All’s Well That Ends Well.
“if the outcome of a situation is happy, this compensates for any previous difficulty or unpleasantness.”
Origin: possibly in the middle ages, with Shakespeare’s play of the same name.
While Kotetsu’s life just about hit rock bottom in this episode, it ended with him meeting the man who’d save his life.
In the city of Sternbild, heroes are a part of everyday life. In fact, the superpowered beings called NEXT are reality TV superstars, wearing sponsor logos and competing for points as they carry out their work. Kotetsu T. Kaburagi, AKA Wild Tiger, is one such hero. Now considered “past his prime,” his career takes a turn when he’s paired with the haughty rookie Barnaby Brooks Jr.—a young man dead set on finding his parents’ killer.
We’ve arrived: the nadir of the book. I’ve convinced no small amount of trusting, unwary souls to try this rollercoaster of a series. Every one found different characters and themes that appealed to them, but without fail they reported having difficulty with this stretch of pages. Why? Because it’s a fuckton of infodump about characters we’ve just been introduced to and don’t care about. Also, (even more) racism.
On the bright side, while previous posts in this series have taken thousands of words breaking down 30 pages of novel, here we’re going to be able to sail through nearly a hundred pages like it’s nothing.
Prepare yourselves for an experience I’m sure many of you are unfamiliar with: an old cis white man telling you his overconfident opinions about how and why the world works.
If you’re wondering why it’s been a little while since the last recap, it’s because this section requires a certain amount of mental steeling to face. Not because it is particularly more horrible than other parts of this book (though at points it is, because it revolves around The Worst Character), but because a great deal of it is very, very boring. Today we will be covering the less-boring part.
When last we left off, Lestat had suffered the death of his first love and his mother leaving to enjoy eternity as her own person and buried himself in the earth, only to be dug out by the much-lauded Marius. This will turn out to be among the worst things that has happened to Lestat in terms of effects on the rest of his unlife. We’ll get into that as we go, because I am not exaggerating when I say that Marius is emblematic of just about everything wrong with these books.
We’re going to finish these before the end of the year, watch and see.
We left off at a dire moment for Our Hero: the inevitable had at last come to pass, and Lestat’s first love Nicolas had immolated himself (with more than a touch of help from Armand). We return you now to that moment as things continue to get worse. Way worse, because we have to finally contend with The Worst Character in the flesh.
