#i really should reread the books

[incorrect-belgariad]

INSANE CROSSOVER ON MY DASHBOARD. heritage post

Botanic Tournament : Main Bracket !

Round 1 Poll N

Commentary by Adara's submitter :

This might be cheating because the flower was named after her but :D

TFW your cousin who you've known for a month creates a flower for you out of a stick and some grass and then it turns out to be a miracle medicine

Why this is not cheating, actually

(Buttercups)

[inumbrapugnabimus-maybe]

I read Howl’s Moving Castle and it is officially a comfort book now so here is Sophie :D

[benevolenterrancy]

@doctorbluesmanreturns so true, so true!

The Big Bad Wolf and his commitment to self-improvement!

book titles all courtesy of @meso-mijali who is funnier than me:

Mirror Mirror: 10 Steps to the Fairest You 7 Dwarves' 7 Steps to Romance, by Doc Red Riding Hood and You: Finding Your Inner Child and Learning to Trust Again Into the Woods: CPTSD and the Self Gnolls, Trolls & Wolves: It's what's inside that matters

(+ "Meyers Briggs: we aren't astrology for STEM, honest!" which didn't quite make it in, but assume it's one of the untitled books u.u)

[queerfables]

This came up in my recent discussion with @indigovigilance, but for my own reference, I wanted to make a dedicated post about it.

Fandom speculation in the wake of season 2 has pointed to the themes of deception, sleight of hand and memory tampering to suggest there's an unsolved mystery woven through the season that we can piece together with the right evidence. I think there's a solid case for this, but I also think it's possible we've been deliberately lead into overthinking things.

Crowley and Aziraphale's conversation about Clues-with-a-captial-C is a reference to Terry Pratchett's iconic Discworld detective, Samuel Vimes. Vimes is skeptical about Clues. He considers assembling a singular, intricate explanation that accounts for every available piece of evidence a great way to end up with a theory that is enormously clever and completely off base.

From Feet of Clay:

Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

From the Fifth Elephant:

Mr. Vimes had told him never to get too excited about clues, because clues could lead you a dismal dance. They could become a habit. You ended up finding a wooden leg, a silk slipper and a feather at the scene of a crime and constructing an elegant theory involving a one-legged ballet dancer and a production of Chicken Lake.

Coupled with the conspicuous barrel of red herrings in the opening credits, I have to wonder if the show, while teasing the possibility of a mystery, is explicitly telling us not to look too hard. I'm not ruling out some kind of twist, but I'm inclined to think that for this story, theories are strongest when they rely on only a few pieces of evidence and follow a clear, straightforward narrative. If there is something still hidden in season 2, maybe it's not an elaborate puzzle but a simple misdirect.

[fox-with-ferns]

It’s been a WHILE mcga fandom

[just-sp-in-inginthevoid]

TR English translation wishes it could be as fun as the French one

[ofthebrownajah]

Me: The show hasn't done enough discussion of the Breaking

Also me: actually I don't remember when the books get into this either

[rrylies]

started thinking about how the ghost of altan trengsin haunts rin after he dies, pushing her to reach for anger just as he had when he was alive, and then i started thinking about whose voice haunted altan. i like to think that the phoenix ended up using his connection / sort-of love towards chaghan near the end, but what about before that? what about before he met chaghan, before he joined the cike? was he haunted by the voices of his parents? or perhaps, it was the voices of all of the other kids who were subject to the laboratory with him? maybe he heard them pushing him to get vengeance for them, for all of speer, because he was now the only one who could.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The West Passage

medieval fantasy set in a giant crumbling palace of traditions with forgotten origin, ruled by giant eldritch Ladies

when winter weather comes in the middle of summer, and a beast below the palace begins to rise, two teens from Grey who have suddenly gained a lot of responsibilities set out on separate journeys to the other towers to find a way to stop it, and meet all sorts of strange people and creatures along the way

world where pronouns/names are based on people’s roles

tons of cool medieval-style chapter illustrations by the author

[etirabys]

me: goddamn, I reviewed some fiction I wrote merely 4 months ago and it feels like it was written by a completely different person with way more life in them. the past months have been rough. I need to stop waiting around taking it easy, waiting for my energy to come back. I should just do the hard things I'm putting off

brain: like rereading and reviewing Nick Lane's dense book on the origin of unicellular life in hydrothermal vents

me: noooo anything but that

[planet4546b]

do not ask me for a long elaboration on this i don’t have one but sports is busted from the bottom up. the idea of winning and fairness is flawed and they way that is employed against already marginialized communities is a part of the system not a flaw in it. i literally work in sports i am legally allowed to say this btw

[clfixationstation]

I just remembered the time I was a summer camp counselor and I tried to read the first Harry Potter book aloud to my campers, and I had to skip over so many fatphobic lines

Because why would I just expose these perfectly nice kids to a bunch of mean comments, played off as comedy, that they would use as ammunition against other kids and themselves? It's just plain cruel. Joanne was incredibly fucking weird for that

[painted-fanbird]

Oooh I am Unwell(tm) over Fire and Stars and What the Night Hides. Those two chapters so effortlessly and succinctly set up Dustfinger as a character I’m literally about to go insane about it asdfghjkl

Dustfinger’s playfulness and the richness of the prose during performance is SO tasty, oh my word. The way it foreshadows that he’s not from our world, he’s from somewhere different, somewhere more mysterious and magical, somewhere where he can have a word with the wind so it doesn’t play havoc with his fire, somewhere where fire is a creature he’s tamed

Then to follow that immediately with his betrayal! But it’s still a betrayal with an undercurrent of understanding (something Cornelia is so good at, actually. Understanding why people make the choices they do. We see it in Dustfinger and Resa’s dynamic as well). He’s wracked with guilt and shame, and having read the rest of the series that single moment leaves SO MUCH to unpack. This moment sets up the fact that he loves the Inkworld, his home, so fiercely and deeply he would do anything to get back to it. Anything.

Though don’t you think it’s interesting that Dustfinger knows Basta and the others are coming that night, and that’s the night he chooses to perform for Meggie? I think he’d have done this anyway, he delights in showing of his talents, especially to young girls who think he’s cool imo (after all, he had his own young girl back home), but he takes Meggie to the back of the house. Outside and away from the route Basta and his men would use to get to Mo. Dustfinger knows they aren’t under orders to take her, but it’s Basta and Meggie has a spitfire streak so who knows what might happen to her if she tries to stop him. So he keeps his eyes on her, and hers on him, so she doesn’t get tangled up in the mess he’s started. And later, when she’s screaming for her father, Dustfinger’s first instinct is to comfort her. Because he is a father. A father with his own bright, spirited daughter he hasn’t seen in a decade. But he can’t.

He can’t.

[isfjmel-phleg]

should I read Wives And Daughters? do you recommend it?

Hello! Thanks for asking!

If you like nineteenth-century British literature of the slice-of-life drama/romance with an emphasis on character development sort, and if you aren't daunted by very long books, you will probably like Wives and Daughters.

It's about Molly Gibson, a teenage girl approaching adulthood, and everything that ensues from A) her widowed father's remarrying a woman with a daughter around Molly's age and B) Molly's connection with the Hamleys, a family of the gentry with two young adult sons. Molly ends up caught in the middle of other people's drama, while privately dealing with her own struggles, and the novel as a whole is about her coming of age. Unfortunately, the book is unfinished, since author Elizabeth Gaskell died before she could complete the last installment, but it's finished enough that it's pretty clear how it will wrap up even though we don't have the details.

Gaskell has a distinct style and focus that has some commonalities with Austen or the Brontes but is very much its own thing. She is beautifully sympathetic to her characters, who are complex and believable, and if you read Wives and Daughters, you will get to know and appreciate the cast quite well.

It's been a while since I've read the book, but I have a lot of affection for it, and for the BBC miniseries which was my introduction to the story, and can definitely say that I recommend it.

[wormthing]

listening to "last living doll" by bryan scary always brings me back to gloomy...

[winepresswrath]

I think I would need to reread the first book to really commit to this opinion but imo some of the horror of book!claudia is that she really is a terribly inhuman monster. she was a vampire child, so she never learned to be human. she was a vampire child so she'll never grow up and fulfill that potential. companionship is a necessity for her because she can't look after herself and that makes her bitter and disdainful of people who want love for its own sake, especially in the context of Louis and Lestat, who damned her to her current state to fulfill their own emotional needs. it's a stark contrast to show Claudia, who yes, is a vicious mass murdering vampire and has fun with it, but is otherwise a lonely woman who craves companionship and understanding because she's a person. Her beef with Louis is still about his failure to prioritize her and his assorted bad idea relationship choices but the undertones are so different and I really feel like the tragedy is that he didn't put her first and not that he could never have made her happy no matter what he chose.