Exchange of Realities

Still here. Still snarking Ron Miller’s “Silk and Steel” as scanned by vandonovan. I almost feel guilty; this text is like shooting fish in a barrel. This time, I’m going to start skipping things; we’re getting on for the point where it stops quite qualifying as something you can put on a family-oriented website. So instead, the highlights.

The next paragraph compares her fingers and arms to a number of things, not all matching, but I would like to draw your attention to two in particular: highways for her arms, and semaphores for her fingers. Now here’s my question: how does a faerie king out in the middle of nowhere know highways and semaphores? I’m not sure it’s quite an anachronism, given that ‘highwayman’ is a pretty old term, but it still strikes me as a bit jarring. (Besides, there’s a genuine anachronism in the next four pages, along with multiple viewpoint switches. Ew.) Mr. Miller, I would like to introduce you to a concept known as “the Fourth Wall”. It is an invisible barrier that separates the audience from the text. When you’re in third person limited, as you are here, it is generally expected that descriptions are from the viewpoint of the character last indicated. This means that when you use something that one cannot expect the character in question to know about to make a description, you start putting undue pressure on the Fourth Wall, possible to the point of breakage. This is not a good thing!

And I would like someone to please explain to me slowly why this fellow thinks the Earth has two moons. I understand that treating her breasts as one moon would be sillier (fear the power of the Uniboob!), but still… this Does Not Work. This paragraph also lends credence to the idea that nobody at the publisher’s office actually had the stomach to read the text very closely, as “mercury” is rather blatantly misspelled. Why was this released if even the editor didn’t have the stomach to give it a full look-over? The world may never know.

It falls at one point into an extended flower-sex metaphor—dew on orchids in moss on white stones, does it get any more blatant than that? And for some reason, this Bronwyn person has “the sex of the scarab”. Does this mean that you can tell she’s female because of the kinds of physical features by which you tell the sex of a scarab? That kind of invalidates her cheese-and-morel bustline, doesn’t it? If it’s a different meaning, I can think of two responses depending on interpretation: “How do you tell by looking?” or just “Wouldn’t that hurt?”

Then there’s the dialogue at the end, when our charming friend Spikenard finally gets sick of ogling. “Your body is halfway between earth and dream, neither magic nor elemental, neither animal nor spirit.” Where have I heard this before? “I don’t like sand. It’s rough, and hard, not like–” Oh. Wait. Wrong story. Does it scare you as much as it scares me that our friend Spikenard here gets beaten in a contest of eloquence by Anakin Skywalker? Not to mention that between the dichotomy of animals and spirits, and the sheer amount of critter-imagery in the above paragraphs, one almost has to wonder just what Spikenard spends time with when he doesn’t have Mary Sues to questionably seduce.

The precinct recently issued a warrant for Bronwyn’s arrest, as an accomplice to sixty-seven counts (probably more, nobody wanted to get an exact number of sentences) of violating the laws of both physics and nature, and assault and battery on our poor aesthetic senses. In order to aid our search for the fugitive, we tracked down two composite sketches combining the confused impressions of the last two pages. (Warning: both not safe for work and likely to trigger laughter.)

There are four pages more of this. Have I snarked enough for one lifetime, or should I continue?