#If I cannot get the mutuals into His Dark Materials/The Golden Compass I will just torture them with my content instead

[derelictheretic]

I am going to write self indulgent His Dark Materials/Far Cry 5 fics again and no one can stop me

[ryehouses]

tagged by @pinkmanage to post 10 favorite characters from 10 different fandoms (like a week ago, i’m sorry, i have somehow slipped from this realm into the next, and it turns out the next is just my 7423rd skyrim playthrough. i too agonized over this.) 

lyra silvertongue, his dark materials. i read the golden compass very young--too young, probably--and lyra was the first girl character i ever encountered who was rude and messy and brash and not at all very girly. loved her, love her, will continue to love her for the rest of my life. 

arthur morgan, red dead redemption ii. is anyone surprised? i literally cannot articulate how profoundly affected i was by this stupid game and this stupid character. 

dorian pavus, dragon age: inquisition. VERY glib, unafraid to set people on fire, the only man with a mustache that i trust unreservedly. i romance him ever single time i have a male inquisitor. 

corvo attano, dishonored. this list is going to be... unfairly stacked in favor of dishonored, because dishonored is written into the core of my being, but like. corvo, though. interesting in both high and low chaos; eats rats; fucking HILARIOUS sense of humor (signing lady boyle’s book is hysterical, okay); likes swords and his murderous daughter; on a deeper note, i really love that the entire fate of dunwall turns on corvo’s willingness to be honorable, and i have howled about this concept at length before

billie lurk, dishonored. listen!! billie should have been the player character for dishonored 2 -- she’s got it all! a reason to go after delilah! an interesting motivation that isn’t just recycled from the first game! sick powers! i know a lot of folks didn’t like doto, but i really did and billie made me CRY 

gaby teller, the man from uncle. my deep & abiding desire to get strapped by alicia vikander aside, i adore gaby, and pretty much every tmfu fic i’ve ever written or thought of centers around gaby, because she’s just so interesting. 

daud, dishonored. not glib, not really a thief, but i love him so much. he’s terrible and dramatic and so upset that he’s having regrets over killing jessamine -- playing a low chaos daud is delightful, because he hates being a better person so much. also gains points for dreaming about corvo stabbing him to death, because, you know. same.  

murphy cooper, interstellar. i physically cannot talk about interstellar right now, due to The Fragility Of It All, but man i love it when anger and love save the world hand in hand. i really do. 

brynjolf, skyrim. this is absolutely because i’m in the middle of a playthrough right now, but bryn has been the hottest piece of ass in tamriel since 2011 and the fact that i cannot marry him is a crime. we love glib-tongued thieves.

guenivere/gwenivere, arthurian mythos; it ain’t matter what adaptation we’re in, i love that girl. she could get it. i maybe played the guenivere rp choice game 600 times attempting to bone arthur, lancelot AND morgana all in the same playthrough. it’s fine.

(honorable mentions to alistair theirin, the entire cast of hamilton, most animated dogs from 1992 - 2017, ALL disney princess animal companions, my horses in rdr2, and the entire da2 companion set, even though they’re all (with the exception of merill; don’t fuck with me on this) fairly terrible people)

do i even have ten mutuals any more? if you are a mutual and you know what my legal name is, consider yourself tagged. 

[jayne-hecate-writer]

The Secret Commonwealth: A review of sorts-ish...

So on a cold fresh autumnal morn, I closed the cover of my book, sat back and almost wept. I have waited for this book for so long, I had had it on pre-order from the despicable Amazon (notorious for tax avoidance, low pay and bad working conditions) for so very long and yet, I cannot contain my disappointment.

This is a cold brutal book, filled with anger and sadness, as much a critique of our society as it is a fairy story. My friends, I present to you The Secret Commonwealth, the second in The Book of Dust trilogy and if you have not yet finished the book, be aware that I am about to discuss some events that could be classified as spoilers.

La Belle Savage was at times a dark book, revisiting the lives of Lyra's parents and explaining how she came to reside with in the walls of Jordan College, safely out of the hands of the Magisterium. It also contained a story of heroism as the young Malcolm Polstead struggles to maintain the safety of the infant Lyra during a catastrophic flood. Although it felt detached from the other stories given that it was in effect a prequel, it was complete and did not leave us with a bitter cliff hanger. Alas, I cannot say the same for the sequel, which is set several years after the events of both The Amber Spyglass and Lyra's Oxford.

The book opens with Lyra and Pantalaiman not speaking, during the episodes when they do speak, they communicate though angry argumentative exchanges and mutual misunderstanding. Pan resents Lyra's depression as she discovers the theories and philosophy of Nihilism, a system of thought that denies the existence of the Dǣmon and even of pleasure itself. Her adherence to the subject matter is fairly typical of every pretentious philosophy reading young adult and borders on the self denying extremes of Emo subculture, without stepping into the grotesque regions of cutting and self harm. There is throughout the book a feeling of abandonment and depression in the main character and it is linked directly to this bleak denial of light and goodness as she struggles to come to terms with her own feelings and knowledge, despite her having had first hand physical experience of the spiritual realm. This is an important part of her self denial that has led to the schism between Pan and herself, as she denies the existence of part of herself.

There is also a feeling of animosity towards the modern day society of Brytain which is clearly very similar in many ways to our own modern Britain, with self serving political posturing and power grabbing being clear goals for some of the characters. Gone is the clear evil and avarice of Mrs Coulter, replaced by the cold brutal spite and vengeance of her brother, Marcel Delamare. The main antagonists of this book are both motivated by revenge and power with the protagonists being somehow dirtied by modern life. The previously heroic Malcolm borders painfully close to the paedophilic with his obsession with a young woman who does not yet have adult status, being ten years his junior and whom he has nurtured since she was a child. In fact throughout the novel, there are many characters who it is implied may have flawed sexual relationships, starting with the loveless flirtations of Lyra herself and moving onto the strangely asexual Marcel, possibly even the Saint Simeon as he craves the touch of his boy, the shamed Princess who delved into lesbianism to satisfy the lusts of her own Dǣmon and finally the revolting actions of a group of rapist Turkish soldiers. Speaking of which, the sexual assault of Lyra is both heart breaking and brutal, it is described as a near rape, but it goes into enough detail to sicken the reader and if I am honest pulls too readily on the cliché of powerful men destroying the spirit of the young woman until she is rescued by another powerful man who berates her for daring to go out in public. This is in some ways  the commentary of a middle class academic man, who has tried to imagine what it is to be a marginalised woman and it does show. However, if you wanted to be less critical, you could see this as a brutal statement on the suffering of women not just in the middle east, but the world over as we struggle against sexism, religious persecution and the removal of our bodily self determination.

With the first trilogy, His Dark Materials, there was an innocence to the story telling, even during the vicious battles and violent murders committed by some of the most beloved characters. With this book, there is a bleak world weariness in the subtext, it is every miserable moment distilled and condensed from the twenty four hour news networks, from global war to Brexit and with the reading it does towards the end of the book grow tiring, if not actually despairing. After closing the dust cover, I am left wondering how Pullman can raise the tone of the next book and I wonder if it is even possible for him to give Lyra the sort of ending she deserves, given that she has silently saved mankind across the myriad of realities. Seeing her fall in love with Malcolm would feel somehow lazy, when given her status as the biblical Eve to Will's Adam and their eternal love.

I think that it has also been forgotten that Lyra and Will killed the self aggrandising deity known as the Authority during the last battle in The Amber Spyglass, she knows for a fact that the fortress of heaven is ruled by tyrants, having battled them both directly and indirectly. She is also aware of the presence of the soul having witnessed it first hand escaping from the land of the dead to the plains of land of the Mulefa. Making her a nihilist in everything but name seems somehow incongruous, but maybe this is a comment on the nature of where the world stands at the moment. After all, did not Star Wars do something very similar with the failure and then redemption of Luke Skywalker in the Last Jedi?

As I grew closer to the end of this novel, I knew that it would not and could not end happily. Pullman does not even give us the moment of reconciliation between Lyra and Pan, instead we are left with a cliff hanger and an obtuse poem and worst of all, the knowledge that it is going to be many more months if not years before we get the answers to our questions. Given that his book is nearly seven hundred pages long, there is a great deal in here that is drudgery, misery and depression; which frankly I found heart breaking. Lyra has been soiled by the things that she has done and which have been done to her. I only hope that for the next book she retains her autonomy, does not fall into the predatory arms of Malcolm and finds the reconciliation with Pan, because otherwise this trilogy is going to be bleak and will see the destruction of one of the most beloved characters created in the twentieth century. I also think that Pullman has sank a great deal of his own personal despair with modern society into this instalment, carefully skirting the more usual tired tropes and cliché.

Is the Secret Commonwealth a good book? I cannot answer this question because it has left me feeling unsettled and hurt. What I can say is that as the original readers of the first trilogy have aged, the tone of the second trilogy has aged with us. Where I would have no qualms about letting my ten year old niece read The Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife or The Amber Spyglass,  I would have some reservations about allowing this book to fall into her hands until she was significantly older. The tone of this book is just too dark at times and in some cases just too brutal. Do not forget that it is actually two of our beloved characters, both young women, who have been raped in this second trilogy and on each occasion they have been over powered and violated, while their struggle has been shown to be useless, there was nothing that they could do to prevent it. Yes, misogyny like this does exist, but do I want to encourage my niece to read such things or do I want to protect her from just how awful society can be?

I suppose that I shall just have to wait for two long damnable years to find out what is going to happen next to our dear Lyra, but while we wait we do have the new BBC show to look forwards to. There were moments while reading this book that I looked up from the page to discover my partner was watching the television and there before me was the young woman who had portrayed Lyra in the film of the Golden Compass. Her depiction of Lyra and all of her depth was remarkable for a child who had never acted before and it is uplifting to know that she was able to put the film behind her and continue with her career. I am bitter about that film because it feels like it was scuttled by the studio and the blame was placed at the feet of the religious bigots who had probably never ready the books. The shame of it was that much of the anti-catholic rhetoric had been removed and still the religiously indoctrinated were not satisfied until they had ruined it and stripped it of meaning and value. If anything, that just makes the making of this series even more important. I very much doubt though that should this series be a success, The Secret Commonwealth will also be filmed for this age group.

[lordeasriel]

tagged by @laciefuyu thank u!!!

icon:  marisa coulter (the golden compass)

blog content: mostly his dark materials and star wars, with a pinch of tv shows and games. and me writing meta on asriel’s glass of tokay.

letter colour: orangey

header: marisa pulling a mission impossible

url: lordasriel was unavailable so i had to use the brazilian version of it. no, i am not a huge lorde stan lmao this for his dark materials and his dark materials alone. please give me the lordasriel url pls i beg u lmao

blog title: a lyric from daft punk’s touch.

name: Fernanda, tho people just call me effie now cause it’s easier.

zodiac: caprico(ld)rn

favorite musicians or bands: jack stauber, tom rosenthal, foals, balthazar, of monsters and men, marina, this list is always changing tbh

favorite sports team: i’m not a sports fan 

other blogs: i don’t have any other blogs other than my previous url ones.

do I get asks: i do, at regular intervals, which i appreciate!

how many blogs do I follow: currently 549

what I’m wearing: improvised pajamas cause my actual pajamas need to be washed but i ain’t dealing with that today lmao

dream vacation: oslo and brighton

dream car: i dont mind cars very much. as long as it’s easy to drive, i’m fine.

favorite food: pastel and pizza.

drink of choice: coffee with milk, caipirinha (very alcoholic lol), any fruity cocktails with vodka, sprite.

languages: portuguese as native, english (advanced i’d say, i understand and write well, i do have an accent when speaking so i’m always shy about it). i do moderately understand written spanish.

celebrity crush: nicole kidman, james mcavoy, daisy ridley, oscar isaac, pedro pascal and currently ana de armas.

random fact: i have an excellent memory when it comes to useless information, such as remembering characters names. i cannot remember, however, what i had for dinner yesterday.

given i’ve been tagging many people recently and i don’t wanna flood all of u, i’m not tagging anyone specific but if u want to do this, feel free to do it as tagged by me, even if we’re not mutuals!