#ahro

[abbacchio37]

the vanished birds BROKE me

i have so many songs that i hear and think holyfuckitsniaandahrosrelationship or ahrooooo 😭

likeeethe lyrics yall

[bookantique]

they all have 2 hands!!!!! god i hate love triangles Get Fucked

[majorproblems77]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH THEM

THEM THEM THEM

@arecaceae175

THEM!

meteorologists report sky just a little bluer today, and it's because skyloft residents link and zelda are in love :)

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #55 – The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Introduction

The Spear Cuts Through Water was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I’ve been meaning to get around to Jimenez’ other work basically since I finished it. Months and months later, my TBR pile and the library’s hold queue cooperated and I finally got around to it. Of the two, you can definitely tell Birds is the debut novel, but despite the roughness I can’t help feeling like it's also the one I prefer. I do have complaints (of which, more below), and the story certainly has issues with structure and allocation of wordcount, but this really is the rare book where I feel no compunctions whatsoever giving five stars.

Knowing myself, this isn’t entirely unrelated to how fucking heartbreaking it is at points.

Synopsis

To brutally over-summarize, the book follows Nia, a starship captain hauling crops on a freight route from a ‘resource world’ to Pelican Station, one of the great centers of human civilization and Allied Space. Due to the peculiarities of faster than light travel, the round trip that is for her and her crew experienced as a span of months is for the people at both endpoints an absence of fifteen years – a convenient way for her to keep making the same mistakes as far as personal connections and relationships go. On the last loop of the route before her contract is completed, she finds herself taking care of a mute, deeply traumatized young boy discovered miraculously unharmed by the locals in what seemed like a fiery wreck. The boy – at first nonverbal, inexplicably a musical savant, deeply traumatized and mysterious in a hundred different ways – finds his way into her heart to the point that even after they return to Pelican and he’s been turned over to the security services, she can’t stop trying to find out what happened to him and making sure he’s alright.

It’s at this point that the two of them come to the attention of Fumiko Nakajima, the Millennium Woman – designer of the five great stations at the heart of Allied Space, and (thanks to the magic of cryo-sleep and FTL time differentials) one of the last survivors of long-dead Earth. She sees in the boy the possibility of something miraculous – truly instant interstellar travel – and so hires Nia and a few reliable agents to take him into Fringe Space, safely out of view of any of her ‘friends and colleagues’ who might take a similar interest in him. For fifteen years. The story then reveals itself to be one of, basically, child-rearing and coming of age – at least until the moment where the child’s miraculous abilities really do reveal themselves, and all at once things get much, much deadlier.

Structure

The book is – not quite incoherent (the thesis is very clear), but certainly unfocused. At first I thought that was rather the point – the first three chapters are each incredibly effective, melancholic short stories in their own rights'; each leapfrogging into the perspective of a character whose actions or legacy shaped the previous, but with dramatically different casts, setting and plots. These are almost certainly the most aesthetically successful and artistically disciplined sections of the book, and as I read them I assumed it would continue in the same vein for the entire book.

It does not – the book settles very firmly into being the story of Nia and the boy who is later named Ahro. The middle of the book is an almost light-hearted coming of age story, spread across the years Ahro spends growing up in the Galactic fringe with his ragtag accidental family. The final act then dramatically shifts tone again, becoming largely about recovering from betrayal and the destruction of your life, and of striving in defiance of all sense and reason to reconnect with someone you love.

There are, then, three very different vibes here, and I can’t say the shifts between them are handled with the most grace in the world. The book absolutely never stops experimenting with style either, shifting voice, perspective, level of detail, and even format (several chapters are relayed as diary entries) basically whenever the mood strikes it. It absolutely feels like an incredibly talented author showing off a bit beyond their limits – you can see the seams, the allocation of effort between the parts is...questionable, and there are a couple vital characters/subplots who just needed another chapter or two of focus – but it’s the sort of messiness that leaves me incredibly endeared.

Love, and its Discontents

Those first three chapters are essentially short stories connected by setting and a character or two – but most of all they’re connected by theme. Each is, one way or another, the story of the protagonist falling in love – the sort of love that defines a life, that cuts you to the core whenever you remember it – and then having that love fail, leaving the lover damaged or lessened in a way that never quite heals.

Things do not stay quite so melancholic, but for a story whose whole climax is centered around the quite literally metaphysical and reality-shaking power of pure love this book has a bracingly tragic sensibility of it. Love is hopelessly one-sided, or turns rancid with resentment for just long enough to make sure it can never be restored again. Romances end in betrayal and murder, bonds both sororial and paternal in half-thoughtless abandonment, soul-deep friendships in vicious arguments and a severing of ties. Love, the book says, is deeply contingent and often more transitory than it seems – and if it isn’t, that can do far more harm than good.

Nia as a protagonist has plenty of baggage about this. She’s introduced as a woman with deep abandonment issues – that is, she keeps abandoning people and then feeling bad about it (her ship is the Debby, after the kid sister who lived and died seeing her for a few days every fifteen years due to the time lag of interstellar shipping). She latches onto protecting and caring for Ahro almost more as an attempt at redemption for herself as anything about the boy himself, it’s only over time she really grows to love him as more than a talisman.

I can’t say it was particularly well-spent time, but the book does something I love at least the idea of. Nia’s crew is introduced in the second chapter with a fair amount of detail and personality, each of them having little idiosyncrasies and distinguishing habits and virtues; one is a best friend she found stranded on a wrecked hulk and nursed back to health. The whole dynamic is that of the grumbling and bickering but affectionate found family crew you’ve seen in a thousand other stories. So when she commits to spend up to fifteen years of her life taking care of Ahro on the galactic fringe in exchange for truly unbelievable amounts of money, she sits down with them, tells them the score, and asks them if they trust her enough to come with her.

And all but one of them say no, and never show up in the story again. Which is possibly the first time I have ever seen that kind of scene not end with re-commitment and affirmations of trust from at least most of the real characters that were asked.

This makes the whole found family situation with Nia, Ahro and (most of) the second crew that do spend years in the outskirts of ‘civilized’ space with them works for me far, far better than these things usually do. Because, unlike functionally every piece of fiction I can think of that’s ever been promoted as being about found families, this one really does sell it as something precious and exceptional, rare and worth fighting to preserve.

It also gets all but three of the people involved killed, of course, and of those three one’s permanently crippled and death would probably have been kinder for the second. The book’s really big on stretching ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ to the absolute breaking point – right up to someone choosing not to die despite an existence of nothing but torture and pain just for the infinitesimal bit of hope and connection of a loved one singing through the prison bars.

The Banality of Evil

The villain of the piece is, without question, the monolithic and monopolistic Umbai Corporation, something between a neocolonialist conglomerate and a sovereign, expansionist empire in the classic sense with a few affectations from its earthborn roots (the specifics of the politics of Allied Space are vague and in any case more impressionistic than anything like a detailed speculative political economy). Which is kind of fascinating, in that it is specifically the Corporation as a corporate body that is the villain – agency and responsibility are spread across whole bodies of Allied nobility and corporate Judiciary officials, armored Yellowjacket thugs and career-minded techs and surgeons. There’s no CEO or President, no Board of Directors who set the agenda and bear ultimate responsibility – there’s no face to it at all, really. I’m fairly sure no agent of the company ever even appears twice. Which is just interesting on its own terms, given Umbai as an entity defines both the setting and the plot to dramatic degrees.

The world of the Vanished Birds is a horrifying dystopia in a hundred different ways, but until the very end of the book this just isn’t really something any of the characters particularly care about. It’s in the incidental details and the little asides in the exposition – that there is a great apparatus of censorship on every Allied world dedicated to controlling and slowing the rate of linguistic drift to ease the flow of time-shifted commerce, that the culture and economy of Umbai ‘Resource Worlds’ are societies deliberately starved of information and culturally engineered to be easily managed and quiescent single-commodity resource exporters. Even in the distant past, Umbai and institutions like it used their control over the Ark Ships escaping earth to filter the species – denying berths to (among a great many other things) anyone of ‘problematic’ politics or who seemed likely to be an economic burden.

It’s a universe where this system seems to spread inevitably and irresistibly, everything valuable bought up and parceled out for the benefit of the system’s functionaries diligent enough to save for occasional vacations, and the nobles and officials in the vaunted heights of far-off stations and City-Planets (the allegorical applicability is left as an exercise for the reader, a bit of restraint I did appreciate).

It is, again, not a system that’s worth analyzing as a speculative political economy or technical exploration of neocolonialism either present or future – but it’s not trying to be, either. And it works very well at seeming like a real, functioning world that the characters are just trying to live in.

The Anthropocene

Going off where most of its wordcount is spent, I’m not sure you could really call Birds climate fiction. But if someone was making that argument, I’m not sure you have too much ground to stand on arguing you shouldn’t either.

Fumiko’s first chapter, read as a stand-alone short story, absolutely is – the story of a love affair between genius savant designing the great orbital habitats which will sustain a lucky slice of humanity in the stars, and a talented but less world-shaping scientist doing what she can to lighten the burden of the remaining four fifths of the species being left behind upon the increasingly uninhabitable earth. This is where the book’s title comes from – the gradual disappearance of the birds Fumiko loved as a child, even from the sanctuary trying so ferociously to preserve them.

The world presented in that chapter feels just barely familiar enough to be unsettling, a scarred and fortified world that’s still on a clear and irreversible decline – which might be either chicken or egg to the fact that the commanding heights of government and industry have given up trying to save it entirely to focus on an escape to the stars.

For the rest of the book, environmental collapse isn’t really a topic that much comes up – though the human shaping of and impact on the environment certainly does. It’s just largely a matter of deliberate engineering.

There is, however, a very easy allegorical reading of the fact that on discovery of a way to travel instantaneously between stars, Umbai ruthlessly exploits and monopolizes it to attain unprecedented degrees of power and wealth as they reshape the entire galactic economy – all of galactic civilization, really – around the new technology. All without the slightest thought or care that this new technology is based on harvesting a specific and finite resource and their brave new world will collapse entirely without it. Omelas-child instead of oil but still – not exactly subtle, but I do appreciate the book restraining itself from directly and explicitly pointing it out.

Fumiko

The ‘millennium woman’ is probably the most interesting single character in the book, and also almost certainly the biggest structural weakness in the whole thing. Which is annoying to me, personally. She simultaneously has some of the best chapters of the book and also ends up feeling like a ball being tossed around as the plot requires.

Her Methuselah existence is only vaguely justified and explained, and it’s entirely unclear just how exceptional she is (beyond the fact she isn’t unique, anyway) – the story never even gestures to the existence of any of her peers beyond vague mentions of the Umbai executive class or Allied nobility. She’s an oligarch-savant with nigh-infinite resources and cadres of loyalists installed in every institution worth owning – until a single mistake is made and the powers that be unite in a perfectly coordinated strike to kill them all and leave her stranded in the torn up ruins of her private research colonies among the corpses of two thousand executed minions.

A character being ruthlessly crushed without warning or chance of contesting it by the powers that be rings more true when the character isn’t one of them, I suppose? As it was, it felt like being dropped into the climax of a story without any of the rising action.

The effect is, I think, at least mostly intentional. The entire chapter is about Fumiko being so distracted with the failures of her memory and a complete preoccupation with her latest project (Ahro) that she cannot even pretend to remember or care about this whole vast infrastructure she has built up for her own advancement and curiosity, or the hundreds of followers who treat her as a living saint (to the point of not even remembering her friend, confidant and second in command until the moment before he’s executed for, in essence, her failing to consider the consequences of breaking a minion’s heart). The fact that there’s a battlecruiser en route to bury everything she’s built in napalm and she just forgot to do anything to prepare is actually very plausible. In which case, I just wish it had been ore dwelt upon and made a point of. Or just – it felt like she really needed another chapter or two from her POV before things go horribly wrong, I suppose?

Her chapters are very well-done and affecting, to be clear. And her mirrored character arc with Nia – both women who get a certain pleasure out of other people caring about and being more invested in them than they are in return, both dealing cosmically poorly with rejection, both forever decorating their life in half-conscious memory of someone they left behind – is both well done and compelling (Nia gets better, Fumiko’s story in an elaborate murder-suicide/terrorist attack).

Too Long; Didn’t Read

Beautiful, emotionally affecting book. Very much a debut work from a talented author – experimenting and showing off a bit more than be supported, some fundamental structural weaknesses – but nothing I found detracted from the experience. Actually one of the quite rare books where sitting down and writing out a review has made me like it more rather than less.

[moronkyne]

WHY IS SCORPIOUS SO SASSY

THIS IS THE FORST TIME IM HEARING THEM

Oh my god IGHGGG HHH HJFHDHDNCJJCJFIIIIIFUFIGUICUDIXUFIJFIXJDIFJFJJDJFF I LIVE ANGGRY BRITISH PEOPLE HEHXHHCHDHDNZNDMDMXMXMXMXKXJCNC FUCK FUCK FUCKF CUCK RUCKC FUCKF YFUCKC BBBRBAA BARKA BRFO AHRO HARK BARK

BARKKKKKK RAAHHHHGFGGG WOOF WOOD WOOOF MEOOOWWW EMEOWWW MEEIOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW MEEOOOOOW

[stephreviews]

Hwarang: The Poet Warrior Youth (2016-2017)

This drama follows the stories of the men of Hwarang, an elite warrior group loyal only to the king of the Silla era. However, a twist in the story is that the current king is in hiding. The previous king was assassinated when the current king was a child, so the king is in hiding until he is powerful enough to protect himself. Until then, his mother, the Queen Regent rules. The story predominantly follows the king, Kim Ji Dwi/Sam Maek Jong, an orphan commoner who doesn't know his own ancestry and assumes the identity of his best friend (Kim Sun Woo), Gae-Sae, and Kim Sun Woo's sister and doctor of the Hwarang warriors, Kim Ahro.

Phew. 😵 That was a long explanation. And that's not even spoiling anything. Now, to the ratings!

Extremely complicated political drama: 10/10

Hilarious wise old man mentor: 10/10

Adorable side couple: 20/10

THEY ARE UNJUSTLY UNDERRATED AND YOU CAN'T TELL ME OTHERWISE! BAN RYU AND SOOYEON FOREVER! 💘

Love triangle that isn't infuriating: 8/10. Minus 2 points for being predictable.

Morally ambiguous queen that I'm not sure if I like or not: 10/10

Sexy Shower Scene: 10000/10

I'll leave the shower scene with a cast like Park Seojoon, Park Hyungsik, and Shinee's Minho up to your imagination 😉 Check out this underrated gem and give it the love it deserves!

Just look at these two!!! Ban Ryu x Sooyeon my beloved ❤️❤️❤️

[nyoaeuikhoudu]

are all the white haired ocs a species? Or are they related in some way?

I'm so glad you asked! They're a subspecies of superhuman called shifters. I need to update their species sheet but in short they're just people with white hair and horns who can turn into animals, objects, other people, etc.

About 30%ish of them have digitigrade hooves instead of a normal leg shape. The two mains in the story who have this feature are Nyo and Ahro.

[mariacallous]

The excerpt below is from a translated interview with Shmuel, a 26-year-old from Jerusalem. He spoke with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on October 20, 2023. He recounts his experience as a passenger on a flight from Tel Aviv to the city of Makhachkala in Russia’s Dagestan region, which was met with hundreds of anti-Semitic rioters at the airport.

I was travelling to Makhachkala to see my fiancé. The flight arrived at 8:19 p.m. local time. Out of the 45 passengers onboard, 15, including children, were Israeli. Many had a layover in Makhachkala on their way to Moscow. We were brought to passport control and asked to wait due to a riot on the street. There were a lot of police around.

Suddenly, we see hundreds of people breaking into the airport. The police evacuated us into a bus, while people were running along the runway and throwing rocks after us. Children were screaming. One girl was injured by shards of broken glass. Very scary. The bus loops around the airport, people are chasing us, rocks are flying. I cover the window with my suitcase. At one point, the crowd stops the bus. They enter inside and ask each of us whether we’re Muslim or Jewish. We’re lucky that the Israelis on the bus speak Russian. It could have all ended with us getting killed (I know the rioters shot and wounded a flight attendant.)

I don’t speak Russian, but Israelis who did helped me out. I answer that I’m Muslim and I’m scared to die. Luckily, they believe me. I saw death on that bus. If they had given me a serious interrogation, they would have realized that I was Israeli. The police rescue us. They place the bus under protection. Thousands of Hamas supporters were on the field. After four hours of terror, a Russian army helicopter evacuated us. It shoots into the air to scare the crowd, like in action movies, and then takes us to a Russian military base in another city. We sleep there, eat there. Whoever wants to, flies to Moscow, but some others stay.

[birds-and-spears]

Mothers by Lilli Furfaro is an INCREDIBLY Ahro & Nia song guys you gotta listen and see the vision

[specialagentartemis]

Fumiko Nakajima agreed to be locked away and remove herself from society for years and give up any chance of living in the world or forming lasting relationships in order to work for the Umbai Company to develop the tech that would Save Humanity. She regrets it every day of her life and 1000 years later she demanded Nia and Ahro remove themselves from society for years to try to elicit the tech/power that will. What. Save humanity? Fumiko read her would-be girlfriend describe her anguish as the rich and powerful gunned down the protesters en masse including children. Fumiko watched the rich and powerful gun down a whole community for working outside the company purview including children. 1,000 years and nothing has changed

[notsamnotreads]

The Vanished Birds is perfect??

Like seriously. I have 0 notes. It is so good. I don't even entirely know how to talk about how good it is. It put me in mind of Becky Chambers especially when she is at her most poignant. Because the book centers around love and how complicated love is and how many kinds of love there is.

Every character, even minor ones, feel so fleshed out and narratively comprehensive. There is nothing that seems to be a mistake or accident. I'm most impressed with the layering of everything. There's such a perfect layered spiral of everything that is happening. So much is just carefully implied instead of being outright stated and that's so fantastic.

I love the tension between Fumiko and Dana. Not only is their romance touching and heartbreaking, but Fumiko represents the techno-fix approach to global warmings while Dana represents the go-down-with-the-ship approach. And Fumiko's approach just carries the same issues humanity has to space and replicates the exact problems they have on Earth in space: capitalism, colonialism, and overextension of resources.

Nia is a complex character who has many regrets and many joys that are in constant war with each other. Also, I love a captain character. 10/10.

Ahro's magical abilities are handled so well and so fascinatingly. The fact he is immediately turned into a resource to be mined and that the use of that resource slowly destroys him. Brilliant.

Sartoris gets a shout out for the casual ace representation. And the way that is handled overall. Very nice, felt very comfortable and seen.

I loved that the ship was old and janky. This added a level of coziness and homeyness that made the book work. Everyone was believably a found family because they had a home. The conversation about if the ship could be a home disintegrated because the ship was definitively a home.

Also the book was just so beautiful. I want to buy a physical copy so I can highlight all the beautiful passages and remember them forever. This is the problem with reading library books. I have to like capture them in the moment.

Nothing ever changes about the takeover of the world by capitalistic ventures, but all of our characters realize the only way to survive the pain and chaos and heartbreak and destruction is to love each other—even when that means losing your own life. There is nothing else to commit yourself to.

[abbacchio37]

is there anyone out there on the the vanished birds tag that wants me to post my reactions, im like almost done but lmk

all 2 of you reading this

[it-s-maria-dolores-world]

Cat Happened

It’s Meowings Day Psalm 36:6 NIV Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,    your justice like the great deep.    You, Lord, preserve both people and animals. When you have no idea what just happened… Reasons for neutering Ahro (Date Neutered: November 27, 2023/ Birthday February 1, 2021 Control of nuisance. At 21 months, Ahro started to stray a lot, and would love to mark his…

[drama--universe]

Hello! I just want to ask. I see you know Miss the Dragon. Hey doesn't every episode feel like déjà vu? Yuchi does the same thing all the time; rescues Liu Ying. Of course the series has something in it, it's romantic and funny but sometimes I felt that Yuchi was just "pushing" Liu Ying and Liu Ying was overly clingy. Like how she kept yelling, ''Yichi gege!'' I apologize to Miss the Dragon fans but sometimes I found her behavior a bit childish. Otherwise the series was fine, for example Qing Qing and Xue Qianxun were great! And as for Immortal of Fate; I didn't expect him to be such a bastard in the end. I didn't expect such plots but I liked them. Ily bye!🩷

Hello! To answer your question, yes it was a bit déjà vu. I personally don't mind, because of the little changes and such, but I can definitely see how it gets annoying fast for some. As for the yichi gege, that's not abnormal for Chinese dramas nor is the more childish behavior and I've gotten used to it due to other drama's. You kind of to accept it, unfortunately, but in the drama it makes a bit of sense since the FL is still pretty young in every recarnation and thus a bit more childlike. Overall, it has a good story and cast, I'm afraid it was just a bit too long and thus falls in repeat pretty often.

Hope that this answer makes it clear 😊 Definitely isn't the worst I've seen with female/male lead's, Ahro from Hwarang makes my blood boil for example 😂

[morihart13]

ALL SOLD

More Eggies!! These beebs are almost ready to hatch! Wonder what plumies are resting inside~

Come and adopt these beans over at my Kofi 💙

https://ko-fi.com/morihart13/shop

Reminder these lovely creatures are a closed species by @ahro who generously had made me the official adopt artist ;u;

[echocian]

Lineart by @ahro of my alt in FFXIV that I tried a flat shading coloring style on for the first time, it worked perfectly with her style. Go check out her stuff!