Girls Gone Canon Cast - His Dark Materials: Episode 6 - Northern Lights/The Golden Compass CH16-17 Ft. Tana Ford

Episode Date: October 27, 2019

PART 2: BOLVANGAR CHAPTERS SIXTEEN THE SILVER GUILLOTINE SEVENTEEN THE WITCHES Followed by a DUST-SCUSSION - our book spoilers after section, so tune out if you don’t want to know what happens in the golden compass/northern lights DUSTIESTCUSSION - La Belle Sauvage & Commonwealth Spoilers GOLDEN COMPASS PATREON EPISODE - WINE   ---  Tana's twitter: https://twitter.com/tanaford Tana's webpage: https://www.tanaford.com/ Eliana's twitter: https://twitter.com/arhythmetric Eliana's reddit account: https://www.reddit.com/user/glass_table_girl Eliana's blog: https://themanyfacedblog.wordpress.com/ Chloe's twitter: https://twitter.com/liesandarbor Chloe's blog: www.liesandarborgold.com ---

you're listening to girls gone canon covering his dark materials Hello, and welcome to Girls Gone Canon, His Dark Materials, Episode 6, Northern Lights, The Golden Compass, Chapters 16 through 17, featuring Tana Ford. I am one of your hosts, Chloe. You might know me from the internet as LizaNarberGold.com or LizaNarber on Twitter and Tumblr. And hello, I am another one of your hosts, Eliana. You might know me as GlassTableGirl on some places on the internet, Arithmetric on other ones, specifically Twitter.

Welcome back, everyone. We do have someone other than us with our bajillion false titles, because the true queen, Hannah Ford, is here. We're pretenders. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Hi, guys. Hey, for some reason, I don't know. Hi, Tana. Thank you so much.

Oh, I'm so glad that you're having me on your podcast. What an honor. This is so exciting. We are, this is, Eliana's pretty excited. I'm obviously also elated. I really was pumped about it. We talked about it all weekend oh you guys well now you're here was past tense well now it's happening pumping i don't know tana we know you as

everything wonderful that you are i mean even without the titles you're wonderful but can you please tell everyone of uh of some of your awesome credits um i uh sure i make comic books for a living which is weird to most folks but i feel like i am among my people with you ladies uh and yeah so i'm best known for my work on silk I did 12 issues of Marvel's Silk. This year, I came in second place for the Hugo Award. Nnedi Akorafor. Whoa. Yeah, it's so great. We lost by eight votes. Eight small little votes.

I know, but we lost to Monstrous, which is amazing. And so you guys should pick that up and pick up my Black Panther work. But I worked with Nnedi Akorafor on it. And you guys are A Song of Ice and Fire people. And I have a podcast called Westeros Wheneverly with Dave and Tana that we drink and kind of talk about random shit in the fandom. But George R.R. Martin is the thing that ties us together. And Nnedi, my author of LaGuardia and Black Panther, is one degree of separation away from George R.R. Martin. It's amazing. I was going to say, so close to touching George.

And I was like, is that at the goals? Are you going to meet up with George? Touch him. Just a little boop. That's true. Hey, we all have our dreams oh uh you can see netty with george so if you guys uh obviously watched season eight of uh the hbo show game of thrones uh george does a like a backstage or a like, what is it a red carpet interview and the woman that is with him while he's being interviewed by HBO, the tall Nigerian woman wearing a gorgeous dress and chunky glasses is Nnedi Okorafor, my author that we got to create a Black Panther character together. We worked on LaGuardia together.

That's so cool. So HBO is adapting Nettie's Who Fears Death novel series. And she would send me reference photos when we were working on LaGuardia. And they were like, yeah, and they were of George's like, not George's specifically, but she based it on George's Tesla. She wanted these self driving cars because she would drive around with George. So there's just like weird intersections of art and life yeah I mean like both of you were a big deal um way back when uh at some point in time I followed you I was like oh cool she's the artist on silk and and you were participating in something on the song of ice and fire servers oh my god tana forge participating in it so yay oh my god no stop stop yay oh i i love our goofy little podcast i have to say that like you know we sort of uh we're one take wonders and so like

the magic of editing podcasts is beyond us uh which leads to some and of course we're also a boozy podcast and so we tend to ramble and be a little less focused than uh than the illustrious luminaries of the podcast world such as yourselves uh but can i say in true westeros wheneverly fashion that i made a drink tonight yeah i'm so excited oh you guys i even made it my westeros wheneverly you're doing amazing she cheers herself oh so uh a themed drink for tonight for the golden Compass is, let me find my recipe here. The Westeros Wheneverly themed drink for tonight is called the Grey Goose Witch's Brew. Named, of course, in honor of Kaisa, Serafina Pakala's Grey Goose Demon.

Love them so much. Yeah. And so it is vodka based but uh unlike what the name would suggest you don't need to be drinking gray goose uh if you want to be drinking this drink on a budget you like me could use kirkland brand vodka uh and it is uh an ounce of vodka two ounces of apple cider like fresh squeezed because it's fall right now and so this is like a good fall kind of drink uh i used a half an ounce of cinnamon whiskey the you could use fireball or something if you wanted to but never again it's not for me never again no and so i'm using troy and son

cinnamon honey whiskey uh which is from ashville north car Carolina which is excellent if you can get it and there's like there's a honey to it and a cinnamon sugar rim and of course in true Westeros wheneverly fashion a dash of blue curacao and you shake it all over ice and serve it in a martini glass

or if you are me and you don't want to knock your glass over you put it in a little mason jar yeah and a little bitason jar um yeah and a little bit of cinnamon in there and it's gonna be great but how do you what what do you put in it there's like you have another note here right so one more element to top it all off give it a final stir yes if you're feeling very fancy you can scrub some cinnamon sticks straight into the shaker before you shake it all up and then you really just shake it uh but so it's got nice apple notes it has a nice sweetness to it uh the vodka is pretty boozy so it'll get you pretty lit and it's

the the blue curacao will make it nice and green so it looks like an actual witch's brew which i think is very on point for us this evening and it also matches you know this past weekend i had the uh unique privilege to watch the golden compass movie for the first time and uh your your beverage matches the fires throughout so i've never seen good for you i couldn't bring myself to watch it don't do it i figured it was gonna be hot garbage so um it kind of is but it's sympathetic hot garbage worse i guess i i've never watched it for the same reason that i never watched the last airbender movie because i was

like same same yeah i was like yeah life is full of bad things and i don't need i don't need that but apparently i did this past weekend i guess maybe maybe not i feel like at least uh you two were together for it which must have made it better? That's true. Yeah, and you know, the second time we watched it, we decided to record a little ditty about it. A little thing. It is for our patrons for their Patreon episode this month, a video episode where Eliana and I are drinking toque, some beautiful golden toque,

and discussing the golden compass. We're very rich. We have many gold many of them we're drinking a white wine I found that was called rough day r-o-u-f-g right but it has a bulldog on it so it's also a pun

on rough day yep that's what I meant to say I was spelling it out and I was like if there's a pun here nope it's R-O-U-G-H and I'm gonna try this one more time we were not drinking today we were drinking a white wine that I found

spelled R-O-U-G-H everyone I didn't misspell it before this take. Not at all. So it was rough day with a bulldog on it. So it's rough. R-U-F-F. It was delicious. Definitely delicious.

Yeah, I mean, it got through the golden compass again. That it did. It did the trick. Are you guys popcorn people? Do like make popcorn on the stove or in the microwave and is it a go-to snack i like it but i don't often no it's not a go-to but i do like it i make it i love chocolate covered popcorn chocolate covered it's real good have you not done that i mean i used to live above a popcorn place oh oh maybe that soured you on it or something no i just don't do it i have it in my cupboard

i don't know why i don't make it i just don't think about it usually perfect salty crunchy easy to make uh it is my favorite snack uh well my tears were salty enough at how horrible the movie was so uh we do talk a lot about the production of the movie and what why it was so bad uh we talk about a lot of those cuts we actually gleaned a lot from twitter gazi on twitter or energy uk on reddit uh they are like the super his dark materials fan they kind of pieced together what the original ending was supposed to be they uncovered some of the original scripts oh lots of good stuff so we talk about all that we chat about that and that will be coming out soon for five dollar and up patrons on our patreon at patreon.com slash girls gone canon oh heck yeah yes boom how's that for a second it was i think

i kind of segued really that you know i think know, I think I did it this time. Like, last time, I was just speaking of a random thing entirely. Well, thankfully you didn't spell anything else. Would you guys ever do, like, a live watch or something? I thought we were going to do that. I thought we were going to do a live watch, but turns out, apparently, I guess

that would have been boring for people as there are times in which I'd actually have to watch. Yeah. We are going to be covering, with Tana here tonight, 16 and 17, The Silver Guillotine, and 17, The Witches, followed by our discussion, which is the book

spoilers after section, focused on the trilogy, the main trilogy, so tune out if you don't want to know what happens in the rest of the golden compass northern lights in the subtle knife or the amber spyglass we will put a warning out before we go into it and we are going to have an even dustier and not just a dustier discussion it is the dustiest discussion that we've probably ever had and in this dusty discussion it's where the student so that's the master yes because chloe is pages into the secret commonwealth and eliana has not finished putting la belle sauvage and

the commonwealth on my pull list because i need to keep up with you guys my pullman list it's really good i need to tell you how to live your life tell me tell me how to live your life. Tell me. Tell me how to live my life. I need you to tell me how to live my life. Oh my god. Just to preach for a minute, like, LaBelle Savage was an actual masterpiece. It was emotional in a lot of the right places. It was suspenseful. It was a journey. It was an adventure.

It was bittersweet. It was full of, like, sorrow and hard choices. And it all is flowing right into the secret commonwealth as well like there's a lot of things that cross over a lot of sadness believe it or not which you know me i'm like really into sad i love to get sad being like fuck me up get me really sad and it does but it also has like that glimmer of hope that you feel and just um i don't know where commonwealth is taking me you know i hope that it's taking me somewhere good and like happy ish or like better like even bittersweet again but um

i don't know labelle sauvage was just something really magical and i really think everyone should read it what was the timeline on it when did bell sauvage come out and when did the secret commonwealth come out in relation to golden compass? La Belle Sauvage Lyra is about three to six months old, somewhere in that range. Oh, so we would get, so we would get some of her origin story,

but it's very good. And I won't tell you more than that. And then the secret, I just want to talk about it. So you have to go read it. It's, it's only like ebook wise. It's 459 pages. So just putting that out there.

So and Commonwealth is Lyra is 20, turning 21. So it is also Philip Pullman as a mature, like living in this universe for after they made a movie about it and knowing that all this other stuff, the HBO series was coming out. It was his like ability to re-inhabit that space that would be interesting just on the surface yes i think i think the hbo series was already uh commissioned by the time that labelle sauvage come out or was already in talks to do so so yeah so it was commissioned in 2015 a new line has held the rights unfortunately since golden

compass and we talk about that in our Patreon episode a lot, actually, but because of that, Pullman actually had said in 2014, in correspondence with Twittergaze slash Energy UK, that he would really hope maybe someday there could be something that

happened, like another version of it, and he just held on hope maybe there would be another iteration, and then a year later it got called for series and now here we are it is yeah well the power of hope we're gonna talk about that that pullman held on to hope we are gonna talk about that bringing it back in i did it well we did get some tweets and emails we want to chat about real quick before we jump into these two chapters yes we got a tweet from thunderclap who sent us a hamlet passage and their handle is donner caution they ask does this relate to historic materials what a piece of work is man how noble and reason how infinite in faculty inform and moving how

express and admirable in action how like an, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this in all caps, quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no,

nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. It's definitely, there's obviously some stuff that he's playing with from hamlet you can see that in the story and just some of like some of the characters and their motivations as well and there's a short adventure story that paulman wrote called the firework maker's daughter and the main character's name is lila and she has a friend named Hamlet so obviously he's definitely referencing Hamlet here and there

in ways but nothing to see here folks nothing to see here go home yeah I think Pullman's definitely referencing Shakespeare in a lot of ways I wouldn't be surprised if he were doing so with this passage

but the connection to dust and the reference for how Shakespeare is referencing it and how it inspires Pullman is the same, right? It's referencing that biblical idea that mankind was made from dust. I think the line in Genesis, I think it's in Genesis

is, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground for out of it wast thou taken for dust thou art and unto thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground for out of it wast thou taken for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return which is why on Ash Wednesday you all might have seen people

they're Catholic with the ashes upon their forehead but I think that if Pullman is thinking of this line from hamlet i'd imagine that to an extent he's kind of arguing against it because like i imagine it's kind of like damn what a piece of work is man right because the connotation of piece of work is negative like that person's a piece of work um likely stemming from this usage maybe earlier i'd have i need

someone who has a membership to the Oxford English Dictionary to look that up for me uh uh but essentially Hamlet is saying here like I think that humans kind of suck because there's an irony of like they're not noble in reason they're not infinite

in faculty and the thought at the time of the writing for this I believe is that angels were creatures of apprehension, or the theology behind it and not action. So it's saying that people are kind of like lethargic man is unlike God, because God does not apprehend, right? God is not supposed to have apprehension, but just does because he's so sure of his morality, allegedly. so sure of his morality allegedly so pullman's work i think leans more towards humanism in many ways and celebrating humanity and the current life over the pursuit of godliness so i think that i can see pullman referencing hamlet in a lot of ways and if there is any sort of conversation with this line it's arguing that yes in fact man is noble yes life is great and consciousness and its and its possibilities are infinite in this book there's a lot of sacrifice that we see but in the books to come as well in the second book in the third book there are a handful of

good sacrifices that are made by people that lived their life and went down living their life in interesting ways right differ? Differing ways. Um, there's a death in particular. I'm like trying so hard. I'm like, can't spoil it. I'm like,

you're doing so good. Eight books ahead right now. I'm like 800 years. I'm like, these are all, you guys are in the past right now. We're in the present. You're in the both and the future.

We're living here. I know. Yes. You have, you've split conscious. Thank you. I'm the time traveler here. Yeah. I, uh, I learned to, to uh i can't say that either fuck god anyways there are some deaths that are very noble right there's

some sacrifices that are very noble coming in the future and it's important it reminds me that line from a song of ice and fire of course that men's lives have meaning not their deaths right um the way they lived and the way they were. And some of the people that are in this story are noble, valiant people that are helping for a valiant cause and doing the right thing, right? Helping to save children against this experimenting and this power and corruption. So there are good people and there are bad people. And I think that duality of life will always exist.

And Pullman does highlight that. One of the things that I think about is the word sacrifice, which means to make sacred. And one of the things that we're going to be talking about today is a lot of mutilation. And I think you could call it a sacrifice, but it's not a willing sacrifice. It's certainly not made to make anything holy or sacred uh and but i i like that there's that playing with this idea of what it means to sacrifice and to be a sacrifice and to be sacrificed um and the way that kind of works as a as a circular idea folding in on itself which i think you can track throughout this series yeah absolutely uh there's some stuff

that's going to come up at the end of the novel that really tracks with what you're saying so yes i think it's a theme here i think he's playing with this idea yeah and pullman does explore it in a lot of different ways we have good people performing sacrifices on of themselves of others even and we also have bad people as we're going to see in a moment who are performing terrible sacrifices as you said on others but some are who perform them on themselves and i think raising that kind of question in later books so i feel like philip holman here is offering a lot of, he's presenting a lot of things, and doesn't maybe break them all apart and look at the minutiae of them, but sort of opens the

door to this kind of analysis or deeper thinking. And there's just enough here, there's just enough meat on the bone to make you wonder, oh, how much of this did he intend? How much of this was intentional? Yeah, absolutely that. There's a lot, even as we go through it, it's like, make you wonder oh how much of this did he intend how much of this was intentional um yeah absolutely that there's a lot even as we go through it's like wait a second what did he mean this yes and and it yeah and as a lover of a song of ice and fire you can certainly spiral into like what was meant and the sort of big payoffs that come with that uh and the other things that just kind of happen in i don't know the fires of creation god again you know so the whole entire podcast i'm just gonna be like labelle sauvage commonwealth i can't say anything bye

we need like a director's cut version where it's just me commenting on everything you guys say with well in the secret commonwealth like an annoying very annoying person you could do it well actually you could do like pop a video or something yeah yeah yeah oh my god smell a vision of the podcast anyways so we did get an email from our friend lo who has been listening to our Song of Ice and Fire episodes for a while and is getting caught up with his dark materials. They just listened to chapters 10 through 12 and wanted to talk about some northern facts, specifically about Lapland in our actual world that we live in. They're from Sweden and the northernmost state is Lapland. And this area used to include Finnish Lapland before Sweden and Finland were split after Sweden lost it to Russia in 1809. It's a very controversial

name, Lapland, because part of the name is a slur, and it refers to indigenous Sami people, and their own name for their land is Sapmi, and consists of territory in contemporary northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. And it's interesting that Pullman puts the Oblation Board's facility in Lapland. Lowe says she's less familiar with the history of racism against Sami people in Finland, but by giving you a rundown of some of the stuff in Sweden, you can understand there's a parallel. The Swedish state have, in many ways that the colonial state have, treated indigenous people, forcibly removed Sami children to schools to civilize them. La Belle Sauvage and Secret Commonwealth, again.

At the beginning of the 20th century, children at these schools were forced to take part in ethnographic studies and other scientific studies that were carried out by a racist state institute for biology, racial biology. The children were measured, including their skulls. The same policies led to sterilization of many Sami people as well as other marginalized groups throughout Sweden, including Roma people, disabled people and sex workers. And they were examined by that state institute. So the history is super racist. And it seems that some of the history might have inspired Pullman.

I could definitely see that. I know we talked a little bit about some of that with Egyptians and the Roma culture that they kind of seem to embody. And it does make me think that Pullman is Pullman-ing from those. Yeah, I don't disagree. I think that is something that it seems like he's trying to pull from that. That wasn't even intended as a pun yeah that that horrible horrible history that's i think that the ugly truth is like that's the case for a lot of things and like that's why it seems as though perhaps he's tried to make this

point in in some of the books especially in his portrayal of what he's named egyptians is that they aren't a lot of the stereotypes that people have shown them to be. It's in fact, those who have been controlling the narrative who are in power, who are the ones who are committing these horrible crimes against these groups that have long been maligned, because they just don't fit into whatever the dominant culture is. Yep, we have our heroicians coming to rescue their children and doing this really hard thing and lira later i mean we're going to talk about it i can assume that everybody's read these two chapters yes okay so yeah so the when lira is spying on uh

the the people that are running this, she says that they look like anybody from London. They look like people from Jordan College. They look like the people who are supposed to be in charge and filled with class and you would think nobility or something. And yet they're doing this deep evil. And we have on the outside, the Egyptians who are doing this impossibly heroic, very scary thing where they're trying to actually save kids and no one will help them. And so we're seeing the inversion of what you see is not what you get. These people, you know, that are told and brought up,

trust the authority, trust the system, and then the system, instead of nurturing them, murders them. Yes. Yes, yes. that murders them yes yes yes mutilates them performs experiments on them uh you know so you have the the people in lapland the uh their sex workers and disabled people and the roma people and this the sami people all being tested on i mean you know this is a thing that happens throughout history and it's the people that you know look like you can trust them and I like that Philip is playing with those things here and really shining a very big bright hot light on this and how fucked up it is you know it later in the, they do things that nobody else would dream of doing. These deep violations of the humanity of children and people. And it's galling to us.

urge everyone to remember that this is happening today in this day and age here in the united states this idea of children being taken away from their parents forced into schools and ethnographic whatever studies um you know in the news lately again with the children um you know young very very young lat very young Latino Hispanic children come here. They trusted that America was going to be a better place, a safer place for them. And they are being torn from their parents and put into quote, unquote, adopted, stolen, kidnapped into other homes. And this is what happened with indigenous people also in the United States.

Again, and as part of the erasure of many different indigenous cultures here so it happened with the indigenous sami people it's happening here just to start us all off set the tone and it's completely to do with corruption too that allows it to happen um stuff that goes through actual official channels that the people are told to trust i won't name names but i'm just saying it also reminds me something that i was thinking that i've been thinking of and i know that you were talking about like nigerian authors in niger Nigeria I've recently learned part of the reason Boko Haram was able to get away so easily with stealing

300 girls is because nobody believed because they were poorer, right? Nobody believed that this actually happened. They thought that it was all made up and it was something to make the current president look bad. But those girls were stolen.

Anyway. president look bad but those girls were stolen anyway i like that i visit your podcast one time and we take a sharp political turn yeah well it's and it's hard not to i mean especially when this is happening in every country every day all the time yeah um it's it's happening in every country, every day, all the time. Yeah. It's happening in my state of Florida right now. We have concentration camps full of kids that have parents that are being adopted away. It's happening in CPS. It's happening everywhere. Yeah. And there are people with power that just let it happen and want it to happen. And that's, do you, do you think that by having his dark materials come out that there'll be a kind of light put on this and it's a true alliance of powerful people using those

platforms, but enough of them building their own alliance of using that platform and protecting that as well. And it's all you see actually in His Dark Materials, right? You see these people that all have very valuable assets that are good and want to do good, get together. You see the Gyptians with their boat skills, right? In general their water skills they know the water i learned this in some of the outer texts but egyptians really know the water they know anything that's happening with the water they you know river thames they it's in their blood and you see things like that or people like lee scoresby who is a very very talented aeronaut uh that have these skills that can band together and can stand as a force against a power

as big as the magisterium as the authority and it takes that and so that's the question do we have that yes yeah right except Amazon is doing the coding for the election so good luck so the silver guillotine, chapter 16, you guys.

They sold facial recognition technology to the FBI. Lol, bye. We're all doomed. Now on with the book. Lyra hides herself in furs so that Mrs. Coulter does not recognize her at the moment. Because she has work to do before that confrontation. Like finding an accessible place to hide her furs for the quote-unquote right time. So she bundles all the clothing up super small.

And like, I was thinking about how this is a huge just bunch of furs and skins. And it probably looks like, I don't know, like what you'd see on the outside of someone that's like fishing on the water on frozen ice and just ice fishing away. It's just like a huge pile of like seal skin. Can you imagine just wearing a seal skin? Apparently it's smelly, but apparently it must be effective because they they live their lives.

On the ice? Yeah. Yeah. They're ice doggos in a different way than the other ice doggos so she finds that ceiling tile and she puts all of her stuff there including the alethiometer because she thinks no one will find that uh she follows the original plan of playing dumb so at least until she sees coulter she's avoiding all of the hospital staff and just like face down shuffle i'm stupid and she feels

super hopeless and anxious and pained because mrs coulter and the monkey are there and she just feels that pain right whenever that monkey shows up that same pain of when it held pan super tight and i heard it fucking monkey i just realized that was foreshadowing for things that happen later in this chapter that's a reminder of that uh let me have this quote but the egyptians were coming think of that think of yorick burnison and don't give yourself away she said and drifted back toward the canteen from where a lot of noise was coming it's like the eve of battle literally it's about to happen literally literally the children are warming up with hot drinks and they're all talking about Mrs. Coulter and her arrival. And Lyra finds her roommates.

She asks if they can keep a secret and she reveals the escape plan. Finally, that when the alarm gets pulled, the people are going to come save them. And she tells them carefully pass this message around. Make sure the adults don't know, but let the kids know. pass this message around make sure the adults don't know but let the kids know part of what i love about this scene is just how childish it feels like in the best way because this idea of whispering like so that the adults don't know what they're up to it just screams like childish hijinks to me like oh we're gonna pull the fire alarm everyone we're gonna go out during like the cafeteria, drink lunchtime.

And it just reminds me of an episode of Recess, which was an amazing show. Never saw it. Oh, my gosh. Scandalous. But he does, Philip Pullman does kids very well in this. You know, the snowball fights and the fire alarms

and all of the scenes with the kids gossiping and then they interrupt each other and they're you know they have all their fears and you know one in three of them get it right you know like it feels authentic it feels real you know i i am with her you know in those halls in those moments and and it was uh i thought really well done. Lyra's a great heroine, right? Like she is a very fleshed out kid. Yeah, she feels very real. Like she is a high jinxy kid. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's part of why so many of us loved reading her when we were younger because she could have been like us or a friend. You know, Pan being this three-dimensional creature outside of her who will act independently of her, but they also work mostly in tandem, is such a visceral thing. It's such a wonderful and easy jump to make to think about your own demon and how you would never be alone. Like there are conversations in this about with Yorick about, do you ever feel lonely? And no, I'm a bear. about with yorick about do you ever feel lonely and uh no i'm a bear um to not to like to enjoy your own company in the way that you do when you're a kid and uh and to have that maybe uh stretched later in life i have no spoilers now did you say tandem or tandem oh for me it would be Tana-dom? Oh!

Yeah, I was thinking, is it Tana? Fucking Yoda. My head was like... It causes a new hope and everyone's super jazzed but the room then suddenly goes cold. Not because of the wind, but because Mrs. Colbert comes in. How did the wind get into the cafeteria?

It wouldn't get in there, alright? I was trying to be dramatic because you're up in the north. Shut the fuck up, Chloe. Guys, Chloe and I just spend a whole weekend together. Watching the two of you crack each other up in real time is a blessing. This is just a delight. Eliana's having a rough day.

God damn it. The children are quietly talking about how the adults go in the conference room to talk and discuss things with the other visitors. And Annie tells them a story of Mrs. Coulter and the rest of them making her come upstairs for a presentation, hypnotizing her, having her demon do tests, and there's this line, and did some other things, and it's like really casually slipped in after they talk about hypnosis. She's like, hypnosis, and then they did some other things, and I'm like, oh. Creepy AF.

That's, yeah. It's not like unfeasible either as a thing happening compared to things that happen here all the time too like we've talked about it but freaking what mk ultra top secret cia project at the height of the cold war that you know they say was officially only from 53 to 75 quote unquote but they conducted experiments on willing and unwilling citizens with like LSD and other drugs for mind control.

And some agents ended up dosed and like committing suicide. And autopsies proved that it wasn't a shock suicide because they were standing against it. Yeah. And in that, like we see things like constantly through this story, we're going to see a pattern that the authority has the power to make people not exist anymore if they want to and experiment on who they want. No repercussions because how do you fight the authority? How do you fight the religion? How do you fight the all-knowing I, the all-knowing being?

It's pretty scary. Yeah, and it's classic, right? Who do they prey on? Pretty scary. Yeah, and it's classist, right? Like, who do they prey on? They prey on kids that don't have any status in society, that don't have any wealth, whose parents, though they love him, Ma Costa, though she loves her son, she can't protect him. You know, like, who do they prey upon? Who are the most vulnerable citizens?

This is an allegory of our time. Who can fight back? Absolutely. who can fight back absolutely annie thinks that the adults will pretend nothing went wrong during the fire drill because they're also afraid of mrs coulter which i think is just a great line that characterizes mrs coulter's power lyra stays with the girls all day she's doing sewing and playing and other activities she's saying little she's listening she's biding her time and as the day progresses the adults start to act anxious and the kids can tell oh there must be a minor emergency and lyra's like oh yes it's that thing that i did that's right we stole the demons it was me it's great because they discuss it in a bit and uh she's like, obviously, someone had to have done it.

And they discuss back and forth of who would like, thank God Kaisa used that snow magic. He was just what a good goose. When I was reading this in college, I had a friend named Kaisa. So it was weird for me yet to think about this gray goose as a male. Just I mean, my friend was a girl. And so, you know, it was just like I had never seen the name before. And then suddenly it's in this book that I'm reading. What does Kaisa mean? Did you ever figure that out of what your friend's name meant? And therefore probably also the skuses?

And it is, I think, just a name. So for a long time, I thought it meant girl. But Kaisa Flicka means like girl, like Flicka is the Swedish word for girl. And so Kaisa's name was just Kais. And I think it's just like the Swedish version of Karen or something. But yeah. Also, if my friend ever listens to this i'm sorry if i forgot what your name means oh my gosh hopefully they just never move along kaisa you little snow goose kaisa come guess guess on our podcast tell us about geese at bedtime she comes clean with the

girls that are her roommates and she's like look i'm gonna escape to go look around and annie is like i'm gonna come with you and lyra's like no you oh you'll be complicit if you're caught i don't want you coming with me and then their demons are like all oh we're gonna fight carillion is a fox which is annie's demon and pan turns into a wildcat but pan wins and carillion submits to Pan. And I guess it's common for battles to be fought this way with demons in their world. It's particularly common. It

sounds like it's for children. They call that out and that children will accept the outcome without any hard feelings, which I think is kind of telling that they call that out because it sounds as though they're saying that for adults if, you know, the demons kind of have a standoff, one of them might submit. But as they start to notice station and power dynamics more, they might take that whole thing more personally and hold a slight grudge.

I mean, I'm not saying it's untrue. I'm a saltier person than I was as a child. Carillion is from the greek krilios which means lord so i i wonder uh since her uh daemon is named lord uh in greek if there's a sort of leadership role i really like this character of annie uh and you know and i like the sort of like vying for dominance or leadership that they have going on here and the nature of their tussle. I like it a lot. I also like that there was no competition. Yes, that they were, they end up working together just whose plan is going to

work the best. I want to help is what she's saying. We should all be in this together. We should be working together. I can do, I can climb up in the roof with you and lyra has the that hero quality of you know i can't hurt anyone else i've already hurt all of you so much i have to do this alone that total hero move yeah but i think there's also wisdom in it right like lyra is more accustomed than and i think if she thinks this way about herself it's justified that she is uh more accustomed to sneaking around and getting away with shit than maybe other kids that have always been in a system forever uh because she's been pulling this stuff at jordan college forever and ever and so and she does want to protect her new friends and she wants and she knows that like

all of these things and so uh them sorting it out feels really you know like i just i really like this character of annie you know it's sad too because yeah a lot of these people that she's meeting here these kids they they have something that they think they're waiting to go back to and what does lyra have to lose oh dark again i'm just saying what does she have? Mrs. Coulter? Asriel? Yeah, that's gonna be real good. I think. But she does have people as we find out. Yeah, she does.

She does. She's got her big bear. Bear dad. She does actually have these girls. They totally have her back. They make her bed with their clothing and make it look like she's in it with their clothing, just like in all teen movies. So that's some sisterhood right there. With plausible deniability, they're being very smart about the whole thing.

They can just blame it on Lyra if they get busted. I tried to do this once for my best friend, Chloe Metter, this weekend. And, yeah, her mother, this was the day of our high school graduation. I'm going to just put us all out there, right? Connie was like, oh, where is insert friend's name here? And I was like, oh, you know, she's over with, like, her boyfriend or whatever. Because I think that they had gotten into a tussle. You know, teenagers and their parents whatever and turns out the whole time bed's best friend was uh on the front porch of her mother and her mother got mad at me for lying to her but my best

friend took it as like that girl has my back and she was like can't you see she's very trustworthy she supports me and i was like it's your fault for not knowing where your kid was it's not my fault so that's how i feel about this story it's not my fault i was just here right or die possible deniability truly lyra then jumps into some ceiling tiles and she follows the metal channels seeing light through some of the translucent tiles and is planning quietly to go from one end to the other end of the station. She and Pan are all like whispering about the retiring room and Jordan and how this is just like it,

except we all know it does not pan out just like it. Fall into sleep. Oh, oh. Yeah, fire me now, bitch. No, you're fired we have different we have different job yeah we do very different job titles honestly in descriptions lyra's up there with all this metal like it's like metal aluminum-y you know crap it's just like scooby-doo she's you know in the ceiling tiles but she starts to cut herself on the sharp edges she's dusty ah she's sore she's scraped up right i i realized as i

said i was like haha good uh she starts to eavesdrop because she comes across people talking quietly but she gets nothing but then she gets to her destination the top of the conference room destination she hears a murmur of male voices and listens uh she hears mrs coulter as well and they discuss the escaped demons that she set free earlier in the day the student overseeing security uh mckay assured them that they had locked the cages and the doors when he left and then they go into like a description of the self-locking mechanisms and how the exterior door is always locked and he came in through an interior door but when the alarm rang everyone was outside in the yard because there was a fire drill and the fire drill and the door alarm or the

alarm on the like hermetically sealed demon room are on the same fucking circuit which come on guys this is just this is bush league like who who's in charge up here right like they can't do a fire drill right there the alarms are all linked together this is just this is this is just sloppy uh and this is coulter's pissed yeah the alarms are all linked together. This is just sloppy. And this is Coulter's pissed. She feels the exact same way as you do. She just says, this is Bush League when she gets in there.

I also love that they're like, well, also you showed up and you demand attention immediately. Yes, I thought that was their one power move in this discussion between the like well also you showed up and you demand attention immediately so yes i thought yeah i thought that that was their one power move in this discussion between like the sort of you know starch suits and mrs coulter they were like well you arrived unannounced and so suddenly you know you threw our routines all out of whack this isn't entirely on us in their like defense i mean this is a very minimum staffed uh government funded place that they're obviously got a skeleton crew also maybe no pun ish intended

uh going on here and i mean it's not like they have every person in the world like they have like 10 nurses and a few random dudes and they're ugly poodles that don't move. Yep. Sorry intercession. They are ugly poodles that don't move. Lyra's been there for one afternoon and she's already got this place cased. She knows how to move the adults. She tricks the doctor. It didn't take...

It wasn't rocket science. I do have to say though, for rocket science Zeppelin showed up like how cool is that shit like come on man this bullshit is so steampunk she shows up in a fucking zeppelin that just like a boss ass bitch she is but she's terrifying god she is just like an ice queen like in that monkey oh everything about this woman is prime evil. She's just cold. So in the previous books, the ones that I haven't read, is there anything about Mrs. Coulter?

Very background, but not like very much so motivation. And a couple of times appears, not often in the one that I did obviously read. The future one is a different situation. But that one is, you will get some Coulter. You will. Do you think satisfying? Like, Anna, give me the Coulter scale for Belle Sauvage. I think we just don't get enough of it.

And that is a bummer. I would like to get more of it. I would. That's up my alley. I digress. They discuss who had the motives to do all of the demon cages, and Coulter's like, it was an adult. You guys are obviously incompetent, and one of you is, like, plotting.

The other's like, it could have been a child. No, no way. No way. It could never have been a child. And Coulter is like, well, you should use the Tartars to increase security in their investigation and she's like also what's going on with the new separator the doctor explains they think they've overcome the risk with the separator that the patient dies of shock oh i mean yay they've used anesthesia with a mayat and bark scalpel in my marginalia I had a sarcastic

comment that was like oh wow five percent like yeah it's still pretty significant yeah yeah I do find it interesting that they mentioned that they use an embark scalpel which basically is an electric scalpel whatever because I

think that's what we ended up seeing in the movie right yeah I believe so in the movie it's electric god so lyra's trembling she's listening to all this and she's super upset pan is an air mind currently and he's comforting her and saying they won't let them do this and you listen to the guy say that he took some of that from the Skrælings but also took some of Asriel's technology that used his manganese and titanium alloy that insulates the body from its demon oh interesting red flags red flags he then asks for an update on Lord Asriel. Mrs. Coulter tells him he's captured in Svalbard

and he's probably going to get a death sentence. Whatevs. He was forced to give up his philosophical work, yeah? I feel like they're being really cavalier about this whole death sentence. It's not the first time that we've heard it. Yeah. All right, all right, all right. it yeah alright alright alright we're all here the gang's all here

yeah I do think it's interesting that they're just so casual about like the death sentence kind of reminds me though like because part of his sentence right now is he's being forced to give up his philosophical work there were a lot of scientists you know who were and philosophers

and thinkers in the past who were sentenced to death for heresy. I love, of course, like the whole point there, though, is that like he was supposed to give up all of that research. And then somehow he like manipulates them into giving him book pens and shit until then he gets like all the stuff he needs to actually research. And he's just like out there starting a full rebellion galileo galileo socrates i mean everywhere uh well and something that we'll learn later is the nature of those bears it makes sense yeah he can be very charismatic that uh as real when he wants to be that uh asriel when he wants to be no yeah i'll just stay here with the bears and they'll patrol and i'll have all the stuff i need it'll be fine well he's like this is great this is everything i ever wanted now i can just

like keep researching here on my own whatever is it in these chapters where we get the discussion of uh not the discussion but the discussion of um when york is talking about how i think it was the couple chapters right before this i believe it was last yes yeah and how he is talking about uh maybe when a bear is trying not to be a bear or uh when a man is behaving like a man is when, you know, you can trick a bear. And I like that idea of self and going against yourself, right? Because it ties into the demon thing. When you go against yourself or your inner nature or what you are, right? Like Yorick Burnison has this very much like, I'm a bear.

This is what we do. I don't know about being lonely this is you know my sky iron armor is my soul like he's very he seems like a very centered dude um you know and lira depends on on pantalimon and i think those kinds of like people that know themselves and are in tune with themselves contrasts sharply against eventually uh other characters that will meet probably the other svalbard bears maybe that are being uh i can't a discussion maybe uh and but also like the the people with their little dogs and the people that work in Bolvingar. Panzer Bjorn.

Panzer Bjorn. And that they went willingly. It's just terrifying. Holter does not want to talk about Asriel because you know just how it is when people want to talk about their exes all the time. Do you? She starts to talk about the new instrument you know just how it is when people want to talk about their exes all the time to you uh she thought she starts to talk about the new instrument it's a sort of guillotine and the blade is made out of that Asriel alloy and the child and demon are placed in separate compartments of the alloy connected to each other through that and then

the blade severs them there's another sharp object made out of that alloy by the way i want to talk about that later we'll circle back to that but coulter's like all i want to see it all you know lustfully but she's tired right she's tired she needs uh to take a nap she's tired yes of course because this tiredness runs in the family how many times are we going to see the women in this family take a fucking nap i'm gonna going to be honest, too. What a dysfunctional family, so to speak. But I'm going to be honest that Lyra, yes, she has a lot of Asriel-esque-ness about her, right? Qualities, especially the charisma.

But she's also very Coulter-esque, whether she knows it or realizes it. She is very Coulter-esque. Yeah. And I'm not going to spoil it or say there's a sympathetic side, per se, to Coulter, but you start to understand her character more, and she's very complex, very fleshed out. But she goes to bed instead of going to go get all riled up and worked up and, I don't know, like, joke off about this guillotine. I don't know what's happening.

It's very gross. She's like all, I want to watch kids get severed. it's so creepy it is so it is so pure yeah and of course like she's sitting there threatening you know i'm gonna sever whoever did this and so dot dot dot we know who did this um so once culture leaves lyra continues eavesdropping and they discuss the heretic research that asriel is doing and how he wants to experiment with dust and the men they are very worried that culture is going to report them and that her attitude when watching the demons being pulled through the people is very gross and concerns them she's been very excited to watch them be separated and lyra is unable to contain herself and elicits

a uh a small cry the men hear the noise they look for the intruder and she's not quick enough to get away they get her they seize her there's a big attack one of the men is holding pan and lyra is sick and dizzy and disgusted and there's this little line that is just heebie-jeebie. He curved toward his Lyra as she reached with both hands for him. They fell still. They were captured. She felt those hands. It wasn't allowed. Not supposed to touch.

Wrong. I don't, yeah, the language here is very unsettling. I don't want to linger on this thought too much, but the language and the implication of the invas invasiveness i think feels very sexual assaulty god even what we were talking about earlier when there was that very casual and other stuff being done it reminds me a lot actually of a song of ice and fire with sanza with that part where i very casually slipped that high cell had maids her down and touched her all over yeah very casual but you could have told that story if it wasn't that without that line yeah you can fight me out at all you want but that line's there

for a reason so they begin to speculate that lyra had let the demons out and then they go into damage control coming back and forth where they determine her punishment which leads to them deciding oh we gotta quiet this girl from speaking about what she's done what they'd seen and they say oh you know it'll help that that shock the shock will make her forget who she is and what she heard so they carry her through the station to a chamber with white tiles and shining stainless steel and they cart her and pan her toward a cage of... sorry that's not a verb

so they cart her and pan toward a cage of silver mesh and hanging between them is a pale silver blade and then she screams but the door shuts behind them and it's a heavy ass door not to ruin the mood real quick and this gives me anxiety like writing and like reading all this

gives me so much anxiety but also is no one thinking who let the demons out who who who who okay good just wanted to make sure thank you glad you're there for me oh except then they all died okay good just wanted to make sure thank you glad you're there for me oh oh except then they all died I thought it I thought it I really did

and yeah the background of that is just like the fluttering of all their little tiny wings as they tried to like change shape and fly off uh i oh this whole scene happens so fast you guys like it unfolds uh so quickly pullman just ratchets up the action in the whole second half of this book, and especially in this scene when they seize her and violate her and decide what's to be done with her right over her head. There's something really sort of feeling, you feel entrapped in this thing, right? Like you, and then they decide, oh, well well we'll just cover our tracks we'll just cut her we'll just put her in the machine and then she'll be too shocked to do anything about it she'll just this is this is how we cover this

uh and and you feel really swept up in it and there is definitely this heart-pounding terror about this whole scene i mean this is exactly how things are still happening right like oh we'll just cover our tracks like that's a corrupt government move yep you just escalate and escalate and escalate yeah and and it's like so intense because it's anxiety riddling right pan turns into all the different animals he's a lion he's an eagle he's a wolf he's a bear he's a polecat but it's two against six and these men's demons are does she's a bullshit kind of person baboons and they pin pan down and i was crying it's really traumatizing she's one second springs toward her and she holds him and he's like clawing into her because he doesn't want to get pulled off and she's screaming never never never and she's backing against the wall it's so emotional and the men still fall on them and tear them apart

and put them in the cages and a humming sound starts above all the screaming and the blade begins to move and it's sparkling in the light but then everything stops and the lights come on and then in rushes Mrs. Coulter. With the wind, is that what she comes- She whooshes in. Who is this? What's the meaning of this? Who is this child? She's demanding answers until she sees, oh my god, Lyra. So Mrs. Coulter, of course, she's horror-struck, and her monkey's the one that pulls Pan out of the cage immediately

as Lyra falls free of it all as well. And then Pan stumbles into Lyra's arms and it's this crazy switch, right? Because Mrs. Coulter, we've been fearing her the whole time, but she's in a way the hero right now. She's the solution. She definitely saves Lyra. But the thing, and you can't forget at any moment that she would not do this for any other child right like she would watch greedily any other child but for some reason uh lyra it has this sort of like uh this golden ticket mrs coulter does have some part of her that

cares for lyra um but it's more like an extension of her right it's extension of herself an extension of her power and it's also this life she couldn't have and could never keep and never have of Lyra right like it feels very much so like this is the child she never got to keep the child she didn't get to raise the child that you know she didn't get to bring her up how she wanted to and i mean lyra's not a scholar right lyra's not really training to be a scholar especially not right this moment she's a little busy with some uh some hobbies and if mrs coulter had her way we know what she would look like and be like and act like but mrs coulter didn't have that way so the end result no matter what is very selfish in this moment, you see kind of this horror on her face, like I almost did this to her. I have a hard time figuring out or sussing out right here what Mrs. Coulter's motivations are,

or what she sees in Lyra exactly. Like I know that she cares about her. I know that that's her biological daughter. I know that maybe there's some sort of possessiveness or maybe ownership or something but there is something incredibly spooky about the way mrs coulter as a character has been crafted there's a quiet menace about her you know that gentle voice of this villainous ice queen who watches as they cut the souls out from the terrified children that she collected for them you know there's like a hands-on monkey mind kind of sinister intent here and so you know there's imbued in all of these scenes with Lyra are is that discomfort, that disquiet between them. And I don't I don't think I need to understand it necessarily, but I am aware that I don't know why she saves Lyra necessarily, but like it is creepy and dangerous.

Yeah, and I think Pullman feels the same way we've touched on this before how uh he says that in a way mrs coulter and therefore her demon scares him so much he's like i couldn't name the monkey monkey scared me too much to think too too much on like naming it are there any other monkey demons in is this a discussion thing does it matter i i can't remember any. It's not a discussion for one of them because we've seen it. Dame Hannah, who we meet at the same time as when

Lyra meets Mrs. Coulter, also has a monkey demon and she has a silver monkey. I don't know what kind of monkey exactly it is because I'm not a zoologist. Alright. monkey i don't know what kind of monkey exactly it is because i'm not a zoologist all right this guy has a baboon we just talked about this guy with the baboon well technically i guess it's an ape and not a monkey whatever i think with the little speech that she does give Lyra,

it comes out very much so that we are different. She sees her as, you know, I mean, especially looking back on how she had to have risen to this power in this world of all men in the rooms of scholars, right? Lyra herself says like, oh, I would never be allowed in this retiring room. That's like forbidden. And there's a lot of gender stuff that we'll probably chat about it a bit but yeah sometimes he doesn't

quite nail it right but with that i think it's interesting that colter had to sever herself to get there right to she didn't sever herself obviously her and her demon are very much intact but she had to sever herself mentally in the way to rise to power and when she looks at lyra it's we it's this is my opportunity you could be powerful come with me to the dark side you know um well there's no luke it's just i'm your father yes the reveal in the golden compass is so garbage and it's so uh but it like it's very much so straight from star wars like if you replace the names you're like okay no my assistant yeah literally she like yells no it can't be and it's uh but that's like the whole dynamic right that she's like yes and

now you're my powerful little like minion it's very fucked up and exactly as she gets her back right here she takes care of her and she kind of softly like pets through her. And she's like, I'm so glad I have my assistant back. You know, like, oh, you left me. And it's very it is very creepy. But it's like obviously Lyra knows now what kind of person she is. But the game she's playing, looking at her as that extension of like, how can I use you? And how could I leverage my place with you

uh something that's been really prominent especially in this chapter we there's a lot of different uh a lot of different stuff with this intercision and now we've pretty much fully understood what it is at this point right we talked about the dust a bit back as they discussed dust how this is hopefully trying to prevent that and talking about what actually happens with intercision and now we've seen it up close what was about to happen. It's pretty fucked up.

Holy shit it's fucked up. Like obviously in this text it's a little more fantasy and it has to do with some other stuff. It's metaphorical. it's not quite what everyday bodily uh you know like this horrible horrible subjugation of this bodily harm is in our everyday society when we hear about it um and it's obviously related to circumcision right that is

that's the main one that you think about when you think of anti-religion but it's a lot like lobotomy when you see the nurses and the doctors they're walking around with their blank animals or demons um it's very much so like lobotomy which you know it lobotomy was practiced a lot more in up until like the mid 50s so similar so similar to that whole peak to full board thing. And it's basically severing the connections to the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the anterior frontal lobes. It leaves the patient less responsive and aware, less self-control, emotionally stunted. They detach. They can't practice empathy or sympathy.

Really, they can't do cognitive extremes. And it leaves them infantile which is i guess arguably could be said is like removing the soul and preventing dust right you're trading one thing for the other here but patients would die from this uh others would commit suicide others would just be non-responsive forever and the mortality rate in the 40s was five percent isn't that that's basically the same as earlier so he's definitely taking for lobotomy a little bit and there are works that reference lobotomies tons of them um hell if you want to talk about earlier when they tried to you know sever lyra for seeing something and hearing stuff

she shouldn't have it makes me think of rosemary kennedy uh in a way like just that was made out of the media the bell jar by by Sylvia Plath has some pretty obvious connotations as far as that goes. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped and dead as a baby. The world itself is a bad dream. And, you know, the idea of living in a society with all these things where you can't do it without just stunting yourself or stupidity or brain surgery and giving away your freedom. Or even Tennessee Williams, who references lobotomies often in his work. His sister, his older sister was lobotomized and you see this criticism. Often he brings up homosexuality in his work. And right, absolutely,

obviously. And in Suddenly Last Summer, there's a woman who basically tries to bribe a hospital to fix her niece with a lobotomy so she won't spill her secrets. Well, this is the this is the 5% thing, right? Like so people die, but then people like the nurses and the people even in this fictitious world are only living half a life, right? Like the people that are lobotomized are are they really alive? Some of them can't speak. Some of them can't. You certainly can't think. You're not the person or the personality that you were before. A big chunk of you has been damaged, removed. um and i was taught you know if suicide is wrong if you commit suicide you lose your soul uh you lose the right to go to heaven is what i was told that if you don't have a soul you can't get into heaven and um i think there's a little bit of a connotation of that in this as well and to put it

into other terms the u.s alone performed more lobotomies than anywhere in the world when it happened well a recorded amount because we all know how yeah yeah stable recordings are in 1951 60 percent of recorded lobotomies were women and in toronto it was 70 jesus it's a recorded 40 000 in total is all that was recorded and you know there were more and so you can think that like this kind of institutionalized um malicious behavior or um like uh destroying children is uh is sanctioned right like there is a lot of historical precedent for this kind of thing to be happening so yes we're outraged how could they do this you know in this fictitious world this shit happens in real life they were experimenting on human beings in our universe 70 of women and they haven't stopped they never have

and it's also it goes with that weakness weakness, right? That the weaker gender, the frailer gender, the this, the that. We need to treat them. I mean, this is a bit. Yeah. To fix them. Yes. And like, and the more outlandish procedures for treating the words hysterical and lunacy, right?

Like a lot of these things that we think of with mental illness are tied to the female sex and to the things that we go through and mental illness are tied to the female sex and to uh the things that we go through and the things that happen to our bodies um and i i just and so none of this is surprising but it's a little enraging and again with like this five percent stuff is he pulling from real life he's cutting very close to shit that happens in our universe how much of this is there he's cutting very close kind of wonder if that is something he's drawing from i mean he would have been growing up right granted not in the u.s but he's growing up in the shadow of this happening right how did this affect the people growing around pullman like He would have grown up with people

who experienced this during the peak of it. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild because it was acceptable as hell. Yeah. Yeah, and I think the gendered aspect behind it is, I think, just so striking to me, how systemic that was. Yeah, it's a little different obviously because right now it's focused on kids and it maybe it's because it's who lyra hangs around with right

lyra hangs around with the boys she's always throwing mud at their faces um but it seems we don't the roommates are like the first really big female influence we see on Liar of the Sides, Mrs. Coulter, Mrs. Lonsdale. That's the next per age female influence she's had. Yeah, I think that there is a commentary to be made about the gender binary that is at work in these novels. And maybe this is something that should be saved for the discussion later, because we have yet to meet certain other main characters. But I've always been put off by the rigidity that I have seen in the gender binaries of this world. north uh none of the egyptian women except for lyra there's no warriors there's no molly weasley that goes along to fight for the kids no ma costa out to save her son um it's only men and there's definitely throughout the series a feeling that like men do this and women do this. Lyra doesn't want to do sewing until the sailor, Jerry? What was his name? Larry? Teaches her, you know, to sew or to repair things, to stow her belongings, not clean up her room.

And while I think that those are some charming moments, I think something is lost here, right? Like the only people that ever do the adventure, if you're not Lyra, you're not in the story. And I think that something gets lost there. It's, I love this book, and I love this series, but it feels very much to me like it does a disservice to the overall work. I wonder if like, I agree regarding the gender binary for the roles in Lyra's world. I wonder if part of it is meant to be a criticism of the way that because much of these novels, of course, are a criticism of Christianity and the way Christianity has boxed a lot of those gender roles, because Lyra even like, that's called out explicitly in another

point where she's like, Oh, oh what why are women wearing pants or something i feel like that's not too much of a spoiler um in that questioning and and begin to see that maybe things can be a little different so i think that's part of it and i know that pullman has it is interesting that he doesn't go further in that criticism or in pushing the boundaries around these because um he criticizes the chronicles of narnia for the depiction of girl characters and um you know to be to be completely honest pullman hasn't been really great in talking about gender and the way that people have been talking about it now. He has shown quite some failings in trying to talk about transgender issues and adding to the dialogue in a very unfruitful way. But I do think I had been hopeful earlier on that's part of why I called out that person

who had a demon that was the same sexist as him because I was like oh is that does that mean something but then it doesn't really and I think it's just something that maybe Pullman's not really drawing from but I think that seeing the rigid

roles within this society does at the very least contextualize to some extent why Mrs. Coulter is the way she is. Not entirely. Some of that is just like plain cruelty. But some of the moves that she makes are things that she's felt that she has to do because of her gender. I do agree with that, especially when we meet her. And, you know, we can look at some of the females that we've seen in the story up to this point you have coulter you have obviously lyra was charmed by her because it wasn't normal in society to see such a fascinatingly beautiful woman right um but then you also have moving on

from that dame hannah even who isn't when she sees her quite as fabulous as mrs coulter right she's very uninterested she's captivated by coulter yes you also have to move along there the journalist at the party and i think that was a very interesting scene because you see a lot of coulter and like the journalist finding their woman's weapon finding that you know the thing we can use in the society is our beguiling charms and our good looks that is what they're using and And Lyra goes, Oh, she's flirting, but Oh, it wasn't actually for flirting sake at the end. I thought that was interesting. And I do think though that he gets to a certain wall and he hits it.

Yeah. That's that. Yeah. There's not a lot of open dialogue after. And obviously I guess at this point we can't ask for much progressiveness from this because i i wouldn't say it gets better in the bell savage or in secret commonwealth so far i wouldn't say that it's completely awful or anything i think it's a little better in fact i actually take it back i do think it's a little better in the secret

commonwealth that shows a little bit of progress but i think especially in the bel savage we're looking backwards and at a time where the ccd and these these ablation board these people maybe also were just coming into this power a little more and this is obviously we've developed over years and now they're pretty much full reign of terror right i mean they're torturing children like openly so i'm gonna ask a question uh and i think it's fine because we get introduced to one of these characters quite explicitly in the upcoming chapter so everyone you should have fucking read by that chapter by this point but are the women so is the counter to some of these rigid gender roles that we see within human society meant to be held in counter with the way that the witches are presented? Because they're, I think, supposed to stand in for the women who are involved in this effort.

Because they don't, don't. I think you might have something there. Because they don't, don't. I think you might have something there. So my take on the witches was that we're dealing with like, not like a, like a virgin Madonna kind of thing, because Coulter is neither of those. But we have, so who are the female characters that we can identify with, right? Like we have these impossibly youthful beautiful magical witches on a broom we have this demonic evil ice queen and then we have the hero of our story lyra and if you're not one of those trinity then who are you in this story annie was great but she's in there for a second and then gone um who else do we have the mother figure of ma costa but she doesn't get to go on the adventure to me it you know the witches seemed very much like uh like an unattainable ideal of what

a um desirable woman would be they don't feel cold they don't age they will take you know lovers and and have families but they look piteously on the men that age and become frail like they're they're yeah they are like at the top of the pedestal oh they're on the pine cloud the cloud pine so where are the human women where are the human women later apparently jesus christ like that's their role god damn it no i mean it's very i definitely think there's a lot of criticism especially with the religion um that's definitely in play but i still do think that he could be a little more progressive especially with some of the the spinoff books too i mean but i i also would put in another devil's advocate i guess no unintended

there an authority's advocate here that on the other shoulder, it's not 100% focused on these romances. The only romances it's really focused on, obviously, are Asriel and Colter Fucked, Made Lyra. They had great boom boom and great hate sex. Yes. One of the things that I, you know, so I ask myself as a person, like, let's say I had to draw this as a graphic novel, because that's my purview don't know um practical and effective as it would be for egyptian man right like and it also fits into the cast thing and so when you don't have that kind of parody when you don't have any other touchstones of any other people that aren't absolute evil the hero of the story or in up on a pedestal witch brigade then like it just it's grasping and i feel like it's so close it's so close it could it's right there and it for me there just feels like a lack and i love this series very very much and so i just i feel that lack you know i wonder if this is something that they intentionally made the choice of in the golden compass movie because i noticed that ma costa

plays a bigger role is she dead and is actually there when they go to bull vanguard it makes sense it makes sense to put her there that's why they brought her along as a remedy to this. Obviously had a contract, but... I mean, a lot of people had a contract, but this movie was what it was. Yeah, like Adonzo in The Voice of Eorik. Sorry.

Sorry you got recast by Ian McKellen after you recorded the whole movie. What a mess. Go check out the Patreon episode for $5 and get all of this juicy content. It's very elementary, right? It's very elementary. It doesn't dive deep enough into some of these connections.

So it doesn't hold up in that as an adult. I mean, if we were kids, it probably would be fine and we wouldn't notice at all, but it also should be an open text. So I don't know. I hope that when I get through the next 450 pages of Secret Commonwealth, I can come back and say, you know what?

I'm going to argue with you guys because I think you did blank blank actually better. I hope that's what I can say. So we'll see, you guys. I don't think it'll happen. There's sort of a praise around this idea of a tomboy right a girl who hangs with the guys right and can seamlessly go into that world and and as you said we don't really see lyra having those same sort of interactions with other girls her age and sharing those and i think that young girls notice that they might not be able to put

words to it but they internalize that especially because the next kid email interaction that she gets is in the second book and it's probably not really a pleasant one but you know where we are chapter 17 the witches you know i'm excited about this chapter but i'm more excited about the next chapter that we're not going to do tonight just because this is great but the next chapter has some really good dialogue uh yeah this is just the intake of breath before you get the like like all the good stuff that comes out this is a huge action one it's a huge action one it is it is so much happens here so fast so we'll just jump in uh lyra is awake it feels like she was just pulled from cold water and pan is so sweet sweet little pan he's warming and loving her back to life but they're both aware of mrs coulter awake and feels like she was just pulled from cold water and Pan is so sweet. Sweet little Pan. He's

warming and loving her back to life but they're both aware of Mrs. Coulter preparing for a drink of something and of course they're aware of the monkey and he's running his fingers over Lyra's body, touching the oil skin pouch at her waist. Not okay. Yep.

Mrs. Coulter gives her something to drink and before she's defiant, Pan is like, we're only safe while they pretend in their heads, he thinks at her. So she just starts to cry uncontrollably. She didn't plan this one. This isn't even a fake cry. Coulter offers her a handkerchief and just lets her go, and Pan takes his time to sniff at the drink, which seems to be a chamomile tea,

nothing more, and he's like, you should drink it. So she does, and Coulter's like, what happened to you at the drink, which seems to be a chamomile tea, nothing more. And he's like, you should drink it. So she does. And Coulter's like, what happened to you at the night of the party? Were you kidnapped? I was so worried. We sent police after you. Oh, my God. She's like, yes.

Yes, I was. Super kidnapped. Oh, yeah. She says, you know, these party guests, this man and the woman, they're like, oh, come meet me downstairs. And she's like, okay. And then I ran from them as soon as I could get free. But, oh, no, the gobblers brought me here in a van with the other kids. And then she's like, oh, but there's all that other amount of time that I got to account for.

But as she's doing all this, she starts to feel good again, like she did when reading the alethiometer. Then she remembers, like, oh wait, I can't say anything too crazy. Gotta keep it vague, light touch. She thinks she's gotta be an artist, so tell us about this, Tanda. This is a moment when I thought Philip Pullman is talking about what it's

like to write a book. Like, I feel like this is him winking through the fourth dimension of himself. Yeah. Yeah, right? Like like this is him winking through the fourth dimension of himself yeah yeah right like this is him being like hey you know good job me i did it and then there's kind of like a self high five and uh they continue on they do because mrs coulter's like how long were you in the building oh curveball yeah i was like i got this larry and you can feel like it's that meme with uh with julia roberts that has all the like math symbols everywhere like she's definitely doing the thing right yeah she accounts for time spent with egyptians she invents a trip to troll a son she fit uh she fits in a fabulous escape uh she details details some time that she worked as a maid at a bar for some reason.

Like, she's really feeling it. And you can see that, like, the whole time she's sort of crying and sniffling and sipping the tea. She worked for some farmers. Then she was caught by the Samoyeds and was taken to Bolvingar. And that's how she ended up here. She's mixing in some of the truth. Yeah. I think, you know, she peppers some of the truth in

like a true artist. A true artist, absolutely. Really, it was a Monet, but it was good enough. It's more like a Monet. She adds it all really sympathetically, and she's like, but they were going to cut. And culture shushes her and tells her she's going to they were going to cut and culture shushes her and tells her she's gonna figure it all out there there you're safe my dear they won't ever do it

to you now i know you're here and you're safe you'll never be in danger again no one's going to harm you lyra darling no one's ever going to hurt you but they do it to other children. Why? Oh, my love. It's dust, isn't it? Did they tell you that? Did the doctors say that? The kids know it. All the kids talk about it, but no one knows. And they nearly done it to me. You got to tell me. You got no right to keep it secret. Not anymore. Lyra, Lyra, darling, these are big, difficult ideas, dust, and so on. It's not something for children to worry about, but the doctors do it for the children's own good, my love. Dust is something bad, something wrong, something evil and wicked. Grown-ups and their demons are infected with dust so deeply that it's too late for them. can't be helped but a quick operation on children means

they're safe from it dust just won't stick to them ever again they're safe and they're happy and seen yeah thank you thank you i'll take the you're incredibly yes you're incredibly creepy good job thank you thank you Super creepasaurus. I was afraid. It's at that moment that Lyra is thinking of Tony Mercurius and she just fucking pukes everywhere. Oh. Mrs. Coulter moves away from her and is like, where's the bathroom, you orphan? She's like, like gross children are so gross she like breaks the

hole like honey and she's like ugh fucking spawn ugh she's like I can't believe you came out of my womb but Lyra interrupts and she's like why'd they do it they could leave him alone Azrael wouldn't do it okay if he knew what was going on

if every other grown-up has dust then it must be okay uh she's gonna tell every child in the world about all of this i love that line but tell every kid in the world but you've also kidnapped that's right if it was good why did she stop them from severing pan from lyra checkmate atheist by that i mean the other way around but i just really wanted to work that line in there it seemed funny to me in that moment when i wrote this so and just there's like if there is a mic drop sound this would be the time for the mic drop sound yeah it would uh coulter and lyra are going toe-to-toe here for sure sure yeah culture is like well many of the adults actually have even had the operation it's quote-unquote good for them

and lyra suddenly understands like oh that's why the adults to use the words of chloe they're ugly ass poodles blank faces i'm glad that you've retained that this evening I think that's one of my favorite things that you've said tonight ugly ass poodles there are a lot of cute ass poodles not the 80 page essay I wrote about lobotomy it was just the way you delivered that

and that was just so off the cuff it was from inside of you I knew it, that was from your heart that was from your demon yeah they can't sever that from me. No, they can't take that away from me. Lyra.

Lyra. Yep. Delilah. Hamlet. So Lyra's, like, about to go hog wild and, like, bitch her out. She's mad. But she shuts her mouth because she's like, I can't get myself away. And Mrs. Coulter kind of goes on and she's like, a quick little operation and you're never troubled again.

And your demon stays with you, only just not connected. Like, like a wonderful pet, if you like. The best pet in the world. Wouldn't you like that? Oh, oh, the wicked liar. Oh, the shameless untruth she was telling. And even if Lyra hadn't known them to be lies, Tony Macario's those caged demons, she would have hated it with a furious passion. Her dear soul, the daring companion of her heart, to be cut away and reduced to a little trotting pet?

Lyra nearly blazed with hatred, and Pentelimon in her arms became a polecat, the most ugly and vicious of all his forms, and snarled. But they said nothing. Oh my god, Animal Corner. I didn't know this, but I guess polecats are British ferrets. They're native to the British Isles. They're like ferrets, but they're not ferrets. They're called polecats. They're surprisingly not cats at all. Full disclosure, I thought that a polecat was 100% a skunk. And that Lyra and Pan, knowing that Mrs. Coulter is always filled with revulsion any time she pukes or has bodily functions, that Pan was just playing into that.

Oh, my God. It's slang for skunk in the South, in the US, so that's definitely true when you're getting that. Yes. I didn't know that. Yes, apparently. There's definitely little ferrets in the UK, but here they're like skunks.

Different names, like jumpers. That's weird. He's an erm UK, but here they're like scum. Different names. Like jumpers. That's weird. He's an ermine, which is a ferret. A ferret, which is a ferret. And a polecat, which is a ferret. Do you think that's saying something? They're really cute, though. They have this cute little mask.

They're going to wrap your heart with love and talons. Oh my god. I'm not doing symbolism. I'm just doing facts now this is just the one kind of animal it is i think what confuses me most is they're like did he give a poke at like his ugliest form i'm like this is actually kind of cute i don't i it's not kind of it is i think it's just vicious skunks are super cute they're just i agree dangerous like there's just implied danger if they can skunk spray you, right? Have you ever seen that one video? There's this man.

He's on a nature trail, I guess, and biking through it. And then suddenly a family of skunks starts walking down. They're so cute. Yeah, they walk down and they come say hi to him. And they go, shoo, shoo, shoo. And I think he's terrified in this moment because they are skunks. But they're so cute they come they walk all over his feet and they're like oh

hello and then they go off on their merry way it's the best they have soft little paws and like if you if you if you de-gland them then they're just like little force puppies okay but I'm not gonna sever the skunk Hannah oh my god

this is how it starts guys Mrs. Coulter is in! This is how it starts, guys. Mrs. Coulter is in me. This is how it starts. I wish she was in me. Wow, okay. I said what I said. Pam's also a polecat for a lot of the Golden Compass movie. I figured that out finally when I googled what a polecat was, but yeah.

Chloe said what she said. I said what I said. She said what she said. Mrs. Coulter tells her to drink her chamomile and that she'll make her a bed so she doesn't have to go back to the other children. She's happy to have her assistant back and tells her everyone was looking for her. And all the while, her monkey paces impatiently, betraying Coulter's serenity. Finally, she asks what she was waiting to ask about. Penny in the air, penny falls, the alethiometer.

She tells her the master probably meant for it to go to Asriel, but that his plans are bad and evil. So really, Mrs. Coulter should have it since it's a silly puzzle Lyra, of course, would never need or understand. And it's not hers. Yeah, it's funny because the master actually knew differently from what we see and it's kind of interesting and frustrating to me because in this first book and parts of the later ones everyone's insistent that like oh the alethiometer can't be for lyra and like it's surely for lord asriel and i think in this first few moments it's people trying to rest that story for her because i think that the alethiometer in some ways it's more than just a symbol

reader right it's a storyteller that's how it's presented and the story isn't about or for Lord Asriel I don't give a shit about Lord Asriel alright it's Lyra's it's always been Lyra's anyways we'll talk about some stuff later but you guys

won't hear it damn it it's going in the dusty discussion I'm like so proud of you but so bitter because I'm like oh thinking over things at the same time I'm so proud yes thank you am I Mrs. Coulter?

are we all Mrs. Coulter? you're like really proud but also like really disappointed yeah I mean yeah her demon is waiting in anticipation and mrs coulter grabs the oil skin bag taking out the tin sealed in wax telling lyra this is a clever way to keep it all together and i'm just laughing because in the background apparently the golden monkey is just like

shaking in anticipation and i'm imagining it just in the back like just holding a rib of something and going like a mini headbang like it's happening now um i'm just waiting for him to just like pass out like just fall over because he's so excited and i just can't imagine how she kept herself straight during this because like i would have just been like this is gonna be the best this is the best thing i've ever done this is so smart and there's a switcheroo that she pulls here that I've seen her pull in a future future book like out of the main trilogy and it like I'm just like oh she's so smart she's so clever doing little things like this moment I love that about Lyra she's just such a clever girl because she opens it Mrs. Coulter opens up that tin which is

sealed. This is a tin that's sealed with wax around it, if you recall. It's not the Alethiometer tin. It is a tin that Fartor Vantrexil, Fartor Quorum Vantrexil, sorry. And York. York also made it.

And she packed all the moss into the grass into it originally yeah so this is great she opens it she gets all the wax off the seal and stuff out she opens it and that spy fly comes zooming out it crashes into the stupid fucking monkey i fucking hate that monkey it crashes into mrs coulter and lyra just like is like scram get out of there and like here's the thing so it's like it is a bomb right like it is a a jack-in-the-box that completely changes this scene and i found myself wondering in a sort of like meta way if pullman went back and rewrote the earlier scene where the spy fly tin and the moss and Yorick like get together and Lyra like takes the spy fly over to Yorick and has him hide it in this very clever way.

So as a setup, obviously, for this later thing. But I think that I wonder in the creative process if Pullman got to this scene and it was an impasse and he knew he needed a way out of it. And so revisited the rest of the text and thought, aha, here's a moment where I can do several narrative things. I can solidify the cleverness of Lyra by thinking of stuff ahead of time. I can solidify the connection between her and Yorick and make them more connected because they have this moment. He does his cool like metalworking shit. They have good conversation. And on top of all of that, it ratchets up the action at the end of the sequence so that there's like the buzzing fly and sort of like a bomb goes off in Mrs. Coulter's hands. And I 100% between Yorick and Lyra

get some Sandor Clegane saving Sansa vibes here maybe a little bit. Interesting. Do you get that at all? Do you get that at all, Chloe? You know, like he makes a thing and then she uses it later as a way of protecting herself and empowering herself to

save herself i'm sorry who are these characters so it's it's another thing you know what just forget about it what are these characters from it's a it's a little known novel i'm not sure you'd get to it at all was it Was it based off of a show? Yeah. Oh, it was based on a show. Yeah, very middling show, really. Yeah, well, it fell flat. So Lyra darts into the kitchen and she turns

all the gas stoves on and she lights them up with a match and she throws flour at the counter as well to burst and it lights on fire when she does that in the air what we are learning so much about survival you guys like we can't eat polar bear livers explodable flower bombs what doesn't philip pullman know he's teaching us so much it was wild and it's true dude it's uh it's actually true and And this is crazy. I'm not fucking kidding. Did you know it's true because of particles?

Particles? When it's in the air as dust, it becomes explosive. You guys, it's a fucking metaphor. This is a metaphor. Lyra just threw dust in the air and is going to blow all the shit up with dust. Like a bomb. It goes off like a bomb. A knowledge bomb. is gonna blow all the shit up with dust like a bomb it goes off like a bomb a knowledge their

entire escape plan would have crumbled around them if she hadn't burst this flower bomb portals the grains are so small that they like burn instantly and it's made of sugar sugar burns right like look at burning a marshmallow or shreve raffian the world's largest flour mill was washed in a mill it was built in 1874 and in 1878 22 employees were killed and it destroyed other neighboring mills in minneapolis and i don't know i can't find the part i was looking but i swear they say something about the amount of nurses that die at the facility in Bullbanger. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar amount. I really wonder if he might have pulled from this because this is like such an obscure, like flower burning thing.

And that was one of the it was the biggest flower mill in the world in 1874. And it was just raised to the ground and it didn't just like raise the ground it destroyed like four to five other mills in the area bloated like it had a powder in the air kaboom and that's a big problem like at mills like if you go to a mill you'll find signs on the wall that say like you have to operate it this way and wear this protective gear because it could everything go up in flames. It could raise out. Isn't that nuts?

That is nuts. I feel like I learned a lot today, honestly. The more you know. Oh, my God. Lyra runs. Children are running everywhere. The escape plan is out. Older kids are hurting the younger kids.

They're getting their warm clothing that they have socked away. Adults are failing to control it all, shocking no one. And Lyra and Pan make for the dormitory to get the alethiometer from the ceiling tile as an explosion, kaboom, goes off in the kitchen. Lyra tugs on her furs and yells, now, at Pan. And they run, knowing that it's escape or die which is super badass the corridor is blocked and the fire has brought down part of the roof already people are climbing over things to get out into the fresh air and they're the gas is smelling as strong as another explosion kaboom

goes off louder and even closer uh it knocks people down and pan and lyra are struggling to get up finally hauling themselves off into the frozen air the adult in me was like lyra did you just murder your friends and the other part of me was like you had to create a distraction but how did she get out of there like obviously this is a fantasy piece because what kaboom kaboom uh everything is ablaze and lyra emerges onto the roof yelling for roger until she and pan who is animal corner an owl finds him um interestingly enough no spoilers but demons seem to turn into an owl in the story for kids when they need to have better observational skills i am noticing that and that is very cool like spying on things everything demon just goes pop i love it yeah i don't know that my demon would ever turn into a moth do you think your demon like have you ever been like i'm

a moth right i hope not i'm not stupid i just spat everywhere um interestingly enough'm going to share something with you guys that I think Aliana knows this, and it's an embarrassing fact about me, but the first time I took the Patronus test on Pottermore, I got a mole. Oh. Yeah, okay. And then I retook it. I used a bad memory for it. That's my problem.

I feel like it wasn't fair. I used a bad memory of a horrible person and like now i retook it and i got a white mare so i feel like that's better and i'm gonna accept that but yeah i got a mole the first time so like if my dn was mole i would probably be upset i got some kind of horse some kind of horse i don't remember they had they had really specific horse types on fucking potter more like look white mare i had some other specific horse and i don't dude. They had really specific horse types on fucking Pottermore. Like, look, White Mare. I had some other specific horse. Dude, Eliana, what if your demon was a horse? What does that mean about me? I don't know.

I'm born the year of the horse. It depends on the horse. Yeah, it really depends on the horse. A lot of different kinds of horses out there. How would you deal with it? It's big. horse yeah it really depends on the horse a lot of different kinds of horses out there how would you deal with it like it's big yeah that's true and and you would have to be by it unless maybe i just ride my horse everywhere instead of using a car um that's what i do oh so your carbon footprint is actually yeah your naphtha footprint yourha footprint. My horse wouldn't even need to, like, eat,

if you think about it. Have you heard of any of these demons eating? I have not. Only me. I don't think they eat or poop, which is good if you have something like a horse. So they're better than the pet. That's the other thing I was thinking of.

True, true, true. That's a lot of compost to try to get rid of. I don't think the pooping would be the worst. Think about if I'm mad at someone, you know? You would have the horse trample them? No, I was going to throw poop on them. Poop on them. Interesting.

I immediately go to maximum violence. No. You can lead the horse to water, but can you lead the children to safety while the building collapses, Eliana? Nice. Wow. Because it did. The building just collapsed

and then there's more noise. The howls. The howls from the Tartars. Oh no. Oh no. They stand with rifles in padded chain mail wearing helmets that cover their face.

Lyra is frozen in fear. This isn't like the Oxford clay beds. Or is it? She starts to scoop together snowballs to throw in the tartar's eyes, encouraging the other kids to do so. Oh my god. This is so Lyra!

And so the demons start to join in, directing the snow to the eye slits of the helmets. They distract them and run as much as they can and then they run again but they're about to be caught there's a lot of exciting action in this part until the tartar stops suddenly the witches arrived it's arrows from behind! The witches! I love it. And so they were, ragged, elegant black shapes sweeping past high above with a

hiss and a swish of air through the needles of the cloud pine branches they flew on. The Tartars still send another troop to try to catch the kids, and all looks lost once more until Yorick Burdison enters the fray with a roar!

Bear dad. The troops divide to try to cover both the witches and the bear. And Lyra guides the children to get out of the way. Because the gyptians should be here soon to save them. And as she leads the children away from battle. Lyra and the children discuss dust. And Lee Scoresby arrives at the battle using the gas from the enemy zeppelins at Bulwanger to fill his balloon and his trip getting there. Brilliant.

That's so smart. So smart. Steal their resources. Good job, Lin-Manuel. I mean, Lee Scoresby. mean i mean that's the kind of thing lynn manuel would do so i believe it all i'm hearing is this line from hamilton that eliana doesn't understand great thanks that's like we cut supply lines yeah contraband and that's totally i'm like yeah he scores we cut supply lines he's still contraband that's what he's doing that's

what he's doing 100 so the children are starting to get colder uh their clothing isn't very weatherproof it's cheap crap right like lyra has the good stuff she's got that dead seal she's got them furs but the kids are cold and pan is trying to inspire their demons he's being very bossy may i add i'm like pan good for you getting out of your little air mind shell uh and he's telling them to keep warm and keep warming your humans up and they aren't properly dressed for this and Lyra's like if we don't find the gypsians soon we're gonna have some big issues like if these kids lie down we're finished and there's this passage Carter Coram had told her many tales of his own journeys in the north and so had Mrs. Poulter always supposing that hers were true

but they were both quite clear about one point, which was that you must keep going. I do think that you must keep going comes into play at the end of this book and is a big message throughout this story. And so Lyra then tells them all to keep walking, follow Yurik's tracks, and continues to bully, hit, carry, swear at, push, drag, and lift each child to keep them going. I'll get them there, she was saying to herself. I come here to get them, and I'll bloody get them. Roger was following her example, and Billy Costa was leading the way, being sharper-eyed than most.

Soon, the snow was falling so thickly that they had to cling on to one another to keep from getting lost and lara thought perhaps if we all lie close and keep warm like that dig holes in the snow she was hearing things i also love how like she started to think that like what if what if we all just lay together like she goes from like two minutes ago being like if they lie down we're all toast and now she's like what if we all lie down she's like never dig holes in the snow dig your own graves like it goes from never stop never surrender to like let's just dig our own graves here here's a good spot to die she has the conviction of a 27 year old woman who runs too much podcasting if you know anyone like that um she hears the noise of an engine

and there are some more howls in the wind and she's starting to hallucinate and she sees lights in the snow and she's like oh no we're back at bullvanger but they're not like bullvanger's lights they're yellow lantern beams not white ambaric lights moving toward them and suddenly john fa is lifting

Lyra into the air and Egyptians are picking childrens up into sleds and Tony Costa is hugging Billy Costa because it's not Ma Costa because women aren't allowed to do things and that snarling engine noise comes back but so does another snarling noise because the golden monkey knocks

Pan to the ground wrestling and fighting and scratching and Mrs. Coulter is dragging Lyra to a motorized sledge. I think that's a snowmobile. Snow thickens, swirling around them and she cries out for help. She's being thrown around. Day's Pan is a wolverine

fighting the monkey and Roger is suddenly there punching Mrs. Coulter, God bless, and hurling his head against her. Oh, bless Roger. I mean, just out here. He's doing his best. I think his best was pretty good for a long time, to be honest.

He's doing alright. Yeah. And unfortunately, he does get struck down by a tartar during that. I think he's still Gucci, but he definitely was just struck down, but I think the headbutts were great. And while he's getting struck down, the day's saved once more because E. Yorick swipes down into the scene.

Can I get a roar, Elliot? Rawr! Majestic. Suddenly, someone is lifting Lyra once more, and Roger, from Mrs. Coulter's grasp and the demons turn into birds and Lyra sees a witch close enough to touch her, loosing an arrow into a tartar.

The witch drops them into Lee Scoresby's balloon basket and he tells them to get inside. They get Eeyorek in as well because semantics, I don't know if that would actually work physically because of, you know, physics, but whatever. The witch has let go of the rope holding the ship down and the ship drifts into the sky. They're escaping. Escape.

Escape. Escape. Leer Leigh is holding Roger in the basket. Leer Leigh is holding Roger in the basket. York unfashions his armor and Leigh is cheering. The witches fly above them as well. And Lyra now is inside this floating basket, this big aeronautical balloon.

She sees furs, bottled air, which I thought was fascinating, and a lot of philosophical instruments that have been bolted down around the place. They fly through a cloud. She wraps Roger, who I think is asleep by this point in some pretty thick furs and lee tells her that a witch lady wants to speak to her which is how they found out where lyra was she thanks york for coming and helping uh watching the aurora glitter in the distance there's some things that lyra has said yeah that we've never let go yeah oh yeah the roar it's the best thing she's ever said no there's the bung

oh the bung you can't forget the bung i've never forgotten the bung i strongly believe i've never stopped yeah i've never stopped deeply believing in the book yeah i really haven't god so i really love this passage. It was just really pretty. And every once in a while, Coleman brings out like some pretty passages. So let's just, you know, look at this word porn for a second.

Great swaths of incandescence trembled and parted like angels' wings beating. Cascades of luminescent glory tumbled down invisible crags to lie in swirling pools or hang like vast waterfalls. So Lyra gasped at that, and then she looked below and saw a sight almost more wondrous. As far as the eye could see to the very horizon in all directions, a tumbled sea of white stended without a break. Oh, lovely.

I really loved it. I don don't know it was just pretty and we get a lot of this uh in the future in the next books etc so i i just love when he writes like this it's nice we deserve it and then of course following all this gorgeous incandescence is the witch that saved lyra from mrs coulter she's clad oh let me tell you about her. She's clad in black silk strips and wears no hood or mittens. She's got green eyes and a chain of red flowers around her head.

Oops. Who is it? It's Serafina Piccolo! Boo boo boo! It's my favorite thing in the world. I love her so much, you guys. Love her so much. Although with the green eyes, I was like, Harry Potter?

Oh my gosh. This is where she went. After. It's Lily Potter. Lyra? Yes? And are you Serafina Pakala? I am. Lyra could see why F are you Serafina Pakala? I am.

Lyra could see why Fardekorum loved her and why it was breaking his heart, though she had known neither of those things a moment before. He was growing old. He was an old, broken man. And she would be young for generations. Okay, first of all, Lyra, respect your own. Yeah, Fardekorum's not that old. He's not that old, I think. He i think he's really uh he gets older too like every year so she's all of us a take yeah i mean i'm just saying that like in eight years i did not expect this level of saltiness from you guys

he's like in his 60s right and he's not that old yeah yeah that's not that old my nana's older my mom's like around that age and she's she has i think a more yeah active social life than i do oh shit you have an active i know right if your mom has a more active social life than you i could never hang out with your mom. Like, you're already pushing it right now. I mean. I know. I know. Me here doing my podcast.

So this is sad. I'm sad. Read La Belle Sauvage. Oh my god. Read The Secret Commonwealth. It's good for your skin. It'll water your guts. That's all I can say right now.

I'm just sad. I'm sad. I'm sad. So then Serafina asks Lyra, do you still have the symbol reader? And she does. And Kaisa! Hey, that's my friend! Kaisa arrives alongside her. Gliding. Kaisa came.

So she tells her that the Gyptians destroyed Bolvangra, yes. Killing 22 guards and 9 of the staff, lighting the rest of the buildings, and there's no sign of Mrs. Coulter and all of the kids have been kept safe. Yay! Yay! Yay, thank God for small miracles, right?

Yeah, Lyra asks how many of the witches it would take to carry them north and Serfie is like, whatever, we're fucking yoked. And we can eat you into the sun it's basically what she said that's actually verbatim the line

Lee attaches the rope to iron rings on the balloon tossing them out to the witches to pull them toward the polar star there's your son is no one gonna address the iron rings that Lee ties these ropes to because he obviously fucks in this balloon right oh yeah i did not go here like this is i just read your note and oh

man it's so good it's so good does this mean the scores call up pexby sarah leah my ship can fly off into the distance on their sprig of wood in their sprig of wood, if you know what I mean. You have to stop. I'm just saying. I'm not strong enough for this. Lee's all out there doing some BDSM rope play already. I'm like, Lee, whoa, put it away. Keep it in your pants right now, just because she's here.

But imagine the bear instead in those rings. I mean, he's also in there, to be fair. It could be all three. Why not all three? Why not? A throuple. You know, maybe I'm open-minded, Eliana. Maybe this is what we needed to add to the story. It was there the whole time. Oh my god.

The bear. The witch. You can't stop me. And the cowboy. I'd read that. I am reading it. This is the story, you guys. I don't understand why you're upset with me. This is the ship and this is the story and this is what happens. This is the airship.

You know what? Yes, I'm on this airship until it fucking crashes is what I'm saying. Oh my God. Everyone is asleep except for Lyra, Lee, and Serafina. Again, because Lee and Serafina love each other. And Seraphina asks if Lyra knows why she's going to Asriel. Lyra says she has to take the alethiometer to him, but then she's like,

oh yeah, also to save him. Because, you know, he's a prisoner. I forgot about all that. And Seraphina says there are things that she needs to tell her about. Lyra's like, like, dust? But Seraphina knows Lyra's exhausted and says, we can talk when, dust? But Seraphina knows Lyra's exhausted and says, we can talk when you wake up. Seraphina reaches

over. She touches Lyra's eyes gently and sinks to the floor in a peaceful peace. Pan flutters over, crawls up to her neck, and Seraphina and the witches continue to take them north toward Spellbard. And that is the end of chapter 17 and part 2

of Venger. Wow. we're on part three next we did it congration you done it and we do we do end with lyra taking another nap we do i think that's like how every chapter ends and then they slept like in many ways yeah maybe that's how all of the chapters in our life and maybe each new day is a new chapter i can see it can i buy that poster are you gonna make it available should we sell that is that i feel like girls Girls Con canon should have inspirational posters, but

it would not say inspirational things. It says get a job, little finger. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Shoot your shot. I've been telling myself all the time. Shoot your shot. Well, you guys, this of course

leads us into our discussion, which is going to spoil the main three books in the main trilogy which is of course northern lights or the golden compass depending on where you bought your book comma the subtle knife and the amber spyglass so if you do not want to get spoiled for that tune out now this will be followed by the dustiest discussion where i monologue like an evil villain for a while and we'll go from there yes the blade and the guillotine is made from half of it's made at least of the same metal alloy the subtle knife is right subtle knife is half made with that metal and subtle knife kind of confirms that people that are intercised have quote lost their soul

in a way and their chance to go to the afterlife or that's what it advertises which of course we learn afterlife is actually for everybody and it's a fucking prison because the authority has turned it into a prison basically um it's literally the plot of the good place i guess because lyra is like oh this is like not actually afterlife this isn't heaven this isn good. This is like a desolate, awful land. It's kind of just purgatory. Yeah. And as you said,

we learned later on that turns out those who have undergone intercision can be there because we see Roger who is important and is kind of the big reason for Lyra going to the afterlife or one of them. And everyone, again, as you said, it's shit in this afterlife. I want to talk about intercision, though, for a bit, because it's a big part of this chapter. These two chapters, of course, and like many other things in this book series, because it is based on Paradise Lost and therefore the story of like the fall and the Garden of Eden. There's a lot of ideas that I think that Pullman is drawing from in terms of philosophy and theology uh last chapter chloe spoke about those links between the body and the soul and and how the body cannot exist without the soul but in christianity it

seems in theology there's more than just the body and the soul there's also the spirit right and in lyra's how and in lyra's world the body houses the spirit and then the demon houses the soul there's also the spirit right and in lyra's how and in lyra's world the body houses the spirit and then the demon houses the soul in our world it's like both or slash there's the demon they're like invisible i guess yeah i'm not gonna lie i definitely tried to like do the thing that they talk about like where you kind of like half look it's like maybe I can see my demon or whatever at one point in my life. I couldn't. I still don't know what I am. Silver guillotine and perhaps the subtle knife and its ability to

separate the soul from the spirit I think might draw from this passage in the book of Hebrews in the Bible of, for the word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword piercing even to the division of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart so the

spirit is the part of humanity which connects with god according to you know theology and that's the part that can pray and be close to god so intercision it's also i think a play on the term intercession which was used to go on behalf of someone uh to petition to god as jesus would dying upon the cross right to petition on behalf of humanity to god um as you can tell my parents are really into god so i know too much anyways the soul is the part that is connected to the world, unlike the spirit, especially the material world. It is the part that feels, that senses, and that experiences the earthly realms. So for the blade to separate the two, it's like the word of God, right? Because people are saying that this is for their own good.

It's to keep them innocent or whatever. It's that two-edged sword piercing, dividing the soul and the spirit. It doesn't necessarily preclude someone from entering the afterlife. The spirit is its own entity that goes on without the body the soul just kind of like dissipates and gets to be like free great awesome congrats the body though perishes uh as the soul does no one gives a shit your body can't feel anything it's just meat meat yep and which is why the demonless are an abomination right because they end up they're in this liminal space of the undead because the body and the soul are connected in its ability to interact with the world but the spirit which persists i i wonder if like pullman's arguing

what is the point of the spirit if one cannot experience life in that way and that is why the spirit and the soul long to rejoin one another in the afterlife they long for one another to sense once more and part of how humans have a body soul and spirit is why they are stronger actually in these books we encounter angels in the story and they turns out are only made up of spirit i think theologically some some argue that angels are purely spiritual creatures and so humans because they have a body and a soul on top of their spirit can overpower them yeah um and it's weird because they're literally just like spirit with like what a loose condom like i don't know like they just appear in a weird form like they're like floof floof floof like and you can't see them except sometimes

you can but then it like as it's darker they're like, and you can't see them, except sometimes you can, but then it, like, as it's darker, they're, like, translucent and shit, like, what is with them? But the spirit, the whole spirit and body idea, like, the separation, what's the point without, right? Like you were saying, like, where's the zest of life without being able to actually experience it? And it reminds me also, going back to that uh the double sword that you're speaking of that reminds me of saint michael's sword in both paradise lost and also like the bible with regards to the archangel the bible have you ever heard of it doesn't ring though um you should be you should just watch the movie you're telling us to read the bible is there gonna be a reboot yeah i don't know maybe after three days um but in paradise lost michael kills satan but satan comes back because

that's just how it is with satan but he leads god's armies in war against satan and it makes me think a lot about will wielding that uh subtle knife in the army to come, the wars to come. And he does have to use it, as we know. Only limited, but he does end up having to use it. So, a little crazy, especially in Tsutagaze. Where he, like, cuts the whole tower down.

Yeah. Wish I could do that. Not that I want to cut any towers down, I just, uh just like the idea the ability I've got a horse I'm a Hufflepuff there's also some other things

in this like the imagery of Lyra in the crawlspace listening to people speaking so thinly on the other side of the ceiling and determining like where to come out or where she needs to be that also reminds me like coming back to Will right of that idea of being in two

different roles and trying to figure out like where do I open this window where where's the right spot similar similar imagery ideas I don't know I miss Will I actually can't wait to get to Will again. I miss him. I miss him so much. In fact, I'm not

going to tell you, but there's a moment where Lyra dreams. She's dreaming about Will in the current secret commonwealth, and I'm just like, Will! I can't wait. We're not going to get it back, I don't think, but I want it back.

I don't know. But I want it back. I don't know. I just want a little bit. That's all I want. As a doctor. Can I tell you the one thing that, not the one thing, but the only thing I have to add to this conversation is one of my favorite words. Prelapsarian. Do you guys know the word prelapsarian? Oh, it is.

I do not. It is just like this delicious word uh and it means of or relating to the fall of man so this time of innocence before adam and eve before the fall this prelapsarian time and that's a real fucking word that exists and i just love it um so there's your vocabulary lesson i'm gonna use that all the time thank you for the day i mean this entire series up until like technically book three is pre-lapsed yes exactly how often do you get to use that amazing word but it is so every episode it's pre-lapsarian my dudes uh have you been have you been wanting to use a big word? Every day.

This is it. This is your moment. I feel really empty without big words, you know? I've been severed. Oh my god. So did Coulter taking care of Lyra and getting her the tea and everything kind of remind you almost of Coulter in the cave with her? But the cave is sadder and patheticer because she is running from

the authority at this point because she finally is like oh no what have i done oops it's too late though to correct any of it because i'm evil yeah she's like kind of like what have i done but also at the same time she's like let's tear bats apart and like okay i feel like it was just her winning mother of the year award right like one cup of tea we're even like here it is yeah I absolutely I'm a great mom I yeah you didn't take pictures before prom oh my gosh

oh yeah I think the the tea thing that's interesting because she serves it then and Pam's like we gotta make sure that this isn't drugged yeah the next time then it is fucking is yeah I think it's a good good call out good cat bitch yeah i love her so much my god yeah i read it when i read that i was just like you fucking nuts yep jesus yeah she's so intense yeah yeah there's also um yeah there's so many like things that I keep catching in book one. I'm like, is this like a thing or they feel like callbacks in the later books, right? Like Lyra urging the children to leave Bolvangar, just as she has to urge the dead. She's like, no, it's totally fine. You gotta, we're gonna go through this window. It's gonna be fucking sick. And some of them are like, I don't know what's out there. Maybe I'm supposed to be down here.

sick and some of them are like i don't know what's out there maybe i'm supposed to be down here she's just leading us to all get destroyed especially because people disappear and the kids are all here in bovanger the ones who don't know they're like uh i don't want to go out there it's like cold i don't have things how do i know someone's gonna come and get me and it's like well what you can't stay in this burning building and they're like i don't know maybe I can yeah and it does kind of I think we might have talked a little bit but I can't remember we might have I think we vaguely did in the discussion but now I'm trying to remember

it was like my first or second discussion I've gotten to join that right? Maybe we took a nap you just took a nap yeah maybe I lied with it but it is interesting I'm going to talk a little bit about some of how this affects the story going forward and a bit in the dusty

discussion but Lyra does make that her mission right she goes for truth and for good and we obviously see that sometimes she has to do some betraying of her own to get there and lying of her own to get there but I don't know.

Yeah. It's going forward. It's a rocky road. I mean, that's the thing is this book, you get to the end and you're like, wow, what a book. But especially after watching The Golden Compass with Eliana last week, it's like they fucked it up so hard and they left it on an open positive note. Spoiler alert. And Hannah, Roger's still alive alive how did they do that how i was so surprised it ended and i was like wait wait this was an end this was us ending it just

yeah it's because they hated the entire religion in 2007 it wasn't selling for them but uh they wanted to be family-friendly lord of the rings anyways they wanted to be harry potter i think they wanted to be the next harry potter yeah they ruined it they ruined it you can't do that you gotta lean into the you gotta lean in but they wanted to have sequels still they done messed it up but that's what's so important about the end of this story right like that is the driving force the driving factor that keeps lyra going through this main trilogy and after seeing all these horrors done to children especially to her friends people that she associates with uh it's all yeah we have to lead into that because at the end right it ends up with lyra going into the other world we were

talking earlier about you just got to keep going that's how it is in the north and i think that's why it's powerful that ending of the first book because she's like i just got to keep going it's why it's powerful in a way like at the end of the third book because she and will don't get to be together because they choose rather than shortening one of their lifespans they just have to keep going because they have to live and lyra here was threatening mrs coles i'm like i'm gonna tell everyone about dust and that's essentially lyra's charge later on in life right you have to keep telling everyone about dust so that you can keep that well not dust but like to live their lives fully to to learn as much as they can so that they can keep that window open that they'll have enough dust for it and just gotta keep going it's it's very finding nemo just keep swimming

just keep swimming yeah that's the everything a lot of things can be i think summed up in finding nemo going to be real lots of thematics lots of thematics well ladies I apologize but I'm now gonna have to kick you off it's my time yeah so you two please take your headphones off I will wave wildly at you when you're allowed to come back but right now I need to get dusty and you get very dusty

listeners if you have not read La Belle Sauvage or The Secret Commonwealth if you do not want to be spoiled for either of these things, please tune out now. Come back next week when we hit episode seven. Eliana is making faces at me. She's so excited about me taking over the dustiest discussion. But we are going to talk a little bit about La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth. She's making rock and roll signs, Abby.

Rock on signs. I don't know. She's giving me kisses. This is a lot, guys. There's a lot going on in this episode that makes me think of some of the stuff happening in LaBelle Sauvage. Different echoes of people like Malcolm

taking a child, going on with a child and saving them, keeping them hidden. And the witches, the witches coming into play. Malcolm's witch saving them on their journey versus Serafina saving them on their journey versus seraphina saving them on their journey it's a very nice parallel separation for example it's not as rare as we think it is or moreover it's rare but not impossible like what it looked like now in the commonwealth we have characters uh characters dying that apparently had demons that were separated and of course you learn in la belleBelle Sauvage about Malcolm Polstad and his demon. And later we learn about the conditions, the very

rough conditions that caused him to separate from him. Coulter saying the alethiometer wasn't the masters to give is absolutely wrong. It is so Lyra's. We learn in Secret Commonwealth that this alethiometer passed from thief to thief before being stolen from its home in Bohemia at a monastery and Dame Hannah and Malcolm all agree it's very much Lyra's at this point. The journey Malcolm and Alice took to protect Lyra kind of serves as that blood promise and sacrifice. They both bled for this. Alice was and just a warning I won't talk about it deeper than this, but she was taken against her will by Gerard Bonneville

and Malcolm Polstead was shot and he bled and sacrificed for Lyra and this alethiometer too. Lyra and this alethiometer have kind of this blood blessing from her friends and family, almost like a prequel version of Serafina Pakala and Lee Skorsky, right? Adoptive parents.

And it reminds me of the blessing almost put on a character like harry potter by lily and james with their sacrifice i haven't finished secret commonwealth quite yet i'm on page 300 but the laws that protect lyra under scholastic sanctuary are being undone by the ccd and unfortunately she doesn't quite have that blood blessing well maybe she does she seemed to survive some crazy stuff until now. And we've learned about the fairy blood now or the fairy milk that she's drank.

So once more, people have come together in support of this girl that's traversed worlds, who was once vivacious and ferocious until she separated from her demon and then eventually had to face this adult life of woe once more. The authority that she sacrificed and lost so much to in order to save the world is back in control, writhing in corruption over something

attracting dust and visions of it, and once more is stopping at nothing to silence the prophecy child, Lyra Silvertongue. Reading Commonwealth makes this chapter's victory with Egyptians rescuing all the kids so hollow. It's only the beginning of Lyra's journey and she has so much to lose still. And it makes me think about, you know, where we are once more with her. It's quite a read. I'm really hoping that once I get to the end of Commonwealth, there's some sort of hope because right now it feels really bittersweet, separated, separated from Pan and Outlook not so good. so i will update you guys thank you for listening to the dusty discussion and now i will welcome the girls back to me hello hello eliana

we get tana back too i'm back yeah i think i'm back yes good yes yes we hear you back hello hello thank you for coming back ladies i'm sorry to have uh had to say goodbye to you for a brief moment there that's okay we were speaking sign language at each other kind of tana was teaching me words she taught me wine and turtle turtle yeah wine and turtle this is wine yeah this little guy is turtle this would be much more satisfying for your audience if this was a video podcast. Yeah. It's okay. I put you guys in the corner

so I couldn't see you because you were distracting me. Nobody puts baby in a corner. I told you I was trying to villain monologue. You weren't letting me. What's a villain monologue without minions in the background screaming all like that? Oh my god, absolutely. Are you admitting you're the minions? Oh, you were saying orange, weren't you?

This is orange? No, no, oh, is this orange? I thought, I was trying to say this is old. Old. Maybe that is old. The only other thing that I know. Well, you do a beard. You gotta do a beard. Well, it has to go down, yeah. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Anyway, so this has been a delight, ladies. This has been a high watermark in my own personal life.

And so thanks so much for having me on. You guys are amazing. And I love you so much. And I think you have the best podcast. Oh, well, thank you for coming on you're the best we were like we're a little star struck we were really excited to have you on so I mean you know

yup it was a blast I love that you just jumped in you're like this is it we're doing this you are officially a girl gone canon yeah you are tell everyone where they can find you on the internet. Plug what you want to plug.

What's new with you. Yeah. Let everyone know. Fantastic. You can follow me at Tana Ford on Twitter or Tana Ford dot designs at both Facebook and Instagram. I just rescued a not a pigeon, a white dove yesterday that landed in my yard. So if you want to see that, scoot on over to any of those platforms um are doves just white pigeons they are they're just

white pigeons which is why i was like it's a white pigeon but then i was like most people call them doves uh and i named her pepper pepper because she acted like a pet bird so pepper the pepper anyway i was gonna say and like the disney show. Oh, Pepper Anne, Pepper Anne. Or Pepper Potts for Iron Man. But speaking of comics, you can check out my latest work on Livewire at Valiant. Issue 11 comes out, I want to say this Wednesday, but it might have been last Wednesday. And then issue 12 will be a month from now or pick up uh LaGuardia uh by Nnedi Okorafor and Illustrated by myself uh which I'm very proud of but that's

where you can find me on the internet and if you want to hear me get drunk-ish and talk about or boozy and talk about Game of Thrones stuff check out Westeros Wheneverly with Dave and Tana on uh wherever you can get fine podcasts. And you don't only do you don't only do a Song of Ice and Fire coverage, right? We did the Westworld. Yes, we did Westworld. We spun ourselves off and did some Westworld stuff. But you guys are in-depth analysis and Dave and I are utterly surface analysis.

We're not even surface. We're mostly just chatting with each other about life. So come to us if you just want to hang out with friends and have a themed cocktail and chit chat about a thing we like a lot. I like that. I'm into that. Yeah, we're always down to do that. You want to do this and I'll do that? Okay.

I'm just kidding, Eliana. I can never leave you. I'm legally tied to her. Thank you so much. Thank you so much again, Tiana. As always, if you guys have not already, please make sure to subscribe to us on any platform that you listen to podcasts, whether it's Google Play, Spotify, iTunes and Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Acast, you name it, we're on them all. Yep. And be sure to keep up with us on social media so that you know when these episodes are coming out we haven't necessarily been following a same sort of regimen for his dark materials

episode so you can find us on twitter at girls gone canon or maybe you too have a an email or tweet that you would like to share with us shoot us something on social media or give us an email on girls gone canon at gmail.com i I promise, guys, they don't bite. They're really nice. Yeah, Tana sent us an email. I was like, oh, let's get this now. Now she's on our podcast. Thank you for being our first.

Our first His Dark Materials guest. I'm your first. Yes, it's my first time. We do have an episode coming out after this for his dark materials next week we're taking a little break from john snow in our song of ice and fire podcast we'll be back on november 8th with john snow in a dance with dragons and a song of ice and fire but we will be trying to race to the end of the first book in the his dark materials trilogy with our next episode episode 7 chapters 18 19 and 20 the beginning of part 3 coming out next week sometime and uh look forward to the very last episode episode 8 for those last three

chapters coming out right before the show airs so we will see you then and of course again you can find us on patreon where we this month switch things up because we wanted to be spooky for Halloween but also just because I had never seen the Golden Compass movie and we did a video for this of us discussing the Golden Compass movie

this time it was my first time watching it this past weekend and it's also my last you took one for the team truly you only had it for 48 hours anyways thanks you two as always I have been one of your hosts Chloe and I've been another one of your hosts

Eliana and I've been one of your guests yes finally thank you somebody finally thinks we're funny