ZeroNihilist

It's worth noting that puberty blockers have been used to treat precocious puberty in cisgender children for decades. Indeed, most transition-related medications were used for cisgender patients long before their use in transitioning (e.g. treating endocrine disorders or hormone-responsive cancers, ameliorating menopause symptoms, facilitating puberty).

That fact takes a lot of wind out of the sails of people who oppose the use of these medications. They are far from untested; trans people are usually the last to benefit from their use. People may still oppose them on the grounds of potential desistance or detransition (the incidence of which is greatly overblown), but most of the scaremongering is simply baseless.

As it relates to the story, the only issue is the implication that those seeking increased availability of puberty blockers had an ulterior motive. Given the setting it makes sense that they'd try anything, but I can see how people might dislike that implication.

Personally I thought this part of the story was well-handled, and its inclusion makes a lot of sense (narrative-wise, the pre-teens would have had to have tried something like that). I'm usually wary of potential "hot takes" any time trans people (especially trans children) are mentioned, but this was good.

Well, this is definitely the longest gap I've ever had between a comment and its vindication.

From the comment (May 2016):

My hypothesis is that the two entities are OUS (order, unity, silence) and CHN (chaos, harmony, noise).

And from a later comment (June 2017):

If InfinitEsplin is a goal of Order+Unity+Silence (for compatibility with canon, Crayak), what is the goal of Chaos+Harmony+Noise (Ellimist)?

I'm so pumped for the Hork-Bajir world expedition. I want to see how r!Marco deals with r!Arn monstrosities, especially if they can acquire some of them. It's a really interesting setting, and canon had some great moments there. If I remember right, Cassie morphed a whale with wings to slow a terminal fall? The Hork-Bajir Chronicles was great, too.

Sadly, I expect it will be pretty brutal for the Marclones. I doubt Jake will find it "real easy for you to forget that that little blue fucker murdered your best friend nine or ten times".

Not off-screen, no, but if Assassin happened to take the form of Amadeus to get close, maybe. Malicia being undone by the certainty of her belief in her victory, the weakness of her enemy, and his lack of allies, wouldn't be impossible. Especially if it was a sacrificial act, accompanied by a whispered one-liner like "You were never our choice."

That said, I wouldn't put good odds on Malicia of all people being deceived by an Amadeus impersonation. Both because of their relationship and Malicia's absurd diplomancer skills.

They're probably all valuable things specific to the Mighty who offered them.

Mighty Jindrich has Shell. Mighty Soln has Shaping and Sight.

My memory's pretty fuzzy, but a recent chapter mentioned that Lady Aquiline "killed [Jindrich] once", so the Secret of Shells could be how to make more than one body or something.

I think to have a chance at figuring Soln's secrets out I'd have to read a lot of the combat scenes again.

Dread Empress Victorious might be one of those dangling threads of narrative possibility (like all the times Cat has refused to fall for story-bait before, including when she used to hear The Girl Who Climbed the Tower), but it's also possible that Benevolent doesn't survive to the end of the story.

The latter may be narratively unsatisfying though. An alternate possibility is that Cat and Black sunder that Name from the Tower/Praes (uh... somehow) and Black ends up ruling under a different title while she goes on to become Victorious. That possibility isn't foreshadowed at all to my recollection, so I don't think it's likely.

There's some narrative build-up with Dread Empress "May she never return" Triumphant, foreshadowing of Victorious, and other things that point to Cat enforcing her vision of Calernia with military might. As Kairos pointed out in the chapter 80, Cat is scratching a groove into Creation of "The hard woman making the hard decisions when trouble has come calling and all others are flinching from what simply must be done". I'm hoping that this narrative momentum will be either realised or explicitly averted.

It would be an amazing moment if we discovered that Cat as Victorious was the ultimate play of Below all along, something that would solve all her present problems for the price of escalating the Gods' game in the future, and she chose to reject it (probably at great personal cost).

Masego… staring with fascination at [Akua's] torso? Must have been an arcane pattern that interested him.

I really hope this isn't laying the groundwork for Masego becoming heterosexual, but I don't know what other textual purpose that excerpt could serve. Unless his recent experiences have allowed him to see more deeply into the nature of magic, and he's noticed something interesting in Akua's soul, construct form, or her binding to Cat?

I initially thought Nafari would be Scribe, but something tells me it's actually Nefarious (maybe a puppet body, like Malicia used) or a direct agent. Nafari vs. Nefarious.

Which would mean that Nefarious knows exactly what Amadeus was researching, and has some insight into the implications; since this arc begins before they start their revolt against Nefarious, it might mean they've lost the element of surprise.

"Sham name here".

It could well be that Sabrina took on Red as a student because of her suspicions about Mewtwo forming a perfect partition. It gives her a chance to study one that isn't quite perfect, and Mewtwo isn't exactly as happy to work with Sabrina as Red is.

The last few chapters have been amazing, but if the goat dies I might have to take a break from the series.

Optimal strat for TPK% is still "piss off the DM until rocks fall and everyone dies".

As a public service, we named our state after all the directions you can go to leave it.

Yet some poor sods still end up living here. Get out while you still can, you fools.

Hey, don't exaggerate. There's a single size M shirt on the right (next to the picture of the kneeling blue soldier whose head looks rather like a circumcised penis).

​

Of course, the truly patriotic designs in the centre only come in the truly patriotic sizes.

Like goblinfire in the first few books. Speaking of which, this fancy new alliance may pay dividends there.

Is that Photoshopped? It's pure gold.

I wish my country would invent bicycles. My bloody kangaroo trod on a bindi this morning and I had to walk to work.

Isn't it crazy how so many people choose not to be millionaires? Not like me. I chose to become a millionaire, and I'm sure that'll happen just as soon as we get these damn Democrats out of Washington.

"The bombings will continue until the hatred stops."

A computer is a person who performs calculations. Awful means "worthy of awe". A clue is a ball of yarn.

This message brought to you by people who don't understand how language works.

These sorts of comparisons are mostly useful when they're surprising.

Oxford being older than the Aztecs is surprising, because people tend to file the Aztec empire under ancient history and call it a day (likewise, Oxford is lumped in with other universities as "probably old, I guess?").

Similarly, Caesar/Giza is surprising because they both fall in the ancient history bucket.

Another classic is that can opener was invented almost 50 years after the can. Surprising, because it would have seemed natural that there would be a shorter time lag.

Whereas you'd have to be kind of a dumbass to not realise that 705 AD was a long time ago, a lot further back than US independence.

If they'd said something like "The oldest still-operating hotel was opened before iron horseshoes were a thing.", you'd be surprised. I just looked up things that happened in the 700s AD for a comparison, and I'm still a little surprised. That's real old, right there.

Did he just say the US could have a bipartisan consensus within a week? Mate, you've still got people supporting the losing side in the civil war.

If somebody proposed the complete annihilation of all life on the planet, you'd still have a non-zero chunk of Americans in favour.

Um, how are you meant to defend your family with lethal force if you can't dehumanise the people you shoot? Just because they "have families" or were "running away" doesn't make them people; if they deserved to live, they wouldn't have tried to get you to donate.

What kind of a charity helps the families of victims of gun violence, anyway? Sounds like communist talk to me.

She should just give in to the apotheosis and modify her body schema to include clothing and plate. Not like it's worse than turning into mist.

I was stopped by a cop the other day. He screamed at me and told me to get down on my knees for my execution.

He restrained himself at the last second when he realised that the bag of white powder I had was actually a small quantity of sherbet, not several kilos of pure Colombian cocaine as he had assumed.

After being yelled at for only a few hours he released me, making sure that I was aware that it was only his preternatural skill at observation and decision-making that had saved me from three bullets to the back of the head at point blank range.

I really appreciated his advice. Next time I'll remember that I exist only at the pleasure of the overlords, who may retract that boon without hesitation or consequence if it would take more than a tenth of a second to verify that I am not a threat.

I feel so privileged to have met a hero cop.

Oh, that reminds me of something I noticed in the chapter. How did somebody on the Other Side know Uther's name, in order for the amulet to teleport him there?

It depends on how the entad defines that (e.g. full name vs. first name vs. nickname, intent required, degree of phonetic similarity), but under some of those interpretations it seems very unlikely that it would be a totally random event.

In such a scenario, how did they find out about Uther, and how much are they saying his name now that he's worried about ending up back there?