My voluptuousness may have come at great cost, but I am equipped to bear this massive, curvy burden to the finish line
Mercedes Lackey-ass book.
Nicky Joins the League
I had no choice but to burn away all traces of my facial hair, lest I invite scrutiny and alarm from others!
Every sport has its quirks of physical culture. Except for pretty much the 400 meter run, or maybe the pole vault, there aren't that many sports where "imagine the median person's idea of a hot person" is an S-tier athlete.
Now, I'd call getting an orchiectomy for the love of the game pretty extreme, but I guess it's not that different from the steroid era of the MLB. Or the contemporary dick-injection era of ski-jumping.
All the same, I don't know how much I trust Katherine to be an honest interlocutor here. Call me old-fashioned, but back in my day if a fellow stopped calling himself Daniel and started calling herself Katherine, well that was some pretty trans stuff. But, I know this is e-sportz, not Sportz! so maybe I just need to get with the times. The frontier of culture, of which sport is best conceived as a constituent part, is always on the advance.
Some sports are played by clicking several hundred times per minute now. Some men are fooooooooorced to remove their facial hair and testes and grow breasts for a one-off cash prize. The landscape may change but the pursuit of arete, the chase for Olympic spirit, the athlete's hunger for glory mixed with obscurity, never does.
"No, I get it completely, Dan." I walk up to him, leaning down so I’m at his eye level. "You’re scared."
Gotta admire Nicky's competitive drive in this scene. In it to win it, even if I think Nicky's, frankly, cheating.
You know that my tits are going to be banging, broseph!
On the other hand, get her ass, don't let this minor foe keep you out of the league. Some day, after league integration, Nicky (and allegedly Laura) will be seen as pioneers, sort of like much less impressive Satchels Paige.
See, and Kyle lets Nicky in. Kyle isn't scared, and so relishes the extra competition. Killer. Instinct. My money's on Kyle for this whole cohort's winner.
Bro Code
Look, it’s totally bro code or whatever of you to try and have my back, but it’s getting to be a little emasculating so I’d like you to stop and leave me to it.
You know, it really is pretty bro-code to try to keep your bro from doing something dumb.
But it's also pretty bro-code to let your bro do something dumb.
Truly, a land of contrasts.
No True Scots Trans Woman
This central knot, of women pretending to be men pretending to be women who are maybe men, is insane. Anyway, unsane. Remarkably crazy. Cuckootownbananapants.
I love the Catch-22 in this game as applied to a collection of mechanics I'd have to describe as hyper-local-social-permadeath. These women have created an antireality field out of their private doubting brainworms that is so strong it's warping Her Majesty's (I am a UK sedevacantist, Charles is a pretender) cold grey island's weird Joanne-induced moral panic.
I guess, that's probably Comentary, or something, on the pathogen vector of brainworms?
Does It Go Without Saying?
Breaking kayfabe for like an hour
I worry that I'm kind of glossing over something for the hyperreality of it all. I don't want to spend too much time being thuddingly obvious but maybe it's worth saying that this story is so far about false telos and its teammate, reinscription?
Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present. Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
Saint Augustine, the subject of the above Arendt quotation, actually almost went into the majors in the medieval French sport Choule, by the way. He claimed that anxiety about the future leads to a distended self, a self dispersed into the future and destroyed by fear.
I want to draw a line between Augustine's distended self, and the perpetually anxious now (the dispersion even) of cisnormativity. And then maybe a second line justifying this extended detour back into Love and Saint Augustine in what is ostensibly a sports blog about Estrojunkies.
So for Augustine, at least as interlocuted by Arendt, there are a few weird things about love:
- Love is craving, enjoyment (fruitas) is distinct from love.
- Craving the eternal (caritas) implies eternity and calm.
- Craving the world (cupiditas) implies temporality and fear.
For Arendtgustine, a proper target for love is love of the self but not the mortal self, the essential self.
So long as man exists, he is not. He can only anticipate his essence by striving for eternity, and he will be only when he finally holds and enjoys (frui) it. The right kind of self-love (amor sui) does not love the present self that is going to die but that which will make him live forever.
Cisnormativity is inherently concerned with cupiditas and therefor mired in anxiety about the future. Its reasoning is dominated by petty, mutable, concerns. You can see this in the evolution and the dispersions of the norms in question.
Obvious example, but take NBA style over the years.
The shorts get longer. The shorts get shorter. The suits appear. The suits get boxier. The suits get fly-er. The arm-rash-guards appear.
It's the same for clothes and haircuts in each facet of life as far as I can tell. At each moment there is assigned a preposterousness to the prior moment and a fear of the next.
The worry that this is all a little paint-mix-y animates that fear.
Maybe not in Basketball most specifically, but people really lost their shit over Dennis Rodman.
During the aughts, people were deeply concerned about Emo music, not because Matches were out there writing songs like "Say 18" (shudders) but because those Emo boys "had feelings" and were kind of feminine. To contrast the asutere masculinity of, what, Led Zeppelin? Made no sense. Was ahistoric and absurd.
To say nothing about the indefinite march of time though the centuries. Old-timey people with wigs and all that.
Anyway, to love these mutable signs of some name is cupiditas, doomed to fear. And that mutability is maybe a good clue that gender cannot be a true telos. But meanwhile each decade comes with its new procession of supposedly immemorial Norms.
The nausea creeps in, and that unreality underpins the especially wobbly-stomached Nicky sections of the text so far I think. For Nicky, the reinscription of masculinity on a subculture that is so clearly aimed against it is, understandably, disorienting.
Naturally this all raises the question, what imutable thing is there to crave instead? Well clearly it's Laura's unassailable athleticism. Probably. Although since that's still half of the Universe of Tribunal Discourse, maybe it too is cupiditas. I dunno, it's a novel, and Augustine probably didn't think much about femme-strats since he could just put on a big-ass robe back in his day if he wanted to compete in competitive mammogenesis.
Anyway. Augustine contrasts a light going out versus the abstract concept of brightness persisting. There will be a last baseball game someday, in the same way that there will be a last RCBG victor. But one has to hope that as long as their is intelligent life, there will be Sport, the Brightness to RCBG's single flickering light. And while certainly a Monster can might be recycled, the Monster can will forever cover Katherine's floor.
But cisnormativity cannot admit that its aims are mutable, fearful, and silly. If it did, it would have to accept paintmixing and even additional colors of paint, to stretch a metaphor. So instead it keeps scraping the walls bare and trying to add a different true shade of blue or pink.
To bring it back to something approaching a point, what is the essence of Ranked Competitive Breast Growth, the hottest new e-sport on the underground circuit? I think it's basically a version of Q-Up that's trying to invent physical sport from first principles again. It's tough because the APMs are so low in this sport. Kind of the first e-ultra-endurance-sport if you think about it.
Lore Dump
RLC
I love an initialism. Gotta have them or it's not even a real hobby let alone a sport.
Fem/Boy
Laura's logic is pretty unassailable, femme-strats are simply the most viable way to explain taking estrogen. This all makes perfect sense and is purely rational.
And, I don't really see Nicky's problem with it to be honest? If Laura is, as accused, a trans woman--I'm not saying she is; E-sportz! is not about to accuse an athlete of cheating--but if she were, hypothetically, a woman, then wouldn't this a good way to win some money?
Tribunal
What if two porcupines tried to slow dance?
Boy-Laura
One of the reasons Laura is so calm and unbothered by the tribunal proceedings is that she’s been through them dozens of times before—though usually she’s the one initiating them
Killer instinct. Hustle. That's why she's the champ. This Izzy man is just a crow pecking at an eagle. And yeah this all checks out. Gotta stay on top of the HRT meta. Otherwise are you even playing?
Izzy clearly isn't in it to win it, and is kind of a filthy casual lacking the raw athleticism and workhorse attitude Laura's bringing to the competition. Kind of like a Mark Spitz, but with maybe less raw talent.
I love the Mane 4's commentary on her, also. These little meditations on denial are amazing, and the way they connect the rhomboid of competition is certainly tidy.
- Laura is everything a trans woman dreams of being.
- I think I hate Laura
- Everything I want, Laura already has.
Good little round. The way that these men exist in a nonplace so far does a ton for the story. It makes this incredibly flexible sense of personal locality, and asks the reader to visit a kind of expressionist hell-cavern.
This Book is Like the Meat Circus Level from Psychonauts
I for one am just glad SOMEONE is taking the scourge of trans women invading male spaces seriously!
The comparison is self-evident.
Kickoff
Okay, 1 week. Surely next chapter we'll get some action. The suspense is killing me.
There's Always This Year
I have felt like a champion before, even having won nothing but the desire to be alive in a day I woke up not wanting to be alive in. I deserve something for that, even if it is a parade of my own making. An invention, which is all the spoils of winning are anyway. Breathtaking inventions, to be sure. But inventions, nonetheless.
It doesn't really matter what the sport is, nor the trophy. Hard recommend There's Always This Year as a meditation on sport and struggle and symbol, the damn book rules.