#like this book came out this year

[tr1ck5]

If I had a nickel every time Violet said "for the win", I'd have two nickels... which isn't a lot but I cringe that it's happened twice.

Unrelated to this but also what the fuck is Jack's problem lmao dude has Issues it's almost ridiculous.

[bobellafofella]

He said lamely, "She is very beautiful." "And she has the sense not to frighten you," Dach'osmin Ceredin said, and Maia took a step back, wanting to protest her deduction, but unable to deny its truth. "We should take lessons from her, we see."

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is one of my favorite books of all time, and within it, one of my favorite scenes is Maia and Csethiro's first real interaction at Nurevis' party! so i drew it. their slow romance is so delicious.

[starry-bi-sky]

do yall ever think about bruce/batman!clone danny standing in front of his bathroom mirror after finding out he was a clone and silently tracing his face. The slope of his jaw and point of his chin. The high angle of his cheekbones and the shape of his eyes, the curve of his brow bones and the shape of his nose. The volume of his hair and the way it curls and gets fluffy when it gets too long.

His hair is black the same way a crow's wing is black. His dad's hair is black the same way a black bear's fur is black. His dad's eyes are blue like the ocean is blue. Danny's eyes are blue the same way a glacier is blue.

His dad has a square jaw and straight flat hair, and he tans and gets a face full of freckles when he's out in the sun for too long. Danny burns like a lobster and his face remains untouched. Danny has a sharp jaw and tall cheekbones, and Sam says when he's not smiling there's almost something regal about him. You would never call Jack Fenton "regal" when he's not smiling.

Sam says when he's not smiling he looks scary the same way a stone statue is. Jack Fenton when he's not smiling looks scary the same way that german shepherd staring at you across the street is.

Do you ever think he grew up wondering if he was adopted. Because of course, he has black hair and blue eyes like his dad. But having the same color doesn't make you someone's child.

Or, worse, things he's heard from the other kids and the other parents and even some of his teachers growing up; that he was the product of an affair. And that his dad was just too stupid to notice. And Danny would defend his parents until the day he died, because Jack Fenton wasn't an idiot and Maddie Fenton wasn't a cheater.

But doubt comes in with fickle tongue. his parents swear up and down that he is their child when he asks about either. That Danny just had his grandparents' features, but he was their son and they loved him.

But Danny doesn't look like either of his parents. His mom's eyes are blue like an aquamarine and Jazz's too. And they burn like lobsters in the sun too, but Jazz gets freckles on her face and so does Maddie. And as Danny grows up he doesn't bulk up or get stocky like his dad did, and when he hits puberty he doesn't shoot up like a tree like Jack Fenton did.

He stays small, and they say he's a late bloomer (and he is), or that he just has his mom's height. But he's fast and has good stamina, and some days it feels like he's built entirely different from his family. That the things they went through growing up just didn't apply to him. Jack and Maddie Fenton both had acne and breakouts when they hit puberty, and Jazz inherits it and he's seen the amount of skincare products she keeps on her side of the bathroom.

And then he hits puberty and breaks out maybe once or twice, but his skin stays clear for the most part and the problems and changes his dad went through just don't happen to him.

And the truth is worse than all of the lies.

How horrifying.

[overheard-at-camp-half-blood]

“They changed the narrative from the books to make Athena bad.”

Athena was horrible in the books too, it was just glossed over by everyone. 💀

[ricky-mortis]

Y’all should watch The Edge of Sleep…

[cautiously0ptimistic]

Do you even know whether you're running toward or away from something anymore? I guess it's all just running, all the same.

[batcavescolony]

just saw someone say Rick Riordan making a TV show is just as bad as anything JKR has done. BFFR you're comparing Rick Riordan trying to make his world more inclusive, changing some parts because of money/time constraints, or just making changes cus he thinks they're needed, to JKR being a terrible person!

[ncthandrake]

ROMAN GODFREY Hemlock Grove | S01E11

[rowenwolf]

I wonder if Tamsyn ever sees how often the locked tomb or gideon the ninth trend and knows how absolutely rabid and faithful we are towards this series. I hope she feels our passion and love.

[not-so-superheroine]

[markantonys]

me at the weekly team meeting: my personal best for the past week is that they released a trailer for the new season of my favorite show and i'm so excited

manager: what's the show?

me: wheel of time

teammate: oh, i love those books

me instantly acquiring a new target to hunt down and talk the ear off of at the office social gathering tomorrow:

[bookshelf-in-progress]

Now that I know more about writing, I'm upset at all the writing advice that urged new writers to find the one best way to write stories, when they should be telling us to play with writing techniques like toys.

Don't tell us to avoid certain points of view! Don't box us into the one currently popular prose style! Let us play and see what effects different techniques achieve, so we can learn the best ways to make use of them! Give us a whole ton of possibility instead of one cookie-cutter template!

[irisesforyoureyes]

I personally like the changes in episode 6 because we have seen what happens in the books and the movies but with this new take even hardcore pjo fans get to experience suspense i mean we get to experience something new! idk why some people are mad they are taking creative liberties with the show like why would u want to watch the same thing take place for the third time?? and especially when the creator of the series is the one altering the plot to have it better suited to this gen

[dayurno]

this is somewhat of a vent post & something i said i would not do again but has been plaguing me enough that i think getting it out might feel better. so. has anydoggy else been. Baffled and upset by nora sakavic’s refusal to speak on how terribly aftg has treated its characters of color? with the author of the series coming back with a new book and starting up on her online activity again, and questions of what she’d change about aftg bubbling up, it’s particularly glaring to me that we are all playing this very long game of pretend where we ignore how badly the non-white cast has been treated & her lack of thoughts on it

and i understand not wanting to bring up nicky and thea because people pick on her for it. i’m not trying to discredit nora sakavic’s terrible history of getting harrassed online by aftg fans. but i think it is very cynical, and it is very juvenile, and most of all very cruel, that she gets to ignore the very real ways the books have set up these characters to be hated. i think it’s obvious why the characters who get the most hate are the only canonical characters of color, and i think we do not get to treat this like a deliberate decision on the fandom’s part when the books have put these same characters in degrading and embarrassing and terrible positions in the first place. aftg is not a story about nice characters with clean pasts, but there is a very specific nastiness to the only characters of color being a brown man who sexually harasses and later assaults the main character, a black woman whose only scene is her lashing out at her love interest after being ignored for the first two books, and the japanese villain who gets maybe two lines of complexity before he goes back to being a terrible person. the white cast, in comparison, while not at all free from flaws, are never shown to commit mindless evil; all of their actions are ultimately justified. the book goes out of its way to give them concession after concession. we know exactly who to side with, because aftg tells us who these people are. does nicky’s assault ever get addressed in the books? does riko’s reasoning to be the way that he is ever gets more than briefly aluded to? is thea reserved even a shred of humanity or grace in her one scene?

anyway. it’s been years of talking about this and the fandom has been constantly hostile to criticism in this regard, and more recently any criticism at all, and it’s Grating to be on the other side of this discussion. it’s exhausting to know that in ten years we do not get even an acknowledgment besides the author saying she will not answer questions about nicky and thea anymore. it’s upsetting and it’s ugly and i wish no one had to talk about this again, but we do because what i thought was common sense has been washed away by a sudden influx of no-nuance adoration for the trilogy. basically i hope we all explode

[anghraine]

I've been moving and navigating further departmental nonsense etc (my pseudo-dissertation got approved for defending, though! l o l). But it was interesting to see the Worst P&P Takes poll I reblogged accumulating more results and the general tenor of responses in the notes.

I mean, the results are definitely to be expected if you're familiar with the side of Austen fandom doing a lot of the reblogging etc. But still, interesting!

Many Tumblr polls specify that they're asking about personal preferences that may be irrational—favorite/least favorite, coolest/most annoying, or something like that. This one, though, asked for the worst interpretation of P&P, not the most annoying one—and the current leader is "Darcy is never really proud, he's just shy and probably has anxiety" against some very steep competition on the Bad Takes front.

I was thinking about why that seemed a kind of tediously predictable choice even though I agree that the take is wrong, and realized that while I do disagree with the shy Darcy interpretation and I particularly disagree with the specific formulation where he is never proud at all, it ultimately feels to me like a failure of nuance rather than just completely wrongheaded like some of the others. And this is probably my fundamental difference with a lot of Darcy takes I see!

In my opinion, a character who is introverted and who feels awkward in various social situations and who doesn't like common social activities and who has to work himself up to talking to his crush and who is repeatedly suggested to behave very differently in contexts where he's more comfortable being interpreted as shy and anxious is not that big of a leap.

Yes, it's important that he is actually fundamentally confident and haughty, that he makes his personal feelings of discomfort other people's problem, and that he thinks he's such a unique and special butterfly that he doesn't need to even put in an effort outside his personal social circle. But it's a misreading that is easy to follow (and long predates the 2005 P&P, as I've mentioned before!).

The additional misreading that a shy and anxious Darcy is also never proud at all is a much more drastic leap, and in my experience, condemnations of shy Darcy interpretations rarely differentiate between "Darcy is shy as well as arrogant" and "Darcy is shy rather than arrogant" as interpretations (although their basic arguments are quite different). But even that as the worst possible misreading of P&P when Darcy is not even the main character is ?????????

I mean, for one alternative (not even the one I voted for!), the idea that Elizabeth is an author avatar Mary Sue seems a far worse misreading of P&P than basically anything to do with Darcy at all. The center piece of the entire novel is Elizabeth's epiphany of self-knowledge about her own shortcomings that do not particularly resemble Austen's at all, but were ethically a concern for her, and she's a complex, interesting character in general whom Austen correctly regarded as a major achievement. Inverting that into Elizabeth as an improbably perfect, reality-warping self-insert is deeply wrong and frankly pretty misogynistic as well.

(ngl though, it's a little funny to see such a blatantly terrible reading of Elizabeth rank so far behind the shy Darcy votes. I've gotten "does anyone actually think/say that?" so many times on my posts about Austen fandom's prioritization of Darcy's character development over Elizabeth's and yet...)

And even just going with the Darcy-centric misreadings, the idea of Darcy as a "bad boy" seems easily the most absolutely wrong take on him. His pride is at least complicated and the finer points can be fairly debated and it's a quality that actually changes somewhat throughout the novel, and you can have discussion over what happened when, whose testimonies should be weighted more, etc. But there is no point at which "bad boy" isn't utterly wrong for him. However, there's definitely a tendency in some wings of the fandom to find the idea of Darcy being misread too favorably more objectionable than him being read too unfavorably, regardless of the particulars, so it's not a surprise.

I suppose you could argue about what "worst" means in the context of variously bad interpretations. Like, is an interpretation that is about a fairly trivial aspect of the book but extremely wrong about it "worse" than an interpretation that is pretty bad but at least comprehensibly so about something very important?

[wigglebox]

Suptober [Extended] - Day 18 || Royalty 👑