#damn you good books

[ritzcrackee]

GUYS HELP IM CRYING IRL HOW DO I STOP

[mayasaura]

It must have been kind of confusing being fandom-in-laws with tlt when Nona came out. Yeah yeah tlt that's the one with bones and goth knights and dead lesbian space juggalos in sunglasses. and apparently a girl and her fluffy white dog??? going on a walk with her happy family??? Okay??

[aria-greenhoodie]

Decided to redraw that lovely Bill Cipher Circle (does it have a proper name?) to act as a cover image for my Bill Cipher playlist…

+ sticker-friendly colored version! ↓

Click for Quality!

[deoidesign]

Thinking about vampires, death, life, and the space they occupy in between

[batcavescolony]

just saw someone say Rick Riordan making a TV show is just as bad as anything JKR has done. BFFR you're comparing Rick Riordan trying to make his world more inclusive, changing some parts because of money/time constraints, or just making changes cus he thinks they're needed, to JKR being a terrible person!

[bluehairperson]

I'm not immune to propaganda 😔

[clockworkreapers]

Well... now since I have B.R.'s design down a peep did bring up this scene from vol 3

[diana-daphne]

Best book ever written, nothing will ever be funnier than this, Jane Austen I love you more than anyone else in the world <3

[sovamurka]

J. C. Leyendecker's "Study for Butterfly Couple" (1923) // unused vinyl design for Arcane's "Pretend Like It's the First Time" episode title card // marble statue of Liang Shanbo & Zhu Yingtai, also known as "Butterfly Lovers" from the eponymous chinese legend

[jessieren]

It’s almost the end of 2024 and so that means it’s time for an Evans retrospective...

And so I present to you the top Evans spotting moments of 2024:

Laos (and THAT blue linen shirt...)

2. Exeter College

3. UIKY teaser pics

4. MAMA exhibition in Brixton (ok so we didn't spot him there but it was his photography on display - for possibly the first time in an exhibition(?) - and we got the Pink Tape 😂)

5. Patti Smith concert at Somerset House

6. Backstage with Endeavour friends at Three Men in a Boat

7. HIA read through (aka THAT black t shirt... 🥵)

8. HIA Rehearsal pics

9. Opening Night (aka Hair-gate) and Press Night (the SCRUFF 🥵)

10. HIA post show discussion

11. HIA fan photos and encounters *sigh* (so. much. good. content) AND the live stream (thank you OTT)

12. UIKY press screening and UK release

13. Almeida Theatre rehearsed reading

14. St Catz book launch

15. MacMillan Follow The Stars

Thankfully - after quite a drought - we got lots of great Evans content through the year and got to enjoy some amazing theatre, tv and personal encounter moments.

I'm forever grateful for the friendship, fun and laughter that we share on here - and that I got to meet Shaun this year, and that he was such a wonderful human being.

Roll on 2025...

[nadiajustbe]

I think the whole issue I have with Howl's character in HMC movie can be outlined in one brief sentence:

"You can't write Howl Pendragon without writing Howell Jenkins"

[greenerteacups]

What do you think of jkr as a writer? I for one has always felt like she didn’t treat her female characters well. It felt strange, being critical of her when she was god queen of the earth, and also being 10

I think most of the problems in her books can be chalked up to genre hopping. Books 1-3 are perfectly good and serviceable children's books — great children's books, even! They have compelling, relatable characters and juicy mystery plots. They have problems, sure, but for the first three books someone's ever written — especially someone with little or no background in creative writing — they're really fucking good. So: there's her flowers.

The last four books pivot sharply into much more emotionally complicated and sociopolitically loaded territory, because they're describing a war. And it's hard to write children's books about war. I would venture you can't really do it, at least without dramatically misrepresenting what war is! And so Rowling makes the executive decision somewhere during the writing of Book 4 that she's not going to flinch away from that, she's going to go for dramatic realism, and she kills Cedric Diggory to let us know. People had died in Harry Potter before, of course — Quirrell gets sent to the fucking shadow realm, for example. But children haven't. (It also gives parents who are reading these books with their children a warning shot: shit is about to get significantly more real, think twice before you buy the next one of these for your 10-year-old.) After that, Rowling starts leaning much more into dramatic realism, and the fast-paced mystery-novel plotting of the first few books is replaced by a slow, simmering political conflict that unfurls over the course of about a million words.

The problem — besides the fact that she's picking one of the hardest things to write about, like, in all of literature, war is really insanely complicated and emotionally intense and hard to portray well — is that she's now trying to use characters, plot points, and technologies she developed for a children's series to enact a sprawling war drama among teenagers and adults. So Hermione, who was a reasonably precocious snobby eleven-year-old, becomes this sort of encyclopedic all-knowing savant of the wizarding world, who somehow remains functional and mostly even-headed despite her identity being the chief target of a prolifically murderous terrorist group. Draco Malfoy, a schoolyard bully whose primary tools included 1. namecalling and 2. telling teacher, JOINS said terrorist group (and admittedly does react reasonably, i.e., has a total crashout and takes to sobbing in a girls' bathroom whenever he gets a free minute). Dumbledore, who starts out as "whimsical friendly winky-wink trustworthy grandfather type", ends up being Magical Winston Churchill in a violent game of spycraft and espionage, eventually revealing he's only been keeping Harry at all these seven years because he wants to KILL him! And like, maybe really good technical writing could smooth out these transitions and make the first-order dramatic choices seem more natural, but Rowling is like, a Fine Writer, technically speaking. meaning she's reasonably consistent in characterization, her plotting is well-paced and believable, she has a clear authorial voice, and her prose is readable. personally, that's not enough to get me to buy into some of the changes that happen in the later books, and because she stuffs these things so full with new elements every installment, a lot of stuff ends up getting glossed over.

And like, I still love the books. I think they're wonderful, and they taught me how to read. but i can say that and also say that Rowling probably did herself a disservice by trying to write four giant war novels as sequels to her first three mystery children's books.

[swervesbar]

[serpentface]

reading all about the white calf, love your work, can i just say. gonna put some hibrides appreciation out there because damn. nobody in this story is lucky but she in particular seems to be having a Bad Time

Yeah a lot of things suck pretty bad for her. Unwittingly in a lavender marriage, mutual dislike between her and her dogshit husband, extremely strained relationship to her former best friend/gay quasi-boyfriend/father of her children who alternates between avoiding her and desperate attempts to make her love him again, having to constantly maintain multiple levels of facade to socially protect their throuple and therefore herself, shy and socially isolated, dealing with trauma that she doesn't even begin to recognize as such because 'nothing bad actually happened', pretty sure something is deeply wrong with her, living under a damocles sword of catastrophic social consequences should her children be exposed as bastards, has discovered an unexpected and mostly unwanted pregnancy while on a months long cross-country trek, etc.

She's also someone who prides herself in being rational, put together, stoic against adversity, and not overly emotional and weak, which basically means all of this is getting suppressed and compartmentalized away like crazy.

She HAS managed to fall into a rhythm with it all and her life IS NOT constant misery and agony. But the situation she's in for the duration of the story completely tears her out of this rhythm and makes all these factors very acute (though also opens her up to new opportunities, new and more positive/differently complex relationships, and much bigger things to worry about than her domestic life).

Unrelated drawing of her struggling not to lose her shit in public (in this case trying not to laugh)

[deoidesign]

I met the me who made different choices

[toxinoire]

I'm gonna write this gelphie post of mine again, but like, a polished with an actual build up version of it.

I'm posting that on ao3 so...

*sighs* Booksical Gelphie will be the death of me.