「Ｂｅｈｅｍｏｔｈ」

Ahhh, another fine winter day.

Working on translating some truly incomprehensible code today. It's kind of fun copying things over and just trusting that it will all work out. If something goes wrong, obviously I'll have to dig in a figure out what was really intended here, but for now I can just copy structure. It did spur me to figure out how to handle gotos in python, which was fun. Turns out you can just use a benign exception in a try-catch block to achieve basically the same effect.

Read some more The Farthest Shore last night, I keep reading more than I intended because it's just so good. Got to the part with the titular farthest shore, so much great imagery with Selidor and the Dry Land and whatnot.

This book may be equal to the first one... except for the king stuff. I still feel like that doesn't fit with everything else going on here. Maybe asking for a fantasy world to be monarchy-skeptical is a bit too much, but this book's cosmology overturns so many other conventions of the genre that it feels odd that it sticks with tradition there.

Like, I guess the question that sticks in my craw is: why do you need a king? The only argument the book has launched in favor of royalty was a vague feeling of chaos in that one port town, but that really seemed to be more due to the Evil Wizard's Curse than the lack of a singular figure of leadership.

It feels at odds with a lot of the core ideas being presented. Lebannen going on to become the king because he was there to swing a sword at the evil wizard's ghost doesn't really seem... fitting? There's this tension between like... this is a fantasy story where a prophecy is fulfilled so a king can sit on the throne and bring peace to the land, and also it's a world with realistically drawn people who have social dynamics and the order of the world is threatened by a single individual craving too much power.

It's good kings vs bad kings again. A good king has been humbled and walked among the people, while a bad king etc etc. At the end of the day: I just don't buy it.

Anyway, I do love how the Cob stuff shakes out. The way that this singular achievement turns out to be a trap not only for all the others in the world who are drawn into it, but also for the person who cast the spell and opened the hole into the afterlife in the first place. He's also completely lost and unable to really see what's going on. Even the promise of immortality is something so sweet to those who live mortal lives that it leads them astray. It's good shit.

Workin' from home again. God I can't wait to move... my new place is gonna have so many more windows.

Man, I really enjoyed listening to the new Media Club Plus last night. When I read Hunter x Hunter originally, I really skimmed over a lot of it, so it's great to go back and do this kind of close reading. But also that means I have knowledge of the big plot points, so I get to enjoy Jack guessing at things.

I've been reading a bit of The Farthest Shore before bed every night, I'm sticking with The Tome. It's more fun than Tombs of Atuan was, certainly, but there's an odd sense of like... trying to tell a bog-standard bildungsroman/restoration fantasy story in the Earthsea world as it has been set up. Which is an interesting exercise in its own right, but it does feel odd from a modern perspective.

Le Guin is clearly working within these genre lines on purpose, and coloring it in with her own personal philosophy. With modern fantasy stuff I think there's more of a sense of like... the medium is the message, y'know. If you're telling this kind of story, you are participating in these traditions in a way that feels distasteful. Also it's like 50 years later and the world has changed.

This is all to say: it's weird how Le Guin is going out of her way to set up a reason that this world needs to have a king. For one thing, that kind of political idea has not really come up before, I had sort of assumed that there was a king in Havnor, and for another it doesn't seem like it quite fits with the generally Taoist and pastoralist approach to worldbuilding we've seen so far.

Indeed, thus far the narrator and Ged have been pretty dismissive of royalty and the great merchants of Havnor and whatnot. I suppose there is some respect paid to the idea of mythic kings of the distant past, but not as much as mythic wizards of the distant past. It feels like it's breaking out of the anthropological worldview of the original book again, which is always a bit jarring.

Also, is this book why the fantasy drug addict is a trope? I mean, besides a) the existence of drug addicts in real life and b) the lotus eaters in The Odyssey. Wouldn't be surprised if that was part of this book's subtle influence.