Eventful Times: Ask Me Anything

Well, it’s been All News in the old Casa McJuddMetz, and we’re sorely in need of some distraction.  Usually, I’d write some blog post to try to attract the Dance Of Intriguing Comments, but time’s been squeezed lately thanks to Rebecca’s latest medical upheavals.
(Interesting fact: We met with the Meyers for dinner after Rebecca’s latest MRI, and they never actually told us what Rebecca’s results were.  However, given that Eric and Kat had an appetite and were eating, we knew the news was not awful.  The overall arc of their daughter’s health can be plotted to a large extent by their caloric intake.)
(Why didn’t we ask, you might ask?  Because frankly, when someone’s struggling with a potentially fatal illness, one of the worst things you can do is to reduce their life to that illness.  There’s a tendency in people to think that it’s somehow disrespectful to discuss anything else but The Trauma, going, “Oh, I don’t want to complain about work when you have pancreatic cancer.”  No, seriously.  Complain.  Let your friends bathe in the trouble of your problems for a while, share what happinesses you have; give them a little oasis of normality when you can instead of reducing their lives to this one disease.  Last night was pretty much just a dinner out with the kids, and I for one was pretty happy about that.)
In any case, caught between the Scylla of Rebecca’s struggle and the Charybdis between things I cannot say yet, I’m gonna default to an old habit of mine:
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly. 
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful.  You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious.  Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability.  To answer your most burning question, I try to pull the lazy “Ask Me Anything” blog entry only once every three months to avoid blog-clog, and yes, I do Google to keep track of the last time I did this.

Mating Habits

When bees mate, several males fly after the queen.  They fuck her until their tiny bee-dicks drop off inside of her, and then they die.
Meanwhile, the queen flies off with eight or nine semen-pumping penises embedded in her hoo-hah, filling her up to lay thousands of eggs.

Bonobos hang upside down and fence with their penises.  Sometimes, to reconcile after a fight, they stand back-to-back and smoosh ballsacks.

Female giraffes in estrus pee in their suitors’ mouths.  The suitors swig the urine around like wine, determining if this is a fresh and fuckable beast, and if that works for them then they hump the shit out of her.

Male bowerbirds attract mates by obsessively making large art-like things out of colored pebbles and feathers and sticks, and go apeshit if you move a pebble.  The only time they move away from their hipster art project is to go knock over a couple of pebbles in their rivals’ etchings.

Bedbugs don’t have a vagina; instead, the males punch a hole straight through the carapace in their stomach to ejaculate directly into their lovers’ body cavity….
Okay, you’re probably getting a little sick of the animal kingdom here.  But my point is this:
Is being gay natural?
Is being polyamorous natural?
Who gives a flying whoopdoodle?
Frankly, the animal kingdom is full of freaky bugs doing freaky things, and I could give a crap if a bunch of penguins happen to share my bedbound tendencies.  The very point of being a human is that we get to do all sorts of things that animals don’t do – I know of no animals that start franchises, for example.   There are very few animals that direct films.  Only a precious handful of Golden Retrievers have built a spaceship to fly to the moon.
What matters most is, “Is this hurting anyone against their will?”  Which is why I’m down on, say, nonconsensual sex – which there is a lot of in the animal kingdom, by the way, and if Donald Duck were portrayed even slightly accurately he’d be a quacking rapist – or trying to have sex with living things that can’t say “yes” in a well-thought-out manner, such as drunk people or children or ducks.
I do not get the idea that if we can find evidence of this in nature, then it’s gotta be okay for us.  Nature doesn’t give a crap, guys.  Nature is where you run in the woods until you get weak enough that something eats you.  If anything, if we can find evidence that our freaky sex isn’t in nature, then maybe that’s better.
In the meantime, sure, there’s probably a gay cockatiel or a polyamorous woodlouse or a cross-dressing zebra out there.  That’s great. Don’t cite them as evidence, unless you feel like running out into the backyard to have a penis-war with your neighbor and then bump your girlfriend’s flank until she pees on you.  The main benefit of being a homo sapiens is that we occasionally get to short-circuit all of our hard-wired instincts and do something amazingly different.

Flashlight

The most merciful thing in the world, Lovecraft once said, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents.  As for me, I say we are looking into a great void, swinging the thin beam of a flashlight across the surface of something vast and unfathomable, a thing whose shape we cannot retain in our minds; it is too big.  It is too terrifying.  And were we somehow to contain the entirety of that thought within ourselves, some critical illusion we call humanity would shatter into pieces.
Like this five-year-old girl with brain cancer.

“I want to try your fruit punch,” Rebecca says, unapologetically curious as always.  She’s always had a taste for sweet things, chewing gumballs until her baby teeth started to turn clear.  And she’s always been direct, rarely rude, but punching a straight line to whatever she desires.  It’s part of her charm.
“Can’t have it, kid,” you say, sipping the spiked punch.  “This is a grown-up drink.”
And you realize: Rebecca might never have alcohol.  She may die before she gets old enough to sneak a drink in some teenaged party.  She may never be a teenager.  She may never be ten, she may never be six.
Her birthday is two months away.
This mouthful of rum is a locked door that she will never open, a single room in a vast mansion.  You go exploring, sweeping the flashlight across all of these other rooms full of dusty furniture with tarps thrown over them, waiting for her to find them.  She’ll never have a drink. She’ll never go to college.  She’ll never have a job.  She’ll never fall in love.
You realize that a child is not a child, but an arc soaring out into time and space, a potential to be fulfilled, and somewhere within her skull is an eyeball-sized mass that may grow to squeeze her brain until it literally forgets how to breathe.   Except this child is a child.  This child may only ever be a child, and then dissolve into a tangle of theories.  What would she have liked?  What would she have seen?
You look down at this beautiful wide-eyed girl, grinning like she has all the secrets in the world to tell you, and you can’t hold it all in your head.  She’s alive here, and over here she may not be.  You swing your flashlight between those two possibilities, trying to capture them both, but the beam is too narrow.  Alive.  Dead.  Alive.  Dead.
You hold her so hard, pressing her skin to yours, hoping to press her memory into your flesh forever.
But you can’t.
You know you can’t.

She’s wrestling with you, shoving a fuzzy stuffed octopus into your face, straddling your chest.  “I’ve won!” she cries, exultant in triumph.  “You are defeated!”
A girl like that can’t be sick.  She can’t.  Then the flashlight sweeps back in time to illuminate her mother’s words in the hospital:
Kids with brain tumors often look fine.  Right up until they aren’t.

We built those rooms for her.  We think they’re ready.
The flashlight sweeps across that door, and passes into the void.

You hide the octopus in a game of hide-and-seek.  You rest it on the water pipes hanging above the basement playroom, and after counting to twenty-eight – nobody’s quite sure why she stops there, but it makes sense to her – Rebecca comes looking for it.  “Is it in here?” she asks repeatedly, checking the cabinets, under the couch, behind the pillows.  You assure her it is, as she looks around, face scrunching up in confusion.
Eventually, she thinks to look up.  Her face is illuminated with a glorious learning, as she sees Mr. Octopus’s stuffed tentacles hanging down and learns a valuable lesson: things can be hidden above her.
But is it a valuable lesson if she’ll never put it to use?
Where will all of those teachings go, if she does?

Supporting a child with cancer is like being coal, crushed under a mountain of pressure.  You have nowhere to go.  You’re shoved against the hard edge of this little girl’s need, contorted into hideous shapes, conforming to the shape of necessity.
But what will happen to you once she vanishes, and there’s nothing left to hold you up?

There are no answers.  We have no certainty.  She could be around for years, or weeks.  The flashlight bobs between all of these horrors and glories – the way she curls up in her mother’s arms, the grainy horrors of MRI snapshots, the wondering if her twitching eye is the result of some tumor, the statistics of grade 3 astrocytoma survival, the success stories from those kids who beat the odds, the wonder of clinical trials.  Every day we oscillate between a thousand potential futures, so many of them terrible beyond envisioning, a handful of happy endings, and all this vibrating between quantum states is exhausting.
And yet the future coalesces but one hour at a time.
You can’t see it all at once.  Little emotions, flickering and dashing, too large to capture inside your skull.  There are times you scream from the horror of it.  There are times you ball your fists from the helplessness.  There are times when that all dissolves and you are given the solace of a minute where she’s a little girl slapping cards onto a pillow.  There are times you ride the hope before crashing into depression, and there are times you catch a glimpse of life without Rebecca and oh God you cannot function.  It’s all seen through a narrow tunnel.
I look into the eyes of my beautiful goddaughter, and I cannot see death. Then I can.  And when I see death I cannot see her, and when I see her I cannot see death and oh God I am so small and there is nothing I can do but hold her hand and hope for miracles.
She may be dying.  And as she dies, we do.  The truth is that the flashlight saves us.  If we were to see all of the monster lurking in that void we would die, are dying, and it’s only our inability to fathom the whole horror of this that allows us to function.  What’s happening to her is something alien to the human mindset, to the idea of life itself, that quiet promise that we grow.  She might not.  She might have experienced just about everything she’s going to.  She might be gone.
Rebecca is a miracle.  Even if this was all we got, she is a fucking miracle, and I want you to know that.
I just want more.
I want so much more.

Why I'm More Likely To Help Women: A Bias

Last week, someone invoked my name on Twitter, saying they’d like to friend me on Fet but were too shy.  So I emailed them to say that I understand social anxiety and of course it was fine to friend me.  Then I read her Twitter page, saw they were a blogger, saw that she’d just been through a hard divorce and her laptop had just died and she was looking for $200 to repair it, and I sent her $20 to help her on her way.
Now, that’s not unusual; I have a little fund I harvest from my writer-earnings to donate to people in trouble.  It’s not much, and I can’t donate to everyone who I think deserves it, but it does let me spot-give to folks I think need the help.
And I asked: would I have been as eager to help if this person was a guy?
The uncomfortable answer: no.  Not really.  (I have donated to guys, but way less often.)
And I thought about that for a while.  Was I white-knighting, getting off on helping women?  No, not really – I do a fair amount of pro-women blogging, but I don’t do it because I think the women need the help.  Was I unconsciously trying to curry favor with women as a way of getting into their pants?  Again, no, because I don’t recall ever actually making headway on that front from donations – though again, yeah, I probably get more date-offers because of my pro-women blogging than otherwise, so there is an upside to those essays I can’t rationally deny.  Was I doing it because I thought women were incompetent and needed the help?  Again, no…
…and I realized: it’s because I don’t trust men.
This is not a new revelation – it goes all the way back to the war on Jefferson Hill – but when I was in my heavily-bullied middle school period, the people who were picking on me were guys.  And it wasn’t just shoving me; the guys in question would frequently pretend to be my buddy in order to get me to reveal some embarrassing secret to them, which they could then share with the rest of the class, and so in the back of my head though I have guy friends I’m always waiting for them to punch me.
So most of my best friends are women.  I tend towards trusting women.  When I write squawky essays about how women are treated like shit, it’s because I often default to viewing things from a female perspective and go Hey, these jerks are hurting my friends.
And I’m more willing to help out a woman in need, because I trust them more reflexively.  They don’t have to earn my trust like men do.  I’ll help a guy out, but I don’t think I’d ever just help a random guy I only read about online ten minutes ago, because some tripwire in my brain would go, “…wait.  What are they really up to?”
That’s a bias I’m not necessarily happy with, as there are a lot of good men out there who I could be closer to, and I’m not.  It’s a bias that does more good in the universe, I think, because I know some of my essays have helped guys view women in a different light… but it’s a bias I need to examine more, see what I can do with, see how I can help.
Because while I loathe the Men’s Rights Movement as a selfish and stupid grab for white dude power, I do have to admit that personally, I can work on trusting guys a lot more.  Just as I ask men to examine their unconscious attitudes towards women, I should also dissect my attitudes towards other men, and see what I can find.  And like men examining their thoughts on women, it’s a process that takes a while and some thinky-bits.
I’m not unhappy I’m helping women, mind you.  I just should reach the hand to more dudes.  I should reach the hand to more people.  Because, you know… that’s the goal.

A Sale! "The Cultist's Son," To Apex Magazine

“This is the third story I’ve read from Ferrett Steinmetz,” someone once said in a forum post.  “Can someone check in on him?  Make sure he’s okay?”
Yeah, I tend to write dark stories.  I don’t mean to, it’s just a lot of them lead down that path.  So I’m used to dealing with characters in bad places.
Yet when I wrote “The Cultist’s Son,” a tale about the damaged son of a former Shub-Niggurath cultist, I wrote literally the darkest thing I’ve ever written.  It’s black.  Jet-black and howling.  It was so bad that when I wrote it I fell into a week-long depression, because god damn this was exploring some wretched places within me.  I don’t think I can write anything darker, or more X-rated….
…and yet somehow this became one of my best stories, for Reasons I Cannot Spoil.
I didn’t think I could sell it.  But I did, to a market I’ve longed to crack for some time: Apex, one of the best dark fiction markets.  It’s coming out in the April issue, along with a rather meaty interview with Yours Truly (and a host of other good authors with good stories).  So I’m quite happy.  And it should be out shortly.
The usual taste:

“I used to think the sky would peel open,” the girl with the green hair confesses, curling black-nailed fingers around a can of Pabst.  “I always had bloody knees, because I never looked down when I walked — I’d clasp my eyes to the sky, bracing myself for the sight of a gigantic hand pulling aside the clouds.  If I saw Him coming, maybe I could pray hard enough in time for God to forgive me.  Otherwise… Mom told me I’d burn like the whore I was.  In sixth grade.”
Her smile is shy, a crooked little secret that Derleth likes.  He finds his own head bobbing in agreement, his body resonating to the tune of her broken childhood.
The girl’s smile melts into a relieved grin; she’s discovered a fellow member of a secret society in a cold and hostile land.  She grasps his hand.
“You know, don’t you?” she whispers.  He can barely hear her over the death metal band onstage, pounding out a Cannibal Corpse cover tune.  “You know what it’s like to live in fear of the world ending?”
Derleth closes his eyes.  He can see the clouds parting across the mesa, black lightning slithering to the ground.  Except it’s not lightning — it’s tentacles tumbling from the sky, suckered and glistening and rooted to something big enough to have engulfed the Earth.  They flop down from cumulus clouds, slapping against the ground hard enough to cause tremors.  The rusting tin shed caves in, collapsing upon his six brothers before the corrugated walls are scooped away by a questing tendril.  A hundred other boneless limbs descend hungrily upon his squalling brothers.  They haul them, wailing, up into the sky, up with a billion other innocents plucked from collapsing skyscrapers, mud huts, once-sleepy suburbs.  Clouds, now tinged with crushed red.
All the while, Mother dances in crazed triumph, naked, breasts flopping.  Spattered in blood, she gargles the syllables that beckoned the Goddess here…
Derleth shakes off the — dream?  Idea?  It’s hard to say.  The girl with the green hair chews her pierced lip.  She’s so afraid he’ll laugh at her, so relieved she thinks she’s found someone who shares her terror of the Rapture, that already she’s confusing intensity for love.
Derleth thinks of himself as an empty cabinet.  He knows if he remains quietly agreeable, people will stack up his insides with their own needs and desires, imbuing him with all sorts of cheerful motivations.  And since he does not trust his own voice — Mother’s doing — he finds that preferable to telling people who he is.  Was.
Except now, he’s found someone who knows a part of him.
“You were raised by fundamentalists, too,” she begs, trying to make a light game of it.  “Weren’t you?”
He turns away from her to dive into the mosh pit, terrified of the unknowable, always terrified of the unknowable.

Willy Wonka And The Polyamory Factory

Here’s a common mistake I see among newbie poly couples: Charlie has just gotten a Golden Ticket to see Willy Wonka’s Magical Chocolate Factory, which in this case is defined as “the really cute girl who does all of the freaky things that his current partner is not interested in.”
And the partner says this:
“Yes!  I’m so glad!  You can totally go to the factory!  Just… don’t eat the caramel.  And if he wants to show you the room where he beats the chocolate, don’t eat the grass.  Or the candy flowers.  And don’t go in the tunnel, I’m not cool with that.  And if he wants to give you the factory, that’s crazy responsibility, say no.”
Now, it could be argued that hey, at least this way Charlie gets to see some of the factory – but realistically, he’s going to spend so much time worrying about whether he’s going to partner his wife off if he hugs an Oompa-Loompa that honestly, he’s going to either hate the factory or hate her.
(Obligatory note: this is not gender-specific, Charlie could be a woman, overprotective spouses come in all genders, thankyouverymuch.)
What’s usually happening when you get the Great Golden Ticket Disclaimers is that the wife doesn’t want to tell her husband, “No, you can’t go to the factory” because she knows Charlie is actually Augustus Gloop and he’s going to fall in the damn candy river.  But she doesn’t want to say that, because then she’ll be a Bad Poly Partner and Charlie will be all mad… so instead, she comes up with a list of a few, uh, provisos, a couple of quid pro quos, until she’s essentially walled off all the best parts of the candy factory.
And you know what?
Charlie usually falls in the damn candy river anyway.
Sex/love/affection has an uncanny way of seeping around protective clauses.  The goal with a a poly relationship should be to find someone everyone is comfortable with, not to take someone and rules-lawyer them into a semi-acceptable form.  If you have to do that much work to make the candy factory safe to travel through, then you should just condemn the fucker and not let Charlie go.
And Charlie will be mad.  Charlie may actually be pretty stupid, because people tend not to learn from reading essays or being given advice by friends.  No, people learn from grabbing the special Three-Course-Dinner gum off the table and cramming it in their mouth and blowing up into a big purple mess when the dessert portion doesn’t work quite right, and only after they’re squooshed back down into somewhat normal size by Willy Wonka’s extremely painful machines do they say, “Wow, I probably should listen to Willy Wonka when he tells me no!”
Which leaves you with an uncomfortable choice, when the Golden Ticket appears: do you say “no,” and let them seethe for the rest of their lives about what a gloriously perfect experience the Chocolate Factory would have been… or do you let them go, watch them fall in the chocolate river, and hope they learn? Or do you let them go and discover that indeed your partner is Charlie Bucket, and gets the factory, and deal with the stress of being a lucrative candy magnate?
There’s never a good answer there.  And I’m not saying, though people will doubtlessly misinterpret me, that restrictions are bad.  (“Safe sex” is a pretty darned good restriction, f’rex.)   What I am saying is that raising fifty million provisos because you’re too afraid to say “no” is often way more harmful than the flat “no” – because if, by some magnificent chance, Charlie follows all your guidelines and emerges from the candy factory whole, chances are good he won’t think, “Wow, all those guidelines protected me from danger!”  He’ll think, “I could have had so much more fun if I wasn’t held back by all these stupid rules!”
But it really is okay to say “no.”  It’s tough, when those golden gates are opening.  You may even find Charlie running off, alone.  But if you never wanted to own a candy factory, or deal with the unique form of PTSD one only gets when you’ve been sucked through the garbage chutes of a chocolate factory and are barely saved from the incinerator, then maybe letting him go off is the wiser choice.

On Killing A Player Character

I had to kill a PC last night.  It’s the first time I’ve ever killed a PC.
I’m still a little upset about that.
Now, when I say “I had to kill a PC,” that’s a ludicrous statement: I’m the GM, the guy who runs the game.  I control reality.  I could have turned the villain into a cloud of balloons, or had Superman fly in from above to save them, or given the merciless Borglike creature attacking poor Gigi a change of heart.
Yet all of those alternatives would have radically changed the nature of the world I’d created.  In a game, you try to set up a realistic set of expectations, and ensure that those expectations are met.  In some games, that expectation is, “You will never die, because you are a hero,” and to that end almost any bending of the rules is okay.  In other games, that expectation is “Death comes easily to anyone, often for trivial reasons,” and in games like that you would feel cheated if someone did fudge a die roll to save you.
My game – like most games, I think – has the implicit expectation of “I’ll try not to kill you, since you’re the hero, but if you make a lot of bad tactical moves, then death is an option.”  And a lot of bad tactical moves were made.
Thing is, I tried to stop her.  When poor Gigi abandoned her fellow PCs, hell-bent on tracking down a wussy enemy of hers in a dark warren called The Murder Holes, she snuck off alone without telling anyone.  She encountered a hidden nest of spiders, whose razor-sharp webs did damage to her, which was my attempt to say “Hey, you’re injured, go back to your healer and group up” – the player interpreted that as “These warrens are dangerous with webs and traps, I shouldn’t backtrack.”  I used an echo to show that her enemy was mutating into a monster that shot energy bolts from his fingers, energy bolts that incinerated a whole nest of spiders – but the information that Joe McWuss here may be transforming into an actual threat was dismissed.  I made it clear by cutting to a scene with the other PCs that they were at least fifteen to twenty minutes away from helping her, and that got overlooked.
The overwhelming display of power I had the now-mutated boss monster – who had been designed to face down three PCs and their sidekick and fight them to a standstill – merely convinced Gigi’s player that retreat was useless, put her back against the wall.  When I had the boss monster say, “You’re getting tired, I can sense it,” that was me, trying to tell Gigi’s player You are running low on hit points, GTFO – but it was taken as taunting, the kind of thing every paper monster says to make victory all the sweeter.  
When Gigi took the fatal hit, I put the game on hold and walked in the yard for a while.  How could I save Gigi?  I eventually said, “Okay, instead of killing her, the monster will infect her and the other PCs can save her.”  And due to more subtle miscommunications, the players approached this Big Boss as “We can kill this monster!” instead of “We need to rescue Gigi and get out!” and by the time they finally decided it was time to flee, they consciously and purposely left Gigi behind.
Now, I could have reduced the threat of the boss monster (who’s intended to be the main nemesis of much of the campaign), or magically transported the other PCs fifteen minutes ahead in time so they charged into battle just as Gigi was about to fall, or any number of other subtle changes.  I didn’t.  And when the players left her for dead, I couldn’t think of a way to save her that didn’t involve things I found to be unbelievable stretches of the imagination.
So I looked Gigi’s player dead in the face and said what all GMs essentially say whenever they kill a PC:
“Your character’s life is not as important as my game’s reality.” 
That’s a tough goddamned call.
And yet, for me, that kind of call is necessary.  I don’t want to play in a game where my success is a given – hell, isn’t that obvious from my love of Magic, programming, and writing, three skills where you learn by slamming your face into failure?  I want a game where if I screw up, significant losses can accrue, where every battle has a chance of going really badly if you don’t plan carefully. Where death is not a given, but always a potential concern.
If I had chosen to save Gigi, I feel – and every GM has to make their own call on this – that I would have irreparably damaged the contract I quietly hold with the players: namely, that actions have consequences, and when actions are not wise, not all of those consequences will be pleasant ones.  I would have saved one game session at the cost of future ones, bending the game towards a style of play I dislike.  (And though I am in charge of trying to provide a fun adventure for my players, as the GM, I am not their bitch.  My enjoyment has to count for something, too.)
Gigi’s player was irritated, which is understandable.  Nobody wants to lose someone they’re attached to.  Yet I remember when we were playing Delta Green a few weeks ago, when Gigi’s player, frustrated by me constantly asking, “Uh, are you sure that’s a good idea?” finally exploded and told me, “Look, just let us make the stupid moves and let us deal with the consequences!”
Well, this time, I let them make the stupid moves and doled out consequences.  Yet that didn’t go over well, either.
That’s not necessarily hypocritical.  People go to games for escapism.  Being in a game that’s frustrating or involves losing is not fun.  Discovering that the GM does not share your opinion on the effectiveness of your tactics is not fun.  Spending your entire game getting killed is not fun.
And tonight, I ran a very not fun game, and as I said, I’m still a little upset about that.
Yet those not fun nights will happen occasionally as a GM.  To Gigi’s player, Gigi was making a solid call.  She had an enemy who she’d wanted to kill since the first game, one who she had a firm shot at, who she could finally track down in isolation.  To Gigi’s player, I have no doubt that this seemed like an awesome idea – and in many games, it probably would have been.  If I’d been running a game where the PCs triumph no matter what, I would have twisted things so Gigi would have been rewarded for her bold initiative and taken out her enemy in style.
But it wasn’t.  I was running the kind of game where running off alone into a dark maze of tunnels to kill a mutating opponent wasn’t a very good idea.  And I was running the kind of game where the philosophy is, “Some nights suck when you lose, but the victories are so much sweeter when you finally figure out the right tactics.”
Nobody wants to be told that their tactics aren’t the right ones. As a GM, it’s my job to say “yes!” as often as possible when players devise weird new approaches.  Yet it’s also my job to judge when a plan simply wouldn’t work, and that causes friction when the player thinks this is a good idea and you do not.
As a GM, it’s also my job to tell the players what kind of world they live in, and to enforce those boundaries – and if my world is the one where all roads don’t lead inevitably to triumph, then that means some nights they’re gonna have the Empire Strikes Back of the soul.
Maybe they like that style of game, in which case they stay.  Or they don’t, in which case I hope the thrills they get when they win offset the occasional nights of suck, and that they learn to pick up when I’m flailing my GMly arms to send signals that whoah, pull back, retreat, this is not working!  Because I suspect a lot of tonight’s death came from a quiet misalignment of gaming philosophies – acting like the hero of Die Hard works if you’re in Die Hard, but what happens if this is Game of Thrones?
I’m a little upset because I don’t like upsetting my players.  But I’m also a little upset because I don’t really see what else I could have done and kept playing the sort of game I want to run, and that’s a rough beat.  A very rough beat.