Motes minor edits

motes-played/content/001.tex

@@ -4,12 +4,14 @@ She played in color. She played in paint. She painted the backdrops for the prod
 
 She played in her free time, such as it was—after all, her work, such as it was, was a joy beyond joys, but everything is a sometimes food. She played hide-and-seek in the auditorium. She played tag with the performers and techs. She played pretend. She played horses and kitties and mousies. She played with Warmth In Fire, endless forks dotting countless landscapes, leapfrogging over each other across fields and between trees, bouncing off the walls of canyons and cities, colliding with force enough to knock them spinning and send them dizzy. She hunted down her friends and played hide-and-seek, yes, and tag and horses and kitties and mousies. She hunted down her friends and played puzzle games and rhythm games and stealth games and real life platformers and turn-based sims that locked her in place when it was not her turn.
 
-She played with her form. She played with her fur. She played with her mane. She played with her claws and with her tail. She played with her size. She played with her age. She played when she presented as twenty. She played when she presented as twelve. She played when she presented as five. She played always, even when she was as old as the rest of her clade—what was it, now? 275? 276? She played with identity. She played with fire.
+She played with her form. She played with her fur. She played with her mane. She played with her claws and with her tail. She played with her size. She played with her age. She played when she presented as twenty. She played when she presented as twelve. She played when she presented as five. She played always, even when she was as old as the rest of her clade—what was it, now? 275? 276?
 
 She played with life, enjoying and enjoying and enjoying.
 
 She played with death. She had died countless times, on-stage and off—to knives, to falls, to drowning, to games, to those who said they loved her, to those who said they hated her.
 
+She played with identity. She played with fire.
+
 Motes played because she was a kid and she was a kid because she played. She was a kid because kids are resilient. She was a kid because kids bounced, because they fell, cried, and then picked themselves up once more and went back to playing. She was a kid because she liked being small. She was a kid because she liked it when others played, too. She liked when others fell into enjoyment and laughter along with her. She liked the way that it brought out the best in those in her life. She was a kid because a life would not truly be complete without kids, and she believed with all of her heart that life should be complete.
 
 She played because she \emph{was} play. Play incarnate.
@@ -18,7 +20,7 @@ And so Motes played.
 
 She sat atop her stool, one of her feet perched up there with her so that she could rest her chin somewhere while she painted. A palette sat on an infinitely positionable nothing beside her. A canvas sat on an easel, rickety and well-loved, before her. A brush sat in her paw, and paint sat on the brush. A thin, black rectangle sat on that canvas, as did a mountainous landscape. Music sat in her ears, chirpy and glitchy to offset the serenity of the scene in a new way.
 
-She hummed, her tail fwipped this way, flopped that, and she painted until the painting was finished—there was no guarantee of when that would be: the painting would be finished when it was finished, as it now was, and when it was finished, she stopped.
+She hummed. She sang. Her tail fwipped this way, flopped that in time with the music. She painted and painted and painted until the painting was finished—there was no guarantee of when that would be: the painting would be done when it was done, as it now was—and when it was finished, she stopped.
 
 Slipping off her stool, she stumbled clumsily to the side, laughing at the sudden rush of pins-and-needles to her backside and the base of her tail. She inserted a step in her list of things to do before cleaning and plopped down onto her belly, using the remainder of the ochre paint in the brush to doodle the face of a fennec fox on the hardboard floor of her studio. It was one of thousands by now, and they had long since started to overlap.
 
@@ -146,7 +148,7 @@ She thought about the more than two centuries that had passed since A Finger Poi
 
 It had not always been smooth, to be sure. The compromises she made early on far outnumbered the ways in which she was earnest to herself.
 
-She did not blame A Finger Pointing, never once. She, of all those in her life, was trustworthy. Motes had once \emph{been} her, after all, yes? They had had their spats—more than a few—as would be the case between any parent and child—as would be the case between any two individuals. She had had spats with more than just Ma. She and Beholden had fought, and at times bitterly, and it was at those times that Bee's guardianship had felt most precarious. It had never disappeared, but it had verged well into the realm of sister—the realm of Slow Hours—or bestest friend—that of of Warmth In Fire—and away from guardian, away from that parental love.
+She did not blame A Finger Pointing, never once. She, of all those in her life, was trustworthy. Motes had once \emph{been} her, after all, yes? They had had their spats—more than a few—as would be the case between any parent and child—as would be the case between any two individuals. She had had spats with more than just Ma. She and Beholden had fought, and at times bitterly, and it was at those times that Bee's guardianship had felt most precarious. It had never disappeared, but it had verged well into the realm of sister—the realm of Slow Hours—or bestest friend~--- that of of Warmth In Fire—and away from guardian, away from that parental love.
 
 She did not remember what the spats were about. She could, yes, her memory was as perfect as anyone else's on the three Systems. But she would not, because that was not the point. The point was that she was Motes. She was their Dot, their \emph{Dóttir.} She was the kid, and they were the grown-ups who loved her.
 

motes-played/content/009.tex

@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@ Motes wilted.
 
 The answer was a long time coming, the silence filled with the gentle tink of glasses as Beholden mixed their late lunch cocktails, carrying them carefully back to the couch and handing them out so that she could rejoin.
 
-``Yeah,'' Motes said at last. ``At least, I think so. It was something that I did almost on a whim. I knew I wanted to be Big Motes, or at least that I was not ready to be Little Motes yet. Been thinking about that all morning.''
+``Yeah,'' Motes said at last. ``At least, I think so. It was something that I did almost on instinct. I knew I wanted to be Big Motes, or at least that I was not ready to be Little Motes yet. Been thinking about that all morning.''
 
 Beholden tasted her drink, nodded appreciatively, then asked, ``Have you come to any conclusions?''
 
@@ -114,9 +114,11 @@ Despite the already warm feeling in her belly from the first mimosa, Motes quick
 
 Beholden punched her gently on the shoulder before taking her empty glass and setting it on the table in front of them.
 
-The full story of what had happened over the last few days between A Finger Pointing and Hammered Silver was laid bare over the next hour. Not just that, but much of their story going back into the past as well. Both Beholden and Motes were left with more than a few questions. Over the last few years, their down-tree instance had opened up more and more about how much she had shielded the stanza from the political machinations of the rest of the clade around them, all of the ways in which she had strived to protect them, and yet more of this became clear as she spoke about all of the fuss that Hammered Silver had made over the years.
+The full story of what had happened over the last few days between A Finger Pointing and Hammered Silver was laid bare over the next hour. Not just that, but much of their story going back into the past as well; she even, at one point, dreamed up a stack of all 98 letters she had received over the years, totaling nearly 300 pages.
 
-When she finished and all questions had been answered or deferred, they fell into silence for a long few minutes, the three of them just digesting the last few days each in their own way.
+Both Beholden and Motes were left with more than a few questions. Over the last few years, their down-tree instance had opened up more and more about how much she had shielded the stanza from the political machinations of the rest of the clade around them, all of the ways in which she had strived to protect them, for better or for worse, and yet more of this became clear as she spoke about all of the fuss that Hammered Silver had made over the years.
+
+When she finished and all questions had been answered or\pagebreak\ deferred, they fell into silence for a long few minutes, the three of them just digesting the last few days each in their own way.
 
 Finally, Motes huffed and flopped back against the couch. ``What a fucking bitch.''
 
@@ -140,17 +142,17 @@ She shrugged. ``Well, I pinged Miss Genet, so we are going to meet later.''
 
 She sat up straight, staring at her partner like she was some alien creature, some queer thing too dense to understand the importance of kettle corn. ``Yes. Busy.''
 
-As A Finger Pointing and Beholden finally got around to whipping up lunch for themselves, the conversation once more fell into comfortable chatter, the sort of banter that so often filed the house, and while, by the time her appointment arrived, Motes had not yet felt comfortable enough to refer to them as `Ma' and `Bee', that welcoming sense of family had returned in force, and she felt once more in her comfortable role as their Dot, their \emph{dóttir}.
+As A Finger Pointing and Beholden finally got around to whipping up lunch for themselves, the conversation once more fell into comfortable chatter, the sort of banter that so often filed the house, and while, by the time her appointment arrived, Motes had not yet felt comfortable enough to refer to them as\pagebreak\ `Ma' and `Bee', that welcoming sense of family had returned in force, and she felt once more in her comfortable role as their Dot, their \emph{dóttir}.
 
 As the afternoon threatened to slide right into evening, Motes took her leave and left A Finger Pointing and Beholden on the couch, canoodling. Clearly that had taken precedence over whatever they had had planned at the auditorium for the rest of the day. That they had come home for her, for Motes, was the base of that warmth that had grown within her.
 
 She made her way out of the house and wandered to the center of the neighborhood. She left the automatic chalk lines going, letting them be the fuel that propelled her forward, let their flowering shapes fit into this perception of herself as a flower child rather than simply a child, a careful reframing that allowed her to have this thing, this gentle goodness.
 
-The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a `U' that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street—inaccessible to anyone who was unwelcome—sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve kept for its own community. Just homes and a beloved workplace dropped together into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.
+The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a `U' that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve kept for its own community. Just homes and a beloved workplace dropped together into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.
 
 In the bowl of the `U' sat all of the common areas. A pool—one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seating a hundred as easily as it could be an Olympic pool—a few tennis courts for the few—who?—who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills—everyone had a favorite—for cook outs, a lake with a paddle boat, a ``community center'' which had long ago turned into a movie-theater-\emph{cum}-cuddlepit\ldots{}
 
-And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the `U' sat the playground. What was initially intended to be Motes's haunt, hers and her friends, had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one's face beyond even the Moon, even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.
+And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the `U' sat the playground. What was initially intended to be Motes's haunt, hers and her friends', had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one's face beyond even the Moon, even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.
 
 It was not dark now.
 
@@ -184,7 +186,7 @@ She caught herself in the act of merely shrugging, then shook her head to clear
 
 ``That's sweet of them.''
 
-``It is. I\ldots uh,'' she trailed off. ``The overflow started when I got a letter from within the clade. It really fucked me up. Like, \emph{really} bad.''
+``It is. I\ldots uh,'' she trailed off. ``The overflow started when I got\pagebreak\ a letter from within the clade. It really fucked me up. Like, \emph{really} bad.''
 
 ``And that's why you're Big Motes? Why you didn't say `Ma'?''
 
@@ -266,7 +268,7 @@ She laughed, feeling earnest joy at the memory. ``Dot! Speck! Mote! Kiddo and sk
 
 ``I said she should have been in charge of lights,'' Motes said, still grinning. ``\,`Beholden to the heat of the lamps'? That has nothing to do with music or sound.''
 
-Still smiling, herself, Sarah countered, ``And then I pointed out Loss For Images and That It Might Give. `That it might give the world orders' being primarily a director is pretty on the nose.''
+Sarah countered, ``And then I pointed out Loss For Images and That It Might Give. `That it might give the world orders' being primarily a director is pretty on the nose.''
 
 ``Yeah,'' she said, sighing as the grin started to fade. ``Yeah. There is a mix of both. It does not matter whether or not the name or the nature came first, not in this case. What matters is that it got stuck in my craw, right? I got stuck thinking about it, and then Hammered Silver sent me her stupid letter and it all came to a head.''
 

motes-played/content/010.tex

@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ She wove around A Finger Pointing and Beholden, drawing figure eights around the
 
 And then, as she had several times over the last week, she latched herself onto Dry Grass. As they had over the last week, they revelled in the closeness and affection, the joy in allowing themselves to be around each other despite meaningless admonitions. As they had, they spoke mostly of small things, of interesting things they had seen or nice foods that they had eaten or simple stories made up on the spot.
 
-It was important to her that she be around this person she considered a member of her family. One of the close ones, not one of the distant ones, not one that had cut her off. One of the ones who reminded her that she was \emph{not} an outcast. It was important that they spend quality time together, that through that time, she \emph{lived} her gratefulness for Dry Grass's presence.
+It was important to her that she be around this person she considered a member of her family, her Ma 2.0. One of the close ones, not one of the distant ones, not one that had cut her off. One of the ones who reminded her that she was \emph{not} an outcast. It was important that they spend quality time together, that through that time, she \emph{lived} her gratefulness for Dry Grass's presence.
 
 And then, when they all piled into the movie-theater-\emph{cum}-cuddlepit, A Finger Pointing, Beholden, and Dry Grass slouched into a beanbag. Dry Grass dragged Motes into her lap while they all settled in. They sat silent through the first part of movie, watching off and on, dozing now and then. The movie was not important. It was good, she was sure, or bad, but that was not the point.
 

motes-played/content/thoughts-on-motes.tex

@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ It goes beyond interests or chosen profession (or, well, ``profession''; this \e
 
 This includes all sorts of different aspects of personality. A Finger Pointing remains her flamboyant, dramatic self just as Motes leans hard into these feelings of childhood. I wanted to explore something like this in more detail.
 
-Finally, I have been fascinated with the idea of childhood for years. It is not the supposed purity\footnote{I find `the purity of childhood' personally unnerving. It strikes me as an aspect of the oft-maligned purity culture. Kids can be mean. They can be \emph{cruel.} They are creatures who act upon their base desires, for better or worse. I think this, in combination with its laws-for-thee-none-for-me attitude, has led to the ``corruption'' of children becoming a talking point of the right, those bastions of that very same purity culture.} of it, nor is it necessarily that my own was bad. What it \emph{was,} though, is less than ideal. It feels like my childhood is something that happened to someone else. It is a thing that happened to Matthew, not to Madison. I never got to live a childhood as Madison, good \emph{or} bad.
+Finally, I have been fascinated with the idea of childhood for years. It is not the supposed purity\footnote{I find `the purity of childhood' personally unnerving. It strikes me as an aspect of the oft-maligned purity culture. Kids can be mean. They can be \emph{cruel.} They are creatures who act upon their base desires, for better or worse. I think this, in combination with its laws-for-thee-none-for-me attitude, has led to the ``corruption of children'' becoming a talking point of the right, those bastions of that very same purity culture.} of it, nor is it necessarily that my own was bad. What it \emph{was,} though, is less than ideal. It feels like my childhood is something that happened to someone else. It is a thing that happened to Matthew, not to Madison. I never got to live a childhood as Madison, good \emph{or} bad.
 
 Honestly, I have little desire to do so now. It is not out of a desire to be a literal kid, myself, that I wrote \emph{Motes Played.} I wrote it because that idea in particular—that someone would wish to just\ldots go be a kid because they can and because it felt good—is fascinating to me. Motes decided that her role was to be the kid, the One Who Plays, and so she leaned hard into that.
 
@@ -112,10 +112,10 @@ If I sound at all bitter, then, it is because I have made something that I am pr
 
 I resent that I need to be rightfully anxious. I resent that, by creating something in this idea-space, I run the very real risk of, at worst, having my personhood negated when I am declared problematic, a groomer, a pedophile, \emph{persona non grata.} I resent that I do not need to consider whether I will be labeled these things; I am all but sure I will. I mentioned above that I have already had a conversation that touched on this. It led to someone reducing their engagement with the Post-Self community.\footnote{Which is valid! Curate your engagement. Stay healthy with your media consumption. The Post-Self community explicitly welcomes a come-and-go, curation-friendly approach in all our spaces.} I resent that I risk losing readers, friends, loved ones. I resent that the oft-misused ``death of the author'' is only applied to the works one enjoys and derided otherwise, and so in this case, I will be reduced to my roughest edges and discarded by those who do not enjoy works such as these. The work that I put into it will be ignored in the face of this one fact regardless of my feelings on what I have accomplished.
 
-I resent that one way I could avoid such readings are to make Motes miserable, to deny her happiness in her identity, do take from her her pride in herself and her growth. I resent that I might well be lauded for changing the ending of the book to have Motes give up, have her follow Hammered Silver's suggestion to put away childish things\footnote{The Odists are famously Jews; why is she quoting 1 Corinthians? But then, I suppose Paul was famously a Jew, too\ldots} and become other than she had been. I resent that a `solution' in my straw-reader's mind would be to replace joy with shame.
-
 I resent that, if I claim that \href{https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReallySevenHundredYearsOld}{Motes is nearly 300 years old} at the time of this story, I will be accused of trying to weasel my way out of grooming accusations, regardless of the fact that dealing with grooming is part of her character and the plot. I resent that if I claim that the headmate upon which Motes is based is actually 38 at time of writing, just like this wretched body,\footnote{Remember that mention of sciatica? Yeeeah\ldots} and has simply leaned into feelings of kidcore, a portion of my identity will be declared wicked and manipulative. I resent that, no matter how loudly I say that I am aware of the broader context of CSA in the wider world, how abhorrent I think that is, none of that will matter in the face of that same imagined wicked and manipulative aspect. I resent that, no matter how nuanced my arguments on consent are\footnote{Many of those who \emph{do} engage with interests and kinks often considered problematic think about consent and those potentially problematic aspects \emph{far} more than most, even those who dislike them, I guarantee you.}—even within this very work!—the work itself will be declared, yes, wicked and manipulative.
 
+I resent that one way I could avoid such readings are to make Motes miserable, to deny her happiness in her identity, do take from her her pride in herself and her growth. I resent that I might well be lauded for changing the ending of the book to have Motes give up, have her follow Hammered Silver's suggestion to put away childish things\footnote{The Odists are famously Jews; why is she quoting 1 Corinthians? But then, I suppose Paul was famously a Jew, too\ldots} and become other than she had been. I resent that a `solution' in my straw-reader's mind would be to replace joy with shame.
+
 It is, as Motes puts it, annihilation. It is the opposite of reclamation. Rather than taking the bad and finding a way to reclaim the good in it, it is taking a thing that is good and making it not just bad, but reprehensible. It is taking things that one enjoys and not making them less enjoyable, but making them shameful.
 
 I resent that.