#and I have not read the first book yet

[goatanarchy]

cant stop thinking how king Maric had to walk around the fade rescuing wardens from their dreams of yearning to be with their lost loved ones while following the ghost of his cringe ex around for guidance. I'd die of shame, I'd go get lost in the deep roads if I had to do that lmao

[firestorm09890]

Y'ALL. Y'ALL so for a long time I've believed that "the sun" in Meursault's story is Carmen, and I went to check Hell's Chicken's dialogue to see exactly how he said that he'd dealt with distortions before, and... you know what else he said?

To my knowledge, it is a phenomenon where an individual morphs into a form often unfit to be considered “human”. It has no known causes, and the appearances were all different.

Unfit to be considered human.

Meursault, who, in his book, was judged by the court to be soulless.

Meursault, who has EGO for Cyborgs who have been so mutilated they barely act like people anymore; a murderer who was experimented on until ceasing to be human; a sheep named after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a novel about the humanity of androids and the inhumanity of humans; and now a rose that can't help its bloodsucking nature, based on Carmilla, a vampire whose story emphasized the duality between her vampiric traits and her human ones.

Meursault, who answered Heathcliff's ironic question of if he had metal for brains like this:

I'm placing my bets now, that line from Hell's Chicken is foreshadowing for Meursault's canto even more than "I have witnessed a number of [distortion] cases in the past" was

[mariatesstruther]

okay but sarah celebrating tommy every year for mother’s day

[sinusoidaldysfunction]

Blister. Twisted Sister.

[chipified]

Pov: trying to convince Yangchen to admit her feelings for kavik

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

I AM NOW THE PROUD OWNER OF A 400-PAGE LONG BOOK OF ACADEMIC ANALYSIS ABOUT MDZS (both the novel and CQL, as well as the wider danmei sphere, internet authorship, fan reactions in both CN and non-CN spheres, and so many more interesting things – there are photos of the contents list below) >:DDDD

I only got it this afternoon so have only read the (quite long?) excerpt available online and pages I came across while flipping through, but everything I've read so far is really interesting and well-written. If you're interested, it's promoted on the blog of @pumpkinpaix, where there are also chapter spotlights with comments from authors of each paper/chapter about them and about MDZS in general (which is how I found out about it, one came up in tumblr's 'based on this tag you follow...' recommendation), as well as FAQs (including where to buy it, though I did link that at the start). Alternatively, all posts about it are in the tag #catching chen qing ling!

I really recommend it, especially if content about MDZS interests you! and I promise I haven't been told to advertise this it's just something so so cool... a collection of academic work about MY FAVOURITE BOOK... and I know people do follow me for meta/analysis so this might be the sort of thing people looking at this blog will be interested in..?

[isthataraccoon]

first time reading kotlc and just got to this part:

absolutely no hate to fitzphie at all (seriously. none.) but alden, babe, they’re fifteen?? stop acting like this is set in stone because it’s absolutely not?? high school relationships rarely ever last and they also haven’t even started dating yet so literally anything could happen.like guilt tripping a teenage boy into not confessing his crush on a friend because she may potentially get into a relationship with your son is soo icky

[a-cloud-for-dreams]

I saw the Voice of God screenshots for that scene where Lane was mad at Kira, and it made me realize that one of the reasons HSR is such an amazing book is because both routes enhance Lane's already compelling character. The Whisper of the Devil path appears to focus more on her rage and stoic nature, which makes sense due to the literal inciting incident of the book. But on the Voice of God route? She doesn't want to hurt anyone. Poor Lane just wants to feel human again. She wants to know what it's like to feel loved unconditionally.

In this essay I will--

[hoofpeet]

I'd probably have to read the printed version and web version back to back at some point to note all the differences but... ough

[cubbyhole-for-flea-bee]

Apologies

[tohjwcc]

Yayyyyyyy. I thought it was a book book, but it was like a wiggly book. Just as cool tho. Yay!

Now I just need Volume four of the camp cretaceous novelisations, and then I have the full set. (Do not have the Ben comic book though..)

[dyed-indigo]

How many wives did Luo Bingge have?

I see quite a lot of debate over this within the fandom, and this excerpt has been passed around quite a bit:

But I felt like I remembered Bingge being mentioned as having more wives within the text, so I decided to skim the books (CTRL + F on the Internet Archive PDFs worked wonders) to find as many references to Bingge's wife count as I could.

I was right that he was mentioned as having more wives (hundreds to be exact), on the back of the very first book in the series even. However, the backs of books are the domain of the publisher rather than the author, so this isn't really trustworthy info to go off of for canon purposes. Still, it made me curious to see if more wives were mentioned somewhere else within the series.

He is mentioned as theoretically marrying at least 100 women at once here, however this was purely speculation on what would have happened in Proud Immortal Demon Way if Luo Binghe truly aspired for marriage. He did marry many women in PIDW, however it's never made clear whether these marriages were out of love or were political (and for horny reasons, the stallion protagonist can never escape his libido).

613 is also mentioned as a number of wives, and seems oddly specific unless there's some Chinese number symbolism I'm missing here, however this is just an example of something that Madame Meiyin could predict with her fortune telling abilities. Her fortunes are mentioned to typically be about romance, so this could be Shen Qingqiu remembering an actual prediction she made in canon, however even if that were the case (which there doesn't seem to be evidence to support) it could simply be that Luo Binghe never got those wives within the novel, and was just implied to get them afterwards (cue Peerless Cucumber rant about Airplane's lazy writing).

There's mentioned to be dozens of women "barely glimpsed" within the harem, presumably in addition to wives like Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan who were more significant, but that still doesn't give us an exact count. If the initial harem count is accurate, it does imply that most of the women within it were just written to fluff the numbers a bit.

Bingge is mentioned to have "never refused" any requests to join his harem. RIP Bingge's understanding of boundaries, but, again, we have no clue how many women even asked to join. Demon Emperors are powerful, but also scary, and Shen Qingqiu is... perhaps an unreliable narrator when it comes to any version of Luo Binghe's appeal factor.

Bingge is mentioned multiple times to have had sex with hundreds of women, however, not all of the bedded were wedded. Madame Meiyin, for example, is mentioned as someone that Bingge slept with but never married, and there's no evidence that i could find that she was the sole exception in a sea of wives.

In conclusion, while manwhore Bingge is real, his count of actual wives is more than likely less than 100, as originally specified. (Though I wouldn't blame you if you thought otherwise, the emphasis on the harem size being "innumerable" and "uncountable" in the narration is quite a lot, and historically many Chinese emperors had a larger harem than Bingge.)

At least, he had less than 100 wives in the novel. In the donghua, on the other hand...

Well. That's a fairly definite amount.

[yasmeensh]

Paleolithic Media Catalogue

Hello everyone :) Short story first: When I began brainstorming for my prehistoric story, I started wondering what other prehistoric fiction there is out there. I was not familiar with it and have not seen much. That's when I started my grand literature review and began a search for what fiction exist out there. I wanted to know what kinds of stories are being made with this time period. What are the common themes or recurring ideas (I found lots of humans and dinosaurs works. And time travel). Since I've had a growing collection on my computer, I decided I should keep on enlarging it and put it online. It's nowhere near complete. I'll slowly keep accumulating the collection as I find more. I only have fiction books and comics right now. I still need to work on the film section.

You can access the blog here!

***

As for where I am in my reading, the one's I've finished reading are Earth's Children series (book 1-4. Dropped it afterwards lol. I made a post on with fanart) Dance of the Tiger and it's sequel Singletusk (They were good! I'll upload my review on the blog), and Sisters of the Wolf (It was ok!). I got my hands on The Inheritors and excited to start reading it. I REALLY want to read the Shiva trilogy, but I found no PDF online... and it's out of print :( There is certainly old copies on ebay. And I want to read Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. There seem to be lots of good books out there.

[writeouswriter]

Girl, help, the book authors are trying too hard to be "hip" with the fleeting "teen lingo" and trends again, immediately dating their works before they're even released

[lulu2992]

So Greg Bryk regularly goes live on Instagram to chat with his followers and answer a few questions, and almost every time, someone asks if he’d like to play Joseph Seed again if he had the chance, to which he used to always reply that, yes, he absolutely would. However, in early 2022, he didn’t seem so sure anymore and said it would depend on the script (the question was specifically about a potential Far Cry 5 movie) and the writer(s). Then, a few months later, he implied he didn’t feel like playing the Father ever again because he thought the character’s story was “finished” and that Ubisoft should focus on creating new things instead…

Well, on October 14, 2023, he once again went live on Instagram and, when people mentioned Far Cry 5 in the chat, he revealed that he had reached out to Dan Hay and Drew Holmes, two of the game’s three main writers he’s become friends with, and that they had visited him “on set” (I’m not sure what he was shooting) the day before. In the past, he had already explained several times that he had loved working with them and thought the story they wrote (along with “JS”, Jean-Sébastien Décant, the game’s third main writer) was fantastic. This time, he added that Far Cry 5 was really “special” to him because the writers “cared a lot” about creating something great with amazing characters, and that he thought the whole Seed family was really well-written.

A few minutes later, when he was asked which character he would like to play again if he could, he said it was hard for him to choose because he loves them all, but he eventually picked Jeremy Danvers (Bitten) and Cobbs Pond (Frontier).

Then, surprisingly, he also mentioned Joseph.

I don’t know why he changed his mind again or if the fact he contacted Dan Hay (who doesn’t work for Ubisoft anymore) and Drew Holmes (who recently became the new IP Director for Far Cry) means anything, and I’m not sure I want more Far Cry 5 content to be released anyway (for continuity reasons), but I guess the Seed family’s return, as equally exciting and truly terrifying as this eventuality sounds to me, isn’t completely out of the question anymore in Greg Bryk’s mind!

[jrueships]

men can and will talk abt wnba players' looks first and make it sound like they're models and not athletes, but immediately scrutinize and deride women for being fans of men's sports bcs they think they're only in it for the handsome looks and don't value a person's skill outside that, and that's a valid reason for alienating and rejecting their opinion because that's a bad thing to do objectively