#i AM magic axtually

[chonnysinferno]

How is it that I mention you and not even 5 minutes later you've already liked it

What are you

Magic???

/silly

Well you see ive been watchinf these reblogs go back and forth actually so id like to say it was a coincidence but it's not (technically it kind of is an "just so happened to be there moment because i just finished updating my rentey and just got on tumblr to find u guys so :-) )

[hyukascampfire]

greetings, my dear ashlynn. i, 🌰, am back in your inbox with the promised cruel prince review. (no spoilers, fear not hyukascampfire-ville.) i was making some goblincore doodles just now for my media journal when i remembered you both prompted me to pick up this series and make art again so i had to rush over here‼️ first of all, i’m obsessed !? which is embarrassing because my sister just had peak literature in her room all along and i wasn’t made aware of how peak it is exactly. but she was staring at the amount of tabs she put on the first book and went “huh? which pages did i mark? nothing really happens in the cruel prince” and i was like “???” idk if it’s because i’ve consumed too much cosy fiction this year but the stakes were high so it definitely seemed to me that things did, in fact, happen.

but, i digress. you asked me to guess who your fave character is omg… idk, cardan? or oak. everyone loves oak though so i wonder if it counts (^^;) it’s probably an unpopular opinion but so far i don’t really understand what makes cardan so attractive besides the fact that he’s handsome. and i do mind that he has a tail 💀 but we’ll see. love jude though! she’s so unhinged (positive.) vivi as well. taryn… i understand why she made those questionable choices but she’s on thin ice. i love how convoluted and nuanced the characters’ family ties are; there were very interesting relationship dynamics at play and the court politics were also very intriguing. i actually sort of expected the ending but that’s only because i have N in my mbti lmao. and you were right about how similar the ~feels~ are to tsfawc, while your work itself is original. either way, i’m happy to conclude the year with such amazing reads, especially since you announced your event— i can’t think of anything interesting to request so i’ll let the others work their magic!!

just my two cents… i’d love to know in advance which requests you got, like, just the members and the tropes (?), the suspense is killing me (> <) no pressure though, i know you’ve already got a lot on your plate. good luck with everything! and take care ♡ 🌰

YESS i was waiting for this!!

i think that, even though i absolutely agree that so much happened in the first book (i mean… let’s talk abt balekin and what he did to his family omfg), the second book is ABSOLUTELY my favorite. it’s SO fun. i absolutely need to see your reaction to the ending. jude has an incredible brain.

my fav character is axtually the ghost!! i effing love the ghost. he’s actually part of the inspiration for taehyun in TSFAWC 😣 i can’t say much because you still have so much to go, but i just love him.

the tail 😭😭 i totally understand u w not seeing cardan as all that yet, but omg from this point forward…. you just gotta come back here and tell me how you feel abt him with each. holly does a great job at throwing you around >.<

i absolutely love jude as a main character. n her sisters,, well, vivi especially. taryn…………. ahem. anyway, i am SO with you on the layered and murky family dynamics. i ESPECIALLY love jude and madoc. their relationship is my #1 favorite aspect of the series. the whole, ‘my father is the worst man in the world, and i am his daughter’ thing? ugh. yes.

also the ending omfg i wish i had seen that coming because when i read it, i was ten shades of shocked and anxious. i was so excited for jude and cardan and how things were going, and well… but i think this just made things SO much better, and of course makes sense for jude’s character. phew.

thank you so much for always coming by to talk, and for wishing me well on the event!! i’ll go post the members and tropes for the event rn, i’m so excited, i’ll do it just for you hehe

[tumblunni]

Randomly had an idea for a game where you're some famous exorcist hired to fix monster problems, but instead you LITERALLY FIX MONSTER PROBLEMS

You're like a monster whisperer and the "battle" system would instead be like a puzzle game to figure out what's troubling their soul and heal them. 99.9% of the times they're causing chaos, its just a big ol misunderstanding! Like a monster wanders into the town by accident and gets scared by all the noise, or it got its whiskers tangled in some manmade trash and now it has to scavenge for human food cos it can't sense the vibrations of prey. Or a new monster moved in on its turf and is eating all its favourite carrots, but then the new monster isnt evil either, it was just an exotic pet that got abandoned and is badly adapted to this ecosystem so it causes chaos. Also maybe you can knit lil sweaters for all of them! And those lil ankle bracelets they give to endangered birda in conservation sites so they can track their numbers. Like maybe you axtually work for am scp style organization thats all about monster kindness instead? :3

Anyway i just thought it was neat cos you could phrase the interface as like.. Collecting Troubles. Like u magically extract the energy of the sadness and use it to upgrade your abilities or as currency to buy stuff. Every happy'd friend is a new sword of justice!

[lilahisntsadanymore]

I dunno if it's because of lil help of the magic Tiktok sounds I've been encountering lately, but the exam was so easy axtually???? Tho when I was on my way I passed by some girls and one of them said "look, so scared" and idk if it was about me but firstly - I was stressed about the exam and secondly - what the heck do people do while passing by other people? Am I supposed to make aggressive eye contact with strangers instead of casually looking forward? Or shouldn't I bother with that silly aggressive eye contact and go straight to making out?

Posted my first smut ever right before going to my exam so that I don't overthink the smut being not good enough 👍 lmao

[megaweapon]

Ohh, that’s an interesting perspective, I hadn’t thought about how translations would impact the storytelling (tho it…… seems like it should be obvious ahaha)! Okay, full disclaimer: I haven’t read it since it first came out so some details are lost on me. I need to re-read it and make notes, but for now, this is what I remember/what I have to say:

But starting Absolute Midnight, I felt like there was a book somewhere along the line that I must have missed: Barker introduces many elements without explanation or lead-up, like the existence of the “abarataraba,” which we hear the characters referring to as if it’s very important, but which we don’t get defined for us until MUCH later. I don’t need everything spoon-fed to me, but it’s kind of hard to care about this significant element of its left so completely vague. There were a few other moments like that, too.

The sudden shift in Boa’s behavior was also a big disappointment. Like, before the beginning of AM her last interaction was saving Candy from Carrion, and Barker hinted at an inner darkness, but the turnaround on Boa was so abrupt and complete, and I didn’t feel like the story had EARNED that kind of twist just yet.

I theorized that Boa was going to be an ultimately harmful presence in Candy long before AM came out (Barker axtually hinted it!) but I didn’t get much satisfaction out of the reveal. It felt less like the gradual reveal of someone who had sinster motives all along and more like the author saying “she’s evil now.”

And he big plot twist at the end where everyone she’s met along the way was part of some huge network of spies who all KNEW EACH OTHER… not only was that just straight up dumb but it took a lot of the magic away from her earlier adventures and also was just… Improbable to the point of being really stupid.

Additional quibbles: where the heck did Letheo go? Why did Barker shove in an Instant Romance, when the story didn’t require a romance at all to stand on its own? If you HAD to have a romance, why not go ahead and develop it with the chapter your heroine has been building a healthy, supportive friendship with over the past two books?

I am actually a fan of Clive Barker, I love his horror fiction, I’ve read a lot o his novels and all the Books of Blood, and I genuinely enjoy his imagination and his occasionally over-the-top narrative voice! He usually makes it work.

And so as to end this on a positive note I actually loved everything with Rojo Pixler, the Kid, and Mater Motley’s attack on Commexo City—it was all so strange and yet compelling, it felt more like the first two books than almost any other part of AM. Especially the moment where the fused Rojo-Requiax still clearly remembers the Kid, and some semblance of Rojo’s loyalty is shown to still be there—love it! It’s such a Barker thing to do, to have a character sort of become the big bad monster that’s been whispered about in the first two books but make that monster interesting and compelling.

I still plan to read Kry Rising when it comes out—like I said I’ve been reading this series for a long time—and part of me feels like some elements were taking for granted (hopefully the Instant Romance) are not what they seem, but yeah… those are my immediate thoughts.

megaweapon replied to your post “just a little rant about abarat”

Thank you, thank you… I started reading the books as a teenager, I remember waiting for both books 2 and 3 to come out and I’m still not over the crushing disappointment that was Absolute Midnight. It had other issues but the terrible romance was top of the list

No but do tell, do tell! Honestly, I’ve come to accept that Im really picky when reading fiction, so to me there are no books without issues, but this looked… Idk. I mean, as I said in the post, editing becomes an issue with bigger authors, because of leverage, because of the fact that they have to cut the costs and people are gonna buy the book all the same… Things like this. I don’t know if Barker qualifies as someone without editing tbh, as I have only read the books in translation (I started reading them a couple years after the 2nd came out in Italy I think, it was 2006/2007, and I still wasn’t really that fluent in English), but the plot looked… well. The plot looked period lmao. Like there were things that were intentionally left open, and I can be okay with that (i.e. the whole dad issue), but the whole thing with the Kid (which I’m not sure has the same name in Italian tbh) when there’s the whole red herring about how Candy has to come to him? Like idk, if they went somewhere new, then I’m not sure what that was.

I mean, it’s probably that I would expect something more from someone who worked on a book for 7 years tbh, at least from a plot point of view, even if the execution might have been wonky because of, idk, health problems or whatever. But the plot. Sigh.

Anyway.