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

[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.