The first comparison between "normal toys" and the paper animals. Louhou is more like a tiger than this Obi-Wan is like Sir Alec

The action figures, which we think of as being fairly durable compared to paper in general, don't last near as long as Jack's origami animals

Stories like this just make the rest of the story even more heartbreaking-he and his mom really cared about these paper animals

Something I hadn't considered is that this isn't all that far off from how big cats sound in real life

Is this why Jack's mom makes him a tiger?

What's interesting here is Jack's father does the obvious wrong thing here-and this poor decision on how to deal with his son's insecurities compounds and he gangs up on his wife with Jack, allowing the acceleration of Jack and his Mother's relationship to deteriorate

This is so heartbreaking-Jack's mom and dad invite them in, serve them drinks and are extra accommodating and they act atrociously

Mark is such a little snot. Even if I saw moving trash as a kid, it would be the coolest thing in the world

I hate how perfectly this describes contempt

This detail is perfect-not only is the tiger, the narrator's favorite origami creation just his favorite, it is literally a gift made out of the ephemera we normally throw away after opening normal gifts

I love this sentence. Its factually correct but given the nuance that's introduced later in the story, it still feels a bit off-but at the core of the plot, it is one hundred percent true

Chiang not only describes the aliens well, but makes them just alien enough while not being distracting-after all, its their culture and their perception of time that are more interesting than their appearance.

This breaks apart from a lot of science fiction in a way I like a lot. Most works, naturally, focus on the author's home country in an oddly specific way. But with this, while the story takes place in America starring Americans, it hints at so many more universal stories

I like the way Chiang uses this convention to show the aliens talking, particularly since Louise doesn't understand them yet

This is the first time we see chemistry between them-and what's interesting is that Louise knows to highlight this micro-intereaction between herself and Gary because she knows their whole story, since it's not a normal detail many people would remember or pick up on in a professional setting like this

This is done later as well, but Chiang does it well here, where he makes the aliens highly alien (as not human at all) but still very comprehensible

This is an old trope in science fiction-usually it's just used to explain why the aliens all speak perfect American accented English in a movie or TV show but there have been other works entirely about this idea-its just not this novella that deals with this concept

This has to be a reference to the Alice in Wonderland story Alice through the Looking Glass, where Alice goes into a world literally on the other side of a mirror

I like how alien the heptopods are but they're still comprehensible-I can picture them in my mind. The idea of an intelligent species looking like this is still quite alien, which is the point I'm sure

Normally this would read as sarcastic (which I'm sure Louise's daughter saw this as sarcastic) but there's an extra layer here because on some level, Louise is almost telling the truth

This is repeated at the end of the novella, when Louise's daughter is born and it at the end, I comprehended how it felt to go through the motions of a normal life while knowing what happens in it all all points. And to me, its very poetically tragic