Chapters 243-245 – The Feels At The End
For next week — 246-247
246. Reflection at the End
247. The End of the World
Worth the Candle on Amazon (ebook and audio!)
Cakoluchiam’s stellar Character Sheet
Steven’s Predictions – Everything is a Clue
Worth the Candle can be read at AO3 or RoyalRoad.
You can support this podcast at our Patreon. Alexander Wales can be supported at his Patreon. We have a Discord as well.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: RSS
RSS – All Posts
iTunes
Stitcher Smart Radio
Google Play
Email – Episodes only
That was lovely.
I’m sure there will be other books and stuff to talk about every Tuesday – don’t worry guys, your friendship definitely seems like one that is never going to end
I’m sure your next big project is just around the corner, and the fans -we’ll try to think of some ideas.
It’s only allowed to be rationalist or rationalist-adjacent stories you podcast about?
It’s not a strict requirement, but we do want to keep it close to that, since we assume our audience is mostly rat/rat-adj. :)
Oh, oh! Do Unsong next!
Accumulated notes over the week:
“You have to accept your shitty life.” — Uther, currently in complete rebellion against his shitty life.
The Candle of Invocation is core of an infamous D&D Rules As Written exploit, where you use a Lawful Evil Candle to gate in an Efreet, compel them (via Gate) to grant you three wishes, and use one of the wishes to create another Candle. Use the other two wishes however you see fit.
“That you think it makes a bad friend to say goodbye is, perhaps, why you’re here.” is the realest goddamn line of the book though.
And now, on friendships!
After having thought about it for a while, I think the problem is just that highschool gives you bad habits. You’re thrown together in a stressful pressuring situation with potential hostiles, and you have a pool of maybe 60 people from which you congeal maybe five deep friendships. And because this is such a one-time situation, you don’t get into a habit of building friendships, because you barely notice it happening. You just get put in a school, and then friendships sort of happen to you suddenly, and they’re sometimes the only good thing, or one of few good things in your life. So of course you cling to them, because you don’t have any control over the process or any expectation that you can get them again. (And of course the usual biases, loss aversion, sunk costs…) But I think part of growing up is just learning that making friends is a process you can basically repeat at will by just entering a new social context, and that those friends you made as a kid are a lot more interchangeable than you thought at the time. They filled a need for you, and the need was real, but it would have worked with any group of sixty children from a familiar-but-not-too-familiar social context. But you don’t know any other group of sixty children. Your world is a house, a school, and a lot of unknown terrain around that.
And I think part of growing up is realizing that there’s friends waiting to be made everywhere you go. As Joon says, it was never really about Arthur in specific. And then the only thing he really needed, was to give himself permission to move on.
Unsong does sound great. I only feel like Unsong is different from the sort of books Steven and Eneasz usually do in that it has less of those humorous bits that usually make the podcast uplifting.
But it’s definitely worth doing anyway, for sure. It will leave an impact.
Or, hear me out, and it’s not likely you’ll take me up on it, it being a fanfic of a fanfic, but I’ll say it anyway: talk about the HPMOR sequel Following the Phoenix. That was genuinely the most heartwarming but significant book you can imagine.
Unsong is puns upon puns upon puns. The universe runs on them. You think Eneasz would survive that?
Uther’s cruelty towards Raven was that he was condescending, like distant uncle or government agent talking doen to a twelve year old girl who just lost her parents.
She loves him and doesn’t want to lose him and he says the equivalent of “People your age can’t always come with. I have to go work/travel/meet friends at the bar”. He doesn’t engage with her emotionally. He doesn’t hug her or cry with her or reminisce about old times or tell her that everything will be okay or ask her about her life to make sure she can manage without him or honestly open up and insist that his needs are important too or get angry at her “emotional manipulation” or anything. He just tosses out some trite cliche phrase while cutting her out of his life, never to look or think back, without providing closure or truth or even a clean cut.
And that is what makes it cruel. Talking to her exactly like he used to when she was twelve and in love with him and couldn’t play with the grownups, except with even less emotion and while using it as a final goodbye.
Oh dang, good point!