My attempt to write about some of my current feelings regarding SFF in the aftermath of the recent explosion of somethingorother all over everything has produced a Horrifying Truth About Unicorns, so I'm just gonna... sit with that.
It's a hell of a paragraph but I'm sort of stuck on it. More will happen eventually.
Um, explosion summary as neutrally as I can manage: a piece got published in Clarkesworld that raised Strong Feelings Everywhere, with Many Things Said. After rather a lot of Things Said, the piece was pulled, and I want to curl around my bourbon like a dragon and emit possibly poisonous vapours.
I will admit that there is something irresistible about horriblizing unicorns once one takes the notion, I am trying to get my narrator to find a plot rather than rhapsodizing about how wonderfully horrible unicorns are.
Unicorns got repeatedly sogged with the Faintly Sticky Twee Fluid; since the actual mythology wasn't much, basically narwhal tusks and creepy creepy Medieval purity policing given tapestry, it sticks.
"Let's make the twee horrible" has a lot of power; "let's make the twee have meaning" (that bit about adult teletubbies, frex) has more, but it much tougher to pull off. (And then we have Pam Dean's unicorns, where is not far off deciding that the self-editing-poetry-understood-as-demiurge should have hooves and a horn and a dreadful sense of humour. I wouldn't try that one myself.)
(I get to treat unicorns as a note in a theme about mage-created sophont killing machines. Which has the virtue of being simple.)
Plot, urgh. Plot's such an annoyance. Is there a plausible state change anywhere? (need to be somewhere else, be someone else, different future....)
I suspect I am complexly shaped in what I'm writing now by having read, at some formative age, an anthology of unicorn stories, which had Many Unicorn Takes in it, some of them very somethingorother. I wonder if my Disastrous Relative knows which one it was. It had the tapestry called 'The Unicorn Penned' on the cover, IIRC.
The narrator has had a state change and is talking about Before. Well, and also unicorns. I am trying to get them to be more precise, such as whether they are addressing someone specific.
They are the sort of narrator who comes out with stuff like:
'Of course the thing about unicorns is that every single one of them is armed with a harpoon, and everyone just kind of waves that off to talk about purity and innocence. Nobody says, “You know, with ordinary antlers or horns you can make peace after a couple of headbutts and everyone goes on with their lives.” A unicorn can only fight to kill; they’re bloodyhearted creatures.'
so I am inclined to let them go on a bit.
(The anthology appears to be the one from 1982 edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois if it is the one that is in my house, according to our database, and the story titles look plausible. I was wrong about the tapestry though.)
(Though, strictly strictly, a harpoon is a spear on a rope, often with a detachable barbed head; the mental image is startling, applying the terminology to unicorns.)
I am not at all sure the narrator cares about that sort of precision. They might be pleased with the idea of being that sort of disconcerting, actually. That's the problem with eldritch horrors, even affable ones.
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Um, explosion summary as neutrally as I can manage: a piece got published in Clarkesworld that raised Strong Feelings Everywhere, with Many Things Said. After rather a lot of Things Said, the piece was pulled, and I want to curl around my bourbon like a dragon and emit possibly poisonous vapours.
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I like the dragon image!
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Alas I need to be a responsible adult yet so no bourbon and no poisonous vapours.
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Not sure I get to comment about unicorns. :)
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"Let's make the twee horrible" has a lot of power; "let's make the twee have meaning" (that bit about adult teletubbies, frex) has more, but it much tougher to pull off. (And then we have Pam Dean's unicorns, where is not far off deciding that the self-editing-poetry-understood-as-demiurge should have hooves and a horn and a dreadful sense of humour. I wouldn't try that one myself.)
(I get to treat unicorns as a note in a theme about mage-created sophont killing machines. Which has the virtue of being simple.)
Plot, urgh. Plot's such an annoyance. Is there a plausible state change anywhere? (need to be somewhere else, be someone else, different future....)
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The narrator has had a state change and is talking about Before. Well, and also unicorns. I am trying to get them to be more precise, such as whether they are addressing someone specific.
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There's a powerful lot of unicorn anthologies out there. Your disastrous relative seems like a good point of inquiry. I surely don't recognize it.
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'Of course the thing about unicorns is that every single one of them is armed with a harpoon, and everyone just kind of waves that off to talk about purity and innocence. Nobody says, “You know, with ordinary antlers or horns you can make peace after a couple of headbutts and everyone goes on with their lives.” A unicorn can only fight to kill; they’re bloodyhearted creatures.'
so I am inclined to let them go on a bit.
(The anthology appears to be the one from 1982 edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois if it is the one that is in my house, according to our database, and the story titles look plausible. I was wrong about the tapestry though.)
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(Though, strictly strictly, a harpoon is a spear on a rope, often with a detachable barbed head; the mental image is startling, applying the terminology to unicorns.)
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(I should probably tinker with it to make it more legible someday.)