“Surely a man like Colonel Russell couldn’t be the casualty of someone else’s story?” -Christopher Huang, A Pretender’s Murder, p. 116

                “I am a thousand stories of Northern Bell Pass, and an illustrious career in the capital, of a northern tribunal tricked. I am a father and a grandfather as well as a cleric, because no single thing takes away from the rest.” -Nghi Vo, Mammoths At The Gates, p. 112

                One of my least favorite things that fictions do is act like there’s a main character. A someone who all this swirls around. A someone who will necessarily make the key decision at the decisive moment. A hero. A villain. I think A Pretender’s Murder is commenting exactly on that: on the strange patterns some cultures have of reading themselves as the most important protagonist.
                One of my favorite things that fictions do is notice how so many threads weave together here, with no single thinking taking away from the rest. Mammoths At The Gates ends with a series of stories: connected and almost contradictory visions of who someone is, of who we are in gathering to hear about them, of who we all are together as we go on. Maybe I’m thinking about that modern phrase, main character energy, and about how wonderful it is to be another thread weaving through so many stories. I go for a walk and folks walking or sitting nearby wave at me. I wave back. Some of us are friends and some of us aquaintances and some of us strangers who live near one another. I love the stories that feel like that.