In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Eleven

Hello and happy holidays! Regardless of your faith, I hope this season has brought you joy and tasty food. And because it’ll be January 11th before I write something original on this website again, happy New Year as well! Never thought I’d see the day, especially considering the doctor told me I didn’t have 20-20 vision!

…Jerry, play the laugh track.

Anyways, to get back on track, let’s talk about the chapter. Life hasn’t exactly been good to Lior recently, but things aren’t going to get much better either. He gets out of the burning studio—only to be immediately caught by Asa’s cronies. Like a reasonable fellow, he legs it and goes for the city gates.

(By the way, I forgot to mention it last time, but “Asa” means “healer” in Hebrew".)

He’s able to evade the zealots fairly easily and runs into the woods. I kind of wish I painted the city’s layout a bit better before this scene so it didn’t just feel like the forest appeared because I needed it to, though I suppose the story’s setting makes it understandable that there would still be untamed forestland near civilization. Oh well—lesson learned, I’ll do better next time.

And once the zealots give up the pursuit, our lovable sculptor realizes how absolutely short-sighted his plan was.

A good bit of this chapter was inspired by the events of Into the Wild—mostly in the concept of a modern human trying to survive in the wilds, but also somewhat in someone pursuing their own ideology and suffering for it. While Lior’s goals are very different from Mr. McCandless’, I enjoyed the sense of a person being so fixated on their views that it makes their life more difficult. Noble in some sense, but ultimately foolish.

Lior starts off by carrying out techniques that align with my own knowledge of wilderness survival—meaning jack shit. I figured first thing he’d want to do is get some water and cover his wounds, with food following soon after. His plan was to find a road, but as he has little knowledge of the surrounding geography and no real way of determining his direction, he’s forced to rely on intuition and guesswork—which pays off as well as you’d expect.

I’d also like to point out Lior’s incredible luck in starting a fire. Anyone who’s ever made a campfire (or read a Wikipedia article) will tell you that you can’t just chip at rocks to make sparks—you need flint. Lior doesn’t know this, and I intentionally kept it that way to subtly allude that his Goddess hasn’t forsaken him as he was fortunate enough to just happen upon a flint.

Though I’m pretty sure someone out there will read that part and think, “Dumbass writer! Ya can’t just bang a chisel on any ol’ stone an’ get a fire! What a hack!” If that was you, please tweet me @varnicrast.

But—moving on—once he’s settled in for the night, Lior talks with Tornara once again.

Any story that has faith as a major component wouldn’t be complete if the believer did not question their conviction at some point. It’s a tale as old as time, made famous through the Bible and other religious texts. As very few of us can go full Abraham and agree to gut our kid in the name of the Lord, it provides an interesting moment for your character to view their actions from another angle and help illustrate their personality in a fresh way for the reader.

In Lior’s case, he questions the deaths of Malka and Chen, accusing Tornara of killing them as punishment for his hubris. He falls into a rage at her inaction and seeming frigidity, causing him to temporarily ignore his affection and even deny her existence.

Yes, for that one scene, our protagonist realizes himself for the baffling man he is. And in that way, he becomes even more foolish.

Yet he still does not abandon Tornara.

I also like to interpret this section as an example of one-sided love, mainly in the form of developing feelings for someone not in a position to return them. It can be an acquaintance who simply isn’t attracted to you, a celebrity who is far out of your league, or even a fictional character—the point is that your love will not be reciprocated no matter how much you wish it so.

Tornara is a goddess, and gods are famous for keeping their thoughts and influence as subtle as possible—at least outside of the Greek pantheon perhaps. She cannot descend from on high to let Lior know that she didn’t kill his friends or that she’s sorry they died. She can’t comfort him with her embrace or grant him the tools to save him from his predicament.

And even though Lior knows this, he experiences the natural evolution of his frustrations at not having his feelings returned: a forfeiture of his love.

Long-term romance is only possible with input from both ends. You tell your wife you love her, she says it back, kissy-kissy boo-boo. When you pour your heart into loving someone who does not reply in kind, it manifests as something closer to worship than affection, making it more susceptible to doubt. And once the serpent of insecurity has poisoned you, it is difficult to maintain a one-sided love as you can’t speak with your partner and resolve that suspicion.

Thus typically leading to one of two results: you give up on the ‘relationship’ and move on, or you find the strength to trust in your love, malformed as it is.

I wonder if any of you have experienced such a feeling, and how you handled any misgivings. Or do you perhaps see such feelings as deviant, having never considered loving something that won’t return your feelings?

Either way, I hope seeing my little fool question his love has entertained you.

Going back to the chapter, Lior then spends a few more days wandering the forest. He won’t talk to Tornara and he ends up eating some bad nuts. My internal thought here is that he ate pistachios only because I got diarrhea from those once, though I have no idea if they would grow in such a climate.

After crawling into a rotten tree in a bid for shelter, Lior realizes he might actually fucking die after taking a mace to the skull, getting food poisoning, and sitting in a cold, moldy stump. As such, he decides to break his silence and reconcile with Tornara.

So, like all good believers, he begs his god for forgiveness and deliverance, apologizing for his humanity and putting the burden of his safety on her.

And by some miracle, he lives to see the next day.

Of course, he doesn’t get much farther than that. Vacuous and weak, he moves forward without a thought. It’s a bit of fun cliche to have a paragraph consisting of just one line repeated to a large amount, so I decided to include one as well. Lior just keeps walking—at least until he trips.

I very much enjoyed writing out those last few paragraphs. Putting a focus on Lior’s conundrum—how his faith won’t let him leave the painting behind but his body is too weakened to move forward while carrying it—and how it forces him to realize his inability was a sadistic joy. Though he was able to restore his love for Tornara, it became his undoing.

And yet—despite understanding how much of a failure he ultimately was—Lior was able to quietly accept his death.

Curious.

And thus the chapter ends. I didn’t have as much anecdotal shit to include this week, but after the massive dumps I’ve been dropping recently, I’ll take this review as a nice change of pace. It’s another chapter that I feel is better left to your personal interpretation so I hope you’ll consider letting me know how you felt about it.

Until then, I apologize for leaving things on a cliffhanger. Please look forward to next week’s chapter.

Welp, that’s all for now. Take care, and try not to drink too much, okay?

See you next year, darling.