#anyway i'm gripping this series so hard. This is all you're going to hear abt for 4 months~

[soft-serve-soymilk]

I hyperfixated enough and convinced my dad to watch my "norgasm" lmao 😭😭😭 So far he has two thoughts, and two thoughts only:

-It's fucking crazy (but so was chainsaw man apparently) -I'm like hiyori (fair tbh) I hope he gets to episode nine :3

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

hi! i’ve heard you mention the gossip girl novels before, but if it’s not too much, id love to hear your opinions on them more in depth! like the characterization and the way it translates the series (and doesnt), or just your thoughts/opinions on them in general. i know it’s a bit of a tall order, but i love your analyses and deconstructions

ahh you sent this i think sometime last month, sorry for taking so long to get to it! i've been super head empty, no thoughts. anyway! i'm gonna begin with like, 2 disclaimers - the first being that i've only read two and a half books at this point, and everything else i know comes from conversations with friends and scrolling through people's blogs/LJs/the wiki pages, etc etc.

the second disclaimer is that the books do have their own problems. a lot of things aged pretty poorly, and if the books were being released today as they are, a lot of that stuff would not fly. i'm not really going into this - in part because i haven't read all the books, so can't give a full analysis of that, and also in part because you haven't really asked abt this specifically! but i do feel i should put this out there, in case you decide to read the books of your own accord, just so that you are aware of what you're getting into.

i'm gonna go character by character, and then blabber a little about relationships in the books!

characters!

blair - book!blair may just be my all time favourite. she's got a lot of the things i really loved about show!blair going for her, minus a lot of the things that made me uncomfortable, like the glaring levels of classism, etc. something i remember that made me laugh was this scene in the books, at a dinner party or something, and blair is so disgusted/appalled by something that she spits food into her wine goblet & dorota takes the goblet away and gets her a new one. that's objectively disgusting, but i loved little things like that - it made book!blair feel more human and real, i guess. i also feel like a lot of the things dair shippers like to see about blair - she cares so much with all her heart, yes she is schemey but she is not Evil, she's sensitive, she's awkward, she's not naturally good with people, she's anxious, etc - all these parts of her character came thru sooo well in the books, better than in the show imo. book!blair is just a girl who wants things to be Perfect. show!blair is like this too, one could argue - but book!blair just felt a lot more likeable to me.

vanessa- i like that vanessa is a main character in the books, but i didn't really read enough of the books to get a grip on her character. i've heard people who read all the books say that she's really fascinating, that she's got this tough exterior and she seems harsh and mean on the surface, but she's really warm and softhearted and kind, inside - but the books i've read so far only showed me the surface of her character. (i do love that she's all punk, aesthetically, and that she listens to belle & sebastian, though. girl after my own heart.) that said, the book in which dan had his gay arc and vanessa tried to seduce him back to heterosexuality, sadly (told you the books aged badly) make it hard for me to stan book!vanessa. i feel like show!vanessa would bonk book!vanessa on the head for that.

jenny - the bits of the books i've read so far had jenny characterisation much like s1 jenny before her whole ~corruption arc, which was sweet. there's some implication, i think, about jenny having an eating disorder of her own, which would've been interesting for the show to get into (if they'd done it well, that is, which is a pretty big "if" tbh, the show did all things jenny-related absolutely terribly.)

dan - my main dan thought is just -why did they make him such a stalker :((( but tbh, dan is. he's this mopey sad boy who is all "woe is me" and he feels... idk how to explain this, he feels like a parody of show!dan. i love him, but i feel like show!dan just had more layers to his personality. then again, i've only read 2.5 books. also - dan getting a CANON QUEER ARC IN THE BOOKS - dan getting a BOYFRIEND!!! hello! television did us so dirty. i really do feel like penn played dan as a queer man (& thank god for penn, really) but i wish it'd been an explicit thing, and not just penn saying that in his opinion, dan is gay. but thank god for penn, at least.

chuck - book!chuck was great. i mean, he was terrible, but he wasn't romanticised. everyone in the show was aware he was terrible, and he was sort of there just to be the butt of the joke (& to steal dan's man, A+ plot, i wish we'd gotten that on the show with dan's boyfriend breaking up with him for chuck. sorry dan. but hey, if he dumps you for chuck, he didn't deserve you anyway!) i loved how chuck was portrayed as this "downside to being rich is that we're invited to the same parties as bart bass's horrible son" which is quite literally something we get, in blair pov, if i'm remembering right. beautiful.

serena & nate get a single bullet point in which i don't say much, because i feel the books didn't really have Much. their characters weren't very deep, imo. show!serena and show!nate had a lot more depth and nuance and character, they had more fleshed out personalities. that said, nate's character's arcs were more interesting - i won't put any spoilers in here, but what happened to him was very interesting, and very different from the kind of arcs show!nate got, to the best of my knowledge.

book rufus was such a weirdo. not sure what he was like as a dad, OR as a person, but A+ fictional character. love him.

apparently both kati & is are plus-sized in the books?? it wasn't done very well, from what i've heard, there was fatphobia involved with their narratives, but i wish the show had kept that, and allowed them to be cool, glam, popular mean girls who weren't thin. in fact, i just wish more characters on the show had been fat - ditto this with the reboot. different body types PLS istg

marx the humphrey cat deserved to be a tv character too. why didn't we get him :(

relationships!

dan got a boyfriend, as i said. i wish that'd happened on the show.

there are such heavy implications of blairena being endgame. the resolution of the blairenate love triangle is LITERALLY blair & serena choosing each other over nate. i feel like the show should've had blairena endgame too, i think the message of that would've been far more impactful, hard-hitting, AND true to the books than the chair/derena endgames could ever hope to be. the books were relatively ambiguous about the nature of the blairena relationship, too, you could've read that as them choosing their friendship over nate, but you could've also read that as them realising they were in love with each other, and their love for each other was far more than their love for poor natie - both interpretations are equally supported by canon, and it would've been soooo easy for the show to take this angle. much like the end of s3 for blairena/beginning of s4, with its whole "forget all these shitty men! you're my best friend! all i need to be happy is YOU, let's go to paris together!" - if the show had ended like that... it would've been so beautiful.

the whole blairnessa arc sounds really cool! i haven't read the book in which that happens, but it is the next gg book i hope to read (i think it's book 8, from what i've been told, if i'm remembering that correctly) - they go from roommates to besties, but it's canon that vanessa kept some of blair's clothes even after she moved out. girlfriends!!!! the fact that blairnessa clothes sharing is canon on the show, too, albeit for different reasons, makes me rlly happy.

a lot of people talk about the potential of blairenate as a polyam triad in the books, which i like! the books really did a lot to centre the childhood friendship of blairenate, and the way those 3 grew up together. like, think the vibes of the thanksgiving episode in s1 w/ the flashbacks to the year right before - the books had SO many moments like that. we deserved that on the show, too. </3

honestly????my otp for the books is serenate. i mean. look at this. so cute. this is deeply funny, given that i don't really ship show serenate.

along the same vein! i thought book!jenate was really cute. the kind of crush jenny has on blair in the show, that innocent and cutesy "this person is so cool and so out of their league and i want to be their friend and i really like them" kind of blenny dynamic?? that is the book!jenate dynamic. (i mean, it's problematic because nate's technically cheating on blair and jenny doesn't know, which sucks, but i liked their dynamic, ignoring that.)

book!derena sucked so much. it made me sad, how much it sucked. dan literally just stalked her, and then they went on a date that was a terrible failure, and like. nothing clicked. no sparks. nothing i liked about show!derena existed between them at allll.

apparently nate/georgina is a thing that happened in the books, which i find very interesting! haven't read that bit yet, but i know it happened.

one day i will write book!date fanfic. ok. that is all.