#my whole job is books

[vera-dauriac]

I FUCKING LOVE BOOKS!!!!!!!!

[egophiliac]

like mother, like son, but less wholesome this time?

(I couldn't decide whether or not to put them together, so have them in all the different ways!)

[aroaceleovaldez]

Nico and Percy's dynamic through the series is eternally funny to me, because it's just. like.

Percy's having a constant mental struggle between his fatal flaw of loyalty with a promise he made to Bianca to protect Nico, versus his Big 3 kid desire to maim other Big 3 kids / Poseidon descendant urge to totally maim Nico specifically. He hates Nico so so much. He thinks Nico's annoying and weird at best, and creepy/sketchy when he's older. The only positive thoughts Percy has towards Nico are "He's Bianca's brother and Bianca was my friend and I owe her/He's Hazel's brother and Hazel is my friend and would kill me if I was mean to him," "He's a powerful asset and useful ally (if questionable)," and "He's kinda pathetic and I feel maybe a little bad about it." Percy has multiple occasions throughout the series where he strongly considers - and on one occasionally actually goes through with - throttling Nico.

Meanwhile, Nico is following around Percy like a lost puppy. He explicitly can never bring himself to even dislike anything about Percy no matter how hard he tries. He has a whole bit in BoO where he's mentally going "UGH he's so stupid BUT IT'S ENDEARING HOW DARE HE." He's totally smitten. He's making deals with his dad for Percy. He's making convoluted plans to help Percy stand a chance against Kronos. During the entirety of BoTL it's like he's playing tsundere - "I'm helping NOT PERCY SPECIFICALLY with this quest! Me helping Percy would be SILLY because I DEFINITELY HATE HIM." Then he proceeds to show up to Percy's birthday party to basically ask him on a weird date and spend the entire next book scrambling around trying to help him or protect him or impress him. And Percy could not give less of a shit.

Just. That dynamic is so funny to me. Percy is the founder of the Nico Protection Club in that he's the one they're all protecting Nico from and meanwhile Nico is throwing himself at Percy to the point where the literal god of gay love calls him out on it.

[deoidesign]

Idk who needs to hear this but time and time again isn't over!!!

Webtoon removed the "time and time again will return!!!" Banner and I don't know why, but it's not over!!! There's still another 1/3 of the comic to go! There's a lot more stuff that I'm working on and it'll be coming back soon!

Please be patient with me, I know it's been a long time... But the stuff I'm making is really good and there's a lot of reasons it's taken this long. I promise I want it back more than anyone.

I'm trying to come back around the end of October. I'm doing my best to get everything ready in time, so no promises, but I'm on track to do so! I'm just one person writing and drawing everything, and my editor was fired so I'm not even getting any notes anymore. It's literally just me. I'm doing my best I promise!

[communistkenobi]

I don’t like when people ask how many books you plan to read/have read this year one because I think that’s a weird relationship to have to books and two because I think even reading a chapter or a portion of something is valuable. this is especially true with non-fiction but even with fiction I think any amount you read, even if you don’t read the entire thing, is not a failure or ‘incomplete’

[bayetea]

I'm a strong "percy would get a job in education/outreach to underprivileged kids in the future" truther but I don't necessarily agree with people who say that him taking on marine biology as a college major doesn't make sense at all

"why would he study marine biology he can already work with sea animals to his heart's desire" I don't know maybe because he wants to get paid???????? he wants a normal job???? percy grew up poor and unsafe. why is it weird that he craves stability with a career that enables him to do something that he loves? or maybe he wants to go into the system and help bring about lasting reform that will actually improve care for sea creatures??? yes he can save sea animals on his own time but think about it. is it better to abandon his life in the middle of the night to go help a trapped sea creature Every Single Time it happens or is it better to enter the system and make it so that capitalists stop polluting water or disturbing sea ecosystems for profit. his powers as a son of poseidon are a band-aid not a lasting solution to systemic environmental neglect and decay. he has an established precedent of caring for bringing about systemic change (see: turning down immortality) and for me this is no different (I just personally headcanon him wanting to bring change for disadvantaged kids but whatever)

to me this logic is like telling an exceptional artist that there's no point in going to art school to become a professional when they can already just do art on their own time for fun. like yeah....... if you're content with doing that as just a hobby. but what if you want to become an even better artist and learn new skills. what if you want to do it as a job that pays you and gives you health insurance and social security. then what

for me the main logistical issue of him majoring in marine biology has never been that he would never do that it's that the intersection of new rome college accreditation to the Actual Real world isn't all that clear/logistically sound. like I guess the mist can handle anything but what impact is new rome going to be able to have on the realm of mortals. this would be a nice thing to discuss actually (more in tags)

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

I have no business enjoying The Golden Enclaves with all of its flaws as much as I do

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Outdrawn

f/f contemporary romance

two cartoonist who’ve been rivals since uni, and now have competing webcomics online, have to work together on the relaunch of a cult classic at the comic press they both work at

they both struggle with art-related physical and mental health issues, and complicated families

[soupysuki]

another lil self indulgent sketch (ღ˘⌣˘ღ)

[spock-adoodledoo]

i think one of the things i'll always appreciate abt maomao is that even though she's the protag, it's not really that the world revolves around her or that things always happen to her, it's more that she gets involved in things (usually at the request of other ppl but whatever) that usually don't affect her immediately. idk but it's nice that she's kind of our dispassionate window into palace life instead of the person everything happens to

[lunar-wandering]

laying in bed thinking about how Wukong is a people pleaser and this part of him gets frequently overlooked due to the focus on his hot-headedness/impulsivity

[shrews-studies]

Now that I'm dipping my toes into the waters of literary translation, I'm really starting to have a new level of appreciation for good translation and it's nice bc woah that's a whole new way I can enjoy reading a book

[storieschats]

Is my roommate a vampire or is he just weird?

Just read My Roommate Is a Vampire by Jenna Levine and it was... meh. It didn’t annoy me, it didn’t gave me an ick in any way and the writing wasn’t awful so it passes the basic romance novel threshold.

But I didn’t find the characters particularly charming nor was I very interested in what was happening with the plot. I kept waiting for it to get better. I was like okay, next pages it will pick up and it kinda never did.

Also if you are going for the vampire thing: for something that is so central to the plot it’s kinda funny how little we actually go over it!

I mean if you are looking for some vampire/monster fantasy rom-com you could do worse so if that’s your thing it’s only like 300 something pages... it isn’t horrible is I’m trying to say... just a bit boring truly.

And it’s so funny to me that even though our love interest male vampire is supposed to be this cute kind marshmallow we still have to throw some scenes where he is possessive or jealous CAUSE THAT IS THE FORMULA GODDAMIT!!! It comes out of nowhere and it’s hilarious.

Also anyone who has read the second book... Is it worth it? Because part of me is like: I didn’t like this one that much and all but the other part is like vampire, Reginald maybe it’s fun?? I don’t know, tell me what you though please!

Forgot to add: The cover.... Amazing ok

Now I’m gonna read the Ex Hex by Erin Sterling because it was like less than two euros on the Kobo store so... Let’s see.

[discjude]

Yeah this is about right (as always my thoughts are in the tags so there's actually kei content there lmao)

[watchmakermori]

Womanhood as a prison in Natasha Pulley novels

I know that a great deal has already been said about Natasha Pulley’s portrayal of female characters, because even her most ardent fans (and I count myself among them) are often highly critical of how women are written in her stories - or, more aptly, written out of them.

But I think there is more to be said about how not only female characters are presented, but how the very concept of femininity is portrayed, via both the characters’ dialogue and inner thoughts. This analysis will reference all of Pulley’s books with the exception of The Bedlam Stacks. I’m excluding it on the grounds of it having little to no major female characters, but if any Bedlam superfans have any insight to add, please do reblog and contribute.

One of the main criticisms of Pulley’s women is their overarching similarity, so let’s briefly consider those commonalities. They are mostly educated, career-driven scientists (Grace is a budding physicist, Agatha a surgeon, Anna a much more experienced physicist). They are usually unnattractive by conventional standards; Grace is described as looking ‘like a boy’, Pepperharrow refers to herself as being ugly, Agatha is ‘tall and flat-chested’, and Anna’s introduction mentions that she has a ‘blonde buzz cut’ and is somewhat overweight.

They are also generally emotionally cold and poor caretakers, especially in contrast to the male characters. Joe’s wife, Alice, is noted to resent their daughter and engage with her far less than he does. Similarly, Shenkov is significantly more child-orientated than Anna. Agatha forces Missouri to watch a man having his throat cut, because she believes him too gentle for war. Said female characters may also show distaste for softer, more vulnerable women. Takiko Pepperharrow speaks of her mother like this (The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, p. 72): 

Saying yes and simpering all the time was silly - her mother did that and even noticeably anxious ducklings walked over her mother

She isn’t the only person to speak of her mother with a degree of pity and distaste. Grace claims that to argue with her own mother feels like ‘slapping a kitten’ - Mrs Carrow is presented as too meek to understand her own powerlessness, to the point that she considers it an achievement to leave the house alone. In the epilogue of The Half Life of Valery K, Valery himself describes the pitiable housewife Cecilia as being ‘just as stunted as his own mother’. Similarly to Mrs Carrow, the aforementioned Cecilia is not presented as fully aware of how small and restricted her life is - her happiness rests on the outcome of a dinner party, nothing larger than that.

The common thread between these pitiable characters is that they embody traditional womanhood - they are married, they are subservient to their husbands, and they have children. Perhaps the most notable - and interesting - trend amongst Pulley’s female charcters is that they invariably have a complicated relationship with marriage, caretaking, and/or childbearing.

Pulley’s novels frequently frame motherhood (along with other traditionally feminine pursuits and behaviours) as an obstacle to the female characters’ goals. In conversation with her mother, Grace talks about the prospect of marriage in the following way (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, p. 102):

“Wives have duties. If I have children I’ll go insane for a year and a half - don’t look like that, you did, with James and with William, it was terrifying - and that will be a year and a half of weeping over nothing and a brain made of soup in which I can’t work. And then it will happen again with the next child, and then slowly I won’t want to work at all, and I’ll always be soup...”

In Grace’s mind, having children is a barrier to her academic pursuits. She is fiercely certain that giving birth will not only reduce her brain to ‘soup’, but that the impact will be permanent - she will lose herself to motherhood, and it will take away her drive and her intellect. Similar sentiments can be found among other female characters, such as when Takiko observes the following (The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, p. 175):

All her sisters had had children, and all she’d learned from it was that people with children turned inward. She didn’t see any of them anymore.

Once again, there is the sense that motherhood steals from women. It takes them away from themselves by turning them inward, and also from other people in that they lose contact with family members. The Half Life of Valery K foregrounds Anna’s perspective on motherhood (p. 137), which is probably the most extreme of all:

..she had told him straight up when they got married that she wasn’t a natural mother, that she didn’t do well with small helpless things, because she had been trained to care about electron microscopes, thanks, and obviously she would gestate him a small helpless thing to look after if he wanted [...] but there would be no talk of staying home, nesting, or maternal fussing, because frankly that was nothing but weakness of character in a woman...

A significant part of this passage is the notion that Anna is not a natural mother because she has ‘been trained to care about electron microscopes’. Not only does this again put scientific pursuits and childrearing in opposition (you may care for one, not both), the verb ‘trained’ suggests that this behaviour is learned, as though she has been educated out of maternal desires.

At this point in the analysis, I would like to specify that discussing these ideas in fiction is not inherently problematic or anti-feminist. It is vitally important for women to be free to reject motherhood, and by extension it is good to see female characters who are unapologetically unmaternal and unfeminine. When I first read The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, I adored Grace’s character for this - I loved her arrogance, her stubbornness, her distaste for marriage, her coarseness. Even the fact that she looked down on other women made her fascinating to me, because we just don’t see a lot of multi-faceted female characters who act in this way. She was complex and interesting without being a Strong Female Character™ to look up to - she was allowed to be wrong and wildly dislikable.

Where I take issue, however, is the fact that we have never seen an alternative to Grace in all five of Natasha Pulley’s novels. She is yet to write a significant female character who is complex and important despite being more traditionally feminine - there are no women who are scientists and dedicated mothers, who are career-minded and gentle, who are fiercely independent and hopeless romantics. It is one thing for Grace and other characters to disparage the poor, oppressed housewives in their society, but it is another thing entirely for the narrative itself to disparage these women. A woman without an education is still a fully-realised person with her own internal life. Women who cannot attain much agency are still as complex as those who can, yet Pulley’s stories never quite acknowledge this.

Which leads me onto the overarching portrayal of womanhood in Pulley’s novels. I’ve always been hesitant to assume too much based on singular characters, as I do think it’s imporant to recognise that a character’s perspective is not a proxy for the author’s. But after five books, the patterns are undeniable, and I think they’re more marked in The Half Life of Valery K than they ever have been. Consider the quotation below, taken from p. 30:

[Valery] never knew what to say when women pointed out that they were women and that it was, generally, awful. There was a knee-jerk human instinct to say it couldn’t be as bad as all that, like he would have to anyone who was feeling blue, but it was one of those instances where it really was awful, and trying to say it wasn’t was somewhere on the spectrum between stupid and criminal.

Valery offers an invariably bleak perspective on womanhood, which is in keeping with the attitudes of the female characters in Pulley’s books. Not only is womanhood described as miserable - Valery also claims that to deny the truth of this is either ‘stupid or criminal’. There is no space to take a more positive view on femininity. 

Being charitable, we could view this as a (heavy-handed) condemnation of sexism and patriarchy, and I do think that this is Pulley’s intention. But it’s worth considering that she does not discuss other marginalisation in this way. Despite the homophobia her numerous queer protagonists face, nobody goes on a similar tirade about the misery of being a man who loves other men. The trials and struggles are acknowledged, but queer love is still rightfully shown to be beautiful and privately joyous - in a way that being a woman never is.

Instead, womanhood in Pulley’s novels is oppressive and inescapable. Even a young girl’s fingernails cannot be neutral - they too represent the trappings of patriarchy (The Half Life of Valery K, p. 274):

“I can’t do it,” Tatiana said to her own laces. She studied her fingernails. “My tools of the patriarchy are getting too long.”

(This is an utterly bizarre thing for a little kid to say, by the way).

Towards the end of the novel, a carriage full of female prisoners is set upon by male ones, which is portrayed almost as an inevitablitity - we do not get a scene of exactly what happens, because the outcome is obvious enough to be implied. This outlook on the inevitability of violence against women is never challenged at any point; Valery only emphasises it in the final pages of the novel (p. 369):

every doctor he worked with and laughed with in tea breaks probably had an identical wife, all of them keeping women like bonsai trees

The messaging across Pulley’s novels is that of womanhood as a prison. There is little to no joy to be found in it; it results in confinement, loss of the self, isolation from others, and exposure to physical and emotional violence. Women who ‘succumb’ to marriage and children are given little voice in her stories - they are pitiable, ‘identical’ lost causes, called ‘stunted’, compared to kittens and bonsai trees. The only female POVs are that of women rebelling against conventional femininity, who are ambivalent or outwardly resentful towards caretaking, childrearing, and reliance on others. And even these women do not get to take up a great deal of space; all of them serve as obstacles to the central romances and all of them are written out to secure the male characters’ happily ever afters.

I do not believe that Natasha Pulley has malicious intent in how she writes female characters. It is important to address misogynistic violence and the ways in which the institution of marriage has restricted and oppressed women, and I believe she does try to do that. But there are ways to explore this issue whilst still acknowleding the variety of women’s experiences - and, crucially, showing that there is more to femininity than suffering.

But it requires time and space. Natasha Pulley has no hope of doing this if she does not start deviating from her usual archetypes - her stories need a better quality and quantity of women. While I live in hope of improvements to her female representation, I would be lying if I said I was optimistic.

[atopvisenyashill]

apparently people are mad about me saying “the show never let dany look ugly” lol

i am Once Again Saying it was the popular opinion that emilia can’t act, doesn’t look like dany, and michele’s styling of dany was ugly and bad until people decided d&d’s butchering of dany's arc was a masterpiece except for the last season conveniently. also that last one lmao.