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It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

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From: (Anonymous)

Back in court. Thanks to her earlier detour, prosecutor leads her down a line of questioning that hilights how easily you can be deceived by someone you love. whoops. Son realises his mother doesn't believe in him. His eyes shutter. That's a horror story of its own. This book would be a lot more interesting without the trans elements. But then, we already know that.

We flashback to a scene of the husband abusing the son. It's placed at the end of the chapter, like a big reveal, but I can't work out why. I swear it contradicts a previous scene though. Let's check...

pg 352
on the day that he came between Braden and me, when Asher clung to his leg like a barnacle, Braden plucked him off and hurled him across the room. There, he struck the wall and crumpled.

... and gah, I SWEAR she narrated this earlier and said that when her husband saw her kid clinging to her leg, that prompted him to stop. I can't find the scene right now, so I'll come back in a bit and look harder to find out if I've misremembered or not. I want to get this thing FINISHED.

(oh yeah, forgot to mention: tim had special magical spidey sense that let him instantly see through asher's abusive dad, presumably related to his anime cello gifts and ability to remember unimpressive facts such as 'numbers, but in german'.)

From: (Anonymous)

YES, I'M RIGHT.

pg 352:

on the day that he came between Braden and me, when Asher clung to his leg like a barnacle, Braden plucked him off and hurled him across the room. There, he struck the wall and crumpled.

pg 108:

I looked down to find Asher launching himself against Braden. 'Stop, Daddy,' he said, beating his fists against his father's belly, trying to save me by doing to Braden what Braden was doing to me.

pg 110:

On that Sunday, twelve years ago, Braden had been so surprised by Asher's tiny, focused fury that it diluted the charge of the moment. Braden turned sweet and solicitous, suggesting we watch a disney movie as a family; stroking my hair and whispering an apology; making love to me that night as if I were a sculpture he was shaping with his own reverent hands.

So... I think they just had two different drafts, forgot they'd already used one set of events, and put them both in the book. I wonder if one author wrote each?

From: (Anonymous)

I love how they didn't bother to sort out the main plot of their book before going to print, but we still got the cursed bladder orgasms.

From: (Anonymous)

I feel like the cursed bladder orgasms alone spell out a case for why TiMs are men.

From: (Anonymous)

Flashback to the tim in a changing room, because I guess that's on the checklist. It's a bit fetishy but not as bad as the earlier scenes, so I won't bother getting a screenshot.

We then witness THE WEIRDEST FUCKING ENGLISH CLASS EVER. Mystifying passage incoming! (the english teacher is nicknamed 'Chopper', jsyk) I like that it includes a poem that is better than this book, so I'm going to include it too, as an air-freshener. =)

I open my backpack and get out the poetry book we're doing for Chopper. We're starting out with William Blake, the Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night

In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

And all at once, tears rush to my eyes, and I'm sobbing.
When we were talking about the Blake poem today, Chopper looked at us and asked what it made us think about-- not what it *meant*, but how it made us *feel*. I thought that was a nice distinction.
Until Dirk raised his hand and said, *She's got an STD!*
Chopper pointed to the door. "Out," he said.
"But, Mr. Jameson--"
"Out," said Chopper, and Dirk got his things and slunk out of the room. Then, with a smile, Chopper said, "Actually, venereal disease is one of the things readers have thought the poem's about. But maybe that's too specific. What else do you think when you read this?"
"It makes me think about a woman who's been made sick," said the girl in front of me. "By a man. Who says he loves her. But mostly, she wants to be alone."
There was a long pause as we all thought about this. "So sometimes," growled Chopper, "love just makes people sick?"
Heads nodded. A *lot* of heads nodded.
"Sick," said Chopper, again. He is positively the gnarliest, most wrinkled teacher I have ever had. But then he looked at us with a strange, gentle expression. "But we keep on looking for it, day after day. Getting our hearts broken. And getting them healed again."
He looked out the window. We all sat there in an electric silence. Chopper looked back at us, and pointed toward the door again. "All right," he said. "*Out.*"

So... the teacher randomly bullies one of the students for giving a interpretation of the poem he was asked to interpret, then 'growls' them a trite little sermon about love, and that's the end of the lesson.

If this is an accurate representation of the authors' highschool education, no wonder this book ended up like this.

From: (Anonymous)

I think we covered that poem in middle school. It gave me sexy vampire vibes, which probably says a lot more about me than the poem.

From: (Anonymous)

I read it for the first time just now, but it made me think of someone discovering someone's private source of joy and twisting it, spoiling it, rotting it. Maybe it works as a metaphor for what's happened to fandom. ;_;

From: (Anonymous)

Today at Morning Meeting there was a prsentation from something called the Rainbow Alliance. It's the student LGBTQ group, led by two students named Finn Johnson and Caeden Wentworth.

And it sounds as awful as you'd expect. We get a detailed description of an enby student, and Caeden reappears-- but I think the authors have forgotten Caeden was an enby, and now Caeden is taking testosterone. All very depressing and tedious; let's not linger.

Lily admits he isn't very interested in joining the Rainbow Alliance. Those are heretic words, so lily tells himself it's due to internalised transphobia and self-hatred. Suuuuuure. *That's* why you don't want to go to the 'lectures', and the 'drag ball', and the 'weekly drop-in sessions' in which finn will no doubt 'delight in subverting all the expectations people have around gender' and you'll get the opportunity to microanalyse caeden's beard hair.

tim goes on about being trans, asking himself boring questions and being boring. he expresses his wish to just read a poem in peace. YOU COULD HAVE JUST READ IT AND SAVED US THESE PARAGRAPHS.

anyway. we don't get another scene about the poem. we get a scene about... being trans. did you guess?

From: (Anonymous)

Is Picoult not seriously just exhausted about how much of this book is about trans

At this point if I wanted a trash read I'd just pick up Nights on Rodanthe

From: (Anonymous)

I assume she clicked on her stonewall tab, did ctrl-a , ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and submitted it to the publisher before the text had even finished loading into the word document.

From: (Anonymous)

Flashback to the day 11-year-old Liam's dad cut his hair off. Liam's dad says something mean, but we don't see what. Maybe it'll be dramatically revealed later, maybe the authors are too afraid to write anything mean, or maybe they just forgot about it. We'll see! That night, Liam's mum drives away with Liam. The next day, he says he wants to be called Lily.

"I'm going to be a girl from now on," I clarified.

"Lily," said Mom. "You've always been a girl."

Phenomenal parenting.

He has his first session with a 'gender counsellor' a few months later. So we can't blame corrupt doctors for this one, this is munchausens-by-proxy all the way.

But at the end of that year, I begain to feel left behind again as I looked at all of the bodies of my girlfriends, suddenly in flower.

Vomit break.

From: (Anonymous)

> I looked at all of the bodies of my girlfriends, suddenly in flower.

Out of context, this sounds like a serial killer admiring the corpses of all the girls he's seduced and murdered over the years. In context, I'm not really sure if it's any better.

From: (Anonymous)

I s2g they keep using this analogy. Along with breast budding

From: (Anonymous)

He's also compared his own genitals to flowers like 3 times, I just didn't bother to quote it since tbf a lot of bad romance does that, and even some good romance. I found it clunky but I have to be VERY discerning with my quotations or I'll never finish a page.

From: (Anonymous)

The only fucking flower I ever wanna see a tim compare his genitals to is cauliflower because if I have to deal with nonsense please go full hog

From: (Anonymous)

More carefully selected prose:

"Mom had been sanguine about delaying adolescence; but leaping into female puberty seemed, to her, like a whole other can of worms."

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/worms-jump-on-bees-electric-field/

It mentions tim's cup size, because of course it does. It also says he grows hips, because skeletons, how do they work.

"My mother and I spent a lot of time talking about what it means to be a woman, in this world, and at this moment in time, and she was determined that, if her child was going to be female, at the very least she would also be a feminist."

no offense but your mother missed the very first lesson there.

tim then mansplains the etymology of the word 'hysterical'. And this book shows as big a commitment to historical accuracy as biological accuracy; he implies that, as a matter of course, women in the 19th century would be locked away as insane for wanting to play music. Nobody tell him about the roaring trade in pianofortes. Come on, authors, you didn't even need to read a book; you could have just looked at an ADVERT from the time. THERE ARE SO MANY.

Honestly, this kind of historical ignorance scares me a bit. It's bad enough when young YA authors do it, but this is something else.

From: (Anonymous)

tim takes a wrong turn late at night, just so he can be followed by a creepy man through a warehouse district and we can see that he's JUST LIKE US. this scene gets 1 point for realism in that tim can't understand a word of the french the creepy guy is saying, because the creepy guy is french canadian. inorite. then again, actually, it says he struggles to recognise it AS french. hm, not in this nonny's experience; you hear french, and then you try to hear the words but you can't distinguish any of them, and it's a really weird feeling. so that's my pedantry of the day. scene also gets -100000 words for realism because tim sees a bar ahead, with a neon sign, but opts not to rush in and act for help, because 'there's no way of knowing whether this is a place of safety'. IT'S A BAR. WITH PEOPLE IN IT. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT.

cop-who-used-to-date-suspected-murderer-mother-and-now-NAMALTS-her (did I mention he was a cop? he's the one who arrested asher, anyway, lol), anyway, er, cop spots tim on street, and gives him a lift. turns out tim was very clever not to go into the bar ("Le Chez"), because it looks like it's an EVIL bar!

"And stay away from Le Chez, all right?" He pronounces it *La Shay*. "Nothing good happens in there, especially to young women."

Mostly, I'm confused by that detail about his pronunciation. What other way would you pronounce 'chez'?

From: (Anonymous)

Like Chex, but with a Z sound at the end. I have a five-year-old's sense of humor and think it's funny to mangle the pronunciation of Chez Panisse every time I see it.

From: (Anonymous)

See, if they'd had him mispronounce it, that would have made sense! Instead, I'm wondering if the authors think we'll be impressed that the love-interest cop knows how to pronounce 1 out of 2 words in a french phrase, and it's a way to get us to like him, or what. I just can't work out why this detail is in here.

From: (Anonymous)

I'm still hung up on this. Why can't he pronounce "le"?????

From: (Anonymous)

Back to the trial.

Attorney must have had some kind of memory wipe (much like the authors), because now he's suddenly furious that the narrator went off-script in her testimony. Erm, yes, you spoke to her right afterward and were supportive! Tbf this attorney character has been a bit controlling and irrational all the way through, so it's consistent, but FOR SOME REASON I think it's bad writing rather than an intentional character-trait.

But yeah. She's fucked the case he was building. 👍

Attorney says things he should have said pages ago. Then the son interrupts.

He wants to go on the stand!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcJmOs8DRQ

Even the characters of this book know that this is a bad idea. But this is a Jodi Picoult, so I think we can guarantee he's going to end up on that stand.

Prediction: asher will tell the court that he knew lily was traaaaans, and everyone will clap.

From: (Anonymous)

Sure enough, asher insists on testifying!

prediction: asher exonerated, mother feeling guilty (boo! hiss!), judge will say something that only a racist could come up with.

Onwards!

From: (Anonymous)

Asher describes all the things he loved about tim. This consists in a list of all the random facts tim told him. "Wow, these must be some facts!" you say. Regard!

"She *knew* things -- all the lyrics to 'Bohemian Rhapsody'"

🤷

So, we pick ourselves up off the floor, and the scene continues. Sure enough, asher confirms he knew that tim was tim. Normally I am pleased when I accurately predict books, but this would be a hollow victory. It has been obvious from the moment they introduced this dumb "pretend you didn't know" plot that he was going to have a dramatic court moment in which he told a roomful of people that trans women are women! Thinking about it, I bet he's going to use that exact phrase, in a triumphant chant. Maybe the whole court will chant with him, and then spill out of the courthouse, onto the road, and roll up the whole fucking planet in a big chanting katamari that will zoom off into the sun and extinguish all life on earth

...where was I?

From: (Anonymous)

Asher's manner in court is described as "transcendent".

Also, it's just hit me that probably the reason for going so hard on making the mother wrongly suspect the son is just a big "see, terfs! You see abusers everywhere, but you're wrong! Not all men! And NEVER men who believe TWAW!"

Page 372, so the book still has time to redeem (well, no, improve) itself. Maybe they'll get dark and make asher have done it. Maybe they'll make him innocent but send him to jail anyway, because so far his defense has come down to his football coach and his mother saying he's a nice person, which isn't the best shield against a murder charge. Maybe tim will come back as a zombie and liven things up for the last 50 pages by playing a GHOST CELLO.

But who am I kidding.

From: (Anonymous)

Well, what else would he be? Ciscendent?

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(Anonymous) - Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

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