#Check and mate

[gattaxa]

HAILEE STEINFELD in SINNERS (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler

"You keep dancing with the devil, one day she’s going to follow you home.”

[queenofheartsdeservedbetter]

I really, REALLY, don't know what I would do without books.

[somewhere-in-the-rain]

Ali Hazelwood books summarised in one tweet:

[togetherasap]

the serotonin released after reading any ali hazelwood book is unparalleled

[evacrstairs]

you and i ended up in the same room, at the same time...

check & mate (nolanmallory) headers. like or reblog if you save or use. ♟️

[jacks347]

"Darlin deserved to be a villain" "Freelancer deserved to be a villain"

You know who deserved to be a villain??

Lovely. Lovely deserved to be a villain. And the fact that they weren't should be appreciated by everyone.

Why?

Because Lovely could've very easily turned into Quinn. Like so easily that it's a little scary.

Seriously, think about it. Lovely had a lot of issues after Adam and the inversion and all of it was because of Vincent. If at any point they had decided that Vincent wasn't shit and they deserved better than whatever insanity this man would bring, we would've gotten a second Quinn.

Someone bitter and angry at how loving one person fucked up their entire life. Someone hellbent on making sure he could never hurt anyone else the way he hurt them. Someone who kept others out of Vincent's hurricane by making sure they never stepped in it at all. Through manipulation or murder, that's up to you.

"But that doesn't sound like Lovely! They're too sweet for that! They'd never turn out that way even if they did turn evil." And? Quinn's entire reasoning for going after Darlin was because they betrayed him. I'm not saying he wasn't a garbage person but I am saying characters have done worse for less.

Lovely deserved to be hurt. To be angry. To leave in a violent storm and pay back the world for what it did to them in a shower of blood and broken promises. And I have no doubt they would've.

But they didn't. Because Lovely is trusting, forgiving, a little naive for the situation they're in, and completely in love.

If Lovely was a little more attentive to their circumstances or a little less in love with Vincent, they'd see that this relationship has brought just as much trauma as pleasure and that going forward with it will destroy them.

Then see above.

Lovely deserved to be a villain. Hell, I'm willing to believe they should've been. But they weren't. And nobody seems to see it.

(Now don't let the entire post of me dunking on him fool you, I love Vincent, he's the first Redacted character I listened to. But like...facts are facts)

[efexbe]

check & mate by ali hazelwood

[isthataraccoon]

omg my friend who doesn’t read asked ME for a book rec because she was at the book store 😭😭😭 I have never felt so honored (I got excited and may have gone overboard because she hasn’t responded since)

guys I think I scared her 🤭😭

[the-architect-of-ferrari]

I just realized how ridiculous the whole “Charlos are a pr friendship and they secretly hate each other” narrative is that paints them both out to be these fake people who put on Oscar-worthy performances pretending they like each other when we have PROOF of how bad they are at acting. You think the same guys who did this commercial can convincingly act for four year straight like they don’t hate each other?

[bellaskhakhiskirt]

God I’m reading “check and mate” by Ali Hazelwood, and I know that this is her first YA novel…..but like, I’m in love? There’s this scene where the main girl’s mentor gives her a lecture about not quitting chess, and tells her about her past…where she was discriminated against by her peers. Where Kasparov, one of the biggest chess players of all time…..said that “WoMeN ArE ToO STupID fOr ChEsS” , and how discouraging it was for girls everywhere. The boys in her class wore shirts saying “a female chess player is an oxymoron”. That is so disrespectful, it would have ended me. I hate it so much.

And I’m like, crying…sobbing , because that’s the case for girls in almost every male dominated field. I’m currently pursuing an engineering degree….and all throughout my schooling I was made to feel like an outsider, like I was imposing my self on this “old boys club”, like I was never good enough. Us girlies would always be left out in group projects, because guys didn’t want to associate themselves with girls. Like we were the plague somehow. It happened so much that my performance started going down and I started believing that I didn’t belong here. But no more. I won’t let them bully me into quitting. 40% of women in STEM leave their careers after 10-15 years because of a hostile work environment. I don’t want to be in that statistic. I’ll do everything I can to encourage girls my age to take up math and science. I’m so tired of this patriarchal bullshit.

[nazliwrites]

Want to live in a world Ali Hazelwood write stories about.

[liam-zor-el]

if kara isn't a lesbian explain why in this art by adam hughs the lesbian colours?

[ohwolfling]

I've been like, wow, I am thinking about Gale so much lately, with renewed vigor, very intense, what is this and um...

this happened September 13th

September 16th

September 21st

I...

not me having a visceral, bone-deep anniversary with some pixels and an OC, Baldur's Gate 3 really did the devil's work on me

[appleinducedsleep]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge |🎄| December 2: Currently Reading

[artsbygih]

Mal and Nolan from Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

[floaphile]

art credit - polartss