#book club moment !

[acoraxia]

Seeing that you mentioned Kui Mulang, the curious thing is that in LMK, Kui Mulang is seen as a kind of devoted husband while in the book he betrays his wife without hesitation (makes me wonder if the writers will play with that, who knows). His wife deserves better.

From what people who have read the books have said, Azure Lion also participated in the war, being a Yaoguai of the Jie Sect.

PLEASE do tell me more about Kui Mulang because I have yet to reach his part in investiture of the gods (apparently he is made a deity by Jiang Ziya after partaking in the Battle of A Thousand Immortals (?)) and I am very very curious about him he seems so hecking neat—also i did NOT read him as a doting husband in LMK i thought he was creepy LMAOJDDKND

It’s the… it’s… the romanticization of waiting for someone over a thousand years and then kidnapping them… against their will… like.. hm. Having knowledge of his kidnapping of his spouse when she becomes a mortal with no previous knowledge of him or their romance and then seeing the show is… funky! So funky! Uhm! Anyway!

I don’t remember seeing anything on Book!Azure Lion partaking in a war… would love to learn more on that.

[soliusss]

Funniest thing I’ve seen on tiktok are those sigma male boys getting mad that American psycho was written by a gay man and going “well I like fight club better” buddy I’ve got some world ending devastating news for you

[leenfiend]

THE TIME HAS FINALLY COME!!!!!!!!!! I've been saving this fic like a sweet little treat for almost a year. save me europa report post canon road trip 60k slow burn save me

[stone-stars]

Transcript:

Caldwell, reading: The opera house impresario rushes out and informs the audience that the actress playing Maria has locked herself in her dressing room and is refusing to come out! Murph, delighted: Emily you're gonna be in the freaking opera! Caldwell, reading: Emily is distraught. [Murph cackles] Caldwell: (laughs) Emily's face! She's about to-- Murph, laughing: Emily, are you gonna cry? Emily's crying! (cackles) Emily! [Caldwell and Murph laughing. Emily occasionally squeaks with laughter.] Caldwell: She's so wet! Murph: Caldwell, you broke her! Caldwell: Oh no! Murph, laughing: This is the nicest thing anyone's ever done. She's crying. Caldwell: (laughs) She's literally crying! [Caldwell and Murph laugh. A few seconds of silence, then they laugh harder.] Caldwell, distraught: Emily! Emily, weakly: … go on. (laughs) Caldwell: It took me an hour! Murph: This… Emily: I'm ready! I'm ready! Caldwell: Emily is distraught. Literally. In real life. She's come all this way just to have her dreams dashed. What should she do?

[raayllum]

This could be completely off but given what we know:

1) Powerful life and death magic (deep magic? dark magic? both?) demand sacrifice, typically in the form of blood

2) Kpp'Ar called his arm wounds "an ancient and disturbing practice" which fits with Aaravos' sole distinction that the 'blood of child' spell is "one of the old spells"

3) In the time leading to his decision to give up magic, Kpp'Ar captured a giant likely in hopes the giant could read a map that would lead to unicorns in what we now know (7x01) is called the Garden of Innocence.

4) There is also something at the Garden that is required for successfully making a Moon primal stone, which is directly related to Aaravos' desire to invert life and death somehow

So Kpp'Ar doing what he could to try and save Soren would match up and reveal an interesting thread of his character, especially in terms of stopping Viren from (literally) doing the same. Not only would these threads convene to help explain how maybe Callum would do dark magic (Aaravos offering up a corrupted Moon primal stone for his usage to save Rayla, or something, as Aaravos needs the corrupted stone to corrupt/invert the Nexus) or deep magic again, but it would likewise give context for how and why.

[waku-waku-week]

[sweattyspaghetti]

Just moments from the fight club script that drove me up the wall:

- we could’ve seen Brad Pitt casually sitting in Edward Norton’s lap with a gun in his mouth (as if this stuff wasn’t already gay enough)

- Jack searching for Tyler’s approval in the middle of his fight

- them being a domestic husband and wife (oh my god and Tyler walking up to Jack to get his tie fixed)

- the hilarious acknowledgment that yeah: they are codependent

- Tyler asking Jack to say please and then doing said thing he begged for as a kind gesture

- that. Jack not entering his cave, being in the present, unafraid, wanting Tyler to do the one thing he never really did, appreciate something. Not see everything as disposable and unremarkable.

Anyway. When tyler said he did this for them for us, like okay we get it. Whether he’s emotionally manipulating Jack or not we get it u freaky queer 🙄🤨

(Here's the link to the script *wink*)

EDIT: wanted to add this too. So the ass towards Jack was 100% purposeful. Alright class. Let’s put on our queer lenses on and—oh! Yep. Gay. Tyler durden is the narrator’s closeted gayness being wide open 👍

[carg0-toad]

this was supposed to be something serious but then the worm eating my brain said "remember that one scene from the book"

[mikaelsrose]

"audrey drools over every li even in inappropriate situations" okay have you considered that they have divine rizz and she is, after all, just a girl?

[the-travelling-witch]

ironic, isn’t it, malleus?

[acoraxia]

My knowledge of fyss!Kui Mulang is not the best because since the fyss version is in English and the book is extra dense with many characters with different names, it has not been easy for me. I know more about Jttw!Kui Mulang. Jttw is easier for me because there is a version in my native language. But about Kui Mulang and his wife, Kui Mulang kidnapped his wife against her will. He also does not hesitate to hurt her If she does something agaisnt him. Furthermore, the moment Kui Mulang is caught, he betrays his wife and tries to put all the blame on her, saying that she was the one who seduced him.

Many fsyy characters have different names. So I think that's why not many recognize Azure Lion. He was part of the Jie Sect but is later turned into a mount when he loses. I think lmk is not taking fsyy as a prequel to Jttw like New gods. However, I feel like it gives more depth to his character? You know, imagine fighting on the side that accepts you because the other side doesn't really like your kind (from what I understand, there may be good reasons as well as discrimination against the Yaoguai) and then you're humiliated into being the mount of an immortal. And many centuries pass, and you gain respect and connections, but they still don't see you anymore than that. He also becomes very angry when he is not invited to Xiwangmu's peach banquet. I'm not saying this to defend him, but the topic of the Yaoguai and how they are perceived is interesting.

this person is answering questions about fsyy. It's the only blog I've found, so they might be able to give you the info you want to know about fsyy!Kui Mulang. I hope it helps you a lot if you ever need it! :)

https://www.tumblr.com/ryin-silverfish

I'm sorry if I send a lot of asks to reply. I tried to send a response to my ask but apparently my reply is too long??? I'm still not very familiar with Tumblr

Checked my inbox after me and my sib discussed media and honestly it made my mood go from “aw” to “OOOH” so quickly haha

Fyss!Kui Mulang will remain a mystery for a while… we gotta accept this fate my friends. At least until I do a little digging and end up launching him on top of my faves like I did with Erlang and Red Son— AHEM anyways!

I did not know he tried to victim blame his wife.. what the HECK dude… what is wrong with you… my guy.. my dude! What the heck!

Also Yaoguai were always very interesting imo… like at some point it makes you wonder if the hate and judgement they get is justified or not. Yes there are yao that eat people or kill them and do things that aren’t great but what of the ones that are just living? The ones who fight on the side of “good”? Makes you wonder about it. (I did learn that yaoguai stands for creatures that stand outside the natural order/cannot be explained. Which is fun!) Kind of interesting how he was turned into a mount… hm. That’s.. certainly something! Especially for a sentient being capable of thought and speech as eloquent as any other immortal he comes across!

I kind of wish they’d taken fyss as an inspiration ngl.. they did show the Nezha and Ao Bing fight scene but it was obviously shown as more aggressive (in the book, Nezha just smacked him while Ao Bing was the one who launched the first attack—meant to he comedic but also horrifying moment for the Ao family) and it’s funny how they introduced Nü Wa.. because they’ll have to address which version of her it is (in some myths she is the Jade Emperor’s daughter (fyss iirc), in other’s she marries her brother—options!) —but! Anyways, this was a fun read

Definitely makes me think about Azure Lion and Kui Mulang’s characterizations… hm hm hm

[st-ignatius]

guys let's start a book club and read the vampire chronicles together. i haven't read them since i was a kid and i'm overdue for a reread. who's in?

[triglycercule]

jk!nightmare and jk!dream are just fucking kaido and teruhashi from saiki k i'm gonna kill myself 😭😭😭 this is what happens when you do the chuunibyou and perfect girl trope you get fucking saiki k. whats next i make jk!epic or something have reality breaking powers??? mayhaps.... JK! not happening

anyways jk!nightmare is so fucking stupid she's the worlds largest girlfailure. the only reason she still gets to live out her delusion is because everyone in school is nice enough to play along with her. meanwhile dream is just perfect she's got one of my favorite designs. perfect looks perfect grades perfect personality part of the star sanses she's PERFECT. too bad that she's a naive idiot. maybe the dumbness is genetic among the dreamtale twins who knows but i made them both total idiots

[cadybear420]

A satistying and iconic moment in Choices history

@choicesbookclub

[jacksprostate]

f Narrator wanting to murder maim mutilate m marla.. or marla/ male marla and narrator/f narrator worsties/besties. or marla/male marla and tyler… or anything with marla/ male marla..

Marlon called me, interrupted me at work, and he said he had a bruise. He said I needed to come and look at it right away, because he needed to know.

This was him, asking me, pounded flank steak, to look and tell him the nature of his bruise.

Marlon hasn't had health insurance in years, so he tries not to think about it, usually. It's easy, since there's no difference when you have health insurance. It's old hat.

But today, he thought about it.

And he noticed a bruise.

So I'm walking up to the Regent hotel after work, and he's in the lobby in his limp little tank top. He'd call it a wifebeater and imagine himself in place of the wife, I'm sure. I wonder if he isn't cold all the time. Mr. Marlon Singer, such a masochist just so he can show off his skeletal body with all the cigarette burns I have to hear him and Tyler laughing over.

I am Jane's abnormal hemorrhoid development.

He doesn't mention what Tyler and I stole from him, even though I think it was all the cash he had. Even though just three days ago he tried to chase me around the house and beat me with a broom. He made me and Tyler go sleep in the junkyard. Buried under our furs, howling at the moon. Maybe I can't fault him for that.

He couldn't keep it here where the guys he brings back could get at it, he said, and sure. But he should've known better than to tell Tyler about it, because now it's bags upon bags of lye being kept in the driest room in the house.

I work on grinding cracks into my remaining teeth as he grabs his neighbors Agatha and Dianne's Meals on Wheels kits. The delivery lady remarks on what a good young man Marlon must be, helping out these old ladies. Oh, yeah. A real, upstanding, mummified rat of a man. Maybe he helped them into the ditch. He yaps at me the entire walk up to his room, and I don't hear a word as I methodically rip up the skin around Tyler's kiss on my hand with a broken nail. It's been infected since Tuesday, and the ring of puffy red flesh makes the ghost of her lips white like the center of a neon tube. Always buzzing.

We get to his room, he says to me, "One of these boxes is for you, you know."

I think about all the women who bother to use what little time they have to operate charities that keep the poor and destitute alive enough to want to kill themselves. All that time spent cooking mac and cheese en masse and putting little packets of powdered milk next to little cartons of the liquid, like they get at schools and prisons, packets that can only be opened by the nimble fingers of caring relatives these elderly recipients do not have.

Sure.

Tyler told me I need to be eating at least two meals a day, or she'd steal a blender and make me drink raw chicken. So I eat the Meals on Wheels box. Sorry Agatha. I rip open the powdered milk packet, dump it into the carton, hold it closed, and shake it. Twice the calories. A recipe for palliative care.

Marlon's sitting there, quiet, eating Dianne's latest last meal. All the urgency is gone. Sucked dry. He's got pallor like a hospice heart failure. When dogs get treated for heartworms, the worms die, and sometimes, not all of them break apart. Sometimes, there will be thin, dead cords of necrotized nematode strung through their heart waiting for the right beat to fall apart and clot a vital artery. This can take years to happen. Your pet recovers perfectly from treatment until seven years down the line, you give it a doggy cupcake and a pulmonary embolism for its tenth birthday.

Marlon looks like he's had his first melarsomine injection and his owner is thinking about taking him to a dog park instead of bothering with the second. If you let a dog get its heart rate up too high when getting treated for all the parasites you let grow in it, its heart will explode. Or all the worms will clog its lungs. Whichever one it is, it's happening to Marlon here in this room. On this bed.

He says he'd found a bruise, a while back. A nasty little thing, like the crush of a plum under your thumb. Near one of his ankles. And Marlon Singer knew he couldn't afford any novel treatments, and he'd seen too many people rot from the inside out from them already. He did not go to the clinic down the street that gets its windows broken in often enough that there's just big black billowing sails of trashbags over their storefront more often than not. Marlon says he once saw a rat nailed to the door, which is something you'd think would be too neat and poetic for real life. He didn't go to the clinic because he didn't have to. And maybe if he was fucking guys he wanted to he would be a bit more cautious, but the men Marlon Singer gets to fuck are the type to have given him those bruises in the first place. They're the reason there's single mothers visiting that clinic, like half melted wax getting scraped out of the picture. He says he shouldn't feel guilty.

I tell Marlon about where I got the idea for poisoning all the food at the Pressman hotel.

He asks me what I mean by that, and I tell him about my first boss at the company I work for now.

When I first started there, I was selling our cars to companies. Bulk orders for work vehicles. My job was to not fuck up any contracts we already had. Marlon is probably aware, but the type of man involved in that sort of thing, he knows he's got you on a collar and chain. You and him both know he'll be renewing the contract, but you have to do the song and dance for him. Pretend you like how close he gets to you. Pretend you don't want to rip his testicles from his ballsack when he leans in sweaty and tells you how he likes your hair, did you go and do all that just for me?

Because he knows. And you know. But enduring this is what you were hired to do. If you were a man, you would've been hired to create a sense of the old boys club with this guy. But you're not.

There is so much pretense in the world.

Anyway, my first boss, call him Joe — whenever I'd return from those trips and dinners, Joe wouldn't pretend that it wasn't a shit job. He'd commiserate and wish me luck with the next one. He didn't overstep, he wasn't creepy, he kept his distance. The best you could hope for. Thirty days on the job, they asked me how I was doing, and I told them I was doing great. The job was amazing, I felt embraced by the company, my boss was great. One of those things was true to me.

And when Joe got his promotion, for being such a great regional manager, he cornered me in my cubicle and informed me he'd been jerking off into my nicely labeled thin salad lunches each time they showed up in the office fridge. He told me this with the same smile he'd always worn.

Marlon, he's next to me, and he leans closer like we're having a nice little confession. My skin itches.

It was before the 90 day clause kicked in my health coverage, so I had to wait at one of those free clinics like Marlon's, and I was surrounded by a lot of young men, wispy mangled pears. What little flesh was left was soft. When I told the nurse what happened, I watched myself die in her eyes. Dappling up with rashes and bruises until I was all painted and sunken like a bog body.

For the longest time, I wondered if I'd become the oral Mary. How many times I vomited in that office toilet, I don't know. I stopped bringing lunch.

The thing is, I couldn't see it in his face. Joe's, I mean. Not even when he told me. I couldn't see it in anyone. So I stopped eating out. Stopped eating altogether, really.

Marlon, his response was to go to the support groups. His tragedy was that it was a slow death, coming for him. Best to wriggle into the pile of dying bodies, see what it's like. Maybe that could muster enough suicidal impulse.

I tell Marlon, of course, I couldn't go to HR. I was a new hire with no evidence and previous record of liking my boss. I didn't want to tell my mom. I didn't want her to know. Those uncomfortable dinners became absolutely, wretchedly unbearable as I thought about the food I was being forced to share.

When the option came up for a dead end job in the least loved department in the building, I put on the best performance of my life to get the part. Best aspiring Compliance and Liability head and sole department employee, that's me. My new job was to keep secrets. It was, already, old hat.

For months I thought about waking up from a narcoleptic fit at my desk, with Joe leaning over the cubicle wall and asking if I was alright. I watched my stomach like it was nuclear. Every extra second it took until I bled like usual slid me closer to buying myself a shotgun and pumping a slug or two into my brain.

It's an unavoidable fear, I tell Marlon. You can't do anything about it. Once you know, you know. At some point, you have to find the peace in it. Imagine yourself, a balloon popping with meaty chunks flying apart, splattering onlookers and raining viscera.

For a month, six months, I had cancer. Worse than cancer. Every time I eat out, I get it again.

Marlon is looking at me, melting stained glass, drowning in that sort of shared pity you build together with someone who's dying.

I don't want Marlon to feel guilty.

I tell Marlon, that's why I poison the food at the Pressman hotel. Someone's got to do it. Blood in the tomato sauce, spit on the steak. Imagine what you could do to a soup. The men who go to the Pressman hotel, they're the kind that leave Marlon bloody and walking around Paper Street calling for Tyler to come out and burn more holes into him. They're the kind that get promoted from regional manager. They're the kind that lean in close, pull your wrist towards them, and say there's one way they know you could secure the contract renewal. The kind that almost ruin it in a temper tantrum when you don't, resulting in an upper management intervention on the 24th day of your new job. They're the kind that hear that shit and say you should've been more appeasing. More polite.

Don't feel guilty, Marlon.

I hope all of them rot so everyone can see the maggots eating their insides.

Marlon isn't smiling. I am unavoidably bad at distracting him. There's something final in it, when he sighs, and takes off his tank top. He says it's on his back, and I should just tell him.

I look. I see it. Black hole, botfly, necrosis. There's so many things these broken blood vessels could be. Withering, snapping apart like mummified heartworms. I imagine driving the two inch melarsomine needle deep into the muscles bunched upon his spine.

I look.

I press my hands into him, and I grip like I'm trying to rend my fingers through his skin, deep into his body cavity to rip out his guts. Like I'm trying to grab the rope of his small intestine and strangle him with it. Marlon's yelling at me and trying to hit me, arms flapping like a chicken, and I am bruising ten deep circles into the soft pearskin of his abdomen. It's the only place left on him that's mealy, that isn't frayed rope under worn out leather.

I tell him, you've got bruises. They look mostly normal, to me.

Don't worry too much about it.

And Marlon, he leans into me, and I let him.

[wickjump]

i kinda want to live again