#dorleyhall — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dorleyhall, aggregated by home.social.
-
Dr. Blåhaj has got her nose stuck in a book, and can be heard quietly muttering that some people yearn for the cuddles.
-
rereading #Dorley again cause its soothing and jfc i do hope Beatrice diverts an iota of Elle's ridiculous power to track down Elizabeth and arrange for Bethany to see her again.
-
CW: somewhat-lengthy babbling about THE SISTERS OF DORLEY
One of the elements I find most fascinating about @badambulist's THE SISTERS OF DORLEY is the nuanced, complicated, and sympathetic way it approaches the question of whether people can ever be more than the worst things we've ever done. All of the characters in the series have pretty clear stances on this question, and I'd even go so far as to suggest the series itself is predicated on a very specific answer to that question... but what I find especially interesting is the way Greaves challenges and complicates every assertion and stance shown in the story. No character is so intrinsically right that they aren't demonstrably wrong sometimes, and no character is so intrinsically wrong that (to steal a riff from the story) they don't, y'know, occasionally have kind of a fucking point.
For me, this is one of the distinctions between a story that's "good enough to be getting on with" and a story I can wholly, unreservedly embrace and engage with. Moral simplicity can comforting sometimes, but honestly, what I personally want from a story is not to be told that the good guys are always right and everything will be alright. I want to be told that sometimes people—including us—fuck up and make mistakes and bad choices we can't unmake... and we can STILL find a way to go on, maybe even to be happy.
That's a story I can believe in, because it's the story I live. I don't live in a world of white hats and black hats. I live in a world full of people who are, mostly, trying to do their best to get by with limited information and even more limited perspective. Some of us are even trying to be good people, with varying degrees of success. And all of us make bad choices and mistakes that haunt us.
So, ARE we better than our worst choice, our worst mistake? Can our lives ever be more than the worst thing we've ever done? A lesser writer would give us a simple answer, or none at all. Greaves has paid her readers the profound compliment of an answer which is neither simplistic nor a dodge.
It's complicated and messy... but also, I think, honest and realistic.