#THE BORROWERS

[kxttsstuff]

Favorite g/t prompts or scenarios!

Some of them are really specific but anyway I hope you like them. <3

📍;; Partners in crime, the human and the borrower are both thieves who help each other in the lower cities.

🫀;; Borrower siblings who lost their parents, and now have a human friend looking over for them.

🍀;; A clumsy, loser borrower who is basically a nerd; and would do very good if they were a human instead. Maybe they discover with the human that this borrower is a math genius.

🌱;; A middle aged borrower who is not as agile as they were when they were young, still very distrustful from humans but manages to slowly open up.

🐺;; The human gets shrunk to the borrower's height and learns how to live with it.

📂;; The borrower shows the human their family traditions, such as food and stories. Much to the human's surprise, some of these stories are blatant human-targeted.

🧵;; The borrower wants to gift something to the human, and ends with really small gifts, such as a tiny scarf (that the human thinks it's a bracelet), or small baked goods. Alternatively, the human is gifted a drawing by a child which features the height difference.

📖;; The human teaches the borrower how to read and write, who never had the chance to do so.

👁️;; A blind human who believes their house borrower is just a ghost, until they reveal themselves as their true self.

🪲;; The borrower has a pet, such as a pill bug or a bee.

💌;; The borrower uses a piece of clothing of the human to make their own clothes, and later the human finds a hole in them and the little guy wearing a new pattern.

🌸;; A borrower and a human communicate in letters or in text messages (maybe from a borrowed phone), and much later on the borrower decides to reveal themselves.

[borrowingtheborrower]

I feel like I'm the only person who actively looks up the development of this show. I've been waiting since 2018 lol.

[gtinthepot]

Illusion from the borrowers afield 1952

[gtzel]

Finished my borrower cosplay!!! Super excited to go out and show people

[duscarasheddinn]

I just think it's adorable when Arrietty rides Sho's shoulder. And I ship them (and have written several fics shipping them). They're already friends, so maybe shipping them romantically would be friends to lovers?

[ravetillyoucry]

G/T TOBER DAY 9: Exploration

[ittybluebell]

*opens my trench coat* psst hey c'mere i've got gt pose refs

*shaking my post like a bag of treats* pspspspsps

[mocksart]

based on this post

[tea-potato-gt]

Oh, what's this? 🤔

A link to the entire Mary Norton novel: "The Borrowers Afield" on the internet archive?? 🤯

(AKA my favorite borrowers book)

Who put that there? 👀 👁️👄👁️ 👀

Chapter 18 and 19 are my favorite, 10/10 G/t content (page 125) 🫣 (though you might need chapter 17 for context lol)

Young Tom Goodenough deserved the WORLD 🌍 Mary Norton did my boy DIRTY 😤

[night-scribe]

Off and on i think about how borrowers can’t really enjoy hot drinks because a little drop or two of a hot drink would go cold too fast for it to actually be hot by the time they drank much of it

But now i’m wondering.. what if, because of this, communal hot drinks are part of borrower culture..? Like, if everyone poured themselves a cup of tea, they’d have a bunch of room-temperature cups of tea pretty fast, but if the tea stayed in a pot over a small fire and everyone drank directly from that..? Either sipping it slowly through something like a straw, using a dipping utensil and plain ol’ surface tension to bring up little drops to sip, or even maybe using a short length of string like a wick and sucking on the end of it. Even if the water is boiling, i assume it would cool to drinking temperature by the time it got to their mouth, if they do it right.

Maybe in cold climates, it’s normal to have a pot of water constantly simmering on the fire to warm oneself up with periodically, since tinies can’t hold onto body heat as well.

[a-chaotically-small-lunta]

What if, in a neighborhood every house had a family of borrowers secretly living inside? And what if the neighborhood always got together and had a big potluck every year on the same day, and one year the borrowers decide to do the same with all the borrowers in the neighborhood? Just imagine a little potluck full of borrowers, maybe even fairies and other tinies! Bringing different foods and cultures together, just having a blast. All the kids are playing together and it’s just a fun gathering for them all to catch up and maybe even trade some items and information with each other. Also imagine being a human and walking in on it. You wake up and look outside and see just this tiny party hanging out on your porch or something.

Anyway here’s a question for you all. What would your tiny OCs or tiny sona bring to the potluck?

I know David (my borrower OC) would bring a stew cause that’s his specialty. My man loves stews, they taste like home.

[kxttsstuff]

Borrowers being amazed.

🪡---------------------------------------------------------

An injured or sick borrower admiring their human friend who studies medicine, admiring their technical knowledge of anatomy, amazed as they are able to perform a surgery or to quickly identify a disease thought to be lethal for them.

A borrower thought to be clumsy, amazed as their human friend makes them their first ever pair of glasses, and realizes they weren't even 'clumsy' in the first place.

A borrower amazed at realizing the scale of the world, just by explaining the continents and oceans, or being taken to a really tall building or astonishing landscape.

A borrower amazed after realizing how many humans exist in the world, and then wondering if borrowers are really that scarce.

A borrower completely amazed after witnessing a magic trick, thinking the human genuinely read their mind for a sec.

A borrower, amazed after seeing the human taking care of a bug, rodent or other creature humans normally fear or disgust.

A borrower amazed after finally being able to show the human their living place inside the walls, through a videocall.

---------------------------------------------------------🧵

[conman167936]

Borrowers In The Apocalypse

So I had this idea specifically while thinking about The Last Of Us, but any zombie apocalypse story will do.

A few days after the initial outbreak, the existence of borrowers is revealed to the world. See, borrowers can get infected just like humans, and tiny zombies don’t care as much about staying out of sight. So humans discover tiny zombies, and soon after, tiny people.

However, this revelation is completely overshadowed by everything else going on in the middle of the apocalypse. Humans, quite literally, have bigger things to worry about.

And so over time, borrowers just kind of… assimilate themselves into the human quarantine zones. Obviously there are some bad humans who want to kill and cage borrowers, but a lot of humans are pretty on board with coexisting alongside tiny people. It’s not like they use up a ton of resources.

But here’s where things get interesting. You might think a zombie apocalypse would be super dangerous for borrowers, but they’re actually holding their own better than most of the humans. After all, the average borrower has way better survival skills than the average human. They’ve had to survive against impossible odds all their lives, whereas humans are just now having this problem.

And so we start to see interesting alliances start to form between borrowers and humans. Borrowers can teach humans everything they know about survival, in exchange for food and shelter. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

Now, when it comes to the zombies, borrowers are actually really good at staying out of sight. Most zombies never even think to look down. But tiny zombies are actually significantly more of a threat to a borrower… unless you have a human friend who can just squish them.

So yeah, a human and a borrower as a badass apocalypse duo.

[sapphicslaylist]

Slay The Princess Borrower Fic, Anyone?

Life has never been safe for a Borrower in a world governed by humans. Viewed as evil omens, any power-bearing “Fae” find themselves prey to black market circles where their fates are drawn to the highest bidder. And sometimes, the winners prefer to place them into the ring and hedge their bets even higher on a gladiatorial fight against something much, much worse.

As is the fate of a pair of escaped siblings, surviving in the woods by the skin of their teeth. But when evading their opponent proves too challenging, it may take deciding between trusting the owner of a nearby cabin or trying to outrun an enemy that can’t be killed.

But the tenants of that safe haven have one damning condition: they must reveal themselves to him first to be granted shelter. In order to make peace with the present, it may take unraveling the horrors of the past and the entwined destines between them all to save who still remains of all Borrowers, Cryptids, and Fae - and perhaps even the very forest itself.

When on Borrowed paths, some things cannot be returned.

Info on the series, its inspiration, and the intended message of the fic are under the cut! You do not need to know anything about Borrowers to understand the story; just think “Princess Tiny.”

Please take care of yourself while reading. Themes of Realistic PTSD, STP-Typical Violence, Internalized Ableism, and Childhood Trauma are all major factors in this work. While I can promise a kinder ending, much like Slay The Princess itself, have heart and see the horrors through. This is a love story about how to trust again.

Was very determined to have the first of these up in the fandom and it appears I managed to do so! For those unfamiliar with the Borrowers, the basic gist of the series is that they’re mouse-sized people who live underneath the floorboards and survive off of lost objects. The original series does depict their plight with humanity (“beans”) and survival of genocidal practices including extermination, imprisonment for entertainment, and otherwise dehumanizing aspects. Combined with the elements of Slay the Princess which often stand for feminine survival of abuse, these two themes clicked together nicely for a properly dark and heartfelt exploration of survival and recovery. All are properly researched and/or experienced, and maintain respect to victims.

I’ve often found myself dissatisfied by how quickly Borrower fics tend to have the beans & borrowers mingle, or how romanticized the brutalism is on people who stand as reference for marginalized communities. For this reason, this work is done as a depiction of their existence in contrast to these actions, and all trust build (handheld elements, interaction of free will, and other prominent soft tropes in this fic) are built up to vs gained immediately. Expect some slow burn and relationship conflict which will be resolved.

I do hope you enjoy it!

[gtzel]

Grinding all day and finally finished The Boy in the Walls [webcomic] episode 6!

Read the entire comic and get regular updates on the WEBTOON