#every episode he just looks s o unbelievably g o o d

[stevethehairington]

no because season four is the best evan buckley has ever looked

[stuckonluke]

BELLARKE EXPLANATION FOR 509 (worth the read I promise :))

So I would just like to make my own intellectually stimulating rant about my interpretation/understanding of bellarke in 509 because everyone is flipping their shit when I really don’t think they need to… (though I do feel your pain and frustration)

Ok so for starters everyone is saying the bellarke is now “toxic” or “ruined” and “they can’t bounce back from this”… First of all, just because Clarke slapped Bellamy, doesn’t make their entire 7 years of friendship toxic. Every relationship, whether romantic or platonic or family-related or whatever has their ups and downs and their bumps in the road. No relationship of any kind is perfect. And Bellamy DESERVED the slap for what he did to her, and the fact that Clarke is so close to him and put so much trust in him to be let down just shows how much it hurt her to have to do something like that, but also shows WHY she would do something like that. It’s not very different from Clarke pulling the gun on Bellamy in 4x11, or Bellamy chaining Clarke to the chair in 3x05 simply to be shocked by her later in that same episode. They’ve both done things to each other in order to help others out.

Let me explain more; in 4x11, Clarke initially has Bellamy chained up in the bunker in order to save their people (same as Bellamy does in 5x09), Clarke eventually pulls the gun on him when he betrays her in order to save his sister. Ultimately, the two discuss the difficulty of each of their choices and how these choices ended up putting Clarke and Bellamy against each other. However, they were able to realize that they each had their own reasons.

5x09 is very similar, but first I have to say that, E V E R Y T H I N G  B E L L A M Y  D O E S  I S  T O  S A V E  C L A R K E. <——that needed to be emphasized. Bellamy betrayed Clarke and helped Madi with the flame because he wanted to save Clarke. Had he not done so, he could not ensure that Clarke would not be executed when Octavia awoke, and Bellamy would rather have Clarke be so unbelievably mad at him and hurt by his choices than have her dead. He’d rather live in a world where she hates him than live in a world without her at all.

Ok but seriously, everything Bellamy does is actually to save ALL his people. By using Madi, Bellamy saves his sister from being killed AND from leading the army to the valley, saves all of spacekru from being killed if the valley was invaded, AND saves Clarke from being executed by Octavia. He’s using his HEAD.

Now let me talk more about the “head and the heart”

Like I said, Bellamy is actually using his head (whether it seems like it or not at first), but he’s making the smart move that will benefit the majority of people. This is the kind of choice Clarke would have made (and did make) in seasons 1-4. Clarke now is using her heart, putting trust in Bellamy to save Madi, and ultimately being let down by the both of them. She’s not thinking about the consequences of anything, she is just following her heart to save Madi. AKA exactly the types of choices that Bellamy would’ve made (and did make) in seasons 1-4.

So now think about it this way; these two have SWITCHED mindsets and are now making choices that the other would have made before the time jump. That means Bellamy is now UNDERSTANDING how Clarke must have felt all those times she tried to lead with her head and save the majority of the people, without letting emotion guide her. Whereas Clarke is now UNDERSTANDING how and why Bellamy did some of the things he did in previous seasons when he let his heart get in the way. As much as it hurts and seems like the two of them are completely different characters, they aren’t, they are reflections of each others past selves.

Therefore I don’t believe any of the choices or actions made in this episode were out of character for either of them. In fact, it may have been a stepping stone to each of them balancing out using their head and their heart because both of them have used one more than the other in different situations. At this point, they now understand where the other was coming from and whether or not they were using their head or their heart. This connection is going to push Bellamy and Clarke back together because now each of them realizes reasons behind certain choices and the difficulties that come with using only your head or your heart.

Other random things I want to address:

I don’t think Bellamy calling Spacekru his family was about leaving Clarke out, I think he was stating that he knows Madi is family to Clarke and thats why she wants to protect her, and therefore he wants her to know that spacekru is his family and he wants to protect them just as badly. He’s not saying that Clarke isn’t his family, the two of them aren’t the ones in current danger, they’re the ones who are making the choices to save the others. He’s simply pointing out the people not currently present that are important to each of them that they BOTH want to save.

Which again is why Bellamy went against what Clarke wanted, because he wanted to save spacekru, as well as Clarke, as well as Octavia.

Finally, if you look at 5x09 as a whole, every single character is pitted against their closest allies. Think about it: spacekru has difficulty getting along with Echo vs Raven about Shaw, Mccreary and Diyoza are put up against each other, resulting in a bloodbath between the same group of people, Indra is against Octavia, Wonkru almost broke out into a huge fight, and Octavia, Clarke, and Bellamy keep switching between partners and enemies. So as much as we focus on Bellarke, the entire episode was about loved ones making difficult choices against one another, which honestly made it an enjoyable episode to watch.

And that doesn’t mean that any of these relationships are ruined!! (Especially Bellarke!!), it just means that sometimes not everyone is on the same page, and sometimes people have to take matters into their own hands for their own reasons, and all of these relationships are simply going to have more depth and more layers added to them because of it.

Ok thanks if you read all this I hope it made sense and I hope that it gives you more hope for the rest of season 5 and the rest of Bellarkes journey because I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Also IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO ADD PLEASE MESSAGE ME, REPOST AND COMMENT, SHARE ON TWITTER, literally anything I just wanna hear your thoughts.

Also follow me on twitter @byemoments1237 lmao xx

[politicsprose]

2017 Holiday Newsletter

Welcome to the 2017 Politics and Prose Holiday Newsletter. As always, we’re proud to present a selection of some of the year’s most impressive books. Happy holidays to all!

American Fiction

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (@scribnerbooks) captures a time and place on the verge of momentous change. Set in Brooklyn in the 1940s, the novel tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who has dropped out of Brooklyn College to contribute what she can to the American war effort. Unsatisfied with her job of inspecting and measuring machine parts, she attempts to enter the male-only world of deep-sea diving. Manhattan Beach is rich and atmospheric, highlighting a period when gangs controlled the waterfront, jazz streamed from the doors of nightclubs, and the future for everyone was far from certain. - Mark L.

Shaker Heights is a perfectly planned town full of people with seemingly perfectly planned lives, but when Mia and her daughter Pearl move in they start a series of little fires, small rebellions, that shake the community to its core. Celeste Ng brilliantly explores the nature of art, family, and identity in her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (@thepenguinpress). The writing is beautifully elegant and layered, and you’ll find yourself immediately swept up in the lives of the characters. At the heart of the story are four mothers: one whose carefully planned family was nearly derailed by a high-risk pregnancy and who watches her youngest daughter so carefully that she forgets to show her love; one who leaves her child at a firehouse to save her life in a hopeless moment; one who longs for a child and fears her chance will be snatched away before she can experience the wonder of motherhood; and one who made a dangerous choice to raise her child on her terms. Whether you are a mother or a child, the story of these women and their families will stay with you long after you turn the last page. - Tori O.

Larry McMurtry has always been ambivalent about the success of the fiction in which he portrays the cowboy myth and the rugged Texas machismo that comes with it, but as you read the three novels collected in Thalia: A Texas Trilogy  (Liveright) you won’t be of two minds. Actually, upon learning that McMurtry wrote all these books in his twenties and that they were the very first three he wrote, you’ll be burning with envy. In Horseman, Pass By, McMurtry sets Lonnie Bannon with his love of his Granddad’s ranch and way of life against Hud, his step-brother, who is endlessly crude and cruel. At the center of Leaving Cheyenne are Gid, Johnny, and Molly, a rancher, his cowboy hand, and the woman they both love. They each take a turn telling the story of their unconventional lives in small-town Texas. Finally, there’s The Last Picture Show, in which we see Thalia as a dead-end place. Of the three, this is perhaps the most darkly comic, as nearly every character engages in self-deception in order to eke out an existence in a town where every day is the same. Amid the fantastic and perhaps unbelievably melodramatic events, McMurtry finds a bottomless well of compassion for his characters. This is one time capsule was worth re-opening. - Sharat B.

Described as an “illustrated novella,” and looking like a quirky coffee table book, A Field Guide to the North American Family (Knopf), by Garth Risk Hallberg, is neither. This work, which Hallberg wrote before his 2015 New York epic, City on Fire, is an ingenious maze of a narrative based on the concept of the North American Family. Reminiscent of Lydia Davis’ seemingly quotidian pieces of pointed brilliance, Hallberg’s work is multi-layered, surprising, and deft. At one level the book uses a series of flash-fictions to recount the story of two families. At another, it’s an index of terms that readers can reference while reading the main plot—or savor for the wisdom they offer on their own. Then there are the photos. Each episode comes not only with its keywords but with a visual image. These are sometimes directly related to the text, like conventional illustrations, but often their relationship to the narrative is more elusive. Some pages look as if they’ve been torn from one scrapbook and pasted into this one, others look fresh and new. Grab this emotional map of North American family life and get ready to wander – it’s sure to be a warm, nostalgic trip. - Justin S.

In Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean (@penguinrandomhouse), Marina Willett’s husband, a famous-turned-infamous literary historian, has disappeared, seemingly a suicide case but maybe that’s just what he wants people to think. From this hook, the book’s tentacles spread into a kaleidoscopic series of investigations, as Marina double-checks her spouse’s leads to get to the bottom of a mysterious bit of H. P. Lovecraft apocrypha called “The Erotonomicon.” Cameos extend from Lovecraft to William Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, and more, becoming something like “The Savage Detectives of American weird fiction.” To follow this book’s incredible story, you don’t need to like, or even know, these figures, which are all fictionalized creations anyway, despite the author’s deep knowledge of their histories. La Farge critiques and parodies but does not romanticize these writers. He’s deeply attuned to how our human sympathies toward icons we learn about from afar can morph into blind obsession despite our best intentions. His narrative is a seamless combination of trickster humor and utter heartbreak, plumbing the depths to which people will go to forgive, embody, and take revenge upon their former idols, all while preserving their own reputation. The best writing lives inside you —even possesses you. The Night Ocean does just that. - Jonathan W.

Lily Tuck, whose novel The News from Paraguay won the National Book Award in 2004, is one of our finest writers of novels-in-vignettes, and her latest, Sisters (@theatlantic), takes compression to extremes. Its “chapters” are often over in a page, a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, but they’re such vivid shards that you feel like you’re catching all the other pieces in a mosaic without having to see them spelled out. This is the story of a woman reflecting on her shaky marriage, whose trappings—her husband’s children, passions, and memories—all come courtesy of a prior spouse. Tuck centers on her narrator’s relationship with this other woman, who, though living across town, always seems to be in the air. What could turn spiteful in another writer’s hands comes off as gentle and empathetic in Tuck’s, as her lead character seizes on snatches of imagery (“a messy ponytail,” “did not wear rings”), to think through what her ostensible rival’s life must be like. Is it the narrator and not the man who links the two of them who truly understands this woman, she who sees that the bouillabaisse dinner he fondly remembers from France might have made her pregnant body sick? For such a short novel, Sisters is full of these kinds of insights, simply but inimitably framed. - Jonathan W.

One of the most talked about books this autumn, and my favorite, was My Absolute Darling (@riverheadbooks), by Gabriel Tallent. Shocking and unsettling, at times difficult to read, the novel follows fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston, who feels more at home in nature than she does with her survivalist and damaged father, as she searches for freedom and fights for her soul. Roaming the woods one night, wondering if her father would be able to find her, she meets two lost teenage boys and guides them safely out. And that is the moment she starts questioning her home life. The way Tallent brings you steadily into Turtle’s mind makes you almost feel her pain. He manages to capture her deepest thoughts, her internal struggle, her will to survive. Obviously suffering from Stockholm syndrome, she debates with herself over whether to stay or leave, doubting her worth every step of the way. But she fights and she survives. She is the kind of girl, brave and determined, with whom readers are almost duty-bound to fall in love. Tallent grew up in Mendocino and spent a lot of time outside. His love for the region is evident in Turtle’s view of the place and Mendocino itself is a strong character in the book. This is Tallent’s debut novel. And what a remarkable debut it is! - Marija D.

Friendships seldom get the sustained literary treatment that romances do, but Claire Messud’s insightful novel The Burning Girl (@wwnorton) shows that these relationships strike as deep, stir as many emotions, and do as much to shape a person, for better or worse. They can have special force when formed early in life, and Messud’s protagonists, Julia and Cassie, are best friends from nursery school to roughly seventh grade. Narrating the friendship and its aftermath, Julia, the one who takes paths already there rather than striking out into untrodden territory—the one who sets limits—insists that she and Cassie are as close as sisters. Their two families never mesh, however, and Julia comes to realize that her notion of “home” is not Cassie’s. Much of Cassie’s home life is guesswork, and while Julia does that work, her version of Cassie is partly made up; at times Cassie seems like one of the characters Julia, an aspiring actress, inhabits on stage. Messud uses the inherently self-dramatizing period of adolescence as a lens to view more difficult questions of how well any two people can know each other, and she brilliantly demonstrates how the typical rites of passage—fantasizing about an alternative family, surviving junior high cliques—can suddenly yield “one of those events that that was little and big at the same time,” bringing about the kind of understanding that a person never forgets. - Laurie G.