Jon Bois: 20020
This guy is a dumbass.
yeah he rules
For as much fun as I had with 17776, there are some significant flaws at play. That story is about its protagonists interrogating an essentially static world until they embrace it, conceding that an eternity of play is better than just about anything anyone else could come up with. As such, it kind of overstays its welcome, spending too long driving its point home.
As such, I was surprised to hear that there was a sequel, 20020, focused exclusively on college football in the eternal, post-scarcity America. If 17776 exhausted its material before it was itself even over, how could 20020 possibly find something new to say?
Friends, 20020 is much better, much more exciting, and much more tense.
I don't know that I would go so far as to say it could be read as a standalone, but this is the best version of the world Bois imagined.
Shortly after the events of 17776 (just a few centuries, really) the eternally young, football-obsessed people of the United States devise a new structure for college football: by drawing lines from each endzone of their stadium until that line hits a national border or ocean, they create a network of school territories criss-crossing the nation. Each school starts with one football. If any team can gather all of the footballs by marching onto their opponents' stretched field and forcing a turnover, they are the national champion.
Husbands Manny and Nick live together in a nice apartment in Atlanta. They have a happy life, an All-American love story. One day, however, the two make the discovery of a lifetime.
And, in a world where no one can die, that's an incredible thing to say.
You see, Manny and Nick are football players. They play for San Diego State, perhaps the only two real San Diego State players left in the country. Their apartment is on the elongated field of Georgia State— meaning they have never stopped playing. And they have just discovered where Georgia Tech keeps all nine of their battle-won footballs. If they can somehow get these balls all the way from Atlanta to San Diego, it will be the greatest shift in the game in centuries. Between them and home are thousands of miles and thousands of hostile college footballs players. To pull this off would be a true Odyssey.
20020 is, in a sense, a form of procedural storytelling. By starting with this central premise— what if a college football field was extended as far is it could possibly go? (an idea which has returned in a number of Bois stories, from The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles to 17776 to even a form of the concept in The History of the Atlanta Falcons), Bois then reads the thousand-miles long pick-up sticks like they're tea leaves and searches for stories to tell, relying on the power of coincidence to imagine what this world would be like. For example, did you know that San Diego State is the one school in the country whose line would not intersect with any other DI school? Did you know that Alabama-Birmingham shares a line with a lighthouse on the Great Lakes? Did you know that the lines of Georgia Tech and Michigan State almost— but not quite— touch in Tennessee?
All of these seemingly extraneous facts, these geographic curiosities, become essential tactical facts in this universe. Bois takes this coincidence-hunting one step further by taking his map and steeping it in the facts and curios of Americana. For example, that spot in Tennessee where the lines almost— but not quite— touch? Did you know that there was a runaway train there in 1910?
Did you know that the intersection of those facts is going to make your heart stop partway through 20020?
By taking these geographic oddities, choosing what stories to tell around them, and relying on our nigh-spiritual need to connect ourselves to the people who once tread these same spots, Bois has procedurally crafted a compelling American road trip novel.
If there's one criticism to be levied, it's that we don't get a full experience here. We get a riveting action scene to end 20020, but the story's not over yet. Part of how we remember 20020 is going to be how we feel about 20021, now two years delayed. I hope we get to see it, because I'm now really invested in this impossible journey of Manny and Nick.
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Why Do People Like Yanderes?
Hi everyone, my name is Diya, and this was going to be a YT video-essay-type-thing but I'm too poor to afford a mic and too busy with college to learn how to edit videos, so here's my vague exploration of the psychology behind why people like yanderes so much through the lens of my favourite Visual Novels.
TW for uh. yandere content. Mentions of sex, gore, and non-con, particularly in the last topic. This is more like the first draft of an academic paper so while it's not explicit, I do go into some detail.
Introduction
If you’re a fan of anime or visual novels, then you’re probably already aware of what a yandere is, or at the very least you’ve seen that one picture of Yuno Gasai. Still, for the sake of thoroughness, let’s take it from the tippy top. The term ‘yandere’ is a Japanese portmanteau of ‘yanderu’ – the progressive form of ‘yami’ – meaning ‘sick’, and ‘deredere’ which roughly translates to ‘loving’. Together, the word refers to someone who is – in short – extremely lovesick. Obsessive to the extreme, and with little morality to spare, the standard yandere is characterized by a dangerous fixation on a chosen target, often appearing shy and caring at first only to flip the script and become violently aggressive towards perceived threats (Kroon, 2010).
It should be noted that yanderes are not a strictly romantic or sexual trope. The Ancient Greeks classified at least six forms of love, from familial (storge) to guests (xenia). Modern psychologists may distinguish love as either Companionate or Passionate (Kim & Hatfield, 2004) or consisting of three dimensions of Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2018). Realistically, possessiveness shows up in a variety of relationships. However, people are generally primed to view certain dynamics as inherently amorous. Societal norms tend to encourage the idea that romantic bonds ought to rank above all others, and therefore if Person A is bizarrely fixated on Person B, then clearly there must be an element of sexual interest involved regardless of the actual relationship between the individuals in question.
Regardless, yanderes remain quite popular in fiction. Many dismiss it as a fetish, which it can be, but that isn’t the case for everyone. While there is nothing wrong with indulging in kinky fiction, not all of us get horny at the thought of being chained up in someone’s basement, no matter how hot our captor may be. So why is it so pervasive? Why is this trope so appealing that most writers cannot help but include at least a single line of dialogue implying that – if circumstances had been ever so slightly different – my wholesome shoujo romcom might have turned into a psychological horror?
Hybristophilia
‘Hybristophilia’, also known as Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome after the titular criminal couple, is a word is derived from the Greek word ‘hybridzein’ meaning ‘to commit an outrage against someone’ and ‘philo’ which means ‘a strong preference for’. Sexologist John Money reportedly defined it as a paraphilia in which an individual is sexually aroused by a partner who has a predatory history of hurting other people (Money, 1986, as cited in Matuszak, 2017). In his book, Serial Killer Groupies, true crime and crime fiction author RJ Parker distinguished two forms of hybristophilia: passive and aggressive. The former is when an individual contacts a criminal with the intention of striking up a relationship with them, allowing themselves to be seduced and manipulated but having no interest in committing a crime themselves. The latter are far more dangerous, as the individual not only derives sexual pleasure from their partner’s atrocities but are active participants in carrying out or covering up the crime. To quote Griffiths (2013, as cited in Pettigrew, 2019):
“[They] help out their lovers with their criminal agenda by luring victims, hiding bodies, covering crimes, or even committing crimes. They are attracted to their lovers because of their violent actions and want to receive love yet are unable to understand that their lovers are psychopaths who are manipulating them.”
In some ways, hybristophilia is the nearest thing we have to a realistic understanding of why people love yanderes. I mean, much of the fantasy surrounding such characters and their media tend to be filled with posts begging to be spat on or calling the rightfully terrified main character ungrateful for being a teeny bit upset about finding surveillance cameras in their ceiling. However, enjoying fictitious immoral activity does not predict real perpetration, so what does? There exists little consensus amongst psychologists as to what sparks this particular predilection, and that was strange to me. You would think there would be more studies into this topic, in spite of or perhaps because of its controversial nature. Heck, that one dude wouldn’t shut up about white women’s obsession with Bundy and Dahmer, and I assumed he had gotten that information from somewhere, but it turns out that was just him using modifiers to justify sexism.
However, I believe that we can hedge a few guesses, and over the course of my research, I’ve organized the main rationalizations under four umbrellas which I will explore through the lens of my favourite yandere-themed Visual Novels. Please keep in mind that most of these games are rated as mature due to sexual scenes and/or gore. Additionally, in the spirit of transparency, this ramble will be focused exclusively on male or masculine yanderes. So, without further ado:
Call Me Bob the Builder Because I Can Fix Them
If you’re familiar with DC Comic’s Batman, or just happen to have attended any costume event held over the span of the last 20+ years, you may be familiar with the character of Dr. Harleen Quinzel, better known as Harley Quinn. Initially created as the Joker’s one-off sidekick in Batman The Animated Series, she was so well-received by audiences that she became a recurring character in the cartoon and was eventually given a proper origin story in the form of a one-shot titled Mad Love.
Harley’s origin story has seen some alterations over the past decades, but the core aspects remain largely untouched. In the beginning, Harleen Quinzel was a promising young woman who wanted was a degree from the university’s prestigious psychology department, which she gained through…less than scrupulous means.
(Listen, I’m not sure if the authors were leaning on the Dumb Blonde stereotype, or if they simply thought that casting her as a genuinely bad student would make her later actions more believable. Either way, the idea of Harley as someone with a legitimate PhD came later)
After landing an internship at Arkham Asylum – a half-hospital and half-prison straight out of the 1870s that might as well be built out of one-ply tissue-paper soaked with gasoline and left next to a crate of fireworks – Harleen set her sights on the then incarcerated Joker. At the start, her fixation on the criminal wasn’t remotely sympathetic. She didn’t want to help him, she wanted to use him. Harleen Quinzel wanted piggyback off his infamy and write a tell-all tale detailing what sort of messed up childhood resulted in Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime. Yet the more she interacted with him, the more the Joker took advantage of her empathy. By the end of their sessions, Harley no longer saw him as a violent serial killer with a clown schtick, but as a “lost, injured child looking to make the world laugh at his antics.”
But Diya, you may be asking, what does this have to do with the video? The Joker never loved Harley, and it could even be argued – as Shehadeh did in a 2017 essay – that her obsession with the pasty-faced clown is more akin to Histrionic Personality Disorder. While that may be the case, I believe that Harley’s story provides one of the reasons yanderes are so popular: their backstory.
Whether they were abandoned by their family, bullied by their peers, experimented on by evil scientists, starved on the streets, died under mysterious circumstances and then trapped in a haunted VCR tape for decades, or are simply so impossibly inhuman that they frankly do not understand why it isn’t socially acceptable to imprison their crush in a pocket dimension made of meat and non-Euclidean geometry, yanderes often have fairly sympathetic or at least understandable explanations for why they are Like That. Your mileage may vary significantly depending on how much you sympathize with these motives, but the point is that yanderes always make sense to some degree. Their morality and priorities may be twisted or even completely incomprehensible, but the audience almost always knows the reason, and that can be comforting. In the real world, other people aren’t always straightforward, and we never really know what they’re thinking, but narrative coherence demands a semblance of internal consistency lest the audience end up frustrated and confused. So yanderes are not only easy to sympathize with, but also fairly predictable. In-universe they may be unhinged freaks with a blood fetish, but to you watching from behind the safety of the screen they’re just acting out the script written for them based on a prototype. And if you understand the why behind their loose gears, then you might just be able to put them back together again.
The concept of rescue romances or “I Can Fix Them” has been around in our stories for thousands of years. The Epic of Gilgamesh detailed how Shamhat essentially ‘civilized’ wild man Enkidu through ritual lovemaking, and a concerning number of religions push the idea that women are dutybound to save men from the follies of sin. Yet men are not exempt either, with one notable example being the German fairytale, King Thrushbeard. Call it what you will regardless: Knights in Shining Armour, the Florence Nightingale Effect, or a plain old case of Because You Were Nice to Me, studies have shown that human beings generally like helping [DA2] others, even when the reason doesn’t necessarily stem from pure altruism. I will delve deeper into this later, but care and compassion are deeply ingrained in human nature, and arising from those roots is the appeal of this mentality: You can save them. You can change them. You can make them better. You are special, and the way you treat this person carries a weight that has not and will never be matched by anyone else for the rest of their mortal or immortal existence.
The illusion is a delicious one, especially if the person you’ve helped turns out to be a billionaire CEO with cash to burn, a super powerful ghost king willing to raze continents to dust for you, a demon having fun on a Friday night, or just your average hot creep with a knife. Moreover, different people have different ideas of what ‘fixing’ even means. Maybe you want to single-handedly rehabilitate your yandere into a functional member of society. Maybe you’re cool with the incessant stalking but would like them to stop slaughtering your friends, family, and local service workers. Maybe you want to make them much, much worse.
Not only do yanderes provide immediate proof that your actions have a tangible impact on the lives of others, but the fantasy also includes the desire of being seen as special. Of being admired and adored by someone whose life you inexplicably made better by virtue of simply being yourself, or an idealized version of yourself. In this fictional world, in this imaginary setting, the person you are is so uniquely, impossibly irreplaceable to someone. And if that’s the case then they can’t risk losing you, can they?
The Allure of Obsession, or ‘Til Death Do Us Part (Literally)
It shouldn’t be necessary, but here is my obligatory disclaimer anyway. Ahem: obsession is not a good thing in real life. Fixating on another human to the detriment of your own wellbeing and that of those around you is dangerous, as is encouraging someone else to obsess over you. You might think you are being worshiped, but real life is not a visual novel. The outside world doesn’t come with an age rating, the author’s guiding pen, and a convenient fade to credits sequence once you’ve reached an ending. The consequences will still be there in the morning, so don’t do it. Just don’t.
PSA out of the way, it’s natural to want to be wanted. Maslow’s Hierarchy places it just above physical safety, but I’d argue that it could easily be compared to baser drives. According to many psychological and anthropological studies, much of humanity’s continued survival and environmental dominance is largely attributed to our ability to form groups, cooperate with one another, and maintain complex interpersonal networks. Social support, intimacy, and a sense of belonging are linked to emotional and physical benefits, such as more optimistic health perceptions, higher subjective well-being, increased creativity and innovation, and greater self-efficacy (DeWall & Bushman, 2011; Harandi et al., 2017; Wang & Sha, 2018). Therefore, it’s perfectly understandable that rejection of any sort would be construed as a threat.
But if someone is obsessed with you, then you have no reason to worry about that, right? No more nights spent agonizing over how they feel about you, asking yourself whether your last text made you sound too desperate, or if you’re boring them because you spent the past hour info-dumping about Stardew Valley farm layouts. With a yandere, there will never be any doubt that they care about you. Sure, they might go about it in weird, manipulative, and insidious ways that violate your physical and mental autonomy, but you can’t deny their loyalty. They do love you in their own bizarre way. You are the sun around which they orbit. When you’re in the room, no one else exists. Every single messy flaw is just another bullet point on the mile-long list of why they adore you.
In essence, yanderes are not only attentive, but their love can be virtually unconditional. A yandere might know everything about you, and still revere you. It’s unhealthy as hell and you might genuinely question their taste, but it can be tempting to pretend that all of you, right down to the ugliest parts of yourself – the traits and choices that you would never share with another living soul even at gunpoint – are worthy of understanding, if not open praise and affection.
Attractiveness, or Okay but Have You Considered That They’re Hot Though?
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I mean what am I supposed to say here? They’re hot, what do you want from me?
No, but in all seriousness, fictional media paints an idealized version of the world, and most yanderes are hot because they have the freedom of existing purely behind that screen; artfully arranged and edited to forever appear compelling to anyone who happens to enjoy their particular style. And there are a lot of styles to choose from. Whether you want them pretty faced and disarmingly cute, or scarred up and big enough to pin you like a butterfly, yanderes come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes that are meant to pique your interest and draw you in like a naïve little fish being lured towards the mouth of an angler fish, unwilling to believe that anything bad might happen to us when the bait is this pretty.
This is often referred to as the Halo Effect, a form of cognitive bias referring to the tendency for people to assume that a single obvious positive trait must be associated with other positive traits. The go-to characteristic is typically physical attractiveness, but a nice voice, good humour, and cooking skills are also factors which serve to influence our perceptions.
So, conventional physical attractiveness is one thing, but that’s only skin deep. What about beyond that? After all, the yandere still has to talk to you before they enact their master plan of tying you up in their basement until Stockholm Syndrome kicks in.
When I showed my friend a picture of John Doe from the game John Doe, she told me that he looked like a creepy slob, and she’s far from the only person who’s ever thought so. Look at them. I feel like if I tried to comb that hair it would simply eat me, and some of the CGs really put the scopophobia in Scopophobia Studios. I love Doe, but he is not hot, and he doesn’t behave in a normally appealing way either. If the player chooses not to take a bath, Doe will immediately comment that you “smell good” before following you home, breaking into your house, and leaving a bloody organ on the floor for the player to trip over. Many yanderes can at least fake a veneer of normalcy, but from the get-go Doe doesn’t even bother to pretend he’s anything less than an otherworldly creature stuffed into a vaguely person-shaped meatsuit. In an effort to find out why so many people had latched on to Doe – including me – I shopped around social media and YouTube for answers, and what I found was a widely unanimous sentiment.
While some were drawn to his fun design and goofy personality, most simply thought that he wasn’t inherently malevolent, just very confused. In addition to being a supernatural being with a completely alien axis of morality, Doe’s meta-awareness and unbridled attempts at winning the player’s affection lends him quite a bit of support from the audience, especially if you yourself also happen to struggle with social cues and relate to his pure earnestness. In Ending 7 of the extended version, the player character has the option to tell Doe – who has altered himself to pass as more ‘normal’ – that they prefer who he truly is, at which point he grows visibly flustered and sports an adorable pair of literal heart-shaped pupils.
Whether they’re charismatic, seductive, cute, sweet, funny, nurturing, or generous, the best yanderes have engaging personalities. Even while they’re committing truly heinous crimes against God, man, and your guts, you still kinda want to hang out with them, and you want them to acknowledge you as being just as interesting. And this is all fine in fiction because you’re the one in charge, and if you ever get bored or uncomfortable or busy with something else, then you can simply close the tab or window with zero consequences, which brings us to the final and most important reason.
Power Dynamics and Consent in Fantasy (I Couldn’t Think of a Joke Here Guys, This Is Kinda Serious)
Once again, I feel that I must preface this section just for the sake of my own peace of mind: sexual coercion and assault are vile and disgusting crimes that should never be emulated or tolerated in the real world. We are speaking purely of fictional media, specifically adult-oriented media in this case, so please be mindful.
In 2009, Bivoni and Critelli conducted a study on 355 undergraduate women with the goal of assessing the reasons behind fantasies of non-consent. At the time, there were two leading explanations of this phenomenon. One stated that women with high libidos but repressed views of sex used these imaginary scenarios to alleviate the guilt they had grown to associate with sex. Because the simulation was a purely mental exercise and they themselves were cast as helpless victims in the scenario, they were able to remain blameless while still finding sexual gratification. The second stated that these fantasies were an expression of liberation by women who were adventurous and comfortable enough with their own sexuality to engage with taboo ideas that they weren’t at all interested in performing in real life. Which do you think was more common?
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If you guessed the second option, you’d be right. The study found that of the 220 women who had experienced such fantasies, 45% found theirs erotic, 46% were mixed, and only 9% reported pure aversion. One justification for this outcome relies on psycho-biological theories, for example masochistic preferences or the unintended activation of the sympathetic nervous system and subsequent mis-attribution of arousal. Other reasons have to do with higher order thinking and are tied to the power dynamics within such fantasies. On the surface is the appeal of being so desirable to someone that they simply cannot control themselves, but then there is a deeper impulse, which the researchers referred to as Adversary Transformation. To quote the article: “[fantasies] involve a struggle between an assailant and a potential victim in which it is relevant to consider who is the winner and who is the loser. At one level, it is a struggle over sex, but the woman's non-consent may be feigned or token. At another level, the woman may be seeking a victory that is not about whether sex occurs, but about what happens emotionally between the protagonists.”
Basically, the imaginary perpetrator may have ‘won’, but the self-character need not have ‘lost’.
Media provides an extra layer to the illusion, one that you as the viewer have absolute control over. If you are choosing to engage with a piece of media that explicitly labels itself as including R18+ yandere content, then you clearly have some expectations, and that background awareness goes a long way in reducing long-term discomfort and allowing audiences to make informed decisions. If you don’t like the plot, you can simply turn it off it with the click of a button, and when the screen goes dark it’s not like the yandere is going to punish you for saying no. Strade isn’t going to break into your house with a drill, there are no homicidal clown ghosts hiding in your TV, and no suspicious pink-haired hackers watching your webcam. They aren’t real, and the consequences aren’t real either. You have all the power here.
Conclusion
In summary, Yanderes are appealing for a variety of reasons. Whether you want to save them, think they’re attractive, wish to indulge in a dream of being utterly coveted, or simply enjoy a bit of spice in your me-time, it’s obvious why the trope has persisted for so long and will likely continue to do so. If you enjoy yanderes but are worried that having a taste for the less wholesome side of things might imply something about who you are as a person, don’t be. The notion that fantasies and media preferences directly reflect subconscious desires is not only painfully out of date debunked nonsense but also indicative of restrictive ideologies wherein bad thoughts = sin. This isn’t 1984. You haven’t committed a thought-crime by having a weird kink. You aren't going to superhell for fantasizing. The human mind is hardly ever so mathematically rational, and the point of fiction is to allow us to safely engage with and explore various ideas, provided the everyone involved is mentally, chronologically, and emotionally mature enough to do so.
Thank you all for listening to me. If you learned something or were just a little bit entertained. If you're curious about knowing more, I've listed my sources below
REFERENCES
Bivona, J. M., & Critelli, J. W. (2009). The Nature of Women’s Rape Fantasies: An analysis of prevalence, frequency, and contents. Journal of Sex Research, 46(1), 33–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490802624406
Critelli, J. W., & Bivona, J. M. (2008). Women’s Erotic Rape Fantasies: An Evaluation of Theory and research. Journal of Sex Research, 45(1), 57–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490701808191
DeWall, C. N., & Bushman, B. J. (2011). Social acceptance and rejection. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(4), 256–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411417545
Flynn, F. J., Reagans, R., Amanatullah, E. T., & Ames, D. R. (2006). Helping one’s way to the top: Self-monitors achieve status by helping others and knowing who helps whom. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6), 1123–1137. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1123
Harandi, T. F., Taghinasab, M. M., & Nayeri, T. D. (2017). The correlation of social support with mental health: A meta-analysis. Electronic Physician, 9(9), 5212–5222. https://doi.org/10.19082/5212
Hazen, H. (1983). Endless rapture: rape, romance, and the female imagination. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3161300M/Endless_rapture
Kroon, R. W. (2010). A/V A to z: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Media, Entertainment and Other Audiovisual Terms. McFarland.
Matuszak, M. (2017). Hybristophilia White Paper. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55dfd21ee4b0718764fb34cc/t/5cb7cabee5e5f00ab13be58b/1555548863275/Hybristophilia+White+Paper.pdf
Oarga, C., Stavrova, O., & Fetchenhauer, D. (2015). When and why is helping others good for well-being? The role of belief in reciprocity and conformity to society’s expectations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(2), 242–254. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2092
Parker, R. (2014). Serial killer groupies. RJ PARKER PUBLISHING, INC.
Wang, T., & Sha, H. (2018). The influence of social rejection on cognitive control. Psychology, 09(7), 1707–1719. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2018.97101
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Christopher Skaife: The Ravenmaster
To catch and capture a[n escaped] raven in full view of the public is a tricky business and to be avoided if at all possible, since it requires not only a cool head and steady nerves but quite a bit of luck. My first piece of advice to anyone finding themselves in such a predicament would be to stay cool and to pretend you have total control of the situation, which you most certainly do not. Like it or not, you're about to become a star on YouTube.
(picture: ravens Munin and Jubilee II, taken during my 2017 trip to the Tower of London)
Tradition holds that there must be no fewer than six ravens kept at the Tower of London, or else the British throne will fall. Of course, for all of their intelligence and capability, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a population of ravens to survive in the Tower all on their own. Enter the man with one of the most unique jobs in the entire world: yeoman warder Christopher Skaife— the ravenmaster.
As the person most responsible for the most famous collection of corvids in the entire world, Skaife is in the singular position to share the stories of these remarkable animals. His respect and love for both ravens as a species and also these specific birds as highly intelligent individuals drips from every page. As the yeoman warders live within the Tower, Skaife is also able to give us a look into the inner workings of one of the most recognizable (yet still secretive) tourist destinations on the planet.
The Ravenmaster is very loosely structured as a day in the life of Christopher Skaife, beginning with the dawn checks on the ravens and ending with shepherding them back into their enclosure. The narrative meanders throughout, however, exploring Skaife's stories about caring for the ravens, their mischiefs, their astonishing primate-level cognition, Skaife's own history, his mistakes, his successes, his dreams, and the curiosities one of the world's most famous castles has accumulated over its long history.
Like a lot of the best nonfiction work, Skaife is the teller of stories you simply cannot find anywhere else. His willingness to approach his vaunted job— quite literally his place in a mythology— with candor is vital to what makes The Ravenmaster succeed. For instance, he quite readily acknowledges the key story of the ravens— that they are an ancient augur of the health of the monarchy— cannot be attested to before the late 19th century.
And, listen: I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I took multiple field trips to the Betsy Ross House. I fully understand how the story around a thing can become more important than whether or not the story is literally true. But I really appreciate how Skaife is willing to approach these stories with objectivity, even if that might undermine his very title.
We are fortunate that, for as much as Skaife is a professional animal caretaker, he is just as much a professional storyteller. The warders are responsible for leading tours of the Tower, something they take quite seriously. If I were to level one criticism, it's that the written structure of the jokes, stories, and even the larger flow of the book feel a little off. Once I realized, however, that this is an adaptation of Skaife's tour story, it made much more sense. If you imagine that you're hearing this story as he leads you through the both literally and metaphorically layered history of the Tower of London, that's the best form of The Ravenmaster. You don't, in fact, actually need to imagine it: there exists an audiobook version, narrated by Skaife himself. I would encourage you to check it out.
I read this book because I love corvids. Every spring and summer, there is a colony of blue jays who take up nesting in my neighborhood, and they've come to know me by sight. It is a wonderful feeling when a corvid likes you— or, at least, has you pegged for a sucker. For that reason, I thought I might close with Skaife's advice for how he came to fall in love with ravens:
If you are in any way interested in birds, and yet like me just a few years ago you don't know where to start, I suggest studying a particular bird: don't try to learn about every species all at once. Pick a bird you love, or which fascinates you in some way. It doesn't matter which one: a goose, a swan, a sparrow, a hawk. Learning about birds, like learning anything else, is all about patience and persistence and just doing the little things right, again and again. Get to know your bird. Attend to their peculiar traits and the shape of them, their flight, their song, the way they walk. Study their talons, their feathers, their tails. Look into their eyes.
If you'll excuse me, I've got some homework to do about blue jays.
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