Little Mushroom: Chapters 7 - 9 (EN) or 14 - 20 (CH)

[x_los]

Welcome to Week 3's "Little Mushroom" (小蘑菇) discussion for English chapters 7 - 9 of Book 1 and Chinese chapters 14 - 20 (inclusive). This spreadsheet contains the schedule and concordances of the chapter endings across the Chinese and English versions. There's an associated Discord server (ask superborb for an invite if you'd like one), and we'll be running comment posts here.

This discussion will wrap up and next week's will begin on May 1st.

Chinese text
English text

SPOILER POLICY: I personally don't give a fuck or even like to give unearned credence to the concept, so since I'm writing the post, anything's fair game.

Comments

Chapter 7

[x_los]

- A guy named Lu Feng has green eyes? If you say so.

- I don’t like that Doussay herself commissioned the robot. I thought it was affecting that she approached the arbiter and chose to die to protect others. This rationale feels cheaper, more like romance novel logic: all characters' decisions are governed by their affections, and the story has little interest in broader motivations.

- How bs is this polar radiation explanation?

- Why is "boom" in quotes?

Re: Chapter 7

[superborb]

Huh, I thought it was heavily implied when she commissioned it (for a "friend").

The science thus far is mostly word salad.

I think the boom is a grammatical holdover from Chinese, where it is indicated with quotes.

Re: Chapter 7

[x_los]

Oh I totally assumed ‘friend’ was Some Client because she was the woman you’d go to to broker such a deal, if talking to this guy directly yourself looked too suspect or you didn’t know who to go to but you knew her because she’s public facing.

Chapter 8

[x_los]

“Thank you for your hard work.”

They keep telling one another this corporate email sign-off aloud, it's a bit weird.

Chapter 9

[x_los]

“There's a saying," Poet said, "that the initial generations of Arbiters and the Trial Court did not belong to the military but were subordinate institutions of the Lighthouse instead.”

That’s not really what 'a saying' means.

Re: Chapter 9

[superborb]

They've chosen the wrong meaning to translate to -- the term means both 'a way of saying sth' and also 'a version of a story'.

Re: Chapter 9

[x_los]

Yeah, and even a way of saying something isn’t the same as A Saying.