#i might as well just tag

[gillianthecat]

I just read Naomi Novik’s final book in her Scholomance trilogy, The Golden Enclaves. This was the first book I’ve read in I don’t know how many months, possibly since last winter. Historically I’ve been a huge reader, usually a binge reader. I’m in an odd lull from it now, and pretty much only watching things. A flip from the previous two years when I lived on fanfic and romance novels and could barely watch a thing.

Overall I liked it, and the whole series! My appreciation of this book was more intellectual than emotion, but I’m not sure if that’s the book or just my current state of mind. I have many thoughts about it, which I may eventually write something about. Particularly about the way she writes romance, and the role it plays in her stories, across her original fic and fanfic. And also about how she mapped the magical world onto the mundane.*

Mostly I’m posting this as a time stamp of when I read it, since I found going back through my blog useful when trying to reconstruct my watching life. And also as a note to self about what I was thinking of.

(This reading was triggered by the post someone reblogged about how there is a recurring character in Supernatural fanfic named Naomi Novak.)

*on the enclave politics of the magical world: I kind of wish she’d made it either less of a match for the cities and international politics of the real world, or more so, and leaned into the political allegory. As it was, it felt too much like relying on stereotypes as a shortcut.

on romance: I found Orion completely uninteresting as a love interest, although fascinating as a concept and a narrative foil. His boring personality was partly the point of the character—what happens when someone really is the hero, and only lives to slaughter monsters?—but it also made it hard to understand why El loved him, or to feel emotionally invested in her grief for him and her performing impossible feats just to save him. Intellectually I understood them, and they make for great storytelling, but I personally didn’t care much about his fate. And then at the end I realized that he performed the same role as the flat generic female love interests in so many stories about male heroes. Where they exist to be saved but aren’t fully fleshed out on their own. (thequeenofsastiel, I won’t tag you in case you haven’t read these books, but it’s making me think of our conversations about women in media.) Someone to motivate the protagonist, to be rescued. (I do also have many vague thoughts about all the interesting things she was doing with Orion and El (and both their mothers) that wasn’t romance, but I have a headache and don’t want to write anymore.)

Which made me look back to the other two novels of hers that I read, Spinning Silver and Uprooted, and in those the male love interests of the young female protagonist are similarly sidelined and… not necessarily one-dimensional exactly, but underexplored. They’re both significantly older than the protagonist, and the story of the romance is really a sideline or an afterthought. I know many people were bothered by the age gap in Uprooted, but as I recall it didn’t bother me because it felt like the story was about the protagonist growing up and coming into her power, becoming someone who was an equal of the old man wizard at the end. Like in so many stories where the hero gets the girl, the "romance" isn’t about him, it’s symbolic of the journey she went on… not a reward exactly, but also more about her than him. In Spinning Silver the romance is even less fleshed out—she goes into the woods with the fairy king (or whatever he was, I read it long ago) and they come out married. My reaction to that was mostly huh? It more or less made sense for the story, but she gives so little explanation of why and how they fell in love that it felt jarring.

If these three books were all I’d read of hers I’d assume she simply wasn’t interested in romance. The fact that 2/3 of the love interests are so much older and given so little page time reminds of that story (not sure if it’s true or apocryphal) about Louisa May Alcott being told she had to put a romance in Little Women and, in irritable defiance, making Jo fall in love with a boring old man. But much of her fanfic is romance, and when she puts it in I can usually feel the love and attraction between the characters, understand why they want each other. Which makes me curious about why it’s so different in the three published novels I’ve read. Is she less interested in het relationships? (I’ve read very little of her mf fan fiction so far.) Does it get in the way of the stories she wants to tell about young women? Is it something about the way she’s using YA genre conventions?

It does feel a little weird talking about her work on Tumblr where I know she has an account (which I even follow) but presumably she isn’t doing name searches out here.

[shininas-ideals]

Glad Fyodor's finally dead, everyone's alive and we can go back to solving cases and flirting fighting with the PM :D

[gerrykeay]

im not putting this post into words. beams into your mind The Parallels

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[writeouswriter]

People sorting ao3 solely by stats and only clicking on fics with a certain amount of kudos or comments, you will not survive the winter, nor the summer, nor at all, *brings out knife,* run

[wasabi-gumdrop]

Kabru has a secret admirer in the castle!

[cuppajj]

squish

[ckret2]

I've seen some folks saying that the reference to The Great Gatsby in TBOB was just a joke Alex didn't put deeper meaning into—which might be true, IDK the man's motives for choosing Gatsby specifically—and that there's no way the book has any deeper relevance to Bill's character beyond the eye doctor thing—which is totally wrong. Whether or not Alex intended parallels, there ARE parallels. So, for those of you who didn't read or didn't pay attention to The Great Gatsby:

the book's about a guy who started out as an unimportant loser with starry-eyed dreams, who very quickly gained a lot of power/gold and now presents himself as this dapper fancy well-dressed super important guy.

He constantly throws huge parties, he's got a reputation for being THE party host. But it's a sham, he's pouring all these resources into this party to make himself look so cool but he's living at the very edge of his means.

He lies about his history, lies about how he got his money (spoilers: he's a criminal), lies even in how he presents his personality—he's a con artist, he's always wearing a mask.

The reason he's doing all this—putting on the mask, making himself look so great—is because he's trying to reach across this very thin boundary to a better life he can see, JUST out of reach, so close but something he's never quite clever enough and rich enough and persuasive enough to reach. Every night at his parties he stares at his goal, he can LITERALLY SEE it, he just can't reach it himself.

The best he can do is briefly charm and dazzle someone on the other side of this social boundary, but he can never quite persuade that person to help him cross over; in fact no one on the other side of the boundary thinks he has a right to cross it.

He finds somebody—the guy narrating the book about him—who's very lonely, socially awkward, and disillusioned, whom he can easily awe with his stories and persuade to help him reach his goal, come on please, it'll be harmless! (It is not harmless.)

He loses control over the act he's putting on and over the people who only follow him around as long as he's still got the resources to keep them entertained and loyal.

It ends with him getting murdered by a guy he has LITERALLY never met before—by which point everyone has realized that he's a nobody making it all up as he goes along who was just desperately chasing the illusion of a good life and the admiration of everyone around him.

The narrator ends up disillusioned with him and the whole culture around him of grasping and clawing for a glitzy glamorous life at the expense of the regular people who are manipulated, trampled, and discarded in the process.

Now tell me that Gatsby doesn't have any parallels to Bill's character. And this is just based off reading the book a decade ago—there's probably tons of little details I don't even remember. The book may well have been chosen as a coincidence, it did recently hit the public domain. But if so, it's a VERY GOOD coincidence.

[growling]

Arospec acceptance leaving peoples' bodies the moment an aro person describes themselves as loveless and/or aplatonic and doesn't actually "make up" for their lack of attraction by platonically loving other people a lot

[pinacoladamatata]

blink and you'll miss it moments around skyhold....

[swankshrimp]

This came to me in a dream

[lucabyte]

i feel like people are sleeping on the occam's razor situation of how buckwild it is to outright accuse a guy of being a clone of your friend even if you DO have a lot of circumstantial evidence. there's other options is what im saying. they could just be like. a guy. that's a sensible deduction. you should explore that deduction. ignore my shirt that reads I <3 RED HERRINGS.

i still think odile has the correct theory on lock but she's smart enough to know it needs like... a real smoking gun to be able to bring it up without sounding insane.

anyway. (mirabelle voice) i know its rude to speculate but has anyone else noticed the grieving? they seem to be grieving. does anyone have any thoughts on the grieving? i have some thoughts on the grieving.

[mindsmist]

don't look back / / move forward

[snakeoid]

imagine astarion so pale hes translucent like a glass frog. ur vampire so white he see through 😭😭

[gradelstuff]

My Hero Academia - Art Card Collection Vol. 1 from Jump Shop Online (2024)

[stealingyourbones]

DPxDC the Olympics AU.

Jazz is competing for sharpshooting

Dick is competing for team gymnastics

Y’all can work it out from there :)

[something-something-peaceful]

How fucking dare, you come into my house, fuck my wife and you don’t even offer any of your bean dip casserole?!