LaPorte Caves

Pepper wrote:

Torque wrote: I am surprised to see that Julia didn't seem to have any thoughts or worry about what Howard will think, but at least she acknowledges that he deserves better.

Do you think Julia will tell Howard what she did? There's such a fundamental disconnect between the characters in this story. Julia tells Howard not to be afraid because there's no violent crime against claimed men, but just the things women do that are legal would be enough to terrify him. Sallan tells Julia that a man could never successfully escape from a nourished woman, while Julia is regretful of how she treated Howard to make him want to escape. The yoga teacher telling the women how superior they are, and then Julia thinking that Howard needs to let go of his ego. Julia is upset enough over the stolen earrings to torture the man who took them, but melted away the locket from Howard without a second thought (and if Howard is upset about that, tough luck). The story is doing an excellent job in creating a world which is, despite some familiar trappings, fundamentally different from our own, and with Julia caught somewhere in the middle. But it's kind of frustrating in a way; plenty of talking, but just never understanding each other.

The deeper I read into this story the more I think that the big issue here is not if Howard and Julia love each other, but what kind of love they feel and for who. As far as I can tell, I really believe that they are in love, but not as deeply as either is with himself/herself. Howard inner monologue about the fact that he has geven Julia much more than he ever had in any previous relationship was particulary illuminating: in his mind he consider love as a commitment to protect his partner and that's sits fine with him because it allows him to stroke his ego and be in control. From her part, Julia loathed herself for being basically the passive side of their relationship, because she felt that she was holding Howard back. Now she's in love with her new self because she feel that she can be the one who carries the relationship, lifting that burden from Howard's shoulder.

I think this video might be relevant to the discussion.

Pepper wrote:

Woodclaw wrote: The deeper I read into this story the more I think that the big issue here is not if Howard and Julia love each other, but what kind of love they feel and for who. As far as I can tell, I really believe that they are in love, but not as deeply as either is with himself/herself. Howard inner monologue about the fact that he has geven Julia much more than he ever had in any previous relationship was particulary illuminating: in his mind he consider love as a commitment to protect his partner and that's sits fine with him because it allows him to stroke his ego and be in control. From her part, Julia loathed herself for being basically the passive side of their relationship, because she felt that she was holding Howard back. Now she's in love with her new self because she feel that she can be the one who carries the relationship, lifting that burden from Howard's shoulder.

I agree with some of that, but not in all the details.

As for Howard's ego and his desire to be in control, I think there's a continuum of him wanting to be in control of his own life, wanting to be Julia's protector, wanting to increase Julia's dependence on him, and wanting to control Julia. I can accept that he did the first two, but I never really saw him as trying to keep Julia dependent on him. And I don't think it's a bad thing that he wouldn't want anyone else to control him.

I also don't think Julia was quite as bad off as you say, either. If she thought she was holding Howard back, that might make her loathe herself, which would make her think she was holding him back even more, etc. Seems like that kind of downward spiral could devastate someone, and I just don't see that for Julia at the beginning of the story. She'd failed at being an artist ((been a while since I read, CONFIRM)) and other things, but it seemed like Howard was a bright spot in her life. Didn't she say in a pre-Nourishment chapter that she was glad Howard was there to protect her?

I'm not quite sure how that all fits in with Julia's hope that spending some time there will make Howard a better boyfriend. There's a telling passage in chapter 14 where she says she wants to stay but offers to take them home. Howard says he'll stay but with the condition that he go with her to send the emails explaining their absence. (I don't imagine any other woman there would put up with a thing like that.) There's a give-and-take there that seems to bode well for them.

I don't think that Julia is bad either, but I can't help but notice that she seem to experience a level of dissonance in her behaviour that seem to be in no small part due to the Nourishment. On one hand I'm convinced that she's really in love with Howard, but she honestly believe that he need to be taken down a peg (something I agree with), and seem convinced that staying is a good way to do it. On the other hand, Julia is witnessing all of this new world from a perspective completely different from any other woman we have met so far. She's not just an alien, but she's also a woman that has a long experience in being weak, sick, hurtable and so on. She knows pain first hand and doesn't wish them on another human being -- at least from a rational perspective. At the same time being inexperienced with her current body -- both its abilities and needs -- she's also unable to corrently judge her destructive potential and how powerful her instincts are.
This ties in to one of my old observations about this world: I think that pre-Nourishment is the bane of this society since divorce women from ever experiencing the same level of duress -- both physical and intellectual -- of men since a very young age. This means that they lack a number of interpersonal experiences that Julia has, but at the same time they're far more comfortable with their power.

Pepper wrote: But if Julia does consider this to be a teachable moment for Howard, then presumably how she acts as the dominant partner is how she'll expect him to act once they're back home. One thing that drives me nuts about that world is how women have divorced themselves from any judgment for their actions. (It's great story telling and world building, I just mean it would be infuriating to live in such a place.) It's not that when they do something wrong there are no consequences; they've got the system so rigged that nothing they do can be wrong by definition. I mean, Julia seems to think that when she has a dozen orgasms that it's some kind of sacrifice that Howard should thank her for. She's getting in touch with her body, finding her center, nobly giving of herself so that she may be at peace when she tells Howard what to do. Julia, if you want to have sex 8 times a day, just admit that you're doing it because it feels good. I never believe someone who gets everything they want and tries to make it sound like they're doing me a favor. I wonder how Julia would like it if they came back home, the Nourishment wore off, and Howard said to her "it's the middle of winter, there's a foot of snow in the driveway, and I'm really stressed at work. I'm going to Cancun. When I return, I'll be much more relaxed so I can treat you better. You can thank me when I get back. The snow shovel is in the garage. See you in a week."

What you describe here it's exactly the kind of problem I ascribe to P-N, coupled with the fact that -- and this a big credit to Circes as a writer -- this society seem to have very little or a lot in the way of self-restrain. On one side the entire infrastructure is built to make impossible for the women to break the law in any significant way, both because they're, for all intent and purposes, the law and apparently there's little that can stand in the way of Nourished, except another Nourished. There was a similar predicament in Robert Kirkman's Invincible, his race of fascist supermananalogues, the Vultrumites, had the problem that only an older Viltrumite was able to significantly hurt one of his peers. On the other hand the simple fact that this society doesn't seem to have breeding camps and other similar institutions shows that the women knows where to stop.
In more than one way the Nourished seem to be functional sociopaths, they know there's a moral, but they choose to ignore it when they fancy it or need it.

grungykitten wrote: OK, after reading chapter 16, I can't help but put some pieces together:

The Nourished women are masters of manipulation. Ruth said so herself when she described The Dance. They can hear everything Julia and Howard say to each other, even whispered in confidence. They know exactly what the pair are thinking.

We know that there is a strong sense of foreboding among the Nourished women that the Diana tree is dying. Suddenly, these beings appear from another world. A world without Nourishment. Maybe the Nourished women never knew Earth existed, maybe they knew but they did not know the way there. In any case, Julia has now marked the way for them.

Viewed with this perspective, lots of things start to make a little more sense. The fact that Ruth took Julia and Howard in without batting an eye, and continues to let the pair stay with her, despite her financial troubles. The fact that Mindy followed them back into the cave after explicitly being asked not to. The convenient timing of the beach trip.

Is there any way this doesn't lead to an invasion of Earth?

This is an interesting scenario, but I think the case might be a little different and even more fantastic. This is all speculation on my part and past comments from Circes already proved me wrong, but stay with me for a bit.
We have really no idea how the Caves actually work, save that apparently they open up on different worlds, but we only have Ruth's word about it. What if they didn't just opne on different worlds, but different time periods as well? Ruth joked about the idea that sirens, at least in their medieval incarnation, were actually Nourished women vacationing in other worlds. This might be a clue or not, but we'll see.
A second interesting element is that the people of Nourishworld speak English or, at least, a language that sound like English, but it's written with ideographs -- like Chinese -- instead of the Latin script. Now this might be coincidence (or a simple plot conveniency), but ti tell us that the Nourishworld had a storical and, perhaps cultural, evolution similar to our own in many respects.
A third element is that most of technologies of this world are the same we have, which clearly clash with the notion of a society reliant on a vastly superior class to solve every problem without any kind of tool for any extended amount of time. Thing like cars and boats are clearly useless to the Nourished and so we can presume they were either created by the men of Nourishworld to fill the gap -- which imply that some of them had the chance to build them and market them in some way -- or relics from a pre-Nourished time, but this would mean that Nourishworld had already achieved a level of technology similar to our society before the Nourishment became widespread.

Given these three points I believe that it would be entirely possible that Nourishworld isn't a different world, but our own in a future where the rise of the Nourished cause posed a massive roadblock to any significant technological advancement simply because the now superpowered women were able to solve any problem on their own and smash their way into becoming the upper echelon of society in any respect. The already existing technology is still a status symbol (a woman can afford to buy her men the best toys) and has been adapted to a point. The language suffered a similar fate, the women developed a code to communicate among themselves that relied on their superior ability to memorize informations and, little by little, this either become the most accepted form of communication or was imposed from above (kind of like Englihs has become the frank toungue of the net today).
If this is true it's possible that Julia is the vector that would bring the first seeds of the diana tree back to the past.

Pepper wrote: Hmm, well none of that is where I figured things were going. It's only Julia and Ruth that have had the ominous dreams (that we know of). Dreams aren't necessarily literal warnings; they could just as easily be about Ruth's financial trouble or Howard's unhappiness at being trapped in that world. The women there are so arrogant it doesn't seem they'd be willing to accept that something was wrong in their perfect little paradise. And if the Diana trees are dying, what good would it do for them to come to Earth? No Diana trees here, either.

I can think of at least two elements that might explain the eventual decay of the trees: sunlight and the Nourishment itself.
When Howard and Julia arrived in the Nourishworld one of the first thing they noticed was that the sunlight seemed odd, somehow less intense. This is a very wild conjecture on my part, but it reminded me of Andrzej Sapkowski's "The Witcher" series where a change in the sunlight is the first sign of a incoming climate change of global proportions and the plants are the first to suffer from it. Considering how dependent Nourishworld is on the fruits of the diana tree any climate change is potentially catastrophic.
The second is a bit more involved, but when the doctor explained to Julia what Nourishment was she stated that each can is a superconcentrate that contain the equivalent of dozens (if not more) fruits at once. Considering that most adult women consume Nourishment several times a day, this means hundrends of fruits by the end of a single week per woman. Unless the diana tree is the most invasive plant in the world, this means that it has to be subject of intesive farming and extensive monoculture, potentially leading to a deterioration of the environment like the colony collapse disorder or leaving the entire society vulnerable to a single specialized parrasite (like the Irish Great Famine of 1842-54).

Merging the two theories above there's also another possibility, maybe Julia isn't the vector that brought the seeds to the past, but she's being manipulated into bringing the seeds back before a specific event that set the chain reaction which is leading to the climate change and the Nourished are hoping to be able to preserve their future or, at least, a version of it by introducing the tree into a less damaged environment.

circes_cup wrote: I just submitted Ch 17 and 18 for posting. Ch 17 is so short I decided to finish both chapters at once rather than post them one at a time.

For those of you that are following the posting schedule I shared a few weeks back, the fact that I am posting 18 now means that everything steps up by a week. Ch 19 should be ready by 3/17 and then we hit a hiatus after that.

Chapter 17 is going up as we speak, but I'm going to wait a moment on 18 to give other stories a place it the tracker, I'm expecting at least one by Sunday.