#also love how oak is a mirrorball

[thejudeduarte]

🍂🍂Sad Oak quotes🍂🍂

"Sometimes he screams into the darkness, just to remind himself that he can."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 24

"Oak cannot repress the shudder that goes through him at those words. He has been poisoned and stabbed many times over the course of his short life. Pain is transient, he tells himself. He has endured it before-broken bones and bled and survived. Pain is better than being dead. He tells himself a lot of things."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 60

"And sicker still when his mouth curves unconsciously into a smile. It has become such an automatic reaction to pain, for him to mask it with a grin. Oak, laughing all the time. Pretending nothing hurts. A false face hiding a false heart."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 175

"Who can love someone who is empty Inside? someone who steals love instead of earning it?"

-The Prisoners Throne, page 175

"Wren once described what she was afraid of, if she revealed herself to her family. How she imagined their rejecting her once they saw her true face. Oak sympathised, but until this moment he didn't understand the horror of having all the people who loved you best in the world look at you as though you were a stranger."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 287

"Wren loves her mortal family. She loves them so much she slept in the dirt near their house just to be close. Lives them so much there might be nothing she wouldn't do to save her mother or father or sister. No one she wouldn't sacrifice, including herself. He knows what love like that feels like."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 301

"And if you really think you're a monster, then let's be monsters together."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 351

"But I know you. And you have to come back to me, Wren, because no one gets us but us. You know why you're not a monster, but I might be. I know why throwing me in your dungeon meant there was still something between us. We are messes and we are messed up and I don't want to go through this world without the one person I can't hide from and who can't hide from me."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 333

"Some broken things stay broken."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 291

"He's become the fool he's spent so long pretending to be. If he hadn't fallen in love, then no one would be in danger if he didn't believe in Wren, promise to be in ger sidex make every excuse for her, then Randalin's schemes would have come to nothing. He loves her still, more's the pity."

-The Prisoners Throne, page 291

[madamescarlette]

folklore as classic lit

@magpie-trove​ requested an aligning of classic literature couples/characters with folklore songs due to my cardigan post, so here is the most @thelonelybrilliance​ post I’ve ever made!!!

the 1— this is very much Natasha & Andrei from War & Peace, in the sense that it is starry-eyed and content and about letting go of a love that was absolute but not final. Alternatively, Sebastian/Mia from La La Land. 

best line: in my defense, I have none / for never leaving well enough alone

cardigan—Penelope in the Odyssey, sitting in her empty room, patiently waiting for her husband to come back to her, just because he promised her he would. 

best line: I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired / and you’d be standing in my front porch light /  and I knew you’d come back to ME (especially regarding Odysseus breaking free from Circe because he longs for home & his wife so) also marked me like a bloodstain is so Greek tragedy of Taylor!

the last great American dynasty—the personality of this song is specific enough that I have a hard time finding a perfect fit, but what evokes the image of a woman riding up on a train to a town to wreak havoc as she makes it her home (not finally, but through the people that she loves there & thus sets roots down for) is The Witch of Blackbird Pond. 

best line: who knows, if I never showed up, what could have been?

exile—Dantes and Mercedes from The Count of Monte Cristo. granted, I’ve never fully read this book, but it calls to mind a lot of his (mostly justified, but still carried too far) anger when he returns and finds her married to the man that tried to kill him, and her trying to explain to him that she had been alone, afraid, and pregnant, and neither of them quite getting through to each other at first.

best line: you were my crown, now I’m in exile, seeing you out (the “exile” of this context has a pretty literal meaning now which made me laugh)

my tears ricochet—the way that this is about a lover’s funeral absolutely calls back Hamlet & Ophelia to me. the way she says you turned into your worst fear—kind of kills me here. (Magpie I’m dying because I had this written down the same day you asked about different couples and then!!! you said it too!!! I cry.)

best line: if I’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too (interestingly here, it’s not necessarily Ophelia’s tears that ricochet off of Hamlet, but it is ultimately Hamlet’s grief that causes hers. They are linked through grief, but if things had been different they could have been linked in love. Therein lies the tragedy, I suppose.)

mirrorball—this is a strange comparison, I’ll give you that, but it makes me think of Gabriel Oak & Bathsheba from Far from the Madding Crowd, less in the sense that it’s through Bathsheba’s eyes as it is through Gabriel’s. The theme of being someone who will show you how good you are, through standing beside you and being exactly what they need you to be- is very him. 

best line: hush, when no one is around my dear - shining just. for. you. (which opposed to the very show-y, changeable affections of the other men who love her, Oak is steadfast, but he also doesn’t need her. He can love her just the same when no one else is around, and even if everyone is. He’ll be there, shining for her. Direct, and romantic, but without need of validation, just because he wants to. It is so endearing.)

seven—maybe no other classical book can really capture that sense of childlike awe and wonder in me like The Secret Garden, being just about children learning about lasting and true friendship, and how wide the world can be when shared with someone else. 

best line: I think your house is haunted / your dad is always mad and that must be why (in this case, Mary’s uncle is not mad, but is instead incredibly sad, and while the house isn’t literally haunted, it is covered in an almost ghostly haze of grief that gradually becomes lifted once each character remembers how to live again)

august— this is The Little Mermaid!!!! the original, ofc. Also has echoes of Eponine from Les Mis.

best line: you weren’t mine to lose (the weight this line has! it’s about learning to let go of trying to be loved, and giving yourself over to loving someone entirely all the same! it hurts me.)

this is me trying— I feel almost entirely biased in saying this, but this is really truly Anne Elliot to me. The way she sings about feeling like a toy that was thrown aside once her golden days were over- is very Anne to me.

best line: it’s hard to be anywhere these days when all I want is YOU

illicit affairs—this is not truly classic, but it is classic-adjacent- the closest fit in my heart is for Lydia in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. 

best line: you showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else

invisible string— it might be cliché of me, but I don’t care. It’s Anne & Gilbert. The way that LMM works with color fits very well with the vibrancy of the green grass, purple-pink skies, and the final gold thread tying the lovers together, the way that it is both inevitable and precious for how easily it could have been lost. 

best line: time, mystical time / cutting me open then healing me fine

mad woman—I must confess, I don’t have much emotional attachment to this song (sorry!!) but I will say this most evokes the image of Medea for me, being both the woman who was abandoned and cast aside, and being the woman who grows with her own rage and spite to become the villain.

best line: the master of spin has a couple side flings / good wives always know (being the original wife who is left for another, Medea brings a whole new context to you made her like that)

epiphany—Who this most made me think of is Boromir and Aragorn (my brother, my captain. my king.) alternatively, it also recalls Narnia for me, mostly because it leaves a great deal of space for things that are too deep to spoken of. 

best line: with you I serve, with you I fall down, down (for LOTR), only twenty minutes to sleep / but you dream of some epiphany (in the sense that once the children leave Narnia, it begins to seem like a beautiful dream to them)

betty— only because this has my energy as a song, it’s Laurie/Amy from Little Women. (lowkey Greta’s movie is still the best thing to happen to me this year & yet I am not at all unhappy with that. But a lot of why it lingers with me so long is what it did to breathe life back into Laurie for me, to make me remember why I love him. and why he’s an idiot. and why he’s ME.)

best line: if I just showed up at your party / would you have me? would you want me? (this also plus I saw you dance with him fits almost too well with Amy’s chasing after her initial fiance and Laurie’s drunken breakdown all over her once-peaceful trip)

peace—Emma Woodhouse and that’s that on that. 

best line: your integrity makes me seem small (Box Hill! it also gives a beautiful depth to the way she sings would it be enough if I could never give you peace?)

hoax—again, not technically classic lit, but the only people I can think of that perfectly fit this are Gen & Attolia from The Queen’s Thief.

best line: stood on a cliffside screaming “give me a reason!” / your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in (cut to Gen rowing Irene out just so he can tell her he loves her and also I love every single one of your ridiculous lies) & my best laid plan / your sleight of hand (quite literal, with a Thief, and a queen who is a master of spies)

the lakes—perhaps only because they are the Original loves of my life, but who I first thought of was Eowyn and Faramir.

best line: while I bathe in cliffside pools / with my calamitous love and insurmountable grief (both of them learn to be loved with their grief and heartbreak, not despite it, which is incredibly important to me)