#T Kingfisher

[tam--lin]

@beradan and I went to the Connecticut Renaissance Faire today as unnamed White Rat and Saint of Steel acolytes.

Emily's embroidery is from art by @magpiemalarkey, mine was designed by my partner based on art from various Kingfisher romance covers.

[msunitedstatesjames]

Most fairy tale retellings: The evil person in fairy tales is just misunderstood.

T. Kingfisher fairy tale retellings: Actually, the evil person in fairy tales is even more evil than you thought.

[bookofthegear]

Oh, because I forgot to do this earlier and people asked, your total run avoided fourteen definite deaths and one Bad Choice that, while not outright fatal, would have meant that your luck would turn sour. (That doesn’t have, like, a randomized effect, given that much of this is improv, but ropes would snap, rungs would break, just how potable IS that water, maybe the pointy people did actually see your light and are lying in wait, etc.)

(Yes, there are actually things you can do to piss off the labyrinth. I won’t go into any details, because that would be too easy, but they do tend to be fairly obviously Significant Choices.)

Overall, you made it much, much deeper into the maze than any other players have, and a couple times I had to scramble to think “Jeez, what IS in that next room, anyway?” because you’d outrun my mental map.

Good job! The cabbages are proud.

[crabs-with-sticks]

Just a lil rant about my newest beloved fantasy author

Something I love so, so much about T Kingfisher's (@tkingfisher) work is how she portrays the mundane as something so beautiful and wonderful. The majority of her protagonists are all quite regular people, with regular lives, regular hobbies, and regular bodies. And how despite that, all her characters are so interesting, so lovable, and so deeply and utterly human.

Its amazing seeing a series where multiple female romantic leads are plus sized, and there is a mix of both body positivity and body neutrality. Because like yeah, they are gorgeous. But also, at the end of the day bodies are just bodies. A bit in Paladin's Faith got me thinking about this, where the male lead asks about the female lead's stretchmarks, and its very much treated as just a normal thing that she has as a woman, not detracting from her beauty, not adding to it. They just are.

And don't get me started about how nearly all of her male romantic leads, who are for the most part, big, strong, sword-wielding paladins, have knowledge of some form of textile craft, and how it doesn't detract from their masculinity at all. And instead it is something that would actually be very useful for a soldier to know.

Tldr if anybody else is obsessed with T Kingfisher's work as much as I am please let me know so that my long suffering reading friend can have a break from it.

[beradan]

It's RenFaire crunch time!!

Original art by @magpiemalarkey based on the World of the White Rat novels by @tkingfisher

Faire is in two weeks. Send help.

[dessertgeek]

The Twitter Mari Lwyd sagas (2019)

So way back in 2019, @seananmcguire and @tkingfisher (and also later @kbspangler) got into a whole poetry/rap battle involving the poor Mari Lwyd (played by Seanan) just trying to get some cheese from Ursula's stores. This went on for a few years, and I can't find transcribed sources, only screenshots.

So, with X/Twitter being What It Is, I wanted a text source to exist. CW for food, alcohol, and all the caps, and full credit to the authors. If you want the original source it's here.

Seanan: WE'RE HERE TO SAY PLEASE WON'T YOU GIVE US SOME CHEESE SOME CHEESE AND SOME BRANDY OR PORT. THIS FESTIVE HORSE SKULL HAS BEEN SHOVED ON A POLE SO GRANT ME YOUR FINEST RETORT.

Ursula: BEGONE WITH YOUR POLE (YOU CAN LEAVE THE NEAT SKULL) DEMANDING MY FOOD IS EXTORTION FOR CHEESE IS QUITE DEAR AND WILL BE WORSE NEXT YEAR AND I CAN’T SPARE YOU EVEN A PORTION

Seanan: IF IT'S HEAD FOR A HEAD, I COULD TAKE YOURS INSTEAD, THAT SEEMS LIKE A TRADE THAT'S QUITE FAIR BUT DECAPITATION REQUIRES CONTEMPLATION, I'D RATHER THAT CHEESE OVER THERE.

Ursula: YOU COME ‘ROUND WITH THE BITS OF A HORSE THAT IS QUITS DEMANDING I GIVE YOU MY CHEDDAR BUT HEY, YOU HAVE SAID, AT LEAST IT’S NOT MY HEAD— I’M SUPPOSED TO THINK THIS IS BETTER!?

Seanan: I AM NOT A QUITTER, NO NEED TO BE BITTER, AND I'D TAKE YOUR GOUDA OR BRIE. YOU ASKED FOR MY HEAD, THINKING THAT SINCE I'M DEAD YOU COULD JUST KIDNAP PIECES OF ME. I HAVE INFINITE TIME AND THE PATIENCE TO RHYME AND I'LL STAND HERE LIMITLESSLY.

Ursula: AND WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT ON NOT-QUITE-LONGEST-NIGHT TO MAKE FREE WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S CHEESES? YOU THINK ‘COS YOU SHOW WITH A WEIRD SKULL IN TOW IT CAN ASK FOR WHATEVER IT PLEASES?

Seanan: THAT'S JUST WHAT I THINK, GIVE ME CHEESE, GIVE ME DRINK, AND I'LL NO MORE CAST DARK ON YOUR DOOR. I'M NO TINSEL OR TREE, I'M CELEBRATORY OF SURVIVAL ON HEATH AND IN MOOR.

Ursula: THERE’S NO HEATH AND NO MOOR BETWEEN HERE AND THE SHORE I COULD MAYBE GET YOU A BOG IN LIEU OF MY BRIE WHICH I’M HOARDING FOR ME WHAT IF—LOOK, SEANAN! A FROG!

Seanan: THAT WAS JUST DIRTY POOL, AND YOU KNOW THERE'S NO RULE THAT SAYS I CAN'T LEAVE AND COME BACK. NOW THERE'S MUD ON MY SHOES I WON'T LET YOU REFUSE THIS FESTIVE DIGESTIVE ATTACK.

Ursula: ALL’S FAIR, SO THEY SAY WHEN CHEESE IS IN PLAY ALTHOUGH I ADMIT TO DECEPTION WHILE YOU CHASED A FROG I SCARFED THAT CHEESE LOG AT PERSONAL COST TO DIGESTION

Seanan: THEN I'LL COME FOR YOUR BOOZE I'M NOT LONGING TO LOSE, AND THIS IS THE HOLIDAY SEASON. I'LL STAND HERE AND SING AS THE MORRIS BELLS RING AND YOUR GUTS CONTEMPLATE CHOOSING TREASON.

Ursula: I’VE NO BRANDY NOR GIN THE SCOTCH STORES ARE THIN BUT OF A SOLUTION I’M THINKIN’ THIS HOUSE’S LIBATION AGAVE’S CREATION WILL NEVERTHELESS GET YOU STINKIN’ IF IT’S BOOZE THAT YOU’RE FOR BONE HORSE FROM THE MOOR IT’S TEQUILA THAT WE WILL BE DRINKIN’

Seanan: WE'LL GET HAMMERED LIKE BOARDS WHEN THE LIQUOR GETS POURED, THEY'LL ASSEMBLE US LIKE WE'RE IKEA. THERE ARE WORSE THINGS TO DO THAN START DRINKING WITH YOU. I'M SO HAPPY THAT I CAME TO SEE YA.

Ursula: I LOVE EVERY ENTITY IN THIS BAR *falls down*

[kneesntoess]

the white rat priests about the saint of steel paladins: if you can't get organic, home grown paladins, store bought is fine

[designstack]

Kingfisher. Drawing.

Realistic Colour Pencil Bird Drawings. More art from Bele, on our site.

https://www.designstack.co/2024/03/realistic-colour-pencil-bird-drawings.html

[terapsina]

Let's talk books. Sorted in threes by vibes.

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I Support Women's Wrongs (murder, slaughter and body horror galore).

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How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Django Wexler - A woman from Earth is dropped into a magical realm, meant to save the Kingdom from the FoRCes of DaRKneSSss... except, unfortunately that might have been a thousand years worth of time loops ago, so it's rather time to lose one's temper and decide to become the Dark Lord herself.

Main character -> basically Deadpool (measured in sanity, humor and levels of bisexual horniness)).

Someone You Can Build a Nest In ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by John Wiswell - Shesheshen, a shapechanging monster who's rudely interrupted during her hibernation by hunters. Manages to to eat one of them, unfortunately she also gets shot by an arrow and falls off a cliff. On the bright side she meets a lovely human woman she might end up falling in love with so much... she'll want to build a nest in her (it's possible there's some Cultural Differences that need to be worked through).

Hench ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Natalie Zina Walschots - Anna's latest temp job for a villain (because even supervillains need office help) ends with her carelessly injured by a superhero, laid off and with injured mobility for the foreseeable future (because human bodies don't see much difference between getting hit by a truck and getting moved out of way by someone able to pick up a truck). Angry, disillusioned, and looking for some vengeful payback she starts compiling the statistics of exactly how much suffering gets left behind the heroes and in quick order finds a new job working for one of the worst supervillains in the neighborhood.

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Extremely Competent Women Show Up to Fix Everyone's Shit (with a whallop of romance which was actually sweet instead of irritating)

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The Witchwood Knot ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Olivia Atwater - Winifred Hall was invited to the Witchwood Manor under the pretense of being the governess for a very bratty kid, but when said boy suddenly turns into a very quiet and perfectly bland boy overnight it's very obvious her charge has been stolen by faeries (and it might have something to do with the actual reason she's there). Rescue however is complicated by some factors, one, there being something terribly dark and wrong about the house (normal houses don't have screaming faces in the walls), another, the faerie man posing as the manor's butler who would very much like to make her run screaming the way so many servants had before her (unfortunately for him, she's not even half as scared of him as she is the eyes of the father of her charge).

This one's about dealing with past trauma, and otherworldly terrors paling in comparison to mundane monsters, set in a very beautiful and dark and shiver-inducing Victorian time world where the Fair Folk are very real.

(Same world as her Regency Faerie Tales trilogy that Started with Half a Soul but it's not necessary to read that one first to enjoy this one)

Keeper of Enchanted Rooms ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Charlie N. Holmberg - Merritt Fernsby inherits a house only to be immediately taken hostage by what turns out to be a very stubborn and opinionated magical house. Hulda Larkin of the Boston Institute for the Keeping of Enchanted Rooms goes there to facilitate the relationship between the house and its new owner.

It's supposed to be a very simple job. Unfortunately there's a third POV character in this book (no, not the Whimbrel House, though I adore that house and *insert here the Rosa Diaz gif about her new puppy and how she would kill everyone in this room and then herself if anything were to happen to that dog*). Anyway, they're a bit... uhhh... let's go with Bad News.

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Heather Fawcett - As one might expect from the title, Emily (a Cambridge scholar) wants to write the first ever encyclopedia of faeries. And she's brilliant enough to do it, what she's terrible at is people (*insert autistic character alert here*).

Someone else might then say it's lucky that a fellow scholar with a far easier time at charming people has stuck his toes in her reaserch trip into the Hidden Ones... that person however doesn't understand how irritating, frustrating and maddening her academic rival Wendell Bambleby actually is.

What follows is a story filled with winter snows, some terrible fae, some adorable fae, some not-very-secret fae, the goodest of good dogs, and lots and lots of squabbling. It's the best.

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Dark and Impactful Stories about Children Who Decide on Their Own Paths

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A Skinful of Shadows ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Frances Hardinge - Kate, an orphan and the illegitimate daughter of some stuffy (and evil) aristocrats runs away because being a bastard doesn't mean she didn't inherit the family magic that allows her to get possessed by the dead.

A dead bear ghost is one thing, a Get Out situation is something else entirely.

A Sorceress Comes to Call ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by T. Kingfisher - Cordelia isn't allowed friends or the privacy of closed doors, and whenever she's done something she shouldn't - a category too unpredictable to guard against - she's not allowed power over her own body.

Because her mother is an evil sorceress (think Regina and Cora... except somehow even worse). An evil sorceress that has found herself a Squire to lure into a marriage.

Hester is an old maid living with her brother, a Squire (well look at them coincidences), when said brother acquires a woman clearly set on his fortune. The plan is only to save her brother, except Hester can't help noticing how the woman's daughter keeps flinching in her mother's presence.

In The Lives of Puppets ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by TJ Klune - A family can be an android inventor, his human son (*homoromantic asexual alert*), a sadistic nurse droid, and a very emotional roomba.

And it can be a very happy family. Until one uncovers and wakes up an android that shares a very Skynet past with one's father, said father gets kidnapped, and one has to go on a journey to get him back.

(A book I like to call Sci-fi Reverse Pinocchio)

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Unraveling an Unjust System (and a hero that - on a scale from occasionally to constantly - hears a disembodied voice directly in their heads okay the connection between these three is a bit of a stretch but they're all great books so shut up)

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Hell for Hire ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Rachel Aaron - 5000 years ago Gilgamesh conquered the heavens, enslaved the demons and made it so that the only road to magic humanity had access, was through him.

Now, however a mercenary team made up of free demons gets hired by a Blackwood witch to protect him (and his familiar, the talking cat named Boston) while he puts down roots (literally) inside the new forest grove he's about to start so that he can stand up against the warlocks after him.

The witch quickly becomes the best client Bex and her crew have ever had (after all, warlocks under the rule of the Eternal King Gilgamesh are slavers of their kind, they are delighted at the chance to kill some).

Vespertine ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Margaret Rogerson - In a world where the veil between the living and the dead has been kinda broken Artemisia (*another autistic character alert*) is training to be a Gray Sister (magic nun).

Until her convent gets attacked by possessed soldiers and she has no choice but to pick up a Saint's Relic containing a malevolent revenant to protect it.

Problem. Only a Vespertine is supposed to do it. Another problem. The only one "alive" who can teach her to be a Vespertine is the revenant. Another another problem. The revenant cannot be trusted and if she loses control to it, the death toll will be counted in cities.

Terminal Alliance ⭐⭐⭐⭐¾ by Jim C. Hines - Post Zombie Apocalypse, where some aliens showed up, sort of cured the zombies and took the (mostly) cured zombies into their military.

Which leads us to Marion Adamopoulos, also known as Mops, the Leutenant in charge of Shipboard Hygene and Sanitation of the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish.

Right up until a bioweapon turns the entire crew except her crew back into zombies. Congratulations, she's the captain now.

(Space Janitors save the universe story).

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[abbitha1108]

T Kingfisher books are like "Here's an average woman who is very relatable. She's going to experience The Horrors. There is at least one person who will experience The Horrors alongside her, as a treat. The Horrors change her as a person and also occasionally make her have a complete mental breakdown. Sometimes she goes to a coffee shop."

[fandomsandfeminism]

Oof yall. The 2023 Hugo controversy has gotten much, much worse.

The Hugo's are another big Scifi/Fantasy book award, basically only second in prestige to the Nebulas. It's held by WorldCon, so who runs the awards changes each year- its handled by whatever group is doing the con.

And in 2023, it was held in China. And at the time, the finalist list took FOREVER to come out, and when it did, Babel (which had won the Nebula and Locus awards already) wasn't even nominated. Which everyone thought was *suspicious*

And NOW the actual nomination ballot data has come out. And not only do some of the counts... seem.....weird. BUT we've found out that not only Babel, but also Xiran Jay Zhao (who wrote the Chinese Yugioh book lol), and Sandman were disqualified late in nomination for being "ineligible" with no explanation for WHY.

The obvious explanation is Chinese censorship, either for the queer content, though other queer works were still included (including Legends and Lattes and Nona the Ninth), or some other political themes. Kuang and Zhou have content in their books that the Chinese government might not...love. but I dunno why Sandman got snubbed then? This is all speculation, but since the people actually running 2024 WorldCon are refusing to answer questions, what should we think? Neil Gaiman apparently tried to get answers and was basically brushed off.

And people are piiiiiiiissed

Mostly, I feel bad for T Kingfisher, who won Best Novel at the Hugo's for Nettle and Bone. Nettle and Bone was a great book! And now this win is always going to have this sheen of ick on it.

[tam--lin]

Good evening, I just spent two hours on a World of the White Rat "what religious order do you belong in" quiz.

[jjelliacee]

she was such a small, inoffensive toad and such a small, inoffensive human

[bookofthegear]

Long, long ago, before Twitter descended into its end-stage hellscape, I ran a few iterations of a weird little choose-your-own-adventure game there, where I used the poll functions to offer options as we traversed a strange concrete labyrinth. I’d like to do that again. But as the shortest poll I can run is one day, this is more like a play-by-mail than a real-time on-the-fly. Fewer choices, but hey, you do get much longer descriptions!

The Rules

- Your choices are by majority poll (though if there are two identical options, they may be weighed together)

- If y’all choose to do something boneheaded, you WILL die, and the game will begin again with a new adventurer (who may someday find your corpse!)

- If y’all choose to retire and raise cabbages, by god, I will send you home to raise cabbages, which is sort of a happily ever after

- If you played on Twitter, please be kind and don’t spoiler too hard for the new players! Also, don’t assume the maze is still the same…

- Life being what it is, I cannot promise every update will land as soon as the poll closes—I love you guys, but y’know

Let’s begin, shall we?

You, friend, are the latest graduate of the Wentworth School Of Exploration and Adventure (Goooo Fighting Codfish!) the second-best explorer’s school in the city. You left behind your grandmother’s cabbage farm in pursuit of higher, better, possibly more fatal things.

It was at Wentworth that you first came across a reference to the works of Eland the Younger, that wandering naturalist, historian…okay, occasionally out-and-out liar…and his great fragmentary work, the Book of the Gear. It detailed his descent into a great clockwork labyrinth, filled with strange creatures and stone gears. Even for Eland, it’s a bit weird. Most scholars dismiss it outright as a fabrication, and the few professors who would talk to you about it strongly suggested that it was dangerous and you should ignore any rumors about its location and do something else. (Possibly on one of their projects! For course credit, obviously, not money.)

You didn’t listen. It was all just more academic cabbages as far as you’re concerned. It took a lot of research and guesswork and a lot of slogging, but after cutting your way through the overgrown woods, miles from any town, you find yourself standing before a stone wall with an immense crack in it. The edge of a stone gear taller than a man is just visible inside.

A small finch sits on a branch nearby, waiting.

Wentworth students are highly trained in the arts of adventuring, including Hiking, Skulking, Orienteering, and deciphering avian interpretive dance. Which brings us to the first question!

[freckles-and-books]

Currently reading: I can never stay away from Kingfisher for long.

[brianadrawsbooks]

I've always been a big Poe fan and a big T. Kingfisher fan, so I was thrilled to find out she's written her own take on The Fall of the House of Usher.

This spooky little book has all the gothic Victorian vibes of the original along with some new sci-fi concepts and a non-binary protagonist. While I loved seeing things from Alex's viewpoint, Maddy was the character who I really wanted to paint. She's a little bit crazy, a little bit dead, and absolutely fantastic.