't know XD), and then I got briefly excited when Frankie started talking about a beanbag because I thought that for once he brought it something other than art, but nope, what he actually brought was a series of sketches -- so I think that's ten for ten XD Anyway, Mae's horrible puppet and the story that went with it, about their father turning into Gepetto during lockdown, was a great note to end the series on.
Fill the glass task -- I LOVE that Mae correctly predicted that Kiell would use the hose, and that Kiell felt equally confident no-one else would, and his impressions of everyone were PERFECT! And then he ended up using the hose in a nonsensical way and not earning any points and getting mad at Alex and sulky when Alex pointed out the right way to use the hose for this task. I'm really glad Jenny got another highlight with her darts and water balloon approach -- AFTER losing a bunch of time on the stupidest approach possible, which was trying to run the water through a solid pole, as the editing repeatedly pointed out. And Ivo's needlessly elaborate system almost worked, but then didn't. I wish Greg would have given Ivo and Kiell partial points for their partially/almost filled glasses, but admittedly it's a lot funnier for Kiell with the hose to get zero points. And Frankie tried to argue semantics about his broken glass in the bath having water to the line and being more full than the others because it also had water outside, but I am with Greg in not allowing this, clever and consistent as this attempt to argue was. Oh, and I was 100% convinced several episodes ago that "a yardstick for failure" was going to be another episode namer from Ivo, and sure enough it was.
The "chess" task was amazing! I laughed very hard at several different points, and also it was a great way to send off these guys, because I feel like each person showed a good deal of their personality throughout -- Jenny getting lost in the math and losing all sense of time, Kiell just stealing Alex's code instead of trying to work out his own and randomly having balloon animal skills (I wonder if he always knew, or if he learned e.g. for that Ghosts episode with the unexpected kids party or something like that), Frankie just stomping the box open instead of trying to work out the code and saying his balloon dog had been run over by a car (while Jenny, who also could not make a dog, saying hers was curled up in a basket), Ivo taking some penalties that may have been a good strategic move (the 10 second penalties were quite low relative to the deltas everyone ended up with) but ending up with Vaseline on his hands and rubber bands on his eyes and general carnage (Greg: "There was a moment you sabotaged yourself" Ivo, wearily: "Narrow it down?"), and Mae just... competently doing the thing (but not being particularly funny or memorable, except for the weird chipmunk face they ended up with while wearing the rubber bands).
Lullaby team task -- this was actually my least favorite of the filmed tasks this episode, and I think also my least favorite team task; I think my favorite bit of it was actually Kiell recognizing the gold pen and being like, didn't I already steal this? Anyway, I did not particularly love either lullaby, but the musical tasks tend to be hit or miss for me -- obviously you get glorious things like "Always Seeing You Do Cool Stuff" or "Me, Fren Brady, me, Fern Brady" (justice for Fern's song!) or things that absolutely should not work but somehow do, like "The House Queens", but mostly I tend not to find them memorable. Anyway, I did not especially like either of these; Jenny's list of colors (Sally on the podcast mentioned last week that Jenny went to art school, so she knew what she was talking about) and Mae's gentle guitar playing were suitably soporific, but honestly I expected better from a team with super-musical Kiell on it, and it was merely alright. As for Ivo and Frankie, look. I don't WANT to ship them in some kind of weird dubconny way, but when they do things like have Ivo wear a dog leash to bed, with Frankie holding a lead, it's kind of hard not to think in that direction, after the one-sidedly grudging handcuffed hug. Other than that, I was disappointed Ivo had not been allowed to come up with more rhymes for dog breeds. A great bit of studio banter, though: Kiell: "I was hoping for a bridge." Ivo: "I'd have jumped off anything towards the end." He's so fast!
Live task (stand or don't stand in ice) -- this was definitely anticlimactic, but I'm glad it clinched Jenny a win (post tie-breaker), because Mae sure didn't need another one.
Oh, and the second part of the series outtakes dropped on YouTube, featuring:
- Ivo discovering the shelling machine after he'd gone out of the lab in the egg-shelling task and standing there contemplating it morosely
- Greg and Alex tormenting Ivo with the curse of politeness
- an extended discussion of Mae's Brian Cox poptart, featuring Frankie saying "take it, you bitch" followed by discussion of whether that's something Professor Brian Cox would say
- a semantic discussion of whether Jenny was "on top of the jelly" and/or "on the jelly", culminating in Kiell asking, "Hey, who's in charge here?" and Alex replying, "I think Frankie" -- and Frankie saying she should get 3 points, which both Greg and Jenny thought was too high, and Ivo bringing it home with "Are you on top of your own show or just sitting on a chair near it?"
- a historical digression about pineapples from Frankie and Kiell demanding reparations
- Greg having entirely too much fun with the puppet
Overall for the series: This was so much fun! It's always hard to tell with recency bias -- I think I was "WHAT A GREAT SERIES!" with s13 and s14 aswell -- and I do still think they're great, but subsequent series have eclipsed them, I've noticed. I ended the series with two strong favorites -- Ivo is definitely going on the all-time favorite list, and Kiell is up there, too -- and another favorite slightly lower down (Jenny), and Frankie as someone I wasn't invested or rooting for but who consistently had such funny and unexpected things to contribute that I looked forward to his segments also (kind of like Dara in s14). And Mae was, well, I can't say that I felt entertained by them at almost any point, except the tentative pun or two, but it was cool to watch them compete -- the drawn pineapples were a clever solution, and they were amazingin the escape room/jelly baby task. Mae said on the podcast that they were so focused on doing well/winning that they forgot to be funny -- and, in fairness, this is a tough crowd to compete with.
I can't say I'm looking forward to Mae in CoC III, because, as they themselves pointed out on the podcast, they, Dara, and Sarah Kendall have kind of a similarly direct vibe -- you did have that with Kerry and Ed in CoC II, but at least they could both be counted on to get amusingly angry when things didn't go their way. I guess I'll have to pin my hopes on Sophie.
I don't think I've written about this here yet, although scytale and I were having the discussion elsewhere, but obviously I have to try to sort these guys into Dragaera houses. That was actually relatively hard! So the one I was absolutely sure about from pretty early on was Mae-- Mae is very much a Lyorn: rule-abiding, focused, high standards for themselves and fear of not living up to them, that earnest light in their eyes. I started out with a vague Kiell is an Issola vibe, because of the musicality in the early tasks, and it solidified from there because the man is just made entirely of charm and charisma, and knows it, and milks it -- but he is also weirdly considerate at times. So, yeah, Kiell as a shiny Issola. Ivo gave me some trouble, because he is such a disaster. At first I was considering another Issola, given his eloquence and politeness and the random turn on Kiell during the first live task -- but actually he does not benefit from any of these, the way an Issola would, kind of the contrary. Then I thought maybe Tiassa, because he does certainly have a lot of ideas, including some inspired ones, but with Tiassa I would expect him to follow through on those flashes of bold inspiration, and that is mostly not what happens with Ivo. So I am concluding that he is a Tsalmoth -- a conclusion I came to shortly after finishing Tsalmoth and which has only strengthened since then. Because he starts out doing one thing, gets distracted by a different idea, flails at that, then moves on to something else -- it's really that barrage of uncoordinated approaches, which mostly end in failure, but he keeps trying. Very Tsalmoth! So that leaves Jenny and Frankie. I'm still not really sure about Jenny, but the way she throws herself into enjoying tasks, including tasks she's already been disqualified from, because it might be fun, strikes me as Dzur. There's just a lot of gusto with Jenny that strikes me as a Dzur trait. Frankie was the longest for me to get any inkling of sorting atall, but I think I've landed on Athyra. Which is weird, because my prior Athyra sorting was Rhod -- mostly for the blatant disregard for Alex's safety -- and Frankie is not at all like that as a contestant. But Frankie's tendency to go on journeys about meaning and language seems like one of the contemplative houses, and he is definitely too observant and nitpicky for a Hawk. His "heaviest thing" task was, I think, a very Athyra solution. And I think the way he sort of rides roughshod over Ivo in team tasks is also an Athyra trait, because I think the primary hallmark of an Athyra contestant is that they fail to see the other people involved -- teammates, Alex, Greg -- as people deserving of consideration. So, yeah, I think Mae = Lyorn, Kiell = Tiassa, Ivo = Tsalmoth, Jenny = Dzur, Frankie = Athyra.
Of course, series 16 lineup, though not yet timing, has been announced. I'm back to not knowing who any of these people are, but I did recognize Sue Perkins's name from Mel & Sue (just mentions around the show, I've not actually seen them together in anything), and I learned on Reddit that Lucy Beaumont is Jon Richardson's wife, so I'm curious to meet her (as Jon was my favorite contestant in his series).
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I also read a whole book! O.o
7. Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves (Scholomance 3) -- it took me an embarrassingly long time to finish this book, especially considering that I had borrowed giallarhorn's copy. But it's done now, and, while I don't really have particularly deep thoughts (having been spoiled for all the big things (well, maybe except one, the exact nature of the prophecy about El), so they did not come as a surprise), I did find it to be a satisfactory conclusion. In fact, let me maybe talk about it in terms of those spoilery things, since I don't know how else to organize my thoughts anyway. SPOILERS from here!
El/Liesel -- one of the first things I heard about The Golden Enclaves was that El got a f/f relationship, and my immediate question was, was it El/Liesel? -- because I was kind of shipping El/Liesel on the basis of El's exasperated but grudgingly appreciative POV of Liesel in book 2, which was just about my favorite thing about book 2. So, I was pretty happy that El/Liesel was going to be canon, although also somewhat cautious about how it would be realized. Well, I'm happy to report that I'm fine with the way it was handled in the book. It doesn't make me ship El/Liesel MORE, but it doesn't turn me off the ship, either -- that Liesel first tries seducing El as a way to tie her to London/her plans, but when that doesn't work, she is fine with it just being a friends-with-benefits thing, and that it has value to El even if it's not the love of her life (and for Liesel, it doesn't detract from the 30 year plan she is building with Alfie, whom I continue to like). Liesel herself continued to be great. It was interesting to learn what Liesel's driving trauma was, but even more satisfying to see her let go of her revenge plans to focuson the bigger task. I continue to like Liesela lot!
Mawmouths in the foundation of the enclaves and El thus being the one unknowingly destroying the enclaves as she kills mawmouths -- hm. I was spoiled for this, likeI said, and I do like the setup that El's harrowing, heroic defeat of the most horrible mals is the same act that causes deaths and destruction. I like the way this is foreshadowed, and I like the dilemma it sets up. But it also feels arbitrary in the same way Scholomance worldbuilding in book 1 felt arbitrary to me, less organic worldbuilding and more allegory for the self-perpetuating evils of capitalism, which is always going to be less interesting to me as a mode of fantasy storytelling. But it's a neatly set up allegory, I'll give it that. And I do like that this horrible way of making/expanding enclaves is out there, and attractive even with the alternative of El's smaller but "pure" golden enclaves.
How mawmouths are made -- this was very "Omelas"! Which, I don't think it had anything to add to the Omelas discourse, but it also did not spend too much time on it, and "Omelas" discourse is certainly fitting to what Novik has set up with the enclaves.
Orion being a mawmouth -- I'm curious if I would've been able to figure this out if I hadn't been spoiled for it -- I do think it's nicely foreshadowed. Orion after his time trapped in the Scholomance was very, very creepy, and El's reaction to him (as well as the earlier mourning for him and angst about being the only person who can set him free-- by killing him) was well done, down to her being creeped out by him being immediately OK his golden enclave-fication, and angry about him forgiving his mother, which her mother has to tell her is his prerogative. The thing that didn'twork for me as well as I hoped was Ophelia Rhys-Lake's motivation in making Orion into a mawmouth in the first place. I was spoiled for that being a thing, and it's such a monstrous act, I was hoping the book would actually sell me on that as something I could accept as plausible, and it just didn't. Part of it could be that we are getting everything through El's horrified POV -- she is absolutely not interested in understanding Ophelia'smotivations, which is fine. But I didn't really buy that someone would arrive at the conclusion of making her own child into a mawmouth to fashion a perfect weapon/mana engine for the motivation she does (or at least the motivation Shanfeng explains for her) -- I mean, I do think I could be sold on it in some specific manner, where the character making the choice had a particular mindset and truly felt all the other choices were worse, but I just wasn't feeling it here. (Speaking of Orion being a mawmouth, I remember someone -- Serpents? -- talking about how Novik's love interests end up being immensely powerful and somewhat monstrous (Sarkan, the Staryk Lord) and how in the Scholomance El was the powerful and somewhat monstrous one -- but nope, we went back to that being the male love interest.) Oh, and the other random thing about Orion being a mawmouth, made through the sacrifice of all the Scholomance seniors that year -- that reminded me of spoiler for Locked Tomb of Harrow and the way her parents got her. /Locked Tomb spoilers
How El comes by the Golden Sutras -- the revelation that this is the payoff of her parents' sacrifice, and that she is not payment for it, asshe first concludes, but part of what their sacrifice "buys" -- a wielder powerful enough to use the Golden Sutras, which an ordinary wizard could not do. (This was one of the few things I was not spoiled for.)
The prophecy -- this I quite liked, even though I do think it's hand-wavy in a way things driven by prophecy can be handwavy because the prophetic character can say "as little sense as you may think this makes, I've seen the other alternatives and they are worse". But I do like that El's prophetic great-grandmother was motivated by the greater good, and had to follow that path even though she knew how hard it would be for El (and for her beloved grandson, whom she knew she could not save), and how hard it was going to be for the other members of her family, like the grandfather who was ready to jump off a cliff with kid!El, and does not forgive her. I do like that as a result El gets to actually spend time with that side of her family.
The Scholomance being restored -- I had zero strong feelings about the Scholomance, so I don't really care, but I'm glad Orion is happy XD
The new thing about this book I ended up liking best was Shanfeng, the Dominus of Shanghai, whom El gets to meet and whose backstory we get more info on. He was a really neat character! -- someone incredibly powerful and clever, who accomplished legendary things -- saving his enclave from a mawmouth -- who is generous and kind and tries to do the right thing -- and yet is still complicit in the mechanism of the enclaves, and, as El points out, "he'd known what he was doing" -- having stood inside the mawmouth and felt the endless suffering of its victims -- "in a way that even the worst council member couldn't know" -- that's such an interesting setup! And that he doesn't try to convince El of anything, not really, but tries to give her the information to make informed choices -- I really respect that, even if he obviously does have his own agenda and probably is a good enough judge of character to know that it's pointless to try to manipulate El. So, yeah, I really liked what we got to see of him and would happily have spent more time with him.
Random things other than spoilers:
I really like the way anger is the most consistent thing about El: "But if I couldn't be angry, I didn't know what to be." "I tried to still feel bitter, tried to hold on to that nice small feeling of resentment and spite as hard as I could." "until one single feeling cameup to the surface above all the rest, and if you can't guess which one it was, presumably you've only just started reading at this particular point in the story." "I could have kissed [Khamis] in gratitude, for the single spark of rage lighting up in me, burning off despair in clean hot fire."
Liesel quotes: "How determined are you to be stupid?" "Probably she was making a massive effort to be tactful because Orion had just died and maybe I wanted to waste some of my time being sad instead of following her own highly superior therapy program of meticulously planning out a campaign for victory." "I didn't have any idea what she thought she was going to get out of shepherding me around the world like a wayward hurricane she'd have liked to aim" "Liesel snapped, deeply irritated by my ongoing refusal to negotiate with reality" "Liesel gave up on trying to persuade me to do anything sensible and instead put her brain on solving all the problems she considered unnecessary that I was nevertheless creating for myself and by extension her."
Other quotes:
El in the New York enclave: "The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn't really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do."
Ophelia about El accepting mana from others that was generated by "cheating": "Just because they handed it to you afterwards doesn't make a difference to the universe. It just makes a difference to you."
"I didn't believe [Ophelia would] have made Orion happy if she could have.I could believe, at a stretch, that she'd have liked him to be happy on the side [...] But not that she'd have chosen to make him happy, if it had really been a choice between his happiness and having the use of him." (Ouch!)
"the detritus of a thousand corpses, those lives I'd slaughtered out of Patience and Fortitude, left in a gush on the floor." (EW)
"The story that every council member [tells themselves.] It was their responsibility to do the terrible things for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn't stand doing it, for the sake of those squeamish people."
And this is not a new thing I read, but now that it's out properly, here were my thoughts on Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory (it was lovely to get to discuss it with cafemassolit -- who liked it even more than I did -- in Chicago).