Pale: More Extra Materials
This review was fast lane comissioned by @Aris Katsaris.
More Pale side-materials. Which, well, the worldbuilding for the Pale/Pact setting has consistently interested me more than the stories themselves, so I'm not complaining. This order includes bonus content from a few different chapters, so I guess it'll probably cover a wide range of subjects.
The first bit is from right after "Leaving a Mark 4.1" and concerns a magic school called the Blue Heron Institute. Apparently magic schools are a thing in PactPale, at least in some places. There's what seems like an advertisement for the school, as well as a personalized letter from its administrator to the three girls inviting them to enroll, followed by an IM conversation between the trio about whether or not to take him up on it.
Unfortunately, I don't know what's going on in the story at this point, so I can't make much of the girls' ambivalence. From the tone of the IM convo, it kinda seems like the guy running the school - an Alexander Belanger - is seen as an enemy by some of their local supernatural entities, so they're not sure if they should trust him or if the political costs would be worth it even if he proves trustworthy. I think? Something like that.
The information presented about the Blue Heron Institute itself is mostly either typical magic school genre stuff or PactPale magi-technobabble stuff, but there are some details that I can get more out of. In particular, a few bits really look like the author sat down with a pen and paper and thought "let's look at magic schools in urban fantasy and write down everything that makes sense about them and everything that doesn't." And, as far as I can tell, he seems to have done a good job at dealing with the latter. For instance, Blue Heron is specifically a magic summer school, so attending it doesn't get in the way of a modern, well-integrated young wizard's general education. The way the classes are set up also seems like it's meant to accommodate students from various magic backgrounds who may have been taught any amount of eldritch family secrets that put them ahead of or behind the curve:
Courses at all levels are available to everyone from the outset. If you were raised attentively by a well-rounded sorcerer clan, you can take all intermediate and advanced courses and leave your mornings free. If you're a muggle who stumbled into the practice, you can take all beginner courses and leave your afternoons free. The implication is that most students come in with a mixture of types of magic they've mastered and types they've remained relatively ignorant of, and thus can fill their schedules with courses that suit them. Those individuals seem to be getting the most for their money, given the way the timeslots are allocated (at least assuming a flat tuition rate rather than a courseload-dependent one).
On the subject of tuition, it's not clear what they charge. The personalized letter from Belanger implies that the girls' tuition will be waived if they sign up for this summer right now, but I lack the context to understand why he's making this offer, or what he would otherwise be charging them. Not normal money obviously, PactPale wizards surely have no need for that. Do they have some kind of unit of exchange of their own? Maybe a karma-backed or political-favor-backed currency? The more I think about it, the more the former actually makes sense. Karmic debt is a tangible thing in this world, and there are magical means of manipulating it, so taking on someone else's karmic debt in exchange for goods and services seems logical. That also means that getting badly in "financial' debt has supernatural consequences along the lines of mystically bad luck, spell failures, and Others being hostile to you, which *feels right* for the setting.
So yeah, that's my best guess about how tuition works. Either that, or some more intricate system of debts and favors that needs to be worked out case by case.
Anyway, some of the further text descriptions make it sound like the basic courses are closer to modern classrooms, while advanced courses fall closer to the wizard-and-a-couple-apprentices model. Again, logical. It also seems like personalized consultation with the Institute's rotating cast of "guest teachers" is as big a part of the curriculum as the preplanned courses, which again makes sense for a school operating in such a highly political environment with students of diverse backgrounds and previous knowledges. In some ways, Blue Heron might work more as an open forum for exchange of knowledge than it does as a formal school. Only in some ways, though; the beginner level courses are likely a balancing factor here.
Next bit is the "Gone Ahead 7.8" supplement, titled "Can We Talk About the Girls?" This one is a more conventional prose interlude, and features a (very enlightening for the reader) conversation between the girls' parents. Lucy and Verona have been friends for a long time, but their parents never interacted much, and Avery's family is new-ish in town and Avery only befriended the other two pretty recently.
The nominal POV character for this scene is Jasmine, Lucy's mother. I don't know how much she's appeared in the story before now, but here she makes a pretty good impression as a hardworking nurse who still, somehow, manages to be a responsible and attentive single mother even though it's slowly killing her of exhaustion. On one hand, Lucy herself has been a big help by helping take care of her brother (which in turn makes me more positively disposed toward Lucy herself than I was before). On the other hand, Lucy's trust and anger issues have come out in very bad ways occasionally, including an incident that apparently deterred a potential stepfather. Granted, it's not clear from the interlude if that was Lucy's fault or the man's fault, but it definitely strained her relationship with her mother either way. As for what happened to the original father, I'm not sure, but something about the tone of her narration suggests to me that Jasmine is a widow rather than a divorcee.
Speaking of divorce though, we get another appearance from Verona's father, named now as Brett. We only got a brief glimpse of him in the early chapters that I reviewed, and at the time it seemed like the negative portrayal of him might have been at least heavily down to Verona's POV. We see him from the perspective of unrelated adults now, though, and simply put he is an incredibly divorced dad. In fact, he might be the most divorced man I've ever read about. He is surrounded by an overwhelming aura of divorced energy that weakens happy marriages just by proximity. He spends pretty much the entire meeting complaining about Verona, blaming himself for how she turned out (without ever admitting to any specific mistakes), blaming his ex-wife for how she turned out (with much more specificity), and making borderline-rude observations about Verona's interactions with the other two in front of their own parents.
He sets the tone right at the start by ordering a rich pastry a la mode even though he just got out of the hospital for a stomach thing and telling the other parents who try to warn him that "his stomach will pay for it later, whatever." The scene ends, naturally, with him doubling over with stomach pain and refusing to let anyone help him back to his car.
On one hand, it's impossible to not feel for this guy. On the other, it's also impossible to like him.
Avery's parents Kelsey and Connor, meanwhile, are hard to get a read on. Moreso than the others, the token unbroken nuclear family feel like they're putting on a facade. The way they talk feels a little off in a way that makes me think the author is trying to write about them being slightly fake, but miscalculated slightly and ended up straying into stilted and uncanny. Not a lot, just a little bit.
Granted, there are also a couple of places where the uncanniness clearly IS intentional, when they're trying to recall certain details about Avery's recent behavior and clearly mentally struggling against that secrecy spell the girls use. There's also another struggle going on though, and that is concerning their daughter's sexuality. They never say explicitly that that's what they're talking about, but Connor seems incapable of talking about Avery at length without obliquely accusing this one teacher of hers for *something* involving Avery's recent behavior without making it clear exactly what he's talking about, and Kelsey gets visibly more and more annoyed at him for this until by the end they need to go home separately.
Avery's parents also seem a little younger than Brett and Jasmine, I think. Like, one of them uses the word "adulting," which I don't think any person born before 1985 has ever uttered. Or maybe they're all supposed to be in that age range, and I'm just too terrified of my own aging to imagine people born when I was having children in high school. But anyway, with Connor being in my own age cohort I can definitely imagine him being fine with gay people in general, always voting for pro-LGBT politicians, etc, but thinking that if his daughter is gay then it means a predatory adult must have done it to her and perhaps this means that wokeness is starting to go too far. Kelsey seems to be at her wits' end trying to get him to come off it by this point.
I will say in Connor's favor that he ends the scene deciding to make a commitment to being a friend to Brett, since he clearly needs one (and frankly, his daughter needs him to have one too). He's not a bad guy. Just...he has some specific conservative hangups that he never thought he'd need to confront, and he's not handling it well so far. He and Kelsey also offer to help put in a word for Jasmine at a different clinic that might give her a more stable schedule, for which she's extremely grateful. Avery's parents are flawed, but they seem to earnestly try to do what's best for the people them.
One thing that interests me about this scene, as someone relatively familiar with Wildbow's work, is that I think this is the first time I've read him handling a group of regular people in ostensibly our own world talking about mundane family stuff without any supernatural elements being mentioned. Supernatural elements are PRESENT, sure, with the way the parents are being nudged by the mind-whammy here and there, but that's a pretty minor factor in the scene overall. The writing definitely feels like the author isn't that sure of himself, and that he knows he's writing outside of his comfort zone. And, I definitely respect that. All things considered, I think he did an okay job with this interlude. Not a great one, but good enough.
On a somewhat similar note, I also feel like the author is making a deliberate effort to be more progressive, especially with regards to race issues. As I mentioned in a previous review, "Worm" had enough unthinkingly reactionary shortcuts and assumptions written into it that I think I'd have bounced off of it hard if I'd read it a few years later in life than I did. The zeitgeist has changed since then, though, and this scene demonstrates that the author has change with it. For instance, when Jasmine is talking about Lucy's anger and mistrust issues, some of the incidents she recounts involve ambiguous racism from teachers and other white adults that Jasmine herself isn't sure of (stuff like a teacher not liking the way Lucy wears her hair to class, for example). I don't know what it's like being black in rural Canada, or exactly what the oft-talked-about black hair issue feels like from inside, but I have enough experience being some type of minority in some type of isolated community that it rang mostly true for me. Likewise Avery's parents' bemused, not-sure-what-to-think reactions to being told that their daughter's favorite gym instructor might or might not have turned Jasmine's daughter off of school sports entirely via accumulated microaggressions.
Combined with the very nuanced portrayal of pseudo-progressive homophobia, this definitely points to self-examination and growth.
On a technical level, apart from the occasional not-sure-if-intentional bits of stilted dialogue, I still wish that Wildbow would do more to engage the senses with his prose. There's only a couple words of physical description, at most, of each character, and mostly only when they first appear. He picked a nice, interesting-looking venue for this parents' get-together, with Avery's parents having invited the others to meet at a quirky hipster-cafe with candlelit tables, but there's so little sensory callback to this after its (very good) initial description that it almost feels wasted.
Like I said after reading the first few chapters of the serial itself, I feel like Wildbow's prose quality has declined even as his worldbuilding and character writing skills have grown. It's unfortunate.
There are a couple more bits of Pale finishing up this month's fast lane order. I'll cover them in another post sometime next week.
