Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
Jun. 20th, 2021 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsHench
4/5. Our protagonist works shitty gig jobs doing data entry for villains. Until she's in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets badly injured by a superhero. So she turns her data analysis skills to the question of how much harm superheroes cause – a lot – and ends up climbing the ranks of a villain organization as she mostly breaks bad to make it sorta right.
I enjoyed this as an emotional experience, so don't let my subsequent complaints put you off. The whole middle section of this book is competence porn as she uses various schemes to take down the deserving. Highly satisfying. Then everything takes a turn to the more complicated and painful and nuanced. But because I enjoyed this, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, and well:
-So she calculates the costs of superheroes in life-years lost. The details are sketchy, but what we get is clearly talking about quality-adjusted life years or some similar shitty ableist metric. You know, the sort of thing where someone's disability or injury makes the years of their life "worth" less. Yes, this is a real thing that really gets used for real legal and economic decision-making. I was not expecting a discourse on the topic from this book, but it's a notable choice in a book that does some . . . things with bodies and wholeness that I am still going 'hm' about. It's complicated, but the short version is that lots of people on the villain side have broken or nonstandard or disabled or deeply othered bodies. And the heroes are whole and perfect and beautiful. Which is complicated by the fact that the villain side are the ones with complex backstories and rich inner lives, while (most) of the heroes are not at all sympathetic. But – mild spoilers, I guess – taking down one of the heroes ultimately comes down to wrecking his perfect body in a really grotesque body horror kind of way. And I really don't think the author had a good handle on all of this, and how it interplays with the general history of superhero canons which have extremely shitty disability politics.
-As I said, the protagonist and her righteous cause are squarely on the villain side. So as you'd expect, this book grapples a bit with how this scrambles the good vs. evil narrative, though it doesn't land in a terribly interesting place from my point-of-view. In the end, it mostly seems that the difference between heroes and villains is that smart villains have more options. And it does this while trying really really hard to pretend that the separate question of lawfulness and unlawfulness does not exist. Because I guess we're just not going to talk about how this villain acquired his absolute mountains of cash, huh. Yeah, it totally wasn't through human experimentation to make medical breakthroughs, oh look over there superheroes are bad guys, mmm-hm.
Anyway, like I said, for all that, this was fun, and as complicated as I wanted it to be, and I would definitely read the sequel she left space fore. Also, the protagonist is bi (or possibly pan) and quite horny, which is fun.
Content notes: Body horror in the last chunk.
4/5. Our protagonist works shitty gig jobs doing data entry for villains. Until she's in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets badly injured by a superhero. So she turns her data analysis skills to the question of how much harm superheroes cause – a lot – and ends up climbing the ranks of a villain organization as she mostly breaks bad to make it sorta right.
I enjoyed this as an emotional experience, so don't let my subsequent complaints put you off. The whole middle section of this book is competence porn as she uses various schemes to take down the deserving. Highly satisfying. Then everything takes a turn to the more complicated and painful and nuanced. But because I enjoyed this, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, and well:
-So she calculates the costs of superheroes in life-years lost. The details are sketchy, but what we get is clearly talking about quality-adjusted life years or some similar shitty ableist metric. You know, the sort of thing where someone's disability or injury makes the years of their life "worth" less. Yes, this is a real thing that really gets used for real legal and economic decision-making. I was not expecting a discourse on the topic from this book, but it's a notable choice in a book that does some . . . things with bodies and wholeness that I am still going 'hm' about. It's complicated, but the short version is that lots of people on the villain side have broken or nonstandard or disabled or deeply othered bodies. And the heroes are whole and perfect and beautiful. Which is complicated by the fact that the villain side are the ones with complex backstories and rich inner lives, while (most) of the heroes are not at all sympathetic. But – mild spoilers, I guess – taking down one of the heroes ultimately comes down to wrecking his perfect body in a really grotesque body horror kind of way. And I really don't think the author had a good handle on all of this, and how it interplays with the general history of superhero canons which have extremely shitty disability politics.
-As I said, the protagonist and her righteous cause are squarely on the villain side. So as you'd expect, this book grapples a bit with how this scrambles the good vs. evil narrative, though it doesn't land in a terribly interesting place from my point-of-view. In the end, it mostly seems that the difference between heroes and villains is that smart villains have more options. And it does this while trying really really hard to pretend that the separate question of lawfulness and unlawfulness does not exist. Because I guess we're just not going to talk about how this villain acquired his absolute mountains of cash, huh. Yeah, it totally wasn't through human experimentation to make medical breakthroughs, oh look over there superheroes are bad guys, mmm-hm.
Anyway, like I said, for all that, this was fun, and as complicated as I wanted it to be, and I would definitely read the sequel she left space fore. Also, the protagonist is bi (or possibly pan) and quite horny, which is fun.
Content notes: Body horror in the last chunk.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-20 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-20 07:05 pm (UTC)It definitely is the focus here. And specifically, that the damage done vastly outweighs the lives saved/damage averted. Of course, in this book, the whole superhero/villain ecosystem has some complicated government/societal underpinnings that work to protect the heroes at the expense of those they harm.