#eugenides the god

[swordbreakerz]

happy HGE! now that authors have been revealed i can post the treat i made for my lovely gav, it was such a blast to draw the crenellations scene and mess around with effect layers gor godgenides

view on ao3 here!

[vskitty]

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Hua Cheng- Heaven Official's Blessing / Tian Guan Ci Fu by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu 

Cal Stephanides- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Simon Torquill- October Daye Series by Seanan McGuire

Alex Fierro-Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series by Rick Riordan

[clonerightsagenda]

It's not like I needed more reasons to enjoy Sister Carpenter, but I've always been fond of characters with the trait "Death loves them". They've got an understanding with it, maybe they serve it in some way, and in return it holds them with a lighter hand, but one day it will come to collect. What a terrifying honor, to be beloved by your own end.

[greengirllover]

a truck full of men honked at me so i flipped them off and all their faces dropped

[mothsartart]

“She comes to the aid of those who need her? She didn’t come to yours.” and “I dream about her at night.” “We have heard you screaming.” kind of vibes

[laughinglynx]

Tagged by @wanderingnork!

make a poll with five of your all time favourite characters and then tag five people to do the same. see which character is everyone's favourite!

Tagging @rainydaydaydreams, @painterofhorizons, @toffyandsalt, @moth-ra, and @candybarrnerd.

[ardenetoile]

The Thief

[cultivating-wildflowers]

The fantastic thing about Lucy Carlyle is that, despite the fact that she has super rare and powerful abilities, she is, and I cannot stress this enough, so normal. She's awkward and dense and reckless and doubts herself and has questionable fashion sense and (as others have pointed out) couldn't read a room if it had subtitles with a bouncing ball.

[bellshazes]

reopening ruinsfic sequenced version and it's 2k. and i would say maybe 40% of t he sections are half-written and the rest are one-sentence placeholders

[brehaaorgana]

The fact that Eugenides isn't winning is a travesty.

Also I would like to submit the propaganda for him is INCORRECT.

Eugenides never really lied in book 1. Not really. If you read book 1, and think he outright told a lie at any point, read it again. A lie by omission? Perhaps, although maybe the fault is actually yours, when you don't listen to what he does admit. And as he tells us at the end, he was so sure he gave it all away.

EUGENIDES IS ENTIRELY HONEST ABOUT WHO HE IS AND WHAT HE IS DOING, AND HE'S STILL AN EXTREMELY UNRELIABLE NARRATOR. GEN TELLS US HES MESSING WITH PEOPLE AND THEN WE'RE STILL LIKE "WAIT YOU WERE MESSING WITH US???"

Also if the spoilers propaganda for Harrow gets to mention ghosts and spirits attached to Harrow and Harrow gets hijacked, then I feel like it's ONLY fair to SPOILERS Mention how Gen is possessed semi-regularly by his God (Eugenides) and over the course of six books it becomes clear that it's not always easy to tell how much of Gen is actually Gen and how much is actually Eugenides. We can't always trust that who we hear or see is just Gen.

I have to reread everything and make notes as I go, but I have this working theory that as part of being The Thief:

1. Gen himself doesn't often outright lie, even though he is a liar and The Thief. He changes his mind, he lets people disbelieve him, lets them make wrong assumptions, and he may even lead people to assume false information, but he very rarely (if ever) outright says something totally untrue. This unspoken fact of The Thief underlies the plot of all six books. Gen even seemingly goes out of his way to not have to actually say a falsehood out loud. And yet he remains EXTREMELY deceptive and unreliable!

My theory is that this is an unspoken taboo of being the Thief, sort of? (Edit: alternatively this is just the simple truism that the best lies are the ones you never actually told, and when you DO lie, you keep it as simple as possible.) One of the taboos we do get told is that Gen may never keep the jewelry he steals — it must be dedicated to his God's altar. He loves earrings, and constantly steals them. But he can't keep or wear the earrings he steals, because The Thief cannot steal for their own benefit. I wonder that Gen's relationship to saying a lie is somehow similar, either as a taboo (rereading book 1 most of the untrue things he tells people are about his own well being... Almost the opposite?), or as a matter of being an "honest liar." He can deceive, mislead, omit, or refuse to correct false narratives or assumptions, but he is exceedingly honest about the fact that he does this, and people simply fall for it anyways!

2. More importantly, one of Gen's abilities as The Thief is to know when other people have told a lie. Or rather, Eugenides-as-Gen can hear an outright lie. This I take from King of Attolia, where Gen is constantly "closing his eyes," during court and insists he's definitely listening carefully for "something." My theory is that Gen's eyes are closed because he's allowing Eugenides to listen (borrowing this power), and Eugenides can hear an outright lie. Gen/Eugenides can tell when someone says something false to them, and even when someone is not telling the full truth. (Or maybe Gen is just that smart, that he pieced together the falsified numbers along with the tax records, etc. Both could be true! I think this is more compelling, though. Especially if Gen isn't entirely aware at first when he started being able to hear lies.)

Basically as part of his role as an avatar, he always knows when someone tells a lie, and The God Of Thieves is also, essentially, The God of Unreliable Narration.

I get the impression that the reader knows that Harrow is unreliable as a narrator from the start, because Harrow has damaged themselves into a loss of memory. Harrow doesn't know certain things and so therefore cannot be reliable even if she wanted to be.

Gen, on the other hand, can tell everyone the truth from the beginning— that he is the greatest thief since mortal men were made, and that he can steal anything— and still fool everyone, because he wields his unreliability like a lockpick.

Book one is Gen allowing everyone to be convinced he's completely unreliable about himself and the assessment of his abilities — only for us to realize that he was letting us think he was unreliable and has an exaggerated sense of himself, just so that he could be deceptive about something else entirely!

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; SIDE C

*NOTE; propaganda is out of order due to poll length!

Eugenides Propaganda:

the entire plot hinges on a detail he lets the reader (and every other character) assume is true. I don't want to spoil it because it's a really fun reveal but he is lying from the first second he appears on the page and you can't trust him to tell the full truth about ANYTHING related to himself and his goals. he mostly does it to keep his advantage and not have other characters be suspicious of him but it's just so fun when you realise he's been lying the whole time

Harrowhark Propaganda:

She gave herself a lobotomy and gives completely incorrect flashbacks to the previous book. Things that straight up did not happen. Gaslight gatekeep girlboss.

She’s schizophrenic (confirmed by the author) and also lives in a world with necromancy and ghostly revenants. She’s not just an unreliable narrator for readers, she’s an unreliable narrator of her own internal experience. She knows this and has to work with people around her to compensate for it. Descent into spoilerville below. Seriously Do Not Read if you want to read these books. There’s also the little matter about how she is *not actually the narrator* of a huge chunk of the story that we are initially led to believe is being told from her perspective.

(Spoilers) Holy shit she is THE most unreliable narrator. This gremlin gave herself a lobotomy so that she could forget about Gideon Nav, the most important person in her life (for magic soul-preserving reasons) so half of the second book in the series is spent gaslighting the reader about a book they just read. She comes up with an entire alternate version of the events of the first book in the series to carefully exclude any mentions of Gideon, and any time someone says ‘Gideon’ in front of her she LITERALLY has a stroke and/or an intercranial hemorrhage as her brain overwrites the word with someone else’s name. God occasionally intentionally triggers her memory revision to get out of difficult conversations. She also hallucinates ALL the time (unrelated to the lobotomy). She shows up at her frenemy’s room in the middle of the night (think little kid stumbling to their parents’ room and saying “I frew up”) to ask her to come check underneath her bed for the corpse that’s been wandering the space station. When frenemy checks underneath the bed, frenemy claims not to see anything, and Harrow is such an unbelievably unreliable narrator that it’s an open question in the fandom as to whether frenemy genuinely didn’t see the corpse or if frenemy was just yanking Harrow’s chain. Harrow is also haunted by a literal ghost that fucks up her already fucked up alternate history. Girlie will pick up a piece of paper and read from it the most violent and haunting piece of prose ever composed, when in reality all that’s written on the paper is the elementary school Superman S*. I am NOT joking that is a real goddamn scene. Harrow was created to win this poll. TLDR; she has brain damage and memory loss, she hallucinates, and is also haunted. * https://twitter.com/vestenet/status/1301012651145859072

Girl is so unreliable, she unreliably tells me events I was there for!!! She's retelling the previous book and I'm like "girlie, this is absolutely not how it happened". Also, she gave herself a DIY lobotomy, it has to impact your memory center I guess

She literally had a lobotomy, how can she be reliable

More Propaganda under cut!

Harrowhark is simply the unreliable narrator of all time. Can’t remember shit because of a lifetime of trauma? Check. Maybe lying to yourself and those around you a bit? Most definitely. Being gaslit by the survivors you depend on to orient you to reality? For sure. How about a little bit of canon schizophrenia? She’s got it all. Ghosts? Or something? Spirits that are attached in some way to your body and are not perceivable by others? Sure, sure! But how about spirits that are attached in some way to your body and are gonna use you to hijack others’ bodies and maybe kill God, too? Absolutely. Wee bit of DIY brain surgery? If it would make you an unreliable narrator, friends, then Harrowhark Nonagesimus has been there, been subjected to that!

Okay I don't know that much about this series since I haven't convinced myself to read all of the first book, but this is my blorbo in law so I'd feel bad not spreading propaganda (all of what I'm saying is something I've read, as to prevent myself from straight up submitting misinformation). So all of Harrow's unreliable narration takes place in the second book, Harrow the Ninth. Basically, without her even seemingto acknowledge it, Harrow's brain is very fucked up during this book, to the point where even she's not sure how reliable her narrative is. There's many questions left unclear as a result of her fucked up little brain, like what's real, what's fake, whether we can trust her judgement, whether even she can trust her own judgement, whether her original cavalier is dead or not (Harrow is convinced she is), etc. Let me tell you, I adore unreliable narrators who aren't even that sure if they're reliable. I have yet to eat that trope up here in this circumstance, but this poll might not run again by the time I do, so for now, here's my messed up blorbo in law.

OKAY SO REMEMBER MY GIDEON SUBMISSION? HARROW DOESN’T! SPOILERS AHEAD BECAUSE SHE LOBOTOMIZED HERSELF TO FORGET GIDEON BECAUSE THAT’S A HEALTHY WAY TO GRIEVE AND THEN IN THE ONLY PARTS OF HER BOOK THAT SHE NARRATES (THE REVISED CANAAN HOUSE PARTS) IT’S LITERALLY A ROOM FULL OF GHOSTS HER BRAIN SUMMONED TO DEAL WITH THE FACT THAT SHE CUT HER BRAIN IN HALF TO FORGET GIDEON. she also is a) haunted and b) psychotic, experiencing hallucinations her entire life of both the ghosts haunting her and less supernatural hallucinations- bells tolling, bones rattling, her parents (some of the only dead people NOT haunting her), etc! in the revised history of canaan house that her brainghosts invent, she brings along someone who knows about her psychosis to help reality check her when she tells him go! her caregiver as a child and support when she got older, crux, is a horrible man- but at one point, when someone other than harrow is in harrow’s body and tells him “i am not harrowhark, i am sorry,” his response is simply “aye, you’ve said that before too. who are you then, if not my lady harrowhark?” showing his familiarity with her psychosis and his love for the child he wouldn’t dare see as a daughter. but enough about that lets talk about her unreliable narration! she lies about her feelings of course but she also simply hides the truth from everyone, all the time, compulsively. also literally the entire section of her book that she narrates is a lie she’s telling US about a lie she’s telling HERSELF and no one understands even a little bit of the truth until like the last act of the book. queen.

[captain-hooks]

Eugenides leaving earrings at the altar of his god then leaving earrings for Irene I'm firing myself into the sun

[svetlacreates]

And Costis heard, as clearly as he'd heard the king speaking, another voice. It said, "Go to bed." Eugenides the man and Eugenides the God, an illustration of one of my favourite scenes from The King of Attolia! This was my gift for @etoilegarden for the @hamiathesgiftexchange!

[trans-elrond]

why you, yes you, should read the Queen's Thief books

for #WinASignedSetofTheQueensThief2024, I am here to gently yet persuasively yell at you about why you should read the Queen's Thief books, in a helpfully numbered list (no spoilers, only vibes):

I like unreliable narrators. You like unreliable narrators. You know who the most unreliable narrator is? This scrunkly little guy, blorbo of all time, Eugenides (Gen). You're gonna fall in love with him. You're gonna want to throttle him. It's okay, it happens to us all. (official character art by Emily B. Martin isn't it gorgeous!!!)

Tumblrinas far and wide are known for our love of ancient Greek and Greek-inspired fantasylands. What if I told you that we could have it all (coastal Greek-esque kingdoms, political intrigue, The Gods Are Getting Involved) PLUS there are, occasionally, guns. Yes you heard that right. It's great. Come for the fantasy, stay for the Fantasy Guns(tm).

I could wax poetic about the female lead, Attolia Irene, for approximately 25 years without drawing breath, but suffice it to say she is THEE fantasy queen of all time. Her arc is incredible. I want to be her. I'm scared of her. I adore her. PLEASE read these books so you can also fall head over heels for her.

DYNAMICS!!!!!!!! we have ALL OF THEM. kings and queens and vassals and loyal advisors and scheming diplomats and brave soldiers and anxious scribes and we toss them into a blender and see what happens and who lands where. it is delicious.

Did I mention The Gods Are Getting Involved? the way these books weave the political reality & the godly, mythical, numinous aspects takes my breath away. Truly the blueprint.

Twists and turns that fly by like a rollercoaster. Truly, no one is doing the Plot Twist like MWT. You start out on these books and you think you know where they're going. yOU DO NOT. And you will be delighted every time.

Incredible prose, with occasional excerpts of poetry and song and myth that provide SUCH fertile ground for lore and worldbuilding and delicious, delicious Character Parallels. If you've ever been into classical reception even a smidge, you will rejoice at the plentiful references.

Bro's Road Trip of All Time (book 5) will knock your socks off. If you ever read Eagle of the Ninth, it's kind of like that, but got me even more good. deeply moving, I am never getting over them, (wails to the sky) I just want to be able to read this book for the first time again so YOU SHOULD TAKE THE CHANCE WHILE YOU HAVE IT

anyway, what are you waiting for, go read queen's thief, you will surely not regret it, what are you talking about these books ripped my heart out ha ha ha ha but i mean in a good & fun way okay enjoy!!!!!!!!

[bl00dyghoul2]

"The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind."

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides