The Terrors of Tarragina (addendum)

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

A copy of The Terrors of Tarragina was duly procured (from Vind — I refuse to allow more teasing of Alzagonde until she does something else horrible). The crudely-imagined and crudely-drawn cover shows a nearly-naked, voluptuous, and quite aroused Herethroy woman, holding a crowbar in a midhand, staring at it as if it were a serpent about to bite her. Beside her are four very full washbasins, one overflowing, and a Cani man with a hammer in one hand and a tremendous erection visible under his skirt.

I, sacrifically, read the cursed thing, since I have plenty of time on my paws when I want it.

Tarragina is the sixth daughter of a countess of Barency. She has a single passion in life: “rejoicining in elegant circumstances”. Through a sequence of misfortunes too implausible to mention, her family loses fortune and title in chapter two. (OK, I’ll mention the guntry race. They’ve got a prize running-guntry that always wins every race. They bet their last village on the guntry in a race against a stranger — who turns out to be a wizard, whose guntry is a transformed air elemental, and wins in a whoosh. Somehow they neglect to mention that this may be considered cheating.)

Anyhow, by chapter 3, Tarragina is condemned to wander the city and country in a life of toil, a thing which she finds utterly abhorrent. She picks up odd jobs here and there — helping a Cani family demolishing a shed in chapter five (hence the crowbar), and washing clothes for some Herethroy farmers in chapter eight (hence the basins). In each case, she attempts the job briefly throws up her hands and hand-feet at how horrid and vulgar it is, and, um, renegotiates the arrangement to be one in which she performs bodily pleasures upon her employers rather than having to do the work. Then, for reasons unspecified, she is off at a different employer the next chapter, evidently the next day.

For a bit of socioprosody of my own: the description of the chapter’s circumstances take 1-3 paragraphs. The attempts at performing the job, and Tarragina’s abhorrence thereof, take another 3-5. The seduction of the employer takes a single paragraph more. The rest of each chapter — five to fifteen pages — is a description of the encounter.

For what it’s worth: About half the time she’s involved with Herethroy, and half with other species. Nobody seems to find this the least bit noteworthy — not that there is much actual conversation involved.

Also, a half-page of action from chapter 5 appears again, word for word, in chapter 21. Perhaps the author did not think anyone would read that far. In any case, it was dull the first time, and extra-dull the second.

I cannot recommend the book, either as literature, pornography, or a source of threats.

Comments

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

So one of Alzagonde's research sources as an example of the evils of transaffection is... a trashy porno? One that doesn't even manage to be good as porn?

Research materials. Riiiiiiight. Pull the other one, crazy Rassy, it's got bells on.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Well, it's one of Mump's sources for transaffection in Barency. His students mostly haven't read it.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as to whether Grinwipey would need to have done in order to come up with what he did, or if one glance at the cover would have told him everything his threats touched on that actually came from the book. In the latter case, his point that if he was a steward, he'd have chanced to see it, certainly holds.

Not really that important, though. (And I'm not trying to suggest that Grinwipey would go out of his way to read traff porn in any case, his opinion on such matters being abundantly - and unusually - clear.)

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Grinwipey did not read the book; he looked at the cover, and, according to him, opened up to the middle and read page one-hundred-and-fifty-fuck.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Ahh, so neither Grinwipey or Big Not-a-Traff Al read the book, so they both had the same sort of images of the use of wash basins as I did. Yeah.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

What on wood did you think they were used for? I admit I had no idea.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

My first thought was "something involving four Khyotsis, possibly an Orren, and lots of lubricant" and my second thought was "where did I put that bottle of brain-bleach"?

Note: we do not actually have brain-bleach, it's a metaphor for 'some sadly unavailable product to allow the user to cleanse their mind and spirit of an image that insists on staying around but was unwelcome in the first place.'

[allessindra.livejournal.com]

page one-hundred-and-fifty-fuck

Now my cat is concerned as to why I'm laughing this loud at this time of day.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[Bard beams, but attempts to explain matters to your cat.]

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

It sounds more Libertine then Transaffectionate, though...

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Well, that distinction is a somewhat artificial -- and somewhat incorrect -- creation of, well, my own theoretical school.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Only somewhat, though. Despite the number of times I've figuratively butted heads on that very point, even I am compelled to note that there was such a tendency among the Vheshrame nobility, at least back when you were describing such matters in detail(I'm not sure how that applies now); it's just that the boundary is fuzzy between how they were behaving, and a more personal transaffection.

At any rate, the book honestly seems more like one about prostitution than actual transaffection. It's just that the prostitute in question is less choosy than some(many? I'm not sure how picky the worst-off prostitutes are, the ones that can barely manage to stay under a roof as it is, or only do so at all by going home with their clients).

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

The tendency is somewhat muted; we are in a somewhat less recreational era. These things change every decade or two, and Vheshrame is generally one of the most actively libidinous cities around in any case.

I would count the protagonist as a prostitute, and (given her eagerness to toss herself at Cani and Rassimel) a libertine as well. I didn't see any actual love in the book, nor even anything remotely resembling a conversation of more depth than "Oh! Your member is so deep in me!"

[rowyn]

I don't know. The idea that one can only engage in libertine or transaffectionate behavior and one and only one label may be applied to any given individual is certainly erroneous. That doesn't mean that the distinction between lust and love is without all value. :)

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Parts of the ideology were flawed, but that doesn't mean the whole is useless. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

A terrible thing when our own youthful philosophies return to bite us on the tail. Even worse when we find ourselves realizing that our adult philosophies are our unexamined youthful philosophies.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Oh, and most of the fiction in Barency that involves transaffection is pornography, from what I hear. That goes for most cities. A couple of my clients have written love stories that stop somewhat short of pornography, but that's Vheshrame.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

The problem with using it as a resource of any kind is that it is, in fact, fiction.

Also, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if the lack of non-explicit traff-positive work elsewhere is in part a vicious circle. Mainstream publishers won't touch it, so the only way traff anything gets published is in those circles that are less picky, so people get the impression that all traff-folk are degenerate and immoral, and around the circle goes.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Mump claims to have scientific ways to extract sociological truth out of a corpus of primary texts: fiction or even poetry. Such sources convey the spirit of a people, he says, thinly disguised under a veneer of fiction.

You're right about the vicious circle.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

I'd say "Right back at him: What does the body of cisaffectionate porn say about that element of society?" except that a rational argument with such people is generally pointless. Whether for moral reasons or otherwise, any researcher who has his conclusions alread framed before he does the research is nigh impossible to dissuade, no matter how flimsy the evidence supporting his position or how compelling that against it.

Changing one's worldview is never an easy thing, of course - I'm sure you, yourself, know about that - but academia ought not to have room for personal crusades.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have seen evidence of actual attempted objective thought in Mump once or twice.

I would like to see his methods subjected to the usual review and replication processes and that includes determining whether other researchers with different theoretical biases would come to the same conclusions. If sufficient numbers of other researcher with different biases came to the same conclusion then we could say his methods are repeatable, and then we could attempt to determine the noise-to-data ratio for his methods.

That might involve finding a way to analyze the societies for sociological truth using other methodologies and comparing the results.

In the case of Mump's search for truth about transaffection, my own opinion is that he must either be using a very abstruse form of magical analysis on the traces of Spiridor and Mentador found in the literature, or that he's in desperate need of peer review.

Approaching the problem from Monster Universe psychological and sociological methods, one finds the following questions to be either unasked or unanswered:
0) Given a large sample randomly taken from primes of all socio-economic groups and from all prime species,
1) what do the members of the group say that their preference is in gender of sexual partner
2) what is their gender
3) In the case of multi-gendered races, have they ever had consensual sex with members of the same gender of their species
4) have they ever had consensual sex with members of other genders (the 'biologically appropriate' gender(s) and/or the 'biologically inappropriate' genders)
[ The reader can see where this goes. It continues to ask about friendship, about partnership without sexual involvement, about partnership with sexual involvement, about exclusivity, and so forth, and may or may not ask if they consider themselves to have been 'in love' with members of the various sets. ]

ONLY once that information has been gathered in a way that ensures minimal fraudulence, can the researcher even begin to examine results and determine what the inhabitants of the World Tree actually DO, and only then can they even begin to say what the actual phenomena ARE.

My suspicion is that the "shape" of minds and spirits are similar across Primes (and some Monsters) to the extent that they can fall in love with any sufficiently compatible mind and spirit, but the physical structure of their bodies and the social structure of their various species and cities is much much more likely to dictate what is considered to be acceptable and what is not.

Most speculatively: the fact that they have so many different Prime species means that their gods may have designed them in such a way that they won't end up competing among themselves rather than cooperating, and I further suspect that the capacity for mutual affection is as strong as it is, in order to further this. I also suspect that the general danger provided by the monsters (many of whom are designed deliberately to provide a sentient and implacable challenge to Primes) is there to ensure that Primes will have a driving need to cooperate to defend themselves.

This creates a tension: the stronger the "cooperating" urge, the greater the likelihood of mutual affection extending to the point of excluding regular bonding with other members of the same species for reproduction; the need for reproduction to replenish the species tends to weaken the bonds between species.

[brynndragon.livejournal.com]

Erm, maybe if the people in question are the ones writing the fiction/poetry, but how does he presume to know if the author is actually traff themselves? In my world, there is a subgenre of fiction written almost entirely by females about male-male love - the authors are neither male nor interested in lovers of the same gender, nor do they necessarily even know any male same-gender lovers (on our iron ball of a world, same-gender affection is considered much like transaffection on the World Tree). So making conclusions about male-male love from such stories would be poor scholarship; making conclusions about how some non-same-gender-lovers view such pairings is the only possible rigorous examination.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

...this too is true. Though I fear that Mump is not much concerned with scholastic rigour so much as with his own viewpoint and agenda.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

The details of Mump's methods are beyond me, so I have asked Vind, who looked somewhat worried at the concern. Vind once asked Mump the same question, and had it answered to Vind's satisfaction at the time, but Vind is unable to recreate the answer.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Oh. It's worth noting, though, that women who aren't interested in other women, but are interested in men, can find a good deal to interest themselves in fiction involving male lovers. This is much less the case where cisaffection/transaffection are concerned. Anyone who writes transaffectionate porn - especially if their own species is not involved - can be fairly argued to have at least some traff leanings, in a manner that heterosexuals finding appeal in a one-sex couple of the opposite sex to them cannot.