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boltlightning · 3 months ago

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year of the dragon round up

you may or may not have heard that i spent this blessed lunar year of the dragon reading many dragon books. here i am rating them based on how cool and relevant the dragons are and nothing else. they are listed in the order i read them here.

NOTE: year of the dragon ends on jan. 25, 2025. so if you have any other recommendations...let me know 👀

the earthsea cycle by ursula le guin — these dragons have left an indelible mark on my soul. i adore that they are super intelligent and have their own customs, but they still act like animals with animal instincts. orm embar you will always be famous to me. ∞/10

seraphina by rachel hartman — love em. lots of good discussion of what it means to be human and what it means to be draconic. the sequel gets WEIRD about their lore but i liked the rest of the worldbuilding enough to politely ignore that. 8/10

fourth wing by rebecca yarros — the dragons are regrettably cool but the logic around them is not particularly sound. they don't act like dragons; they don't have the wants or needs that supposedly wild animals would. their classification is awful and bad. but i like that they give their riders powers. 4/10 but really they get a 0/10 for compelling me to finish this book and a -2/10 for starting a wave of romantasy books with poorly considered dragons.

eragon by christopher paolini — i adore saphira. i don't remember what the rest of the books teach us about dragons and i won't be rereading them anytime soon, but i love saphira sm, and i love that despite dragons being a recognized part of life, they still have some magical mystique to them. 7/10

temeraire by naomi novik — you all don't need to hear me talk about this series more. gold standard for lite fantasy dragons. tied intimately to the themes of the story. lots of variation and biological consideration. as a dragonet temeraire hisses like a cat when he gets caught in a hammock and bats at swinging lanterns. what more can you ask for? 10/10

dragonfall by RL lam — i loved the lore and religion. dragon parts as relics is such a cool idea. that said we didn't have a lot of time with the dragons in True Dragon Form but i will look forward to that in the sequel. 9/10

the aurelian cycle by rosaria munda — these books are like if fourth wing was good. LOVE the idea of these dragons, i wish they were explored more in depth, both from a biological view and an emotional, thematic view. they could've been replaced by horses and it wouldn't have changed much. but i like them and they're cute. 6/10

the farseer trilogy by robin hobb — look. when i first read these books i didn't know they even had magic, let alone dragons, and they function so differently from dragons in all fantasy that i don't even know how to rate them. it's such a surprise i don't want to give more than that away. i haven't read the sequel series that actually deal with dragons more in-depth, so i'll give them a go read these books/10

(and yes i know the rest of the realm of the elderlings books have more dragons, i just haven't read them yet. the rating is a command for you all as much as for me)

a natural history of dragons by marie brennan — love the biologist-centrist view of this books. they are animals and they are treated like animals and that's very refreshing and fun in its own way. i wish i liked the book more so i felt compelled read the sequels to see the other variations. solid 7/10 for the dragons tho

tooth and claw by jo walton — this entire book is a heavy-handed metaphor, and while i had trouble visualizing the dragons, their biology is inherent to the heavy-handed metaphor and pretty fuckin cool. there's gross eyeball stuff. they wear hats. 8/10 for that alone

harper hall trilogy by anne maccaffrey — i haven't read the rest of pern but a friend told me how the dragons in the series came about and honestly...love it. wish i could make myself read more of these books. 7/10

to shape a dragon's breath by moniquill blackgoose — love to see feathers and spikes. there was a surprising amount of chemistry (legitimate science not metaphorical) involved with their magic and i like that they're not just for warfare. but it had the same issues as the aurelian cycle, where they are not characters and contribute very little to the emotional journeys of the humans. but their breath is very cool! 8/10

the bone ships by rj barker — not only are the ships made of dragon bone cool, but the dragons are also cool. and importantly they are as gross as they are mysterious. the sopping wet sailors get a 9/10 and the arakeesians also get a 9/10

DNF LIST

heartstone by elle katharine white — genuinely really enjoyed the dragons and their variations as presented here. this book is regrettably determined to get in the way of its own interesting ideas for the sake of being a pride and prejudice retelling. however i will give the dragons a 6/10 for being present and cool despite this

when the moon hatched by sarah a. parker — i did not even get to the part of the story where the dragons appeared. regrettable. NO SHOW/10

SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES

a song of ice and fire by george r. r. martin — i read these books 10 years ago before i was dragonpilled. i remember liking the themes and drama of dany's dragons, and what it takes to feed/train them. HOWEVER: i can't bring myself to watch house of the dragon. while i am supremely jealous that this series gets a high-budget dragon show and not temeraire (peter jackson PLEASE buy the rights again there's an audience for this shit!!!!) glad that there is a dragon show that has gotten so popular, it bothers me that they're wyverns, not dragons. this is the dumbest thing to be pedantic about in this series and i know that. nonetheless: 5/10 very thematic but not particularly cool. sorry.

the book of dragons, an anthology by johnathan strahan — lots of variety here (obviously) and the graphic design fucks. i'm still working my way through it, but it's impossible to rank these all anyway, so i'll give it a GRAPHIC DESIGN IS MY PASSION/10. in particular i love the brooke bolander piece and think about it all the time <3

#bolt reads things #boy i hope this doesn't show up in each series' tumblr search lol #again. based on the dragons and not the books #i love aurelian cycle i think everyone should read it and talk to me about it #still finishing the bone ships trilogy but really enjoying it so far. very fun once you get used to the ship language

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oshiawaseni · 2 years ago

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Trails of Love Hori's been paving down in the build up for the series' ending

Part II: Decoding the love story being told through other characters

Part One | II. KamiJirou | Part Three ->

.•° ✿ 5. "I̥̰̟͈̣̮͑̑͐̓̌z̴͉̙̲̋͗͌u̶̫̝̒̊̐Ocha" ೋღ

Oh look, time to defeat the raid boss of BNHA: IzuOcha. (I wrote this meta in March, and after reading it now, I didn't feel I needed to change anything, but I added a small bonus section at the end. Hope you enjoy!)

I have a lot of things to say about why Ochaco was never meant to be the one... but I'll try to stay concise and on topic with regards to this meta. Ochaco appears set up as Izuku's love interest from the get-go, but is that really what Hori wanted to do? I'll be taking a dive into their themes and in part three of this meta, I'll be explaining why the answer to that question has been a resounding: NO!

When I compared the feedback Ochaco got from Aoyama, Toga and Mina about her having a crush on Izuku for wanting to be like him, to Izuku, who didn’t get any feedback for all the times he did the exact same thing and copied Kacchan, it felt very unfair.

See what I mean? It is completely unfair. And this was such a hard topic for me to navigate and answer for the anon at that time. But then I did some thinking.

Compress, Gentle/La Brava, Kamijirou and finally Kirimina (which came as a pleasant surprise, and for me, cemented Hori's intentions with all of this)... all of these characters have been written to highlight various things about BkDk's relationship.

Then, there is Ochaco's admiration of Izuku and she always gets told it's a crush, and it's so weird of a plot to begin with. This very one-sided "crush" also felt out of place with the rest of the themes going on. I eventually realised maybe we had been looking too closely at the admiration issue all along. By attempting to explain the meaning of the tree and why it's different from this other tree, we didn't see the forest it's connected to and that there was actually something bigger going on that Hori had been crafting.

Scale it back and you’ll see: It’s not that Izuku didn’t get his own feedback about his feelings for Kacchan in the various ways he shows he wanted to be like him, but Ochaco’s conversations with Aoyama and Mina and Toga were his feedback!! It was one of the biggest AHHHHHHHHHHH SO THAT'S WHY pin drop moments I've ever had.

No one was calling him out, because they didn't need to! Calling out Ochaco for that behaviour was all Izuku's same behaviour needed!

Chapter 15 is the first time Izuku displays this behaviour of wanting to be like Kacchan. In Chapter 48 Izuku trains his movement after thinking of "Kacchan and the others". His movement mimicking Katsuki's is first noticed by Iida in Chapter 52.

We spent so much time worrying what the difference is between Izuku and Ochaco’s admiration, but we tackled the problem all wrong! In fact, we didn’t need to tackle it at all.

Because not only did Ochaco’s crush sideplot serve as a red herring to veil the real love story going on from the average reader, it was also used as another tool to highlight it.

In chapter 58, Izuku showed off his new movement style and everybody, even Katsuki, noticed it was copying the way Katsuki moves. The fact we get another Ochaco shot of her watching Izuku mimic Katsuki really does add credence to the theory that she noticed Izuku's feelings because he's also copying the person he loves. And if their logic was true for her, then why couldn't it be true for Izuku too? Izuku's mimicry being such a non-issue for 1-A was surely done on purpose for us to see this hypocrisy one day: That her mimicry gets called out as love by everyone, but everyone sleeps on Izuku's own mimicry simply because it's between two boys.

Our take away was never meant to be “what’s the difference between their admiration/love”, but simply that Izuku was both wanting to become like and inadvertently becomes like Kacchan because he loves him so much and a way to keep Kacchan close to him was incorporating both his attitude and movement style into his own.

Hori was linking the two concepts of mimicry and romance together with commentary from Mina/Aoyama/Toga while having Izuku do this EXACT THING they were talking about, with Katsuki, right in front of our damn salad!

Because what other characters noted about Ochaco's behaviour... Izuku was also expressing towards Kacchan. (Hori even brought it up again in DvK2 just to remind *everyone* that Izuku is very conscious of doing the exact same thing as Ochaco)

Even if Ochaco later reveals their logic to not be true FOR HER (which I wholeheartedly believe in. BkDk+TogaChaco end game LETS GO), we know for sure this logic has absolutely been true for Izuku. And the feedback Ochaco got also fits Hori’s framework of;

Bkdk -> are the actions

Other characters -> are the words for their feelings and actions.

Ochaco never was a raid boss to begin with... she only had the appearance of one. All to get BkDK through to the finish line.

Ochaco talking about "putting the All Might doll away" here used the same verb as "shutting her feelings away" and her scene instantly jumps to Izuku looking at his black whip - a quirk he has also "put away" behind a locked door that represents OFA. Black whip is a quirk which emerged from the feelings he has for Katsuki, that Izuku has also had to "put away" because what happened to him was so traumatic. I think Hori wanted us to see their two stories of "locking something away" were actually the same in essence, and it wasn't just black whip itself that Izuku had to lock away, but also his feelings for Katsuki... because we lost Izuku's POV towards Katsuki after the "I'm too blessed." scene. Most likely to hide the romantic love Izuku feels towards him from the reader.

I realised the same logic of the other couples also applied to Ochaco too a few months ago, while I was putting together this meta about all the ways Hori has indirectly shown readers what Izuku’s feelings for Kacchan are. Hori couldn’t say it outright because of his demographic and the current expectations society has that BL should stay in it's own category and far removed from shounen.

So Hori gave bkdk their moments without a whole lot of context and developed the idea of them simultaneously in another language, by getting other various characters to do the talking. And he used these characters to indirectly spell out bkdk’s love story in conjunction with bkdk’s own behaviour, all for the sake of his big bkdk reveal in the series' finale.

And to think he’s been doing this almost since the beginning blows my mind. (Chapter 15! Chapter 15 was the start of WWKD: What Would Kacchan Do) The man is a genius. A lot of this feels like he had needed to release his feelings about bkdk, so he left these trails of code throughout the manga... and we’ve finally cracked the damn thing.

We did it. We realised Hori’s 2nd language and roundabout method of telling one of the greatest love stories in shounen history. And I’m sure there’s even more examples of it to discover, that all our fandom's talented, keen-eyed bkdks find every day.

If Horikoshi Kohei-Sensei wrote this story because he wanted to cement his mark in jump history, he has deservedly done just that!

Part B - The real ship of dreams

(It felt too good to be true, yet I was quietly hoping...) .•° ✿ 5. TogaChako ೋღ

Circling back to the first part of this meta, "The Shape of an Eternal Bond" ... Do you remember when I talked about how BkDk couldn't imagine a world without each other, and the sense of an eternity they both exude together? Something that has always been, something that will always be. It seems more themes and feelings we get from bkdk's relationship have now been thrown into the Togachaco fight.

Ochaco gave Toga what is essentially a marriage proposal to a vampire, and then her wires made the shape of the infinity symbol. Toga expresses to her "I can't stand the thought of you not being in this world anymore." This is 1. so touching 2. bkdk as HELL, and I am certain that Katsuki and Izuku will confess their desires to be together forever before this manga ends.

I mean, this just goes to show you how us bkdks and Hori are literally on the same neural link, and we've been right about his methods of storytelling and how he's leaving trails of love inside these other couples to express concepts that are present in bkdk's own (soon to be) very romantic relationship.

It's a fun thought exercise to look at Togachaco's fight and predict what certain themes of theirs Hori will install into bkdk's talk/feelings they will express to each other... but there is a certain one, other than "forever", I feel very strongly about and will focus on here...

And that is Izuku's smile.

Something Katsuki once detested became the thing he most advocated for and longed to protect. His thumbs pointing to himself while talking about smiles... no wonder this had an air of Katsuki, himself, being the biggest reason Izuku smiles. "How could you leave me and choose this for us - a life of no smiling like that?"

At the start of the series, Katsuki couldn't stand Izuku's face or the smile he made at him. Whenever he saw it, he could only think of it as somebody laughing at him, looking down on him... but then DvK2 reframed Izuku's wide smiles at him and turned them into something pure, and genuine, and I think that's when Katsuki started to realise how much he was being loved the whole time.

And how could Katsuki possibly not reciprocate those earnest feelings from his special person who helped him find his heroic heart?

And this seems to be something Ochaco has noticed about Izuku? Ochaco, somebody who loves when people smile, noticed how big Izuku smiles when he talks about heroes... but especially the besotted faces he makes whenever he's with Katsuki... Of course she did.

On the Weekly Shounen Jump cover that featured bnha chapter 394, most of the characters on it are happy and smiling. Izuku isn't, however. That's because he's lost the ability to smile because Katsuki is still dead in the manga... Hori used this jump issue to build on this theme in the manga - that if you take Katsuki away, then away goes Izuku's smile, too.

Because Katsuki's very existence gives Izuku his happiness.

These two panels were supposed to be compared to each other - "Blood" and "Smiles" are two concepts mirroring each other in Togachaco's story. It's their different love languages. Toga felt like she couldn't ask Saito-kun for blood because he'd never accept her, Ochaco felt like she couldn't ask Izuku for his smile... because he'd also never accept her... she knew this was because Izuku already had somebody who gave him his sweetest smile... the same person who knew him more than anyone.

Chapter 395's title, 'shiawase no ue ni' was an interesting one that feels nuanced with Ochaco's feelings towards Izuku. It can be read as "Above (my) happiness..." I think this title is describing the concept of prioritising something else BEFORE one's own happiness. It's the perfect concept title for self-sacrifice, like Toga putting Ochaco's life above her own, but could ALSO be referencing Ochaco placing Izuku's happiness with Katsuki before her own feelings for him!!

Ochaco's story, at present, appears to be about putting aside unrequited love for a person she didn't quite understand, and instead placing her efforts into an attainable goal - rescuing somebody's heart from despair, and in doing so, becoming each other's important person. And then neither have to journey through life alone anymore. Ochaco knew this is something Izuku and Katsuki found in each other. In the image above, the girls are looking at Izuku and Saito, who won't turn their way, because they are both looking at a blonde boy next to them. Their "Sometimes Saturday." Katsuki.

The hidden face as Ochaco says she "came to like" Izuku Midoriya is quite suspicious. It belies what she's saying and she seems to either be hiding something negative or she’s not being truly forthcoming about her situation and feelings for Izuku. There are also themes of envy that finally showed up in Togachaco's dialogue which may be foundation Hori has laid down for the reveal of Ochaco's feelings later, as well. Envy about the attention Izuku received from others as a hero. Envy towards Izuku's innate passion for heroes, and the adoring faces he makes for Katsuki, perhaps.

So this smile that Katsuki has always misunderstood as something negative aimed towards him ended up turning into something... very lovely and important to him, as shown in Izuku's panel and how Ochaco described Toga's smile right afterwards.

And honestly... if we get little snapshots of the many smiles Izuku has made for Katsuki, while Katsuki is thinking about how adorable Izuku looks just for him when they're talking, I don't think I'll make it out of this bkdk reveal alive. Hori is going to obliterate us with whatever he's got cooking for them.

With all the major bkdk-alike couples now finished, the next post of this meta series will be: Part III, and the conclusion of this meta series ->

Back to Part One

#bakudeku #bnha meta #bkdk canon #hori trails #must read meta #kana writes #togachaco #bkdk #I'm sorry I took so long to post this part #you see... there was an order i was trying to do things in...#i wanted to link to topics I was writing on twitter but then stuff happened there which messed with my plans for writing these metas out #on top of that #the tumblr editor would randomly wipe out entire asks so I became really demotivated #but this is one of the last metas I wanted to write for bkdk so I will finish writing at least this series to completion #sorry the togachaco section is small I didn't want to make the post even longer but I felt like I should talk about them #as this was the intended final post of part II - I shoulda known togachaco would also become a big part of this meta series xD #but their themes and expressions of love are a happy and welcome surprise just like kiriminas :)

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