#ftakb

[bayofalgecirascranes]

i am rereading the part of Skin Stealer's Son by @muffinlance where the cat that controls dead things is doing a Danse Macabre against Vivaldi's Winter and i just noticed... Aaron instinctually knew what steps he needed to take to cross the dancing circle???? He felt exactly how he would fit into the murder-dance if he'd had his weapons???? He felt compelled to join the circle of dancing corpses?????

I mean, he resisted the compulsion without even trying, so he's definitely alive. But i don't think the dance would have affected him like that at all if he wasn't at least somewhat dead.

Of course, living folks also don't see Deaths unless those folks are cats, and he's literally a fellow who is still walking around long after his Death was supposed to take him, so.

[therealslimshady]

of all the side characters in the skin stealer's son, the weaponsmith is my absolute favorite. She's all caught up in keeping her people safe after they've been enslaved for generations and then in waltzes the world's shadiest boy, about to wreck havoc across the heldlands and expedite all her plans by several decades

[gaymedievaldruid]

I'm about to write something fucking wild, this is going to be great

[therealslimshady]

@muffinlance baby griffins.....

in fucking Tears thinking about how disgusting a baby griffin would look

[ruinconstellation]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Fox's Tongue and Kirin's Bone - Allison M. Kovacs Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Markus Yin Sung & The Lady | Adelaide Sung Sr. Characters: Markus Yin Sung Additional Tags: markus gets shivved. welp., Canonical Character Death, Wordcount: 100-1.000, Past Tense, POV Third Person Limited, Yes beta we survive like Aaron Summary:

Unlike Aaron, Markus didn't meet his Death whilst still alive; rather, his Death met him, as was the norm.

beta by @eliduremaybe !

[bayofalgecirascranes]

I feel like if Markus and Aaron had ever properly met they would immediately either make plans to take over the world together or make plans to kill each other, no in-betweens.

[therealslimshady]

currently can't stop thinking about how when the-dragon-as-orin rode into town that last time, he forwent tradition and entered first, while Aaron entered last

[scolop98]

this isn't even foreshadowing it's just spoilers worded as jokes

oh my god, all your ominous john baker-posting from back during book one has finally paid off... that was one hell of a final chapter

I love him Your Honor

-Actual Legal Defense of John Baker

[therealslimshady]

Aaron fox's tongue and kirin's bone is not doomed by the narrative or saved by the narrative but a secret third thing (his existence throws the narrative off it's tracks and several important people are very put off by this)

[bayofalgecirascranes]

hey @muffinlance

how evilly were you laughing when you wrote this piece of dialogue?

[bayofalgecirascranes]

I have a ftakb theory i thought you might be interested in, regarding what might have happened to the late prince Orin after he and Jeshinkra took their ride in the woods 👀

when i first reread the Skin Stealer's Son I went back to read basically those exact lines three or four times over back-to-back because I agree with your theory absolutely and completely.

I really hope the o'shea siblings will reunite as living breathing people and not ghosts in the third book

[bayofalgecirascranes]

#It's so funny#If he ends up on the throne somehow by the end of the series it will have been entirely accidental#He's just trying to live laugh love over here it's not his fault it keeps putting him in strategically optimal positions#FTaKB tags by @therealslimshady you ever sidestep Death so hard you trip and fall into ruling over all of humanity.

Aaron Fox’sTongueandKirinsBone plots accidentally what certain people he knows could only hope to plot on purpose and I love that for him.

[gaymedievaldruid]

So I FINALLY finished Fox's Tongue and Kirin's Bone and I'd really just love to have nuanced opinions about the themes and politics and world building but all I have is I just really like Lochlann, he's such a sad wet cat man (my favourite type of blorbo) and also how do you pronounce Lochlann? I've just about got my two braincells to agree that this is based off Gaelic mythology, not Celtic as I initially thought (and then was confused by until I put two and two together) so presumably Lochlann is pronounced like Lock-lan. Except I can't for the life of me read it that way. I think it might help if someone could tell me whether I'm right or wrong and maybe that'll help

[bayofalgecirascranes]

I just need to scream at someone about my most off-the-wall theory for Fox's Tongue and Kirin's Bone and you have a lot of fun theory posts. I don't know if anyone else has talked about this, but I haven't seen any theories discussing it at least. So here it is:

I think Aaron and Markus are identical twins.

Listen. Listen. Think about it. Really think about it. Aaron is able to take Markus's place near *seamlessly*. When he's being questioned in the first book his defense is not to point out any actual differences between them like noses or eye shape, but that Markus is taller and better fed than he is.

His own father does not recognize any differences between the two, after Aaron has had a few months of good food and care. Another point - the Duke was very shocked to learn he had another son. Perhaps because he wasn't sleeping around *that* much to get two separate women pregnant at basically the same time?

His older sister only realizes because Aaron is *shorter* than Markus was. Here are these people who, theoretically, knew Markus very well. And Aaron, on appearance at least, is indistinguishable from Markus to them.

How much does a person reasonably expect someone to change in half a year? How different could they be until you didn't recognize then at all?

How likely is it that two half-brothers, both born at roughly the same time, are *that* identical? Like, is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? Probably about as much as them being separated twins.

And in a society that can sometimes be *weird* about identical individuals what's to say their mother didn't just give one to the Duke and kept the other for herself? We still don't know who either of their mother's are - if they're alive or dead, what relationship they had with Duke Sung.

The only real indication we've had they they are *half* brothers is the Lady's word about multiple 'indiscretions'... and in going back to the last chapter of Fox's Tongue and Kirin's Bone to check I am now just realizing that she never really answered the ''Was his mother the same as mine?" question. Aaron asked *three* questions and she gave *two* answers.

So. Make of all that what you will.

You have convinced me, it makes perfect sense. Unless Markus wasn't as strictly human as we were all lead to believe...

But I think that rather conflicts with Markus being "the chosen one destined to save Humanity" thing, and I don't think the story has made much reference to Changelings, so I'm going to go with your idea until and unless the third book disproves it.

[bayofalgecirascranes]

my latest red-string and thumbtacks tinfoil hat theory about Fox’s tongue and Kirin’s bone is: what if Aaron is a Kirin doppel of Markus Sung? What if Markus got doppeled when he was really young, when nobody was watching him, so nobody knows and neither of them remember?

From the scene at the Late Wake meeting it’s almost confirmed that doppels can also be skin stealers, and I’m pretty sure we know that some doppels don’t know they’re doppels until the first time they transform, and we know there’s also Kirin shenaniganry going on.

I’m fully aware that this theory makes little to no sense and will probably be soundly debunked by canon like my “Markus is not actually dead he’s just possessing Aaron while he’s sleeping and also he’s the one who killed the fox and ate its tongue” theory, I just find making objectively insane ftakb theories and just going full conspiracy-mode about that story to be really fun.

[gaymedievaldruid]

Spoilers for Skin Stealer's Son

...so Aaron could seek refuge with the Rafferty brothers by swearing fealty over Kirin's bone. If he does I don't imagine it going well, unless he plays it exactly right and gets Rose and Lochlann to sit down and shut up for long enough, so they probably won't go there until they absolutely need to. But they, technically, could. Unless the racoon woman with the Face is in with the Rafferty's already, then they might have their reunion faster than expected.