#THREE LINED BOOKS

[mie-png]

Something that happened to me today so im putting hesh through it too

[vor-leser]

"Oh wise Athena, help them see..."

[catharsis-in-a-bottle]

^

the Extremely Normal Vimes/Vetinari Dynamic ™️ in jingo

[hoshizoralone]

[dansemacabre]

i’ve been thinking about “sixer, it would eat you alive” since i read it and. man. every layer you peel back makes it worse. im not a bill apologist but. shit

if you (1) take it at face value, it paints bill as an apologetic murderer in his single (and maybe sole) open moment of regret. he doesn’t let his walls down often- only with ford do we even get to see the remnant of his galaxy, see the “actual remorse” ford describes, get just a hint of his origins. but he does it, because he thinks ford should know.

if you (2) take it from ford’s point of view, as something he committed to journal three, like. wow. imagine being so committed to a being that you’d hunt down and kill the monster that destroyed his home, only to (assumably) figure out later that that being was the monster. the small moments of trust, the “good times”, are so key to manipulation. how long did ford hold onto that one shred of vulnerability? no wonder ford stayed for as long as he did. in his eyes, bill was a survivor. ford wanted to survive too.

(slight tw below for unreality- any time i mention our reality, i mean “our reality” as a narrative device used in the book of bill as a proxy for the idea of bill being in our reality, since he can’t actually be in our reality. all of this is a fictional theory about a show/book with fictional contents!)

but if you (3) remember that “even his lies are lies” and absolutely Nothing bill says should be trusted. Whoo boy. if i read tbob right the book itself is being created in the theraprism (even tho it shows up with the ciphertologists at some point? idk that’s a whole other post). it’s meant to show what the reader wants to see; it manifests in our reality as what the collective fandom wants to see. so if we want to see truth, if we want to see where bill ended up and who he actually is, there’s a non-zero chance that the whole interaction was a complete fabrication.

imagine bill, stuck in the actively harmful, probably earth-illegal theraprism, once again being forced to be “fixed” and molded into something more palatable, being forced to conform no matter how much it hurts. (i know natural uncontrollable mutation ≠ just so much murder and destruction and chaos, but. you can’t ignore the similarities. bill has obviously been thinking about those silly straws.)

he looks back on everything that went wrong, back on his relationship with ford, back through every dimension where he wins. would that one moment, that one truth amid centuries of lies, have saved him from purgatory? if he had just been open? shown his damage? maybe he did think of his parents, or his henchmaniacs (especially the oracle). people who he might have once opened up to. maybe he just wanted to open up to someone again.

so in his own weird way, stuck in a cell, he reshaped reality again. in this reality, for this fleeting moment, he had been someone worth believing. and ford had listened, hell, ford had wanted to help. looking back, knowing how he treated ford, knowing how ford ended up because of it, maybe bill would have said the most honest thing he’d ever told ford: i am the monster, i am not worth your time or belief, and i will eat you alive.

[octoir]

tomarry hot take: I actually don’t think Harry would even come close to defeating Tom in a duel

I think he COULD come close, with extreme levels of training and practice, but that classic “step into DADA and whoop Tom’s ass” scene? guys…I have something to confess.

Tom’s a fucking nerd.

he’s studied and practiced dark magic for years. he’s canonically regarded by DUMBLEDORE as the most brilliant student to ever walk through Hogwarts. Tom would DESTROY him.

imho the real fun of tomarry comes from the subsequent arc of Harry training to defeat him, and then actually coming close, and THEN Tom starts to become intrigued bc who the fuck is this semi-competent little shit?? and why is he now thinking about him all the time??

[nafohcnis]

Oh what a day !!!

[the-plantman-is-queer]

I’m going insane rn

Doing one of my never-ending rereads and... even when Neil hated Andrew and fully believed all the worst rumors, he still expected someone to be in Andrew’s corner... and then in book three we see him decide to be that person:

something about the way Neil, a perfect stranger to the concepts of friendship and teamwork, still expected better from Andrew’s team and family... I know that’s the entire core of their relationship but it still knocks a hole in my chest to see it laid out so baldly

[atopvisenyashill]

The Girl In Grey

After wildlings attack the Tourney of the Winged Knights, Sansa takes the chance to escape Littlefinger’s control and makes for the Wall, to reunite with the only family she believes is left alive - her half brother Jon Snow.

Unbeknownst to Sansa, Jon Snow’s body has at last healed from the murder attempt and awakened, and is making plans to take the wildlings he has with him and march on Winterfell. The unlikely duo happily join forces to reclaim their home - and find they have much more in common now than they did as small children.

[jacarandaaaas]

I don’t think we would have survived the argument scene if it was the book version…

[anna-scribbles]

truly my only gripe with chalice of the gods is that percy did not use riptide once during the whole thing

[cassandrva]

let's talk about the fish/water/christ symbolism in the game of kings. with spoilers

fish (as ιχθυς) is an acronym for christ, and it's the first food jesus eats after being resurrected, right? it symbolizes rebirth, life, and christ himself. i personally think fish are slippery and cold-blooded too, but that's neither here nor there.

now look at how the game of kings starts: "lymond is back". we immediately know this book is about returning, it's about rebirth. in fact, the first thing we see is the man himself submerged in a body of water and coming out on the other side, after a baptism of sorts, as the character he will play for most of the book: lymond the outlaw, lymond the traitor.

the first words out of his mouth are "i am a narwhal": he identifies himself as a fish right away, and not just any fish but the unicorn fish; the unicorn of course being scotland's national animal. in perspective, he tells us everything we need to know about him: his status as a christ figure, his destiny to be reborn, his complicated relationship with his country.

the next time he's in a body of water, it's the second chapter and he's dying from a head injury in a bog. he's washed clean, this time, too: from his own identity. he's free to inhabit another character from the lymond constellation. it's also pretty funny that he's found by sym while he's going fishing ("you’ve hooked a twenty-pounder this time, my lad"), and he's nursed back to health by someone named Christian. not subtle.

lymond seems to be pretty into this whole fish and rebirth thing, does he not? he wouldn't lie to us. he wouldn't pretend to embrace life while actively seeking death, right? anyway, no relation at all, when the baby queen mary tries feeding him a fish he pretends to eat it and secretly throws it away. the fish is described as struggling and barely alive, which again i am sure is a coincidence.

then some stuff happens, and the next time lymond is offered fish he doesn't have it in him to keep pretending. he doesn't want the damn fish. newsflash, asshole (richard): he really, really wants to die. this is my favorite scene for many reasons, and one of them is the perfect juxtaposition of its literal and symbolic meanings: richard says he wants to see lymond hanged, but what he does is to drag him away from the tomb-like dovecote and towards running water, makes him eat the damn fish again and again until the miracle is complete. he's holding on to his brother with both hands and teeth before he even realizes he's doing it.

when it comes to an end the fish is off the hook, christ is off the cross and for once he's not sacrificed for the sins of others, and we close on him in his mother's arms in a beautiful literary pietà.

there's so much stuff i purposefully didn't mention and probably didn't notice, this is just a tiny example of the gorgeous figurative and thematic cohesion in this novel. i love it. thank you dorothy dunnett.

[kyouka-supremacy]

(╥﹏╥)

[asexualsimonsnow]

A few people in the tags on my Agatha romance plot line poll are voicing the same sorts of thoughts I had. I did not like her romance plot line because she had all these lines in the two previous books that, to me and many others, were implying her aromanticism. To have a chapter from her POV where she expresses feeling broken due to a suspected inability to feel that type of attraction only to later have this “resolved” by her finding the right person was extremely frustrating and disappointing.

Even beyond an aro reading of the character, it’s disappointing to see her coupled up at the end of the third book. So much of the first book was about subverting the expectations that come from these types of stories. One of these expectations seemed to me to be not just that the chosen one gets the perfect girl, but that all the characters are neatly coupled up by the end and have romance as a part of their story. In the first book not only is Agatha not with Simon, the chosen one, her supposed destiny, she’s not interested in coupling up and fulfilling that expectation placed on her by the world in which she lives and by the type of story she inhabits, at all. It feels like backtracking on her character growth to watch a romance play out for her in the third book.

[ackaff]

Hey its okay, The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness, okay?

[waitineedaname]

im rereading bits of the airplane extras and man i would kill for more night hunt missions with sqh + sqq + lqg in their disciple days, theyre so ridiculous