"Speaking of livers," the Unicorn said. "Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
🎨 John William Waterhouse

#BookWormSat #NationalReadingMonth #Literature #Fiction #Fantasy #PeterSBeagle #LastUnicorn

There's a fair amount of media about trans people, some by trans folks, some by cis folks. There's a fair amount of media about gender bending, for that matter. And media by trans folks (egg or hatched) that isn't about trans folks but has vibes.

Still, RoboCop and The Last Unicorn are two pieces of media not particularly by, for, or about trans folks, that merit IMO a content warning for gender dysphoria.

In RoboCop, Murphy is stripped of his personhood. His memories of his wife and child are deleted, his memories of having a selfhood are deleted. He has to investigate who he was from the evidence of someone who recognized his body language, and someone who had murdered him. When he learns who he had been, and what had been taken away, the executive who he is trying to arrest deactivates parts of him and tells him he's a faulty product, not a real cop. His colleagues are split on the matter, but many of them follow the order to execute "it," not him but it. His triumph at the end of the film is reclaiming the name of a person he has no real memory of being, because those memories became someone else's property and were destroyed, but a man nevertheless.
Yes he's a cop, this is a common problem in cyberpunk. I have other thoughts about that, and about the interesting absurdities generated by OCP running the cop shops like McDonaldses, and (more germane to this subject) "what your boss really means when he says he wants you to bring your authentic self to work today." Morton claimed ownership of all that Murphy had been. He discards precious memories with the same reckless abandon as he does a functioning arm. That gun twirl? That makes it through the process, a skill learned to impress a child and on a personal whim, a charming trait that's good for marketing. (And, ultimately, the RoboCop initiative could only be a marketing device, a mascot. It can't possibly be the product OCP is really going for, better represented by the ED-209, with its mass producibility, larger margin, easier parts to source and produce, and ability to be sold to other markets.) If you go to work, and your boss says to bring your authentic self to work today, that means they want those traits that work for the company. Your boss doesn't want all those inconvenient things that make us people, and doesn't want to train you to seem warm and human. Training takes time and money, after all.

Amalthea is in a rather different situation, with rather different consequences. She isn't human, but is turned human by a spell intended to keep her safe from something that is going after unicorns. Her body language is… different. Interestingly, I think one can even see her briefly walking on her toes. When she turns to threaten someone, she does so as if she still had a horn. However, over the course of the story, she is succumbing to the spell and becoming more and more human, and less and less what she had been, which (among other things) is placing a rather soft but dire time limit on how long they have to do what they've come to do. In this case, becoming the mask as a result of that curse has longterm consequences, and there is, for some, no happy ending. (In no small part because nothing ever truly ends, as both this film -- and the book it's adapted from -- is not uniquely quick to point out.) In regards to the experience of an immortal unicorn in a human body, when the notion is first broached in the novel, she says, “The magician did him no service, but great ill… how terrible it would be if all my people had been turned human by well-meaning wizards—exiled, trapped in burning houses. I would sooner find that the Red Bull had killed them all.”

Bee Tee Double-U, Beagle is a peculiarly wonderful person. Shapeshiftersvt@tumblr said,
"I think Peter Beagle might have been the first person to imply to me that my transition is a gift to others. That living my life fully and honestly is a way of gifting others with something precious and good, something that they can appreciate and remember for decades later."
And, interestingly but fairly unrelatedly, RoboCop was written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. Edward Neumeier's offspring is a Shaun Neumeier, a nonbinary autism rights activist. I just find that interesting.

Two rather different problems, that would cause surely two different kinds of pain to those of us who know what it is to live in a body that is not our own.

"Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
🎨 Aubrey Beardsley

#BookologyThursday #Mythology #Folklore #Book #Fiction #Literature #Fantasy #PeterSBeagle #LastUnicorn

"I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I'm full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep [or] die. I'm not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

#BookologyThursday #FolkloreThursday #Book #Literature #Fantasy #PeterSBeagle #LastUnicorn #Unicorn

Oh gosh, this edition of "The Last Unicorn" is beautiful. When I think about the money I could drop at Folio Society if the budget allowed, it's almost embarrassing. Gimme all the gorgeous books!

https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/the-last-unicorn-limited-edition

#Books #Bibliophile #PeterSBeagle #Fantasy

"Where have you been?" Molly cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" ...

"I am here now," [the unicorn] said at last.

Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand, she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?" The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

#BookologyThursday #Book #Literature #Fantasy #PeterSBeagle #LastUnicorn #Unicorn

"Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
🎨 Germán Hernández Amores

#BookWormSat #PeterSBeagle #LastUnicorn #Book #Literature #FantasyLiterature #FantasyFiction #Fantasy

"Take me with you. I might be useful. I know the way into Haggard's country.... No wanderer was ever the worse for a wizard's company, even a unicorn.... Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

#BookologyThursday #BookChatWeekly #31DaysofHaunting #Literature #Fantasy #Mythology #Folklore #LastUnicorn #PeterSBeagle #Unicorn