Latest / Rachel Oates / BookTok's Worst: Alchemised

Transcript

BookTok's Worst: Alchemised · Rachel Oates

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OK I know you guys have been asking for this for a while but
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I am finally finally reviewing Alchemist.
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So Alchemist is a 1040 page novel by Senlynew which was
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published in 2025 but actually started as Harry Potter fan
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fiction. Not just any Harry Potter fan
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fiction though. Draco Malfoy and Hermione
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whatever surname is romance fan fiction.
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Now I'm not a big Harry Potter fan, I think a lot of you will
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know this and I only read the series of books for the first
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time when I was like 23 ish or something like that.
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And like I thought they were fine, they were okay, they were
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whatever. Like maybe I was too old to
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appreciate them but I found myself cringing quite a lot at
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like the racist character names and the cheesy pun filled naming
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conventions of everything like Diagon Alley.
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And also like, how was anyone shocked that Lupin was a
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werewolf when his name is literally Lupin?
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Like a lot of that stuff just felt kind of obvious.
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Like maybe I was too old, maybe I was too old.
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We'll go with that. All that as an aside, though,
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I'm also very much in the camp of not wanting to support
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anything JK Rowling does these days, because I'd rather not
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fund transphobia, obviously. I think I think that's a pretty
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reasonable thing to say. That said, to the best of my
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knowledge, enough has been changed in Alchemize that it
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doesn't actually feature any Harry Potter characters.
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And Rowling is, to my best knowledge, not profiting in any
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way from this book, which is why I felt OK to buy a copy and
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review it. I will also add that even though
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you guys have been asking me to review it for a while, I seem to
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miss any, like, discussion of this book online for some
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reason. And so I went into reviewing
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this absolutely blind. And the way I'm doing this video
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today is a little bit different because, as you know, I quite
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like to write my scripts of these reviews as I go along.
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So I'm kind of taking you on the journey with me.
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You know, you're discovering the book as I do.
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And then at the end, I give you like, a summary of my thoughts
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and everything. So with this one, I decided
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because it's so damn long, I'm gonna split the videos up and to
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Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each referencing a part of the book
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because the book itself is split into three parts.
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And at time of filming this, I haven't actually read the third
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part yet. So my thoughts in this video are
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based purely on Part 1, and then when we get to Part 3, maybe
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some of my thoughts of this will change and we'll address them
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when we come to it. So I'm really taking you on this
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journey with me. But yeah, going in, I knew
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nothing about the characters, the story.
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I didn't even know whether people thought this book was
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going to be good or bad. I just knew people had been
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asking me to review it. And I was like, I don't know if
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that's because it's going to be really good or really bad.
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I get both recommendations. So I just knew it's fantasy.
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People want me to cover it. And there's probably some
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romance in there since it's based on romance fan fiction.
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And that's, that's about it. That's as far as my knowledge
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went. And then I saw that this won a
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British Book Award for the best sci-fi fantasy book, and I was
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like, OK, I'm sold, it's gotta be good, I'm reading this.
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And then it was not good. And I decided to make the video
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on it. Or at least it didn't start off
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good. So I figured I'd make the video
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on it. Now this book opens with a
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content warning, which is something I always appreciate.
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And and especially when a book covers the kind of dark topics
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that this one apparently does, and it does from what I've read
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so far, this warning at the start of the book tells you to
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go to the back of the book for the full list, which is fine by
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me. I'm OK with that.
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I'm not personally a fan of when a book's like, hey, go to this
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website and look here and then click on this and then do this.
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And then you might find content warnings because I'm like, who
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has time to do all that when you read in like a physical book?
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I'd rather they just be in the book, even if it's at the back
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of the book. But that's just a personal
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preference. So this book lists things like,
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well, it says Alchemized is a work of dark fantasy containing
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wartime violence, religious abuse, depictions of complex
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trauma, suicidal ideation, self harm, humour, experimentation,
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medical torture, eugenics, cannibalism, sexual assault,
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rape, and allusions to necrophilia.
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Please remember that depiction is not authorial endorsement.
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Because Alchemist is told in third person limited point of
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view, it necessarily involves some distortions of vision as
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well as missed or misconstrued events.
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Reader discretion is advised. So as I've always said, I'm
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absolutely fine with books including and addressing these
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kinds of topics and so long as it's not done gratuitously and
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it is done considerately. I also feel like they need to be
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used with purpose and not just for shock value.
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Like so these big things in here like cannibalism, I'm like,
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well, does that add to the story?
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Is there a point to it or is it just to be shocking for the sake
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of being shocking? You know, I want, I want these
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things to have a purpose and not just be like, I'm making it dark
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for the circle of energy, you know what I mean?
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And again, that line about depiction is not authorial
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endorsement. Again, I like that.
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I think that's a good thing. And that's something that we do
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need to separate. Just because an author writes
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about something, that doesn't mean they support that.
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However, there's a difference between an author writing
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something like I'm writing a bad character who believes bad
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things and I'm writing it in this way so you the reader can
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be critical of it. And an author who says I'm
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writing characters who do bad things, I'm romanticising it and
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you should too. There is a difference in that
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for me, and I think that distinction is important and 1
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is OK and 1 isn't. So an example I often give is
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looking at a book like John Fowles as The Collector, that is
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written from a couple of different points of view, but
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one of them is from a guy who essentially stalks a woman,
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kidnaps her, locks her in his basement and collects her
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essentially. And obviously we see his point
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of view. He's not a very nice man.
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He is a bit deluded. He's very unreliable as a
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narrator and we're seeing his delusions and why he's trying to
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justify by this abhorrent behaviour.
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But we know that the author's not endorsing that and he's not
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writing this, for example, as a love story between a kidnapper
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and his victim. You know, it's very much meant
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to be something that is horrifying and exploring what
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makes people do these bad things and what are the effects on the
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victim and how the victim can try and get out of that
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situation and so on. And compare that to something
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like books I've reviewed on here before, like Haunting Adeline,
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which literally has like a man stalking a woman and sorry, I'm
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just going to say raping her and sexually assaulting her
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repeatedly and then her falling in love with him and it being
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traders love story. Both of those books have the
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points of view of people obsessed with someone stalking
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someone hurting someone. But one seems like an
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endorsement and one doesn't, you know?
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So while you can separate the characters and the authors, you
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do have to look overall, what is the author's message here?
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And a general depiction of stalking and rape, for example,
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can be very well done and it can be quite emotional and it can be
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something that is not necessarily enjoyable to read,
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but like interesting to read and compelling to read need.
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And it can make you think about things and so on.
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Or it can be just kind of gratuitous and romanticising and
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quite problematic. So again, alter intent matters.
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Author point of view matters. Just the overall presentation of
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the topics does matter. Sorry, that was me going off on
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a rant on the side. And also, yeah, I'm always
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appreciative of when books label rape as rape and not just sex
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with some might not consider consensual or non consensual
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concept when when they just mean rape, you know, call rape rape.
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I think I think that's a really important thing to do.
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We can't keep downplaying what rape is in general, in culture,
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in media and literature, none of it.
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And I've kind of already spoke about this a little bit, but
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because I went on my rant there off script.
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But in my original script I wrote, my hope is that the
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author doesn't try and justify any of these sensitive topics
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because one of my biggest hates in fiction is the
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romanticization and glamorization of in particular
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sexual violence. So, you know, if you write a
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character who rapes or is any of these other things are pro
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eugenics or into necrophilia, for example, I'm fine with that
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character being represented, being shown, even show me their
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point of view, that's fine. But don't try and get me to root
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for them as a protagonist or a love interest.
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You know, I don't think that's too much to ask for, although
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you'd be surprised in some books it is.
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Apparently some people believe that means I'm not a real
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feminist because I'm not pro rape in books.
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And other people say that I don't understand fiction is
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fiction. And I'm like, well, I do.
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I just think, you know, if something is contributing to
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overall rape culture, it deserves calling out a bit, you
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know? Anyway, I've ranted about those
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people before. Let's not do it here.
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So let's start talking about the book itself.
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The prologue starts with a woman, Helena.
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She is our main character, our protagonist.
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She's the one we follow through the story.
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She is in a stasis tank in the dark.
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She for some reason keeps being shocked by electricity to
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stimulate her muscles. But the problem is she's
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conscious this whole time and apparently she shouldn't be.
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And that's basically the pro that is it.
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She's just in the stasis tank in pain, being tortured.
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And you'll see this as a theme throughout the book.
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So far in the 600 pages of this book that I've read out of the
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thousands so far, Helena is just tortured repeatedly.
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This is just a book about her torture, So and maybe it gets
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better towards the end. Maybe there's some sort of
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empowerment, maybe she stops being tortured and fights back.
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But from what I've read for 600 pages, it's just torture,
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torture, torture. And it's, it's getting quite
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difficult to stomach. These scripts are taking me a
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really long time to write because this book is taking me a
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long time to read because it's really hard to stomach a lot of
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the violence and abuse against women in particular.
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And also it's boring, which is making it really hard.
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So this is when Part 1 of the book starts, and Part 1 is what
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we're going to be looking at in this video.
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Chapter 1 opens with one of my least favourite things in
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fiction, excessive swearing in every line of dialogue just for
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the sake of looking edgy and being like hey guys this is an
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adult book for adults because we swear.
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Like don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to swearing.
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I'm not personally much for swearing myself, but I really
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don't mind when other people do it, and I don't have a problem
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with seeing it just generally in books or film, TV or anything
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like that. I don't mind it in media in
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general, but I can't help but feel like if you need to
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punctuate every single line of dialogue with a crapton of
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swearing, then maybe you're lacking the ability to express
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yourself effectively. Like if you're going to use
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swearing in dialogue, use it sparingly.
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Use it for emphasis, like maybe you show a character find snaps
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when they swear for the first time, like, you know, something
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like that. I don't need a Oh no, we often
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did this. We often did that what you often
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do and you have like, it's just it feels unnecessary to me.
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And it kind of it comes across as juvenile at a point, you
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know, like a teenage boy trying to convince the world they're
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grown up now because they swear. Thankfully, though, the swearing
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seems to come in like little chunks.
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So there's a lot in this first bit and then there's a lot in
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other little sections, but it's not quite throughout the book.
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So this isn't like AI think it's Colleen Hoover who swears a lot
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in a book. And it's like, oh, and then we
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have all something Colin Hoover. I can't.
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I know the author of Haunting Adeline had like excessive
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swearing for no reason. And I searched all this book and
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there aren't thankfully half as many swear words as I thought
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there were going to be. But honestly, this was not the
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first impression to the book or the authors write in style for
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me personally, but I know some people might like it so that's
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OK. So whoever is keeping Helena in
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stasis realises she's actually awake.
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When when the light came, it nearly split Helena's brain
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open. There was screaming.
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F, how's this one awake? A voice broke through the
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sensory agony. F this stasis gel, can't get a
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decent grip. Make her shut up.
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She's about to drown herself. How the F is she awake?
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Someone must have F the dosage on this one.
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Don't let her crawl off. She tore herself free.
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Forcing her eyes open, all she could make out was blinding
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white. She lunged towards it.
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You effing bitch, you cut me. Pain exploded across the back of
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her head. So in the 1st 4 lines of
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dialogue in this thousand page book we get 5F words and a
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bitch. I feel like we should put that
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on merch. Just 5F words and a bitch.
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Anyway, Helen. I don't know how to pronounce
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her name. Is it Helena?
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Is it Helena? I keep saying both, so I'll
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probably keep saying those in this video, but she gets knocked
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out again, like immediately. And this is where we're playing
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the first drinking game of this book, especially in Part 1.
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Every time Helena gets knocked unconscious, drink.
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Going to warn you though, don't do this with alcohol because you
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will get alcohol poisoning and die.
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In Part 2 of the book, it's not every time Helena gets knocked
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unconscious, but every time she sleeps or all falls unconscious,
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it's both of them. In the second part, so many
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scenes seem to end not with like a sensible ending point, but
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with and then Helena fell asleep and then Helena was unconscious.
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It's absolutely wild. Anyway, when she comes around
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again, there's the men who were there the first time she woke up
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and a new woman and we just get a repeat of the scene we just
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read. Like this book is so full of
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repetition it's crazy. And she was conscious when you
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open the tank. Sure was start screaming when we
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lifted the top and pulled her up.
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Gave me a heart attack. I can tell you Williams was so
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startled he nearly drowned her. And when we did get her out she
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was effing Ferrell. Scratched the S out of me until
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we knocked her out. Had the intravenous and all
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that. The sedation was turned off.
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Someone must have bumped it. And we know we know all this
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because we literally just read it on the page.
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You don't need to recap the events to another character that
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we already just saw it. Frustrating.
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I can see why this book is so long if it's just going to keep
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repeating the same things over and over.
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So annoying. However, we do go on to get some
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new information in that she's the only one awake, a lot of
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other people have died in stasis and she's an anomaly because
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strangely they don't have any records for her.
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So who is she? Why is she here?
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How did she get her in the 1st place?
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Questions. The woman says you are right to
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call this in, it's anomalous. Let me know how many of the rest
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wake any corpses intact enough for reanimation.
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Go to the mines. The living stock goes to the
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outpost and then to Helena. She says so.
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Prisoner 1273. Or are you prisoner 19819?
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Nine. You have two inmate numbers, and
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there's no record of either in this facility.
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Do you happen to have a name? Helena said nothing.
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Now that the mere concept of light was not a terror, she
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could think a little. She was still a captive.
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But Helena won't speak. And at that point, I think it's
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pretty understandable, really. Well, she either can't or won't
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speak either way. Understandable.
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And we're also clearly opening this book with a little bit of
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slavery. Lovely.
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Well, I thought it was slavery. Turns out it's like necromancy
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slavery. So that's fun.
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And then Helena's knocked out again.
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So we're 5 pages into the ebook and she's already been knocked
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unconscious twice. If I keep doing this with a
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caffeinated drink like Monster, I'm not going to sleep for a
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month at this rate. When she wakes up the next time
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she is on a bed, she's in shackles and a mystery woman
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gives us a nice little info dump which sets up a mystery around
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Helena. Helena Marino you.
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There's the sound of shuffled pages.
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Should be dead. According to your 1273 file, you
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were marked for culling due to unspecified extensive injuries,
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but the 19819 designation means you were selected for stasis.
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More pages were shuffled. However, there's no record that
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you ever arrived there or underwent processing.
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The woman sucked her teeth. You've not existed anywhere in
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our file system since August of last year. 14 months.
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And now we find you in the very stasis warehouse you never
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arrived at. How is that?
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Helena blinked slowly, trying to process the information. 14
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months. Obviously, no one can survive in
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stasis that long. Even at six months with perfect
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conditions, it's nearly impossible.
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And you weren't even stored properly.
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So where did you come from, where did you go?
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No, where did you come from? And who put you there?
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Helena turned her head away, refusing to answer.
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There wasn't anyone left to protect, but she refused used to
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cooperate with her captors to make anything easy for them,
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even their filing system. The thing I want to point out
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here, especially in that last bit, is the write in style.
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Is anyone else sick of this weird trend in so much modern
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fiction where sentence fragments are presented as whole
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sentences? Look at that last sentence to
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make anything easy for them, even their filing system is not
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a complete sentence like, and this is just a like.
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I get that sometimes you might want to use incomplete fragments
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to make speech or narration seem kind of scattered or choppy or
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intense, but using it here doesn't nothing more than using
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a comma would do. At least using a comma would be
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grammatically correct. You know, she refused to
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cooperate with her captors to make anything easy for them, or
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she refused to cooperate with her captors or make anything
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easy for them, even their filing system.
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But that on its own to make anything easy for them is not a
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complete sentence. And that really annoys me.
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I've noticed authors like Frieda McFadden do this a lot too.
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And it always kind of takes me out of a book because it makes
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no sense at all. And I'm like, I know you want us
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to pause here, but that's why we use a comma or our editors not
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picking up on this stuff anymore.
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Do they not care? Do people?
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I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
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I know grammar and language can change over time as our
15:08
understandings change. And that's how, like, it sounds
15:11
silly, but looking at like Internet memes and jokes and
15:14
stuff is a really good example of this, of seeing how language
15:16
can change. One person makes a joke here and
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it spreads and spreads and spreads.
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And now suddenly this like random collection of words has a
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whole new meaning that it normally wouldn't or it didn't
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5-10 years ago and yet it does now.
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And I get that in language and books, we can do the same thing.
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And you might be like, well, so many people, people do it now
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and so many people understand it that it makes sense.
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And just because it makes sense, that doesn't mean that it's
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necessarily correct and that there isn't a better way to
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express it more clearly. You know, I, I don't, I'm
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rambling again, sorry, going off script here.
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I mean, I do find it funny because I found one of the
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biggest struggles I'm having with my own writing.
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And I'm so I'm writing my first novel at the minute and I've
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been working on it for like a year now and it's slow progress,
15:51
but I'm, I'm really enjoying the process and I'm putting a lot of
15:54
time and effort into it. And one of the things I'm
15:55
struggling with is that I am personally such a fan of writing
15:58
in these long, complex sentences with embedded clauses that I
16:02
know I absolutely overuse them. And I need to stop doing that.
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Like, I'm purposely making an effort to vary my sentence
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length a bit to make my prose flow better, to play around with
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the rhythm of my writing and mix, you know, these short,
16:17
simple sentences with the longer, more complex ones and
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find a good balance between them.
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And also not just over complicate things for the sake
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of it, you know? But I feel like this book has
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kind of the opposite problem in that there are too many short
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sentences, rarely any complex sentences, and there are
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sentences so short, they're not even sentences.
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They're just random clauses with like a full stop, but not even a
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full clause. It's like just random little
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phrases with a full stop. You know, it's frustrating.
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I mean, don't get me wrong, there's some instances where
16:44
this works and it's clearly a stylistic thing.
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So for example, here, where were you before stasis?
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The woman was speaking loudly. So at this point, with the full
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stops, with the, you can imagine her speaking loudly, slowly,
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almost condescending. Where were you before stasis?
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It annoys me a little bit because I kind of want a full
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stop in the before stasis there, but I also kind of understand
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why it's not. It just, it just feels a little
17:08
inconsistent and odd. But here you've got those full
17:10
stops with a reason or a point, you know, being like, where were
17:14
you? You know, it's slow,
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condescending, angry, you know, whereas just what was the other
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one to make anything easy for them, Even their filing system.
17:22
That's a narrator. So it doesn't necessarily.
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Sorry. Yeah.
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It's like an omniscient narrator.
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So the choice of grammar in that phrase doesn't have a purpose.
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It's not trying to convey a certain tone or way of speaking,
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because this is like an omniscient narrator, right?
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So it's not really there with a purpose.
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It's just bad grammar. And that's what annoys me,
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right? We get more back story and world
17:41
building. Before the warehouse, she'd been
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captured along with everyone else, crammed into cages outside
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the alchemy tower where all the prisoners had been brought so
17:48
they could witness the celebrations of the war's end.
17:50
She could still smell the smoke and blood in the summer heat,
17:52
hear the raucous cheers as resistance leaders died, their
17:55
screams fading, watching them die and knowing it was still not
17:58
over even then. Some Necroman.
18:00
The crowd would hurry forward, eager to show off, and in a
18:02
matter of seconds that their body would get up again.
18:04
Someone Helena had trusted or served under, brought back with
18:07
reanimation. A necro thrall, an empty
18:09
automaton corpse. They'd be slit open, their skin
18:12
in ribbons, organs excised, eyes blank, face slack, and they
18:15
would be used to kill the next traitor in an even more brutal
18:18
way. The executions had not stopped
18:20
until the air was red, was a mist of blood.
18:22
General Titus Bayard's body was used to kill his wife slowly,
18:26
making him eat the strips of her as he cut them off.
18:28
So there's our first instance of cannibalism, sadly not our last.
18:31
Disgusting. I I feel conflicted about the
18:35
inclusion of this in here because I like I say, I want
18:38
dark things used with a purpose. If, for example, I'm trying to
18:41
think of a place where it would actually make sense.
18:43
I get that it's kind of showing the barbaric nature of the the
18:46
bad side, the one against the resistance.
18:49
Although we'll talk about how stupid name the resistance is in
18:51
a second. You have like the good guys and
18:52
the bad guys, right? So in Harry Potter fan fiction,
18:55
this started off as the way I've Googled this, the Death Eaters
18:58
and the Order of the Phoenix. Order of Phoenix is a good guy,
19:01
are the good guys and they're the side Helena's on.
19:03
And in this they're called the Resistance or they have some
19:06
other names. I think the Order of the Eternal
19:08
Flame, something like that. And then the bad guys who are
19:11
like necromancers are meant to be the Death Eaters.
19:14
And I don't know if they've got like an official name in this.
19:16
I still can't figure that out. But I'm just calling them bad
19:18
guys, right? So I guess part of this is
19:20
saying, hey, the bad guys are really, really bad because
19:22
they're making a man who's already dead reanimate himself
19:25
and eat his wife. I get that.
19:26
I get that. Like show us he's bad or show us
19:29
they're bad. Show us they're depraved.
19:30
But it still feels a bit gratuitous and like shocking for
19:33
the sake of being shocking rather than actually getting to
19:36
the plot, you know? God, I'm going on so many
19:37
tangents today. Sorry, I'm 5 pages into my
19:40
script and I've already gone off on so many tangents.
19:43
OK so the woman who is there when Helena wakes up, she uses
19:47
magic to torture Helena until she talks and we learn.
19:50
Helena managed to nod shakily. She should have realised the
19:52
woman was a vivimancer, Necromancy's inverse twin
19:55
wielded on the living rather than the dead.
19:58
I was like, I don't know what this means, but OK, Viviman.
20:00
Answer comes up a lot, I had to the end Google what it meant
20:03
because just saying the opposite of Necromancios.
20:05
What does that even mean? We'll get there, don't worry,
20:07
I'll explain it. And then the woman tries to use
20:09
magic on her again to do, I don't know, something, we don't
20:12
really know what. And the woman panics.
20:13
Because something has been done to your mind?
20:15
The woman said, sounding bewildered but also strangely
20:17
excited. Some kind of transmutation?
20:19
I've never encountered anything like it.
20:21
I'm going to have to report this.
20:22
I'll need a specialist. You have.
20:23
The woman paused. There's no name for this.
20:25
I'll have to come up with a name.
20:27
She seemed to be talking mostly to herself.
20:29
Transmutational barrier inside a brain.
20:31
How is that possible? I've never there are patterns in
20:33
it. This is elaborate, beautiful
20:35
professional work. A vivamancer manually rewiring
20:38
the human consciousness. Helena lay there not
20:40
understanding. Me too, Helena, me too.
20:42
So she looks into Helena's head with like a magic screen.
20:45
And the technology in this book makes no sense.
20:48
This book feels like one big anachronism.
20:49
So she looks into Helena's head with a magic screen and
20:52
explains. I doubt you understand any of
20:54
this. Same.
20:55
But imagine your mind is a city. Your thoughts run along various
20:58
streets to reach their destinations.
21:00
Those lines you see are your streets that have been rerouted.
21:02
There are barriers transmutationally crafted, and
21:05
so instead of following a natural pattern through the
21:07
brain, someone has created alternative routes.
21:09
Some areas are cut off entirely. I can't even imagine how the
21:12
skill this would take. And This is why Helena can't
21:15
remember anything. And she doesn't remember like
21:17
the last two years of her life. She doesn't remember how she got
21:20
in the stasis chamber or anything like that.
21:22
But the woman also says she's foreign and an alchemy student.
21:25
And then, in a convenient turn of events, hmm.
21:27
The woman's eyebrows furrowed, and she studied Helena more
21:30
carefully. Wait, I remember hearing about
21:32
you. You're that little savant the
21:34
holdfast sponsored. That must have been more than a
21:37
decade ago. So you must be, what, 20
21:39
something now? And there's more world info
21:41
dumping. Helena has these green bands
21:43
around her wrists, which have been put there after her side
21:46
lost the war, and her mentor or sponsor or I don't really know
21:50
who it is, but her side's leader was killed and these green bands
21:54
are, so it says, inside the stasis tank.
21:56
She'd been constantly aware of them clamped around her wrists.
21:58
Their existence had persisted along the edge of her
22:00
consciousness, an inescapable presence that stifled her
22:04
resonance, preventing any transmutational manipulation
22:06
that might have let her escape. Even in the tank, she could feel
22:09
the Lumithium inside them. By its nature, Lumithium bound
22:13
the four elements of Air, Water, Earth, and fire together, and in
22:17
that binding, Resonance was created.
22:19
The sacred Faith held that Resonance was a gift intended by
22:22
Sol, Godhead of the Elemental Quintessence, to elevate
22:25
humanity. Resonance was a rare ability in
22:28
many parts of the world, but not in Sol's chosen nation of
22:31
Palladia. The pre war census had estimated
22:33
nearly 1/5 of the population possessed memorable resonance
22:36
levels. The number had been expected to
22:38
rise further in with the next generation.
22:40
Usually resonance was channelled into the alchemy of metals and
22:44
inorganic compounds allowing for transmutation or alchemization.
22:48
However, in a defective soul which rebelled against souls
22:50
natural laws, the resonance could be corrupted, enabling
22:53
vivimancy like what the woman had used on Helena and the
22:56
necromancy used to create necrothorials.
22:59
As the elements of resonance, Lumithium could increase or even
23:02
create resonance in inner objects through exposure, making
23:05
them alchemically malleable. However, pure Lumithium was too
23:08
divine for mortals, overexposure caused wasting sickness, and for
23:12
individuals with resonance, direct exposure could result in
23:15
raw metallic pain within their nerves.
23:17
But the cuff she's wearing means she can't use her magic or
23:20
resonance, and that means all she knew was that as long as
23:23
those manacles remained locked in place, she wasn't an
23:26
alchemist at all. And that's the end of chapter 1.
23:29
I was so confused by all this. It felt very heavy and info
23:32
dumpy, but I didn't feel like we were getting good explanations.
23:35
Now having read more of the book, I'm understanding a little
23:38
bit more and I'm going to try and explain it to you.
23:40
So there's a place called Palladia and that is surrounded
23:43
by other lands or countries. I think I might be wrong, this
23:47
is just what I'm understanding so far.
23:48
It's all so messy and hard to follow.
23:50
So you get Palladia in the middle and that's all that's
23:52
surrounded by, like other lands and countries and islands.
23:54
Helena is from one of the southern islands and she was
23:58
brought here because she's got magic and it's not normal that
24:00
those people have magic. But in Palladia about 1/5 of the
24:03
people have magic. Magic here is called resonance.
24:08
Resonance can be used to do things like manipulate metals,
24:12
like if you have like a metal knife, you can change it into a
24:15
sword and stuff like that and you can manipulate these metals
24:18
with it. Some people also have, I think
24:21
elemental powers, like one of the main guys who's in charge of
24:25
the resistance and who used to rule Palladia is called Luke and
24:28
he has firepower. So far we haven't seen anyone
24:31
with air, earth, or water power, but maybe they exist, maybe they
24:34
don't, I don't know. There's also these powers that
24:36
people can use to manipulate humans and organic matter, and
24:39
that's called vivimancy and necromancy.
24:42
Necromancy, like they're two sides, the same coin, I think.
24:46
Vivimancy can be used to do things like heal people or
24:50
manipulate brains and emotions and that sort of thing.
24:52
Necromancy can be used to reanimate dead corpses, I think,
24:57
right? What she's found is that she's
24:59
wearing these like manacles or bracelets, and these are
25:03
stopping her from using any magic.
25:05
So she can't use magic while she's wearing them.
25:07
And she can feel one of the elements in them is an element
25:10
that usually enables magic, but it's combined with something to
25:14
prevent her from using magic. And that's where we're at so
25:16
far. This book does not do a good job
25:18
of explaining any of this stuff well.
25:20
And we get bits and pieces in this like really scattergun
25:23
method. And I'm slowly starting to put
25:25
it together. I just, I complain about this
25:27
more later. But the world filling in this is
25:29
not done in a enjoyable or easy to understand way.
25:32
I'll give you some examples later of books that do do that
25:35
well, but this one does not. So by the end of Chapter 1, so
25:38
far, we know nothing about Helena and her personality
25:41
really. We know she used to be gifted.
25:43
She was good at magic. She used to do magic and went to
25:46
like an alchemy institute. She's an immigrant.
25:49
We know her brain's been altered, but we don't know what
25:52
it was altered to or from. We know she's a prisoner after a
25:54
war. We know that the people who won
25:56
the war seem to be evil sadists who practise necromancy and make
26:00
people eat each other. But we don't know at this point
26:02
what the war was about, what they were fighting for, or who
26:05
the other side was. We assume, I think that like
26:08
Helena side are meant to be the good guys.
26:10
But after reading more of this book, I don't think there's any
26:12
good guys in this. I don't think this was a good
26:14
guys versus bad guys war. This was a bad guys versus bad
26:17
guys war. That's just my opinion though.
26:18
But we still know nothing about Helena, her personality, her
26:21
values. She's just been like lying there
26:23
while people talk at her and like being unconscious and then
26:27
awake and then unconscious and then in pain and awake and
26:30
unconscious and people talked at her.
26:32
And this is basically the whole first part of this book.
26:34
It's things happening to Helena and at Elena and near Helena,
26:38
but Helena doesn't do anything. She's not an active participant
26:42
in the first part of this book at all.
26:43
And so far in the the second part of the book, she's not very
26:46
active either. I'll just say that.
26:47
So at the start of chapter 2, we find out that the people who
26:50
currently have her captured, oh, I've got their name now.
26:53
They're called the Undying, right?
26:54
That's for the capital U, the Undying.
26:56
I keep forgetting their name. Helena calls some of them
26:58
Litchers, but apparently that's a slur and they're not allowed
27:01
to say it anymore. But they go by the Undying
27:03
overall. So the woman, we still don't
27:05
know her name or anything about her.
27:07
She's left wherever Helena is. And Helena's chained up.
27:10
And then some other woman comes in called Grace, and she says
27:13
she knows Helena because she was an orderly in the hospital.
27:15
What hospital, we don't know. Turns out Hellena used to work
27:18
in a hospital, but we don't know when that was or where that was
27:20
or why that was. Grace has a bunch of scars on
27:23
her face, and she says the Undying didn't do this.
27:25
She gestures at her face. We did it ourselves.
27:28
The Undying can do anything they want to us.
27:29
To anyone labelled resistance. It's a thing nowadays to keep
27:32
Greys instead of staff. Other times they just want
27:34
something to play with at a party or after a night out.
27:37
Her face twisted. No one interferes.
27:38
Even the ones who aren't Undying or in the guilds will go along
27:41
with it because they all hope it'll give them a better chance
27:43
of earning immortality. 2. Grace gave a jerky stilter
27:46
truck. But if you're messed up looking,
27:48
they won't keep you for long. She drew a shaky breath and then
27:50
peered hard at Elena. So from what I could tell here,
27:53
Grace used to be part of the Resistance and she's now like a
27:56
prisoner of wars. Well, not a prisoner of war, I
27:58
don't know, maybe she is a prisoner of war, I don't know.
28:00
It's never really explained, but they do this thing like in self
28:02
defence, where they hurt themselves and scar themselves
28:05
to make themselves look less attractive so they're less
28:07
likely to be raped. It's very dark.
28:09
Again, it's not really clear who or what the Greys are, but I
28:11
assumed they were captured members of the Resistance and
28:14
that's a group Helena was a part of.
28:15
I still don't really know what greys are.
28:17
I don't think that's been explained yet.
28:18
I don't know. I don't know.
28:19
So in my original script here I said so far there's been a fair
28:23
bit of info dumping, but I still feel very confused about how the
28:25
magic works, how society is structured, who these groups of
28:29
people actually are and what they're fighting over.
28:31
This is a very long book though, and I'm really hoping that it
28:33
builds on this more and starts to make more sense and feel more
28:35
developed. It does get developed more, but
28:38
it's still not explained well. It's I really struggle with this
28:41
book. There's a few things where I've
28:42
literally had to be like, what the hell did I just read?
28:45
And then like go and look it up in the wiki for the book because
28:47
I'm like, I don't know what you're trying to say.
28:49
And this book actually made me feel stupid at times.
28:51
I was like, am I just too stupid to understand this?
28:54
Or is it really this poorly written and I've had to go away
28:57
and like read some good books and like assure myself you're
29:00
not dumb. Don't worry.
29:01
Like you're not stupid. You're not losing your brain
29:04
power. So this new character, Grace,
29:06
who I will say this, like I say, I've not finished the book yet,
29:09
but after 600 pages, she doesn't appear again after this scene.
29:12
So I don't know if she's relevant or not, but this new
29:14
character Grace starts dropping more info about how awful the
29:17
bad guys are. Apparently they are keeping
29:19
prisoners of war as slaves, keeping them manacled, which
29:22
means cutting off their magic power, killing them if they try
29:25
and run away, and then displaying their bodies and just
29:27
really messed up stuff, obviously.
29:28
So I think it's clear at this point that anyone on that side
29:31
of the war is probably irredeemably bad, right?
29:34
They're doing some pretty depraved stuff.
29:35
If you're on the side of the people who are keeping slaves
29:39
and killing prisoners of war and making them eat each other, I'm
29:42
just going to go ahead and guess you're pretty irredeemable, OK?
29:45
There's no way you can be on that side and do those things
29:47
and support that stuff and then have the author somehow make
29:50
them a sympathetic or nuanced villain that's just like
29:53
comically evil at that point. And I don't see how that can be
29:56
redeemed at all. But see how it goes.
29:57
There's also a mention of something called the Eternal
30:00
Flame or the Order of the Eternal Flame.
30:03
I said it's unclear whether it's a building, a group, or like a
30:05
faction of the Resistance, but everyone that was in it is now
30:08
dead. It turns out that they're like
30:09
the Eternal Flame is like the overall group that also gets
30:13
called the Resistance. It's like you have the Undying
30:16
and the Eternal Flame. It took me like 300 pages to
30:18
figure that out, but here we are.
30:20
Some guy called the High Reeve, stupid name is just killing
30:23
everyone, and I will have my rant about the High Reeve as a
30:26
title later. Don't worry, we'll come to it.
30:28
Who's the high Reeve? Helena hoped it was a safe
30:30
question to ask. She didn't remember the title.
30:32
Grace shook her head. I don't know.
30:33
He still wears a helmet the way the Undying did during the war.
30:36
The High Necromancer is too important for public
30:38
appearances, so he sends the High Reeve instead.
30:40
He's some kind of vivimancer, but not like the rest.
30:42
He kills people without even touching them.
30:44
So there's, again, this is a thing that's taken me like a
30:47
long time to figure out, but in this world, you need to be
30:49
touching someone to use magic on them.
30:51
But this guy for some reason can just do it from a distance,
30:54
which makes him like extra powerful or something, I don't
30:56
know. Resonance doesn't work like
30:57
that. Helena said, correcting her
30:59
reflexively. Without an array, a stable
31:01
channel has to be formed through contact.
31:03
And then I know how resonance works.
31:04
Great. Grace said sharply.
31:06
But I've seen him do it last week.
31:07
Grace's voice failed. Her throat bobbed several times.
31:10
There was a smuggling ring. There's been a grain shortage.
31:12
Most of what we get on the outpost is rotten.
31:14
A few people were bringing in extra food.
31:16
It wasn't even a lot, but the warden heard rumours about the
31:18
prisoners organising 10 people in all public execution.
31:21
The high Reeve did all of them at the same time did it clean so
31:24
they'll last longer in the lithium mines.
31:26
So here we get a little bit more explanation of magic, but not
31:29
really. I was also still confused at
31:31
this point about what a vivimancer does because that's
31:33
not a term I'd like heard before and I felt like opposite of
31:35
necromancer wasn't explaining it so I googled it.
31:37
Apparently Google says it's generally to do with controlling
31:40
organic matter and growth and can be used for things like
31:42
controlling others bodies or healing them or hurting them,
31:45
and that is what it seems to do throughout the book, but that's
31:47
never actually explained on the page.
31:49
I guess you just have to pick it up or Google it.
31:51
I don't know. I don't know where the outpost
31:52
is either or what the outpost is.
31:54
That's still not been explained to me, but we'll get there, I
31:56
guess. Grace says they're a place
31:58
called Central. Grace shook ahead.
32:00
No, they call this Central now. Houses all the undying
32:02
experiments. I she choked.
32:04
I have three brothers. Turns out Grace is here at
32:06
Central, wherever that is, to sell one of her eyeballs so that
32:09
she can afford food for her younger brothers.
32:11
Lovely. Very dystopian.
32:12
Again, I kind of wouldn't mind this as a a plot point.
32:15
I feel like there's something pretty dark about that, but it
32:17
seems to be forgotten. It's not come back up yet.
32:19
So we'll see. And then Grace is like, where
32:21
were you? You were supposed to save Luke,
32:23
but you didn't. And I was like, I guess Luke's
32:25
the old leader and she had to save him.
32:27
OK. And then before we can get any
32:28
more answers or any more information, Grace just runs
32:31
away. OK.
32:32
The woman returns with a group of necro thralls, and it turns
32:35
out they are reanimated dead people that they use as slaves.
32:38
So from what I can tell, and again, this isn't really
32:40
explained, but from what I've picked up in context clues in
32:43
the next 600 pages, these people kill people and then they
32:47
reanimate their corpses and tell them what to do.
32:49
And that's a necro thrall. There's also ones that they call
32:53
litches, even though that's like a slur and they're not allowed
32:55
to say that. And I think they've got another
32:57
name. And litches are when they kill
32:59
someone. And then if one of the undying's
33:01
like bodies has been destroyed, they put their soul into the
33:05
bodies, this other dead person and walk around in like a dead
33:08
person's suit. And that's a lich, I think.
33:10
But the necro thralls, I think, I think they're like reanimated
33:14
corpses with no personalities. They're just like mindless
33:17
slaves. I think, I don't know, just so
33:19
confusing. The woman wants to take Elena to
33:21
see the high necromancer to be examined.
33:24
And I was like, I assume he's the top guy in charge.
33:27
It's never really explained, but he is, he's he's like the guy in
33:29
charge. So he's like, I think he's meant
33:32
to be Voldemort in the Harry Potter fan fiction.
33:34
He's the parallel of that, I think.
33:36
I don't Helena doesn't want to go because she says this was the
33:39
guy who killed Luke. The High Necromancer killed
33:41
Luke, Luke who'd been the whole world to her.
33:43
Helena had enlisted in the Resistance and sworn fealty to
33:46
the Order of the Eternal Flame. Not out of faith, but because of
33:49
Luke holdfast. Remember that.
33:51
Not out of faith, but because of Luke holdfast.
33:54
Remember that. Because I have complaints about
33:56
it in Part 2, especially because she might not believe in the
33:59
gods. Remember that she might not
34:01
believe in the gods. She doesn't believe in the gods.
34:04
She's an atheist. She doesn't believe in the gods,
34:06
but she he had believed in him that he was good and kind and
34:09
cared about everyone. She'd promised she'd do anything
34:11
for him, but he died before her eyes.
34:13
So at this point I was quite annoyed because I was like
34:14
lovely a main character who doesn't have any personality or
34:17
values of her own. She just wanders around after
34:19
some man who I thought Luke was her ex-boyfriend.
34:22
Turns out he's not but I really thought he was up to the like
34:25
end of the first part of this book.
34:27
She has to go see the high necromancer anyway and she
34:31
realises that central. This building that she's in now
34:34
used to be what they called the Alchemy Tower, in the the very
34:37
heart of the Alchemy Institute that the Holdfasts had founded.
34:40
Helena had come halfway across the world to study in this
34:42
tower. Luke had been so proud of the
34:43
institute his family had built. It had been the heart of
34:46
Palladia. She'd known it through his eyes,
34:48
all the history and meaning of it.
34:49
Now it was ravaged and mutilated.
34:51
So she has a cry and she gets knocked out again.
34:53
So while she's an unconscious drink, so this alchemy institute
34:57
is like the centre of all of this.
34:59
And it's like, again, I'm trying to figure this out from like
35:01
what I've read in the rest of the book.
35:02
It's not explained here, but it's this like magical school
35:05
built by this family called the Holdfasts.
35:08
The Holdfasts are in control of all of Palladia and I, and I
35:12
think maybe the surrounding areas, I don't know.
35:13
Because they believe they have this divine right to rule imbued
35:17
on them by the God's soul, I think.
35:19
And so they're like, we're chosen by God.
35:21
We rule everything, remember, we're in charge and we're rich.
35:25
And you mean it's a dictatorship?
35:26
Like, that's what it is. It's it's a monarchy and a
35:29
dictatorship, right? It crazy, but they're the good
35:32
guys, apparently. Yeah, but they're their internal
35:34
headquarters. The Alchemy Tower has been taken
35:37
over by the Undying and is now called Central.
35:39
OK, so Helena's knocked out again.
35:41
As we said, when she wakes up, she's been examined by a man.
35:44
Nightmare fuel. We learn this woman who we've
35:46
been like hearing from throughout this book, but we
35:48
don't actually know who she is yet.
35:49
She's got a name. Her name is Doctor Stroud, but
35:51
we don't know who this random guy is.
35:52
He's like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this is impossible,
35:56
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the High Necromancer
35:58
comes in and it's like, grumble, grumble, grumble.
35:59
How do you not know? Grumble, grumble, grumble and so
36:02
on. I could be a voice actor.
36:03
I know. I'm great.
36:04
We learned that the High Necromancer's name is actually
36:07
Morrow. And here's a narration.
36:09
The High Necromancer was not what she remembered when he, the
36:12
old Luke, had been human. Now he was mutated, his limbs
36:15
stuck out in ways that were impossibly jointed, and he was
36:17
nearly the size of two men. She thought, at first, that he
36:20
was wearing a mask. The High Necromancer had been
36:22
masked during the celebration, wearing a huge golden Crescent
36:24
that concealed half of his face like an eclipse sun.
36:27
As he drew nearer, however, she realised it wasn't a mask she
36:29
was staring at. Mauro's face was skull like, his
36:32
features so sunken, the skin so translucently pale that she
36:35
could see through to the bone. Where his eyes should have been
36:38
were two blackened, empty hollows as if they'd been burned
36:40
out with live coals. So that's horrifying.
36:43
But you know what? As a villain, I'm, I'm OK with
36:45
horrifying. I think that's pretty creepy.
36:48
You know, I love that. And I was like, but at least we
36:50
know he's not going to be the love interest here because he's
36:52
not hot. If he was hot, it doesn't matter
36:55
how many people he'd killed, he'd still be viable as a love
36:58
interest because that's what happens in these romantic books,
37:00
right? But like I said earlier, I went
37:02
into this book knowing absolutely nothing.
37:03
So I was like, I didn't know who was meant to be the love
37:05
interest. I just knew there was one
37:06
somewhere. And I was like, surely it can't
37:09
be this guy. Surely it can't actually be
37:10
anyone on the bad guy's side because like, cannibalism,
37:14
slavery. I said at this point is my
37:19
original script. I'm just assuming there'll be a
37:21
love interest. I just hope it's not one of the
37:23
murdering bad guys, but if it is, I bet they'll do a.
37:25
He was just following orders, but he didn't enjoy it and now
37:28
this one woman can redeem him and bring him to the good side
37:31
or some nonsense like that and we'll get there.
37:33
Anyway, this guy tries to read her memories and Helena rolls
37:37
around screaming because it's painful having a memories read
37:40
right? We're told she's a healer and
37:42
she's also a kind of vivamancer, so she can like, change organic
37:45
matter and stuff as well. She gets her manic and then her
37:48
manic. She gets her magic suppression
37:50
bracelet things replaced with newer ones when the guard, who
37:53
is a person called Mandel enters the room and we get an answer to
37:57
the first mystery. Why was Helena awake in the
37:59
stasis chamber? Mandel says no, it was not
38:01
betrayal. I am loyal, loyal to our cause
38:03
and loyal to you. She says tomorrow it was my
38:06
foolish desire for vengeance. I confess it.
38:08
I wanted her to suffer, but I would never betray you.
38:10
Explain yourself. Mandel pushed herself up, still
38:13
kneeling, her head bowed but her voice shaking with emotion.
38:15
She is a traitor to vivimances. She tormented me, thought
38:18
herself better than me for having been part of the
38:20
Holdfasts Institute, her vivimancy blessed by the Eternal
38:23
Flame. She had to be punished.
38:25
Helena stared at the woman in dazed bewilderment.
38:27
You tampered with a prisoner and her records out of jealousy.
38:30
Stroud looked astonished. Why didn't you report her
38:32
abilities? Mandel shrank back.
38:34
I feared that she would be favoured if it was known that
38:36
you might find her useful and not punish her as she deserved
38:39
to be punished. So whoever this Mandel person is
38:41
has an issue with Helena for something that happened during
38:43
the time period that Helena can't remember and so she
38:46
decided to lock her conscious in this stasis.
38:49
Stasis chambers, like revenge, I guess.
38:52
OK, I don't care. Mauro kills Mandel on the spot.
38:55
It's pretty gross. And then he takes this bit of
38:57
metal from her corpse, like the chest of her corpse, and he
39:01
shoves it inside a different corpse and all of a sudden she's
39:03
back alive. And I think this is what a lich
39:06
is. I think, I don't know, It's
39:08
bizarre, it's weird. None of this is explained
39:10
properly. So now at this point in the
39:12
book, our only mystery is like, what happened to Helena's brain?
39:15
And we pretty much get a hypothesis of this, like, and
39:17
we're only 3% of the way into the book here.
39:19
That's like, what, 30 pages? Something like that, I don't
39:22
know, I can't do maths off the top.
39:23
I mean, I can't do math. We're like 30 pages into the
39:25
book and we basically get a hypothesis for why Helena's
39:28
brain is the way it is. So one of the guys is like,
39:30
there was a guy on the side of the resistance who had a brain
39:33
injury, but they found a way to cure him using a healer called
39:36
Elaine Boyle, who was Luke's personal healer.
39:38
Apparently she was killed when they seized the institute and
39:40
they're using her reanimated body for mining now.
39:43
I was only aware of this because they hoped there were similar
39:45
techniques used in the Eastern Empire.
39:47
The healer, I was told, had a special ability to to alter not
39:50
just the brain, but the mind. They proposed to enter the mind
39:53
of Bayard. That was a man with a brain
39:54
injury and healing from within. The mood in the room suddenly
39:57
shifted, growing electrified. That would be animancy, not
40:01
healing, Stroud said with slow incredulity.
40:04
I do not know. The words were different,
40:05
Shishyo said. That's the man who's come in and
40:07
done in manacles. The mind, I was told, resisted
40:09
another's presence. But this healer believed that
40:11
with many small treatments it was possible.
40:13
Like learning how to to tolerate poison.
40:15
Mithridatism, Moreau said. Slowly he straightened into his
40:18
full tremendous height. Soul Mithridatism.
40:21
Hope I'm pronouncing that right. He advanced on Shiseo as if
40:24
intending to RIP the answers out of him.
40:26
The eternal flame found a way to make living subjects survive
40:29
soul transference. And you never thought to mention
40:31
this? So at this point I was like and
40:33
tell me if I'm misunderstanding this because we still haven't
40:36
got a full answer for this. I hope to where I've read in the
40:38
book but this is what I'm thinking so far.
40:40
The implication here is that this Elaine woman altered
40:43
Helena's brain, or Elaine is Helena, or Helena is Elaine and
40:49
altered her own brain. So either Elaine transferred her
40:52
memories into Helena's body so she wouldn't be recognised, or
40:55
there is no Elaine, or she exists and she's not really
40:58
important and she's just like a distraction or something and
41:01
Helena changed her own memories. I don't know.
41:03
I don't know. I mean like if Helena was a
41:05
healer and seemed to be in a relationship with Luke, then why
41:07
would he choose a different person to be his personal
41:09
healer? That makes me think Elaine
41:11
wasn't his personal healer, Helena was.
41:13
And also that similar names. So like basically could be the
41:15
same. And then there's that thing from
41:17
the last chapter where Grace recognised Helena, but Helena
41:19
didn't recognise Grace. So I'm like, maybe maybe it's
41:22
Elaine in Helena's body, or maybe it's Helena with her
41:26
memories wiped. Well, we know she has a memories
41:28
wipe. I don't, I don't know.
41:29
Anyway, the point I was thinking is then there's some other stuff
41:32
on the page that I don't know if it's in here or later, but they
41:34
talk about how to do that to someone's brain, to alter their
41:37
brain. You not only need to be this
41:38
different kind of magician, but you need to like personally know
41:42
them really well and understand their brain.
41:43
So I'm like, surely you could only do that to your own brain,
41:45
right? But then the soul transference
41:47
thing, I don't, I don't know things and stuff.
41:50
Anyway, they're like, OK, well, now this is a mystery.
41:52
So let's send her off to the high Reeve.
41:54
Still a stupid name. So I know like a Reeve is like
41:57
an old mediaeval rank, right? So fun fact, they used to have
42:00
this role called a Shire Reeve and then Shire Reeves, as in
42:04
Reeves of the Shire. That's where we eventually got
42:06
the word sheriff from. So Shire Reeve of a time became
42:09
sheriff, which is fun and I like that.
42:11
So my point is like a Reeve is like a a genuine position,
42:16
especially in like mediaeval England.
42:18
But calling someone a high high Reeve still sounds silly to me.
42:21
I mean calling someone a high neck necromancer still sounds
42:22
silly to me, but high necromancer and the high Reeve,
42:26
it just sounds silly. That's just a personal thing.
42:28
Anyway, she has to be sent to the high Reeve to be examined
42:31
and then the chapter ends. And so at this point Helena has
42:34
still done nothing and said nothing.
42:35
Like she's still just a passive character.
42:37
She's nothing. Who is she?
42:39
What is her personality? Why won't she do something or
42:42
like say something or questions like this is just page after
42:46
page of things being done to her.
42:47
She spent all her time so far in the book either being
42:49
unconscious or being tortured or just sitting in there silently.
42:52
Like, I don't care about her. I don't see the appeal of this
42:55
mystery because like, who is she?
42:56
Why should I care? Why do I care that her brains
42:59
been altered? Tell me in the next chapter
43:01
she's taken back to a different room where she collapses again
43:06
and she has a little thing to herself and this is what she
43:08
thinks. Transference and Emanci, both
43:11
words were unfamiliar. She turned them over in her
43:12
mind, trying to contextualise the comments that have been
43:15
made. Again, that's that's not a full
43:16
sentence. That is not a full set that you
43:19
need a coma, not sorry. Annoying souls and minds and
43:22
occupying the mental landscape of another person to transmute
43:24
them from being from within. That's also not a full sentence.
43:27
And the Eternal Flame had discovered this.
43:30
Surely not. Souls were considered inviable
43:32
among those of faith, The Eternal Flame considered even
43:35
the physical operations of vivimancy and necromancy.
43:38
A risk to an immortal soul, Alteration of a mind, the
43:41
transference of a soul. Surely that would be seen as
43:43
infinitely worse. So a bit of regurgitating what
43:46
we've just read, but she's like, I don't know how this can be OK.
43:50
So now we get a bit more regurgitating of what we just
43:52
read, including who was Elaine Boyle.
43:54
Helena didn't know the name and she was sure there had never
43:56
been any other healers, much less a personal one designated
43:59
for Luke alone. So this is leaning into my
44:02
Elaine and Helena are the same person theory.
44:04
I will say I was wrong on that, but we'll get that.
44:06
Instead of being taken straight to the High Reef, though, she
44:08
spends a few days being tortured and interrogated by Stroud.
44:11
And there's some more info dumping about how Luke's family,
44:14
the Holdfasts, believed they were chosen by gods to be
44:17
rulers. And there's lines like the
44:18
Resistance had considered the war a holy war, a divine battle
44:21
between good and evil, a testing of the faith.
44:24
But Helena's motives have been more personal than that.
44:26
And I thought this might lead to, like, a genuinely
44:28
interesting story point about religion and holy wars and
44:32
rulers who believe they have a divine right over being
44:35
democratically elected, or how both sides were controlling
44:38
through fear, but in different ways, you know, fear of
44:41
punishment from the gods versus fear of punishment by man
44:44
through violence. And it could have discussed some
44:47
really interesting things there. And I was keen to know what
44:49
Helena's views were on this conflict.
44:51
Like, why did she choose to side with the resistance if she
44:54
wasn't actually religious? What are her values?
44:57
Does she ever feel any real internal conflict?
44:59
And what ideologies guide her actions?
45:01
But apparently in this first part of the book, we don't get
45:04
any of that interesting stuff. Instead, she's just portrayed as
45:06
a silly little girl acting because she liked a boy.
45:09
And so she just follows his politics like a good, silent
45:11
little woman. And it just really frustrated
45:14
me. This whole first part of the
45:15
book is just her being like, Luke was so perfect.
45:17
And I don't believe in his religion and I don't care about
45:19
politics. So he he.
45:21
I don't even know about that. I just follow a man.
45:23
And then the second part of the book starts to look at some of
45:27
these questions a little bit, little bit more, but it never
45:29
actually dives into it. It never actually explores these
45:32
topics. There's like, brief mentions of
45:33
these conflicts. And then it's like, yeah, but
45:36
but, you know, I have feelings for this boy and say it just you
45:39
never go deep with it. It's so annoying.
45:41
And Helena's saying all this stuff now about not being
45:44
religious but, like, supporting Luke about, like, it makes
45:47
certain stuff that happens in the second part of the book not
45:49
make sense. Yeah.
45:50
So it says Helena's motives had been more personal than that.
45:52
Luke didn't need to be divine for her to want to save him.
45:56
He could have been entirely ordinary, and she would have
45:57
made all the same choices. Remember that.
46:00
Because this doesn't make sense with some of the conflicts she
46:03
has later in Part 2. But that's another video for you
46:05
guys then. And there's some stuff about how
46:07
at the institute Helena was treated differently by the
46:09
students. And I'm paraphrasing here
46:11
because she was working class and a foreigner and she earned
46:14
her place there while the other students were from rich Guild
46:16
families who basically bought their way in or born into it.
46:19
And they all looked down on her. Again, this could be really
46:22
interesting if it wasn't all just a vessel to talk about how
46:24
amazing Luke is with him telling her Helena was special though.
46:28
Why would his family want another Guild student at their
46:30
institute when they could have someone like her?
46:32
Luke had always had a talent for making Helena feel like she was
46:34
special rather than painfully out of place.
46:36
She'd wanted to prove him right, that she was something that
46:38
she'd be worth believing in. Her family wouldn't be wrong
46:41
about her, sorry, his family wouldn't be wrong about her.
46:43
She'd focused on her education and ignored political
46:45
hostilities around her. And like, we love to see a
46:48
successful, talented woman getting an education.
46:50
I just hate that she's only doing it for a man, you know?
46:53
We're also told that the Guild people are the bad guys in this
46:56
because they're the one who partnered with the Undying
46:58
eventually. But the Guild guys started off
47:00
as bad guys because they used to criticise Luke's dad leadership
47:04
and that's how the war started. They'd say that his father was
47:07
being accused of allowing the country to fall behind because
47:10
of his derelict governance. All that the Guilds had proposed
47:13
that the Principates power be limited to religious affairs and
47:16
that they be the ones to run the country.
47:17
It seemed that nothing Principate Apollo, Luke's dad,
47:20
did was ever enough for the Guilds.
47:22
Their complaints and demands were endless.
47:24
When Principate Apollo was murdered, the Guilds didn't see
47:27
a tragedy at all, but an opportunity.
47:28
They used Luke's age, only 16, as a pretext for declaring A
47:32
reformation. No longer would religious elites
47:35
and a warrior class rule. The city state would be governed
47:38
by the newly formed Guild assembly.
47:40
So at this point I'm kind of on their side.
47:42
You want us to be against the people who wanted democracy and
47:45
representation rather than a 16 year old dictator who believes
47:49
he has a divine right. I I don't know, but anyway,
47:52
while the guilds like, hey, no, we want democracy, Morrow shows
47:55
up and he offers people immortality.
47:57
So suddenly he's in charge of that side, which, you know, I
48:00
guess the immortality itself isn't bad, but his whole method
48:03
of killing people in cannibalism is.
48:04
But other than that, on cannibal side of the Guild, I'd I don't
48:08
know. The politics in this book is so
48:10
complex for no reason, you know? Back to Helena's interrogation.
48:13
And we finally learned what a vivimancer is.
48:15
Although healers were relatively common in remote parts of
48:18
Palladia, Vivimanci was rare enough that there were all kinds
48:21
of claims about what vivimancers were capable of, that they could
48:24
enthral the living. Just as necromancers enthralled
48:26
the dead, for instance, and perform unspeakable
48:28
transmutations upon living flesh.
48:30
So we finally got that. It's still not a great
48:33
explanation. The one I googled earlier was
48:34
better, but here we are. Then there's just more scenes of
48:37
Helena being tortured by Stroud and other people, and I'm just
48:39
starting to think this book is torture porn at this point.
48:41
And 600 pages into it, that's pretty much all I've seen so
48:44
far. Can't say I'm a fan.
48:45
Stroud was not enthralling, but she was an expert in paralysing
48:48
and transmutationally manipulating Helena at the site
48:51
is provocation. If Helena twitched too much,
48:53
Stroud would fuse her bones together to keep her still.
48:56
She seemed to take delight in the technicality of it not being
48:58
torture. Sometimes she left Helena like
49:00
that for hours. Yeah, no, that's literally
49:02
torture. That's just torture.
49:04
OK, sorry, I took a break to get some lunch but we are back now.
49:06
So Helena is busy wandering around the central building when
49:10
she bumps into a man who she recognises as Jan Crowder, who
49:13
apparently used to be on the Eternal Flame Council.
49:16
And when I keep hearing Eternal Flame I just keep thinking the
49:18
bangle song and I can't take it seriously.
49:23
But she realised it's not actually Jan Crowther, it's
49:25
someone using his body. This wasn't Crowther, one of the
49:28
Undying was wearing his corpse. On the rare occasions when they
49:30
couldn't regenerate anymore, so grievously wounded in battle
49:33
that their immortal bodies could no longer heal, the Undying
49:35
could move themselves into their necros rolls instead.
49:38
It's why the resistance had called them litches.
49:40
She's saying this like it's some sort of revelation, but we
49:42
literally just saw it in the last scene.
49:44
We saw Morrow do it to Mandel, so OK I guess it was an
49:48
imperfect solution. Even when maintained, the bodies
49:50
rotted slowly around them and lacked the regenerative quality
49:53
of the near impervious originals.
49:55
Helena suspected this was why Morrow was so interested in
49:58
transference. The method had the potential to
50:00
allow the Undying to move into living bodies instead.
50:03
So she bumps into Crowther, then nothing interesting happens, and
50:05
Helena is finally taken to the High Reeves place, his big
50:08
house. Helena was pushed into the
50:10
backseat of a motor car, a necro thrall cramming her towards the
50:13
middle as it seated itself beside her.
50:15
The smell of rot immediately began to fill the enclosed
50:17
space. And I don't know why, but I'm so
50:18
shocked that they have cars in this world.
50:20
This is one of the things that just like you'll see it
50:22
throughout this first part, it's really jarring.
50:24
It just feels wrong and out of place because I'm really
50:27
confused about when this is supposed to take place, like
50:29
what kind of time period, what kind of world?
50:31
This is clearly a fictional world, right?
50:32
As we'll see, this isn't Earth. This is a fictional world.
50:35
And yet somehow they still have cars.
50:37
They they have like cars from our time.
50:39
They have other technology from our time and then they have
50:41
magic and then they have like future tech like stasis chambers
50:45
and these screen X-ray machine things.
50:48
And then they also have like mediaeval weaponry and like it.
50:52
You'll see as we go on. It's confusing.
50:54
If what grace is up was true. The High Reef preferred murder
50:56
to strategic choices like interrogation.
50:58
Men prone to violence were generally thoughtless acting
51:00
with emotion 1st and applying reason after.
51:03
Kind of loved this menaceo emotional bit.
51:04
It's hilarious and true. But yeah, there's a whole bunch
51:06
of page filler of Helena thinking about everything we've
51:08
just read because this book is just repetitive filler.
51:11
I swear it needs an editor desperately.
51:13
It could have been half the length it was, if not less.
51:16
And then she's like, I need to escape but I can't.
51:18
So instead of giving up my secrets, I don't know, I'll try
51:20
and provoke this guy into killing me because that's
51:22
logical. So here we have the whole
51:24
suicidal ideation thing where she's like, like even this is so
51:27
passive. Like she's not doing anything to
51:29
try and escape. She's not actually doing
51:31
anything to like kill herself. She's like, I guess I'll just
51:34
try and make him kill me. She's so passive, it's really
51:36
annoying. So she gets the creepy mansion
51:38
and a woman is stood outside who she describes as barely more
51:41
than a girl, and then later the girl in green.
51:44
So this woman, this young girl is clearly young.
51:46
And then it also goes on to describe her chest.
51:48
So that felt a little bit creepy.
51:50
Her attention turned to Stroud and she donned A brittle smile.
51:52
Welcome to Spire Fell, my husband is waiting for you.
51:55
So I'm getting child marriage vibes at this point.
51:57
Barely more than a child young girl married.
51:59
Let's talk about her chest. I don't like this.
52:02
The house has a dead Butler because why not?
52:05
And she finally meets the Hyreeve and it says that it's
52:07
some guy she knew from magic school called Kane Ferran.
52:10
He has silver white hair and pale skin.
52:12
So I think this is the Draco Malfoy love interest character.
52:16
And I said I'm still hoping he's not the love interest because
52:18
all we've been told about him so far is that he's a cold blooded
52:20
murderer and I can't deal with a book trying to redeem a war
52:23
criminal like that. Sadly, he is a love interest.
52:25
He is one of the main characters and 600 pages then he has not
52:28
been, in my eyes, redeemed. I do not like him.
52:31
He looked at Helena again, no emotion on his face, but there
52:34
was a predatory calculation in his eyes.
52:36
Like a wolf I'm sure. He says.
52:38
And we find out why she's there as Kane or Ferran as he gets
52:41
called for. This whole first half of the
52:43
book is given his instructions. The High Necromancer wishes to
52:46
have results before the winter solstice.
52:48
Per his commands. You have to perform the
52:50
temporary transference method upon her as free frequently as
52:53
possible to achieve singularity without extinguishing her soul.
52:56
Once that is accomplished and you've accustomed yourself to
52:58
her mind, I believe that reversing the transmutations of
53:01
her memory should be a small matter for you.
53:03
You may examine what's concealed, and when it's done,
53:05
I'll come to retrieve her. The High Necromancer intends to
53:07
extract the memories as well, so at this point I was still kind
53:10
of confused about what the plan was.
53:12
From what I can tell now, having read more, they want Theron to
53:15
reverse the memory erasure in her head and reverse all the
53:19
rerouting and then extract the memories that she's suppressed
53:22
and then get himself aligned with her brain.
53:25
So they could potentially put someone else's soul into her
53:28
brain. I think.
53:30
I think that's the plan. It's not really what they end up
53:32
doing. The whole motivation of every
53:34
character in this book is so muddled and nonsensey.
53:39
And that sounds like I'm saying nonsense.
53:41
It's so muddled and full of nonsense.
53:43
So much of it just doesn't make sense.
53:45
I feel like the author just wanted to put these characters
53:48
together in these situations and then came up with a reason for
53:50
it afterwards. And so those reasons and the
53:52
motivations don't really make a lot of logical sense.
53:55
It bothers me. It bothers me.
53:57
We found out that the wife is called Aurelia and she's just
54:00
portrayed as this like silly stuck up little brat.
54:03
I thought of pass nonsense like this, but apparently not.
54:05
I did think at first I had hope. I was like, oh, if he's married,
54:08
then maybe he's not the love interest, this is good.
54:10
Otherwise they're going to do something like he's only forced
54:13
to marry her because he has to and he doesn't really love her
54:16
or she cheats on him. So he's like, get out of here.
54:19
And then he becomes a little bit, I don't know.
54:20
I thought they were going to do something like that if they made
54:22
him and a love interest, but I kind of still hoped at this
54:24
point that they didn't. But he is.
54:25
That makes sense. I hate it.
54:26
Yeah, I hate how Aurelia is written.
54:29
It's just giving misogyny. The girl in green made an abrupt
54:33
sound and all her perfect ringlets trembled.
54:35
You mean we really have to keep her?
54:37
She burst out. I just don't see how it's fair.
54:39
She's not even Palladian. Why can't she stay at the
54:42
outpost with the rest of them? Why are we keeping her here?
54:45
I had all these parties planned this season.
54:47
I've already had to cancel 3 dinners and make up excuses
54:49
about why no one asked me if I wanted a prisoner.
54:52
Avoid was flirting with a note of tearful petulance.
54:54
And what is she wearing? If anyone sees her, it'll be all
54:57
anyone talks about. So I hate this.
55:00
Ferran rifles through Helena's memories, without her consent,
55:03
of course, because what is consent apparently just doesn't
55:06
matter. And afterwards she forced the
55:08
floor violently because it was painful.
55:10
And this, this book really is just how many ways can you
55:13
torture one woman? It's gross.
55:14
The wife brags about how this house, big mansion that they're
55:17
in, is made of pure iron, which seems like an odd choice to me.
55:20
I feel like that would be very uncomfortable.
55:22
You know, like, iron floors, iron walls, iron that'll be
55:25
cold, Right? But what do I know?
55:27
I'm not even a homeowner yet. And then she's like, I was
55:31
chosen to be Kane's wife. So I'm like, yeah, arranged
55:34
marriage, child marriage, seemingly.
55:36
And she said she was chosen because she can magically
55:38
control iron. And then she shows off by
55:40
turning the rings that she's wearing into knives.
55:42
And then, I mean, that does seem like a cool power, to be honest.
55:45
And then Helena's, like, if the house is iron, that meant
55:48
Aurelia could wield it like a weapon.
55:49
I mean, that would be kind of cool to see.
55:51
Like absolutely give me like some sort of horror vibes with
55:54
like shifting rooms and doors that move and appear and
55:57
disappear and corridors that change.
55:59
Like that would be really cool. They don't do that, but that
56:01
would be really cool. And but here's the thing, like I
56:04
had a question. Why does this make her the
56:05
perfect match for him? If anything, does that not mean
56:08
she's like the biggest danger to him?
56:10
Because if she's feeling horrible enough and they have
56:12
one argument, can she not just trap him inside his own home?
56:15
Like with no way for him to get out?
56:16
Like surely this is an awful choice for an arranged marriage?
56:18
Although it does turn out we don't know at this point and
56:20
it's not explained until much later.
56:22
Fair. And and also has iron magic so I
56:24
guess she couldn't trap him and I guess they kind of equally
56:26
match, but whatever. That wasn't explained at this
56:28
point we didn't know he had iron magic.
56:30
Anyway, Helena has to stay in this big room with a locked
56:32
window so she can't escape. End of chapter chapter 4.
56:36
This chapter starts with Helena trying to find a way to kill
56:38
herself, which feels honestly unearned, for lack of a better
56:42
word. Like we've just seen so little
56:44
of her personality and we know so little about her motivations,
56:47
her ideas, her values. Like it just feels like this
56:49
comes out of nowhere other than like her thinking maybe dude in
56:52
the car, You know what I mean? Like all we know about her is
56:55
she just spent 14 months in a stasis chamber.
56:58
She woke up with a bunch of memories wiped, She's been held
57:00
prisoner. And her first thought is yeah,
57:02
better kill myself. This doesn't make sense.
57:04
Like I anyway. Anyway, it's written in such a
57:07
boring and undramatic way. Which is?
57:09
She went back to the bedroom and was disappointed to find that
57:11
there weren't any drape cords for her to hang herself with.
57:14
She checked behind all the curtains in case one had been
57:16
missed. That's it.
57:17
That's her suicide attempt. It's ridiculous.
57:19
Since she can't kill herself, she decides to take a wander
57:22
around the mansion instead. But she gets scared of the dark
57:24
and decides to stay inside her room instead.
57:26
She is gifted an impractical sounding red dress, clean
57:29
underwear, and is fed gross sloppy leftovers like the stuff
57:33
you'd put in like a pig through. We got some back story about
57:35
Kane or Ferran and Helena and they were basically academic
57:38
rivals and she took over the top spot from him at school.
57:42
So during the six occasions Helena took the national exam,
57:44
Top Rank had swung like a pendulum.
57:46
Helena Marino. Kane Ferran rivalry.
57:49
I'll be an indirect one, never openly acknowledged.
57:52
And then it all comes back to Luke again, too.
57:53
Of course, Luke had been so proud of her, loudly proclaiming
57:56
that year one barely counted because it had been Helena's
57:59
first year ever studying alchemy, and she was doing it in
58:02
her second language. That second language thing is
58:04
interesting because it's never been mentioned before, and it's
58:07
actually never mentioned again in the book.
58:09
Yeah, OK, that's the thing. Back in the present.
58:11
And she tries to leave the room again, but she falls, and she
58:14
sees visions of her old roommate, Lila.
58:17
Lila. Lila.
58:18
I think it's Lila. She passes out again, so drink.
58:21
This is, I believe, Lila's first mention.
58:23
And Lila is like supposedly quite a main character a lot.
58:27
A lot of what Elena does is because of Lila, but we never
58:30
really see much of her and Lila interacting.
58:32
We don't really know anything about Lila.
58:34
Lila's a paladin who would protect Luke and that's about
58:37
it. That's all we really know about
58:38
her. It's just so nothingy.
58:40
None of these characters are developed at all, and I think
58:42
that's because it originated as fan fiction.
58:44
I'll get into this more later, but it feels like the author was
58:47
relying a lot on his already knowing these established
58:50
characters, so she didn't bother to give them backstories or
58:52
motivations or personalities. You know?
58:55
And later, Aurelia takes Helena to a room and says that she
58:59
needs to wait for Ferran there. He shows up.
59:01
He's immediately a monster because it turns out it's his
59:02
bedroom. He's like, why are you here?
59:04
And then he's like, let's get this over with.
59:06
Helena didn't move because she never moves because she's
59:08
passive. This entire first part of the
59:10
book. His gaze lifted.
59:12
Come here. When she didn't obey, a small
59:14
smile curved along his lips. I can make you if you don't, we
59:16
hate him. He raises hands and gestures
59:18
lazily, long fingers curling with perfect precision, knuckle
59:22
by knuckle. You know what it gives me vibes
59:25
of? You know the bit in Adventure
59:26
Time where the deer takes off his hooves and he's got fingers?
59:30
Sorry. Her lady's limbs began moving
59:33
against her will, like a puppet manipulated across the stage.
59:36
Her legs been lifted, weight shifting.
59:38
Step. Another step.
59:39
She fought against it, tensing, but it only made her bones feel
59:42
like they'd snap. It stopped once she was within
59:44
arm's reach. He tilted her chin up with a
59:46
fingertip, their eyes meeting. See, he said.
59:49
It'll be easier if you obey. Don't you just love when working
59:51
class immigrant women have no bodily autonomy and are treated
59:55
like puppets and slaves by rich, CIS straight white men?
1:00:00
Romance. There could actually be great
1:00:02
commentary here about that, but the book just misses the point
1:00:05
and sees no problem with this. It goes on to romanticise this
1:00:08
kind of behaviour. Shocking.
1:00:09
So he does this whole routing through her mind thing again,
1:00:12
Little dear fingers and sorry I shouldn't but yeah, it's it's
1:00:16
awful. Again, without her consent, it's
1:00:18
painful, she's screaming, it's just another on page torture
1:00:21
scene. I do wish I was more invested in
1:00:23
these characters in this situation, but I feel like this
1:00:26
is just a poorly thought out mechanism to get the main
1:00:29
characters in this same house together.
1:00:31
I, I don't know, for some reason he gets furious and screams at
1:00:34
her to get out and he's like oh I said get out.
1:00:37
He looked like an animal ready to lunge and RIP her throat open
1:00:39
with his bare teeth. I don't really know why he did
1:00:42
this, I can't remember, but he's mad.
1:00:43
He's aggressive because he's an emotional little man child.
1:00:46
As she stumbles out of the room, she can't see properly, she's
1:00:49
having bloody visions and she decides to throw herself down
1:00:51
some stairs to kill herself because that's her first
1:00:54
response to everything. But then Ferren stops her.
1:00:56
And when I say stops, I mean he physically assaults her.
1:00:59
She tried to jerk loose, lunging towards escape, but he dragged
1:01:02
her back from the railing and down the stairs as she beat and
1:01:04
clawed at him, trying to RIP herself free.
1:01:06
He didn't stop, he pulled her through the house, practically
1:01:08
kicking in the door of her room before shoving her onto the bed.
1:01:12
After the whole trying to uncover memories in a brain with
1:01:15
magic thing, she gets really ill.
1:01:17
She passes out for a couple of days, she has crazy dreams and
1:01:20
they have to call a doctor. Cool the next passed out drink.
1:01:24
God's sake. The next day, she's allowed out
1:01:26
in the walled gardens of the mansion to get some fresh air,
1:01:29
but she ends up screaming and running around in the rain
1:01:31
because she's dramatic like that, I guess.
1:01:35
And OK, remember earlier when I said I was confused about when
1:01:38
this book was set because, you know, there's clearly cars but
1:01:40
magic. And also.
1:01:41
Anyway, she steals a newspaper from Ferran, and the date says
1:01:44
it's November 1788 or yeah, no, it's November, November 1788.
1:01:50
This is another confusing thing, right?
1:01:51
They use the months like November and blah, blah, blah.
1:01:55
But instead of like, New Year or whatever, they go by like,
1:01:58
solstices. And as you'll see later, like
1:02:01
the whole solar system's weird because you've got planets that
1:02:03
are like a little bed on the window.
1:02:05
You've got planets that are like Mercury, Mars, Venus, and then
1:02:08
the planet that she is on, which isn't Earth, it's called
1:02:10
something else. We'll get to it.
1:02:11
But then the days are like, they're not called like Monday,
1:02:13
Tuesday, whatever. They're like, I don't even know
1:02:15
what they are now that they're called something.
1:02:17
They're like matter day or mature, I don't know.
1:02:20
I can't remember. But like they're not our days of
1:02:22
the week, but they are our months.
1:02:23
And the year system is like ours but not our it.
1:02:27
It's so confusing. So 1788 they have cars and she's
1:02:31
confused because the last thing she remembers is 1786.
1:02:35
So she realises she's lost around 19 months of memories.
1:02:38
But again, that's confusing because I was like, she clearly
1:02:40
has some memories of like the end of the wars because she
1:02:44
knows that Luke was killed, right?
1:02:45
So like what does she know and what doesn't she know?
1:02:47
This is never explained. There's no clear timeline at
1:02:50
this point, or up to about 600 pages in that explain what she
1:02:53
remembers and what she doesn't. So it seems like she's like, I
1:02:56
know school and I know Luke. I know there was a war, and
1:02:59
apparently she was working in the hospital then.
1:03:01
But she doesn't seem to acknowledge that she was working
1:03:03
in the hospital. And she has to be told she was
1:03:04
working in the hospital. And then the war goes on and
1:03:06
then she loses her memories. And then Luke's killed.
1:03:09
And she seems to remember Luke being killed.
1:03:11
And then she's in the stasis chamber.
1:03:12
So it's like she remembers this. This area is cloudy.
1:03:16
She doesn't remember this. And then she remembers the thing
1:03:18
here and then she's in stasis. I don't, I don't know.
1:03:22
I don't know an article in the OR does she even remember Luke
1:03:25
being killed? Clearly she's having visions of
1:03:27
it. So she don't I don't know.
1:03:29
Oh, this book is such a little bum.
1:03:33
So an article in the newspaper that she's given conveniently
1:03:36
tells her that the Ferrans, one of new Palladius oldest
1:03:39
families, have a history in the region that predates the
1:03:41
holdfasts. They were frequent victims of
1:03:43
the eternal flames persecution. Iron Guild master Artreus Ferran
1:03:47
was arrested and executed for speaking against Holdfasts
1:03:50
oppressive regime and his son Kane Ferron was baselessly
1:03:53
accused of of assassinating Principate Apollo Holdfast.
1:03:56
All charges against father and son were later dropped and she
1:03:59
shocked at this because Ferron had been accused of killing the
1:04:02
Principate, the assassination responsible for causing the war.
1:04:05
She stared at the words until they blurred.
1:04:06
How did you not know that you? This is why the memory timeline
1:04:10
doesn't make sense. Clearly she was aware there was
1:04:12
a war, right? She's aware of some of that.
1:04:14
The war lasted more than 19 months, so she clearly must have
1:04:18
some memories of the war, surely?
1:04:20
I don't know. She seems to know there was a
1:04:22
war happening. She seems to know that, but she
1:04:24
doesn't remember what caused the war, which is that apparently
1:04:27
this guy killed your boyfriend's dad.
1:04:29
Except he's not a boyfriend. I thought it was a boyfriend.
1:04:30
He's not a boyfriend. He killed your best friend's dad
1:04:32
or whatever. This book is so stupid it
1:04:34
doesn't make sense to me. So basically what what caused
1:04:36
this whole thing was Kane Ferran's dad was like, hey,
1:04:40
Luke's dad ruling over this country like a dictator.
1:04:43
That's a bit oppressive, mate. Like maybe we could have a
1:04:45
council instead of a dictatorship.
1:04:47
And then this guy is like, Oh my God, that's treason.
1:04:50
Arrest him. And then Farran's dad is like,
1:04:53
oh, I admit it, I did it. I committed treason.
1:04:56
Me, me, me, me, me. And then Mauro comes in, who's a
1:04:59
high necromancer and is like Cain Farran the son.
1:05:02
Your dad's a traitor to us because he admitted he was a
1:05:06
traitor to them. Therefore, you need to do what I
1:05:09
say and go kill Luke's dad. And then son Ferran is like,
1:05:13
yeah, sure, I'll go kill Luke's dad.
1:05:15
And then he does. And then Luke is now in charge,
1:05:18
except she's only 16, so I assume Ferran was only 16 when
1:05:21
he did the murdering as well. And now Luke's in charge and
1:05:25
Ferran's rising up the ranks and that started the war properly.
1:05:28
But there was already stuff happening before, so why does
1:05:31
she not know this if she knows there was a War I There's so
1:05:34
many holes in this, I don't understand any of it.
1:05:36
I'm genuinely frustrated. Oh, my God.
1:05:39
Yeah. See, look at this.
1:05:40
I said in my original script before I knew the rest of the
1:05:43
timeline. It's not like this stuff
1:05:44
happened during her memory loss. This stuff happened before the
1:05:47
start of the war, so presumably years before she lost any of her
1:05:50
memory. This book is so stupid because,
1:05:53
like, if he. Right, Right.
1:05:54
Here's the thing. Right.
1:05:56
Get my little brain on trying to figure this out.
1:05:58
Luke and Helena are the same age.
1:06:00
I think Ferran's the same age as well.
1:06:02
He might be a year old, but he's roughly the same age.
1:06:04
If Luke came into power when he was 16, that means Ferran killed
1:06:08
Luke's dad when they were all 16.
1:06:10
If Helena is like 25 now and she's been in stasis for 14
1:06:15
months and then she lost 19 months of memories before that,
1:06:18
that's hang on. That's almost three years.
1:06:21
That would take it back to 22. Last thing she remembers is
1:06:23
being 2122. That means that the murder
1:06:26
happened like 5 years before her supposed memory loss started.
1:06:31
So why doesn't she know this? I would like to pull my my hair
1:06:34
out now please. I'm feeling very frustrated.
1:06:38
OK then. There's more crap in the
1:06:40
newspapers, including this awful story.
1:06:42
An editorial caught her eye. It was almost innocuous,
1:06:44
describing the current labour shortage and lamenting the
1:06:46
recent loss of so many talented alchemists in the conflict
1:06:49
caused by the Eternal flame. Obviously these newspapers are
1:06:52
propaganda, but also there were statistics presented about how
1:06:56
Palladia's economy was expected to continue to shrink due to a
1:06:58
multi generational loss of alchemists.
1:07:00
Alchemists. The solution, the author
1:07:02
declared, was sponsored births. The article suddenly stopped
1:07:05
being editorial and read more like an advertisement.
1:07:07
The head of the new Science and Alchemy department at Central
1:07:10
Earngard, Stroud, was heading up a programme to bolster the next
1:07:13
generation of alchemists using scientific selection methods to
1:07:16
give them the best start. Volunteers were wanted,
1:07:18
participants would be provided food and lodgings, and upon
1:07:21
completion of the programme, those with criminal convictions
1:07:24
would be eligible for retrial. Helena read the editorial
1:07:26
several times, hardly able to believe what she was seeing.
1:07:29
It was a breeding programme being passed off as an economic
1:07:32
solution. Nazis if as if alchemists were
1:07:35
dogs to mate in pursuit of economically desirable
1:07:37
transmutation abilities. Again, that's not full sentence,
1:07:40
but yeah, gross, gross, gross, gross.
1:07:42
I said at this point, please do not have this book, have Helena
1:07:45
choose to get pregnant so she can get out of being punished
1:07:47
for being part of the resistance or whatever.
1:07:50
That's not what this book does. It's worse.
1:07:52
So I felt at this point, like the book was trying to be a bit
1:07:55
like The Handmaid's Tale, but without the excellent writing or
1:07:57
thought revoking commentary. And Helena decides to go for
1:08:00
another shower because that's a thing in the 1700s world.
1:08:04
Showers, cars and showers. OK.
1:08:06
And even though now at this point, right, she's been awake
1:08:09
for days, she's been, I don't know, it's probably like a week
1:08:12
or Two's passed at this point and she's already had a shower
1:08:14
once and now she's having another one.
1:08:16
Conveniently for the sake of the plot, this is only the first
1:08:18
time she notices. Oh my God, I have scars on my
1:08:21
body that I've never seen before.
1:08:23
Like, how did you not see them before?
1:08:24
Are you just, you just not look at your body?
1:08:26
Are you just not aware? Wild.
1:08:29
And here's the thing, right? Some of these scars in
1:08:30
particular are on the palms of her hands.
1:08:32
You're telling me that in like a week to two weeks, she hasn't
1:08:36
once looked down at the palms of her hands?
1:08:38
Wild. She goes outside later, and when
1:08:41
she's next out there, we're told the rain did not cease.
1:08:43
Instead, the sky dimmed as dusk fell.
1:08:46
At this point in the lunar cycles, even Lumisia, the
1:08:48
brighter moon, had waned too much for her light to penetrate
1:08:51
the cloud cover. So OK, this isn't Earth.
1:08:53
We know this now. This is what I mentioned before.
1:08:55
This is a fictional planet, but with two moons.
1:08:57
But earlier she was going on about like the solar system
1:09:00
she's in and that links to like metal and stuff like that.
1:09:03
And she lifted off, listed off planets like Mars, Mercury,
1:09:06
Venus, basically all the other planets in our solar system.
1:09:08
So basically this is where Earth is.
1:09:11
It's kind of like Earth. It's in our solar system, but
1:09:14
it's not Earth because we've got 2 moons.
1:09:16
And the countries are different. And it's the 1700s.
1:09:19
And times and months work the same way, except days of the
1:09:23
week are named different things. And there's still seven of them
1:09:26
though, but they have different names.
1:09:27
And they have magic and cars and showers.
1:09:30
And as we find out later, they have electric lights and
1:09:32
radiators and sort of cameras, but also swords.
1:09:37
And no, no phones, no radios. They have to pass everything on
1:09:41
via letter. So you have cars and photographs
1:09:45
and radiators and showers, but not radios or phones or
1:09:49
television. And it's the 1700s.
1:09:53
I'm running out of words. I can't, I can't.
1:09:55
OK, say what you want about other kind of not so great
1:09:58
fantasy dystopian fiction series as like, I don't know, like,
1:10:01
like ones that are genuinely not necessarily well written, like
1:10:05
like Divergent or the selection of things like that.
1:10:07
Say what you want about the problems with those book series,
1:10:10
but at least they're consistent in their world building and
1:10:13
their settings make sense. You know, the other confusing
1:10:16
thing is that Helena keeps me scared of the house because
1:10:18
apparently it's always dark in convenient times.
1:10:21
So I was like, does this place not have light and light
1:10:23
switches or at least like candles or windows?
1:10:26
I was like, is there not like lights you can turn on?
1:10:30
But turns out, yes, there are lights.
1:10:32
There's like electric lights overhead and everywhere.
1:10:34
And there's switches. She's just not using them for
1:10:36
the sake of the plot. I don't know why she's not.
1:10:38
But since she's so scared of the dark, she ends up curling up on
1:10:40
the floor and having a little cry until Ferran appears and
1:10:43
somehow she can see him despite being in this pitch black dark
1:10:46
corridor. How?
1:10:47
I don't know. Maybe his face just emanates
1:10:49
light because he's so pale and something something pale, I
1:10:53
don't know. She's, he's shocked that she's
1:10:55
scared of the dark and so he drags her back to her room where
1:10:58
he proceeds to mock her for opening up about why she's
1:11:01
scared of the dark. It's from her time trapped in
1:11:03
the stasis tank, obviously. And then I was like, OK, now
1:11:05
thinking about it, it was literally never explained why
1:11:07
she or anyone else was in the stasis tanks in the 1st place.
1:11:10
That's still not explained by where I've got up to in the book
1:11:12
later, so I don't know. I guess we'll find out later.
1:11:16
And I assumed it was like to move them somewhere far away,
1:11:19
but no. And then I was like, well, maybe
1:11:21
you need to keep youthful bodies and then just unfreeze them when
1:11:23
they need a new slave. Then half the bodies die and
1:11:26
rotten stasis anyway. So like, even if you're turning
1:11:29
them into necro thralls with the dead bodies, like they're all
1:11:32
rotted and they're unusable so they just get thrown away
1:11:34
basically anyway. So why not just keep them in
1:11:35
prison? I don't, I don't know.
1:11:37
I don't know. OK, at this point we are 10% of
1:11:39
the way into the book. Honestly, I was bored at this
1:11:41
point and confused and bored. And did I mention bored?
1:11:43
And if I was reading this, this just like for fun, right, I
1:11:46
don't think I would have continued with this.
1:11:47
This would have been like, OK, I'm done, I'm bored, I'm fed up.
1:11:50
Stop. And like, don't get me wrong, I
1:11:51
love a long book. The 1000 pages is not what the
1:11:53
problem is. There are some really, really
1:11:55
good long books that I've read even just recently and just
1:11:58
throughout my life. You know, I've got some examples
1:12:00
here. So I've read and reread Long
1:12:02
live Evil and it's sequel. They're like 5-6 hundred pages
1:12:05
each. And I love them.
1:12:06
I think they're great. They're fun, they're silly,
1:12:08
they're a bit campy, they're not serious.
1:12:11
I I they're my guilty pleasure read at the minute.
1:12:13
I love them. Arc Wangs like how do I
1:12:15
pronounce this? Is it katabasis or catabasis?
1:12:17
I don't actually know how you pronounce it, but that's what
1:12:19
560 pages? Not my favourite novel of hers,
1:12:22
but very, very, very good. Really enjoyed that.
1:12:25
Babel is still my number one of hers or Babel again, how do you
1:12:28
pronounce it? I, I saw an interview actually
1:12:30
with RF Kwong and they were like, oh, how do you pronounce
1:12:32
it? And she was like, even I don't
1:12:33
know, sometimes they say Babel, sometimes I say Babel.
1:12:36
So I was like, I get that. Anyway, point is, they're
1:12:39
longish books. I love them.
1:12:41
Recently read The Institute by Stephen King, that's 560 pages.
1:12:45
I love that. Nearly finished reading Sleeping
1:12:47
Beauties recently, that's 700 pages in the past.
1:12:50
One of my favourite ever books is Stephen King's 11/22/63.
1:12:54
That is a chunky 850 pages. And then you have some other
1:12:58
really, really long books which are fantastic, like the entire
1:13:00
Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna
1:13:04
Karenina. Like, I have nothing against a
1:13:05
long book as long as you're using those pages with purpose,
1:13:09
you know, don't just make something long for the sake of
1:13:11
it all because you don't know how to edit.
1:13:13
If the story is compelling and the characters are interesting
1:13:15
and the writing is of a good quality, then and also like the
1:13:19
pacing of the story is good, then to me, I'm all about the
1:13:22
long books I can get lost in and just like immerse myself.
1:13:25
And I love that. I think it's great.
1:13:26
But when you've got books like this where your book is over
1:13:28
1000 pages long and I'm already this bored, 100 pages in and
1:13:32
nothing's really happened, and I don't care about your
1:13:34
characters. I'm like, maybe you should have
1:13:36
worked with an editor to get this down to like, a certain
1:13:38
length, you know? Just a thought.
1:13:41
OK, so on to Chapter 7. Ferron took her to him from the
1:13:43
courtyard each day. His mood was always dark after
1:13:46
that, and he'd mockingly point out the location of the various
1:13:48
light switches that she was too dense to observe on her own.
1:13:51
Too dense in quotation marks there.
1:13:53
So clearly there are lights in this world she just hasn't been
1:13:57
seeing. I don't know, I don't
1:13:59
understand. Does the author want Helena to
1:14:01
be stupid or is she just writing in these massive plot holes for
1:14:04
the sake of convenience? Please tell me.
1:14:06
Meanwhile, Helena is still busy trying to kill herself because I
1:14:09
guess the plot needs to give her something to do while she's busy
1:14:12
sitting around doing nothing and just having things happen to
1:14:15
her. Well, no, I say that she doesn't
1:14:17
even plan to kill herself or try to kill herself.
1:14:19
She just thinks about maybe I should kill myself, just just
1:14:22
thinks about it a bit. One day while she is exploring,
1:14:25
she finds an unfinished family portrait of Ferren as a kid and
1:14:28
his parents. And this is a painting.
1:14:30
A painting of them. An unfinished painting.
1:14:32
So this is a world where photographs exist.
1:14:34
We know because we see photographs happen later.
1:14:37
And yet you choose to have a painting here.
1:14:39
Don't understand electric lights, cars, lorries.
1:14:42
There's lorries in this world, Radiators, showers, cameras and
1:14:46
photographs, stasis chambers and paintings.
1:14:49
Like maybe, maybe this is just meant to show that they're super
1:14:51
rich because you know, they, they can have a painting
1:14:53
commissioned. They're rich people.
1:14:55
But then why would there not also be family photos around?
1:14:58
Why is the only image of this family an unfinished painting?
1:15:03
I yeah, this book feels full of really confusing and confusing
1:15:07
anachronisms and, like, not in any kind of good or interesting
1:15:10
way, just in AI don't get it kind of way.
1:15:13
Moving on. Stroud comes back to check up on
1:15:15
Helena's health, and we're finally told that what was wrong
1:15:17
with Helena is after her last magical brain surgery, she had a
1:15:20
seizure. Lovely.
1:15:22
And it's while she's here that Stroud makes a bunch of creepy
1:15:24
claims about wanting Helena next for her breeding programme
1:15:27
because she's got good magical genes.
1:15:30
Gross. I get the eugenics warning now.
1:15:33
Yeah, yay for treating a woman's body like, like an object.
1:15:36
We do get the revelation, though, that Helena's chin
1:15:38
snapped up. Well, you won't have much luck
1:15:39
with me. I'm sterilised.
1:15:41
And at this point, I was like, maybe I will like this book
1:15:44
after all. Thank God, I love this.
1:15:47
Right. We're not going to get a forced
1:15:48
pregnancy plot. We're not going to get her,
1:15:50
like, selling her womb so she can get some freedom.
1:15:52
Like we're not going to get that.
1:15:53
Thank, thank you, Thank you. I was so damn grateful.
1:15:56
And I was like, you know what? You don't actually see many
1:15:59
sterilised women represented in fiction, especially not as the
1:16:02
main characters and protagonists and love interests.
1:16:04
So I was like, you know what, that is really refreshing.
1:16:06
I really, really love that. It's nice to get this like
1:16:09
sterilised woman romance representation.
1:16:12
Love it, love it. I really liked that.
1:16:14
Until Helena looked away, staring across the room so hard
1:16:17
her vision blurred. It was one of the conditions
1:16:19
that Falcon had for allowing me in the city.
1:16:21
Since Vivie Mansi is a corruption of the soul that
1:16:23
begins in the womb, it could, it could be passed on.
1:16:26
I'd already taken vows as a healer that I wouldn't ever
1:16:28
marry or have children. But he, she's wallowed.
1:16:31
He wanted to be sure. So instead of this being
1:16:33
wonderful empowered representation, and instead of
1:16:36
like, you know, one side controlling her body with like a
1:16:38
forced pregnancy, for example, we have the other side
1:16:41
controlling her body with false sterilisation.
1:16:43
So this isn't her choice. This isn't good representation.
1:16:46
She has no bodily autonomy. This world does not allow women
1:16:49
bodily autonomy. And I kind of hate it.
1:16:51
I was also at this point, like, who the hell was Falcon?
1:16:53
Like, do we know him? Turns out I had to look back to
1:16:55
the rest of the book. He got one mention before for
1:16:58
being the spiritual counsellor of the Eternal Flames Council,
1:17:01
whatever that means. Yeah, I it was at this point,
1:17:03
right? I think I've mentioned it
1:17:04
before, but it's at this point I realised I was a bit of an
1:17:06
idiot. The Eternal flame cancel or
1:17:08
order of the Eternal Flame as it's sometimes called, is just
1:17:11
meant to be a RIP off of the order of the Phoenix right from
1:17:13
Lord not Lord of the Rings Harry Potter because it started as
1:17:15
Harry Potter fan fiction. So I was like, OK, so the
1:17:18
undying of Voldemort's people, the Death Eaters, we've
1:17:21
established this, but it doesn't translate well at all.
1:17:23
And it doesn't really make sense as like a comparison.
1:17:25
And you can see what this is kind of where the plot holes
1:17:27
have come in because like, tell me if I'm remember remembering
1:17:29
this wrong because again, not really a Harry Potter fan, but
1:17:32
if I remember correctly, Voldemort I wanted like mass
1:17:35
ethnic cleansing of like all non magical people, right?
1:17:38
And he was like a super magic racist or a magic super racist.
1:17:42
One of the ones clearly he was the bad guy.
1:17:44
His followers were bad guys and the order were the good guys
1:17:47
trying to stop him, right? But in this book, the bad guys
1:17:50
are the ones who are like, yay democracy, yay eternal life.
1:17:54
And then they turn bad when they get power because suddenly all
1:17:57
like to get power because they're just murdering a bunch
1:17:59
of magical people who didn't conform.
1:18:01
And now they're trying to force pregnancy on other magical
1:18:04
people to make more magical people that fit with their
1:18:07
ideas. So it's like their initial ideas
1:18:09
were actually quite good and made sense, unlike the Voldemort
1:18:12
people's original ideas. But their execution is bad in
1:18:15
this. And then the good guys make
1:18:17
sense in Harry Potter because they're like, no, we don't want
1:18:21
genocide. We don't want like a non magical
1:18:23
person Holocaust. Let's stop you.
1:18:26
And that makes sense. They're like understandably
1:18:28
good. But in this, the good guys are
1:18:30
like, rich religious zealots who believe they should be divine
1:18:33
dictators, which doesn't really sound good to me.
1:18:36
And they're also like, yeah, and we can control women's bodies
1:18:39
with, like, forced sterilisation for people with the wrong kind
1:18:42
of magic. So I mean, it sounds like this
1:18:45
is just like Nazis fighting Nazis, You know what I mean?
1:18:47
It's bad guy versus bad guy, both with different Nazi ideas.
1:18:52
It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm all for like complex
1:18:55
politics and all that sort of thing, but like, there's complex
1:18:59
and then there's just muddled and bizarre.
1:19:01
And that's what this book is. Stroud goes on to Helena that
1:19:04
your eternal flame was quite adept at identifying potential
1:19:07
vivamancers not even born. It was what, 30 years ago that
1:19:10
Principate Helios mandated that all pregnancies be managed by
1:19:13
the faiths hospitals, devout doctors trained to know what to
1:19:16
look for and what solutions to offer.
1:19:18
What kind of parents would want to keep a monster once they're
1:19:20
warned of the danger? So see what I mean?
1:19:22
They're also, both sides are big on eugenics.
1:19:25
Both sides are awful. OK, Next up, Helena asks Ferran
1:19:28
if he killed her boyfriend's dad, and he says not officially.
1:19:32
And she's like, but did you? And he asks what we've all been
1:19:34
thinking. You don't remember?
1:19:36
He shook his head. Did you even do anything during
1:19:38
the war? The way the Holdfast used to
1:19:40
parade you around, you'd think you would have at least tried to
1:19:42
be useful. But you have the most
1:19:44
unexceptional personnel file I've ever seen.
1:19:46
He scoffed. How many years of her life did
1:19:48
you spend in that hospital? And he's right.
1:19:50
Why doesn't she remember? Like, what was she?
1:19:52
You do it. I, I don't understand how this
1:19:53
memory loss thing works and when it's meant to cover, I don't
1:19:57
know. How does she not know the basics
1:19:58
of like what caused the war she was supposedly fighting in?
1:20:01
I don't know. Anyway, he just brags about
1:20:03
killing Luke's dad and then the chapter ends and we get a
1:20:06
flashback to Luke during the war.
1:20:08
I think this is like a recovered memory in Helena's mind.
1:20:11
I think he says this is how we win.
1:20:13
This is how we've always won. My father, my grandfather and
1:20:16
all the principates going back to Orion, they won by trusting
1:20:19
that good would triumph over evil.
1:20:20
And I have to do the same. Explain to me again how you're
1:20:23
good guys? I get how the other side's evil,
1:20:25
but how are you the good guys? It's just kind of accepted in
1:20:28
this world that like, oh, they're good.
1:20:29
Why? Why are they good?
1:20:30
I don't get it. I don't get it, right.
1:20:32
And in this like flashback memory, it seems like Luke is
1:20:35
this opium smoking mess, right? He's like off his head,
1:20:38
whatever. And him and Helena seem like
1:20:40
really toxic together. But then the flashback or memory
1:20:42
ends with her saying that she would do anything for him.
1:20:45
And yeah, I got really confused here.
1:20:48
And there's some more info dumping to give Luke a back
1:20:50
story. His family have the magical
1:20:51
powers to a turn lead into gold and B create magic fire, but
1:20:55
there are rules to prove that they're the good guys.
1:20:58
So in Orion's work, he was like the original one of their family
1:21:01
who took control. Alchemization was predicated
1:21:03
upon spiritual purity. Only an alchemist with a soul as
1:21:06
pure as the metal they sought to create could alchemize it.
1:21:08
However, Luke had always preferred pyromancy biomagic.
1:21:11
There were strict rules the family had to abide by when
1:21:13
alchemizing gold. The heavenly metal could not be
1:21:15
abused or used for selfish purposes.
1:21:17
After all, the neighbouring countries and Palladia's own
1:21:20
currency had to be respected. There were the rules about fire
1:21:22
too, but not nearly so elaborate as those involved in gold
1:21:25
production. So I was like, eh, dress it up
1:21:27
how you want, but like, there's no ethical millionaires and
1:21:30
that's what these guys were in this world.
1:21:31
So I don't believe they're good guys.
1:21:33
But it's funny, all these rules and stuff here not brought up
1:21:35
again. They're not mentioned once in
1:21:37
the next, however much that I've read.
1:21:39
Maybe they come up again in the last quarter of the book was all
1:21:43
third of the book. But it seems odd to mention it
1:21:45
once and then never again for like 2/3 of the book, you know?
1:21:49
So back in the present day, out of the recovered memory, Helena
1:21:52
overheard Ferran having an argument with the man that she
1:21:55
saw before using the body of a guy from the resistance,
1:21:58
Crowther, right? So instead of building any
1:22:00
tension or creating a mystery of like, Oh my God, who's this man
1:22:03
who's using his body? What happened to him?
1:22:05
We're just straight up told this is Ferran's dad.
1:22:07
So Ferran's dad, who I think we thought was dead ages ago, is
1:22:10
actually using Crowther's body somehow.
1:22:12
OK, publicly he's thought to be dead, but he's secretly in
1:22:15
Crowther's body. Cool.
1:22:16
Ferran and his dad both scream awful things at each other.
1:22:19
Like I should have refused your mother's pleas and had you
1:22:21
killed in the womb. Atreyas said, his face
1:22:23
contorting with rage. You deserve none of the
1:22:25
suffering we endured for you. So this is clearly a very
1:22:28
healthy father son dynamic blah blah blah.
1:22:30
Feron uses his magic to force Helena to take some mystery
1:22:33
pills once again. Why are women not allowed bodily
1:22:36
autonomy in this book? Why is Helena so passive all the
1:22:39
time? These pills make magic used on
1:22:42
her last longer. So he uses his magic to suppress
1:22:46
her emotions in her brain, and then the tablets make that last
1:22:48
longer. And she, well, because she
1:22:51
considered it was certainly easier to be near fair.
1:22:53
And now that she didn't feel overwhelmed by how much she
1:22:55
hated him and afraid of his capacity to hurt her, she was
1:22:58
still excruciatingly aware of how dangerous he was, but
1:23:01
without the sickening physical reaction of that knowledge.
1:23:03
You're being different to me now.
1:23:04
You're less mean. She furried her eyebrows in
1:23:06
confusion, a feeling she was still apparently capable of
1:23:09
experiencing. Why would I torture you when you
1:23:11
won't react? He asked softly in her ear.
1:23:13
He straightened, raising an eyebrow.
1:23:14
See. Nothing.
1:23:15
No elevated pulse, no pounding heart.
1:23:17
I could bring in one of your little friends and peel their
1:23:19
skin right off here in front of you and you wouldn't react.
1:23:22
He shook his head. There's no fun in that.
1:23:24
What is wrong with this man? At this point?
1:23:26
She also manages to find a secret hidden camera in her
1:23:29
room. Well, actually, no, not a hidden
1:23:31
camera. A hidden magical eyeball that's
1:23:33
spying on her. Yeah, so we can have cameras
1:23:37
that can take photos and put the photos in newspapers, but not
1:23:41
take family portraits put up around the home.
1:23:43
And we can have cars and electric lights, but we can't
1:23:46
have a video camera in the home. We have to enchant a magical
1:23:49
eyeball and look through the magical eyeball to spy on
1:23:52
people. It's stupid.
1:23:55
And not even just like any magical eyeball.
1:23:56
They're paying people a pretty hefty sum to have their eyeballs
1:23:59
taken out like the Grace woman in the beginning.
1:24:02
OK, OK, sure. I hate this book.
1:24:04
The next day, Helena has bad withdrawals from the pills.
1:24:07
She throws up. She gets super depressed, she
1:24:09
feels rubbish. It's all very don't do drugs,
1:24:11
kids, you know? And then a few days later, we
1:24:13
get another scene of transference, the magical brain
1:24:16
surgery, and it just drags out so much.
1:24:18
There's so much repetition here. I'm still confused about what
1:24:20
transference is. Is it him trying to put his soul
1:24:23
into her brain? Is it the act of trying to undo
1:24:25
all the changed brainness and the memories and it's never
1:24:28
explained it? I don't know.
1:24:29
I don't, I don't think the author even knows really what it
1:24:31
is, but it's OK, hey, because this time, hang on, I don't even
1:24:34
have a drink anymore, but you guys drink Because Helena passes
1:24:37
out again. She has another seizure.
1:24:39
She ends up unconscious. And when she wakes up, she sees
1:24:41
a man that she doesn't recognise holding her face.
1:24:43
And then she passes out again. So drink.
1:24:45
That's two times passing out in like half a page.
1:24:49
When she wakes up again she realises, Oh my God, that
1:24:51
strange man holding my face that I didn't recognise, It's
1:24:54
actually Ferran. I don't know why she didn't
1:24:56
recognise him, but for the sake of plot she didn't.
1:24:58
So OK blah blah blah, bunch of nothing happens.
1:25:01
There's a party at the mansion, Helena sneaks out to see what's
1:25:04
happening and catches Aurelia cheating on Ferran.
1:25:07
Like that's a surprise, we all knew it was going to happen if
1:25:09
like Helena and Ferran are going to end up together but OK.
1:25:11
And lightly, clearly don't even like each other.
1:25:13
It's an arranged marriage, of course she's going to be
1:25:15
cheating with whoever. Fine.
1:25:17
Also at the party there were several photographers with large
1:25:19
cameras. Flashes like small explosions
1:25:21
kept going off as they tried to capture the room.
1:25:23
So cameras do exist. Look, OK, I get there's a
1:25:26
difference between a static camera and a video camera, but
1:25:29
in this world? Like, why do you need magical
1:25:32
eyeballs? I, I don't, I don't know, I
1:25:33
don't know, I don't know, I'm confused, I hate this, I don't
1:25:36
know. OK then there's a scene where
1:25:38
Helena finds herself weirdly jealous when Ferran kisses his
1:25:41
wife, which is gross considering it's immediately followed by one
1:25:44
of the guests bringing some prisoners to torture and kill
1:25:46
for fun as a party game. Ferran starts it all off by
1:25:50
snapping the neck of a 12 year old boy and then killing the
1:25:52
rest of the family 1 by 1. And this is the love interest
1:25:55
we're meant to root. It happened so fast, everyone in
1:25:57
the ballroom was left standing in shock, unable to process that
1:26:00
it was already over. Helena could scarcely believe
1:26:02
it. It didn't seem real that
1:26:03
something like that could happen without warning 5 people.
1:26:06
So yeah, at this point there's no room for him.
1:26:08
I don't think there's any excuse even.
1:26:10
Oh they made me do it for like murdering an entire family
1:26:12
including a 12 year old boy in cold blood.
1:26:15
I just can't. There is also a scene where
1:26:17
Helena overhears Aurelia arguing with people saying she needs to
1:26:21
hurry up and get pregnant because the only reason you
1:26:23
exist is to give the Ferrans an air.
1:26:25
If they cast you aside, do you think anyone else would ever
1:26:27
take you? Yay women as objects.
1:26:30
Yay only valuing a woman for her uterus.
1:26:33
I hate this book. Like, again, I would understand
1:26:36
if this world was like, more, oh, sorry, if this book was more
1:26:39
critical of this ideology in the world.
1:26:41
And I guess in some cases it is. But in others, it feels like it
1:26:45
just used this blatant misogynistic crap as, like, a
1:26:49
vehicle to get the main love interests together rather than
1:26:52
critiquing that ideology behind it.
1:26:54
Does that make sense? Yeah, anyway, Aurelia moans that
1:26:57
Ferran won't sleep with her. Told you so, That was obvious.
1:27:00
And the other person is like, get him drunk, drug him if you
1:27:03
must, or find someone else to put a child in your womb.
1:27:05
I will not let you bring our family to ruin.
1:27:07
So I think it's her mum saying this.
1:27:09
He can't get drunk? Aurelia snapped.
1:27:11
Do you think I haven't tried? I've gone to every shop, used
1:27:13
every drug and perfume and nothing ever works.
1:27:15
If I get pregnant, he'll know it's not his.
1:27:18
Yay for rape and coercion again. I hate this book.
1:27:21
There's another scene of sort of weird flirting between Ferran
1:27:24
and Helena. He stands outside her door while
1:27:26
she sleeps. It's gross.
1:27:27
I don't like it. It's given Edward Cullen
1:27:29
watching Bella, but worse. The next day, Helena goes
1:27:31
exploring around the house again.
1:27:32
She finds a big metal cage, as you do, big enough for a person.
1:27:36
It's inside a room. I'm not shocked.
1:27:38
Whose house doesn't have a big metal cage in the office.
1:27:42
So stupid. But no, seriously again, if a
1:27:45
man has a giant person sized cage in their home, he should be
1:27:48
automatically disqualified from being a love interest in a book.
1:27:51
Just saying. Ferren shows up, there's some
1:27:53
more awkward flirting that I really hate and he complaints
1:27:56
about his arranged marriage and Helena says you sound as
1:27:58
enslaved as I am. Stop trying to pretend you're
1:28:01
equal or the same. Or there's this whole pattern
1:28:04
throughout this book of Helena going on and on about how her
1:28:06
and Ferren like two sides of the same coin.
1:28:09
We're basically the same person but on opposite side.
1:28:11
It's like, no, stop it. This is no Romeo and Juliet.
1:28:13
No hate this. You are, at this point, a
1:28:16
literal physical prisoner who is fed slop every day.
1:28:19
You're having magical brain experiments done on you.
1:28:22
This guy rifles through your memories without your consent,
1:28:24
He has physically assaulted you numerous times.
1:28:27
He insults you constantly, you have regular seizures as a
1:28:31
result of his torture, and if you ever did get to leave, you'd
1:28:34
likely either be murdered on the spot or put into a breeding
1:28:37
programme. He's not enslaved like you are
1:28:39
just because. Oh, he's in an arranged marriage
1:28:41
that he doesn't want. Who set that system up?
1:28:43
And even with what we find out about him and his back story
1:28:45
later, you can't even come close to calling them comparable or
1:28:49
the same thing. Do not be stupid.
1:28:50
Stop trying to make this murdering monster seem
1:28:53
sympathetic, because he's not. Then Ferran goes on about Luke
1:28:56
and his family and how they were the real bad guys and they were
1:28:59
trying to keep people like Helena isolated from everyone,
1:29:02
but who knows what reason that's never explained.
1:29:04
And the narrator says Ferran was a snake trying to present
1:29:06
himself as though he were on Helena's side, as if her
1:29:09
morality were dictated based on who was nicest to her.
1:29:12
Except her morality is based on who's nicest to her.
1:29:15
That's the only thing we actually know about her so far.
1:29:17
She has said a number of. And I've told you to remember
1:29:20
it. She said I'm not religious.
1:29:22
I don't believe in this. Hello, baby.
1:29:24
I'm sorry, Am I being mad? Gorgeous boy.
1:29:25
Hi, this is my nephew Tigger. He's beautiful.
1:29:28
Aren't you? Hi, I'm cat sitting this
1:29:30
weekend. Sorry.
1:29:31
Hey, gorgeous, do you want to come round about this book with
1:29:32
me? Are you thinking good boy?
1:29:34
Yeah. So she said a number of times
1:29:36
I'm not religious, I don't believe in this religion, blah,
1:29:38
blah, blah. And she said like she doesn't
1:29:40
have any political beliefs. She literally said early that
1:29:43
the only reason she enlisted and was part of the resistance, the
1:29:47
order, the whatever, the only reason she was fighting and
1:29:49
working in this hospital was because not out of faith, but
1:29:52
because of Luke. Because he was kind to her and
1:29:56
so she believed he was a good man and she'd do anything for
1:29:58
him. They were her exact words.
1:29:59
I hate this book. I'm glad Tigger was here to calm
1:30:01
me down. She goes on for a while about
1:30:04
horses and donkeys and cars and lorries.
1:30:07
OK. And then she discovers this
1:30:08
massive wolf monster thing in a stable of the mansion but
1:30:12
nothing happened. I completely forgot about this
1:30:13
wolf monster because again by where I've read up to nothing
1:30:17
ever comes of it so okay. She then discovers in the
1:30:20
outside bits of this garden, there's basically a mausoleum
1:30:22
with the ashes of Ferrans dead mother in them and she's like,
1:30:26
lol, guess they didn't make that woman immortal or didn't want to
1:30:29
make a woman immortal. Just play hi beautiful.
1:30:33
Oh, I love them so much. So what's it say right.
1:30:35
Ironically, the one thing the guilds thought the holdfasts
1:30:37
weren't traditional enough about was women.
1:30:39
Girls had been welcome to study at the institute for decades.
1:30:41
There were female lecturers, instructors and board members in
1:30:44
the school. So at this point, even with what
1:30:46
we know about like the the good guys and they're like forcing
1:30:50
certain women to be sterilised and stuff like that, they're
1:30:51
still trying to make out that no, no, they were actually quite
1:30:54
progressive. They were quite good and like,
1:30:56
Oh no, the bad guys are bad because they oppress women as
1:30:59
like well. This will be more believable if,
1:31:00
one, there weren't so many women of power on the bad guys side.
1:31:04
We already had Stroud and Mandel and probably Smothers.
1:31:08
I can't remember now. Yeah, the Mandel, the woman who
1:31:09
locked Helena in the stasis chamber.
1:31:11
And two, I get that these guys are awful like the bad guys, but
1:31:15
so are the good guys. They're all misogynistic in
1:31:17
their own ways. They're all controlling women in
1:31:19
their own ways. Like, I'm all for complex
1:31:21
narratives, but, you know, I don't need these groups of
1:31:23
people to be all good and all bad.
1:31:25
I don't need a black and white. But this feels in this book less
1:31:28
like nuanced and grey areas and more like these people are awful
1:31:31
and we're going to tell they're awful, but actually we're going
1:31:34
to try and redeem them and they'll be good.
1:31:36
And these people are the good guys, but they're actually
1:31:38
awful. But we're not going to address
1:31:39
any of that awful stuff. And we're just going to be like,
1:31:41
yeah, they're good. You know what I mean?
1:31:42
I don't, I don't know. I don't know.
1:31:44
They're all crappy. I'm not rooting for anyone.
1:31:46
It had been viewed as a fact of nature.
1:31:47
Men of soul were active, hot and dry, full of vitality and the
1:31:51
source of life seed. Women, it followed, were an
1:31:54
inferior human form, wet and cold, passively bound to the
1:31:57
monthly cycle of Luna, the lesser moon.
1:31:59
While their bodies were the necessary vessels for birth, it
1:32:01
was their blood that was the source of all defects.
1:32:03
Both vivomancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of
1:32:07
resonance caused by a poisonous womb, hence the attempts from
1:32:11
both sides to control women and their pregnancies.
1:32:13
It's gross, we hate it. I do think this is a really
1:32:15
interesting thing to include in the book, and it would be great
1:32:18
to see some more exploration of this, some more criticisms of
1:32:21
this going forward. But there's not.
1:32:23
There might be in the third part, so I'll hold my hands up
1:32:26
and say it might be coming up. But for now, in the 1st 2/3,
1:32:29
they don't look at this as in depth or as thoughtfully as I
1:32:33
would like. However, not all women were
1:32:34
doomed to called passivity passivity.
1:32:37
To avoid such categorization, a girl could devote herself to the
1:32:40
cult of Lumithia, a goddess of warfare and alchemy who had been
1:32:43
born from the heart of soul. Women associated with Lumithia
1:32:46
were not expected to be traditional.
1:32:48
They could be alchemists, surgeons, paladins, anything.
1:32:50
But there was a price. Were they to marry or bear
1:32:53
children, they had to give it all up.
1:32:54
Lumithia was a virgin goddess. Mothers and married women were
1:32:57
not welcome at her altar. So even this is still about
1:33:00
controlling women and telling them that they cannot have it
1:33:03
all if they want to. Again, I hoped this would be
1:33:05
exploding critiques more, but it's just not really at all.
1:33:10
And also This is why I was confused, right?
1:33:11
Because OK, my original script I said, wasn't Helena an
1:33:14
alchemist, but she was dating Luke And maybe they were going
1:33:17
to do like a switcheroo and be like, oh, just kidding, they
1:33:19
were never dating. She was just obsessed with him.
1:33:21
I don't know. But like it turns out they
1:33:23
didn't even do that. They just like they built it all
1:33:25
up. So it seemed like they were in a
1:33:26
relationship, but then they weren't all.
1:33:27
So then I was like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't
1:33:30
know, I'm tired, I'm really tired.
1:33:32
We skipped to another scene of magical brain surgery and guess
1:33:34
what? Helena passes out again.
1:33:36
Drink. Oh gosh.
1:33:38
And I'm going to go take another break.
1:33:40
Now I know I'm taking a lot of breaks in this filming.
1:33:42
I am a little bit allergic to cats, even though I love them to
1:33:44
bits and I'm looking after them. So I need to go take my
1:33:46
antihistamines and breathe again.
1:33:47
So I'm going to go do that. I'll be back in a while, maybe
1:33:49
late tonight. Let's see you soon.
1:33:50
OK, Day 2 filming. Let's do this and I apologise if
1:33:54
the first part of this video is out of focus.
1:33:56
I didn't realise my lens was on manual focus because I'm a silly
1:33:59
goose and it never is, but I think it got knocked in my bag
1:34:02
my way here to my sisters. So hopefully this will actually
1:34:04
be in focus today. I have a lot of hair going on.
1:34:06
So where were we? Right.
1:34:08
OK, Helena is reading newspaper. I'm going to tie my hair up
1:34:11
actually, because I feel scruffy.
1:34:12
Give me a second. I'm such a mess of a minute.
1:34:14
It'll do, I'll do. Right, this is fine.
1:34:16
So Helena is busy reading newspapers and she keeps reading
1:34:19
them over the weeks. And in one of them in
1:34:21
particular, there's more on the baby farms.
1:34:23
The repopulation programme, which had initially been treated
1:34:25
as an economic necessity, was gradually reframed as a new
1:34:28
scientific frontier, new Palladia would forge its own
1:34:31
future. No longer would al chemical
1:34:33
repertoires be left to chance. Parentage in the programme was
1:34:35
to be selected based on the strength and variety of
1:34:37
residents. Tests were being done to
1:34:39
discover the ideal combinations. Scientific terminology and the
1:34:42
overuse of words like genius and groundbreaking try to frame the
1:34:45
programme as if it were an obvious next step.
1:34:47
There were never any explanations about where these
1:34:49
assets would go or who'd raise them, or that they were people,
1:34:52
just that they would exist and be industrially and economically
1:34:55
valuable resources. When I first read this I was
1:34:57
like why is this legitimately something that like reform would
1:35:00
want if they were in power? Why is this like what's so many
1:35:02
pro-life Republicans would do in America or what they are doing
1:35:06
in America? Meanwhile Aurelia the child wife
1:35:08
is having an affair with a man named Lancaster who is also
1:35:12
showing a lot of interest in Helena and he was shocked when
1:35:15
she didn't recognise him. He's like how do you not know
1:35:17
who I am? So clearly they've interacted at
1:35:20
some point during her memory loss.
1:35:22
Cat hair in the air. Yeah.
1:35:24
This is just another mystery that I don't care about.
1:35:26
And I actually forgot was in here.
1:35:27
I forgot Lancaster is even the character.
1:35:29
So there we go. And Helena thinks he must be a
1:35:31
spy and he's secretly working for her side, but I really doubt
1:35:34
it. And her, her first thought is
1:35:36
like, Oh my God, he must be here to rescue me.
1:35:38
And I'm like, how naive are you? You're stupid.
1:35:41
Stroud turns up and gives Helena a medical exam and says that
1:35:44
she's malnourished and they need to feed her better.
1:35:46
And the exam continues. And guess what?
1:35:48
Helena passes out again. Drink.
1:35:51
We've got another one today just for the drinking game.
1:35:53
I really, I really hope none of you are playing this with
1:35:54
alcohol because I do not want to be responsible for the state of
1:35:57
your livers. So Helena has more dreams, which
1:35:59
are her old memories coming back, and she keeps forgetting
1:36:02
people. So she had Luke, who's the guy
1:36:04
in charge, her roommate Lila or Lila.
1:36:07
I think it's Lila who was the paladin, and then her twin
1:36:09
brother Soren, who was also a paladin.
1:36:11
And she keeps forgetting that he exists for some reason.
1:36:14
She remembers like Luke and Lila a lot more.
1:36:16
But Soren, she's like, Oh, yeah, I forgot he was there, which is
1:36:20
interesting, I guess. I don't know.
1:36:22
Again, I forgot that this was a plot point.
1:36:24
In the next chapter, she manages to finally steal a knife.
1:36:27
And she tries to attack Ferran, but he's got a chest as hard as
1:36:30
granite, so she's like, screw it, if I can't attack him, I'll
1:36:32
just try and kill myself. And she tries to slice her own
1:36:34
throat, but he uses magic to stop her.
1:36:36
And the whole scene, as it plays out on paper, is not half as
1:36:39
exciting as it could be or it should be or I want it to be,
1:36:42
mostly because I don't give a damn about these characters.
1:36:44
And also because, like, it's just rushed through.
1:36:46
There's no tension, Like, no tension at all.
1:36:48
Then there's a big political event that happens because
1:36:51
someone, an unknown person, tries to shoot some governor on
1:36:55
the bad guy's side, but it misses him and kills Mandel
1:36:58
instead. Mandel is the woman who
1:37:00
imprisoned Helena, Helena in the stasis tank and then got killed
1:37:04
by Morrow and then put in a new body.
1:37:06
Now she's been like killed, killed and can't be put into a
1:37:09
new body. She's like dead, dead.
1:37:11
And this creates some uproar because Mandel died in front of
1:37:14
a crowd of reporters and international visitors, citizens
1:37:17
and foreign dignitaries. One of the Undying, whose
1:37:19
appearance marked her as undeniably and visibly among the
1:37:22
immortal, died. I was confused by this because,
1:37:25
like, before, when like, she died, they just took this metal
1:37:28
out of her chest and put it into another body.
1:37:30
So I think that metal is like her soul or something like that.
1:37:32
And they just put it in there. And I was like, can you not do
1:37:34
that again? Or are there rules for this?
1:37:36
Like, it needs to go in a new body within a certain amount of
1:37:38
time. It needs to go in a certain type
1:37:39
of body. There's so many.
1:37:41
There's only so many times you can do that.
1:37:42
Or was this like an assassination attempt that like
1:37:45
broke that metal and killed killed her?
1:37:47
I don't know. It's not really explained in the
1:37:50
next scene with Stroud, though. I'm so sorry.
1:37:52
I feel like I'm just doing and then and then, and because
1:37:54
that's what this book is. Well, actually I've got, I've
1:37:56
got a little thing I want to talk about about this later.
1:37:58
But I will just say the book is just a series of kind of not
1:38:02
necessarily disconnected scenes. But well, no, they are
1:38:04
disconnected. They're just like, this happens
1:38:06
and then this happens and then this happen.
1:38:08
It just feels boring. Stroud comes back and examines
1:38:11
Helena again. So Helena learns from Stroud
1:38:14
that the Undying frequently develop a tendency towards
1:38:17
sadism over time, some more quickly than others.
1:38:19
The Undying had always seemed psychotic, but Helena hadn't
1:38:22
realised it was a side effect of the immortality.
1:38:24
And like, I'm sorry, no, you can't tell me you're going to
1:38:26
try and redeem these monsters by being like, and you can't help
1:38:29
it. It's just in their nature.
1:38:30
It's just who they are. It's a medical side effect.
1:38:33
It's not their fault. Like, I don't care.
1:38:34
You're still responsible for your actions, even if, like
1:38:37
you're in. Well, you know what?
1:38:38
This is something that I've actually thought a lot about.
1:38:40
And I've got a short essay about it in my, my last book Outside.
1:38:44
And there's also a poem about it too called Jellyfish.
1:38:47
And it's, it's the shortest poem in the book, but I also think
1:38:50
it's the most ambiguous because a lot of my poems, I do this
1:38:53
kind of like storytelling and I spin this narrative and like you
1:38:56
follow a story through throughout the poem, but there's
1:38:58
like an underlying meaning and message there.
1:39:00
And it's usually an analogy for something else.
1:39:02
But in this, this is a little bit more kind of abstract.
1:39:05
There's still a slight narrative there, but it's also a little
1:39:07
bit more ambiguous than than some of the others.
1:39:09
So like, if you don't mind, I'll read you the poem.
1:39:11
And if you like it, it's available in my book outside,
1:39:14
which is available as an e-book and a physical hardback copy,
1:39:17
which it's like a big chunky book of like 300 pages.
1:39:20
It's a big tall book like this. It's full photos, paintings,
1:39:24
other artwork. It's got essays, it's got poetry
1:39:26
in, it's a little bit of everything.
1:39:27
And if you buy the physical copy of the book, you also get a code
1:39:30
in the back. So you can get a free copy of
1:39:31
the audio book from my website as well, just because I know the
1:39:33
hardback is a little expensive. So I want to give people who
1:39:36
want that like little something extra as well.
1:39:38
I wish it wasn't so expensive. It's just printing costs.
1:39:40
I'm sorry, I don't make much money on it, but you know,
1:39:43
Right. So yeah, my poem Jellyfish is
1:39:45
kind of about this whole like, are people really responsible
1:39:47
for their actions or not? Or does the outcome matter more?
1:39:50
It's, yeah, mindless little Jelly floating up and down, no
1:39:54
care or choice or brain in there.
1:39:56
And you can't make a sound. So if somebody touches you,
1:39:59
there's no concept of consent. There's no negotiation.
1:40:03
But chemicals are sent a stinging, sharp sensation, pain
1:40:07
you did not mean to cause for. It's just in your nature, but
1:40:11
it's not in your thoughts. You drift without a memory.
1:40:14
So do you even have a past? Oh, can we blame you little
1:40:18
Jelly for lashing out so fast? So obviously it's, it's, it's a
1:40:21
simple poem. It's just a little whatever.
1:40:24
But it's about a jellyfish sting, obviously.
1:40:26
But it's also a big analogy for people who have these like quick
1:40:29
emotional reactions without having the time to logically or
1:40:33
emotionally process what they're doing.
1:40:35
It's about people who hurt people even when they don't
1:40:37
intend to, and how sometimes we need to ask, well, can we really
1:40:41
blame them if they're acting out of instinct or ignorance?
1:40:44
But also it's about how even if you didn't intend to hurt
1:40:47
someone, the person that you did hurt still has to live with
1:40:50
those consequences. You might not blame the person
1:40:53
for doing it or you might, but the person who is injured or
1:40:55
hurt, whether that's physically or emotionally, still has to
1:40:58
live with the sting. They still have to live with the
1:41:00
consequences of that. They still have to go through
1:41:02
the pain and the suffering and the trauma.
1:41:04
You know, a jellyfish or a person might, sorry, might lash
1:41:07
out and sting you. And that's not intentional on
1:41:09
their part because, you know, they, they have no brain.
1:41:11
They didn't think it through. It's not not like they even have
1:41:13
an awareness of what they did was wrong.
1:41:16
So, you know, you can you, can you really blame them?
1:41:18
But when you think about it like that, you have to ask, well,
1:41:20
like, does blame really matter? Because ultimately that person
1:41:23
is stung and in pain. And the jellyfish might not
1:41:26
still be aware of it, but the pain is still there.
1:41:29
You know, And I think that's kind of what this part of the
1:41:31
book reminded me of. Like, I get these people might
1:41:34
be living with what is essentially a health condition
1:41:36
that makes them sadistic. However, that's not an excuse
1:41:40
for what they do. That doesn't erase the harm
1:41:42
they're doing. That doesn't stop them
1:41:45
inflicting trauma on people. I think you can understand
1:41:47
someone and their motives or lack of without condoning it or
1:41:51
excusing their actions. So for example, if we know that
1:41:53
these people have this like health condition that makes them
1:41:56
sadists, we might not blame them for their actions, but we can
1:41:59
still be like, well, I don't condone your actions.
1:42:02
You are still objectively doing harm.
1:42:05
You know, murdering people, slavery, cannibalism, eugenics.
1:42:09
So you can be like, Yep, I understand why you're doing
1:42:11
this. I understand that, but you're
1:42:13
not condoning it and you're not like letting them off the hook
1:42:16
and you're not saying like, oh, well, you know, you can't help
1:42:18
it, so just carry on. It's more like, OK, I understand
1:42:21
you can't help it, but let's figure out a way to stop this,
1:42:23
you know, to stop the harm. Anyway, So that's what this
1:42:26
whole little passage made me think of.
1:42:27
And I hoped that the book would try to explore this a little
1:42:30
more and doesn't just do the whole like, oh, but it's not
1:42:32
their fault, so I guess we can forgive them.
1:42:34
Nonsense. I don't want these literal evil
1:42:38
monsters to just be made out to be the victims in all this.
1:42:40
Even if it is like a health condition, like a effect of
1:42:43
their magical immortality, they're still humans.
1:42:46
They're not like a jellyfish who literally have no brain.
1:42:48
Like they're still humans with like sentience and a
1:42:51
consciousness. Well actually I was going to say
1:42:53
they have free will, but there's an argument against that too.
1:42:56
But in a practical sense, they at least have the illusion of
1:42:59
free will or free will depend on what you believe.
1:43:02
Like people do have choices over what they do and their actions.
1:43:05
So like, you know, even if you have a biological tendency
1:43:07
towards XY or Z, you could absolutely choose not to act on
1:43:10
that usually. There's probably some
1:43:12
exceptions, but like, on the whole, I'd say like, you know,
1:43:15
even if you have a biological tendency towards sadism, that
1:43:18
doesn't mean you have to hurt people.
1:43:20
Do you know what I mean? I don't know if I'm making sense
1:43:22
now. I'm just rambling, OK?
1:43:24
Like, look and look, OK. I mean, I get it.
1:43:26
Books don't have to be morally perfect.
1:43:27
A writer can absolutely write a character that they don't agree
1:43:30
with. I get that.
1:43:31
But if a book has a crappy message that seems to be
1:43:34
glamorising or excusing violent or harmful behaviour, then I
1:43:38
still have a right to criticise that and be like, I think this
1:43:42
is a crappy message. And yeah, and I think I, I
1:43:44
mentioned this a little bit yesterday, but I seem like for
1:43:46
me, the thing that I hate most is not when an author writes A
1:43:49
morally dark character. I think that can be really,
1:43:51
really interesting. That can be really entertaining.
1:43:53
You know, look at and I just reviewed yesteryear a little bit
1:43:56
back on my channel. I think I mentioned yesterday
1:43:58
John Fowles as the Collector is written at least partially from
1:44:02
the perspective of this like horrific stalker and kidnapper.
1:44:05
I've been really enjoying the time of Iron books at the minute
1:44:08
because it's my guilty pleasure. I keep saying this.
1:44:10
It's great. That does a really fun job of
1:44:12
examining the difference between enjoying an evil character in a
1:44:15
book and experiencing those actions in real life.
1:44:18
And all the characters are really nuanced and complex and
1:44:20
it's really, really fun. And I love that.
1:44:22
And the main character kind of goes into, it was like, oh, it's
1:44:25
fiction, Fiction doesn't matter. Anyone can do anything in
1:44:27
fiction and I can enjoy the evilness and you and it doesn't
1:44:30
mean anything. And then when she's actually put
1:44:32
into that world and has to experience it, she's like, oh
1:44:34
crap, this is not what I thought.
1:44:35
This is not as consequence free and harmless as I thought it
1:44:39
was. And I think that's a really kind
1:44:40
of fun examination of all of that.
1:44:42
So I think, I think, I think having evil characters and bad
1:44:44
characters can be a fun thing. But what I just personally hate,
1:44:48
and I think a lot of people kind of mistake my rants for me being
1:44:51
like, oh, we should ban all that.
1:44:52
No, I'm not saying we should ban any books.
1:44:54
I'm not saying we should stop people writing them or whatever.
1:44:56
But what I am saying is that like, I personally do not like
1:44:59
this and never will. Probably what I just personally
1:45:03
hate and have criticised a lot of the years and will continue
1:45:05
to criticise is when an author writes an awful character but
1:45:08
doesn't understand understand that the person they're writing
1:45:11
is awful and they try and romanticise the character and
1:45:15
their behaviour. So for example, they romanticise
1:45:18
and glamorise and sexualize and like kind of hype up a bit
1:45:21
rapists, torturers, stalkers or whatever.
1:45:24
Or in this case mass murderers. I, yeah, I don't know.
1:45:27
I have no problems with those kinds of characters being in
1:45:29
books, but I do have an issue with books acting like those
1:45:33
actions are forgivable or redeemable or sexy because it's
1:45:37
not sexy. I'm not saying I want those
1:45:39
books banned, like I say, but I am saying I see massive problems
1:45:41
with them. And we'll continue you to voice
1:45:43
my disgust of that. And also just like on a personal
1:45:45
level, like if I know, for example, you're into books that
1:45:48
like sexualize and romanticise and eroticize rape, I'll
1:45:51
probably be like, OK, if you enjoy getting off to seeing a
1:45:55
woman be violently raped, I'm probably not going to feel safe
1:45:58
around you, you know? And I think that's just a
1:45:59
personal thing for me anyway. I've rented enough.
1:46:01
OK, back to the story. This is why my videos are so
1:46:04
long because I can't show up. So back to the story.
1:46:08
And Stroud says that the high necromancer wants to see Helena
1:46:12
again. So that you guessed it, in order
1:46:14
to get her there, she's knocked out.
1:46:17
How many times has she been unconscious at this point?
1:46:19
Seriously. OK, Elena gets to see Morrow.
1:46:21
And did I mention stupid name? It's spelled Morrow, like MO
1:46:25
Double ROUGH for those of you who are listening to the audio
1:46:28
only version. Morrow.
1:46:30
Like, I get it, but I don't like it.
1:46:32
I don't like it. Anyway, Morrow lay reclined upon
1:46:35
a throne of bodies, Necro thralls contorted and twisted
1:46:37
together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair moving in
1:46:41
synchrony. OK, synchrony when you go with
1:46:43
that, sorry, it would be synchronicity.
1:46:45
No, first thing that comes up. Synchrony versus synchronicity.
1:46:48
Oh no, I'm completely wrong with this.
1:46:49
Synchrony is about two or more things occurring simultaneously,
1:46:52
often in a mechanical way, where synchronicity is a psychological
1:46:55
concept referring to meaningful coincidences that have no causal
1:46:58
link. I did not know that.
1:47:00
And something new every day. OK, completely right, ignore me
1:47:03
then. Necklace rolls contorted and
1:47:05
twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a
1:47:07
chair, moving in synchrony, rising or falling as they
1:47:09
breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him.
1:47:12
Morrows seemed shrunken somehow, from the immense, distorted
1:47:15
being he'd been. Now.
1:47:16
He looked as though the skin was rotting off him.
1:47:18
I wonder if Morrow was hot if people would be listening after
1:47:21
him too. Anyway, he decides to look
1:47:25
through Helena's memories because like apparently just
1:47:27
everyone can do that in this world and she's in pain.
1:47:30
She's screaming again, it's just another torture scene.
1:47:32
Maybe at this point we should have been drinking every time
1:47:34
Helena screams too because that would really like if you're
1:47:37
playing it with water that I'd get your daily 8 glasses or
1:47:40
whatever it is wouldn't it? In no time.
1:47:41
Anyway, after he's done he's like oh didn't you realise
1:47:44
Helena must be the eternal flames and a Mansa when before
1:47:48
he thought it was this Elaine Boyle person but now apparently
1:47:50
it's Helena. But didn't we already like
1:47:52
suspect it was Helena? I don't, I don't know.
1:47:54
I thought, I don't know. There's only one answer.
1:47:57
She is the animancer. Even now, with her resonance all
1:48:01
but gone, she's still resisting. She erased her memory of what
1:48:04
she is in an attempt to escape me.
1:48:06
And again, they say it's like some sort of revelation, but I
1:48:08
thought we'd already figured it out before.
1:48:09
So I'm confused. I don't know.
1:48:11
OK. Ferran is like, I beg your
1:48:13
forgiveness for my failure. I never considered it, but again
1:48:16
I thought, isn't that why they sent her to him in the 1st
1:48:19
place? Because they suspected this?
1:48:21
No, apparently it was just to try and like get the memories,
1:48:23
but I don't, no, I don't know. I don't know.
1:48:25
I think my first time reading through this, I was like, OK,
1:48:28
there's like a bunch of like things with this Elaine person
1:48:30
and whatever and blah, blah, blah.
1:48:31
But like, I'm pretty sure because Helena's the main
1:48:33
character, it's going to be her, right?
1:48:35
And I thought this was kind of obvious.
1:48:36
And then as the book went on, I was like, oh, yeah, they're just
1:48:39
like alluding to this. And then they do this like it's
1:48:41
a big reveal. And I was like, I thought we
1:48:43
already knew. I don't know.
1:48:44
I was confused my first time reading it.
1:48:45
And I had to go back and reread. And then I was like, OK, I
1:48:47
don't, I don't know. OK, they just, I think I said
1:48:50
this earlier. They just kept going on about
1:48:52
how you have to know someone completely to be able to do this
1:48:54
and rewrite their brain like this, so surely the implication
1:48:57
was that the only person who could have known herself so
1:48:59
completely was herself? No, I don't know.
1:49:02
Anyway, then there's some discussion around who killed
1:49:04
Mandel and they're sure it was someone from the Order and that
1:49:07
they used an Obsidian weapon to kill her.
1:49:09
So I guess at this point we're learning that Obsidian is the
1:49:11
bad guy's weakness. Cool, I've just realised now
1:49:14
within the next or the 1st 600 pages of this book, this never
1:49:17
comes up again. So I'm sure it might towards the
1:49:19
end, but OK. Also, don't you think it seems
1:49:22
silly to discuss this in front of her Elena when you now think
1:49:25
she's like super powerful and you know, she used to work for
1:49:28
the order and like is still on their side and what like, why
1:49:31
would you be like discussing your entire people's only
1:49:35
weakness that can actually kill them in front of an enemy?
1:49:38
It's it's so silly. Anyway, there is also the
1:49:40
revelation that Helena ended up in the stasis chamber because
1:49:44
she was trying to rescue her roommate Paladin Lila from a
1:49:47
prison or some experimentation lab or something like that.
1:49:50
Back at the mansion and Helena realises that Mandel isn't the
1:49:53
first of the dying to be killed. They've actually been dying for
1:49:56
weeks and she realises this because people have been
1:49:59
disappearing from the society pages of the newspaper.
1:50:01
She reads OK, I guess she confronts Ferran about this and
1:50:05
he says they must be trying to cover it up.
1:50:07
Then she info dumps all this stuff that she's apparently
1:50:09
figured out. So her doing all her thinking,
1:50:12
this has all happened off page and now we're just getting all
1:50:14
these revelations like dumped honours.
1:50:16
This is like the first thing she's actively done in the book
1:50:19
is read and think. So this is what she says.
1:50:22
When the Undying are in their dead bodies, they don't retain
1:50:24
their old resonance, they get whatever resonance the new body
1:50:26
has. Like your father, he's an iron
1:50:28
alchemist. He doesn't know anything about
1:50:30
pyromancy. So if Someone Like You, an
1:50:32
animancer, lost their body, you'd lose the ability.
1:50:35
And if you thought being a lich was a punishment, something
1:50:37
you'd do to teach someone a lesson, you'd cling to your body
1:50:39
no matter what condition it was in, and be desperate to figure
1:50:42
out transference. But even if you did, you'd still
1:50:44
need to find an animancer. But someone like that would
1:50:46
fight the transference. So that's where the repopulation
1:50:49
programme comes in. Morrow doesn't care about the
1:50:51
economy or what kind of alchemists there are in New
1:50:53
Palladia. The Real all reasons Stroud
1:50:55
using selective breeding is to find a way to control what
1:50:58
resonance children are born with.
1:50:59
That's why they brought back your father.
1:51:01
And I saw him in Central. She's trying to produce an
1:51:04
animancer for Morrow. If transference is perfected by
1:51:06
the time she does, he'd have the means and the perfect vessel to
1:51:09
use. But he's running out of time.
1:51:11
Something's wrong about him. He's too old and that should
1:51:13
affect the resonance, but it hasn't with him.
1:51:15
He's got some other sorcerers power, something he can draw
1:51:18
from, but he's deteriorating anyway.
1:51:20
I saw him only a few months ago and he wasn't like that.
1:51:22
The throne is keeping him alive. Maybe the source of his power is
1:51:25
right in front of us, but it's being disguised so that people
1:51:28
wouldn't realise. Perhaps it's presented as a
1:51:30
gift, something people are desperate to earn, but really,
1:51:32
he's the one that needs it. The undying.
1:51:34
You're the source of his power and the resistance.
1:51:36
We figured that out, didn't we? How to kill him, How to kill all
1:51:39
of you. OK, so in summary, I think
1:51:42
they're trying to like breed new magical babies and then perfect
1:51:46
this transference thing. So these like old dying people,
1:51:49
like Morrow can like transfer their souls into these new
1:51:53
babies and you can't do it when they're older because they'd
1:51:57
resist it. So you need to do it when
1:51:58
they're young and can't resist it.
1:51:59
But then you're a baby and you're, I don't know, I see
1:52:02
flaws in this plan, but OK. Or maybe I'm just not
1:52:04
understanding it. I'm very confused.
1:52:06
So Morrow himself gets his power from like his little minions.
1:52:10
And when he gives them immortality, they give him
1:52:12
something, which is what's giving him power and keeping him
1:52:15
alive. That bit's a bit more simple.
1:52:16
The chapter ends here though, and we learn in the next chapter
1:52:18
that immediately after saying all of this and like coming to
1:52:22
these conclusions, instead of doing something about about it
1:52:24
or having a back and forth conversation with Farren, she
1:52:26
just, she passes out. It's really, well, OK,
1:52:31
technically she has a seizure and then passes out and Farren
1:52:35
just leaves her, but it's still passing out.
1:52:37
To be fair, my only experience with seizures was with my little
1:52:41
Kyra Bean. And when she was ill, she had
1:52:44
quite a lot in the beginning and then her medicine seemed to work
1:52:46
and then it stopped working and got really bad again towards the
1:52:50
end. But yeah, so that's my only
1:52:51
experience with seizures. But even I know like they have
1:52:53
the seizure and then where they're having it and then
1:52:55
afterwards there's like a recovery period where they're
1:52:58
like they're back in consciousness and they kind of
1:53:00
feel like what just happened and it's all very confusing.
1:53:03
And then afterwards Carrie's to sleep for a really, really long
1:53:05
time because seizures are not just like mentally draining, but
1:53:08
they're physically really exhausting as well.
1:53:10
Like her little paws used to shake, her whole body used to
1:53:12
shake, her jaw used to lock up and she'd be dribbling and
1:53:15
spitting everywhere. It was.
1:53:17
Oh God, it's the most horrible, heartbreaking thing to see.
1:53:19
But like that sort of like physical, you know, that the
1:53:22
shakes and the activity like that is physically draining.
1:53:25
And like the vet said, like her muscles would have ached so much
1:53:28
afterwards. Like, like all her muscles, her
1:53:30
full body of muscles. Plus it's really exhausting on
1:53:33
the brain. Like, and then she's trying to
1:53:34
figure out what happened. It's just like, yeah, so she did
1:53:36
have to sleep for a long time afterwards.
1:53:38
So I get why when she passed out after the seizure affair and
1:53:40
just left her for a while because like, he knew she
1:53:42
wouldn't be waking up for a bit. But I know like when when it was
1:53:46
the chiro, like I could not leave her after she'd had a
1:53:48
seizure at all. I'd always be like there with
1:53:50
her and she'd just be fast asleep.
1:53:51
And I'm like, I'm here, I'm here, I'm watching you safe
1:53:54
anyway while Helena is. But sorry, just sad trauma
1:53:57
dumping on you there a little bit.
1:53:59
But like, that's my experience with seizures.
1:54:00
So I kind of, I know I get it a little bit right.
1:54:02
Where were we? OK, while she is passed out,
1:54:06
Helena has another memory come back.
1:54:07
This time she is being told she's exceptional at everything
1:54:10
magic related and she should have a nickel titanium weapon if
1:54:13
she wants one. Hopefully this will be relevant
1:54:15
at some point. Now thinking about it, having
1:54:17
read more, we do actually see this exact scene later.
1:54:20
And there is, I know something does come of it.
1:54:22
I guess I don't know. We'll get there.
1:54:24
Yeah, we'll get that. We'll see.
1:54:25
Then there's a few boring pages and it says this.
1:54:28
Ferran was constantly busy, spending most of his time trying
1:54:31
to hunt down the last members of the Eternal Flame.
1:54:33
When she did happen to see him from the courtyard windows, he
1:54:35
looked visibly ground down. Sometimes he came back covered
1:54:38
in blood. She began to suspect that Mauro
1:54:40
was torturing him regularly. Since Ferran couldn't stay dead,
1:54:42
Mauro got the pleasure of killing him over and over.
1:54:45
And I was a little confused here because I was like, since when
1:54:48
was it established that Ferran was like one of the Undying?
1:54:51
You know, because we know that people can work for the Undying
1:54:54
with actually being immortal because Stroud told us I'm not
1:54:57
immortal. I just work for them.
1:54:59
And this whole book so far, we've had little scenes of
1:55:01
Helena being like, well, what is he?
1:55:02
Is he immortal or is he not? I don't know.
1:55:04
And now it's like, just accepted out of nowhere with, like, no
1:55:06
new knowledge, like, oh, yeah, he's immortal and he must be
1:55:09
being tortured and killed and brought back to life over and
1:55:11
over and over. OK.
1:55:12
I mean, I still don't really understand how the immortality
1:55:14
in this book works. Maybe, maybe we'll get an
1:55:17
explanation in Part 3. I don't know.
1:55:18
We'll see. It just feels, I don't know,
1:55:20
maybe I'm stupid. She goes on to say, or the
1:55:22
author goes on to say, she tried not to know.
1:55:24
Notice when she couldn't help it, she tried not to care.
1:55:26
He'd chosen this life, after all.
1:55:27
Mauro was dying, and Theron knew it.
1:55:29
Yet he still chose to serve him, carrying out everything that
1:55:32
Mauro now lacked the strength to do himself.
1:55:34
He deserved to suffer. I mean, like, yeah, he's he's a
1:55:36
mass murderer. He's regularly torturing you.
1:55:39
Sorry if I don't pity him. Then we actually get a scene
1:55:41
where Helena gets her period for the first time.
1:55:43
When she found spots of blood between her legs, she sat
1:55:46
staring in total incomprehension until it dawned on her that she
1:55:49
was menstruating. Even before the war, the stress
1:55:52
of her scholarship had kept her irregular.
1:55:53
It stopped completely after the assassination.
1:55:55
See, she knew about the assassination.
1:55:59
OK, never mind, she'd forgotten that it was something her body
1:56:01
was supposed to do. When she'd been sterilised.
1:56:03
Mathias had wanted her womb removed, but Ilva had insisted
1:56:06
that the procedure be as non invasive as possible, a ligature
1:56:09
which meant she could still bleed.
1:56:11
So there were many choices that the author could have gone for
1:56:14
when choosing how to sterilise Elena.
1:56:16
Helena here. It concerns me that she chose
1:56:18
the most reversible one because this makes me think they're
1:56:20
going to reverse it and force a pregnancy on her.
1:56:23
That was my worry at this point. I said in my original script, it
1:56:26
makes me worry that we're going to end up with a forced
1:56:27
pregnancy plot at some point, but I really, really hope this
1:56:30
isn't the case. Later in a scene with Farrah and
1:56:32
he asks, you know, I wonder sometimes who's responsible for
1:56:35
more resistance deaths, Holdfast and his morals or me?
1:56:39
What do you think? It's not the same.
1:56:41
His fingers twitched. He almost managed to hide it by
1:56:43
crossing his arms. Is there really a difference
1:56:44
between having someone die for you and killing them?
1:56:47
Yes, but I mean, this would be an interesting kind of morality
1:56:52
discussion to have, but it just doesn't really go any further.
1:56:54
You know, I feel like Ferran and the author writing about Ferran
1:56:57
are trying to be like, see, he's not so bad, He's just like the
1:57:00
hero. But I can't help but come back
1:57:02
to this like, well, actually both sides seem awful position.
1:57:06
It's why like I'm never really going to well, I'm never going
1:57:08
to support any wars or anything like that, because I feel like
1:57:10
while asking people to fight and die for you is bad and like, you
1:57:15
know, not not good morally, it's awful.
1:57:18
You are responsible for those deaths.
1:57:19
I still feel like it's different.
1:57:21
It's like a different kind of bad to physically going out
1:57:24
there and murdering people. You know, both are bad, but
1:57:27
they're different. I my brain is not working today.
1:57:31
You know what I'm trying to say. And you can probably have some
1:57:34
more in depth discussions about this than me down in the
1:57:36
comments because my brain is just mush today.
1:57:39
I'm so sorry. Yeah, Go on, leave me your
1:57:40
thoughts. I think I think it'll be very
1:57:42
interesting to read and I'm very excited to hear what you all
1:57:44
think. One of the things I hate is this
1:57:46
idea that like, oh, well, we've both done bad things.
1:57:48
Therefore, like, if I do bad things too, it doesn't matter
1:57:51
because so did you, you know, they're both bad things, and
1:57:54
even if one's worse than the other, it doesn't matter because
1:57:56
they're both bad and now we're both as bad as each other.
1:57:58
I don't like that. I really don't like that.
1:57:59
Yeah, I think that's what I'm trying to say.
1:58:00
I don't know anymore. I'm so, I'm so tired.
1:58:04
Ferran then goes on about how he doesn't believe he has a
1:58:06
conscience and he hates so many people.
1:58:08
He's just so unlikable. And he's not even an interesting
1:58:11
villain, you know, he's just unpleasant.
1:58:13
Even with what we learned about him in Part 2 of this book and
1:58:16
how they try to develop his character, I just don't find him
1:58:19
interesting and I don't find him sympathetic in any way.
1:58:22
I just, he seems just like cartoon evil.
1:58:24
And then the author's like, no, no, no, I'm going to try and
1:58:26
redeem him, but he's still just cartoon evil.
1:58:28
I will say I don't think this book is for me anyway.
1:58:31
Then there is another party in the mansion and this time while
1:58:35
snooping around, Helena overhears the guests bragging
1:58:37
about raping women as part of the 4th pregnancy thing to
1:58:40
create more magicians. It is sickening, like completely
1:58:42
sickening. And this part for me really
1:58:44
makes these people irredeemable. And like people like Ferran who
1:58:47
like he knows this is happening and he's not speaking up against
1:58:51
it. That makes him irredeemable for
1:58:52
me. You know, I feel like if you
1:58:54
need some, someone in real life who was like, Oh yeah, all my
1:58:56
friends and colleagues are going out every day and raping women
1:58:59
and I am like the second highest rank in this company that forces
1:59:03
the rape of women and I am upholding this company that
1:59:07
rapes women. Like that's not redeemable in
1:59:09
any way, is it? Let's be real.
1:59:10
One of the guys who has been doing the raping says always
1:59:13
glad to perform my civic duty. Palladia can never have too many
1:59:16
alchemists, replied a leering voice.
1:59:18
Stroud lets you have anyone you want.
1:59:20
Well, the sly voice replied, it probably depends on your
1:59:22
repertoire. She'll give you a list of room
1:59:24
numbers to choose from. There's this one girl pretty
1:59:26
thing. Scarves weren't too bad.
1:59:28
Little bitch managed to bite me, but she was very cooperative.
1:59:30
After I broke her jaw, I told Stroud to let it heal the old
1:59:33
fashioned way. There was a dramatic sigh.
1:59:35
I'll go back again this week and make sure she's knocked up, and
1:59:37
if not, I guess I'll try again. I rather hope it didn't take.
1:59:40
I think I'll like her better with her mouth wired shut.
1:59:43
Like I say, Ferran says he hasn't done it himself.
1:59:45
But again, you're standing by and letting all this happen.
1:59:49
Especially when you're in a position of power that's letting
1:59:51
this happen. Like you are part of the
1:59:52
problem. You are the problem.
1:59:54
But again, that's not something that's redeemable, just standing
1:59:57
by and letting this happen. They all talk about how this
1:59:59
person from the Order is killing people to mimic the murders of
2:00:02
people in the order who were killed.
2:00:04
Yeah, OK, that was it. So.
2:00:05
So the Undying killed a bunch of people in the Order of the
2:00:08
Eternal Flame, and now whoever is killing members of the
2:00:11
Undying are doing it to mimic those murders, apparently.
2:00:14
Again, I forgot this was even a plot point because I'm so
2:00:17
invested. I'm so uninvested in this, I
2:00:19
don't care. And Helena obviously feels sick
2:00:22
because Yep, that's, that's pretty gross.
2:00:24
She's sad at the thought of all the women from the Resistance or
2:00:27
order who'd been captured and been raped.
2:00:28
Because, you know, I think that's the normal reaction to
2:00:31
hearing about mass rape and forced pregnancy, isn't it?
2:00:34
Disgust and horror. Not just, well, I didn't do it
2:00:36
myself, so looking at you. Ferran.
2:00:38
However, and Helena does lose me a bit when she thinks that
2:00:41
there's so many because, well, there had been so many women in
2:00:44
the Resistance, not many in combat, but everywhere else.
2:00:47
They'd staffed the hospital, gone to the front lines as field
2:00:49
medics and dragged the wounded bodies to safety, Operated the
2:00:52
radios. You do have radios, hose and
2:00:55
relayed messages, washed and repaired the clothes and
2:00:57
uniforms and cooked the meals, all the ordinary tasks that
2:01:00
never ended, not even when a war began.
2:01:02
It had been the women doing them.
2:01:03
So yeah, typical little women jobs, right?
2:01:06
I don't like this, this idea that like, well, yeah, the
2:01:09
resistance had a lot of women, so they're better than the
2:01:10
undying. But then you're forcing the
2:01:12
women to do like, cooking, cleaning, healing, sewing
2:01:15
because. Because that's all women are
2:01:16
good for, right. Apparently.
2:01:18
And now just being raped and impregnated again, both sides
2:01:22
are oppressing women in different ways.
2:01:24
The underlying misogyny in this book concerns me for like the
2:01:27
author and their views because like, it feels like passages
2:01:30
like this about how like, Oh yeah, the women were like so
2:01:33
important to the resistance and they did this and this and this
2:01:35
and this and like, yeah, those are important jobs, but being
2:01:37
like, they're really the ones that women can do.
2:01:39
Women are only good for these jobs unless you want to give up
2:01:42
being a wife and mother and then you might be able to do that.
2:01:44
Like that's that's not being painted as a good thing and a
2:01:47
positive and why the resistance is somehow better than the
2:01:49
undying bothers me quite a bit at this point.
2:01:51
I like I say I am open to changing my my mind when we get
2:01:55
to Part 3 because that's the only bit I haven't read yet.
2:01:57
So let's see where this goes. But we have a couple of hours of
2:02:00
video to make before then. Anyway as she's fine from the
2:02:03
party. That guy from earlier that
2:02:05
really is having the affair with Lancaster.
2:02:07
He finds her and attacks her and threatens to rape her because
2:02:10
he's a monster. And then he sticks a needle in
2:02:12
her neck to incapacitator and I thought she going to pass out.
2:02:15
She doesn't. For once she does not pass out.
2:02:18
Put those drinks down. Instead, he drags outside and
2:02:21
through the gate, and then he makes disgusting rape threats.
2:02:24
Like, gods, I'm going to turn you inside out sick.
2:02:27
They're stopped by Ferran, who just casually stuffs his fists
2:02:30
inside Lancaster's stomach. Not the chest.
2:02:33
I thought it was chest. And he pulls out his intestines.
2:02:35
And then Lancaster just grumbles and stumbles away with his
2:02:38
organs hanging out. And The thing is like, this is
2:02:41
not a man who's immortal, by the way.
2:02:43
Lancaster is just a regular guy, like, not an immortal guy.
2:02:46
So you want me to believe that he just had his guts pulled out?
2:02:49
And then he just walks away and he's like, oh, I guess I'll go
2:02:51
to hospital now. No, Farron take.
2:02:54
Well, I mean, it happens. But Farron takes Helena back up
2:02:57
to her room and agrees to clean her wounds and stuff.
2:02:59
And she says that he knows he won't hurt her now because she
2:03:03
knew he wouldn't. He only hurt her on certain
2:03:05
days, and this wasn't one of them.
2:03:06
So she sat very still. What kind of nonsense is this?
2:03:10
This is exactly the kind of thing that abuse victims tell
2:03:13
themselves. As someone who was in an abusive
2:03:17
relationship, this is the sort of nonsense you tell yourself.
2:03:19
Like, oh, well, he'll only hurt me if I do these things.
2:03:22
He'll only shout if I do these things.
2:03:24
It was my fault that he hurt me in this way because of this and
2:03:27
this. So if I do this, he won't hurt
2:03:29
me. I know I'm safe today because he
2:03:31
didn't do this or I didn't do this.
2:03:32
And that's nonsense, absolute nonsense.
2:03:34
Can we not romanticise this, please?
2:03:36
He then leaves and he locks over in her room for her own safety.
2:03:41
That's right, punish the victim and not the attempted rapist I
2:03:43
guess. Although, well, no, he does go
2:03:46
and punish the rapist, but we'll get there the next day.
2:03:48
She kept thinking about the girls in the repopulation
2:03:50
programme, lured him by the promise of food and pardon.
2:03:52
If Elena hadn't been sterilised and missing memories, she'd be
2:03:55
there too. Compared with what the rest of
2:03:57
the survivors suffered, Ferron was almost kind.
2:03:59
It was such a horrible thought. Again, it's this comparison that
2:04:02
makes it so harmful with Ohio. Well, you know, he's torturing
2:04:05
me and like I'm having these seizures because of what he's
2:04:07
doing to me and I'm locked up here and I'm being fed slop and
2:04:10
I'm getting like, you know, all this like torture and attacks
2:04:13
and attempted rape on me, but at least I'm not being raped by
2:04:15
multiple men. So I guess it's actually quite
2:04:18
no, what he's doing to you is still horrible.
2:04:20
It's still awful. Aurelia comes into the room to
2:04:23
info dump a tragic back story showing how evil the evil side
2:04:27
are. She says, did you know I was the
2:04:29
third daughter my mother had? People thought there was
2:04:31
something wrong with Cain when he was born, thought maybe he
2:04:33
was a lapse, which means he doesn't have magic or he didn't
2:04:36
have an iron resonance. No one was sure, just knew the
2:04:39
family was secretive about him. My father saw an opportunity.
2:04:41
My mother and father were cousins.
2:04:43
Incest. He thought they could easily
2:04:44
have a girl with pure iron resonance and the Ferrans would
2:04:47
be desperate to marry Cane to her to stay in control of the
2:04:50
Guild again. That should that should not be a
2:04:52
full stop. Mother said the first two were
2:04:53
tiny little bits of things. My father paid a Vivimansa to
2:04:56
come in early to see if they were girls, but when they didn't
2:04:59
show any signs of iron resonance in the womb, he didn't let her
2:05:02
keep them. If they come to term, he said
2:05:04
another iron family might be. As to the marriage contract, I
2:05:07
was the 3rd girl. My mother always said the first
2:05:09
two babies were hers. I was Kane Ferrans.
2:05:11
She burned them in the fireplace and buried the ashes in the
2:05:13
garden, spent all her time out there with them.
2:05:16
At least this has been portrayed as a bad thing.
2:05:17
So that's good. But like, what is it with this
2:05:19
book and taking away women's control of their reproductive
2:05:23
rights consistently? It's just a lot at this point,
2:05:26
but you know, at least at least it is being portrayed as a bad
2:05:29
thing. So that's that.
2:05:29
There's a lot of awful stuff in this book and some is said to be
2:05:32
as bad as it obviously is and some is romanticised, but
2:05:36
overall it's just not pleasant to read because even when things
2:05:39
are shown to be like, oh this is bad, it kind of feels sometimes
2:05:43
like the amount of torture and pain that women go through in
2:05:47
this book. It just kind of feels like the
2:05:49
authors enjoying writing about the torture of women and it's
2:05:52
just a bit uncomfortable, you know?
2:05:54
I don't know. Anyway, then she shows Helena a
2:05:56
story in the newspaper about fair and killing Lancaster in
2:05:59
public and Aurelia's like, yay, he's done it for me because he
2:06:03
found out about our affair. But then she realises it's not
2:06:05
because he's jealous about the affair, it's because of what
2:06:08
Lancaster did to Helena. And then Aurelia gets super
2:06:11
philosopher. It's all a bit stupid.
2:06:13
And I'm I'm confused because like, why did Ferran attack him
2:06:16
outside the house, pull out his intestines and then let him go
2:06:20
away to the hospital and then show up at the hospital and kill
2:06:23
him there in public? Why not just kill him
2:06:24
immediately outside your house? Why did you have to wait and
2:06:27
then like do it with a big audience?
2:06:29
This seems stupid. I don't know.
2:06:31
Also, what kind of newspaper publishes photos of a violent
2:06:34
murder? Because that's what this one
2:06:35
did. Wild.
2:06:36
So as a consequence of this, thankfully, something happening
2:06:39
because something happened, not just.
2:06:40
And then Aurelia decides to go crazy since Ferran is away and
2:06:44
out of the house and offered some meeting or whatever.
2:06:47
And she decides I hate you, Elena, I'm going to get my
2:06:50
revenge by plucking out your eyes for reasons I don't know
2:06:53
why. OK, so she's literally like got
2:06:56
a knife and she's like digging around in Helena's eye socket.
2:06:59
Like again, we're seeing this on page.
2:07:01
It's OK, right? Fine.
2:07:03
When Ferran, who has been watching this whole scene from
2:07:05
his little magical eye cameras, like his eyeball cameras, he's
2:07:09
like, Oh no. And he magically telepathically
2:07:12
sends the dead bodies after Aurelia to stop her from killing
2:07:17
Helena. And then he uses his long
2:07:19
distance magic to make the Iron House attack Aurelia.
2:07:23
And I thought he killed her. And I was like, yay for killing
2:07:25
your wife. Yay for women attacking women
2:07:28
over men. I hate this.
2:07:30
And so Ferran has been like running back and he's in a car.
2:07:34
I don't know how, but he gets there really quick and he's just
2:07:37
like. And when he gets there, Helena's
2:07:39
eye is hanging out of the socket.
2:07:41
And then Aurelia is in this like iron cage and I thought she was
2:07:44
dead, but apparently she's not actually dead.
2:07:46
But if she's not actually dead, she has iron magic herself.
2:07:48
So why didn't she just be like get out of the cage?
2:07:53
I don't know either. I don't know either.
2:07:55
So Ferran running back and he's like you're a healer, teach me
2:07:59
how to magically fix your eye. And then she does and bam, his
2:08:02
eyes are back to normal and fine.
2:08:04
All is well in the world. And he goes to check on his wife
2:08:07
and somehow he like gets her out of the cage or brings her back
2:08:10
to life or something. Or maybe she was just knocked
2:08:12
out. I don't I don't know, I don't
2:08:13
care. But she's out of the cage and
2:08:16
alive now somehow. And he threatens to torture her
2:08:19
and says, I've tried to be patient with you Aurelia.
2:08:21
I've been willing to overlook your indecent behaviour and
2:08:23
petty interferences, but do remember, aside from being
2:08:26
somewhat decorative, you are useless to me.
2:08:28
If you ever go near her again, or speak to her or so much as
2:08:31
set foot in this one again, I will kill you.
2:08:33
I will do it slowly, perhaps over the course of an evening or
2:08:36
two. That isn't a threat, it's a
2:08:37
promise. Now get out of my sight.
2:08:39
I know we're meant to hate Aurelia, and I know she did just
2:08:42
torture Helena. Yes, that's awful, we don't like
2:08:45
her. But I'm never going to be in
2:08:47
support of or rooting for a man who just threatens to torture
2:08:50
and kill his wife for not following his rules.
2:08:53
Like as a I'm not excusing anything she did to Helena, but
2:08:56
I don't think violence is the answer to violence.
2:08:58
And I don't think you make fair and out to be this like good guy
2:09:02
who will do anything to protect Helena by making him into
2:09:05
someone who threatens to kill his wife when so many women are
2:09:09
dying like that around the world today.
2:09:11
And that's like a very real threat for people.
2:09:13
You know, a really bless her. She's been like probably as a
2:09:16
child forced into this arranged marriage and now her husband's
2:09:19
threatening to kill her. Like, I'm sorry, but she's also
2:09:21
the victim here. She's also a bad guy, but she's
2:09:23
also a for some reason, after this whole attack, he makes
2:09:27
Helena sleep in a different room.
2:09:29
Now a point is made to say this room has radiators.
2:09:31
So there are radiators in this world.
2:09:33
Again, what level of technology they have, I don't understand.
2:09:37
There are radios, right? We heard earlier there are
2:09:39
radios, yet later notes and messages have to be passed along
2:09:43
by handwritten letter. Why?
2:09:44
If you have, OK, OK fine, OK, we're back to film and I've just
2:09:49
realised we're about to cover the worst bit in the first part
2:09:52
of this book. This makes me so well, this
2:09:55
whole, this whole next section from now to the end of Part 1.
2:09:58
Worst bit of the entire book so far.
2:10:00
I hate this so much. So we skip forward in time a
2:10:03
little bit, and Stroud comes to visit again and reveal something
2:10:06
that I can't stand. Helena's vision was still
2:10:08
imbalanced, making things swing out of focus as Stroud began
2:10:11
examining her. Stroud noted something in her
2:10:13
file and then made Helena lie back and spent more than a
2:10:15
minute kneading her stomach and lower abdomen.
2:10:18
Perfect. Stroud said, finally stepping
2:10:19
back and taking several more notes.
2:10:21
You're finally ready. Ready for war enrollment in my
2:10:23
repopulation programme. I was sterilised.
2:10:26
Yeah, I know. Stroud just nodded.
2:10:28
I believe I may be the first vivimancer to manage a full
2:10:30
ligation reversal. Can we please just stop
2:10:35
controlling a person's uterus for once please?
2:10:40
I would love it. All that stuff I said earlier
2:10:42
about liking that a sterilised woman was being represented in
2:10:46
at least what they call a romance novel.
2:10:47
I take it all back. This feels like an even bigger
2:10:50
insult. The only thing in my mind that
2:10:52
is worse than forcing a sterilisation on a person is
2:10:55
forcing A sterilisation and then forcing the reverse of it, and
2:11:00
then forcing pregnancy because we know that's going to, oh, I
2:11:03
hate it, I hate this. And Helena tried to make herself
2:11:05
breathe steadily. If she started hyperventilating,
2:11:07
Stroud would probably sedate her or knock or knock her out
2:11:10
completely. So at least at this point she's
2:11:12
a little bit aware of how much she's passed out in this book so
2:11:14
far. And then, to make Matt's worse,
2:11:16
Stroud turns to Ferran and says to him, it's time you had
2:11:19
children. As are other animancer.
2:11:21
The High Necromancer has chosen you to be the first to make an
2:11:24
attempt with Marino here. If she becomes pregnant, we'll
2:11:26
look for signs of Anamancer. So now we're going on to not,
2:11:30
we're not only like controlling her uterus in terms of like, can
2:11:34
she have kids or not? But we're forcing who she has
2:11:36
kids with. Am I going to force rape on her?
2:11:38
So not only is she being held as a kidnap victim by him and being
2:11:42
physically tortured by him, but she's going to be raped by him
2:11:45
and impregnated by him. And people call this romance
2:11:48
and, and The thing is like, at least they acknowledge it as
2:11:50
rape. Helena says you're having me
2:11:52
raped and you expect me to be grateful about it?
2:11:54
Helena's voice was dead, coming from far away.
2:11:56
Stroud's expression soured. I'm giving you an opportunity
2:11:59
for your life to mean something. I would really love to throw
2:12:01
this book across the room but sadly I've been reading the
2:12:03
e-book version so I can't do that.
2:12:05
There's a lot of screaming and crying.
2:12:06
Obviously. I think most of us would react
2:12:08
in the same way, right? I just don't understand why so
2:12:11
many of these books that are marketed as like fantasy,
2:12:14
romance or romanticy just spend page after page finding ways to
2:12:17
torture women in like more and more disgusting disturbing ways.
2:12:21
I don't I don't see the appeal. Like, I don't know about you,
2:12:23
but I prefer reading books where my main characters have agency
2:12:27
and do things and go places and aren't just repetitively
2:12:31
tortured for. How much has it been so far?
2:12:34
240 pages of pure torture so far and it only carries on.
2:12:38
We've got another 780 ish to go. Helena is obviously terrified,
2:12:44
understandably. She flex her fingers, wishing
2:12:46
she could move her hand inside her body as easily as Ferran had
2:12:49
into Lancaster's belly. She'd RIP out her organs right
2:12:52
there in the bed. You know what?
2:12:53
First time Helena's been relatable to me because same
2:12:56
with my uterus issues and the pain issues I have.
2:12:58
Oh, there are days where I'm just like, I will dig it out
2:13:00
with a spatula if I have to. Oh, gosh, yes, I relate.
2:13:04
I don't want this thing then horrifically, and I'm not going
2:13:07
to read you the details here because it's unpleasant, we get
2:13:09
a graphic scene of Theron raping Helena.
2:13:12
I'll be honest, like, I know we had trigger warnings saying
2:13:14
there would be rape in here, but I didn't know it would be rape
2:13:17
between the main love interests. And if it was, if I'd known it
2:13:20
was going down this path, I don't think I would have picked
2:13:22
up the book and I don't think I would have chosen to review it.
2:13:24
This is my fault for deciding to go in blind.
2:13:27
But I guess, you know, screw me for thinking that an award
2:13:30
award-winning fantasy book wouldn't have the main love
2:13:34
interests raping each other. Yeah, OK.
2:13:38
The thing is, like, Ferren clearly doesn't want to do it.
2:13:40
He's been coerced into this by his bosses and Stroud and
2:13:44
whatever, but he still does it. And we also, I don't think we
2:13:46
needed the scene to be as graphically described in the
2:13:49
book as it was. That again, felt unnecessary.
2:13:52
Also, I I don't understand either the author's intention of
2:13:57
having like the forced rape here or the undying forced rape.
2:14:01
Because like if the end goal is pregnancy and you just want to
2:14:03
force pregnancy on someone, then why not go for artificial
2:14:06
insemination? Why not go for inverter
2:14:08
fertilisation and then, you know, popping into the woot?
2:14:11
Like they're advanced enough as a society.
2:14:13
I know it's confusing, but they're advanced enough as a
2:14:15
society that they have radiators, they have cars, they
2:14:18
have lorries, they have cameras, they have radios, they have
2:14:22
stasis chambers and magical X-ray screens.
2:14:26
You're telling me you have all of that and you don't know how
2:14:29
to do artificial insemination? You have to have women raped
2:14:32
instead? No, sorry, but this just feels
2:14:34
like the author wanted a sick excuse to write about the main
2:14:38
character being raped and I do not like it.
2:14:40
This. This didn't need to happen.
2:14:42
This didn't need to be included. You could still hit plot points
2:14:45
without having this happen. You could still have discussions
2:14:47
of this without having this happen.
2:14:49
I am getting like Handmaid's Tale vibes again here.
2:14:52
The difference is Handmaid's Tale is never marketed as
2:14:55
romance and it's. I'll be honest, it's been many,
2:14:57
many years since I've read it, but I don't remember any of the
2:15:00
rape scenes in that being either this graphic, there being this
2:15:03
many of them, or the women who are raped falling in love with
2:15:07
their rapists and it being marketed as romance.
2:15:10
You know what I mean? In the next chapter, Stroud
2:15:12
returns, and this time she drugs Helena and uses magic to control
2:15:16
her body so that she can be raped again.
2:15:18
Helena is then raped again on the page, except this time,
2:15:21
thanks to the drugging. She could barely feel his
2:15:23
weight. She wanted to arch up, press
2:15:25
into him, even as an endless scream throbbed inside her
2:15:28
skull. Her eyes snapped open and she
2:15:29
stared up at him. She felt as though she'd never
2:15:31
truly looked at him before now. He felt very human to her.
2:15:34
She wanted him to touch her. She remembered what his hands
2:15:36
felt like, the Press of his fingertips along her jaw.
2:15:39
She craved it so much Her skin ached, the weight she'd been
2:15:42
desperate to escape from that night before.
2:15:44
She wanted it. Tears burned a hot trail down
2:15:46
her temples. She hadn't thought it could be
2:15:48
worse a second time, but it was 1000 times worse now.
2:15:50
Her body wanted him. It's sickening to read and write
2:15:54
a scene like this. Right.
2:15:55
I'm shocked this got published. I'm shocked this won a British
2:15:59
Book Award for a fantasy book. I can't, I can't.
2:16:02
I don't know if I've spoken about this yet in the recording,
2:16:04
but I'll I'll mention it now. One of the reasons I picked up
2:16:06
this book and finally decided to review it now was because it did
2:16:09
win this British Book Award for Best sci-fi and Fantasy Book and
2:16:13
it bet absolute legends like RF Pong and Joe Abercrombie.
2:16:17
Reading this now, I don't know how it happened, but I find it
2:16:20
kind of insulting. This bet RF Kwong's Katabasis
2:16:24
Catabasis. I'm sorry I had this struggle
2:16:26
yesterday and I'm saying it, which like I say, it's my least
2:16:28
favourite book of hers I've read so far, but it was still
2:16:30
fantastic. It was brilliant.
2:16:32
It was miles above this slop. Joaber Crombie, I'm not like
2:16:36
overly familiar with a lot of his work and I haven't read The
2:16:39
Devil's yet, which is the one that this book won over that was
2:16:41
also nominated. Knowing what I know about his
2:16:43
other work again, I don't see how this one over Joe
2:16:47
Abercrombie even what was one of the other ones, Rebecca Yaris's
2:16:51
Onyx Storm. It bet that and Onyx Storm was
2:16:54
terrible. It was full of wasted potential
2:16:56
and poor pacing, but it was still better than this.
2:16:59
Plus it had cute talking Dragons.
2:17:01
It was better than this. It's RF Kwong I can't get over.
2:17:03
That book is everything that this wants to be and more.
2:17:07
You know, it's a thoroughly excellent book.
2:17:09
It's got the quality of writing, the complexity of characters who
2:17:13
who are nuanced and dark and have their faults.
2:17:15
It's got this beautiful mix of classical references, philosophy
2:17:19
and logic, all integrated perfectly into this compelling
2:17:22
plot. And you've also got this
2:17:23
intriguing love story that's a little bit toxic, a little bit
2:17:27
not. And you don't quite know if you
2:17:28
want them together or not. And then you get this ending and
2:17:31
you're like, is it a happy ending?
2:17:32
Is it brilliant? I love it.
2:17:33
It's complex. It's everything people say
2:17:36
Alchemized is, except it actually is.
2:17:39
You know, this is just slopping compare.
2:17:41
I can't, I can't, sorry, I can't when we're talking about like
2:17:44
Catabasis, like and the love story and that and how I'm like
2:17:46
is a little bit toxic. It's a little, the issues are
2:17:48
things like they don't communicate properly.
2:17:50
They don't think things through. They aren't opening be honest
2:17:52
with each other. That's where the toxicity comes
2:17:54
from. Not he kidnapped her for months
2:17:56
and repeatedly raped her. So anyway, this next rape scene
2:18:01
is even more graphic and disturbing than the last and I
2:18:04
hate it. We also get the reveal at this
2:18:05
point that before all of this Helena was a virgin.
2:18:09
Because, you know, good guys. The eternal flame guys were big
2:18:12
on the whole purity culture nonsense.
2:18:14
But only for girls. Girls literally.
2:18:16
She'd always known of sex in ettress.
2:18:18
It was part of life, like birth and death.
2:18:20
But in the north sentiments were different.
2:18:22
The kept rigidly behind rigidly behind closed doors boys who get
2:18:26
into trouble for going to the entertainment districts, but it
2:18:28
was considered an irrepressible part of their nature to hunger
2:18:30
and a sign of their vitality, and so punishments were usually
2:18:33
light, more of a consequence of being caught than for the ACT
2:18:36
itself. The expectations were different
2:18:37
for girls, even those allowed beyond the traditional confines
2:18:40
of Palladian society. Lumithia was a virgin goddess,
2:18:43
pure and gleaming. Women associating with her cult
2:18:46
and the opportunities it permitted were required to be
2:18:48
likewise. Helena's life at the Institute
2:18:50
revolved around her scholarship, which, in addition to be
2:18:52
dependent on her academic performance, had included a
2:18:55
morality clause. She'd adhered to it more
2:18:57
devoutly than she would have any faith in greater terror of
2:18:59
earthly consequences than divine threats, her fear stifling even
2:19:03
the smallest potential spark of desire towards anyone.
2:19:05
So one, this was shocking for me to hear because I thought she'd
2:19:08
been dating Luke, but apparently not, and that's becoming less
2:19:11
and less clear. And I think in Part 2 we
2:19:13
realised, Oh no, they were just friends.
2:19:14
Bizarre to me. And two, I'm so sick of books
2:19:17
with this. Women should be pure and it's
2:19:19
immoral to have sex nonsense. But men are allowed to get away
2:19:22
with it. And I feel like if this book was
2:19:24
critiquing that more overtly, that would be OK.
2:19:27
And I'd be like, Oh yeah, this is a great critique of that.
2:19:29
That's a great exploit. But it just doesn't, at least
2:19:31
not what I've seen so far. It bothers me.
2:19:33
And also, right, right. OK, here's a rant I want to have
2:19:36
that I think I alluded to when I was filming yesterday, but I'm
2:19:38
not sure. And sorry to bring this up so
2:19:40
late, but it only occurred to me here in writing the script,
2:19:42
right? Why are the Resistance called
2:19:45
the Resistance when the Order of the Eternal Flame, who are the
2:19:47
Resistance, were literally the ones originally in power?
2:19:51
Surely the bad guys, the Undying, they're the resistance
2:19:54
because the guilds resisted against the Order, and then the
2:19:58
Undying joined with the guilds and fought the Order, and then
2:20:02
the Order fought back, but somehow the Order are the ones
2:20:05
called the Resistance. Not that this makes any sense.
2:20:10
They're keeping references in here to Helena saying and
2:20:14
thinking things like rape is just a part of war.
2:20:16
But I think the author wants us to be like, OK, this is a dark
2:20:19
wartime fantasy, so there must be rape.
2:20:22
But then using that as a precursor to romance just feels
2:20:26
cruel and insensitive to the actual victims of rape,
2:20:29
especially wartime rape. Does that make sense?
2:20:31
You can show that like war is bad and rough and has these
2:20:35
horrible consequences on people, but when you're like, hey, this
2:20:38
horrible thing happens to during war but it's OK because they end
2:20:41
up in love, that just feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth,
2:20:44
doesn't it? Does this author not realise
2:20:45
that stuff like this, like rape during wartime is literally
2:20:49
happening in the world right now?
2:20:51
The bad guys in this book were based on Voldemort's supporters
2:20:55
in Harry Potter who were based on Nazis.
2:20:58
And and what we're seeing in the real world at the minute is a
2:21:00
pretty huge Nazi and Nazi adjacent resurgence.
2:21:04
Women around the world are literally having their
2:21:06
reproductive rights stripped back in numerous different
2:21:09
current countries. We're seeing wars, genocides,
2:21:11
and therefore wartime rapes happening all the time in
2:21:14
numerous countries around the world right now.
2:21:17
And you're taking all of that suffering and pain and instead
2:21:20
of critiquing it and saying this is how we stop it, this, you're
2:21:23
turning that into a romance story.
2:21:25
You're turning it into a plot point for a romance where the
2:21:27
wartime rapist becomes the love. And I, I can't back on.
2:21:32
It's so out of touch. Look, like I say, maybe this
2:21:35
book will do a 180 and surprise me in the third part, but it's
2:21:39
not looking good so far at all. Almost straight after this.
2:21:42
So like immediately after the rape, Ferran leaves the house.
2:21:44
He comes back, he takes a tablet of something because he's taking
2:21:48
tablets as well, although we don't know what they are.
2:21:49
I don't think it's ever explained, at least not in what
2:21:51
I've read so far. And then he rapes her again.
2:21:54
So we've had a number of rapes at this point.
2:21:56
Her body had anticipated it. Just as a drug had acclimated
2:22:00
her to the house, it had attuned her to this.
2:22:02
It was such a profound betrayal. She thought of shoving him off.
2:22:05
If he'd physically force her, pin her down or paralyse her,
2:22:07
then she might hate herself less.
2:22:09
But she was so tired of being hurt, and so she didn't move.
2:22:12
When it was over, he left without a word.
2:22:13
She didn't look at his face. If this was a book like The
2:22:17
Handmaid's Tale, right in a scene like this, I might applaud
2:22:20
it. But knowing it's going to end in
2:22:21
a romance between them, I can't. Then some moon thing happens.
2:22:25
Like, I don't know if it's like a solstice or an eclipse.
2:22:28
I can't remember. I didn't write down some of
2:22:29
them. It's basically like a new year
2:22:31
sort of thing, I think. And Helena doesn't get fed, so
2:22:34
she goes look for Fern around the house and she finds him in
2:22:36
his bedroom, drunk, where he backs her against the wall,
2:22:39
wraps his hands around her neck and forces a kiss on her and
2:22:42
then sexually assaults her. Yeah, it was a punishing kiss.
2:22:46
The moment their lips touched, he crushed her body against his.
2:22:49
The hand on her throat slid into her hair, tangling in the curls,
2:22:52
gripping them tight as a kiss deepened.
2:22:54
Angling her head back so he could consume her, he kept
2:22:57
kissing her hard enough to hurt but not bleed, like a storm
2:23:00
poured down her throat when she was gasping for breath, he
2:23:02
pulled away from her lips, kissing along her jaw and the
2:23:05
side of her neck, his other hand curled around her waist.
2:23:07
Helena stood frozen in shock, pliant and stunned in his
2:23:11
possessive hands. So this is horrifying, right?
2:23:13
Nothing about this says there's any consent on her part.
2:23:16
He then undresses her against her will and then when her body
2:23:19
responds to his touch, she's shocked and he stops and she
2:23:23
runs out crying. I feel like the author is trying
2:23:25
to make this like a Oh my God her body responded and he did it
2:23:28
for like more than just pregnancy.
2:23:29
They're so into each other. No, can we not?
2:23:31
The fact that he's now doing this to her against her will
2:23:34
when it's not for the point of pregnancy, when he's not being
2:23:37
coerced into it in this moment, he's not.
2:23:39
He's just doing it for fun because at this point, sorry,
2:23:41
she's not ovulating either. So he's just doing this because
2:23:43
he wants to. That makes him an irredeemable
2:23:45
rapist in my eyes. Sure, he was a victim in the
2:23:48
other cases because he was being forced to, but he wasn't here.
2:23:50
He just chose to do this irredeemable.
2:23:53
And that thing of her body reacting like that's because
2:23:55
she's been drugged, that's not her choice.
2:23:58
She's not responding to him because she wants him, because
2:24:01
she's consenting. She's doing it because she's
2:24:03
been drugged. And even without the drug, even
2:24:05
in like normal rape outside of this book, just because a body
2:24:09
responds, that doesn't mean there's consent.
2:24:11
It's an involuntary physical response.
2:24:13
We don't control it. So just because someone might,
2:24:16
you know, have signs of arousal or even orgasm during rape, that
2:24:20
doesn't mean it wasn't rape. I understand her being shocked
2:24:22
by it. That's that makes sense for the
2:24:23
character. But I can't help but feel like
2:24:25
the author was trying to make it seem like Helena was actually
2:24:29
into this. And I find that a little
2:24:31
problematic. Yeah.
2:24:32
OK. Right.
2:24:32
So I kind of went off the script there.
2:24:33
But like what I wrote in my original notes were this is just
2:24:35
another sexual assault scene. And we can't excuse him with.
2:24:38
Well, he was forced to do it this time because this was all
2:24:41
his choice. And at this point, she's his
2:24:43
captive. She's been, so even if she did
2:24:45
kind of want to consent to him, could she even do that because
2:24:49
of the power imbalance between them?
2:24:50
She's his drugged captive. Does she even have the ability
2:24:54
to consent at this point? If you try and make it a romance
2:24:56
from here out, knowing all that stuff, that just doesn't work
2:24:59
for me at all. Trapped in Spire Fell, she was
2:25:01
latching on to any glimpse of kindness, any sense of
2:25:04
tenderness her mind could fabricate.
2:25:06
But it wasn't kindness. He wasn't kind, he was simply
2:25:08
cruel. He wasn't as monstrous as he
2:25:10
could be, and for Helena's fracturing mind, an absence of
2:25:13
cruelty was sufficient solace. For her starved heart.
2:25:16
It was enough. So Helena is traumatised.
2:25:18
Anything she feels for him is not real.
2:25:20
This is not healthy. Come again?
2:25:22
Can we not categorise this as romance, please?
2:25:24
Just because he wasn't as cruel as he could be, that doesn't
2:25:27
mean he's good for you. I can't anyway.
2:25:30
Then after all the trauma and repeated rape and everything,
2:25:32
she panics and she's like, crap, I do need to get out of here.
2:25:34
Maybe I can kill myself again. So she starts smashing her head
2:25:37
against like the metal bars on her bedroom window.
2:25:39
Again, this is not a healthy response to what some people
2:25:43
might be claiming is a consensual encounter with
2:25:46
someone. This is not healthy.
2:25:48
Just in case there's any doubt, you know Darren.
2:25:50
A rapist enters her bedroom and his hand around her wrists let
2:25:54
go and his palm was pressed against her forehead.
2:25:56
No, it was too late. His resonance poured through
2:25:59
her. It was as if she were a
2:26:00
tapestry. He found the threads for motion
2:26:02
and ripped them out. He didn't sedate or paralyse
2:26:04
her. It was worse, more violating
2:26:06
than that. He took away all the things she
2:26:07
felt, leaving her mind scrambling, trying to reconcile
2:26:10
the dissonance. It was like the tablets, except
2:26:12
he only used his resonance to keep her there for as long as it
2:26:15
took until her body finally lost all the drive of those now
2:26:18
vanished emotions. Can you not just let a woman
2:26:21
have control over her mind and body for once in this book,
2:26:25
please, just once, just once. I can't, I can't.
2:26:28
He's not just controlling and the undying in general, not just
2:26:31
controlling her body and her uterus and her reproductive
2:26:35
organs. They're now, I mean, they've
2:26:37
always been controlling her mind too.
2:26:39
And now they're just, they're doing it so casually, like
2:26:41
they'd Helena acknowledges that she probably has some version of
2:26:44
Stockholm syndrome, you think? And then they have this big
2:26:47
argument and rapist is like, you know, the eternal flame.
2:26:50
People were just using you. And then Helena's like, wow,
2:26:53
wow, wow. Luke was my best friend.
2:26:55
So it became clearly at this point they weren't actually
2:26:58
dating. They were just friends.
2:26:59
This book is not clear about it, though.
2:27:00
And then blah, blah, blah, I hate you.
2:27:03
She storms out, he storms out. I know one of them storms out.
2:27:05
And then the next scene, Oh my God, she's pregnant.
2:27:08
Gross. Obviously, as you would be.
2:27:10
Helena is distressed once again. I don't think this is fantasy or
2:27:14
romance. I would call this a horror novel
2:27:16
at this point and just torture porn.
2:27:18
But maybe that's just me. That's the thing.
2:27:20
Like if this was marketed as like body horror, even like,
2:27:24
like kind of feminist horror to be like, look at the horrors of
2:27:27
what war and men and misogyny do, I wouldn't mind it so much.
2:27:31
But calling it romanticy and then having the I can't, I
2:27:34
can't. Helena starts screaming again.
2:27:36
Yeah, don't blame you. I have fun fact for you, there
2:27:39
are 159 instances of Scream or screaming or some variation of
2:27:44
that in this book, which means there is a scream every 6 1/2
2:27:47
pages. That's how much this poor woman
2:27:48
is tortured. If you are playing the screaming
2:27:50
drinking game, please be careful.
2:27:52
Rapist Ferran appears and tries to stop her having a panic
2:27:55
attack first while she's still screaming.
2:27:58
She's screaming in the corner. Him and Stroud have a little
2:28:00
conversation where she tells him she's purposely trying to
2:28:03
torture Helena because she bombed the lab she used to work
2:28:06
in and killed a guy called Bennett that she used to work
2:28:09
with. Bennett gets mentioned a lot
2:28:11
like in passing but I've not seen him on page yet but he's
2:28:14
like a guy who him and Stroud had a lab and they would do like
2:28:17
creepy experiments on people and now he got killed because
2:28:21
apparently Helena bombed the lab and now Stroud is continuing
2:28:24
experiments without him and because Helena bombed the lab.
2:28:27
Stroud hates Helena but I'm confused because she didn't seem
2:28:30
to know Helena at first. I'm not sure when she found out
2:28:32
this information or put it. I don't know, I don't I don't
2:28:35
have a clue. None of it makes sense.
2:28:36
They argue and Stroud went white, nostrils flaring.
2:28:40
I worked at Bennett's side. My re popular programme is a
2:28:43
farce, a convenient cover for the High Necromancer to achieve
2:28:46
his ends and sate the endless appetites of his loyalists.
2:28:49
Very sneered at her. So again I'm confused is is the
2:28:52
brothel actually about repopulation or is it to keep
2:28:56
the stupid men happy? Or is it about creating magical
2:28:58
babies that Morrow can put his soul into?
2:29:01
But then if it's just about keeping the men happy as a
2:29:03
brothel then why all of this with Helena trying to get her
2:29:06
pregnant? Unless that was just to torture
2:29:08
her. But if it's about the babies,
2:29:10
then why do you need the. I don't know, I don't now I'm so
2:29:13
confused and none of this makes sense.
2:29:15
Ferran goes on and says. After you threatened to comedy
2:29:17
in my assignation, I investigated your little
2:29:18
project. You boast so freely to the
2:29:20
papers. I was curious to see what
2:29:22
remarkable data you must have to show for it.
2:29:24
I was something of an academic myself once.
2:29:26
Do you mind telling me about your controls or the statistics
2:29:29
and historical data? No matter where I look, I can
2:29:31
only find anecdotes in unsubstantiated newspaper
2:29:34
articles. Things are still in the early
2:29:36
stages. Stroud stammered, her face now a
2:29:38
stark combination of white with red stained cheeks.
2:29:41
I am legitimate, ultimate. Your programme is a spectacle.
2:29:44
Ferran's voice grew low and taunting.
2:29:46
Your lab assistants are better qualified than you are.
2:29:48
Again, I'm confused because if he knew all of this and he knew
2:29:52
like the programme wasn't working or something, or he knew
2:29:56
I don't Like if he knew any of this, why did he go along with
2:29:59
the rape? If he was going to be critical
2:30:01
of it, why did he go along with the rape?
2:30:03
None of it makes any sense. Ferran then kicks Stroud out of
2:30:06
his house. He apologises to Helena, he puts
2:30:09
her to bed, and he uses his magic too.
2:30:12
Not her out again. When she next wakes up, he tells
2:30:15
her. You are not allowed to hurt
2:30:16
yourself or do anything that might cause an abortion or
2:30:18
miscarriage. You'll be monitored full time
2:30:20
now, just in case your newfound desperation drives you to
2:30:23
previously unknown heights of creativity. 1 Miscarriage is
2:30:26
abortion. It's literally called a
2:30:28
spontaneous abortion. So saying miscarriage or
2:30:30
abortion if you don't need to say both.
2:30:32
And two, you're still not letting her control her own
2:30:34
body. Let her have control over her
2:30:36
own body. Please just stop.
2:30:38
I hate this. I'm restricting you for your own
2:30:40
good. I'm protecting you for your own
2:30:41
good. I'm holding you captive.
2:30:43
You're no, I hate it. Let the woman have autonomy over
2:30:45
her own body. It's not that hard.
2:30:47
If she doesn't want to be pregnant with your baby, she
2:30:49
shouldn't have to be pregnant with your baby.
2:30:51
He gives her a recap pregnancy, which is wild because she's
2:30:54
literally a healer. Her parents were doctors, she's
2:30:56
worked in a hospital. Why would she not know about
2:30:59
pregnancy anyway? About the book, it's pointed out
2:31:02
it was a medical textbook, not a housewife's guide.
2:31:05
That would have avoided technical and medical
2:31:07
terminology in favour of the more accessible explanation of
2:31:09
pregnancy. Can we not with this implication
2:31:11
that housewives are like stupid and need things simplified for
2:31:15
them please? You really really want to
2:31:17
believe that? Like a housewife couldn't read a
2:31:19
basic textbook on pregnancy? Stop it.
2:31:22
Less of this. Helena's not like the other
2:31:23
mother, she's actually educated he Oh no, none of that please.
2:31:27
Anyway, now that she's pregnant. Helena, who made a point of
2:31:29
telling us earlier that she never wanted to be a mother, is
2:31:32
suddenly obsessed with protecting her baby, which is
2:31:34
another trope I hate in fiction. This idea of oh child free
2:31:37
people will just change their mind if they just hurry up and
2:31:40
get pregnant. No, stop it.
2:31:41
Stroud comes back for whatever reason, even though she was
2:31:44
kicked out before. I guess she has to come back
2:31:45
because she's got something else to say and something to do with
2:31:47
the plot and you know you have to be told she's useless and she
2:31:51
reveals. If the High Necromancer is
2:31:53
correct, she's keeping the memories hidden by internalising
2:31:55
her resonance, which means she's probably been putting most of
2:31:58
her energy into maintaining it. It might explain her letter, the
2:32:00
G, since it's unlikely that it's been done efficiently.
2:32:03
Now she's pregnant, she doesn't have the strength to sustain
2:32:05
both, especially if this embryo is an animancer.
2:32:07
The High Necromancer says that his power was so great he
2:32:10
claimed every drop of his mother's life while still in the
2:32:12
womb and was burst from her corpse upon the funeral pyre.
2:32:15
We'll have to be sure to maintain merino.
2:32:17
Perhaps if we're lucky, we'll end up with both a baby and the
2:32:20
memories before she succumbs to the toll once again.
2:32:23
Women are just objects, right? Just womb conveyor belts that
2:32:26
can be discarded after use. Helena closed her eyes.
2:32:29
Now she understood. She she was expected to die and
2:32:31
they'd all known she only hoped it would happen too early for
2:32:34
the pregnancy to be viable. I get where she's coming from
2:32:37
and I don't want to downplay a character's legitimate trauma,
2:32:40
but at this point we're like a third of the way through this
2:32:42
book and all Helena has done so far is scream, pass out, be
2:32:46
tortured, be raped, and want to die.
2:32:49
Why does she not have a personality?
2:32:51
Why does she not do anything? Why is she OK to be like a
2:32:55
passive object in all of this and just a passive victim?
2:32:58
For all the agency she as a character has in this first part
2:33:01
of the book, she might as well be, I don't know, a computer
2:33:04
with a corrupted hard drive that they're trying to recover or a
2:33:07
test tube that they're doing in vitro fertilisation in.
2:33:10
I'd have the same response to that, but at least she wouldn't
2:33:12
be traumatised. But seriously, if you can just
2:33:14
replace your main character with an inanimate object and have the
2:33:18
same things happening essentially, you know, and it
2:33:20
feels like nothing would change, then maybe you need to rethink
2:33:22
your main character and actually give them something to do.
2:33:24
Give them some values, some goals, some motivations.
2:33:28
Give them some agency. Also during this time 1 of the
2:33:30
dead maids in the house has been acting strangely and Helena
2:33:33
thinks she's maybe not a dead thing at all but a corpse with a
2:33:36
person's soul in it. So not a necro thrall but a lich
2:33:41
or something. I think it's actually Ferran's
2:33:44
mum's soul in there and she's not actually dead and they're
2:33:47
trying to hide her but I could be making that up, I don't know
2:33:50
because she's not in Part 2 at all from what I've read so far,
2:33:53
but that there with raped Helena being pregnant.
2:33:56
That is where Part 1 ends. And so that is where I'm going
2:33:59
to end this video today. That was basically a book in its
2:34:02
own right, right? I mean, obviously we didn't get
2:34:04
in conclusions, but that was basically a book in its own
2:34:06
right. So next time, next video, we are
2:34:09
going to be moving on to Part 2, which takes place four years
2:34:12
before the torture, rape and pregnancy.
2:34:15
So it takes place when Hellena is around 21 or something like
2:34:19
that. And it's just basically it
2:34:20
covers the time she lost her memories.
2:34:22
You know what though, I do feel like if this alone, this Part 1
2:34:26
was a book in its own right and we had none of the upcoming
2:34:29
romance rubbish and it was just a focus on a woman overcoming
2:34:32
rape and torture after being a prisoner of war.
2:34:34
I wouldn't be so critical if they didn't try to redeem her
2:34:37
torturer. I wouldn't be so mad.
2:34:39
Even so, I don't think we need to see quite so much on page
2:34:41
suffering, especially the rape and torture.
2:34:43
I don't think that needs to be so graphic on the page.
2:34:45
This has been an entirely miserable experience to read so
2:34:48
far. This has been 300 and odd pages
2:34:50
of just misery and torture with no purpose.
2:34:53
No point if they'd been more critical of these governance
2:34:57
systems, if Helena had had more agency, if she didn't even just
2:35:01
try to fight back or speak up for herself once or twice.
2:35:04
And then if we got like an arc of her, I know like escaping and
2:35:08
reclaiming bodily autonomy or something like that would be
2:35:10
fantastic. And I I wouldn't be so critical.
2:35:12
But knowing where it goes into Part 2 with the romance and the
2:35:16
back story and trying to redeem Farrah and I just, it doesn't
2:35:19
sit right with me, you know? Yeah.
2:35:20
So in summary, we just got 280 pages of torture, no real
2:35:24
development. The plot barely moved forward
2:35:27
and definitely no character development for any of them.
2:35:29
It was just let's show all and be tortured for almost 300 pages
2:35:32
rather than telling a compelling story and I'm just personally
2:35:35
not a fan of it. I have read incredible books
2:35:37
that aren't even 280 pages long in total and managed to do more
2:35:41
in that time than the first third of this book did.
2:35:44
Overall, the first part of this book is miserable and yet still
2:35:47
a boring experience and I would not recommend it.
2:35:50
But I'm going to keep going and we're going to see how it gets
2:35:52
better or worse in parts 2 and 3.
2:35:56
Thank you for coming on this journey with me.
2:35:57
So I know this has been long. Part 2, I'm afraid, is even
2:35:59
longer, but Part 3 is a short 1. So hopefully we'll have a long
2:36:03
video and a short video. I don't know, we'll see.
2:36:04
But yeah, thank you so much for watching.
2:36:06
Thank you for sticking with this whole video so far and coming on
2:36:08
this very long journey with me. Let me know if you can make
2:36:11
sense of this magic system any more than I can because I think
2:36:14
it's a bit of a mess, but maybe I'm stupid, maybe I've missed
2:36:16
something. Let me know.
2:36:17
Do let me know that if you have any good book recommendations
2:36:20
for me or any of the bad books you want me to review as well.
2:36:22
That's always fun. But for now, thank you so much
2:36:23
for watching. If you want to keep up to date
2:36:25
with with me and everything I'm doing in my life, I do have an
2:36:28
Instagram you can follow where I post all sorts from like fun
2:36:31
days out with my friends to like actual photography projects I
2:36:34
do. I've been photographing a lot of
2:36:35
birds this year, which has been absolutely amazing.
2:36:38
And I keep posting them on Instagram.
2:36:40
I also post like books that I'm reading on my stories and other
2:36:42
recommendations and stuff like that.
2:36:44
So you can go follow me over there at Rachel Oates with a 0
2:36:46
or I do have Patreon and channel memberships and I'm going to be
2:36:49
posting a little behind the scenes vlog over there very
2:36:51
soon, which is exciting. But for now, yeah, thank you for
2:36:55
watching. Thank you for being here.
2:36:56
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you been around a while just check yourself subscribe please
2:37:00
that would be great. But now thank you.
2:37:01
Have an amazing rest of your day.
2:37:02
I'll see you again soon, Bye.