NOTE: Full spoilers for the book contained below.
Jenny was startled, like she wasn’t expecting questions. “Oh. Well, just a little over a year ago, President Patrick Kennedy tore down that old statue of Fermin Delton to make way for one of his late daughter, Kelly.”
Although I feel that I conceived this story independently of most actual world events, the protests and riots and cultural uproar of 2020 worked their way into its themes almost without me really trying.
There are different opinions on the topic. I hope not to prescribe any specific courses of action through my writing, either consciously or subconsciously. That said, I certainly and unashamedly take the position that a disdain for and excessive judgment of history is not healthy for society. To me, this is rather self-evident, and this perspective is woven into the thematic fabric of Cultivation. However, I also tried hard to make a story entertaining enough that even those who may not entirely agree with my perspective can find something to enjoy and not feel targeted.
Leonard was strange. He’d be totally alright, like a machine, for weeks on end, dealing with terrible things at the hospital day in and day out, and then suddenly some small thing would bring him crashing down.
I feel that on a fundamental level I understand and empathize with Leonard’s behavior. It’s a very mannish inclination, I think; pushing the painful and confusing things away as long as you can until the dam finally breaks and you have to face it all in one overwhelming wave. This all started for Leonard after his first wife died under such avoidable and tragic circumstances.
Essie understands better than Leo does how the process works and how to get him to snap out of it. But I don’t think she quite empathizes with him–or at least, not as much as she will by the end of the novel.
The sisters sat across from each other at a square table amid what must have been a couple hundred students eating and noising about. Maxine no longer sported her old shoulder blade-length light brown hair…
I can’t personally relate to the experience of being long estranged from a family member. A blessing in my real life, but a weakness for my writing. I hope I didn’t miss anything terribly crucial to such an interaction. Had I the time and resources I probably would have run the Julia and Maxine scenes by some people with real-world experience in that relationship and taken some of their feedback.
I think that the fact that there would have been a period of time of adjustment between them at the beginning, and the fact that Maxine was gone for the last two years, means Maxine and Julia never really got super close. They became friendly enough with each other, but not close emotionally. Hopefully that is relatively believable and written effectively enough.
I don’t believe I mentioned this before: in the first draft of the story, Maxine and Julia were halfsiblings, not stepsiblings. It got changed because the idea that the death of Becky happened that long ago made it really tough to believe it would still be affecting Leonard or Maxine. Some of the flavor of that original conception of the sisters’ relationship was probably never quite eradicated.
Julia winced. She couldn’t help but remember the last time she’d gone after someone she was attracted to. How she’d been so blinded by the excitement of it all. How she hadn’t thought much of it when he asked her… Ugh. And how she had so stupidly agreed to it.
Why did I choose to have Julia not be sexually innocent? Normally I wouldn’t consider a character’s sexual history relevant to the story. But I made an exception here.
I couldn’t shake the feeling in writing Julia’s character that over the course of her teenage years she had became less and less tied to her parents’ moral compass and society’s ideals for behavior. In wanting acceptance and companionship so badly, she would often be trusting and therefore was a bit easy to manipulate. She made a choice just once to engage in sexual activity when pressured by a boy she liked, Teddy. Of course, Teddy was more interested in sex than he was in her; she was used. This whole scenario was inserted into the plot because it is thematically linked to FDU’s attempted manipulation of Julia. They want to fool her into doing whatever they want to her–affecting her against her will.
The fact that she “fell for it” with Teddy should make the reader worried that she might make the same mistake again. And yet the fact that she regrets what she did and realizes she was impulsive and foolish makes us feel that perhaps there’s a chance for her now.
Of course, her falling for Gill so quickly and easily tips the scales closer to worry.
I think Julia is somewhere in between merely wishing she was just more judicious in her decision making, and feeling that she ought to have kept to her parents’ principles. She certainly feels guilty. But it all rolls into her general discomfort with change more so than a feeling that she should have heeded her parents’ ideals.
She [Dennie Delton] smirked, and then she leaned forward from the wall, standing solidly on her two feet. When she spoke, her tone was low and plain. “Fermin Delton killed a good number of people from the Mattaponi tribe in the late Indian wars. He kept his prisoners in here as a ransom against the tribe to keep them from attacking.”
There was a palpable pause. The awkwardness had not been staved off.
“That’s awful,” Essie said with a deep frown. The expression didn’t match her face.
Dennie shrugged. “That’s history for you. But we remember,” she said with a smile that suddenly showed teeth, many of which looking blackened or sallow, “how much he did for us. Without him, why, none of us would be here today.”
The people of FDU retain some of their monuments to people like Fermin Delton, who founded their town and paved the way for their livelihood but also committed terrible acts of evil. As stated/implied later on, this is merely a front, and Dennie is stationed here to interact with tourists and probably purposefully manipulate their emotions against Delton’s history. It’s all for Entropy.
The organization behind FDU does not view anybody from the past as redeemable. They pretend to honor them as a way to hide their true feelings from those who might object. Truthfully, they want everything but their own creeds and culture to be destroyed and forgotten. They claim their goal is to right the wrongs of the past and present, but in a wicked twist of irony, such an attitude constitutes imperialistic bigotry of the highest order.
That’s what Entropy is.
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