Discord
02-14-2020, 01:56 AM
The second chapter begins with a very serious, utterly unhumorous backstory behind Nita's fear of circuses and clowns, and then a description of a nightmare she has featuring them.
"Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue's, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can't get off! I can't get off! And, just this once, the clown didn't think it was funny, either."
There's a couple more pages after she wakes up, going into how she feels about her mother's passing, before she goes back to sleep. She doesn't appear in the rest of the chapter. I have no idea how or if the clown thing is going to be relevant to the story. I'm guessing it probably will be, otherwise that'd be a really weird thing to just throw in at the start of the chapter.
The main content of the chapter is Kit finding Darryl (who is eleven years old). He goes to school (not sure Kit's age, but I think it's 15 or 16? He goes to high school), talks to some friends, does school stuff. Most of the characters here were probably introduced and developed in earlier books, so it wasn't that interesting to me, but it was still entertaining enough. At lunch, Kit goes home to begin looking for Darryl. There's a touching moment where he asks the gate to keep his sleeping mother safe, I like just how casual objects being sentient is treated in this story. There's a couple pages about the tracking and cloaking spells Kit uses to find Darryl and stay hidden, and then he just goes and finds him at Darryl's school (with the help of his dog, Ponch, who is a main character I in this story think). And it turns out that Darryl is autistic.
So, I'm not really sure what to make of this. Following this discovery, Kit has a long talk with his mentor wizard about it and what it could mean for Darryl's Ordeal, followed by another long talk about autism with his mother (who is a doctor). I feel like the author definitely knew it was a complicated topic and wanted to make that clear in the book, and it seems accurate enough in the information it presents (not that I'm that knowledgable myself) and doesn't denigrate people with the condition as inferior.
"Autistic people have trouble, sometimes, predicting what other human beings' minds are going to do. It's a skill they have to develop with practice, whereas we take it almost completely for granted, that prediction inside: 'If I do this, then she'll do that,' and so on. So you have to be prepared for the things you say to really upset him, more than would seem reasonable."
But it seems like Darryl's autism isn't just going to be part of his character, but actually kind of central to the plot? Like, here's a quote from Kit's wizard mentor in regards to Kit's plan to talk to Darryl by entering his mind (which is a thing Ponch, the dog, can just do. "Ponch has been able to treat someone's interior landscape like an exterior universe before." Guessing it was probably a major thing in a previous book):
"'Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity's subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it. This Ordeal, where the candidate is autistic--' He shook his head. 'It might be an attempt to resolve the autism, which is likely to be incredibly traumatic for Darryl whether it works or not...or it might simply be about some mode of wizardy we haven't seen before, one that involves Darryl staying autistic. What looks like our idea of 'normal' function may not, in the One's eyes, be the best function. Judgement calls in these cases can get dangerous."
There's a lot of emphasis that Kit will need to interfere as little as possible in Darryl's Ordeal and only stay in an observer role. So, it isn't clear so far how Darryl's autism will affect things. But yeah, I'm not sure what to think about this. Obviously how autism is represented in stories is a sensitive issue, and I've read a lot of stories where characters display mental illnesses, to varying degrees of well-writtenness. But i get the impression this story isn't just going to have an autistic character, it's going to have the character's autism be very narratively important, and not in a "internal character struggles" way, but in a more, direct way i guess? I'm not sure I've ever read a story like that before. Maybe Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (tv show, second season) kind of counts. A character with painful sensory hallucinations got transported to magical fantasy land, and their hallucinations became actually real, and they could sort of control them and direct them off their body (for example, when they hallucinated barbed wire wrapped around their leg, they were able to physically unwrap it and pull it off, and ended up with a strip of barbed wire).
Anyway I'm very interested in where this story is going and I hope it does it well.
"Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue's, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can't get off! I can't get off! And, just this once, the clown didn't think it was funny, either."
There's a couple more pages after she wakes up, going into how she feels about her mother's passing, before she goes back to sleep. She doesn't appear in the rest of the chapter. I have no idea how or if the clown thing is going to be relevant to the story. I'm guessing it probably will be, otherwise that'd be a really weird thing to just throw in at the start of the chapter.
The main content of the chapter is Kit finding Darryl (who is eleven years old). He goes to school (not sure Kit's age, but I think it's 15 or 16? He goes to high school), talks to some friends, does school stuff. Most of the characters here were probably introduced and developed in earlier books, so it wasn't that interesting to me, but it was still entertaining enough. At lunch, Kit goes home to begin looking for Darryl. There's a touching moment where he asks the gate to keep his sleeping mother safe, I like just how casual objects being sentient is treated in this story. There's a couple pages about the tracking and cloaking spells Kit uses to find Darryl and stay hidden, and then he just goes and finds him at Darryl's school (with the help of his dog, Ponch, who is a main character I in this story think). And it turns out that Darryl is autistic.
So, I'm not really sure what to make of this. Following this discovery, Kit has a long talk with his mentor wizard about it and what it could mean for Darryl's Ordeal, followed by another long talk about autism with his mother (who is a doctor). I feel like the author definitely knew it was a complicated topic and wanted to make that clear in the book, and it seems accurate enough in the information it presents (not that I'm that knowledgable myself) and doesn't denigrate people with the condition as inferior.
"Autistic people have trouble, sometimes, predicting what other human beings' minds are going to do. It's a skill they have to develop with practice, whereas we take it almost completely for granted, that prediction inside: 'If I do this, then she'll do that,' and so on. So you have to be prepared for the things you say to really upset him, more than would seem reasonable."
But it seems like Darryl's autism isn't just going to be part of his character, but actually kind of central to the plot? Like, here's a quote from Kit's wizard mentor in regards to Kit's plan to talk to Darryl by entering his mind (which is a thing Ponch, the dog, can just do. "Ponch has been able to treat someone's interior landscape like an exterior universe before." Guessing it was probably a major thing in a previous book):
"'Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity's subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it. This Ordeal, where the candidate is autistic--' He shook his head. 'It might be an attempt to resolve the autism, which is likely to be incredibly traumatic for Darryl whether it works or not...or it might simply be about some mode of wizardy we haven't seen before, one that involves Darryl staying autistic. What looks like our idea of 'normal' function may not, in the One's eyes, be the best function. Judgement calls in these cases can get dangerous."
There's a lot of emphasis that Kit will need to interfere as little as possible in Darryl's Ordeal and only stay in an observer role. So, it isn't clear so far how Darryl's autism will affect things. But yeah, I'm not sure what to think about this. Obviously how autism is represented in stories is a sensitive issue, and I've read a lot of stories where characters display mental illnesses, to varying degrees of well-writtenness. But i get the impression this story isn't just going to have an autistic character, it's going to have the character's autism be very narratively important, and not in a "internal character struggles" way, but in a more, direct way i guess? I'm not sure I've ever read a story like that before. Maybe Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (tv show, second season) kind of counts. A character with painful sensory hallucinations got transported to magical fantasy land, and their hallucinations became actually real, and they could sort of control them and direct them off their body (for example, when they hallucinated barbed wire wrapped around their leg, they were able to physically unwrap it and pull it off, and ended up with a strip of barbed wire).
Anyway I'm very interested in where this story is going and I hope it does it well.
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