SEAL Book Club

[Bee]

I haven't finished reading the pieces but I've only got like one left
Anyone?

[thiskurt]

I haven't finished reading the pieces but I've only got like one left
Anyone?

Yeah, I can finish them by tomorrow, normally.

[InspectorCaracal]

I haven't finished reading the pieces but I've only got like one left
Anyone?

Yeah, I can finish them by tomorrow, normally.

i will get em done by tomorrow too i promise

[Bee]

Ok, well, I'm going to loop back around to the first magazine we did, Uncanny Magazine, so we have three stories and three poems

So I feel extraordinarily thick but I don’t know what to make of this batch.

Ribbons by Natalia Theodoridou
Possibly the best piece this week, but I’m definitely missing something. What’s up with the ribbon and womanhood link? This isn’t the first time I see it in a story but I don’t recognize the reference.

Was the war also a metaphor for something, and if so, what?

The Clockwork Penguin Dreamed of Stars by Caroline M. Yoachim
Eh. It was okay. I would’ve rather have followed the penguin into the stars.

The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste by Christopher Caldwell
At first I thought I would’ve disliked it less if it had been an anime but no, I’d be rolling my eyes too much even with all the allowances I already make for cheap bastardizations of Catholicism.

There’s even lolicon in this thing, though. Anime really should be banned.

Crustacean on Land by Mehnaz Sahibzada
This is intriguing and creepy, but I don’t understand it.

The House Snakes by Sonya Taaffe
I don’t understand this AT ALL

Weaver Girl Dream by Lisabelle Tay
Maybe looking up the story it’s apparently based on would make it clearer but this is even creepier than the sea monster stalker., like Mother Gothel is the most terrifying Disney villain.

[thiskurt]

Ooh, shoot.

Ribbons by Natalia Theodoridou
Possibly the best piece this week, but I’m definitely missing something. What’s up with the ribbon and womanhood link? This isn’t the first time I see it in a story but I don’t recognize the reference.

Was the war also a metaphor for something, and if so, what?

Yes, this is a very nice piece I thought.

The story of The Green/Velvet/Red Ribbon is a reference to a fairy tale, but I think a relatively recent one, about a man and a woman who marry, but the woman always wears a ribbon, the woman tells the man she will marry him, but he can never ask her to take off her ribbon. Many years later when they are old, and I think the man is on his deathbed, he asks her if she will finally tell him why she is always wearing the ribbon. She finally takes off her ribbon and her head falls off, revealing that the ribbon was keeping her head attached to her body this whole time.

I don't think that story is linked to womanhood that much, but maybe it is I don't know what the interpretations of that story are, but I think that's something this story does specifically.

It's not clear if all cis women have such a ribbon, but I'm assuming they do, and the story mentions trans women have them too, some always had them, some found they appeared during puberty,...

I don't know what the war was a metaphor for either, except it may be linked to manhood, although the main character himself does dismiss that idea. Or *handwaves* *mumbles something vague about the battlefield of life*

No sure if the "make a bargain to turn into an animal to drodge the draft" had a meaning, besides parelleling issues of identity with that of the main character's.

The Clockwork Penguin Dreamed of Stars by Caroline M. Yoachim
Eh. It was okay. I would’ve rather have followed the penguin into the stars.

This could be a Pixar film, well, no, maybe Dreamworks Animation.

No, but, robot penguins fighting its programming to answer a call from Saturn and taking off in a space shuttle could definitely be an animated movie. I don't think you could end it the way it did, though. Or maybe you could. All the other clockwork animals in the zoo setting off in their own space shuttles to go after the penguin could be perfect sequel bait.

I'm pitching it now.

The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste by Christopher Caldwell
At first I thought I would’ve disliked it less if it had been an anime but no, I’d be rolling my eyes too much even with all the allowances I already make for cheap bastardizations of Catholicism.

There’s even lolicon in this thing, though. Anime really should be banned.

Didn't finish this one after all, zoned out on the prose. I don't think it will be as bad as "lolicon + cheap bastardization of Catholicism" could be in my head, but the less said about that the better.

Crustacean on Land by Mehnaz Sahibzada
This is intriguing and creepy, but I don’t understand it.

I feel like this is either about a lobster who was captured by a diver, or a diver who was captured by a lobster, and I don't know if the narator is a lobster or a diver, or both and if 'her' is a lobster or a diver or both and I have no clue who the puppeteer is.

The House Snakes by Sonya Taaffe
I don’t understand this AT ALL

No clue. I remember thinking this was about sailing somehow, but now I can't remember why and I was probably delirious.

Weaver Girl Dream by Lisabelle Tay
Maybe looking up the story it’s apparently based on would make it clearer but this is even creepier than the sea monster stalker., like Mother Gothel is the most terrifying Disney villain.

Yeah, this is a retelling of a Chinese folk tale. I didn't look it up before, but I feel I got the gist of it, it felt familiar without ever having heard this folk tale, I guess there's just something universal about these types of stories.

No N° 1 Mother Mug for her, though.

[InspectorCaracal]

Okay so I didn't read any of the stories but I read your posts about them so I read Ribbons because I know the ribbon fairy tale and oh my god there's so much going on in this story, I had no idea from your comments that the entire thing is about being trans?? I feel like I gotta set up a thing like one of those crazy investigation boards with all the pictures and newspaper clippings and strings connecting the different points in order to process it all the way but let me at least give it a surface try lol.

The biggest question: what's the ribbon/womanhood connection, and why?

Like Kurt said, this is a reference to a specific fairy tale, but the content of the fairy tale itself isn't informing the choice, it's just where it came from. (Although that said, I think maybe the whole story was inspired by the green ribbon tale.)

I'm absolutely certain the ribbon was used here because of two key characteristics:

1. It's highly visible. You can immediately see if someone has a ribbon or not. It's an inescapable visual marker, "this person is a woman".
2. Everyone says you can't remove it or you'll die. If you're born with a ribbon, if you get a ribbon, you have it forever.

I want to explain how those two points connect directly to experience as a trans man, but I can't put the feelings into words, I can just *handwave* recognize it? But there's definitely a lot of societal trends that I've noticed which are like... unidirectional when it comes to gender. There's super few things that go from fem-gendered to masc-gendered - in fact, literally the only two things I can think of are the color blue and computers. But there are loads that go from masc to femme. Look at English language names, for example. There's so many names that were masc names which started being adopted as fem names and now if you met a man named Leslie people would think it was weird.

The ribbons are like that - you only can get a ribbon, you can't remove it. You can wear a fake ribbon, but you can't not-wear a fake not-ribbon. And this is why I think the author used the ribbon tale specifically, because of the "if you remove it, you'll die" angle. The idea that you can become a woman, but you can't stop being one. More specifically, the idea that everyone says you can't, that you'll die, which traps Jan in the ribbon, even though at the end it's revealed that he can in fact remove the ribbon and not die.


Okay, the war. The war is given a lot less attention so I'm not entirely sure what it is. It could be a lot of things. I don't think it's linked to masculinity or manhood - the Thursday lover is a woman with a ribbon and is conscripted, and the Procurer is a war vet and a woman.

I think, tentatively, that the war is a metaphor for all the external strife and injustice and suffering in the world, wrapped into one package. Because of this part:

Besides, people are getting blown up at the border. The world is burning and I’m thinking about a ribbon? What a selfish, worthless son of a bitch.

He asks himself: Who do you think you are that you can reject this?

Who do you think you are that you can escape?

I think this is why he doesn't try to remove the ribbon until the end, as well, because he's been conscripted. He's in the war, now; he's hit rock bottom, so losing his head by removing the ribbon won't really lose him anything else any more.

And then he's fine.


Transforming into animals to dodge the draft is even harder to pinpoint. I have some tentative thoughts that maybe it's about social camoflage, when you're pretending to be someone you aren't in order to "fit in" and not cause any waves and protect yourself. Which, if so, makes Jan considering it a metaphor for considering "going back in the closet".

[InspectorCaracal]

As a side note, I don't know about other stories the ribbon connection might've been in, but before Kurt mentioned the Green Ribbon and I read Ribbons myself I assumed that it would be a reference to courtly favors, as that's the main link between ribbons and womanhood I know of.

[Bee]

As a side note, I don't know about other stories the ribbon connection might've been in, but before Kurt mentioned the Green Ribbon and I read Ribbons myself I assumed that it would be a reference to courtly favors, as that's the main link between ribbons and womanhood I know of.

The Husband Stitch was my first contact with the ribbon story, so it’s very firmly set in my mind as a womanhood thing

THS is fantastic but pretty intense and almost traumatic but really worth it anyway

[InspectorCaracal]

As a side note, I don't know about other stories the ribbon connection might've been in, but before Kurt mentioned the Green Ribbon and I read Ribbons myself I assumed that it would be a reference to courtly favors, as that's the main link between ribbons and womanhood I know of.

The Husband Stitch was my first contact with the ribbon story, so it’s very firmly set in my mind as a womanhood thing

THS is fantastic but pretty intense and almost traumatic but really worth it anyway

Oh, interesting! I just skimmed it but I'm pretty sure this is referencing the same ribbon story, which is particularly interesting because tbh there's nothing really in the original story/stories to link the ribbon to womanhood specifically.

***edit: yep got to the end and it's 100% the same story

***edit 2: comparing the three stories in particular is super interesting, because the original story is about the morbid fascination with the unknown, THS is about feminine bodily agency, and Ribbons is about identity and external labelling

[Bee]

As a side note, I don't know about other stories the ribbon connection might've been in, but before Kurt mentioned the Green Ribbon and I read Ribbons myself I assumed that it would be a reference to courtly favors, as that's the main link between ribbons and womanhood I know of.

The Husband Stitch was my first contact with the ribbon story, so it’s very firmly set in my mind as a womanhood thing

THS is fantastic but pretty intense and almost traumatic but really worth it anyway

Oh, interesting! I just skimmed it but I'm pretty sure this is referencing the same ribbon story, which is particularly interesting because tbh there's nothing really in the original story/stories to link the ribbon to womanhood specifically.

***edit: yep got to the end and it's 100% the same story

***edit 2: comparing the three stories in particular is super interesting, because the original story is about the morbid fascination with the unknown, THS is about feminine bodily agency, and Ribbons is about identity and external labelling

READ IT PROPERLY DAMMIT BE RESPECTFUL >:(

no for real THS is about so much more than bodily agency (though of course that's also a central theme), and it legit kept me up for weeks afterwards. I couldn't even look outside at night because of the runaway murderer ;-;

ANYWAY yeah