bone dancing

[jazzfish]

"When have I ever done what I was told?"
"Always. Because it's the easy path, and the one you're least noticed on."

I read Bone Dance, by Emma Bull, several times in high school. I liked it quite a bit. The explicit mix of fantasy and postapocalyptic low-tech, with some background Sufficiently Advanced Technology, worked really well for me. Plus I was just getting into tarot so I greatly appreciated the use of a tarot spread as a structural device. I enjoyed Sparrow as a character; I related to them, though I don't think I would have said so in those words. The worldview of "keep yourself secret and safe" and "nothing's for free" resonated with me to such a degree that I didn't even notice it, it's just how things worked.

I last read it just under ten years ago. At that point I could recognise that Sparrow is a pretty messed-up character. That recognition hit me kinda hard.

A couple of weeks ago thanate mentioned on Twitter that Sparrow looked a lot like "Murderbot lite" and the correspondences therein might be interesting. And it had been awhile, and Network Effect hadn't arrived yet, so I figured, what the hey.

I can confirm that Sparrow does, in fact, look a lot like Murderbot Lite, and it was, in fact, Interesting, though likely not in the way she intended.

It is a really weird feeling, to read something that you've read a bunch of times before and suddenly pick up on all kinds of implications and subtext that you just never got before. It's like... I understand it now. I understand Sparrow burying or burning the dead past, learning to be themself, learning to be part of a community. To have friends, to be a friend.

Partly, of course, this is because I'm a better reader now than I was ten, or twenty, years ago. More of it's because I'm a better human being than I was then, and I can see myself in Sparrow a lot more clearly. I always understood well enough who Sparrow was... but it wasn't until a decade ago that I could understand why Sparrow's friends might see that as ... not a problem, exactly, but hurtful. And even then I couldn't understand Sparrow's catharsis and transformation. I could see what happened, but not the why of it.

Maybe I'm learning how to human. Maybe I'm healing some very old damage.

It's a start.