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(Super mild spoilers for Worm, mild spoilers for the Old Testament)

The biblical character Abraham is referenced twice in Pale, once as Musser’s first name, once as Charles's last. 
All three agree to commit child sacrifice (Abraham by binding Isaac, Musser in his demands from Reid and Raquel, and Charles with Yalda + the kids eaten by the Choir + many more), but I think the author points out something deeper - not their sacrifice, but their confidence in making it. 
When God tells Abraham to kill his beloved son just to prove a point, Abarham basically says - “Here I am, motherfucker. Let’s do this!”
The prose[16] in Genesis does a lot to emphasize Abe’s instant obedience, his complete lack of hesitation - you could go as far as saying that Abraham is beyond a doubt.
In the original context this doubtlessness is championed, while in Pale it’s the exact same doubtlessness that’s vilified. 
Musser's doubtless adherence to the 'it is what it is' perspective perfects his villainy: He takes people's guardians and lovers with the same guiltless thrill I feel when stealing someone's last Defuse Card in a game of Exploding Kittens
When confronted by the girls, he justifies his actions with the fact that he’s been in the game longer than they have, something that I’ve heard from so many shitty bosses that I can’t even choose an example for this essay. 
It’s so easy to imagine a real life slave owner using the exact same argument, which is barely even a parallel - Musser is a slaver, cut and dry.
The girls are the opposite of the “Abraham” archetype, champions of doubt. Not in themselves, but in the rules they were given. After all, doubt is the first step towards awakening. 
But what is the awakened person supposed to do, when confronted with people like Abraham Musser who are forcing their eyes shut? How can we change their minds? 
According to Lucy, we can’t. 

>“Ignorant people won’t have a wake up call.  They’ll invent reasons.”

So what can we do, instead? 
I don’t know, but here’s what Avery does: She keeps herself safe from the Abrahams while focusing her efforts on radicalizing the Isaacs. 
The interactions between Raquel and Avery are some of my favorites in the book. Raquel only knows the Musser way of doing things and the cutthroat norms of practitioner society at large, but she still feels that something is deeply wrong. She tries to ignore her doubts, tries to obey, and it’s exactly that obedience that stands like a wall between her and Avery. 
Let’s go over a conversation between the two and see how Avery builds a bridge over that wall.

>“I swore an oath to hold the fort.  Please leave, or I’m going to order the familiars to attack,” Raquel said.
Avery reached into her pocket.  She scribbled on the blank spell card.
“If that’s a practice-”
“It’s not,” Avery said.
She crossed no-man’s land.  Closer to dangerous Others.  Her eyes were down on the card.
Through Snowdrop, she was aware of how tense many of the goblins were.  How tense Verona and Lucy were.
“If you hug me I’ll have one of these Others tear your head off,” Raquel whispered.
“Okay,” Avery said.  “Let’s not do that then.”

I laughed out loud at that part, at the way Raquel’s graphic threat is contrasted by Avery’s quiet  assertion of non-aggression. I can imagine the flat tone in which Avery says it, her eyes just slightly wider. 
Note that Avery doesn’t submit, doesn’t back down, but at the same time doesn’t admonish or point out that it isn’t nice to threaten people with having their heads torn off. She kindly stands her ground. 
Both of these girls are conflicted. Avery is aware of the danger but her heart’s breaking for Raquel, who’s arguably more lonely than Avery had been at her worst and more abused than Verona has ever been. Raquel is dying to get that hug, but not only is she terrified of what Abraham would think of her, she’s terrified of what she’d think of herself.   

“Can you base this speculation in the text in any way?” 

I mean, besides the fact that primates need hugs, and this ape hasn’t been getting any? When offered a hug earlier Raquel refused but didn’t say she didn’t want one - only that it would get her in trouble. Also, she keeps sharing her emotions with our girls, which is (checks notes) not something you do with enemies, and then quickly admonishes herself for doing that. 
Let’s see how Avery bypasses Raquel’s internal conflict:

>She held out the card.

>Raquel took it.

>“That’s our emails.  I’ve been in touch with a bunch from the Blue Heron.  Just like, saying hi, keeping one another up to date.  That’s me, Verona, and Lucy.  Write an email, send Verona a cute cat picture, ask for a movie recommendation.  I dunno.  Send me pretty much any email, just so I have your address.  Even if you don’t know what to say.  That’s all you have to do.”

Avery opens a line of communication, leaving it to Raquel to make the next move, and leaving her nothing to argue against. Quoting the Tao Te Ching, the softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world. 
(Eat shit, Toadswallow.) 

Avery, specifically, stands out against the many Abrahams in Pale, because while they sacrifice others for their own benefit, Avery sacrifices her own safety for others. 
The most sublime act, according to Blake[17], is to set another before you. I think Avery would agree. 
I think Taylor would agree, too, and that’s one of the reasons that I find Avery the most similar to Taylor than any of the author’s characters that I’ve read. The running doesn’t weigh into this, as they run for completely different reasons, but their refusal to abandon someone in need definitely does. 
It’s easy to see the similarity between Taylor sticking her neck out for Charlotte and Bryce to Avery sticking her neck out for Raquel but the differences, as always, are more interesting than the similarities - while Taylor feels a “sadistic glee” at rotting someone's balls off, um, for the kids, (which is ironic, considering what an Abrahamic character Taylor is), Avery never feels anything remotely resembling joy while hurting people. 
If there’s any deep psychological need that Avery’s satisfying under the guise of ‘doing good’, it’s her need to be connected to other people, which just isn’t that bad, even if it is a reaction to her long period of suffocating loneliness. Like Verona, Avery treads the line between pathology and reasonable adaptation, making the reader question whether the line even exists. 
Let’s go over what it is that Avery has adapted to. 
The problem for a middle child of three is having the oldest child drawing parental attention by breaching new frontiers, while the youngest simply requires attention in order to survive, thus leaving the middle child with the bottom of the barrel. 
Continuing the author’s tendency to optimize existing formulae, Avery is not a middle child of three - she’s a middle child of five, which is possibly “twice the middle child”. She’s got two siblings drawing attention from above, and two from below. From above Rowan’s fighting for car rights and having his first girlfriend, and Sheridan’s just being a pretty normal teenage girl with all the dread that brings. 
From below Declan is abusing his parents’ preference for peace over justice, taking that peace hostage until he gets what he wants, while Kerry works under the long-internalized assumption that screaming is the only way for her to get attention. 
As if that isn’t enough, Grumble, by his very existence, siphons even more of Avery’s parents’ time and energy.  
This, on paper, explains Avery’s loneliness, but I didn’t really get what she was going through until the dinner scene. She’s trying to get her family to not-watch the reality show she hates, and even though it’s her turn to choose, even though her parents have accepted the mission of making Avery feel less lonely, Avery’s desire gets trampled by her horde of siblings.
(Also, do North Americans really watch TV at dinner? Seems to me like a waste of time that could have been better spent arguing.)
It’s exactly this experience of drowning in loneliness that makes Avery’s kindness shine so bright - while Verona chooses to distract herself and cling to her existing friendships super hard, Avery makes the Naruto-esque decision to never let anyone be this lonely, because she knows how horrible loneliness feels. 
Even within her own family, Avery insists on doing good, which is more impressive than it sounds. I have a nephew that grew up as a middle child of three (easy mode, compared to Avery) and now he’s one of my favorite people in the world - kind, intelligent, and capable of impressive perspective shifts. But when he was Avery’s age, this guy was absolutely intolerable - sacrificing everybody else’s wellbeing to get the attention he needed. 
Avery could have done the same, but she chose not to.
During the elementary school nightmare where the girls meet Charles, Avery is thanked by her dream-mother for “being good”, and is awarded with a kiss on her forehead. This reads to me like an accurate representation of the past. 
In Avery’s present, she’s no longer thanked for being good - her behavior is taken for granted and she’s basically negatively rewarded by getting less attention than her troublemaking siblings. 
It’s very cool, to me, to see an issue that I’ve been made aware of at the age of maybe seven finally being criticized, and criticized so sharply. Moreover, this fundamental systemic issue is paralleled for the reader’s convenience with failures of Ontario’s real life society as well as its practitioner one.
These parallels are even harder to miss when Declan molests Verona and then throws a tantrum when rightfully accused. Judge Connor is swayed by this tantrum, allowing Declan to make the first Claim instead of the two older, better behaved girls. 
It’s only after Avery refuses to participate in a trial that is set against her that she’s given a chance to make her case to her father. She uses that chance to point out a greater societal issue: Declan’s decision to bump into Verona’s chest is a part of a cascade of increasingly misogynistic behavior, like Declan expecting Amber to accept his friendship even if he keeps it secret from his male friends. 
Note that when Declan accuses Avery of being “PMS’ed” he’s doing more than just being a little shit - he’s effectively projecting a perspective in which Avery is physiologically incapable of reason because she’s a woman. 
That’s an extremely powerful act of speaking that the little shit has learned somewhere, and is now free to utilize without being aware of the philosophical implications.
Avery, unlike Abraham, expresses doubt in the system she’s a part of, insisting that things can and should be better.

>“You need to deal with Declan, Dad,” Avery said.  Standing on the ladder, she was of eye level with her dad.
“We need equilibrium.”

Speaking of speaking, “we” is a very interesting word. It can mean “everybody involved” and it can mean “your mother and I”. In this case Connor uses a “we” that sounds like the former, but is actually the latter. 
What Avery needs is to be equally respected. What Verona needs is to have her complaint taken seriously and her future safety guaranteed, AT THE VERY LEAST. What Amber needs is someone to tell Declan that it’s deeply wrong to treat her as a member of a lower caste. 
What all of the trio needs is for grown men to stop ogling their chests in public - men who were probably boys like Declan, who were left to gain momentum on this pattern by fathers like Connor. 
The reader is invited to speculate as to the origin of Verona's dad's unconscious (?) assumption that the women in his life exist solely to serve his needs. 
(You know, now that I think about it, “Boys will be boys” has a very similar ring to “It is what it is”.)
Connor claims that his reason for not disciplining Declan more strictly about his language is that:

>“That was half the boys I knew growing up and all of them grew out of it.“

So what? Why let them “grow out of it” instead of radicalizing them while they’re young and malleable? 
Because it’s work that Connor doesn’t want to do. 
Let’s compare this to the cases of sexual harassment that we’ve seen in the the Blue Heron Institute - Nicollette is exposed to constant unwanted advances from buttholes like Seth, but it’s not like Alexander promotes this stuff. 
He even tells Seth to STFU - but only when Alexander feels disrespected by the molestation of his indentured servant. McCauleigh and Fernanda, whose casual harassment doesn’t offend Alexander, are left to their own devices.
Connor is not Alexander, but he chooses a similar strategy. He’s willing to tackle women’s suffering at the hands (and shoulders) of men, but only when it inconveniences him. 
He prefers to “softly challenge” Declan not because it brings long term change, but because it minimizes the amount of work that he needs to do today, something that Verona very nearly points out.

>“Does challenging him softly work?” Verona asked.  “Because I’ve been getting the vibe that this has been an ongoing thing.”
“Verona, please go home,” Avery’s dad said.
“No.  Not while Avery needs backup.” 

This segment isn’t about Verona, but I have to express how much I adore her quiet bravery - it’s hard for her to stand up to a father, considering what a father is to her, and yet she does, and even more impressively she does without lashing out, without freaking out, without losing her cool, all the while making it clear that she’s there for Avery. 
Which may or may not make it a little easier for Avery to be the person she wants to be - even faced with this injustice, Avery does not hate, she does not rage, and she does not terrorize. 
She still loves her father, she still sees him as doing his best, she still has faith in him. She expresses her frustration, makes her case clearly, and when she isn’t listened to she gets up and leaves.
Like with Raquel, she keeps the line of communication open, she doesn’t insult or attack. 
She demands what’s rightfully hers which, again, is more impressive than it sounds. 
I know people who are kind like Avery and they always get taken advantage of, always struggle to stand up for themselves. People who have assimilated the pattern of setting other people’s needs before their own find that pattern hard to break, even when they’re clearly being used. 
So how does Avery break that pattern? By appropriating her deeper, stronger pattern: helping people in need. 
She first speaks up to her father to defend Verona, but once started on this pattern, she finds her voice, finds it in her to point out injustice for herself. Eventually she points out that if Connor was willing to pay Verona for tutoring Declan that means that Avery isn’t being paid for the work she did.
This happens naturally, but these situations where Avery stands-up-for-herself-for-others can also be created artificially. 
Miss gives Avery a piece of information to trade with the Garrics, and because Miss is a sweetheart (Please, God, don’t let this be a Mahō Shōjo Madoka Magika twist), asks that Avery haggle for a fair price. Avery, who would otherwise be inclined to give the info as a gift and hope to be given a gift back, trains her "standing up for yourself” muscles not for herself, but for Miss. 
But even as she fights for what she deserves, she remembers that “Things don’t have to be this way” (the opposite of “It is what it is”). 
When Walt Garrick pretends to be skeptical about Avery’s intel (an obvious haggling tactic), she muses that everything could have been so much easier if it was just her and Jude working together to decide on a fair price. Walt trying to take from Avery as much as he can while giving the least, is only one step removed from Musser simply taking whatever he can.
The library scene gives us a different perspective on the same problem - the librarian suffers because shitty parents are letting their children cause chaos in the library, knowing that she has no power to stop them. They’re sacrificing her happiness because it makes their day a little bit easier, in the same way that every time Alexander forswears someone he sacrifices their whole life because it makes his own life a little bit easier.
This conflict between self-sacrifice and other-sacrifice doesn’t just exist between Avery and outside forces, but to a degree between Avery and the rest of the trio. After Charles escapes Ray’s custody, the girls need to decide whether to bind Jabber and dematerialize Ken against his explicit lack of consent, or leave themselves weaker by leaving these strategic weak points exposed. All three feel the temptation to sacrifice others to ensure their own safety - how easy it would make things for them. 
But the price of this other-sacrifice is setting a precedent, starting a pattern. Every time they choose safety over justice they make themselves more likely to make the same choice next time, leading them to a situation where they finally become a ruler like Connor, putting justice in second place to peace, and becoming the thing they swore to vanquish. 
I assume you’re familiar with this kind of story.
Interesting thing about the discussion about dematerializing Ken - I’d expect the main conflict here to be between Lucy and Avery, but it’s Verona that pushes for the forceful solution, while Lucy pushes back against it (mostly out of fear for the local Others’ response, I think). 
Why is it Verona that pushes for the use of force? Because it’s not your everyday Verona - it’s a Verona that’s terrified of reuniting with her dad. An irritable, constantly groaning, lashing out Verona. 
This is a very consistent throughline for the author - how it’s harder to be heroic when you’re terrified, when you’re in pain, when you’re suffering. 
But Avery is suffering too, and as if she wasn’t heroic enough, this suffering makes her even more heroic.  
Maricica’s gift to Avery, relatively early in the story, is the knowledge that Kennet has not even a single girl that she could have a happy relationship with. Seeing this reality damages Avery, destabilizes her. You could even say that when you gays into the abyss- 

“Please don’t.”

Ahem. Anyway, Maricica using a fantastical element to illuminate a real world statistic is a beautiful way to use fantasy to show a problem real people suffer from, one that a well-meaning-but-ignorant person might not recognize.
Unlike Lucy and Vernoa who start dating and not-dating, respectively, Avery doesn’t even get a chance at that. Like many things in Avery’s life, it’s massively unfair, particularly considering how lonely she’d been before, how much she’d like to quench that thirst for companionship. 
For me, the scene that communicated that thirst the clearest was the one where Avery sees Zed and Brie kissing in the supermarket, and realizes how lonely she is; how deep and intense her unmet need is, a need for… not romance, according to her, but a companionship.
Soon after this she crawls into bed with Snowdrop, but being hugged by the coolest motherfucker on the planet does not quench that need at all. 
But why doesn’t it? There are several possible reasons. 
One is that Snowdrop was made from Avery, at least in part, created in her image and likeness. My first instinct was to compare Avery&Snowdrop to God&Adam, but that doesn’t really track. Unlike God, Avery had very little control over the final product that is Snowdrop. Snowdrop is part Avery but she’s also part Opossum. 
No, a better analogy would be that Avery feels towards her familiar like a mother feels towards her child - your child, who is in many cases your favorite person in the world, is a version of you with a whole bunch of other elements inside of them (which once again winks at “The horror of being composite”). 
On a very visible level Avery acts like a mother to Snowdrop. A hippie, lenient mother, but a mother still. It’s easy to be reminded of the image of Avery standing next to Ramjam with her hands on her hips, making sure that he doesn’t peer pressure Snowdrop into headbutting nails.
(Should I even compare Avery’s parenting style to Abraham Musser’s? How she insists Snowdrop belongs to herself and all that? I trust that it’s pretty clear at this point.) 
The problem is, the closeness and warmth that you feel for a person that you summoned into being doesn’t really compare to what you feel when held by an equal. 
Consider that even though Jasmine confesses that Lucy brings her life, Lucy doesn’t fill the space that a man would. It’s not about sex, not even about the excitement of courtship and romance, but about having the committed partnership of an equal. Snowdrop is great, but she’s not an equal to Avery. 
Another explanation is that Snowdrop is too cool. I said before that Snowdrop is the coolest motherfucker on the planet, and I’d like to take a detour from the main theme of this essay to talk about that for a bit. 
Snowdrop has two desires: 1. To make her friends happy and 2. To fuck around doing dumb shit. 
Every single action she takes satisfies one of these desires - she never thinks whether the time she’s spending pranking goblins and getting pranked in kind could be spent elsewhere; she never thinks about her actions' long term effects or her moral duty as a member of society. 
The character of Snowdrop is one that enjoys all of the benefits of a cool villain, the kind that you lowkey envy for being able to freely pursue what they want, but also the benefits of a Sam Gamgee-esque sidekick, that would do anything for the beloved protagonist. This is a super interesting character engineering, creating something that is cooler than any real life person could be. 
And that might be why Snowdrop can’t quench Avery’s loneliness - she’s not a real person. 
If practice is a metaphor for writing, Avery is a teenager that writes stories about a champion of friendship and loyalty to alleviate her own loneliness. Writing this character comforts her, but at the end of the day, she still goes to sleep alone. 
Writing a character like that could also be a great way to reach out and make connections with others, as happens when Snowdrop strengthens Avery’s relations with Kennet’s Others, possibly symbolizing the author’s feeling of being connected to the community through his characters.
(However, one would be tempted to speculate about the choice to have Avery create a champion of valor and have the people that celebrate her the most be a bunch of literal goblins. What could WeebsBane be trying to tell the readers here?[18])
Just like Verona’s losing herself in the ecstasy of practice could be read as a statement of the addictive potential of writing, Avery's relationship to Snowdrop can be read as a statement about how we can use writing to alleviate our own loneliness.

“Like you do with me?”

To a degree. You do make the work of writing an essay less lonely, but I originally summoned you because you make it easier to communicate the harder points.

“You seemed to be doing fine without me so far on this segment.”

Yeah, because this essay was relatively straightforward so far. Wanna help me wrap it up?

“Sure.”

We didn’t need the library scene, we didn’t need to read about characters like Musser or Charles to know that people like this exist - we run into them all the time. People who’ve simply made the decision to stop caring. About strangers, about their co-workers, even about their own family members. As individuals they can be infuriating, but as a social phenomenon they are terrifying.
And someone’s gotta do something about it. 

“Who… Who’s going to do something about it?”

Ain’t no one here but you and me, friend. 

“But what can we do? Like, realistically, what are we supposed to do about that?”

Realistically? Focus on people, not demographics. 

“And do what?”

I don’t know, but I think we can take a few moves from Avery’s playbook. 
What does Avery, whose name is amalgamation of “fair” and “wise”[19], do, when running into people who actively try to care less? 
She refuses to accept that “It is what it is”, she refuses to point fingers and make excuses, refuses to sacrifice others’ happiness for her own. 
She’s kind to people who are being difficult, honest with people who say the opposite of what they mean, and smart enough to disengage from people she can’t change. 
She builds bridges where she can, and when she can’t she takes on the heroic challenge of working on herself, making herself stronger and wiser so she could help more people (and also so that she could make straight girls swoon, which is also valid).
Avery leans on her friends for help, but she doesn’t whine, and doesn't accuse them when they can’t be there for her. 

“And you’re expecting me to be like that?”

I can’t tell you what to do, that’s the whole point. But to me, Avery is a mythological character - I can’t be like her, but I can try, and she reminds me that I can try. 
Like Abraham is the perfect protagonist for Genesis and the message it tries to convey, so is Avery perfect for Pale’s core message.  
And I think that’s the end of this segment. 

In the next I’d like to discuss how, as much as I praise Avery’s perfection on the level of character construction, like the biblical Isaac….
I Have Some Questions About the Execution
(Which I'll post as done as soon as I'm done editing it for the bazillionth time)

Footnotes:

[16] In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham “Abraham!” and Abraham responds with “Here I am.” 
That’s a very strange interaction to include in the text because A. it gives the reader zero information and B. Ink and skins to write on were REALLY expensive at the time.
So why is it here? 
In the next verse, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, his only son, the one which he loves, Isaac, and Abraham doesn’t even argue - he just goes and does it. 
How do I know that he doesn’t argue? Because it doesn’t say that he does. In the previous verse I was notified of things as mundane as Abraham saying “Here I am” when called, so an argument, were it to occur, would have to be reported as well.

"Wouldn't it be easier to just write - And then he went and did it without arguing?"

Man, I don't know. Take it up with Søren Kierkegaard.

[17] Not the one from Pact. The other one.

[18]  Just kidding. Or am I?

[19] Avery literally means “counsel of Elves” but according to a stranger on Reddit, shouldn’t be taken literally but as “beautiful” + “wise” or “fair” + “wise”. 

“Kinda feels like you’re forcing this one.”

Yeah, a little.

(Previous post)
(Mild Worm Spoilers)

Of all of the things that make the author’s works dear to my heart, the one that I find most precious is the ability to make the reader feel seen. 
Firstly, externally: Many readers who experienced betrayal at a young age find it difficult to relate to characters and events depicted in popular media, even the “dark and gritty” kind. 
Raquel Musser describes that feeling better than I could: In a moment of exhaustion, she shares with our girls the frustration she felt when she tried to unwind by watching television, but found the plots too “stupid” and “asinine” to relate to.
The first interaction with the author’s works brings bittersweet catharsis - the reader finally feels that someone’s finally depicting things they’ve been through, without trying to soften or hide the truth. For many readers, this is the first time their experience is validated. It certainly was for me[8]. 
The second part has to do with giving the reader an opportunity to see themselves. After going through the ins and outs of characters’ different responses to their relational trauma, the reader is better equipped to consider which of their own personality traits are in fact adaptations. 
After reading Worm, I had a firmer grasp on my own narrative - my own creation myth, if you will - an elaborate theory explaining why I try so hard, why I feel more comfortable in environments with clear power dynamics, and why I’m so concerned with whether other people think I’m smart. 
Thanks, WittyBard, I thought to myself. That was extremely painful, but I’m glad we did it, and I’m doubly glad that we’ll never have to do it again.
Little did I know that while I was still recovering from Taylor and Lisa, Verona was being summoned into being, ready to fuck my shit up. 

Verona and Lisa have a lot of similarities. Both were hurt by emotionally immature parents, and both have chosen to hide their hurt behind winning smiles. Unable to process the rejection of their own parents, they decided to simply “be okay”. 
But that decision left them with the repressed rejection broiling under the surface, a constant pain. The way both choose to deal with this pain is by finding comfort in their own intelligence and creativity, by constantly taking on mental challenges, by acquiring and synthesizing new knowledge.
This is what enneagram fans call “a type 5 motherfucker”.
But this category is too broad to capture the complexity of real people, and by creating these two characters, the author cuts it in two. If we wanted to summarize Lisa’s cope in one sentence it would be something like “Well maybe I am super lonely but at least I’m smarter than all you bozos[9].” 
I imagine I could have survived high school without this cope, but it sure made it easier.
Verona, however, doesn’t seem as bothered by whether people think she’s smart. Aside from her separate desires to help and to be seen as useful, her engagement with the practice seems to stem from the pure joy of exercising creativity. 
This genuine joy makes it hard to see that Verona, like yours truly, is an addict. 
There are many different definitions of what an addict is, useful within their respective contexts, but the one I’d like to use for the purposes of this essay is this: an addict is someone who is prone to taking a certain stimulus they enjoy, and appropriating it as a tool for short-term emotional regulation. 
Before Verona, I thought that while my show-offness had been developed as a way to protect a wounded ego, my curiosity and love for analysis were the “healthy parts” of me.
But with Verona, I was made to see how even curiosity can be appropriated into the addictive behavior pattern, how Verona loses herself in the ecstasy of putting a diagram together, in the exact same way that I lose myself in the challenge of composing a text. 

“Like you’re doing right now?” You ask. 

Exactly. 

“Okay, I get the parallel, but I don’t understand why you’re so sure that Verona practices to lose herself? There’s obviously a practical need to draw diagrams, and though she enjoys the practice beyond pure necessity that doesn’t mean her enjoyment is a trauma response.” 

Fair point, and a part of the problem with these things is that it’s all mixed together, both in the story and in real life. So let’s see if we can divide and conquer. We agree that Verona’s fascination with becoming Other stems from this trauma, right?

“Yeah, sure.”

How do we know that she wants to become Other because of her trauma and not simply because that it’s cool as heck?

“Well, in that case it’s obvious that she’s putting distance between herself and the human world that hurt her.”

Sure, but how does becoming Other actually help? This isn’t just about being away from her father - if it were, she could dream of using the practice to get her own place, without giving up her humanity. It's not even about changing herself so she won’t feel sadness - we are shown that Others can go through grief or drown in despair. 

“Okay, so what is it about?”

It’s about not being Verona anymore. 
At a very young age Verona was judged by her parents, entities that to her were all powerful and all knowing, as unworthy of love - her mother by finding Verona unworthy of staying in Kennet for, her father by not finding Verona worthy of genuine attention. 
Verona was far too young to appeal against this verdict, even to herself, and she’d been serving out her sentence ever since. 
But blessedly, she was given vacations, or walks in the yard - we get a lot of hints that from a young age Verona was left to her own devices, to busy herself with art. The constant pain caused by being someone unworthy of love was mitigated by investing herself fully in her own creativity. 
Little by little, time after time, little Verona discovered that coming up with something truly creative brings with it a moment in which nothing hurts, in which the pain isn’t just forgotten but is truly gone. But it’s a short moment, and it takes a lot of work to achieve, so little Verona became really good at the kind of work it takes to get her “fix”[10].  
And so, we could theoretically ask - is Verona naturally talented, or does her impressive ability stem from spending so much time engaging in her own creativity as a form of emotional regulation? 
Could it be that a Verona from a parallel reality where her parents weren’t cunts would feel comfortable enough to just laze around and watch TV, do whatever it is that kids do that isn’t so intense, and not develop her creativity as much? 
If I had to guess, I’d say that Verona is probably both naturally talented AND very trained at thinking creatively because of her addiction. 
I don’t know. 
But what I do know is that when I read the descriptions of Verona forgetting some personal crisis, becoming entirely free and excited in the solving of some puzzle, I see something very familiar. 
When I write an essay like this, my favorite part is coming up with ideas. I’ll be reading a description of Verona smiling away the pain and think of how similar she is to Lisa, and start looking for other similarities. That stage is so much fun - every new connection is surprising and delightful. 
My second favorite part is the writing -  like drawing a diagram or planning a ritual, it has to do with the balance of elements - should I start with a personal story, or a scene from the book? What is the tradeoff with each choice? (In an earlier draft of this essay this very paragraph used my work as an engineer as an example, but I decided to rewrite it to be about writing because this is, in several ways, an essay about writing.)
Making an essay into a video is the part I find most uncomfortable. Both recording and making the hard subtitles are processes that have a predetermined outcome, and the moment there are no more surprises, the moment I’m on a train track with a single destination I start to feel like I’m drowning, or at the very least holding my breath. This is when I add the footnotes, if only to keep myself entertained[11]. 
I didn’t understand why that pattern was so prevalent in my life until I read Verona - how terrified she is of an existence that’s devoid of surprises (something she bonded with the Carmine Beast over) and how she leaps at every chance to try something new - be it the Spirit of Long, Montague’s nightmare coffee or turning into a cat.
This pattern appears in practice as well as everyday things, like how she doesn’t usually wear make up but does enjoy putting on smokey eye shadow for the weekend-cabin-hangout, and we see from the first time we meet Verona, cleaning her home. Let’s zoom in on that scene. 
The work is described in detail, giving the reader a view of how thorough and hardworking Verona is. The description of her thoroughness and precision made me think I’m reading about someone who just enjoys working, a trait that can be endearing, and so I was surprised to read her narrating her own burning hatred for the chores she was given. 
This felt more in line with the author's usual way of constructing a character - augmenting the character’s heroism by making her take more suffering upon herself. Similarly to how Taylor’s heroism in giving Chubster CPR is augmented by the vomit in his mouth, so is Verona’s industriousness augmented by the fact that she hates cleaning. 
I was getting somewhere, but I still didn’t realize what this scene is actually about. 
Verona’s dad arrives, and when Verona expresses her need to feel acknowledged, to be thanked for the work she’s doing in the house, his response is to break into a monologue about necessity, about how everyone works hard and the world is thankless. 
This is the first time the reader is confronted with this red-herring-theme. 
In this first instance, the reader might take the monologue as the author simply expressing his opinion - that hard, thankless work is a necessary part of any life worth living. 
This statement might make sense, but that isn’t the point. Verona’s dad is using this statement to cover something darker, and the more we see of the interaction between Verona and her dad, the more we realize how fake his monologue is. 
Because in reality, there’s nothing stopping Verona’s dad from thanking his daughter, from hugging her, from telling her that she’s hardworking and smart and he’s so lucky to have her. 
The reason he doesn’t thank her isn’t because it’s a good preparation for “the real world”, but because thanks is something that you give, and he doesn’t want to give - only to receive. 
Even though it would make the hours of work easier on Verona if he took a minute to give her the appreciation she needs, he instead uses several minutes to complain about how hard he’s working. 
I hate him, but I also feel bad for him. There’s a sense in which the man is trapped in some pathologically narrow perspective, and his suffering is as real as anyone else's.
But that’s a very adult view of the man. Before we get to see him as adults, we see him like most children see their parents - as always right. 
Verona’s dad's presentation as having the correct answer is a preparation for a twist, and it is a twist not only at the level of plot, but also at the level of meaning - making the reader perceive one meaning as the message of the book and then replacing it with another. 
I can’t overstate how rare this is in the literary world, and how important - the reader isn’t just told not to fall for the lie of necessity, they are made to be deceived and realize the deception. 
This facilitates a sobering up that doesn’t just call for the reader to reject the temptation to shrug and say “it is what it is”, it forces them to practice that rejection.
The reader isn’t just told that “Verona can’t see how shitty her father is because she’s too close” - the reader themselves is taken to her perspective, and is taken through the same process that Verona herself has to go through, to shift her perspective from thinking about her dad from an okay father to realizing that he’s a pathetic son of a Hellhound. 
God, I just wish some horror-movie-esque Other would drag him somewhere dark and-

“Um, can I ask a question?”

Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. 

“You said that we’re taken to see things from Verona’s perspective, but this happened after her dad smashed her artwork when she forgot to get him a birthday present. Couldn’t she have known by then that he’s wrong sometimes?”

Not psychologically, I think. The fact that she talks to him like she does in that first scene, the fact that she never got back to sculpting, makes me think that the event was never fully processed. Lucy describes how she herself had to clean up the mess because Verona preferred to tiptoe around the wreckage instead of acknowledging what had happened.  
The fact that this event is withheld from us makes us see things from Verona’s true perspective. We’re not aware of all of the information that she has, but we feel about the situation like she does, at least consciously - pretending that her dad is alright. 
This reminds me of how in Worm we are made to discover Taylor’s mom's death through Emma mocking Taylor about it. On the one hand, the reader is distanced from Taylor because she knows something that the reader doesn’t, but on the other hand finding out that shocking piece of information at the exact same moment that Taylor realizes Emma actually went that far, places the reader emotionally closer to Taylor.  
What’s done here is similar - the author can’t make us repress the piece of information Verona tries to ignore, so we are not given it and are thus forced to pretend with her that everything’s fine[12].
From that point on, the author turns our point of view, slowly, like one turns a knife, until we realize with Verona that something is very wrong. 
At this point, Verona finally fights back by yelling at her father for not knocking on her door, or more accurately, for entering without her consent.

“Ew.”

Sorry[13]. Verona’s counter-action draws a counter-counter-action from her father. A couple of days later, he offers to drive her to the mall and get her some fried carbs, which weakens her defenses…

“Understandable.”

… which he then utilizes to get her to do some chores, right before they supposedly go. After he gets her to communicate her submission by doing the dishes, he goes to bed and forgets about the whole thing, which essentially means that he got her to do more work while neglecting her promised reward. 
I feel like I’m not even close to describing how painful that scene was to read, or why.
The best I can do is think of another scene that made me feel this way: In the beginning of Shirley Jackson’s EXCELLENT We’ve Always Lived in the Castle, there’s a scene where the protagonist, who is hated by the town’s people, is bullied in the most subtle way - finishing her meal at an eatery (or something) she asks someone to move his chair so that she could pass through, and he does - he just does it as slowly as he reasonably can, making her wait for the sole purpose of making her wait.
She knows he’s doing it because he hates her, he knows she knows, she knows that he knows she knows, and so on. 
The reader is left to grind their teeth in misery. 

“Okay, but why was that scene so horrible? Maybe by analyzing that similar scene we can get a grasp on the other one.”

Hmmm, good point. I think the heart of the scene in Castle is that the protagonist can’t call for help, can’t even express her outrage. Saying “This motherfucker is intentionally moving his chair slowly to bully me!” will only make our protagonist sound insane. With Verona and her dad we get something similar - Verona isn’t just helpless against her father’s theft of her hard work with promises that weren’t fulfilled, he also takes away what little power she has in complaining. It’s not that her Trauma is passively Quiet - he’s actively making it Quiet. But it’s more than that. 
While the tension between the Castle-dweller and the townspeople is enough to tighten the discomfort at the heart of that novella, the author creates an even tighter tension by caging Verona in the same house with her father; While Castle-chan can take solace in the knowledge that she is being deliberately abused and harassed, Verona concludes at the end of the scene that her father didn’t even do it on purpose. 
That, too, confused me at first. In Worm, the thing that makes the villains so hateable is that they want their victims to suffer; that they rejoice in their suffering. But now I see that it’s exactly this lack of knowledge that makes Verona’s dad the perfect villain - FOR THIS STORY.
I’ve said that Pale champions two graces - selflessness and seeing other people’s perspectives, and has one sin - selfishness. Isn’t it weird that it has two graces and only one sin?

“Now that you say it, that doesn’t seem very balanced.”

It sure doesn’t. Verona’s dad is the perfect villain because he embodies two sins: the first is not caring about Verona’s needs, the second is not seeing her perspective.
Of all of Verona's dad’s crimes, the one that hurts her the most is that he really doesn’t know what she’s feeling and thinking. 
Unlike Taylor, who knows that Emma knows exactly how each of her actions makes Taylor feel, Verona knows that she’s suffering the pain of getting her hopes up and being denied because of the exact opposite reason.
I don’t know which is worse.
But what I do know is that I felt a huge relief when Verona’s father crossed the line, in doing things that are undeniably shitty and unfatherly; things that Verona can tell other people about, like “he screamed at me and broke my stuff”. This is the second time that her dad vandalizes Verona’s possessions, and that pushes Verona to leave and seek another place to live in, which blessedly raises some alarms. 
I’ve wondered about this choice, from a writing-strategy perspective - wouldn’t it make for a more interesting challenge for Verona if her father never crossed the line, if he never turned her trauma from Quiet to Loud? Wouldn’t it be more intense if he played it smart enough so that she could never complain? 
It would. 
I think her father crosses the line for two reasons. One is once again making the reader feel seen - perhaps you too know what it’s like to have a campaign of abuse cross a line and feel a pinch of hope at the idea that your complaints will finally be heard. 
The second reason is that his crossing the line only makes it clearer how invisible Verona is to her father - in order to simulate in his mind what Verona could and couldn’t complain about, he'd first have to simulate in his mind what Verona would want to complain about. Simulating Verona’s mind in his own would be seeing her perspective, which would defeat the purpose. 
The fracture in the center of Verona’s entire world is that her father really does have the emotional maturity of a ten year old - his perspective is the only one he can imagine.
Whatever the reason for Brett breaking Verona’s stuff, I’m very glad it happened - I don’t think my little heart could’ve taken much more of that slow, quiet suffering. 
Anyway, the scene that comes after is probably my favorite in the book so far. After Verona’s dad breaks her practice equipment (including the mask her best friends made for her), she shoves her broken things into a bag, now stained with leaking ink, hugs it to her chest, and turns into a cat, bag and all. 
She meets up with Avery and Lucy, refusing to go back to human form, and performs the super high functioning tasks of sneaking to some cabin’s basement to get the furs, drawing silence runes on the fly, and blowing Edith the fuck up. 
It’s a super intense action scene, but at the same time everything’s colored in heartbreak, and that mix is so beautiful. 
I love scenes like this so much[14]. 

“What do you mean scenes like this? Are we talking about New Delhi or…”

Taylor’s voice breaking with grief in New Delhi is a good example, but I want to talk about an older example, from an older book - one that’s called Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit[15].
In Oranges, >!the protagonist discovers that her best friend in the world had just died, but she’s already excommunicated from her community, and is provided no support in her sudden, shocking grief. She’s also in the middle of a shift driving an ice cream truck, a job that she has to do or she’ll have no money to buy food.!< All she wants to do is sit down somewhere quiet and cry, but instead she takes orders and serves people their ice cream, doing her best to ignore cruel remarks about how callous she is to be able to work at a time like this. 
The similarities between this and Verona stealing the furs are obvious, but the differences are worth discussing.
While Oranges couples the protagonist's interesting personal crisis with the mundane action of selling ice cream, Pale couples Verona’s personal crisis with the exciting scene of cat-form-Verona stealing the Furs. 
Coupling an interesting personal-life event with an interesting plot-driving event, we get a similar effect with the stunted, held-back heartbreak, but presented through a much more engaging read. 

“Funny, I thought you were going to say something else.”

What? 

“Well, when you said ‘important distinction between the scenes’, I thought you were going to point out the actual important distinction - not how engaging it is, but what it teaches us about human beings. The protagonist of Oranges serves ice cream simply because she has to, in a time where she would prefer to sit down and process. Verona chooses to dive into the action specifically because processing in silence seems unbearable to her, so she avoids it at all costs. New Delhi isn’t the right comparison, then, because Taylor really needed to handle Behemoth, so it’s not as clear that her motivation is distraction. Perhaps a closer parallel would be how Taylor asks Lisa if there’s something to do, when she comes out of the meeting with the principal.”

Hmmm. Yeah, I agree, but we need to point out a key difference here, too. While Taylor and Lisa alleviate their suffering by being above somebody else, whether by gouging their eyes out or by making them feel stupid and exposed, respectively, Verona really is in it for the pure love of the game. 
She didn’t want to blow Edith up. She didn’t even want to win - she just wanted to do something exciting, and in that sense, she’s really sweeter than her predecessors. Her approach to the practice is the same as her approach to Jeremy - she might hurt somebody eventually, but if she could choose she’d much rather everyone involved just play and explore and be happy together.  

“You know, now that you mention it, there’s something about her relationship with Jeremy that never quite sat right with me.”

Okay, what?  

“There’s a scene where Verona and Jeremy are hanging out by the lake, she offers to ‘bone’ and he refuses, you know the one?”

Yeah, that didn’t sit right with me either. Like, I could imagine a thirteen year old boy refusing sex with a girl he’s really attracted to if he feels something is off, particularly if Miss basically tells us that he’s chill, but the fact that they both didn’t instantly jump to hand or mouth stuff (each for their own reasons) just seems odd. 

“Yeah, that’s not what I wanted to say. In that scene, she tells him that her dad would cry or scream at her without any restraint between 3 to 5 times a week. She says that as if that’s something messed up, and he agrees that it is. She couldn’t tell anyone about the first breaking of her stuff because she hasn’t processed it; She couldn’t tell anyone about the fried carbs because it would sound whiny. These two make sense to me - but she could have told Jeremy about the screaming and crying all along.”

She could, but I think she didn’t know that she could. It was only after her dad broke her stuff again, after a couple of days of living with Lucy and her wonderful mother that Verona began to realize how messed up things were at her home. She doesn’t complain to Jeremy, mind you - she uses him as a calibration point, asking him if his parents have tantrums like her dad does and not knowing if he’s going to say “Oh yeah 3 to 5 times a week sounds about right” or say that it only happened once like he actually does. It’s only after the incident that she realizes something had been wrong all along. 

“Does she? Because if I remember correctly, just before her dad breaks her stuff, she thinks about how he broke her, how something inside her isn’t functioning properly, because of him.” 

You’re right, it does come before. 
Let me do you one better - when she kisses Jeremy for the first time, she says that she can’t date him, and he asks “because of your parents?” and she thinks yeah, but not in the way you think. (Which I love. It’s like a pun, but sad.) Meaning that she already knows that her parents’ shitty-ness affected her ability to form relationships. 

“Wait, I’m confused. So does she know that her relationship with her father is messed up, or doesn’t she?”

That’s the thing, it’s a process, and a slow one. It’s not like one moment she thinks her dad is great and the next she realizes he’s an emotionally immature piece of trash. It’s a gradual thing, like… when you’re asleep, or in a dream, and you’re slowly becoming more and more aware that what you’re perceiving isn’t real, and there’s a reality you’re not paying attention to. What’s a nice, succinct name for that process? 

“Do you mean… Awakening?”

Damn right I do.

“Are you being smartass, or does that actually mean something?”

You tell me. We see a lot of examples of people having the practice used on them without them knowing - Jabber chuckle-paralyzing people, the Sable Prince forcing people to stay in their homes, the girls using the connection blockers on their parents. 
If we go with the interpretation that practice is a metaphor for writing and speaking, what does it mean that practice is invisible to the unawakened? How can anyone be unaware of speaking that affects them?

“They can’t?”

Correct, but they can be blind to the way speaking affects them. Verona’s case is a perfect example of this. When her dad demands that she rub his back while he cries and she tries to communicate that she doesn’t want to, he binds her by saying that if she doesn’t support him emotionally, she’s a bad daughter. 
Just like how her dad doesn’t know that he forgets to check on her room because she drew a connection blocker, pre-Awakening Verona didn’t know that he was shaping the social reality into one in which she literally has to do what he wants. 
Her awakening into magic is metaphorical to this real life awakening to the system of power that she was subjected to. 
In fact, It’s the same thing with the systems of power that apply to Others. When the Sable Prince arbiters the interrogation of Edith, he seems to us like a manifestation of fairness, but after the girls alcazarize the Furs we see from the Carmine Beast's perspective how corrupt the system is, how skewed it is towards the judges interests. 
Miss and Rook have awoken at some point to the corrupt nature of that system, as did the conspirators in the Carmine plot (I think?) but many Others haven't. Awakening doesn’t just mean to realize the system is corrupt, but to shift from the passive acceptance that “it is what it is”, to an active belief that things can and should be different.
This book is about becoming aware of the systems of power that you are subjected to, but can’t see because they were presented to you, using speaking and writing, as facts of life.
Before ‘woke’ meant too many different things to be useful in a discussion, it meant something like this. “Stay woke!” meant “Be aware that the systems within which you reside were not only built without your best interests in mind but were in fact built to weaken and exploit you.”  

“I didn’t think we were going to cohere the themes so early.” 

Me neither, but here we are. Don’t worry, we’re going to find a whole bunch of delightful surprises before we’re done here. That’s why I love writing essays so much, you know? It’s like a box of chocolates. 
But here’s the thing - this only happens to me with this author’s works. Oranges and Castle were really fun to analyze, but the themes, as far as I’ve noticed, don’t connect nearly as extensively. 
BTW, did you know that Abra Cadabra comes from Aramaic, meaning “I will create as I speak”?

“Yeah, I actually did know that. It’s pretty well known.”

Hmppfff. Okay. But did you know that Verona means truth, and Hayward means a warden who is in charge of fences?

“I didn’t. Cool. But there was another thing I wanted to talk about. Reading Verona’s interactions with Jeremy…”

Hold up. Sorry. There’s a lot to talk about regarding Verona’s relationship with Jeremy and sex in general, but I feel like this is a good opportunity to stop and breath, think about what we saw here and how it’s applicable to our lives, about how we or people we love are still held by systems of power and the imaginary concepts that hold those systems in place. Maybe contemplate the different ways this book makes us see ourselves. 

“Can’t I just ask this one question, though?”

No, it’s going to turn into a whole discussion (I know, because I’ve already written it) about how sexual behavior is affected by trauma, and then this segment will become too long for a reddit post.  But it’s a subject very much worth discussing, so let’s continue this in the first comment, in a segment called…

Verona - Boning As a Trauma Response

Footnotes:
[8] My origin story is a combination of Lisa’s and Taylor’s - while still reeling from a sibling’s suicide I became the target of a prolonged campaign of bullying that started, I kid you not, by my former best friend. 
You can imagine that reading Worm for the first time was a big deal for me.

[9] When Rick Sanchez says “Your booing means nothing to me, I’ve seen what makes you cheer,” the booing, in fact, does mean something to him, and he reminds himself and everyone in earshot how smart he is to alleviate that pang of rejection.

[10] This, I think, is why creativity is hard for the addict to recognize as an addiction - while porn and videogames can be abused until the enjoyment of the “fix” is a pale shadow of the experience that got one addicted in the first place, the work that creativity demands keeps the “fixes” coming at intervals, a sort of self regulating mechanism, keeping the "fixes" from losing potency.

[11] Don’t you just love footnotes? It’s a digression, taking away from the momentum of the main argument or story, but because the reader knows the digression is coming and chooses to partake in it, it doesn't feel as distracting. On the contrary - when done right, a footnote can be charming and whimsical, and is often more interesting than the text itself. 
RIP, Terry.

[12] I love this shit so fucking much my dudes, you don’t even know. 

[13] Or am I? You felt that too, didn’t you? This sexually-originated discomfort? Verona says she might have been naked and her father shrugs it off by saying something about how he’d changed her diapers, but that doesn’t really convince anyone. Considering that Verona later tells Lucy how lucky she’s been to get the breast genetics that she had, we can assume that Verona’s body changed in some key ways since the last time her father has seen her naked. Ways that might not leave him as indifferent as he would like to believe, and might even motivate the abrupt door opening. 
God this is uncomfortable to write about, even as an analyst. I can only imagine the levels of discomfort the author had to endure while writing this scene.

[14] I remember being in one, myself. I had witnessed something truly horrible, froze for a second, and went back to my punching bag. I finished my sets without saying a word, the silence broken up by the sound of my foot hitting the fabric at measured intervals. It wasn’t some explosion of rage, on the contrary - it was precise and controlled, focused. That was the whole point.
Fitness was my first addiction.
When you tell people that you’re addicted to fitness, they think you’re bragging. It’s hard to explain, especially at 14, the desperate need to keep staying in that headspace even when you know it’s hurting you. The habit to overtrain eroded my cartilage and tendons to a point that I was forced to take a break from training and used the free time to develop another addiction. 
Now I have two problems, and they’re both related to joints.

[15] If you’ve already heard me talk about Oranges in the Worm Videos, skip this footnote. 
Even though Taylor often speaks about her love for books, she only mentions one by name - Oranges, that she and her mother had read together. This seemed intentional to me. 
Reading Oranges, it was hard to miss the similarities - not only does this book champion a protagonist that does what’s right at every single turn and is still vilified by society, but it also delves deeply into conflicts in perspective and the absence of a singular, objective truth.
It’s funny and heartbreaking and even sexy at times, and I can’t recommend it enough. 

(Pervious post)
When we say trauma, we usually mean Shock Trauma: a single, harmful event that clashes with some basic assumptions that the afflicted person had about reality. 
The most simple example of this is a person being bitten by a dog, and subsequently developing a phobia of dogs. 
Complex Trauma is a term that was first explained to me as repeated Shock Trauma, which made me think about the person from the example above being repeatedly bitten by different dogs - but that, surprisingly, doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma. 
Clinically speaking, in order for an event to be considered Complex Trauma it needs to be both repetitive AND relational in nature - to happen between people, usually parent /child or prisoner/captor. 
I’m going to go on a limb and guess that you’ve already came up with several examples for this - a girl being viciously bullied at school over the span of several months, a boy repeatedly failing to protect the women in his life from violent men, a borderline-feral girl being taken to a foster home where she is often punished for not complying with demands with which she is unequipped to comply.
While the person suffering from Shock Trauma can return to their normal life to recover, for the person going through Complex Trauma there is no “normal” to return to - they live in a constant state of tension, and so it’s not surprising that the post-traumatic-stress that is caused by Complex Trauma is characterized by symptoms that are more severe than those of Shock Trauma and a greater negative effect on one's ability to maintain social relations. 
But while Complex Trauma has to have a relational element, it doesn’t have to come in the form of repeated Shock Trauma. Another example of Complex Trauma would be a girl growing up with a single father who demands that she provide his emotional needs while he ignores hers.
When looking for a reason why the suffering of Pale’s protagonists feels so different from the suffering in Worm and Pact, I initially went for the angle of Shock vs. Complex Trauma. But as I began to research for this essay, I realized that’s not the right way to slice it - first of all, Verona, Taylor, and Blake all suffer from clear cut cases of Complex Trauma, while Lucy and Avery are borderline cases[6]. 
Looking for another definition that would capture the difference, I tried going with Invisible Trauma, a term referring to either Shock or Complex Trauma that is hard to diagnose because the person is high functioning. Again, this was true for Verona and Brian, but not so much for Lucy and Avery. 
In order to resolve this issue we're going to use the non-clinical terms Loud Trauma and Quiet Trauma. 
In Loud Trauma, the person knows that something bad happened and likely knows that they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. More importantly, they have a clear name for their trauma - something they can say and instantly get sympathy from other people, (perhaps over a fugly burger,) or at the very least get acknowledgement.  
Someone suffering from Quiet Trauma, however, will find it difficult to communicate the gravity of their situation to other people. 
It’s very easy to imagine a younger Verona failing to explain how neglected she felt by her father:
“It’s like he doesn’t care about me at all!”
“What, he ignores you?”
“No, he… He actually wants us to spend time together, pretty much all of the time.” 
“So what’s the problem?”
But the real kicker of Quiet Trauma is in the fact that the afflicted person might not even know that they are suffering from it. 
Pale provides many small, quiet heartbreaks, and my favorite one might be the moment where
Verona narrates the guilt she feels over having it so easy, compared to her friends - after all, she is straight and white, so what is she complaining about?
That guilt comes in sharp contrast with the fact that from a clinical point of view, the trauma that she endured is significantly more severe than theirs, as are its symptoms.
This shouldn’t be taken as a diminishment of Avery’s and Lucy’s suffering. Whether or not the girls’ suffering clinically qualifies as trauma, it’s intense, constant, and damaging. That damage is worsened by the lack of solidarity or empathy. Just like with Verona, it’s easy to imagine someone well-meaning-but-ignorant trying to talk to the girls and not really getting it:

“I’m the only black kid in a white town.” 
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Are they, like, racist to you?” 
“Actually… I don’t know.”
“So… What’s the problem?” 

Or in Avery’s case:

“I don’t have any friends.” 
“Oh, maybe you should play some sports.”
“I’m already playing sports.”
“So… what’s the problem? Just make friends there, or maybe talk to some people in class. If you’re feeling lonely, you can always play with your siblings!”

For a person going through Quiet Trauma, it’s easy to take society’s cue that there’s nothing wrong, and be swayed away from seeking a pragmatic solution to their problems, therapy, or even a name for their situation. 
There’s a lot of comfort in being diagnosed. It’s not just that the diagnosed person can be relieved of the guilt that comes with seeing themselves as “just weird/weak/stupid”, but it also allows them to seek external knowledge and learn how to manage the condition. 
All of these benefits are often denied from the person suffering from Quiet Trauma, that is by definition undiagnosed. 
This is one of the most important ways in which Pale informs the reader about the real world - after diving into those perspectives, seeing the girls’ troubles up close, the reader is transformed into someone who is far less likely to make the same mistake as the well-meaning-but-ignorant person depicted above. Someone that, hopefully, will know when to validate someone's experience of nameless suffering. 
Like other works by this author, Pale champions the value of seeing more perspectives, urging and luring the reader into expanding their view, into acknowledging how little we know about the lives that other people live.
While Worm expanded our views on Loud Trauma (be it Shock or Complex, Visible or Invisible), Pale aims to do so with Quiet Trauma, as it is the main source of suffering for heroes, villains, and everyone in between. From characters as unmemorable as Henrrietta, who is unable to bed the man she loves after years of unconsenting proximity to her “brothers”, all the way to Carmine Beast who’s at the heart of this bloody mess, slowly eroded by the oppressive denial of her very nature.   

“What about Melissa?” You ask, your eyebrows furrowed. “Her trauma is breaking her ankle so badly it almost snapped off. That sounds like Loud Trauma to me.” 

Pun intended? No? Okay, it’s tempting to think of Melissa’s ankle-snapping incident as a single event that ruins her life, and it is, but notice that her suffering doesn’t stem from the event itself (she doesn’t have nightmares about the fall itself or pain, and she isn’t triggered by heights) but from her isolation. The social connections that were reliant on her ability to land a backflip are now gone and, to add insult to injury, she’s now unable to do the one thing she was actually proud of.  
Nicolette's case is similar. Her trauma isn’t being pushed into a bathtub and breaking her skull - it’s being surrounded by people who simply don't care about her suffering. 

“What about Drowne, though?” you ask, eyes narrowed. “He was beaten so badly his face was disfigured. That has to be Loud Trauma.” 

Fair enough, I’ll give you that one. Loud Trauma does exist in this book, but it’s not at the focus. While we’re talking about Drowne, I should say that he provides one of the clearest examples of a traumatized person recreating their trauma. This is easy to see in the case of Loud Trauma (such as Drowne intentionally disfiguring Reid Musser’s face, or most characters in Worm doing basically anything), but it’s harder to catch in cases of Quiet Trauma - such as Verona’s avoidant attachment actively making it harder for Jeremy to meet the needs her father didn’t; Lucy’s hostility alienating her from her classmates; and Avery’s loneliness motivating her plans to become a solo traveler (maybe?).
Mellissa can be seen as recreating her rejection, or attempting to, by being so deeply obnoxious to the trio instead of jumping[7] at the opportunity to befriend them. 
Nicolette might be seen as replicating the cold environment she grew up in by working for Alexander (who makes it clear how little he cares by gainsaying her on a regular basis), or it might be a pragmatic decision that has nothing to do with her trauma. I don’t know. 
The further away we get from the protagonists, the harder it becomes to see these things clearly, but I think that’s the point - it’s easy to interact with people suffering from Quiet Trauma and have no idea what kind of internal despair they’re struggling with. 
Despair, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say desperation, is the keystone of the worldbuilding of Pale. There is a sense in which every single being in this world is barely holding on - not just recovering from the trauma of having their needs unmet for an extended period of time, but living those unmet needs.
This translates to an underlying tension, the feeling that getting what you want always comes at the price of denying someone what they need. 
This is true across timescales. On the one hand we have Reggie, the composite kid, who survives one week at a time, unable to afford not to screw others over. On the other hand, we have the ancient Carmine Beast and Guilherme, who likewise find themselves crushed over centuries by forces beyond their control. 
That quiet desperation, or more accurately the perspective through which it could be used to excuse cruelty, is the real antagonist of this book. 
Beyond any particular adversity, beyond any particular challenge, the girls’ true goal is to defeat that desperation and the systems that perpetuate it, to prove that we can make this world one where sentient beings help one another. While Taylor aspired to get everyone to work together, the wild practitioners aim to cultivate paradise one relationship at a time, each one in their own way. 

At first I thought that the strong friendship between the girls was a literary tool, alleviating the suffering that was so ubiquitous in the author’s works - and let me tell you, I was not complaining.

It’s so nice to enjoy the unique beauty and sophistication of the author’s writing without having to endure a constant psychic assault…

(You nod in enthusiastic agreement.)

… but now I realize it’s more than that - it’s a proof of concept. The girls prove, with their own none-transactional alliance, that such a thing is possible - the first small step from which they seek to expand the garden through the bonds they form. 
And the word prove is important here - because desperation isn’t the real enemy, but the lie that things have to be this way, that the world isn’t nice so we can’t afford to be nice. This is what the girls aim to disprove, from the very first scene (not including the prologue), from the very first interaction between my most hated character in this book and my favorite one, who is, of course…

Verona - I'm In This Picture And I Don't Like It

(Which I'll post on the subreddit and link here as soon as I'm done writing it.)

Footnotes:
[6] On paper, Lucy’s case doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma precisely because she has one healthy and loving parental relationship, something that Verona doesn’t. Whether or not Avery suffers from Complex Trauma would be even harder to diagnose. 
According to the therapist I consulted for the writing of this essay, in order to make a diagnosis someone would have to sit down and talk to the girls, and evaluate the severity of the symptoms. Even then, there is no clear threshold to what qualifies as Post-Traumatic-Stress and what doesn’t. The word "Spectrum" was brought up several times.

[7] Pun fully intended, lol.

(Edit: I was asked by the moderators to unite the first two posts into a post and followup post, but because the character limit doesn't allow for comments, I'm putting them both the post body. The reader is requested to pretend that this is not a super long read but instead two reads of convenient length.)

Abstract

Pale is a wild ride. I’ve read about a third of it (to the point of the Alcazarization of the Furs), and it made me shed many a manly tear, laugh loud enough for my neighbors to comment, it scared me to my bones, and even offended me at times[1]. 
And still, when a friend asked if I was planning to make a video about it, like the ones I’ve been doing about Worm, my initial response was a no. I thought that Pale simply doesn’t have enough meat to bite into to make for a satisfying analysis[2]. 
It is with great pride and joy that I report to you that I was wrong. 
I gave it a shot, expecting to end up with a short essay focusing on the characters’ engineering, but the more I wrote the more themes and patterns emerged until it became clear that this book is what we call in the world of literary analysis “hella juicy” - something that I wouldn’t have known had I not decided to write this analysis. 
Like the author’s other works, Pale praises the choice to take on suffering for the sake of other people as the highest grace, followed closely by the choice to see other people’s perspectives. 
This grace, as always, is coupled with a sin, but that sin is very different from the one presented in Worm. (I’m going to use Worm as a go-to reference for the simple reason that it makes it easier and shorter to express observations about Pale, but I’ll keep the comparisons to a useful minimum.) 
While Worm’s antagonists were fueled by spite, a mostly unconscious desire to hurt others in order to alleviate their own suffering, the antagonists of Pale are driven by desperation and necessity, a suffocating lack of options - or more accurately, they are driven by a worldview in which that necessity excuses selfishness and cruelty. 
In this analysis (=series of Reddit posts) we’ll examine the way these worldviews clash; practice as metaphor for writing, or speaking, or both; the unique way this book handles trauma (Loud and Quiet); the underlying Horror of Being Composite; and what it is that makes the main characters so gosh darn loveable and their friendship so precious. 
Thank you for giving this essay a shot. Let’s begin by talking about…

The Practice As a Metaphor

My father once asked me what’s the point of fantasy, as a literary genre. 
Why should we waste our time with speculative realities, he wondered, when it’s obviously more useful to learn about things that exist?
There are many good answers to this question, but here’s the one I find most valuable: 
Fantasy is absolutely about “things that exist”. It’s about people: the way they think and feel, the way they act, the way they are.  
The fantastical elements, be them lightsabers or rings of power, are used not to take the place of the human beings in the story, but to facilitate their examination, and Pale is a champion of this. 
Like many of the author's works, it takes something that already existed in the literary world and takes it further than the reader thought was possible. 
Pale’s examination of human beings happens on three different levels - independent of the practice, directly through the practice, and metaphorically through the practice. 
Independently from the practice, the girls were suffering real, invisible pain even before of their Awakening - Verona with her torturous relationship with her father, Avery with her silent drowning and Lucy with her loud one, as much as it was emblematic of her life as the only black girl in a very white town. 
Directly, the practice is used to give the reader a view of real-life fates that would be difficult to explore through a natural progression of the narrative. One example of this is the scene of Lucy creating her eavesdropping implement and listening, in a past vision, to the conversation that took place before her step father left, a display of how “quiet” racism can wound someone in a way that never quite heals. 
Another example is the scene where Verona is taken by Alpeana into a nightmare where we join her in a horrifyingly credible depiction of what it’s like to be a social dropout in small-town-Ontario, an existence in which her only solace comes from a pipe. (That scene, btw, is the example I used when justifying the existence of fantasy to my father.)
The metaphorical element is trickier to point at. While Worm’s metaphor was clear to even the least-analytically inclined reader, with Pale it’s slightly harder to answer the question - what is this book about?

“But No-Am” you say, hesitant. “You already said that in the abstract - The practice is a metaphor for writing and speaking, or something?”

Yeah, I guess I spoiled that one for myself. Does that make sense to you?

“Not really? The practice is a magic system. It’s reliant on the way that humans think, and so it might have some similarities with human communications, but that doesn’t make it about writing. What does it even mean, for something to be about something else?”

A tough question to answer, but let’s try it together. It certainly isn’t a question of what the author, dead or alive, means for the work to be about, and it’s not about what interpretation we like the most, either. 
To me, the work being about something means that while reading it, while processing its  dynamics, the reader is gently led to contemplate similar real world dynamics. This is easier to demonstrate with the practice-as-a-metaphor-for-speaking interpretation of Pale: By paying attention to matters of claim, rule of three, gainsaying and foreswearing, the reader is made to think about how in real life shaping public opinion affects what one gets or doesn’t get; how setting the tone early in an argument shapes the rest of discussion; how a threefold repetition solidifies what it is that’s being said[3]; how proving someone wrong is, in real life,  a form of attack; and my favorite - how lying drains one of their power. 

“Wait a second, that’s wrong. It’s not lying that drains one’s power, it’s the being caught in a lie and judged to be a liar that makes one unable to practice.”

Correct! And you see how that’s much more powerful as an analogy to real-life-lying, right? If you lie and nobody ever finds out, you’re in the clear. But if you break a promise and someone calls you out publicly, your word loses value, and you’re no longer able to make pacts[4]. 
The practice also offers more subtle parallels, like how breaking bread with your enemy literally makes it harder to attack you - in real life, serving barbecue to the detectives coming to question you about a murder probably won’t stop them from coming up with correct conclusions, but if you want to resolve a fight with someone you care about, few things are more effective than making them a nice meal.

“Okay, so the mechanism takes the reader through thinking about all these vibes-based things, like the traditions of hospitality and all that, I get that. But I don’t think that it has much to do with writing.”

I didn’t either, initially, but the more I read, the more I found this interpretation necessary. 
Relatively early on, Verona says that she believes Avery could endure having a boring job if she could still practice in her free time. 
This baffled me. Why would Avery need a job? Capes never had to worry about finding a job, so why would a practitioner, who is similarly much more powerful than an ordinary human being? Wouldn’t they be able to provide and exchange value in a way that’s more time efficient? 
That made me think of practice as symbolic to something other than speaking - something that is so fun to do that it can keep you going through a really boring job (putting up drywall comes to mind, for some reason), something that you can live off of if you’re good at it or well connected. There’s also the matter of conjuring beings that can be powerful and useful, while at the same time being non-existent to most people - some very old and known, others new, strange, and quick to pass. 

“Like you conjured up a representation of the reader in order to make your essay more engaging?”

Yes, exactly! The similarities between practice and writing kept popping up, but I wasn’t quite convinced until I tried to apply this parallel to the wild practitioners. While the establishment practitioner learns from textbooks and teachers, being told what to do and how, the wild practitioner interacts with the Others themselves and learns in a way that’s unmediated by another person. 
This reminded me of the author's works. For one, the thing that makes the works so refreshing is the fact that the writing doesn’t follow some guidebook, or at the very least doesn’t feel like it does. It feels like it was learned by direct interaction with the concepts, by understanding and questioning them, and these questions are at the heart of this book.
These questions can be “What if a Buffy-esque story would be, instead of about horny 17 year olds, about horny 13 year olds?” or “What if instead of it being about longing for a normal life, it would show how horrible normal life can be?” 
But it can also be deeper, more universal questions, like “What makes a friendship stable and loving?” 
This is a question that we’re going to get into in a big way, but for now we all can agree that what makes the girls’ friendship so beautiful is not that they understand each other - but that they try to. 
The wild practice, as I understand it, is a metaphor for the writing of this very book, but it extends beyond that. Just like our teenage witches, the author is not limited to a single paradigm, and so he is free to learn from many different sources, and to switch up the elements constructing his stories - from superpowers/scifi to supernatural drama; from constant, crushing loneliness to supportive, heartwarming friendships; from self deception to the deception of others (and Others); from the horror of being composite (as it is explored through the characters finding out that they have different brain parts aiming to achieve different goals), to another, more fluid form of that very same horror (as it is explored in cases like Edith betraying Matthew, inviting the reader to wonder if the part of her that succumbed to addictive behavior is the echo of the pyromaniac turned nymphomaniac and drug addict.)
I’m sure you can find many more examples of this. 

“Yeah, I see the parallel, but I don’t know if it’s intentional, or if it means what you think it means.” 

That’s fine - as we go over the characters and their relationship with the practice, we’re going to find more locks to use this analytic key on, and each one will give more weight to the claim. 
But before we start analyzing the characters themselves, there’s one more concept we need to introduce, one more difference between Worm and Pale that we need to examine. This difference is complex and radical, and though I felt it from the very beginning, it took me a long time to point it out. It’s so fundamental that I didn’t even know what to call it, and we can’t discuss things without naming them. As you probably know - Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power[5].

And the name that I ended up finding for this concept is…

Loud and Quiet Trauma

When we say trauma, we usually mean Shock Trauma: a single, harmful event that clashes with some basic assumptions that the afflicted person had about reality. 
The most simple example of this is a person being bitten by a dog, and subsequently developing a phobia of dogs. 
Complex Trauma is a term that was first explained to me as repeated Shock Trauma, which made me think about the person from the example above being repeatedly bitten by different dogs - but that, surprisingly, doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma. 
Clinically speaking, in order for an event to be considered Complex Trauma it needs to be both repetitive AND relational in nature - to happen between people, usually parent /child or prisoner/captor. 
I’m going to go on a limb and guess that you’ve already came up with several examples for this - a girl being viciously bullied at school over the span of several months, a boy repeatedly failing to protect the women in his life from violent men, a borderline-feral girl being taken to a foster home where she is often punished for not complying with demands with which she is unequipped to comply.
While the person suffering from Shock Trauma can return to their normal life to recover, for the person going through Complex Trauma there is no “normal” to return to - they live in a constant state of tension, and so it’s not surprising that the post-traumatic-stress that is caused by Complex Trauma is characterized by symptoms that are more severe than those of Shock Trauma and a greater negative effect on one's ability to maintain social relations. 
But while Complex Trauma has to have a relational element, it doesn’t have to come in the form of repeated Shock Trauma. Another example of Complex Trauma would be a girl growing up with a single father who demands that she provide his emotional needs while he ignores hers.
When looking for a reason why the suffering of Pale’s protagonists feels so different from the suffering in Worm and Pact, I initially went for the angle of Shock vs. Complex Trauma. But as I began to research for this essay, I realized that’s not the right way to slice it - first of all, Verona, Taylor, and Blake all suffer from clear cut cases of Complex Trauma, while Lucy and Avery are borderline cases[6]. 
Looking for another definition that would capture the difference, I tried going with Invisible Trauma, a term referring to either Shock or Complex Trauma that is hard to diagnose because the person is high functioning. Again, this was true for Verona and Brian, but not so much for Lucy and Avery. 
In order to resolve this issue we're going to use the non-clinical terms Loud Trauma and Quiet Trauma. 
In Loud Trauma, the person knows that something bad happened and likely knows that they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. More importantly, they have a clear name for their trauma - something they can say and instantly get sympathy from other people, (perhaps over a fugly burger,) or at the very least get acknowledgement.  
Someone suffering from Quiet Trauma, however, will find it difficult to communicate the gravity of their situation to other people. 
It’s very easy to imagine a younger Verona failing to explain how neglected she felt by her father:
“It’s like he doesn’t care about me at all!”
“What, he ignores you?”
“No, he… He actually wants us to spend time together, pretty much all of the time.” 
“So what’s the problem?”
But the real kicker of Quiet Trauma is in the fact that the afflicted person might not even know that they are suffering from it. 
Pale provides many small, quiet heartbreaks, and my favorite one might be the moment where
Verona narrates the guilt she feels over having it so easy, compared to her friends - after all, she is straight and white, so what is she complaining about?
That guilt comes in sharp contrast with the fact that from a clinical point of view, the trauma that she endured is significantly more severe than theirs, as are its symptoms.
This shouldn’t be taken as a diminishment of Avery’s and Lucy’s suffering. Whether or not the girls’ suffering clinically qualifies as trauma, it’s intense, constant, and damaging. That damage is worsened by the lack of solidarity or empathy. Just like with Verona, it’s easy to imagine someone well-meaning-but-ignorant trying to talk to the girls and not really getting it:

“I’m the only black kid in a white town.” 
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Are they, like, racist to you?” 
“Actually… I don’t know.”
“So… What’s the problem?” 

Or in Avery’s case:

“I don’t have any friends.” 
“Oh, maybe you should play some sports.”
“I’m already playing sports.”
“So… what’s the problem? Just make friends there, or maybe talk to some people in class. If you’re feeling lonely, you can always play with your siblings!”

For a person going through Quiet Trauma, it’s easy to take society’s cue that there’s nothing wrong, and be swayed away from seeking a pragmatic solution to their problems, therapy, or even a name for their situation. 
There’s a lot of comfort in being diagnosed. It’s not just that the diagnosed person can be relieved of the guilt that comes with seeing themselves as “just weird/weak/stupid”, but it also allows them to seek external knowledge and learn how to manage the condition. 
All of these benefits are often denied from the person suffering from Quiet Trauma, that is by definition undiagnosed. 
This is one of the most important ways in which Pale informs the reader about the real world - after diving into those perspectives, seeing the girls’ troubles up close, the reader is transformed into someone who is far less likely to make the same mistake as the well-meaning-but-ignorant person depicted above. Someone that, hopefully, will know when to validate someone's experience of nameless suffering. 
Like other works by this author, Pale champions the value of seeing more perspectives, urging and luring the reader into expanding their view, into acknowledging how little we know about the lives that other people live.
While Worm expanded our views on Loud Trauma (be it Shock or Complex, Visible or Invisible), Pale aims to do so with Quiet Trauma, as it is the main source of suffering for heroes, villains, and everyone in between. From characters as unmemorable as Henrietta, who is unable to bed the man she loves after years of unconsenting proximity to her “brothers”, all the way to Carmine Beast who’s at the heart of this bloody mess, slowly eroded by the oppressive denial of her very nature.   

“What about Melissa?” You ask, your eyebrows furrowed. “Her trauma is breaking her ankle so badly it almost snapped off. That sounds like Loud Trauma to me.” 

Pun intended? No? Okay, it’s tempting to think of Melissa’s ankle-snapping incident as a single event that ruins her life, and it is, but notice that her suffering doesn’t stem from the event itself (she doesn’t have nightmares about the fall itself or pain, and she isn’t triggered by heights) but from her isolation. The social connections that were reliant on her ability to land a backflip are now gone and, to add insult to injury, she’s now unable to do the one thing she was actually proud of.  
Nicolette's case is similar. Her trauma isn’t being pushed into a bathtub and breaking her skull - it’s being surrounded by people who simply don't care about her suffering. 

“What about Drowne, though?” you ask, eyes narrowed. “He was beaten so badly his face was disfigured. That has to be Loud Trauma.” 

Fair enough, I’ll give you that one. Loud Trauma does exist in this book, but it’s not at the focus. While we’re talking about Drowne, I should say that he provides one of the clearest examples of a traumatized person recreating their trauma. This is easy to see in the case of Loud Trauma (such as Drowne intentionally disfiguring Reid Musser’s face, or most characters in Worm doing basically anything), but it’s harder to catch in cases of Quiet Trauma - such as Verona’s avoidant attachment actively making it harder for Jeremy to meet the needs her father didn’t; Lucy’s hostility alienating her from her classmates; and Avery’s loneliness motivating her plans to become a solo traveler (maybe?).
Mellissa can be seen as recreating her rejection, or attempting to, by being so deeply obnoxious to the trio instead of jumping[7] at the opportunity to befriend them. 
Nicolette might be seen as replicating the cold environment she grew up in by working for Alexander (who makes it clear how little he cares by gainsaying her on a regular basis), or it might be a pragmatic decision that has nothing to do with her trauma. I don’t know. 
The further away we get from the protagonists, the harder it becomes to see these things clearly, but I think that’s the point - it’s easy to interact with people suffering from Quiet Trauma and have no idea what kind of internal despair they’re struggling with. 
Despair, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say desperation, is the keystone of the worldbuilding of Pale. There is a sense in which every single being in this world is barely holding on - not just recovering from the trauma of having their needs unmet for an extended period of time, but living those unmet needs.
This translates to an underlying tension, the feeling that getting what you want always comes at the price of denying someone what they need. 
This is true across timescales. On the one hand we have Reggie, the composite kid, who survives one week at a time, unable to afford not to screw others over. On the other hand, we have the ancient Carmine Beast and Guilherme, who likewise find themselves crushed over centuries by forces beyond their control. 
That quiet desperation, or more accurately the perspective through which it could be used to excuse cruelty, is the real antagonist of this book. 
Beyond any particular adversity, beyond any particular challenge, the girls’ true goal is to defeat that desperation and the systems that perpetuate it, to prove that we can make this world one where sentient beings help one another. While Taylor aspired to get everyone to work together, the wild practitioners aim to cultivate paradise one relationship at a time, each one in their own way. 

At first I thought that the strong friendship between the girls was a literary tool, alleviating the suffering that was so ubiquitous in the author’s works - and let me tell you, I was not complaining.

It’s so nice to enjoy the unique beauty and sophistication of the author’s writing without having to endure a constant psychic assault…

(You nod in enthusiastic agreement.)

… but now I realize it’s more than that - it’s a proof of concept. The girls prove, with their own none-transactional alliance, that such a thing is possible - the first small step from which they seek to expand the garden through the bonds they form. 
And the word prove is important here - because desperation isn’t the real enemy, but the lie that things have to be this way, that the world isn’t nice so we can’t afford to be nice. This is what the girls aim to disprove, from the very first scene (not including the prologue), from the very first interaction between my most hated character in this book and my favorite one, who is, of course…

Verona - I'm In This Picture And I Don't Like It

(Which I'll post on the subreddit and link here as soon as I'm done writing it.)

Footnotes:

[1] At one point John quotes Sun Dze’s Art of War, to which Toadswallow, whose greatest joy is farting in another goblin’s face, responds with mockery and admonishment. "Art of war?” he asks. “You quoting that isn’t so different from [a] college douchehole quoting Nietzsche.”

This was a blow to my ego, considering my tendency to quote Friedrich in my essays, but fortunately I got over it because he who has a “why” can endure almost any “how”.

[2] I said it once and I’ll say it again - if you want to deepen your own understanding of a story, writing your own analysis is one of the better ways to go.

[3] Do you remember how in Fight Club, Tyler Durden tricks the protagonist into promising something three times, and the viewer intuitively understands how that makes the promise more meaningful?

[4] There’s a Talmudic tale that goes something like this: A man comes to his Rabbi asking for advice. 
“What’s the problem?” The Rabbi asks. 
“I’ve broken my promise to a friend, and now he won’t trust me no matter what I say. Is there anything I can do to fix it?”
“Yes, there is. It’s a two step ritual, and if you complete it your friend will trust you again. The first step is this - take a pillow stuffed with feathers to a tall rooftop, open up the pillow and disperse the feathers in the wind, every single one of them. After you do that, come back and I’ll tell you the second step.”
Hopeful and excited, the man thanks the Rabbi and leaves. Several hours later, he returns. “Okay, I did it. What’s the second step?”
The Rabbi smiles. “The second step is to put the feathers back in the pillow, motherfucker.”

[5] A quote from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a book we’ll talk more about later on. 

[6] On paper, Lucy’s case doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma precisely because she has one healthy and loving parental relationship, something that Verona doesn’t. Whether or not Avery suffers from Complex Trauma would be even harder to diagnose. 
According to the therapist I consulted for the writing of this essay, in order to make a diagnosis someone would have to sit down and talk to the girls, and evaluate the severity of the symptoms. Even then, there is no clear threshold to what qualifies as Post-Traumatic-Stress and what doesn’t. The word "Spectrum" was brought up several times.

[7] Pun fully intended, lol.