Present Perfect vs. Subjunctive · 7:23pm Dec 13th, 2017
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, come witness the world-title pay-per-view event of the century! A grammatical aspect versus an entire mood! Two heavyweights will enter the ring but no of course that's not what I'm talking about this is a blog about Integral Archer's story Subjunctive!
I'm not sure if this story is really well-known enough to merit a solo post, but I have a lot to say about it, so let's dive in.
In opposition to the goofy intro I gave this post, I'm going to start the review by saying that never have I spent so long being so disappointed by a story. My goal in writing this is to try and analyze my reaction to this piece, figure out where it went wrong for me. I don't have a ton of confidence in my ability to do this satisfactorily, however. Let's begin with the things I did like.
Our story opens in the first-person POV of Errenax, a changeling linguist. He's plying his trade in Canterlot, mere moments ahead of the wedding invasion. It seems he's picked up a student, you see, one who happens to be a Royal Guard and who doesn't have any clue who his teacher might be.
Suffice to say, I was hooked.
Linguists as a whole are just not a profession you see in literature, at least not these days. As I consider myself one, I found an unexpected kinship with our narrator. And of course, I loved being able to understand the things he was talking about. In fact, I learned quite a bit from reading this story. (Pop quiz: what's the part of speech of the word 'no'?)
The narrative, however, is written in a thick, dense prose that did often lose my attention. I put this in the 'positives' section of this review because it actually is a positive: this story is Errenax's, full stop, and other characters lampoon his writing as worthy of lurid romances. It's lampshaded, in other words, in a way that I found most effective. That still doesn't change the fact that, even if I had adored this story through and through, I could not in good conscience recommend it to everyone, because the writing style is not going to agree with everyone. It's very classical, and unless you've got an appreciation for the classics, you're probably going to bounce off of Subjunctive, hard.
But the introductory scenes are followed by some backstory, chock full of solid changeling world-building (and remember, this was well before season six). I was surprised, for instance, to learn that Errenax had been birthed by a single female, rather than the Queen, who had mourned the loss of his brother. This detail by itself told me volumes about what my expectations towards changelings should be. How they learn Equestrian speech, how he finds his purpose as a linguist, it was all just great stuff, good character-building as much as world- and society-building.
Even better are the scenes where Errenax and his team first enter Equestria. Integral Archer deftly handles things like describing a skyscraper from the perspective of someone who not only hasn't seen one before, but can't fathom such a thing existing. (He thinks they're mountains, for starters.) Attempts to integrate into Equestrian society are fraught with as much failure as success, but are always fascinating. And of course, once he's settled, his aforementioned student, Foil — hah! I just got the joke — is a great character, for all that I wondered how a self-described dullard could speak so eloquently. (More on that later.)
There is a lot of teaching to be had, enough that I questioned whether this was some kind of textbook. I mean, even if you're up on your linguistics, you will learn something from this story, as I have already said. And this is all done in service of some of the clever things that happen later on, like a speech by Foil that is entirely in the subjunctive mood (thanks to horizon for pointing that out in the comments). The various chapter titles are cleverly integrated with what goes on, as well, just for another example.
After the background comes the invasion himself, Errenax on the front guard as a specially-appointed commander. It's a lot of fun watching him strut around, reveling in the victory at hoof before, y'know, love beams of death from afar. The bulk of the story then becomes his tale of trying to get back home, not knowing what's become of his people — his family — and clinging to the last vestiges of hope in the face of utter, complete defeat.
We're coming quickly to the point where the story unhinges itself, so I want to talk about something that both works and does not work: Fluttershy.
When Errenax is blasted by the love lasers, he's eventually discovered by Foil, who gives that aforementioned speech, then throws him off a cliff. Fun stuff! The end result of all this is that he ends up in Ponyville — because why wouldn't he? — beaten, battered, broken and thoroughly demoralized. And who else should he run into but Fluttershy?
This was a great idea. "Fluttershy versus a changeling" is a pretty classic conceit, given that it's a great test of her character: will her kindness win out over the fear of these monsters who've so recently attacked ponies she cares about? And so she begins taking care of him, in a unicorn form, and he sees an opportunity.
There's an entire chapter where he's doing nothing but looking at stained glass windows, specifically the one that shows the mane six defeating Nightmare Moon. So he recognizes her, and realizes that if he can get in her good graces, he could take her back to the hive, where she would become a valuable prisoner of war. Great plan, right?
Unfortunately, Fluttershy is never really used well beyond her introduction. For starters, her dialogue rarely sounds like her, but this is again lampshaded in the final chapters: Errenax is writing the story well after the fact, so everything's filtered through his typically florid writing style, to say nothing of his own recollections. Good enough, but it did feel like too little, too late.
Otherwise, Fluttershy just sort of hangs around him, not really doing much. Sometimes she directs him through Equestrian culture, like when they're lost and wandering without transport, and there's even one time she successfully advocates for him not to kill someone. Or maybe the other way around, I forget. Point is, she doesn't have a lot of agency, nor does she really do much besides give him someone to talk to on occasion. Meanwhile, he abuses and bullies the crap out of her to keep her from leaving, and while the story makes no bones about this, ultimately, nothing comes of it.
In the final chapters — which I actually really liked, though given that they involve him coming back to his home, only to find out he's more or less the last living changeling, there was a considerable amount of schadenfreude at play after the story had lost my good graces — she travels back to the island with him, where he emerges in his natural form, due to something about not being able to change anymore. Unfortunately, this put the lie to a lot of what I had been thinking privately, namely that she knew he was a changeling since pretty early on in their acquaintanceship and was humoring him in an ultimate display of kindness. But no, she's taken aback by his appearance, he attacks her, she gets dragged off for a while until she escapes and just leaves. That's it! No final words, she just leaves him there alone, and all I could think was how does she get back to Equestria?
But this doesn't start the problems with this story. No, like many things that go wrong in life, it all starts with a girl.
...Okay, I'm being somewhat facetious. The real source of Subjunctive's issues begins, ironically enough, with a train wreck.
I can't really explain it. This is what I was talking about at the start, that I just do not know what went wrong in this piece. I read the scene three times over, and I simply could not make heads or tails of what was happening. Errenax and Fluttershy are on a train bound for Canterlot. The Guard stops the train to check it for changelings. He panics and does… a whole bunch of stuff. Like I said, it was hard to follow. My main concern was, was Foil actually there? Was he actually attacking Errenax? The whole scene felt very nightmarish, and didn't make any sense in context. What I didn't know at the time was that this would be a precursor to considerable, story-breaking confusion down the line.
But first, the girl. Fluttershy and Errenax follow the train tracks for a while until they come to a farmhouse that looks abandoned. It isn't; turns out, it's inhabited by a crazed and paranoid broken-horned unicorn who's got a changeling in his barn. So Errenax sets out to "deal with the changeling", which of course means "have freaky changeling sex in the barn".
Like you do.
This brought with it a whole host of questions, though, not least of which was "what the hell is everyone else doing in the house while they're fucking and very much not killing one another?" But this was fine, the moment was tender and the freakiness indicative of this alien society that I had for some time forgotten Errenax was part of.
But then he spends the rest of the story being moony and weepy about her, because she wanted to go off and start a new hive with him, and he wanted to get back to the home he was sure was still there. This would have been great and tragic, but he just never shuts up about her, and it kind of killed my enjoyment. This wasn't some epic romance, they literally knew each other for about two minutes before getting down and dirty.
And I think this speaks to what be the single greatest problem with Subjunctive: Errenax is an unreliable narrator — something I tend to enjoy — but it's never clear just how unreliable he is. He's incredibly self-reflective, aware of what he's doing and why, so long as he's trying to fit into a society. But consider his feelings for a changeling he literally just met? Impossible.
Things only get worse in the final set piece. Fluttershy and Big E go to the docks of Fillydelphia, where they meet a bunch of sailors who talk like they're doing a Shakespeare revival. I can't make this up. This is where my suspension of disbelief went to die, and not just because this was probably yet another situation where Errenax's artistic license got the better of him.
Here began a series of scenes where Errenax either was not present or would not be in earshot of characters speaking to one another, yet was able not only to hear their entire conversation, but deliver to the reader what it was they were thinking about. I don't understand what went wrong here. I cannot fathom what the author was trying to accomplish. It invokes a certain sense of the fantastical, but at the same time, it's just bad writing. It stands in direct opposition to the quality of everything that comes before it. I just don't know what went wrong.
It also didn't help that the sailors' motives were completely opaque. A ship's captain lets the two of them use his boat to get to the changeling island, completely for free, over the complaints of his rightfully suspicious first mate. This guy, I can't even say, it's like he fell in love at first sight with Errenax and would have done anything for him. There's lots of talk that he was getting old and senile and his judgment was gone — this last bit is proven in a later scene — but in the moment? Nothing he said or did ever made sense.
In actual truth, I convinced myself that everything that had happened since probably the barn was taking place in his head, maybe a fever dream as he lay dying on the shore. (He tries to kill himself a few times, unsuccessfully, in the penultimate chapter or so.) And that would go a long way to explaining why the fuck the last half of this story makes zero goddamn sense, save that it's really just me and my brain trying desperately to justify why a story which started out so promising could take such a left turn into whatever it had turned into. Absolutely nothing in the story justifies this interpretation: not Errenax's unreliability, not the fabulism, nothing. It's grasping at straws that aren't there.
After a climax with another changeling on the ship, we go then to the final few chapters, which again, I liked, if only because they represented an end to the torment and confusion, but mostly because they were just really nicely written. The final chapter presents a happy ending that grated on me, but that I realize now probably was a fantasy, and definitely can be justified as such, given how differently it's presented from the rest of the story. And that by itself tells me the rest is meant to be taken literally.
I feel bad, writing this review. I spent a good four months on this piece, and most of that was because it's just so slow, and eventually became a chore to read. I wanted to like it, really I did — I'm pretty sure I approved it for posting on Equestria Daily, for god's sake — but the last half just left me drained and bereft. I just couldn't enjoy things after the 'romance', certainly not after the sailors were introduced. And I'm still not certain I fully understand why.
2.5/5
Half of a great story.
I would eagerly read a story where a changeling has to convince Fluttershy not to kill someone.
In any case, I may end up giving this a look. If nothing else, the first half sounds promising.
4747812
She might have convinced someone not to kill him. :|
This was one of the more flawed but fascinating stories I've read on this site. I totally get what you're saying, but for me the fascinating overcame the flawed. I also, I think, have more tolerance for magical realism. (Or maybe it was just something about this kind of magical realism, because I still can't make heads or tails of Twin Peaks.)
4747943
I can't either. I got nothin'. :B
4747938
I know what you meant. I'd still eagerly read that story.
Confiteor Deo: ignosce mihi, quia malam fabulam scripsi . . .
There was a time when a man was able to forget. He could remember himself as a lad, and that long, tumultuous process of maturing wherein he regarded himself to be Melville in respect to writing, and God in respect to knowledge, by mere fact of his possessing pen and paper, and consequently felt entitled to hold up to the world the scribbles he spent his youthful plethora of hours scratching out, and solemnly to declare it as fine literature. He could remember, flush red with a hidden embarrassment, and then promptly forget.
Unfortunately, due to the Internet, he is now unable to ever forget.
I still log on to this website from time to time. I would prefer not to (har har), but I do it out of a sense of duty: a duty to a story that I started a year ago, and a duty to those passers-by who are so unfortunate as to stumble upon my stories. I confess that still, even today, three or so years after Subjunctive was finished, whenever I see my little bell flashing red, informing me that people are staring at and judging me, there’s a little start in my breast, which the cardiologists would call arrhythmia and the psychiatrists anxiety.
When I saw you had posted a review that was not just mere passing sentences, but paragraphs upon paragraphs, I almost didn’t read it, convinced that not only would it be damning from start to finish, but I would be nodding my head, agreeing with every single point of abuse. But given that you had read the whole damn thing and had taken the time to write all this, I owed you that much.
I was correct about my agreement, but pleasantly surprised to not be entirely right about the abuse. Whether you did it out of mercy or out of genuine appreciation, I thank you for your initial praises: you reminded me that, hey, I’m not a total hack, and there are parts of me that might be decent still. It seems that I had forgotten what was good about the story and was just self-consciously remembering it as bad.
But you’re right. You’re right about everything. Even for certain interpretations you have that I neither intended nor wholly agree with, I cannot fault you, because I understand exactly how a person could come to such conclusions, and that is wholly my fault.
To this day, I think back to this story and cringe, more often than I would admit even to a mental health professional. Time and hindsight have made me painfully cognizant of the story’s flaws, and more regretful of my younger exuberance and arrogance.
When I was writing it, I regarded myself and it as perfect and brilliant. To be sure, this is the only proper attitude to have when writing (my determination to get the text perfect despite three rejections from Equestria Daily, and the pre-readers’ perception thereof, was what eventually got it posted, despite EQD’s still, at that time, having a three-strike rule), but the hazard is that such an attitude blinds one to his errors and deafens him to his editors. By no small degree was the novel’s shortcomings—especially in the ending as you’ve pointed out—due to the fact that I’d begun serialization before I had had the entire thing planned out, so determined to get the seeds of my work out there, thinking it a crime to deprive the world of my genius. Well, it—and I—suffered for my impatience.
Why don’t I just delete it? Because as flawed and cringeworthy as I think it is, I do not, for a second, regret writing it. The mistakes I made and the feedback I got were priceless tools for shaping me into the writer I hope one day to become. Fan fiction has only one proper function: practice. People routinely ridicule fan fiction because of how bad it is; what they don’t realize is fan fiction’s being bad prevents writers from writing bad real fiction. Because a writer, after writing fan fiction—provided that he’s serious about his art, is introspective, fair and honest to himself, and doesn’t dismiss those who don’t hold the work in as high esteem as he as haters, thus reinforcing the walls of his self-erected echo chamber—realizes what he did wrong and tries not to make those mistakes again.
My whole and sincere thanks to you for writing this, for consolidating your thoughts and letting me know them; you’ve helped me grow a few more inches. I’m touched you gave it your own blog post, when you would have been totally justified in just giving it a paragraph alongside of those for twenty other stories. You apologized in the comments section for not being able to have a better opinion, but you have nothing to apologize for, and I nothing to accept. It's I who owe you an apology; you walked away from the story feeling that you wasted your time—an unforgivable sin for any writer.
Don't feel bad about your thoughts; what would have been much worse for me is if you had had them and had considered silence the only response I and Subjunctive deserved.
Genius.
4747968
Please don't.
Now that I've told you not to, you have no one to blame if you decide to defy me and, 100k words later, feel that you've wasted your time.
4747987
Then I do not regret reading it! And I thank you for this lovely comment.
I can say that you got further into it before having problems than I did before deciding to quit. It's hard to say at this point precisely why that was, but there you go. I did find it began with great promise, and I'm happy at least to hear that there were ideas throughout that made it worthwhile for you to read despite the rest.