Blood Sister: subversively saccharine

The alibi in a single adverb — posed, like the whole reading, as Hal's guess. In Hal's imagining of it, JOI wants the saccharine montage — the earnest getting-to-know-you sequence, the sunlit conversion-climax — and can only permit himself to make it by filing it under "subversively" saccharine, i.e., ironic. The adverb is the permission slip: it lets him feel the sentiment while disowning it as parody, have the earnest thing while claiming to mock it. "Subversively saccharine" is the exact architecture of the whole aesthetic the anthology tracks — sincerity smuggled in under an ironic alibi, feeling that dares not present itself as feeling. It is 132's "basically goo" from the maker's side: Hal calls what he loves goo and imagines his father making what he means and calling it subversion.