nostalgebraist:

Okay, I’m going to explain an injoke here, which may make it unfunny, but I feel like it needs to be shared with people who aren’t Esther or my friend C

So, you may remember that a while back I got into reading about Rescue Rangers fandom for some reason.  One of the most (in)famous Rescue Rangers fanfics is something called “Gadget in Chains,” which is like 1000 pages long and consists of endless sympathy porn / softcore actual-porn about a mouse from the TV show going to prison and being subjected to various misfortunes.  (I have not read more than 10 pages or so of it, but I have read this hilarious review.)

And of course, when I learned about this fic I inevitably put it on my Kindle, because the idea of having a 1000-page Rescue Rangers fanfic on your Kindle right next to Dostoevsky and stuff is too good to pass up

So then I was at a party with my friend C (previously mentioned in this space as the author of that article about winning an M:TG tournament on shrooms).  C doesn’t have a Kindle.  I was showing him my Kindle, and talking about how weird it was that I could just put all this heterogenous stuff on it, and it would render it all in the same font and generally make it all look identical.  “For instance, I have a 1000-page Rescue Rangers fanfic on here,” I said.  I opened up “Gadget in Chains.”  C grabbed the Kindle and flipped to a random page somewhere in the middle, then began to read out loud.  The first thing he read was:

The old hag said and then gestured to the mole beside her. “This is Molly Velvet. Don’t mind her ferocious expression – the Rescue Rangers are always harassing her nephew just because he works at a casino that’s owned by a cat they don’t like. She’ll warm up to you  as soon as she’s sure you’re one of us.”

Re-read the second line of dialogue there.  It’s incredible.  So much exposition packed into such a little space, and it’s all so weird.  This woman has a permanently “ferocious” expression just because of the perils of her nephew?  Her nephew is getting repeatedly (”always”!) harassed by the supposedly-heroic Rescue Rangers?  Just because they don’t like … his boss?

C and I fixated on this sentence for the rest of the evening.  Especially C.  He quoted it incessantly, until the very obnoxiousness of the quoting became a joke in itself.  He advised party-goers not to mind the ferocious expressions of other party-goers; any talk of employment circled back inevitably to casinos owned by disliked cats.  He applied his English degree to the sentence’s quick delivery of narrative information; he envisioned a thesis reading it through a number of lenses (Marxist: everything bad here is ultimately the fault of a bad capital owner; Feminist: Molly Velvet is being spoken for, having her anger excused … )

Someone arrived at the party late.  “How’s C?”, he asked.  “He keeps talking about this casino?  Owned by a cat?  I dunno, man,” someone said.

When I left the party, C was drunk, literally crawling along the floor, being videotaped for posterity on someone’s cell phone, proclaiming in drunken spurts of speech: “always harassing her nephew … just because he works at a casino … ”

The sentence is now burned into my brain.  When someone makes a nasty facial expression, I tell myself not to mind it.  The sight of a chipmunk brings up visions of wrongly harassed nephews.  I cannot escape.  (But don’t mind my ferocious expression!  The Rescue Rangers are always harassing my nephew … )