sev @sev@witches.town

Ow my everything hurts.

"So, what if it was never going to be easier? Would you keep doing it, then?" Yes, dammit. I would persevere even if I knew it wouldn't get eaiser. But then I'd be *angry* about it, too. Ugh, therapy. I suppose technically I do come here to get my buttons pushed on purpose.

I really just need to accept that socks are an ablative technology for me and that after a half-dozen uses I will have worn a hole in the heel & need to replace them.

In related news, today is the last hurrah for my beloved rainbow jolly roger socks. :(

"His heart knew that whether or not he had meant it, whether or not he had been duped, whether or not he had been lied to, he shared the guilt....He had not been the one to cause the horror, but he had been part of making it happen." -- Angel of Destruction, under #Jurisdiction

*smug*

The thing that haunts me about Angel is the truth of the bare facts: the Langsarik's resistance of #Jurisdiction *did* create any number of situations that resulted in tragedy, even if they themselves did all they could to reduce its effect on the relatively "innocent".

Just surviving an unjust system is never clean -- there are always compromises. This is true of resistance, too.

The version of the story where they are pirates isn't entirely wrong. The system can be blamed for making them that way, but they are not easy heroes.

The third novel under #Jurisdiction (chronologically, not publication order) is Angel of Destruction. There's a different set of protagonists, but they, too, ate trying to sow justice within a fundamentally unjust system.

One of the antagonists is a fanatic who craves vengeance over peace; he claims anything other than blood fails to be just punishment for resistance.

"...it will be over, even if it can never be right." Return to Rudistal is where Andrej learns to live with himself despite being complicit in atrocity.

Which is an important life skill for all of us.

#Jurisdiction

One lesson of Prisoner of Conscience is that if we are to survive under a corrupt regime, we must be scrupulously careful of others' dignity, when we have been placed in a position of power over them. #Jurisdiction

"...he hadn't wanted to believe it .... Should he have kept a closer watch on things?" Oh, the tender anguish of the newly-woke, and all around the less-privileged have known it all along, helpless to even be heard. Prisoner of Conscience is definitely not my favorite of the #Jurisdiction novels but this time I'm paying attention to how its resolved specifically with this lens.

These early novels are a white-savior narrative; Koscuisko comes in from outside Fleet (but from a culture nonetheless Under #Jurisdiction ), bumbles about, and those less-privileged than he pay for his newly-awakened sense of outrage. But as the series wears on, the larger picture causes the reader to question: do Koscuisko's actions bring any lasting systemic rescue?

Or do his compromises with a corrupt regime just serve as a safety valve for people's outrage against authoritarian rule?

One of the themes of the whole series forms the central tension of this first book -- resistance vs. complicity, of a good man within an evil regime. And because this is the first book, after setting up that tension, Matthews lets us relax into his success on the personal level, without rubbing our noses in the fact that saving a few men using #Jurisdiction rules doesn't change the system at all.