#god I love these books

[tigtree]

i think too often about adam parrish becoming gansey at harvard. wearing gansey's old clothes, using gansey's old words, picking up the outcasts and the freaks and giving them somewhere to belong.

that quote about "i think ultimately you become the person you needed the most" but it's adam parrish and the crying club

[ishipgenfics]

Camilla and Palamedes are just... everything to me. God. I don't read them as romantic or platonic or QPR, though I can totally see all of those readings. To me, they are the perfect embodiment of the necromancer/cavalier ideal. They did it. They got it right.

Think about it. Think about all the duos we see throughout the series. The Second House feels more like coworkers than anything. They work together very well, but there's not enough devotion. The Third House is a mess. Coronabeth and Ianthe have got one flesh down, but not one end. They care about each other like hell, but they don't agree with each other. And let's be real here, neither of them care about Babs. The Fourth House are just siblings, the Fifth House are married, the Seventh House... well, we all know what happened to the Seventh House, and the Eight House necromancer is eating his cavalier alive. Gideon and Harrow get the closest at the end of Gideon the Ninth, but their also very traumatized teenagers, and more codependent than anything else.

But Camilla and Palamedes? They did it! They got it right! They understood that the cavalier can't be the only one to sacrifice, that the necromancer must be willing to do anything for their cavalier too. They'd kill and die for each other, they'd do whatever necessary to keep the other one safe and happy. They're so in sync and so in love. They ate each other like binary stars to keep their love intact even if they as individuals couldn't be.

I just. I love them so much. I would actually die for them.

[shrimpscrawling]

I always forget that Ronan was so chilly with Blue in the beginning. I know they don’t interact a whole lot in the books generally, but he was so pissed about her tagging along in that helicopter

[tara-maclays-gf]

// be the serpent spoilers

GUYS. in be the serpent we learn that stacy's full name is anastasia brown. it name comes from koine greek and it means SHE WHO WILL RISE AGAIN. ??!?!??!!???!?!!!!!!

[boltlightning]

Artemis, whose chastity is a running joke on Olympus, who is mocked because she cannot be conquered, derided because she does not care to be dishonoured — the gods in their cups forget sometimes how many ways there are to love. I see it in her now, as she steadies the knife of a child who is learning to skin a hare; as she breathes a little more warmth into the hidden campfire; as she runs at Teodora's side by the light of the setting sun, crimson in her hair, freedom in her laughter. She loves, she loves, oh with all her glorious heart does she love; brighter and more beautiful even than Athena's love for Odysseus, hotter and more beautiful than Paris's desire for Helen, Artemis loves the women of the wood, her people, her sisters, her heart's kin. She would bleed divinity for them; she would stand naked before snarling Scylla in their name. And yet, because her love is not some sexual thing, because it is not the thing that the poets stroking their beards will make ballads of, she herself does not know it is love. Her joy is not spoken of by the spinners of stories, not sung by the music-makers, and so she does not perceive it even as happiness, as delight. She lives merely in this moment without a name, and will recoil in wounded horror if I whisper the truth in her ear: that she most deeply, most truly, loves.

— claire north, house of odysseus

[domesticadventures]

just in case anyone was worried k.a. applegate is only interested in torturing human teenagers, here are some of my favorite moments from the first half of the andalite chronicles

[therubyreader]

I just finished my reread of The Hunger Games Trilogy and now I remember why I didn’t reread it until now: it’s so heart wrenching and sad and I’m emotional and crying

[nikothefunkyskeleton]

FchCTdfffgydgrf Walt just did the best thing ever and by that I mean he just banished somebody’s soul and like the Nico Di Angelo Stan in my heart is just SCREAMING like a little girl

[maibeloved]

BRUH FIDDLESTAN MAN OUGH WHAT IVE BEEN MISSING OUT AAAA

[lxnlego]

I think one of my favorite parts of these series is that rich characterization isn't just reserved for the Main Character™️ it's for every person that is in the books. It makes the world feel so much more real and vast.

camilla hect tries so hard to present herself as unflappable, which makes this scene significantly more devastating to me.

she sees gideon on the stairs, lurking in the shadows and dressed in all black, and she only narrows her eyes and explodes into action.

she fights cytherea “like her heart had exploded,” but her face is described as solemn and obstinate as she asks about palamedes’s last words.

she watches harrow sit up all at once after following the thanergetic links to palamedes’s river bubble and she doesn’t flinch. she tries to repress the intensity of her desire to know if he’s still in there, even though she ultimately can’t contain her feelings and harrow sees through it.

she has “a resolute, keen, utterly unmoved face” and nona remarks that she never flinches at loud vehicle noises or people shouting nearby through the thin walls.

when she’s lost so much blood that she’s breathing high and tight, she holds onto nona “unflinchingly” despite the pain (and, let’s be real, the terrifying experience of being nona’s passenger on a motorcycle, of all things).

she gets a second-hand knuckle kiss from palamedes, and THAT’S when her composure breaks. even after it’s a well-established routine — she almost doesn’t flinch.

[v-i-r-i-d-i-a-n]

Making my way through the hunger games books because I never actually got around to finishing any of them and just read the beginning like all of them because I for some reason thought I finished the last one I read ??? Anyways mmph Suzanne Collin’s the woman you are

[waitineedaname]

I simply don't think that's true eBooks.com but thank you anyway

[painterlad71]

nobody talks about how funny phillippa gregory is. like ill be sat there so deeply upset and then

'Ned plays the part of "trust", with Frances Mewtas as his partner, playing a female trust, "gullibility" perhaps'

like girl say it to his face lmaooo

[dontmixpaintinyourcoffee]

Alright I have a bunch of contenders here but I'm going to narrow it wayyy way down to the one that I think hooked me into the books in the first place.

Happens right at Book 1, when Visser 3 eats Elfangor. Someone else has already explained the horrific details of the relationship between Esplin and Elfangor and Alloran and all that, and they worded it excellently, so I'd like to bring up a different aspect. Not only was it grotesque and gruesome and detailed, it was an immense shock to my little 9 year old system. I was a big reader as a kid, and all of my nerd kid instincts were telling me that, somehow, Elfangor was going to survive and become the mentor for the kids. The Gandalf, the Obi-Wan, the loving parent character who you go home to at the end of the adventure. A moral compass and protector, because there's no way these kids are going to be left to their own devices, right? That just doesn't happen in stories, that doesn't make sense. And then he didn't. He didn't just not survive, he was obliterated. He was chewed up and swallowed and the kids recount the deafening silence that fell when his screams stopped echoing in their minds. It wasn't just the horror of what was happening in canon, there was almost a meta level to it for me. It's when I felt myself go into free fall with the characters because the story walked right up to me and said "this will not be what you think it will be. " I always felt very strongly with book characters, reading was a major emotional outlet for me, but this was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I wasn't protected by the frame of the narrative anymore. All the rules that I'd built up in my head from tons and tons of kids adventure books meant NOTHING here. There is an adult who is kind, who is a soothing presence, who seems to have the best interests of everyone at heart, and he is immediately bitten apart and swallowed before he could do anything about it. I honestly think that's the thing that made me so invested, it was a book that didn't want to protect you, it didn't want to shelter you, it wanted to challenge you. I wasn't aware of it at the time of course, but that was something that totally changed the way I engaged with media and storytelling, and I love it for that.

in your opinion, what was the most messed up moment in animorphs? either most shocking, weird, gross, horrific....however you want to answer

The scene I've always found most viscerally disturbing is Ax and Marco on the Normandy beach on D-Day (MM3). It's the soldiers rushing the beach in waves, "Like cattle going down the chute to the slaughtering floor. But, of course, cattle don't know what's corning. Humans do... And they still came." It's the way Marco sees every murdered soldier "Like Jake. Cassie and I had sworn to protect him. But there'd never even been a chance." It's Ax being awed by the simple act of the medic being killed "while trying to save a man he must have known was doomed."

The two coldest and most aloof Animorphs are reduced to "crying, sobbing" and "digging in the sand" at their inability to make sense of the battle. It's Ax desperately wanting this to be Visser Four's fault, because surely this can't be the way history is supposed to happen. By the time Rachel is dropping grenades, we understand her sheer desperation to make it stop, regardless of the cost.

That said, maybe I find that one so impactful because it's a real event. My grandfather fought in that war, my distant cousins died in that war. I don't have the same visceral fear of turning into a spider that I get from "Bullets entered organs by neat, round holes and came out in a shredded mess... One second they were scared and brave and alive. The next second they were dead."

Anyway, everyone's mileage may vary, and if someone else has a different contender then toss it out there.

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

HOT, SINGLE, UNSTUDIED SPONGES. 3000 NAUTICAL MILES AWAY. Come sail the distance and read Tiger Tiger!