This is the first novels I've even heard of that discusses polyamory in a remotely respectable way. Maybe that's because American culture villainizes it so there's no way it gets picked up by major publishers.
N. K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" has a a poly relationship which i thought was really good when I read it years ago. I need to re-read those books...
Not in relation to the poly aspect, but in relation to the pronoun and non-binary aspect, the Imperial Radch trilogy of books by Ann Leckie does something similar, though in a different form. The protagonist is part of a far future human civilization that only uses she/her pronouns to refer to absolutely everyone, with them effectively not having a concept of separate genders as every form of expression and identity is just considered equally valid and normal. Since it's within the protagonists prospective, all other characters are referred to with these pronouns. This is interesting because the other characters, but not the protagonist, are given descriptive details including a lot of commonly gendered traits, but then always referred to with the same pronouns and terms such as "mother" or "sister", and by the end of the series, it ends up making what are seen as very gendered binary pronouns and terms in our lives feel like they are non-binary and gender less through how the books use them. It's also interesting as the main character comes into contact with members of other human societies outside her own that still hold very binary views of gender identity and expression, and she always views these societies as confusing in the limited scope allowed to their members for self expression and the limits placed on them bizarre and arbitrary , and through experiencing the book in her eyes you see our own rigid gender ideas as weirdly arbitrary and restricting (though part of that might come from the fact that I myself am non-binary and autistic, so have a very outside prospective from binary gendered society) It also has some exploration of the perspectives of different forms of intelligence, as the main character is a fragment of a ship's hivemind AI stuck in a cyborg body, and has the aspect of being unable to assign a gender to a primary character with the protagonist, whose description is intentionally non-gendered (ie, she mentions what is basically dysphoria about the singing voice of the body she now has, but it is never mentioned what it is about the voice that bothers her). Anyways, this is an already far too long comment on a 3 year old video, but just felt the need to throw this out there for anyone wanting books that similarly challenge the gender binary and people's assumptions about pronouns. I'm also very excited to read this book now, as I hadn't known of any other books that explored pronouns and gender in a similar way to Ann Leckie's work, so glad I found this video!
I've recently picked up "Iron Widow" by Xiran Jay Zhao, and while the story itself is not a romance, its romantic subplot does feature a polyamorous throuple, which I really enjoyed for its casualty and for deliberately subverting the love triangle trope.
@@samschmit7181 the joke is about maskulin reproductive anatomy so a male partner or masculine bodied individual is sort of required to make the joke work
While CCC has a small install base, a good chunk of it seems to be made up of some of the most important (to me) TH-camrs on the platform, so hearing Joseph isn't unexpected.
does no one else notice the use of coloring words in these videos? the way the colored words is used is so simple yet so good, it helped me understand a word or two and really easily conveyed a point he was making. i swear this shit’s genius and i’ve never really seen much else like it
This is a super interesting take on a complex topic I never, for some reason, expected to be addressed in fiction. Even as an enby myself I still catch myself doing the thing you did sometimes, trying to parse out if someone is a man or woman based on context clues and sterotypes, even when gender has nothing to do with the topic at hand or is explicitly removed from the context. I'm still coming to terms with Gender Stuff and I feel like giving this book a go could be helpful both in understanding my own identity and understanding Gender Stuff as a whole. Def gonna look into it.
I really like this channel a lot, I haven't heard of you before Joseph Anderson recommended you but I'm reallly happy to see an lgbt book reviewer/discussion youtube channel. Also rq your bird avatar is so fucking cute. I love it a lot.
HOLY CRAP. I was really struggling with pronouns in literature yesterday, so the timing of this couldn't be better. The skit I read used they/their, but, this turns out to be rather confusing in a literary sense. Though I'm beginning to suspect my brain simply isn't used to reading depersonalized pronouns without getting confused about who the action is happening to. I'm of the mindset if love is defined in this way, then EVERYONE should be bi/pan romantic. But I guess... you'd have to define where the boundary between friendship and romance is. Or what romance is, exactly - which is a question I keep asking myself given I'm writing about it at the moment.
It's definitely a mental adjustment, but I can say from experience, it doesn't take long using de-gendered pronouns for it to start clicking. Well, romantic orientation simply describes a person's *capacity* to be romantically attracted to someone else. Much like how being heterosexual doesn't mean you're attracted to *every* person of the opposite gender, just that the range of people you would be attracted to are those who the opposite gender to you. You can still not be attracted either because of non-gender related factors, or because you're just not looking for anyone. If I'm panromantic, then that still means I can form non-romantic friendships with everyone. Just because someone is in my range of possible romantic attractions doesn't necessarily mean I want to get all kissy with them.
Question do you have a preferred length in novels? Like do you prefer a great short book, that can hold your attention but can get out before it goes to far to possibly ruin the narrative? Or a longer book that may or may not flop at the end by overcomplicating the story. (Granted im not saying thats always how it goes but i mean...it can.)
Book length doesn't factor too much into whether I enjoy a novel. I've abandoned short novellas, and completed huge epics. If a book is good, I'll continue reading it. Granted, a longer book has a greater chance of losing me at some point because it'll just have a greater chance of having bad content in it *somewhere*, but I've never abandoned an otherwise good book for being too long.
@@CloudCuckooCountry in that case i suggest a small Sci-fi called the Transaile saga, (been a couple of years since ive read it.) But its a good little book that i remember quite fondly, its no masterpiece by any means but it told a good story from what i remember. Its no Poe, or Sophies world, but I'd say give it a look.
Zie/Hir are specifically old as shit, *checks google*, oh wow, older than I thought, with direct etymological roots over 150 years back and english dictionary appearances about a century back; popular in some subcultures for at least the last few decades as well, though less dominant in their role amidst the more recent wave of actual neopronouns.
@@cultreader9751 Simple explanation: sexual love is “wow they’re attractive I want to pleasure them erotically/want them to pleasure me” romantic love is “wow, I want to cuddle and kiss this person, I want to wake up next to them and I like to go on dates with them.” You can have one without the other.
I gotta say I like how just one character is experiencing the gender thing, as too many of these books make highly unbelievable situations where everybody is just coincidentally going through the same thing at the same time. Its not a normal thing to go through so isolating it to one character just is more logical.
I agree, but Cuckoo specifically says he means a cisgender should have questioned their gender identity, and as a cishet person who did once question themselves I agree.
I'm someone who really struggles at the very IDEA of attempting to read, I haven't read a book as an adult at all, as I lack the patience sadly, or attention span. It's a poor excuse, but I want to be better about it. Reading anything longer than needed for school is a huge struggle, do you think this book might be a good starting point for me seeing as I'm both poly and nonbinary?
I would say it's definitely worth a try. If it's attention span that's getting in your way, I'd recommend finding a book with relatively short chapters and committing to reading at least one chapter per day before bed. So, in addition to Giddy Death and Strange Demise, I'd also recommend Snare by Lilja Sigurdadottir, Dragoncharm by Graham Edwards, and I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. Another thing I can recommend is to try audiobooks and radioplays. As much of an advocate for on-the-page reading as I am, some people just prefer listening to reading and that's still a valid way to experience literature. You can ease yourself into it with the same idea: one chapter per night before bed.
Yay, 1,000th Like! To be fair, Dick and Dom's conversation seems not entirely dissimilar from a conversation I had with one of my friends. Our conversation was ridiculous and honest and we laughed. We are still friends to this day. But yeah I would not want to transcribe the conversation for others to read because wow. I agree with you, props to the author for actually writing it down. I'm also very interested to see the story through Rutti's eyes, for several reasons. As an enby who uses they/them for myself (and who daydreams about learning Finnish & moving to Finland to escape gendered pronouns), the idea of not telegraphing / pinning a gender on a stranger is also familiar to me in my corners of the internet, where many people don't even put their gender in their profile - I've defaulted to calling people "they" unless they've confirmend they use other pronouns (har har). I'm also still not sure how to pronounce many neopronouns either. So I guess a book won't help me with pronounciation even if it helps me with pronouns. And definitely agreed that all characters (and people) could do with a little introspection on gender and their own relationship to it - you don't have to be trans or even gnc at the end of the day for it to be interesting and useful.
I hate to say it, but I think you are wrong here, or at least overly optimistic. If we’re playing chess and I can’t find my queen, I can put a dime in that piece’s place, and if we both agree that the dime is a valid stand-in, we can continue to play as normal. Similarly, if I see an invented pronoun on the page that I don’t agree with, I can make an agreement with myself to pronounce “they/them” in my head instead of “internalizing” the neopronoun as I read like you described. Ironically, your movie example would be a MORE effective means of this internalization, as a viewer will be forced to hear the pronouns and/or read them in the subtitles, hindering their ability to intercept the meaning of the text before it is created in the mind of the viewer
I actually attempted to mentally substitute zie/hir with they/them while reading the book, but it didn’t work. The only thing that worked for me was adjusting to the new pronouns and getting used to them. Granted, you may have different success with that. I’m certain that someone can still acclimate through hearing zie/hir spoken and through speaking the pronouns themselves. I never said reading the pronouns was the only way to acclimate, just that it might be more effective if you’re determined to read the book to its conclusion. If I’m flat wrong and most people don’t find reading to help them adjust in the way that I say it does, that’s fine, I’ll accept that, but the only way to find out for sure would be for more people to try out reading or listening as a form of mental adjustment. In the meantime, I think it’s reasonable to stand by the theory in this video.
I'm a little confused as to what you mean with this book acclimating one to invented pronouns. Could you expand on how reading a text is different from hearing the same text? How is decoding language visually rather than audibly producing this acclimatization effect? I mean, if I listened to an audio-book version instead of reading it, do I not need to use the concept of invented pronouns to understand it?
It's a bit of an abstract theory, but I'll try to clarify: Linguistics differentiates between written-language and spoken-language as two entirely different modes of communication that people process differently. This is why you can have people living with various mental disorders that affect their writing capacity, but not their speaking capacity, or vice versa. The most commonly known one is probably dyslexia. The basic idea is: reading/writing and listening/speaking take different pathways through the brain when being processed as information. This next bit largely draws from my experience and the experiences of other avid readers of classic fiction whom I've talked to, and it's a bit artsy, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt: in the act of reading, your brain has to use the text on the page essentially as code to reconstruct a "voice" in your own mind. The "voice" of the narrator essentially becomes your mind's own "voice". So when you read "zie/hir" off of the page, it's your mind that is using the pronouns to construct meaning. This is different from if you heard a speaker using "zie/hir" because a different voice is providing the meaning. You may still understand what they mean, but it's not *your mind* that's providing the voice which is using those pronouns. Since reading requires you to provide the voice of the narrator in your own mind, reading invented pronouns can be a way of practicing them with your mind's voice, which can help you acclimate to thinking with them. Hope this helped!
0:23 If you think that Title is _"one hand of a mouthfull"_ then you must have never read (and I qoute) "The Complete Life of William Mckinley and story of his Assasssination An Authentic and Offical Memorial Edition Containing Every Incident in the Career of the Immortal Statesman, Soldier, Orator, and Patriot." Author Marshall Everett, copyright 1901.
I understand that you probably don't want to hear people nagging you to review some random book they like or hate, but... It'd be very cool if you could review something from Brandon Sanderson. If you are inclined. And have the time. And something to say. And don't have other reasons not to. Just an FYI.
7:53 - You note that, but, at least in my case, any pronoun, that isnt one used in the 3 languages i primarily use, tends to get a get a "autocorrect" or not be acknowledged as a word to describe a participant of whatever scene/defaults it to neuter. For the e.g. Zie, due to internal s & z in german being almost the same, gets to be a "honourable" you, hir forms into her or him unless the context doesnt fit, etc.
I'm not against invented pronouns, though I haven't met someone who uses them myself, and I don't use them. It would be... hypocritical, I guess, for me as a trans woman to be against it, even though I find it honestly bizarre. That's not the point I'm getting at though - when I heard that during the NB character's perspective they use invented pronouns for everyone else, I was... a little taken back. Th- that's not how gender or pronouns work. That'd be like if, as a trans girl, I called _everyone_ regardless of gender, sex, or identity she/her, ma'am, Ms./Mrs.- Like, you see the problem, don't you?
Julie Winchester I can understand the problem if we’re talking about someone doing this in real life. If there was a real person calling people pronouns they didn’t wish to be called, regardless of their intent, that would be wrong. That being said, I think it’s fine for this to happen in fiction as an exploratory exercise. Fiction is a space where people can explore topics and ideas in a safer capacity than in real life. Obviously that doesn’t mean every topic is fair game, or that there aren’t wrong ways to explore certain topics, but in this case no real person is being misgendered and the novel doesn’t advocate for people to use invented pronouns to refer to others against their wishes. It’s simply one way of exploring the idea of de-gendered language in fiction. I can understand if you still find the idea distasteful, but I don’t see that as a problem with the book (or with you, to be clear) because I still believe that fiction, up to a point, should have leeway to explore topics that may be considered distasteful.
Also, this may be bizarre, but Uh Are the chibis you used for the characters a stylistic choice as a, for lack of a better term aside from "book reviewer", furry TH-camr, or are they actually animals in the book. And Caroline seems to have a rounded shape, perhaps to differentiate her from the NB character without slapping boobs on her stick puppet, but I mean- is she actually a chubby character? I don't read much these days, but like- the lack of positive representstion of diverse body types has always bothered me, so I just wanted to know if she's actually meant to be a big girl. ^^;
They're not actually animals in the book. The animal puppets are just a fun way of representing the novel's characters. The "roundness" of Caroline's puppet is a consequence of how I draw the characters' clothes over the base image. Drawing dresses tends to make the wide bottoms of all the puppets way more obvious. There's no symbolism behind that, it's just the visual style. There are a few characters with chubby body-types in this novel, however I can't recall if Caroline is one of them. Richard is, if I recall correctly.
A person I watch on TH-cam has talked about polyamory before, I think it was related to Fallout 4? Honestly monogamy seems more of a religious thing than anything of actual concern, but we're so ingrained in the culture of singular marriage that we never think about the possibility of other relationships.
@@pyrix Can attest to the fact I thought monogamy was a ridiculous thing to be culturally enforced as a child with no outside exposure to the concept of polyamory.
Are there any polyamorous romance novels you've enjoyed? Leave a reply to this comment so people can scroll through for recommendations!
This is the first novels I've even heard of that discusses polyamory in a remotely respectable way. Maybe that's because American culture villainizes it so there's no way it gets picked up by major publishers.
N. K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" has a a poly relationship which i thought was really good when I read it years ago. I need to re-read those books...
Does The Witcher count?
Not in relation to the poly aspect, but in relation to the pronoun and non-binary aspect, the Imperial Radch trilogy of books by Ann Leckie does something similar, though in a different form.
The protagonist is part of a far future human civilization that only uses she/her pronouns to refer to absolutely everyone, with them effectively not having a concept of separate genders as every form of expression and identity is just considered equally valid and normal. Since it's within the protagonists prospective, all other characters are referred to with these pronouns. This is interesting because the other characters, but not the protagonist, are given descriptive details including a lot of commonly gendered traits, but then always referred to with the same pronouns and terms such as "mother" or "sister", and by the end of the series, it ends up making what are seen as very gendered binary pronouns and terms in our lives feel like they are non-binary and gender less through how the books use them.
It's also interesting as the main character comes into contact with members of other human societies outside her own that still hold very binary views of gender identity and expression, and she always views these societies as confusing in the limited scope allowed to their members for self expression and the limits placed on them bizarre and arbitrary , and through experiencing the book in her eyes you see our own rigid gender ideas as weirdly arbitrary and restricting (though part of that might come from the fact that I myself am non-binary and autistic, so have a very outside prospective from binary gendered society)
It also has some exploration of the perspectives of different forms of intelligence, as the main character is a fragment of a ship's hivemind AI stuck in a cyborg body, and has the aspect of being unable to assign a gender to a primary character with the protagonist, whose description is intentionally non-gendered (ie, she mentions what is basically dysphoria about the singing voice of the body she now has, but it is never mentioned what it is about the voice that bothers her).
Anyways, this is an already far too long comment on a 3 year old video, but just felt the need to throw this out there for anyone wanting books that similarly challenge the gender binary and people's assumptions about pronouns.
I'm also very excited to read this book now, as I hadn't known of any other books that explored pronouns and gender in a similar way to Ann Leckie's work, so glad I found this video!
I've recently picked up "Iron Widow" by Xiran Jay Zhao, and while the story itself is not a romance, its romantic subplot does feature a polyamorous throuple, which I really enjoyed for its casualty and for deliberately subverting the love triangle trope.
4:00 Hey, as a straight dude, that's legit how we tell each other we love each other.
FYI: I ran the first joke past my actual ex and he thought it was hilarious
Good that he has a sense of humor 👍
What a good sport!
“He?”
@@samschmit7181 the joke is about maskulin reproductive anatomy so a male partner or masculine bodied individual is sort of required to make the joke work
@samschmit7181 Wow! The person reviewing a book about the LGBT community, is part of the LGBT community!
Mandalore practically shouting his lines is so unspeakably perfect
Once I realized the two male leads were Dick and Dom, I couldn't stop giggling.
I was not expecting to hear Joseph Anderson
While CCC has a small install base, a good chunk of it seems to be made up of some of the most important (to me) TH-camrs on the platform, so hearing Joseph isn't unexpected.
I'm here from his tweet, so I definitely was.
Cloud cuckoo country is that one quiet kid who claims his dad owns Nintendo and is actually right
3:59 Hentai and porn producers have nothing on this. And your delivery, glorious.
Scratch that, Joseph is glorious.
So my main takeaway from this is Cloud openly complimenting the author's balls. I never realised he could be so forward.
You of all people should know how forward I can be
Never thought I'd relate to a cartoon birds ex boyfriend, yet here we are. 2020 is fucking wild.
does no one else notice the use of coloring words in these videos? the way the colored words is used is so simple yet so good, it helped me understand a word or two and really easily conveyed a point he was making. i swear this shit’s genius and i’ve never really seen much else like it
This is a super interesting take on a complex topic I never, for some reason, expected to be addressed in fiction. Even as an enby myself I still catch myself doing the thing you did sometimes, trying to parse out if someone is a man or woman based on context clues and sterotypes, even when gender has nothing to do with the topic at hand or is explicitly removed from the context. I'm still coming to terms with Gender Stuff and I feel like giving this book a go could be helpful both in understanding my own identity and understanding Gender Stuff as a whole. Def gonna look into it.
3:59 Oh my god that dialogue deserves a medal.
I really like this channel a lot, I haven't heard of you before Joseph Anderson recommended you but I'm reallly happy to see an lgbt book reviewer/discussion youtube channel.
Also rq your bird avatar is so fucking cute. I love it a lot.
HOLY CRAP. I was really struggling with pronouns in literature yesterday, so the timing of this couldn't be better. The skit I read used they/their, but, this turns out to be rather confusing in a literary sense. Though I'm beginning to suspect my brain simply isn't used to reading depersonalized pronouns without getting confused about who the action is happening to.
I'm of the mindset if love is defined in this way, then EVERYONE should be bi/pan romantic. But I guess... you'd have to define where the boundary between friendship and romance is. Or what romance is, exactly - which is a question I keep asking myself given I'm writing about it at the moment.
It's definitely a mental adjustment, but I can say from experience, it doesn't take long using de-gendered pronouns for it to start clicking.
Well, romantic orientation simply describes a person's *capacity* to be romantically attracted to someone else. Much like how being heterosexual doesn't mean you're attracted to *every* person of the opposite gender, just that the range of people you would be attracted to are those who the opposite gender to you. You can still not be attracted either because of non-gender related factors, or because you're just not looking for anyone. If I'm panromantic, then that still means I can form non-romantic friendships with everyone. Just because someone is in my range of possible romantic attractions doesn't necessarily mean I want to get all kissy with them.
Hearing Joseph Anderson had me dying laughing! 🤣
As someone who is actually in a poly relationship, i may have to read this just based on that... look forward to what you're working on next o/
Oh boy a poly
These latest videos aren't always my favorite subject matter to watch, but I'm glad you're making them and glad you're making videos again in general.
The gull to have the character outright say their feelings. Just... it's blunt, but it works and I love it.
Were those Mandalore and Joseph A.?
Yes
Wait, as in MandaloreGaming? What part?
@@pyrix 4:00 I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL. MY COCK DOESN'T LIKE YOU EITHER, BUT I LOVE YOU TOO.
Question do you have a preferred length in novels? Like do you prefer a great short book, that can hold your attention but can get out before it goes to far to possibly ruin the narrative? Or a longer book that may or may not flop at the end by overcomplicating the story. (Granted im not saying thats always how it goes but i mean...it can.)
Book length doesn't factor too much into whether I enjoy a novel. I've abandoned short novellas, and completed huge epics. If a book is good, I'll continue reading it. Granted, a longer book has a greater chance of losing me at some point because it'll just have a greater chance of having bad content in it *somewhere*, but I've never abandoned an otherwise good book for being too long.
@@CloudCuckooCountry in that case i suggest a small Sci-fi called the Transaile saga, (been a couple of years since ive read it.) But its a good little book that i remember quite fondly, its no masterpiece by any means but it told a good story from what i remember. Its no Poe, or Sophies world, but I'd say give it a look.
Zie/Hir are specifically old as shit, *checks google*, oh wow, older than I thought, with direct etymological roots over 150 years back and english dictionary appearances about a century back; popular in some subcultures for at least the last few decades as well, though less dominant in their role amidst the more recent wave of actual neopronouns.
bruh imagine Joe wearing a Cat School armour shouting those lines to Mandalore who's decked out in Space Marines gear...
Nice to see a difference drawn between romantic/sexual love!
I'm asexual but I cannot comprehend the distinction between the two.
@@cultreader9751 Simple explanation: sexual love is “wow they’re attractive I want to pleasure them erotically/want them to pleasure me” romantic love is “wow, I want to cuddle and kiss this person, I want to wake up next to them and I like to go on dates with them.” You can have one without the other.
Ok, so he is DEFINITELY going to talk about the Twilight Saga
I gotta say I like how just one character is experiencing the gender thing, as too many of these books make highly unbelievable situations where everybody is just coincidentally going through the same thing at the same time. Its not a normal thing to go through so isolating it to one character just is more logical.
I agree, but Cuckoo specifically says he means a cisgender should have questioned their gender identity, and as a cishet person who did once question themselves I agree.
Holy shit, the intro joke completely blindsided me when paired with the laugh track
4:14 that got so blunt it's borderline spherical it can't get any more blunt
I'm someone who really struggles at the very IDEA of attempting to read, I haven't read a book as an adult at all, as I lack the patience sadly, or attention span. It's a poor excuse, but I want to be better about it. Reading anything longer than needed for school is a huge struggle, do you think this book might be a good starting point for me seeing as I'm both poly and nonbinary?
I would say it's definitely worth a try. If it's attention span that's getting in your way, I'd recommend finding a book with relatively short chapters and committing to reading at least one chapter per day before bed. So, in addition to Giddy Death and Strange Demise, I'd also recommend Snare by Lilja Sigurdadottir, Dragoncharm by Graham Edwards, and I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver.
Another thing I can recommend is to try audiobooks and radioplays. As much of an advocate for on-the-page reading as I am, some people just prefer listening to reading and that's still a valid way to experience literature. You can ease yourself into it with the same idea: one chapter per night before bed.
@@CloudCuckooCountry Thanks so much for the response
Honestly, this is your funniest review so far that isn't part of your Book Burnings. I'm thoroughly entertained.
I am in a poly relationship and have been looking for more poly media, so this video came at the right time!
It requires a lot of trust & love to maintain poly without falling into the online-friend trap of not feeling like anybody is there for you.
@@littlemonztergaming8665 It does, but the end result of a successful one is wonderful and loving.
ShadowmarkReturns woahhh
Hell nah…. Lmao
@@definetlyyes89 ?
Yay, 1,000th Like!
To be fair, Dick and Dom's conversation seems not entirely dissimilar from a conversation I had with one of my friends. Our conversation was ridiculous and honest and we laughed. We are still friends to this day. But yeah I would not want to transcribe the conversation for others to read because wow. I agree with you, props to the author for actually writing it down.
I'm also very interested to see the story through Rutti's eyes, for several reasons. As an enby who uses they/them for myself (and who daydreams about learning Finnish & moving to Finland to escape gendered pronouns), the idea of not telegraphing / pinning a gender on a stranger is also familiar to me in my corners of the internet, where many people don't even put their gender in their profile - I've defaulted to calling people "they" unless they've confirmend they use other pronouns (har har). I'm also still not sure how to pronounce many neopronouns either. So I guess a book won't help me with pronounciation even if it helps me with pronouns.
And definitely agreed that all characters (and people) could do with a little introspection on gender and their own relationship to it - you don't have to be trans or even gnc at the end of the day for it to be interesting and useful.
Describing a bromamce?
Sweet another book recommendation! Once school is done I'll have an entire wish list to read. Thanks!
The cameo from the author came from nowhere
I hate to say it, but I think you are wrong here, or at least overly optimistic. If we’re playing chess and I can’t find my queen, I can put a dime in that piece’s place, and if we both agree that the dime is a valid stand-in, we can continue to play as normal. Similarly, if I see an invented pronoun on the page that I don’t agree with, I can make an agreement with myself to pronounce “they/them” in my head instead of “internalizing” the neopronoun as I read like you described. Ironically, your movie example would be a MORE effective means of this internalization, as a viewer will be forced to hear the pronouns and/or read them in the subtitles, hindering their ability to intercept the meaning of the text before it is created in the mind of the viewer
I actually attempted to mentally substitute zie/hir with they/them while reading the book, but it didn’t work. The only thing that worked for me was adjusting to the new pronouns and getting used to them. Granted, you may have different success with that.
I’m certain that someone can still acclimate through hearing zie/hir spoken and through speaking the pronouns themselves. I never said reading the pronouns was the only way to acclimate, just that it might be more effective if you’re determined to read the book to its conclusion.
If I’m flat wrong and most people don’t find reading to help them adjust in the way that I say it does, that’s fine, I’ll accept that, but the only way to find out for sure would be for more people to try out reading or listening as a form of mental adjustment. In the meantime, I think it’s reasonable to stand by the theory in this video.
I love the rainbow bar for audio pickup during the interview!
I'd love a discussion of the Dresden files since while i could never get into it I'm curious of why others like it.
this has an assload of quality, and thats more than i can say about *my* ex, OHHHH!
I'm a little confused as to what you mean with this book acclimating one to invented pronouns. Could you expand on how reading a text is different from hearing the same text? How is decoding language visually rather than audibly producing this acclimatization effect?
I mean, if I listened to an audio-book version instead of reading it, do I not need to use the concept of invented pronouns to understand it?
It's a bit of an abstract theory, but I'll try to clarify:
Linguistics differentiates between written-language and spoken-language as two entirely different modes of communication that people process differently. This is why you can have people living with various mental disorders that affect their writing capacity, but not their speaking capacity, or vice versa. The most commonly known one is probably dyslexia. The basic idea is: reading/writing and listening/speaking take different pathways through the brain when being processed as information.
This next bit largely draws from my experience and the experiences of other avid readers of classic fiction whom I've talked to, and it's a bit artsy, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt: in the act of reading, your brain has to use the text on the page essentially as code to reconstruct a "voice" in your own mind. The "voice" of the narrator essentially becomes your mind's own "voice". So when you read "zie/hir" off of the page, it's your mind that is using the pronouns to construct meaning.
This is different from if you heard a speaker using "zie/hir" because a different voice is providing the meaning. You may still understand what they mean, but it's not *your mind* that's providing the voice which is using those pronouns.
Since reading requires you to provide the voice of the narrator in your own mind, reading invented pronouns can be a way of practicing them with your mind's voice, which can help you acclimate to thinking with them.
Hope this helped!
Very late on this, but here is a meaningless comment to satiate the algorithm.
Jospeh Anderson brought me here. wtf is this i love it
0:23
If you think that Title is _"one hand of a mouthfull"_ then you must have never read (and I qoute) "The Complete Life of William Mckinley and story of his Assasssination An Authentic and Offical Memorial Edition Containing Every Incident in the Career of the Immortal Statesman, Soldier, Orator, and Patriot." Author Marshall Everett, copyright 1901.
4:15 Ok, but is it as good as the owlfuckery from The Ancient Solitary Reign?
We all know what it did to you.
(12:43 - 12:57)
By expanding your content, is that still more or less centered around fictional and nonfictional literature?
Possibly
If you ever consider it - a dive into discworld would be a lot of fun))
Also, GREAT VIDEO! Sorry I forgot to say that in my first comment.
Thanks very much. Glad you enjoyed my video.
How dare you review a book that's only available on audible.
Strange. There were still physical copies available first and second-hand when I made the review
you are a dork 8:37 I got permission, and I'm gonna use it. Have a nice day.
Do you ever feel like "breaking character" in the future or are you not putting up a character for these videos?
I experiment with the CCC character.
I judgmentally look down on people in poly relationships and I don't know why.
4:00
gg for that click bait comment at the end
I ain't touching this with a 10 ft pole but good to see videos and the quality is still top notch!
I understand that you probably don't want to hear people nagging you to review some random book they like or hate, but...
It'd be very cool if you could review something from Brandon Sanderson.
If you are inclined.
And have the time.
And something to say.
And don't have other reasons not to.
Just an FYI.
I'm not really an avid reader of fantasy or scifi, so Brandon Sanderson has never been on my radar, unfortunately.
7:53 - You note that, but, at least in my case, any pronoun, that isnt one used in the 3 languages i primarily use, tends to get a get a "autocorrect" or not be acknowledged as a word to describe a participant of whatever scene/defaults it to neuter. For the e.g. Zie, due to internal s & z in german being almost the same, gets to be a "honourable" you, hir forms into her or him unless the context doesnt fit, etc.
Your laugh is amazing
I'm not against invented pronouns, though I haven't met someone who uses them myself, and I don't use them.
It would be... hypocritical, I guess, for me as a trans woman to be against it, even though I find it honestly bizarre.
That's not the point I'm getting at though - when I heard that during the NB character's perspective they use invented pronouns for everyone else, I was... a little taken back.
Th- that's not how gender or pronouns work.
That'd be like if, as a trans girl, I called _everyone_ regardless of gender, sex, or identity she/her, ma'am, Ms./Mrs.-
Like, you see the problem, don't you?
Julie Winchester I can understand the problem if we’re talking about someone doing this in real life. If there was a real person calling people pronouns they didn’t wish to be called, regardless of their intent, that would be wrong.
That being said, I think it’s fine for this to happen in fiction as an exploratory exercise. Fiction is a space where people can explore topics and ideas in a safer capacity than in real life. Obviously that doesn’t mean every topic is fair game, or that there aren’t wrong ways to explore certain topics, but in this case no real person is being misgendered and the novel doesn’t advocate for people to use invented pronouns to refer to others against their wishes. It’s simply one way of exploring the idea of de-gendered language in fiction.
I can understand if you still find the idea distasteful, but I don’t see that as a problem with the book (or with you, to be clear) because I still believe that fiction, up to a point, should have leeway to explore topics that may be considered distasteful.
Also, this may be bizarre, but
Uh
Are the chibis you used for the characters a stylistic choice as a, for lack of a better term aside from "book reviewer", furry TH-camr, or are they actually animals in the book.
And Caroline seems to have a rounded shape, perhaps to differentiate her from the NB character without slapping boobs on her stick puppet, but I mean- is she actually a chubby character?
I don't read much these days, but like- the lack of positive representstion of diverse body types has always bothered me, so I just wanted to know if she's actually meant to be a big girl. ^^;
They're not actually animals in the book. The animal puppets are just a fun way of representing the novel's characters.
The "roundness" of Caroline's puppet is a consequence of how I draw the characters' clothes over the base image. Drawing dresses tends to make the wide bottoms of all the puppets way more obvious. There's no symbolism behind that, it's just the visual style.
There are a few characters with chubby body-types in this novel, however I can't recall if Caroline is one of them. Richard is, if I recall correctly.
@@CloudCuckooCountry Ah, alright. Thank you. ^^
ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppopaganda
Comment for algorithm boost
A person I watch on TH-cam has talked about polyamory before, I think it was related to Fallout 4? Honestly monogamy seems more of a religious thing than anything of actual concern, but we're so ingrained in the culture of singular marriage that we never think about the possibility of other relationships.
There's no reason why monogamy should be culturally enforced in the way that it is. Everyone's best lived life is different.
@@CloudCuckooCountry BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN! /s the children, or you uptight boomers? :P
@@pyrix Can attest to the fact I thought monogamy was a ridiculous thing to be culturally enforced as a child with no outside exposure to the concept of polyamory.
And this is bad for?
@@helrem ...?