Take me to a place where I can dance until I'm dead
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Mile High Club / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page Mile High Club.
It's a wild ride, which is perhaps the one consistent quality of your body of work. This tale does a great job of melding all the different "arenas" together, into a strange ballet of sniper duels, mind games, marital disputes, and homoerotic memories. It's good. It's gonna stick with me for a while, as will the other tales in the series.
A challenging and ambitious work. Gears, ruthless to the end. Engaging people making ugly choices. Anwar's remarks were particularly sharp and well crafted. Hope we get more stories from this corner of the canon.
I sing of arms and the man
Storm-tossed by Hera's jealousy
I love how this evolved from the early fragment that I saw, and how it fits into the broader story too. This is a great, action-packed, extremely strange capper to a great series. I hope other people get on board with reading it soon.
Downvote for now, but I'll try to explain why I feel that way, cause it's pretty well written otherwise.
Tossing in the names of Clef, Kondraki, Mann, Gears, feels pretty pointless for the purpose of the story. I'm not entirely sure what you're going for there, but on first read it feels like a name-drop for cool points or recognition, that wasn't followed through with. I don't remember any foreshadowing in previous tales for their specific involvement, so these 4 are brought up suddenly in this story, bring a lot of expectations with them, have minimal involvement, then everyone but Gears dies in the same story. In my perception, all 4 could have been replaced with random agents with random names. They would have the same basic traits and dialogue, none of the story's events would change, and I wouldn't be quite so dissatisfied.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, idk. But at the moment, I feel like it lacks strong ties to previous tales, or the right payoff to the potential it could have.
Novoting, so that's how you know how conflicted I am.
Pros: Excellently written. The action is pretty engaging, even if it became a bit hard to follow at points. The dialogue slides and flows, and it has your patented blend of magical realism.
Neutral: I'm admittedly iffy on intercutting the story with the flashes, but they worked ok — they killed the movement a bit, but I figure that was your intention.
Cons: what the fuck lmao
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the team composition, but this felt like if all the other entries were hardboiled spy thrillers, LeCarre shit, then this is an adaptation of one into a Tarantino movie. Like, you can see the identical plot elements, but the style is so wildly different it's impossible to overlook in the context of the whole series. I don't really know about the senior staff inclusion, but I also don't really care. i should note that a lot of my issues with the style wilding out and undercutting all the tension you've built up start midway through this tale, so… yeah.
I think it's a fine tale on it's own, even though I have my standalone issues with its pacing and kind of messiness near the end, but I really don't like it in the context of the series you've built up (which I've adored). I'd be remiss to downvote this article in context of other articles, so I think this is my option.
Half of this is is a pretty fantastic work and a good capstone to the team's entry. Parts of it are engaging, entertaining, and sell the stakes and atmosphere.
Parts, and halves.
The other parts are thematically and tonally separated from the rest of the entries to an extent that is frankly hard to believe. If you told me that this was two stories that got placed into a blender I'd believe it.
The… snappy - I suppose - narration clashes hard with the previous hardboiled spy thrillers1 that we've been presented with previously. There are parts where it feels like ARD is more interested in being stylistic than telling a story - and while that's not normally a bad thing, I was super interested in where this was going, so I'm coming in with different expectations than a standalone piece. Stuff like:
A place where everybody knew your name.
and the general depiction of greaser-Anwar (some sort of Americana Anwar, man that would have fit so much better if this were the Cold War, not the Gulf War2) just shock me out of the atmosphere that has been building. We've not investigated any cultural clashes so far (a few in minmin's previous entry) but not to the extent that greaser-Anwar is thematically justified.
The introduction of senior staff and the throughline of Charles Gears felt… really weird. The first couple tales set me up for a Foundation that was cash-strapped and spread thing - heck, one of the first entries mentions how the Foundation can't afford its best in this. Then to turn around and have senior staff comprise the entirety of the sniper team was a strange decision - they carry connotations.
And the ending "The threads of man work for you, Charles" segment, well… The Gulf War was violent, ugly, and incoherent. To switch to those themes of Anwar and Charles being focal points in the universe's cosmology rang really weird and discordant to me. I know it may have been Anwar doing some flimflammery to try and stay alive, but… It was an odd decision.
And I guess there's no getting around the elephant in the room here. The Anwar/Charles love story feels like the kind of thing you write to keep up the energy to make writing the rest of the piece fun. I feel that in ARD's writing here, and it's something I've done - not with star crossed soldiers, mind, but I understand the place ARD's coming from.
That being said, it's hella discordant with the rest of the entries and with the rest of the tale itself. It feels like ARD wrote two stories and somehow mixed them together without realising it.
In short: most of the problems could easily be fixed by someone sitting down with ARD and going "what the fuck". This tale follows the subtle, understanted tension and aromanticism of the preceding works, and asks us to accept the sudden and unforshadowed change to both romantic themes and bombastic violence. I think we, as the reader, can accept one, but not both simultaneously.
Edit: You know, I don't know why this is the only tale I thought was set in the Gulf War, not the Cold War. Really strange.
Responding to explain my downvote, as I was torn. I second most of Riemann's complaints above. But mostly the writing style of the flashbacks was so disjointed from the main narrative of the article that I felt jarred out of my immersion.
Moreover, I was significantly confused by the causality of the flashbacks referring to current events as they occurred, which was not clearly explained and took me out of the piece.
I agree with most of the above comments, but I'd also like to explain my main complaint.
I read this twice, talked to others about the plot, and reread this again, and I'm still shaky on the entire plot. It's overly chaotic and the flashbacks are really disjointed, it feels like an amalgamation of like, three different tales in one. The whole romance subplot thing with with Anwar just seems… unnecessary.
I just don't get it. -1.
I'll throw in my disagreement with the above comments. This tale wouldn't be nearly as exciting without the bisexual homoeroticism permeating Dr. Charles Ogden Gears' every pore throughout this entire story.
Instead of pulling out his own lighter, he leans forward so our death sticks are touching. I’m too baffled to do anything; he holds steady for several seconds as the embers on his cigarette light up mine.
I refuse to believe that there are people who read this & think that this, of all things, is what kills the feel/vibe/tone of the whole story.
then this is an adaptation of one into a Tarantino movie.
Tarantino movies frequently feed off of the feeling of the moment. Whether the plot is simple, complex, or nonsensical, what matters in his films are how the characters play off their settings, with each other. It is an extremely correct assessment that each individual story in this series carries a completely different approach to storytelling. But that is because there isn't a singular plotline being told here, but a series of incidents in the same timeframe & general setting that all coalesce & add up to a greater anxiety. For example:
The… snappy - I suppose - narration clashes hard with the previous hardboiled spy thrillers that we've been presented with previously.
Everywhere, NY is hardly much of a "hardboiled spy thriller", but rather, the start of a cat-and-mouse game between magic-wielding users of secretive organizations. There is a marked difference between these two concepts. Tip of the Spear is a series of vignettes about those outside of the know on anomalous happenings being affected by such, & the intensity of dealing with an escalating situation. Not even close to the same thing. Where is the expectation for this to be tonally similar?
Then to turn around and have senior staff comprise the entirety of the sniper team was a strange decision - they carry connotations.
It's not outright spoken here, but there is a strong implication that this is happening because this is the final line of resort in this particular situation. It's not like it's ideal for these guys to be here. But the shit has long since hit the fan, & is now being flung everywhere. Yes, it comes out of nowhere. See: it's stylized after Tarantino.
The Anwar/Charles love story feels like the kind of thing you write to keep up the energy to make writing the rest of the piece fun.
The answer to this one is just simple: homoeroticism makes everything better.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
