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Also do we think tetsuji was weird about kevin "only thing left of Kayleigh" day

oh yeah definitely. yeah older men love to project their unhealthy relationships with kayleigh day onto kevin. god's strongest soldier etc etc.

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I always think about how cruel It was that at the winter banquet Riko made Jean give Kevin the tickets so that Kevin would have to give them to Neil

Riko could very well have given them to Neil himself. Instead, he made sure that Kevin would feel responsible for Neil's suffering too, he made sure the one to ultimately ship Neil off, knowing what would happen to him, would be Kevin, he made sure that Kevin would take part in Neil's self sacrifice. Most of all, he made sure that whatever Kevin did, he would feel guilty about it. If he refused to give Neil the tickets, Andrew would suffer and It would be his fault. If he gave Neil the tickets, Neil would suffer and it would also be his fault

Then, he made sure to call Kevin on christimas to tell exactly what the result of giving the tickets to Neil was. To tell Kevin that he had marked Neil, that now the only member of the Perfect Court who was missing, the one who represented the hope that it could be possible to get away from the Moriyamas, was now caught and trapped, and Kevin was the one to hand him over

That's one of the reasons Matt punching Kevin after Neil came back actually also makes me so mad. Matt played right into Riko's game by blaming Kevin for Neil's suffering. What Riko wanted was exactly to make it so Kevin had a role in whatever he did to Neil at the Nest. When the team blames Kevin for It, they further cement the idea that It was all Kevin's fault, while completely disregarding the fact that Neil was the one to decide to go in the first place. Most of all, completely disregarding the fact that the only one to blame here is the abuser himself. Not Neil for being faced with an almost Impossible decision, much less Kevin for respecting whatever Neil decided

The more I re-read aftg the more I realise that Riko's mind games are probably way worse then his knifes (on that note, we also need to talk about how Riko used Neil being at the Nest to further break Jean, but this is a whole other post on itself)

I hate that little bitch and I am not prepared for Kevin's prequel book

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wilf (wip i’d like to finish)

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remember when shiv tried to explain love and thne proceeded to list things that. were not at all love.

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and ok, kind of related to the discussion of cat and laila is that growing up psychologically healthy IS a huge character trait that should influence how they behave in the story. in trc, the dream thieves, gansey and blue have this really frank discussion about how they're both different from adam in that they've grown up never questioning the fact that they are loved unconditionally. blue and gansey are good about reaching out and accepting help, about sharing their emotions. but adam, who's been abused all his life, is touchy, easily angered, extremely stubborn about his independence and thinks that anything he didn't suffer for is something undeserved and shameful to accept. while blue and gansey understand that about him and accept him for it, but they're also kind of frustrated that he isn't able to see things their way. they're not unsupportive of adam, but there are things about him that they just Don't Get that they try their best to work around. the reader and the characters themselves are aware of the fact that their upbringing influences their perception of what happens and how they react.

cat and laila, on the other, are just generically nice. in tsc, we do see them react like people who have had a healthy upbringing and have no idea how to handle someone like jean. sometimes. more often than not, they immediately switch to being very sympathetic and accomodating which is helpful for jean's plot, but makes cat and laila seem less like their own distinct characters. it makes them feel more like aurora lynch, a perfect concept of a loving mother, rather than characters who inhabit their own unique lives when the main character does not require their presence.

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@afurtivecake

I thinks it's reasonable that this could be canon, actually! It's the Ravens' prestige that allows Tetsuji to get away with so much, so I think it's more likely that the cult stuff started slowly – as cults tend to do in real life, anyway. I think also that it's very likely that the Ravens, being a team that only exist because it was funded by female athletes, also started way more egalitarian than it ended up being by the time AFTG takes place, because I don't think Tetsuji's need for money would immediately end with Castle Evermore being fully built. Much like what you said about the increasing abuse, the decreasing female lineup could be covered with "well, they've had plenty of women before, this might just mean this year's male recruits are just better". The advantage of having the creator of this very young sport being the coach probably is what kept the Ravens dominant for the first few years, and as Exy started to turn a profit, Tetsuji was able to kick off of that into slowly phasing out any outside influence. It's no wonder it all came down only after that veneer of success was gone.

Forever and ever fascinated by the pre-TKM EAU Ravens alumni. Like POV you are 22 years old. You haven't spoken to your family in five years. You just graduated from a grueling training program (violent cult) and now you're gonna go to a pro team full of people that had completely normal college experiences and yet are as good as you. You have completely missed out on the formative years of your adulthood because you were too busy getting literally tortured for what felt like 547 days a year. Your best bet of any familiarity is praying you land on a team with another Raven alumni but the chances of that person being the partner you spent the past five years symbiotically linked to are slim to none. You will cling to a jersey number that represented your worth and that will very probably be taken away from you promptly. It can't be said you have fully left your team (cult) but Coach Moriyama (your God; the guy who has literally beaten the fear of that God into you) doesn't give a fuck about you anymore. You haven't seen fresh produce in years. You can't sleep. You can't eat. You can't even practice exy right because your new coach threatens to suspend you if you hit your fellow teammate with a heavy racquet. Congratulations! In an average of five years you will be either chronically in pain or prone to injury in a way that's so debilitating you will have to retire permanently from the sport you have given your whole life for. Nobody will care about that because your alma mater just pumped out a new batch of recruits just like you.

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fem neil josten commission rahhhhhhh

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Forever and ever fascinated by the pre-TKM EAU Ravens alumni. Like POV you are 22 years old. You haven't spoken to your family in five years. You just graduated from a grueling training program (violent cult) and now you're gonna go to a pro team full of people that had completely normal college experiences and yet are as good as you. You have completely missed out on the formative years of your adulthood because you were too busy getting literally tortured for what felt like 547 days a year. Your best bet of any familiarity is praying you land on a team with another Raven alumni but the chances of that person being the partner you spent the past five years symbiotically linked to are slim to none. You will cling to a jersey number that represented your worth and that will very probably be taken away from you promptly. It can't be said you have fully left your team (cult) but Coach Moriyama (your God; the guy who has literally beaten the fear of that God into you) doesn't give a fuck about you anymore. You haven't seen fresh produce in years. You can't sleep. You can't eat. You can't even practice exy right because your new coach threatens to suspend you if you hit your fellow teammate with a heavy racquet. Congratulations! In an average of five years you will be either chronically in pain or prone to injury in a way that's so debilitating you will have to retire permanently from the sport you have given your whole life for. Nobody will care about that because your alma mater just pumped out a new batch of recruits just like you.

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I think these books would be 300% more interesting if Riko Moriyama was a girl

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kind of riffing off of that last reblog although in a different area. obviously the non-white representation in the original trilogy is. questionable. but at least all the non-white characters in the originals have texture. nicky and riko and tetsuji and even thea (in her one chapter appearance) are all incredibly distinct characters and even their more arguably ill-thought-out traits are extremely memorable. they contribute to the drama of the plot they're messy they cause conflict. and i mean. i Like that there are more casually represented non-white characters in jean's trilogy. it's Nice that we get laila and cat and ananya. but fundamentally all the characters who get to have that kind of texture and messy conflict and motion in the plot are implicitly white. and part of that you could say is because the trojans are just generally not as messy as a group compared to the foxes or the ravens but jeremy still gets to be messy. no one was saying jean's new love interest Has to be a white boy with a scandalous past and there Have to be two supporting women of color who Have to be comparatively unconflicted in their backstories and arcs.

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the problem with cat and laila

right off the bat, this post is going to be fairly critical of nora so i want to make it clear that i do deeply respect her as a writer, and this is basically the main issue i have with her work. and feel free to tell me if you think im wrong! i welcome opposing viewpoints here.

that being said: the biggest disappointment in the entire series for me is cat and laila as characters. i was so hype that we would finally have some female mcs (or secondary mcs), and honestly i feel completely let down.

i don’t think i have to point out nora’s obvious misogyny (lack of female mcs, unwillingness to even consider that allison and renee might be anything but straight, calling male characters ‘men’ but female characters ‘girls’, etc). she is pretty clearly not super interested in writing women, although i would say she did a fairly good job with the three original female foxes, especially renee. but even though cat and laila are more important/central to the plot than their counterparts were, they are worse written.

that is not to say i dislike cat and laila. i like them a lot! they’re perfect! and therein lies the problem, because perfect characters are boring and, frankly, bad writing. im not even going to get into the fact that they basically become jean’s mommies, because that’s another whole post, but also that’s there.

in a series with so many incredible, morally gray, nuanced characters, it is simply so fucking disappointing that cat and laila don’t get the same treatment as the men.

i mean, just think about it for a second. what flaws do the two of them have? i literally can’t think of any. a few times they get upset, and that’s pretty much it. but for the most part, they are simply everything they need to be to move the plot along. nothing more, nothing less.

and their backstories? a fucking joke. they each have like one mildly upsetting piece of baggage from before the series begins. and im using mildly in the context of the frankly insane backstories of pretty much every single male character.

i love these books so much, and that is why this upsets me so much. think of how much more interesting the books would be if *either* of them was a fraction as interesting as neil, or andrew, or kevin, or hell even renee. imagine if they got upset, if they were prickly, if they were mean or demanding or manipulative or combative or fucking anything but happy and/or supportive 95% of the time.

obviously there’s nothing to be done at this point, even if nora wanted to address this (which i don’t believe she ever will). i will continue to read and obsess over these books, but i will also continue to read them critically, because frankly the level of misogyny lurking just underneath the surface of these books is flat out insulting.

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How to fix all for the game:

1. Explain where the dealer who serves the ball in this sport goes after they serve the ball.

2. Neil transgender. “Why would he choose to name himself after his serial killer dad who hates him and wants him dead” I don’t know why is he already hiding from his dad Nathan by going by Neil when their names are both Nathaniel. He WOULD decide to do this to himself.

3. Challengers plot real. Kevin Day Tashi Duncan in the middle trying to get the other two to hook up because it will improve their game.

4. I take back everything I said about the Japanese Appalachian yakuza being a problem. It’s perfect just sublime world building. I just need more focus on what the lived experience of growing up in a preeminent Japanese crime family in fucking Charleston West Virginia is like. Riko Moriyama should also be a girl it makes more thematic sense. 

5. Kevin relevant

6. We are already one level removed from reality through the invention of this fake sport and a second level removed from through everyone’s connections to organize crime in inexplicable places and perhaps a third level removed by how everyone speaks and acts like a 2013 tumblr dashboard. We need to be one level higher. the Edgar Allen University Ravens should be vampires.

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I’ve called Kevin Day a horse girl with no horse before on here, and then I said Neil is his horse. I wanna add: Neil is also a horse girl, but in the sense that Neil’s favorite horse is a dead one and he loves to beat it. and the horse is riko.

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I wonder if Kevin believes on a certain level that Riko wouldn’t have turned out the way he did without him. There were plenty of warning signs from very early on, especially around his relationship with Kevin, that things had the potential to get much more twisted. But he wasn’t always terrible, at the beginning. He knows that Riko, whether because of the situation he’d been born into or just his own nature, was probably always going to be a psychopath before he’d even met him.

But Kevin couldn’t help but feel that he might have been the catalyst, for some of the really dark and sadistic parts of Riko’s character that made more and more frequent appearances as they got older. Even if Riko was a ticking time bomb already, being given another boy his age, not as a friend or brother but as property that he could do whatever he liked with, could easily have triggered something in him.

Riko didn’t like people talking back, attempting to fight him off, any failure to submit completely to him. Kevin tried once or twice, when he was very young, but he learnt quickly; Riko also learnt quickly that he liked the power of knowing restraints were unnecessary more than the violence of using them. Maybe he wouldn’t have learnt those kinds of things with someone else, someone more like Neil.

Maybe Kevin sometimes wonders if Riko would have gotten such a taste for complete control of other people if Kevin hadn’t given it to him so easily.

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Still watching the newest Cloudward Ho episode but I wanted to congratulate Olethra Macleod for her childhood crush being confirmed as WLW

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Honestly I still hold out hope for book 3 because I recognize the story is very much not done yet. But I am a bit underwhelmed by most of the Raven storyline so far – to me it's clear that Nora wants to add nuance to the story in a way that either didn't come through like she intended in the first trilogy or that Neil would not have cared about to look; specially in TSC there is a lot of talk about how the Ravens are all victims of Tetsuji, that they started out as brand new adults with stars in their eyes that trusted Tetsuji and in turn got so violently abused they all became unrecognizable shadows of their former selves.

However I feel like at this point talk is all that it is. We are getting told time and time again that there is more to the Ravens, that they deserved better than this, but we don't actually get shown that in any meaningful way. To the point that I do not blame what is the most accepted interpretation of this as just being Jean justifying his abusers because the narrative so far reinforces it even if I'm not sure that it's the intention.

I'm not saying that the way the Ravens have behaved so far doesn't track with the circumstances they are in – Edgar Allan is being completely incompetent at handling the mental health of the cult survivors their incompetence allowed to exist in the first place, and their violent crash out is the most understable thing in the world. And, individually, I also think that the interactions Jean has with the Ravens make sense, the problem is how they pile up.

From the very first interaction with Thea in the first chapters of TSC, to Jean reaching out to Sergio by the end of TGR, all the interactions end horribly, and often violently. And I think that it's past the point where it's actually adding much to the narrative – or, when it adds something, it's the least interesting option the story could take.

To me the biggest example of this is Zane. Through all of TSC, it felt like he was being set up to be like a counterpoint to Riko and Grayson; that his story was supposed to show how the Nest wore down even those with the best intentions. Because Zane might have struck a deal with Jean out of his own selfish desire to be Perfect Court, but all the Ravens wanted to be Perfect Court and no one else offered Jean help; it means something that Zane was in that room and did not volunteer himself to rape Jean, because that was the one act of violence Zane wasn't willing to commit for the Ravens, which is why Riko uses it to punish him later and why it so utterly breaks him. Zane was somebody that had principles, and even if he couldn't be described as being selfless or caring for Jean, he risked more than he gained with their deal. Grayson couldn't be a easy enemy to have, and I don't think that Riko would have reacted to Zane's protection any better than he reacted to his betrayal if it had become an inconvenience to him. Which is why to me it made sense that losing the Perfect Court spot to Neil – after a year of Jean essentially not being his partner anymore – drove him to betray Jean, since from his point of view not only Jean was the only person he could get revenge from without repercussion, but he was also the one to betray their deal first. And I do think that it was important that the betrayal also cost Zane something; when he was put in a situation where he could either rape Grayson or be raped himself and how the resulting trauma of this pretty much broke him. I didn't need the confirmation on TGR to know this had been Riko's punishment because one of the first things we learn about Zane is that not becoming a rapist was pretty much his only moral line.

So that's why his appearance in TGR was a gut punch (derogatory). I feel like he could have been swiped for any other Raven and it would not change the story all that much. And while I can respect what that moment meant for Jean's character development, I do think it wasted all of the potential of Zane as a character. To reveal him to be genuinely hateful of Jean since the beggining and never having taken Jean's fear of Grayson seriously truly trew away so much of the groundwork the first book had laid out for him. And maybe this was just part of his crash out and he will still show any redeeming qualities in book 3, but at this point hoping for that just feels like grasping at straws.

Which is why by the time Jean reached out to Sergio only to get a slap in the face for it only made me feel tired. These beats aren't even hitting anymore because they don't change. The books keep asking us to hold empathy for the Ravens as imperfect victims but it does not give us anything in return, there is no glimpse of a payoff in sight. It's to the point that I even wonder if this is not Nora's intention, to turn around and only show that Jean and by extension the reader was only kidding themselves by holding out any hope for the Ravens to be anything other than two dimensional cartoon villains. Which is A story she could tell, sure, but it's also no different than what we got from the Ravens for the first three books. So what's the point of floating the possibility of that storyline just to shut it down at every turn?

ANYWAY. Again, I'm aware there is still a whole ass book left. What I'm frustrated with is that I genuinely can't tell which way the narrative is going to take, and not in a good way. This is starting to make me wonder if I'm stupid for caring about a plot line the book told me to care about. All I wanted from TGR was an inkling of an whisper of an indication that we were going to get something nuanced and different for once, and I am severely disappointed I didn't get that. This is less about my personal preferences than it is about a narrative going through with the promises it makes. I would not have this hope if it wasn't set up in book 1.

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