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# Readings
## A Minnow, or Perhaps a Giant Squid
## A Minnow, or Perhaps a Colossal Squid
## Dinosaurs, etc
* Al:
* The comedic aspects are really great. Some of the lines are just fantastic
* Didn't realize would be reading about vore.
* Fantastical elements intertwined with everything, felt almost Wes Anderson-y - "So, by the way, language is a thing! What a mess!"
* Dildonic appliance
* Kyell:
* Love the subtle humor of Damiana's paper. The first three times, she says "But let us talk natural philosophy" and then she never does.
* The humor is paired with serious/weighty topics
* The third paragraph drops Anthropovores and Concupiscent (pisc as fish root, even if not in the meaning), Mariposan as secondary world/alt history
* Parenthetical "(how?)" gives narrator's judgement
* Written work is presented to the readers directly as part of the story and one of the characters in the story is also reading that work, gives empathy to that character because you're having the experience of reading the work and so does that other character, you're experiencing the same thing
* Character work:
* Characters are mirrored but also in opposition:
* Damiana has been leaving the society in search of truth
* explicitly rejecting society in lots of ways
* "I'm looking for the answers you only make stories about and your stories are dumb. The path to the truth is to reject everything"
* Estrella from early on has been an intimate part of the society (whether or not she wants to actually do the thing)
* she considers turning the fish back into humans, but she never did
* She recognizes the same problems in the society as Damiana, but chooses to embrace them
* Estrella becomes Damiana's voice in society, and also the pescification is a good thing, giving Damiana what she wanted in the end
* The executioner is laconic, not her tía, but everyone's tía
* The Reina could do rarework, but couldn't think any bigger than fish? Really?
* Damiana says 'turn me into a squid' but los Matadores gift something else in the form of chupasirenas - you get your reward beyond imagining via your suffering without faltering, both have been trying to get across that there was something more
* not a deus ex machina, despite the gods literally swooping in, because it's driven by a character's choice, sacrifice, and connection - everyone has shallow truths and this is a deep one, and really, nothing is fixed
* World:
* Arcs are intertwined with society
* Names:
* Queen is "Queen of Shadows"
* Estrella is "Star" (a guide in the purpose of sea)
* Damiana is "Tame/domesticated", which she rejects, though chupasirenas are pets of sirenas - she rejects the queen's fixation on money
* Makyo: "Damiana is also a plant used in triple sec sometimses. May be reading too much into it, but it shows some in her almost drunken bravery."
* "Apparently also an anxiolytic, so that it eases anxiety, which shows up in the chupasirenas' role."
* Given the choice of turning into a fish or a bird, we'd probably all choose bird, but in the end, the birds have to protect themselves, while the fish are explicitly protected
* In our own history, if you murder someone, you can buy your way out of prison/punishment if you killed someone of lower status, but if you owe someone money, there is no way to buy your way out by its very definition, and you can't murder your way out of debtor's prison
* Society's obsession with money: if you want to put something like that in, you have to have it in mind and do a revision pass to say the love of money runs counter to the love of the world, where can you explicitly say that? Even if it's just a little moment
* Any time you can do the reversal of bad thing into good thing, it's a super effective device (not just a good thing, but a full on unexpected subversion)
* Kiri:
* It's super charming
* The imagery, esp with trying to get back to the water
* Takes one out of current place and transports reader to another place
* Dry humor lands very well
* Footnotes really polished it off at the end
* Dayna:
* Rants are fantastic, and this is a very good one.
* Trying to get across everything inside her until her very last breath, headed to the gallows
* You train your reader to read your work
* Newsies: "What makes a good headline?" "Nudes! Corpse! Lovenest!" - in this, there are catchy words like mermaids! Gigantic! - those bits are still there to teach you to read so you don't bounce off of it
* $20 words brought in with sarcasm almost as a jibe, intellect as sass
* Rarework is incredibly intimate, and no one is meeting her on that level *except* Damiana because they're both there to be intimate
* Estrella is very thoughtful and is trying to connect with people, and would if only they would reach out in return
* An academic paper introduces a distance between reader and author, but Estrella makes it a more personal thing through her connection
* Her suggestion, so:
* Read this longer ago, almost bounced off it at the beginning
* Form of epistolary narrative (miscellany if not specifically epistles), which takes more attention and energy
* Academic paper provides room for an infodump, which caaan be good, but not necessarily
* Works not just because of the catchy headline which is a whooshy opinionated teaser, but with the paper, they purchased that space
* Makes a very good entry point to a secondary world via worldbuilding and name recognition
* Gives all the characterization of Damiana because she's being remembered at the beginning, and there's a ticking clock of stakes
* "Don't just know about them, fucking respect them" "Don't just treat this like a new whale to hunt to extinction"
* As the threat of fishifying looms, she has owned that decision rather than letting it be done to her
* This paper becomes her memorial, and *then* you find out that the only way she discovered the sirenas was their dead bodies, so this becomes a new yearning
* This is a new payoff that only her connection with Estrella can provide, has gone from tiny minnow death to death at the sirenas' hands to a new third-path payoff, and that's *just* the academic paper, and Estrella gets a third path payoff of an unexpected connection, since Damiana is never coming off and it's finally a good thing
* Footnotes act as an aside
* Damiana's ultimate end as chupasirena is something neither expected, so Estrella's complicitness is a search for something meaningful becomes a connection (which happens whether she wants it or not, she can feel it when they die or whether or not they'll come back/turn back; Damiana gives it willingly and Estrella gets a full connection)
* Big theme of the story is said right off: think bigger, and not just bigger but grander
* Both settings and worlds mirror each other:
* Eternal el Estanque vs eternal maelstrom
* Murderers into birds: you reduce both lives into kill or be killed in grand way; but with debtors, shove them in a box out of the way and call it mercy
* Subversion: Damiana chooses both kill or be killed and debt
* Nature vs society, and society is just as harsh and vicious, and nature is just as clean
* Language: several sentences repeating repeating the same thing to build up the world, but also a way to buy a chewy voice
* Makyo:
* The language is beautiful and lush and delicious like *Time War*
* The learning curve is steep because it slams right into the language
* The two characters and their arcs are mirrored, but have opposite directions
* Ergodic format with footnotes and asides
## Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs
*