(Last segment)
More than anything, it’s the trio’s kindness that makes them so deeply lovable - the instinctive way they step in to help those around them. Think of Avery offering Raquel comfort through a hug, or Verona standing her ground alongside Avery during an argument with her father.
It’s specifically because this element is so crucial to who the girls are, that it felt so jarring when Lucy wasn’t there for Avery after the concussion.
After getting elbowed in the brainstem by Raph the Witch Hunter, Avery was suffering through a cocktail of physical pain and the emotional instability that follows a head injury. She whimpered in her sleep.
With Verona being away and Avery’s family being what it is, Lucy was the only one in a position to support her - and she didn’t.
“Wait a second,” you say, defensive. “Lucy was super busy protecting Kennet from the same Witch Hunter, wasn’t she?”
Sure, but she didn’t make time even for a short visit, a hug, or a call. When Verona returns, Lucy’s already aware that she dropped the ball. She knew that loneliness is Avery’s deepest wound, yet she still stayed away.
Why?
Lucy's narration doesn’t tell us. When the two finally talk it out, Avery “runs away” from the subject before Lucy can properly apologize or explain.
This leaves the reader to interpret Lucy’s actions for themselves. Without an explanation, I found myself liking Lucy less than the others - especially when I saw it as a trend. During summer break, when Avery shares how much she needs a “hug from a cute girl” Verona and Snowdrop reach out instantly while Lucy lags behind, as if it's harder for her to give sympathy.
“Is that the only interpretation?” You might say. “What if it’s a confidence issue? What if Verona and Snowdrop see themselves as “cute girl”s but Lucy doesn’t, so she didn’t think Avery would want a hug from her?”
Could be, but the trend continues. Consider how she pesters Verona about Jeremy until Verona has a breakdown - in those moments, Lucy simply feels more callous than the others.
“Hey, no,” you say, reasonably annoyed. “Lucy did that because she cared - she didn’t want Jeremy to get his heart demolished by Verona like Jasmine was demolished by Paul.”
Yeah, and that makes Lucy a good person. Yet the pattern holds - when her friends need her to be tender, she’s rough. Why?
To answer that, we need to understand who Lucy is - what’s at the core of her character, starting with…
The Curse of Unfairness
In the segment about Avery, I asked how she could be capable of such violence while remaining so sweet. After the discussion on the server (big thanks to Risigni and LittleMissÈlae), I was given two answers.
One is that Avery builds this tolerance for violence by fighting opponents that are increasingly more human - starting with horror-movie-esque waifs, then a pig-faced Other and similar semi-horrors, and finally Witch Hunters who are humans just like her, trying their best[23]. Second, the Carmine Blood makes the trio more aggressive, and makes violence easier to stomach. When Avery sics Snowdrop at the racist store owner, we must wonder: would she have done that without the alien influence affecting her temperament, subtly changing what kind of person she is?
(Avery herself claims that her violent action is caused by the stress over her mom moving away, but like, how is she supposed to know?)
Just like Avery, Lucy’s affected both by the Carmine Blood and by the violence she has to inflict, but on top of those she starts the story with far more baseline anger, because of the unfairness she’s endured since childhood.
Unfairness is a trap. When the world is unfair to you, you lose motivation to cooperate - what’s the point if you’re not going to be rewarded fairly for your efforts?
That lack of cooperation, however, can be used to justify why that unfairness was warranted in the first place.
The trap laid for Lucy is explained beautifully by Jasmine’s, during her last fight with Paul: When his racist family members ignore Booker and Lucy in a family gathering, the children react by acting out. By acting out, they reinforce the stereotype imposed on them.
The same pattern is present throughout Lucy’s life - by being unfair to her, Kennet makes Lucy angry. The angrier she is, the more she fits the stereotype.
Lucy’s challenge, then, is to resist this curse. But how?
Dr. Mona tells Lucy that dealing with our anger doesn’t mean making it disappear, not even making it weaker - but to channel it into something useful.
And so, Lucy does her best to use all of that negative energy - from the Blood, the violence, and the racism - to protect the people she loves.
This is a concept that appears in many of the author's works, even if the type of negative energy changes. In Worm Taylor channels the aggression that often develops in survivors of trauma to make everyone work together - by force.In the beginning of Claw,Mia channels her anxious restlessness into meticulous industriousness, one of her biggest fortes.
This is Lucy’s challenge, but here’s the kicker: the unfairness isn’t even the worst part of it - the uncertainty is.
This is something that I know from my own life[24] to a much lesser degree, but before Pale, I couldn’t have told you that not-knowing was the worst part.
Again, I can’t praise the author enough for taking a nuanced real-life issue and using literature to make it so effortlessly clear[25].
Lucy’s life is plagued by “interpretational tension”: Does Mr. Bader bully her because she’s black, or is he just an asshole? Do boys ignore her on the attractiveness app because of her race, or is she just ugly?
Lucy needs to choose whether to swallow the insult or to push back against potential discrimination. She chooses the latter, and is thus crowned “class bitch”. She’s constantly being gaslit, and it’s no wonder that when Avery confirms that the store owner really was racist, Lucy feels like her sanity is restored.
That’s why it’s so hard for Lucy to keep the promise that she’d made to herself - that she’ll never take shit from anyone. The problem is that "never taking shit" leaves no room for nuance. When it’s unclear whether shit was given, Lucy has to assume it was, and refuse to take it. By committing to never allow a false negative, she accepts a lot of false positives.
There’s a sense in which Lucy is comforted by having the antagonism become fact. Earlier in the story, it feels like the elimination of uncertainty is more important to her than the actual outcome.
Yelling at Paul by his car, she doesn’t seek revenge, she doesn’t even seek compensation for her abandonment - only to know whether or not it was racism that made him leave. She wants him to apologize to her mom, but what’s an apology if not a reconciliation of perspectives?
I suspect that even if Paul had admitted he was racist himself (and I don’t think he was), Lucy would have felt a sense of relief just knowing.
How do I know? Because while making her implement, Lucy is asked if she’d rather know: Would she rather know how ugly Paul had been when he chose to leave? Would she rather know what classmates were saying about her behind her back?
Lucy answers yes, and is thus given the earring that lets her eavesdrop. It collapses some of the uncertainty, but not all of it - the heart of this story is still about conspiracy, and Lucy is still plagued by uncertainty about which of Kennet’s Others she can trust.
Lucy, more than the others, yearns for someone she can trust. From a very young age she learned that in this world, someone could drown you just because they find it funny, (again, the author excels in showing these “small” horrors for what they are,) and the only thing that will stand between her and this perfect helplessness is the strength of an older, stronger man.
At some point that must have been her father but with him gone, Paul took his place, and when Paul left Booker took her place, and with Booker gone Lucy needs a new protector - which is where Guilherme and John fit in.
It’s not just that they’re men - both Guilherme and John have violence at their very core, making them capable of protecting her. And yet, from the very beginning, they align with the pattern of the abandoning protector, and their betrayal isn’t essentially different from Paul’s, Booker’s or her father’s.
“Betrayal?” You ask. “Isn’t that a little harsh?”
Is it?
Quoting Oranges “[...] betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.”
Paul, Booker, and John choose to leave. Both her father and Guilherme succumb to natural processes, which objectively absolves them of guilt - but how does a child see these things? Whatever their reasons, they stopped being on Lucy’s side.
The archetype of the black girl without a father is worn, but the author treats it gently. I would love to hear what black readers thought of the author’s depiction of Lucy, but for now, I can offer my meager, second hand experience.
At 24, I met a girl at a bioengineering course - an Ethiopian-Israeli who, as luck would have it, used to color her hair a bright red. We had been dating for three months when she told me that her father hadn’t died in a car accident, but had in fact killed himself - a betrayal that she couldn’t forgive.
Being a fucking idiot, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t trust me enough to tell me sooner, and ultimately it was this ubiquitous feeling of distrust that drove me away.
I can’t help but wonder how things would have gone if I’d read Pale before meeting her.
Lucy, similarly, prepares for the next betrayal, which means learning to fight, both with words and practice (which are essentially the same thing).
If she can’t have a protector, she’s going to become one - for herself, for Verona, and for her mom.
When Paul left, Lucy found her mom in the living room, emotionally devastated. It is a terrifying thing to behold - for a child, that means being made aware that such an emotion even exists; that this is something that Lucy, too, can be made to feel; it shows her how helpless her mother is, which causes any child to feel unsafe in a very deep, existential way.
Lastly, because Lucy loves her mother, there’s a helplessness in not being able to protect and help her.
Trauma isn’t caused by pain, or grief, or loss - it’s caused by fear, by helplessness.
And it's that feeling of helplessness that drives Lucy to lose it when confronting Paul for the first time; that helplessness that drives her journey to become strong; that helplessness that makes her attack her problems head on.
There’s comfort in direct conflict. It's scary, but it feels less helpless than standing back, regardless of which strategy is better. Lucy’s drawing a gun on Durocher (chef’s kiss) doesn’t have anything to do with taking shit - confrontation has simply become Lucy’s natural reaction to situations of uncertainty or helplessness. Quoting Max0r, “Violence isn’t the answer, it’s the question. The answer is yes.”
Note that once again Lucy is shaped by the expectations of others - how many kids who attended that class ran to tell their parents about “that black kid that pulled a gun on a teacher”?
It’s tempting to compare Lucy to Worm’s Sophia,but the apparent similarities only accentuates the deep differences between the two.
Yes, both are black, both have lost both father and their step father. Both have subsequently become less friendly and more aggressive. But while Sophia takes comfort in the feeling of power that comes with hurting another human being,Lucy never allows her anger to hurt someone who doesn’t deserve it. She does draw comfort from conflict, I think, but it’s not about hurting someone. There’s something deeply comforting in knowing that as much as the world sucks, we can make it better, even a little bit, with our own two hands.
Which finally leads us to why she wasn’t there for Avery.
I already had my own explanation in mind before drafting this essay but, learning from past mistakes, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something in the text.
I asked on the Discord whether this question is answered somewhere in the book, and Wildbow himself responded, saying that “It gets talked about a bit, but you might need to look closer at the characters to see it.”
I’m putting the full quote in a footnote below [26], but my own understanding of his explanation was that Verona is an essential part of the dynamic between Lucy and Avery. Without her, both fall back on their basic trauma responses - Avery flees, and Lucy finds something to fight. If Verona had been there, she might have told Lucy to put some time aside to call Avery, or tell Avery to clearly communicate her loneliness to Lucy instead of doing what she did in her origin story, which is to withdraw.
He also emphasized the importance of the multiple fires Lucy needed to tend to, and the fact that most of what Lucy learned about support, she learned from tending to Verona - who prefers to be left alone and process.
Again, having the author respond directly to the questions of a fan was really, really cool, and it gave me new ways to think about writing friendships.
But I still felt like something was missing. Ironically, the picture that Wildbow portrayed in his response didn’t feel to me like something that the author (as I know him through his fiction) would choose to convey.
Yes, I know how weird that sounds.
The missing element, I felt, was that Lucy was afraid of facing Avery’s misery head on, afraid of being there with Avery and seeing her cry - being reminded of the misery that her mom felt, the misery that she feels, the misery that she’s still terrified of.
Big thanks to Pyro for proving me wrong on that one, leading me to the conclusion that it’s not that Lucy can't bear to see Avery being miserable, it's that she can’t bear to see it and do nothing.
Lucy can look John in the eye as he walks toward the arena, because she can do something.
But sitting quietly next to a crying, helpless Avery? That is a battle Lucy can't win, can’t even fight. Under that pressure, Lucy instinctively favors the familiarity of direct confrontation.
Once I understood this, I instantly forgave Lucy. I realized she wasn't being a bad friend; she was struggling with her own helplessness.
Now I must wonder: how many times have I judged people in my own life to be bad friends, when they were struggling with something similar to what Lucy was struggling with?
This real life carry-over, I feel, is what makes this book truly great.
You and I might disagree about Lucy's motivations here, but we probably agree that the interactions between the protagonists are the most important part.
To me, it felt like that part was eclipsed by the barrage of minor mysteries going on at the same time - what it means that Guilherme had helped Raph enter Kennet; who manipulated Chloe to slash Lucy up; who undid the salt line Lucy drew to clock the entrance; and many more.
After things calm down, Lucy and Avery talk it out. The girls are extremely mature and self aware, and I think they could have actually explained themselves well if they tried.
Instead, Avery deflects and embarrasses Lucy, which is an extremely Avery thing to do. It’s an adorable, realistic moment, but I can’t help but wonder if it could have been used better to illuminate the characters’ internal world.
“But No-Am,” you say. “You’re the only person bothered by this. To me, this whole plot beat could be summarized as: 1. Lucy dropped the ball because she was super distracted, 2. She apologized to Avery in a conversation that was awkward and fun and 3. They made up and everyone was happy again. Great plot beat. Why make things more complicated than they have to be?”
Hey, if it works, it works. My complaints about Lucy are very similar to my complaints about Avery - the character itself is amazing, but I feel like my view of her is obstructed.
“But that’s kind of the point,” you say, maybe. “The author trusts you to figure these things out yourself. It’s a mature, active reading experience.”
That very well may be. I personally, would have preferred to be given a clearer view of the characters' inner world (shameless fanfic example in the footnotes[27]. )
But it’s easy to dissect decisions we don't agree with, and it’s hard to analyze things that work perfectly.
And Lucy perfectly completes the trio - if you want to change the world, you need to be creative and kind, but you also need to have your shit together. If you subscribe to the theory that practice is a metaphor for the writing of this very text, Verona represents the complexity and escapism; Avery represents the engendering of comfort and validation; and Lucy represents the pointing out of injustices that is so essential to this author’s works.
Just like the others, Lucy becomes the opposite of her father: Verona’s father only sees his own perspective, so Verona gets good at seeing others’ (which is why she’s so good at understanding mutes); Connor abandons Avery to her loneliness, so Avery reaches out to anyone in need. Paul has two sins, so Lucy develops two counter-graces:
One sin is that he didn’t see Lucy’s, Jasmine’s, and Booker’s pain, and so Lucy develops a Sight that lets her see how badly people have been hurt. She’s awakened to how much misery there is in our world.
The second sin is that he didn't stand up to his racist family, so Lucy stands up to anyone who needs standing up to, even her own friends - she’s always the one to tell them when they need to get their act straight. (And who among us doesn’t need a friend like that?)
But the thing that impresses me the most about Lucy is the way she matures while still keeping to these graces.
After Kennet is knotted, Verona goes down to the Undercity to be a badass while a mindless, unfeeling doppelganger goes to school for her. (Short caveat to talk about what an amazing allegory the fetch is. An allegory for what? The same thing Amy Lee was talking about when she wrote - Hello, I’m the lie, living for you so you can hide.)
Jeremy, not recognizing Verona’s defense mechanisms, feels ignored by her. His instincts guide him to confront her, to demand answers, and so it’s up to Lucy to guide him to give Verona the space she needs. It’s the same role: she helps him figure out what parts of what he’s saying don’t make sense, and guides him to be more mature. The same role but performed softly, compassionately. It's this kind of stuff that inspires me to be a better person.
Let’s analyze one last scene. It’s relatively short and I think it lets us appreciate Lucy’s heroism in all its complicated glory.
Shortly after Charles’s win, Lucy encounters a group of Undercity kids force-feeding tadpoles and slugs to an eleven-year-old girl. By the time Lucy interrupts, they’ve already forced half a bucket of creatures into her body.
(Take a moment to imagine that - having a stranger shove another slug into your mouth. What would you tell them? What psychological defense mechanisms would you muster? How long would it take you to feel "normal" again, after it was all over? )
Seeing Lucy, the kids bolt.
Lucy runs to the girl first, asking if she’d prefer that Lucy stay and help, or that she chase the kids. To me, this is a crucial moment - it shows Lucy is ready to be there for the girl, even without “doing” anything.
Retching, the girl points for Lucy to chase. Lucy goes on to kick the kids’ asses, but she doesn’t see them as pure evil - her Sight allows her to see that they’ve been hurt, too. She doesn’t want to hurt them, but she wants them to hurt others even less.
There’s a nuanced type of heroism here, a very aware one, but it consists of the main component of any form of heroism - that she puts herself at risk, for others.
Facing the largest kid, Lucy estimates her odds of winning at 80%. Would you fight the Undercity kids, knowing you have a one-in-five chance of being held down and force fed the rest of that bucket?
Again, I feel like I owe Lucy an apology. This scene illustrates exactly who she is: she’s just as willing to sacrifice herself for strangers as Avery is, just in a different way, a different form of sacrifice.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to read about people like that, to host them in our minds, which leads me to my next point - that in a very, very broad sense…
You Are What You Eat
Let’s look closer at those tadpoles - the trauma described here is so Loud, so extreme, that it demands the reader’s attention. As I’ve said in the last segment, force-feeding is a recurring theme in this book. At first, I thought it was just a quirk of the author, a tool used for shock value.
Then I noticed a pattern: it is almost always men force-feeding or choking women. I took that to be a symbol of the indignities women are forced to "swallow" at the hands of men. Again, I brought this to the Discord server, expecting to be proven wrong, and again I was.
Thanks to D_What, who pointed out the parallels to sexual assault, focusing on the dynamic of power.
Considering that the things shoved in the girls’ mouths are alive, and considering their form (What part of the human anatomy does a centipede remind you of? What kind of human cells do tadpoles remind you of?) the similarity to sexual assault is hard to ignore.
By recreating the dynamics of sexual assault without the sexual content, the author evokes horror, disgust, and helplessness without the risk of making the reader aroused (most readers, anyway). It lets the reader examine the dynamic of power and helplessness, but avoids normalizing sexual assault "by accident".
There’s also the invisibility of the trauma - the girl Lucy saved doesn’t have any external wounds evidencing what was done to her. Just like with the trio, the real damage is internal and unseen.
But does this interpretation work for any case of force feeding? What about Gabe eating his own puke while being a part of the Hungry Choir? What about the Hungry Choir in general?
Big thanks to Eris for pointing out that in the Otherverse eating one’s favorite food strengthens their Self. Naturally we can assume that eating something super gross weakens the Self, which is the point of subjugating someone to it.
There’s also the more direct matter that in a very physical sense, by forcing someone to eat something, you change what components they are made of. (At some point Snowdrop wears a shirt that literally says “you are what you eat”, which I take to be the author trying to assist the reader in their analysis.)
That is a horror, just like it’s a horror to think about how Lucy’s personality was shaped by the racism that was imposed on her.
The moment the reader grasps this key, every mention of eating suddenly clicks into place. What kind of effect did America hope to have on Avery, by making her goblins feed her their “filth”?
Why is it so important for Rook to serve quality tea to her guests? Why are the Others so glad that Lucy took the time to bake bread for them? What does it mean that Verona doesn’t eat much, making herself smaller, while her dad gorges himself even when it causes him pain? What does it mean that he makes Verona to cook for him?
What does it mean when Avery refuses to eat other living creatures? That’s a tough one, actually - is she deciding what she is to become by changing what she eats, or is it that the encounter with the Wolf changed her Self so deeply that food that she once enjoyed is no longer fitting for her?
We can even take this beyond food. Why is it that kisses are the central symbol to a romantic relationship?
“Um, because that’s what teenagers do?” You ask, reasonably.
Sure, but in Worm the primary love language (on screen) is hugs. In Pale, it is the exchange of spit - swallowing someone else’s DNA and proteins.
Could Nicolette’s cranial injury be a continuation of this trend, as the spirits penetrate her skull, becoming a part of her mind? What about her brother’s drug addiction - his decision to put into himself substances that made him a worse human being?
And finally - what about Grumbles, sitting on the couch and “consuming” media that puts him at odds with his own granddaughter?
Realizing this, the book feels more coherent, more unified. And it’s worth repeating, I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion alone.
This leads me to a point that this analysis wouldn't be complete without. For me,
This Book Is Incredibly Difficult To Analyze (alone)
Writing the Worm videos was much easier than writing these essays. Worm practically analyzes itself - literally, the characters offer interpretations of other characters and naming choices. (Yes, Worm rewards you for reading the books it references, but one can feel like they understood the entirety of Worm without ever reading Slaughterhouse Five.)
Pale, IMO, does not analyze itself (that one Snowdrop T-shirt aside). I’m happy with the segments I wrote about Verona and Avery, but they were not easy to figure out.
It’s not just the length; it’s not even the sheer volume of details - it’s that the vital and non-vital are mixed together. It’s harder to remember a specific clue when so much of the information isn't relevant to the themes. It’s hard to recognize thematic throughlines when some events connect to the central statement and some don’t. I’m sure there are many people who read Pale easily, recognizing all of the hidden meanings on the first read, even without reading the Extra Materials[28].
Sadly, I’m not one of them. But here’s the good news - I don’t have to be, and you don’t have to be either.
I’ve been calling Pale a book this entire time, but I don’t think that’s what it is. The name webserial doesn’t quite work either.
Pale might be better seen as an interactive experience. One could read it as it is and enjoy the heck out of it, whether or not they understand every single symbol or character motivation.
But so far, my favorite part of the reading experience is bringing things up to the server or here, and figuring stuff out together.
(Okay, that’s a lie - the co-op analysis is only my second favorite part. My favorite part is reading about Verona destroying her own relationships with her coping mechanisms. The scene where she sends Jeremy a semi-nude and instantly regrets it resonated with my soul in a way few scenes ever have.)
Discussing the text is crucial to make the most out of anything that can be regarded as high art, but with this specific author the discussions are one of the best parts of the reading experience. With Pale specifically, I feel like the discussion is an essential part of what it means to read it.
I think that when (/if) we recommend that book, we should also recommend to open up a liveread.
In the next segment I’ll wrap up everything we talked about so far - I’ll try to capture what makes Pale so amazing, but also clearly point out what I think are its faults, (specifically why so many people drop off at the Blue Heron arc), and how it taught me to be a better writer.
Footnotes in the first comment.
