Q and James stick around for the police and paramedics to come and look at the dead body they found.

Three paramedics crouched around him, two men and a woman The woman was disarmingly, almost inappropriately pretty – she looked out of place in that grim scene, miscast.

Inappropriate.

Inappropriate.

Also the use of the word ‘miscast’ bothers me in ways I can’t really pin down yet. Maybe because it just draws my attention to the Hollywood quality of “all the (both the) ladies are hot, while the dudes get far more neutral descriptions, if any at all.”

Q and James sit around in shock, making bad jokes and repeating each other, as one does when not functioning at full capacity. The Miscast Paramedic, though, has less of an excuse as she comes over to be extraordinarily inappropriate, cheerfully announcing that the man is dead and then acting confused over why the two boys would feel bad about that.

Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in some ways – you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability.

I….hate your guts.

Also, the unpretty women don’t want you either, so suck on that.

Also Pale = Pretty Count: 2

Okay so let’s talk a second about character vs book, because I know that’s a conversation that happens around this book. The idea that Q is supposed to be a misogynist and that’s not the same as being misogynistic. I don’t really have much to say about it in this instance, because it’s still early in the book and there’s no time for him to change or suffer consequences. And something like this would be an okay example of that, except for two things

1) It was 100% pure authorial decision to only have one female paramedic, among two males, one dead male interviewer, and two male main characters. (Again, it’s early, but still.) And it was 100% authorial decision to make her ‘hot’ and linger on that fact.

2) It’s not like this thought process is unknown to women, so having to read it at all isn’t comfortable. I’m not learning anything here, I’m just hating the main character and then also stuck with said main character for the rest of my reading time. There’d better be a hell of payoff if I’m going to have to stick with a guy that I hate who is likely going to make me hate him even more, and if the payoff is far down the line, I’m not going to get that far. (Well, I am, because this blog. It might take another 20 months, but still.)

So, yeah, that’s the thing with stuff like this. The narration has options when it comes to either leaning into the character’s attitude, or causing friction for him throughout the whole narrative.

Miscast Paramedic continues to be weird, but Q goes even harder on the ‘upitty woman’ thoughs and gets snarky at her. Eventually he tries to leave, but Miscast Paramedic says that the dead man left files for both of them and tries to hand them out. Not her job, but at this point, fairly obvious she’s not an actual paramedic. Q takes the envelope with his name on it, but James doesn’t, and they fight about that before leaving the house and parting ways.

Q once again thinks about Julia and how much he wants to date her, and I’m wondering how often this is going to come up. There’s only so many times I can write “this dude’s thought process is bad and I don’t like him” before that gets far too repetitive.

He idly opens the folder as he walks, expecting to find his personal records that the interview guy must have had, but instead he finds a notebook with the manuscript for the sixth, previously unknown Fillory book. (Titled, unsurprisingly, The Magicians.) He opens the notebook and a piece of paper flies out of it, getting blown by the wind into a nearby community garden.

Do you know w hat a community garden is? Oh don’t worry. The book has you covered with a page and a half of backstory about the legal standing of this random plot of land and the process of turning it into garden. Just in case. So useful and not at all a weird waste of a page.

Q goes chasing after the page, but the wind keeps sucking it further and further back into the garden, and he’s so focused on chasing that he doesn’t realize that the dormant winter veggie plants are getting thicker and decidedly less garden-y, until eventually he comes out of a thicket onto a huge lawn, where it’s now summer instead of winter.

Off in the distance is a large stone house, with various additions and big clock tower in a different style. He looks behind him and just sees a forest instead of the garden he came through. Nearby is a random teenager smoking a cigarette, randomly. Q asks if he’s in Fillory, and the teen says nope, this us upstate New York.