#one of these days I just want to read/write a small essay on the parallels and contrasts/complements between Jason and Salim

[hopesallwegotleft]

I adore the range of emotions Jason shows here so much. He goes from that determined 'You don't mess with a Marine >:(' expression to a winded 'but boy killing that damn thing sure took a lot outta me.'

And then in the last gif you can see a bit of fear creep into his expression, which I'm guessing is because he realizes he's alone so 1) there's no one to keep up his bravado for and 2) he realizes he's utterly by himself with no one to help him or even talk to him

[perfectlyripeclementine]

queer novel masterlist

cleaning up that post i've got running with books that touch on queerness. these are not organized in any particular fashion, or gathered along any particular theme. these are just gay novels i've either read and enjoyed or would like to read. blurbs are the books' own descriptions of themselves. not all these blurbs mention the queer stuff, but trust, if it's on this list it's in there. last updated 9 dec 23.

lists: sapphic books by Palestinian authors; butch memoirs; another list of masc, butch and stud books; a digital library of trans-related content; free access to the works of Leslie Feinberg.

After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz. "“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past."

All Boys Aren't Blue, George M. Johnson In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

The works of Dionne Brand: In Another Place, Not Here. Beautiful and meticulously wrought, set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this astonishing novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile.

Love Enough. In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here—June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.

The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." Brand is our greatest observer—of actions, of emotions, of the little things that often go unnoticed but can mean the turn of a day. At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.

What We All Long For. Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends—each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.

By turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen's lost brother—who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld—journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy's arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, Soraya Palmer. Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home.

But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi’s.

Telling of the love between sisters who don’t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

Before We Were Trans, Kit Heyam. Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.     Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.  

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman. As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

note from roo: essay in this about how queer white women engaged with Harlem should be essential reading for white queers who enter spaces (like drag spaces, ballroom spaces etc) that are informed by Black culture.

Land of Milk and Honey, C Pam Zhang. A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.

Grievers and Maroons by adrienne maree brown. Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

In the second installment of the Grievers trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit. The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune's life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

Elastoe, Darcie Little Badger. "Elatsoe—Ellie for short—lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals—most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered. Who killed him and how did he die? With the help of her family, her best friend Jay, and the memory great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Elatsoe, must track down the killer and unravel the mystery of this creepy town and it’s dark past. But will the nefarious townsfolk and a mysterious Doctor stop her before she gets started? A breathtaking debut novel featuring an asexual, Apache teen protagonist, Elatsoe combines mystery, horror, noir, ancestral knowledge, haunting illustrations, fantasy elements, and is one of the most-talked about debuts of the year."

Sordidez, by E.G. Condé "In the ruin created by climate disaster and a devastating civil war, survivors in Puerto Rico and the Yucatán peninsula struggle to rebuild their communities and heal their lands, but powerful forces from abroad plot against them. Desperate for answers, Puerto Rican journalist Vero Diaz seeks the counsel of the Maya revolutionary known as the Loba Roja, triggering a chain of events that will forever reshape his destiny and the fate of the Caribbean world."

When They Tell You To Be Good, by Prince Shakur "When They Tell You to Be Good charts Shakur’s political coming of age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer, and anarchist in Obama and Trump’s America. Shakur journeys from France to the Philippines, South Korea, and elsewhere to discover the depths of the Black experience, and engages in deep political questions while participating in movements like Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. By the end, Shakur reckons with his identity, his family’s immigration, and the intergenerational impacts of patriarchal and colonial violence."

My Government Means to Kill Me, Rasheed Newson "Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind.

In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships—all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.

Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning."

Where There Was Fire, John Manuel Arias Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, and her husband disappears, the future of Teresa’s family is changed forever.

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There Was Fire.

[wordtowords]

In Vogue: All That is Preternatural

preternatural - adjective - beyond what is normal; unusual (Google)

Is it just me, or does it look like everyone is trying to jump onto the preternatural bandwagon in a big way? Are creators so uninspired with what most would consider normal that they feel they have to push the envelope and take huge risks in order to get people to notice? I don't know, but yesterday I was led down a fork in the road, which veered away from Status Quo Drive, and I wound up taking a walk on the wild, weird side.

Case in point #1: The pregnant daughter of my best friend decided to videotape the preternatural way she chose to announce the gender of her forthcoming infant to close relatives. My friend, no doubt proud of her daughter's idiosyncratic imagination, texted the footage to a small group of us women friends. The daughter–I'll call her Cindy–is obsessed with her two riotous black Labs and felt that she just had to include them somehow, somewhere in the unveiling, so she bought and later put a blue collar on one (to represent a boy baby) and a pink collar on the other (to represent a girl). Then on one side of the family room, Cindy had her husband contain the dogs in separate cages in order to control them and heighten the suspense. On the opposite side of the room, Cindy was crouching down, holding a treat. When she called out to the right dog, her hubby opened just the right cage and it galloped to her, revealing to everyone its blue collar. It was all very Pavlovian to me, and I suppose unique, to be euphemistic. I'm sure all of you dog lovers out there can't wait to impart this preternatural, pre-natal gender reveal to your own expecting daughters or sons; but personally, I am left thinking that the whole thing divulged more than just the baby's sex. My guess is that Cindy may just wind up spending more quality time with the dogs than with her son. Thank Goodness the husband seems to prefer human children over canine kids.

Case in point #2: Have you seen any of the critically acclaimed films released in 2022? After the aforementioned texted home video, I saw two on TV that are being streamed right now: "Banshees of Inisherin" and "Everything Everywhere All at Once," both considered foreign, I believe. (And yes, they are, very.) The first, set on a beautiful, bucolic, remote island off the coast of Ireland somewhere in the distant, indiscernible past, has a simple, yet somewhat ridiculous plot involving two grown men: the older friend decides to alienate his younger best friend because he is dull, and warns him if he persists in wanting to reclaim the friendship, in retaliation, he will cut off his fingers on his left hand, the hand he uses to play the violin. That's it. That's the plot. Does he do it? Of course. And his selfish, sadomasochistic act leads to repercussions that only worsen the situation, but at least the bored protagonist is no longer bored. He's miserable. The second film, sci-fi in many respects, is pretty much a series of nonstop acid trips depicting parallel universes that eventually boil down to a reconciliation between an estranged teen daughter and her mother, the owner of a laundromat (both are Chinese in descent) somewhere in L.A. Both movies transcend the preternatural. I'm sorry, but both are just weird–too weird for my taste.

I am sure there are plenty of critics and readers out there who definitely disagree with me and would take a walk on the wild, weird side any day of the week just to take the detour off Status Quo Drive. Which is perfectly fine. To each, his or her (or their) own. Yet every once in a while, natural, as opposed to preternatural, is on the soft, comforting, cozy side :).

#film review, #word-to-words, #slice-of-life, #literature, #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing #opinion #satire

[bonsai62]

I just realized something... I was talking to this person one time on a post before and as I was typing that’s when i realized something:

This is for my fellow Nobamaki & Itafushi shippers! If you guys don’t ship it then it’s okay! This is just like a small analysis in my eyes and the way I read things! I can be wrong or just love reaching on a shit ton of things but this is all for fun and I love sharing with you guys!

Let’s get started! Also, this contains spoilers!

Do you guys realize that Nobamaki/Itafushi actually parallel to each other? Let me explain in shitty English and basic grammar and vocabulary lol:

As I watch and read Jujutsu Kaisen I see a lot of parallels between characters; Gojo with Megumi or Yuji, Getou with Megumi and Yuji or Nobara and Maki... but what I want to parallel between characters is:

Yuji & Maki

1. Raw strength:

Both are hella fucking strong and for people who don’t have cursed techniques, they know how to kick fucking ass. What made me realize that both of them are the same is honestly during the baseball game. I like how we were able to see Maki and Yuji making a home run... okay well Momo fucked up Maki’s groove! Haha! But during the Tokyo vs Kyoto event, Maki and Yuji go ham on their enemy.

Yes, Maki used weapons but still, we can’t deny she got good speed and strength that is similar to Yuji’s. That’s why I wish I can see them both doing a bad ass duo fight together.

I have a small headcanon that Yuji actually enjoys training with Maki the most because I feel like he can understand someone who shares similarity in natural raw strength and speed. And Maki feels the same way and it’s a good excuse to bully Yuji as a joke. I would honestly love to see that! Lol!

2. Their story:

Yuji and Maki honestly have it bad. Yuji loosing his only family member (his abuelo) and becoming Sukuna’s vessel which leads him to a future execution. For Maki is the fact that her family treated her like garbage and having to leave her sister behind and eventually her sister dying.

Both Maki and Yuji share that same pain when it comes to loosing someone. We saw Yuji with Junpei and in the Shibuya Arc with Nanamin and Noabra. Again, Maki the same with Mai.

I think what made me even realize it MORE on how alike and how they parallel with each other are these images right here and how they worded their final saying:

In the Shibuya Arc, Yuji lost it. He lost it with Nanamin and Nobara (but luckily for Todo, he was able to pick his feet back up).

If I was Yuji, I would’ve reacted the same way because imagine having the idea you want to save people no matter what but people keeps dying around you or by you? It’s tiring and I would’ve had a mental breakdown too.

After kicking Mahito’s ass, Yuji says there is no reason anymore. For me, when Maki’s arc came it really reminded me of this:

When Mai died and was killed by her own dad. Her dad took away someone who was precious to Maki no matter how much they didn’t get along. Maki really wanted to create the Zenin clan just for Mai to be safe and free.

Again, same with Maki, I would’ve killed the whole clan too because of how in general the Zenin clan is and how they treat people.

3. Having a “curse”:

Nanamin to Yuji: “You’ve got it from here”

Mai to Maki: “destroy everything”

I don’t necessarily mean a curse curse but it’s more like final words that someone important to them said before dying.

For Yuji, he won’t die because Nanamin believes that Yuji can move forward and save the world.

As for Maki, Mai tells her to destroy everything in order for things to change (I might be wrong). It’s for the Zenin clan to start fresh. That is another way I kinda Interpreted (again, I can be wrong). Maki still isn’t done with destroying things plus she is going to move forward just like Yuji. 

I have a thing that if the higher ups find out about Maki, she would be on the verge of being executed as well. So imagine both Maki and Yuji together being executed.

Now on to the next pair!

Megumi & Nobara

Again, this is just me analyzing. But if you ship Itafushi and Nobamaki, you can actually see another pair that parallels to each other but so far I haven’t seen anyone compare them yet, or it’s just me lol!

1. No rivalries:

I think what I love about these ships so damn much is that there is NO RIVALRIES. Even if you don’t ship them you have to admit it is amazing seeing a m/m or f/f getting along without being damn rivals. I’m glad Gege decided not to do that especially towards the women because it does get so tiring that two women don’t like each other for no damn reason or fighting over the main guy or other main guy. At least when Nobara didn’t like Mai or Momo, she had a reason for not liking them.

And don’t get me started with Megumi and Yuji. I was so happy to finally see two boys be friends instead of the usual, boring rivalries. I’m a be honest with you, I was pretty shocked that Gege was able to make Megumi and Yuji be so close and trust each other as friends. It’s a breath of fresh air for the two ships like omg I was happy not seeing the basic shonen bullshit with the f/f and m/m relationship.

2. Hyping up their pairs:

What I mean by hyping them up, I’m talking about the potential that Maki and Yuji has that Nobara and Megumi sees from them. Nobara since the start acknowledge that Maki is strong and vice versa with Megumi with Yuji. What made me see that Nobara knows that Maki is just amazing and strong was during the baseball when Maki was able to hit almost a home run. Nobara just knew that Maki would be able to make that home run but again Momo ruined her moment! Lol!

As for Megumi, we see while the Tokyo students came up with a strategy to win against the Kyoto students, we see him saying that Yuji can actually beat all their asses without curse energy or energy(one of those). Megumi reassures to people that Yuji can take care of himself and is very useful. Another time Megumi reassured that Yuji is strong is when he was in his bed healing from Hanami’s attacks and when they fought tiger against that one dude (forgot his name)

3. Thinking about them/defending them:

Now… this is really what made me think why Nobara and Megumi parallel with each other

It’s becasue I feel like they’re the ones who are more attached and over protective with Yuji and Maki than how Maki and Yuji are with them.

Now, I’m not saying it’s vice verse with Maki and Yuji. But I’m talking about how Nobara and Megumi expresses it. Let me explain:

While reading and watching JJK, we see how Nobara is with Maki compared to anyone else. And no, I’m not saying that Nobara isn’t overprotective with Megumi or Yuji but just the way she is towards Maki. I would honest love to see how these girls got along and how they became close!

Ever since Maki and Nobara had that deep conversation about why Maki choose to be a sorcerer, that is when I actually started shipping them because of how much respect Nobara has towards Maki and it continues to develop more and more with the two of them. We saw how Nobara got super defensive when she fought against Mai (First time) and started dissing Mai. The second time was with Momo, when she was straight up talking shit about Maki.

I love how when Nobara was talking about Maki and Yuji when fighting against Momo. However, I felt a different vibe towards it as well. What I mean by that is that I got more of a “big sister vibe” toward Yuji and a “I love and respect Maki”

But again, I feel like Nobara had some sort of feeling and attachment toward Maki ever since that fight with Momo and more than anyone else too. However, that is just me though! You do t have to agree with my reaching!

For Megumi and Yuji… First of all… Megumi would not hesitate to pull a trigger if anyone is trying to harm Yuji. What made me see that was against Kamo and the Kyoto students. I swear that day Megumi was literally about to commit murder.

Yeah, Nobara got pissed but she went easy on them, but Megumi didn’t. Oh no, he was about to commit a felony. He wanted all the smoke. He wanted that curse. I swear I even felt how pissed he was. I just feel like every time and separates, shit goes down the wrong way and everything goes wrong.

For me, shipping Megumi and Yuji is a whole ass different post but I won’t do that lmao same with Nobamaki because I can write a whole ass essay why I love how compatibly/perfect for each other lol

Bonus:

But guess what… during the Kyoto and Tokyo event, same shit happened with Megumi like Nobara: Megumi was thinking of Tsumiki and Yuji. And again, I felt like it was still different when Megumi was thinking of Tsumiki and Yuji. I find it crazy how Nobara and Megumi were thinking about two people during that event:

Nobara: Maki & Yuji Megumi: Yuji & Tsumiki

This is my personal favorite image of Nobara and Megumi. *wink wink* it’s basically the same image on who is important to to them.

Again, for Nobara and Yuji’s relationship, I just love the way it is. She gives me “big sister” energy towards Yuji and vice verse. Yuji and Nobara are those chaotic siblings that are the hyper ones while Megumi and Maki are the chill ones that can actually keep them down. There has been one occasion where both Megumi and Maki calms Yuji and Nobara down because of how they were acting and I’m not gonna lie it’s kinda cute lmao:

4. Not leaving them:

During the Shibuya Arc, Maki and Nobara separates but at one panel, Nanamin was telling Nobara and Nitta that he was going to join the Zenins. Nobara quickly picked her head up and suggested that she wanted to join him in order for her to be with Maki (this is a stretch but hey Iike being dramatic) however, Nanamin quickly declines her and tells her that it’s too dangerous. I think she was disappointed that she couldn’t go, but hey, Nanamin is a gentleman and he knows when a child is gonna end up getting hurt. I thought it was cute that she was super worried about Maki and just doesn’t care and wanting to join her.

Now, up the recent chapters, Megumi really shows us that he doesn’t want Yuji leaving him or he wants to stay by his side. Those few chapters really made my heart feel some type of way because it just the way Megumi is for Yuji and I can honestly feel how much he cares for him. As I mentioned above, I feel like everything goes to shit when those two aren’t together and I hope that they develop more and more. There has been two more occasions where Fushi doesn’t want Yuji to be left behind; one during when they were in prison and the second during the fight against Hanamin. The eyes that Fushiguro gives Yuji is full of trauma and careness.

In conclusion, I can’t wait for Nobamaki and Itafushi to develop more and more in future chapters. Again, you guys don’t have to agree with me on this. This is just for fun and sharing is fun too! If I’m overreaching then I’m sorry I just can’t help it :(!!

I hope you guys enjoyed my lil analysis! I’m sorry for the bad writing, I’m not very good at translating my feelings as I’m typing because my brain goes all over the place lol! But please, feel free to comment or give me an ask! I’ll be happy to elaborate more for you guys!

Stay safe y’all! And good night or morning!

[nitw]

Can you explain what you mean with misinterpreting Chara? I've always been confused about that character and you seem to have a pretty solid read you alluded to in that post about Snowgrave.

of course!!! as your local chara defender since the ripe age of 13 i hope you don't mind me doing a small essay on this. please bear with me tho because i sometimes can't articulate my thoughts well on stories that deal with philosophical themes ;;

UHHH SPOILERS FOR UNDERTALE AND DELTARUNE CHAPTER 2 BELOW

first let me make a few things clear so i don't have to repeat myself a bunch:

only tobias radiation fox himself has The Word of God privilege when it comes to things that haven't been explicitly confirmed in the games yet, EVEN if they're strongly hinted at. don't take anything i say about the plot as more than firm personal interpretation based on the info we have right now!

i cannot stress this one enough: undertale is a game that was never meant to be experienced from a singular perspective/mindset. the genocide route doesn't JUST exist for the sake of "enjoy your personalized edgy fuck-you run for being a serial killer in a video game", every one of the total 93 endings (look it up) in this game exists to reflect the player who achieved it in one way or another. the genocide route is really no different from any of the others, because in the end, no matter what, the player who decided to go through with the things they did will ALWAYS be rewarded for it. the question the player will have to ask THEMSELF afterwards is "is this what i wanted?"

OK MOVING ON-

let's think back to the little but vital amount of info we have on who chara actually was, like, as a person. we know pretty much all of this due to 1) the tapes in the royal lab 2) asriel's additional dialogue at the end of true pacifist.

while we'll never really know why frisk fell into the underground, asriel tells us explicitly about chara's hatred for humanity, and how they jumped from mt. ebott for "not a very happy reason"; supposedly a suicide attempt. chara "never talked about why", it's left intentionally vague because their reasoning isn't really what matters. what DOES matter is how this is relevant to the genocide run, ESPECIALLY with the new obvious parallels in deltarune's snowgrave route. i'll get to that.

when you finish the genocide route, chara will talk directly to the player in person. they talk about your (you AND chara's) success, despite "their plan (having) failed". this "plan" is one they secretly made with asriel when they were both still alive, as revealed from the tapes. chara got terminally poisoned from eating buttercups (whether this was fully intentional or not is still kiiinda up for debate), and while on their deathbed, asriel says that he doesn't like the plan anymore. yet despite his fear, he still fused his soul to chara's when they died.

the actual plan here was to become a monster powerful enough to slaughter humanity, specifically chara's home village by their own dying request - this all ties into their mysterious spite and hatred mentioned before. but due to asriel's resistance against chara, their fused body was killed by the humans - which eventually led to the creation of flowey, and asriel's inner demons after death.

but back to the genocide route. during chara's monologue to the player, they give us a LOT of important exposition. basically:

at the very start of the game, frisk's own determination is literally what brought chara's soul 'back to life'. we know how human and monster souls are different and how "determination" in this universe is something only humans possess, so it makes sense why it awakened them. i won't get into the whole narrator theory because i feel like it's not that relevant to my point (it's fun tho), but chara is always present from the moment frisk falls down, and stays regardless of the player's actions.

if you managed to finish undertale at all you'll already kinda know this (thanks sans), but the EXP and LV you (can) gain throughout your journey aren't just numbers on your screen - they're genuine in-universe manifestations of power that increase when you kill someone. and in genocide, chara explains how they were directly affected every time your stats rose. they could FEEL their spirit growing stronger for every life you decided to take (REMINDER THAT THE GENOCIDE ROUTE CAN BE PERMANENTLY STOPPED AT ANY POINT BEFORE SANS. YOU DID THIS.), so is it really that strange that they felt the desire to grow even stronger?

and once you do reach this point, there's no return. all that excessive time and effort you put into killing off a civilization OBVIOUSLY has some consequences. the consequences HERE being - if you paid attention to chara's life story - you took advantage of a traumatized child who was already at the breaking point and making irrational choices on their own, and you led them to believe that this was what they needed!

this is VERY MUCH SUPPORTED by the snowgrave/weird/pipis/whatever route of deltarune chapter 2 that was discovered about 2 days ago as i'm writing this. i'm gonna go ahead and assume you know what happens in it and i don't care to go into details if you don't, since this post is about chara, but surprise: THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO NOELLE, TOO! even in a completely normal run, noelle makes it clear multiple times that she wouldn't mind staying in the dark world; that in spite of how scary and dangerous it seems at times (something something horror movies), she started to feel at home. POSSIBLY even more so than her ACTUAL HOME, with her dying dad and negligent mom. like chara, noelle is a young person with low self esteem and her fair share of trauma, even if it's not as apparent. and like in the genocide run, the player's desire to ruthlessly kill in order to grow stronger affected her already-poor mental state.

someone else already pointed this out specifically, so don't credit me for it, but the main difference between chara and noelle is that noelle managed to break free in the end.

if you're like Most People Who Played The Genocide Route Back In Like 2016 and you played the genocide route with no further knowledge about it than "i have to follow these specific steps to get a harder fucked up version of the game", i don't blame you. you didn't actually know what you were doing in the end, did you? but did the outcome disappoint you, make sense to you, or did it just leave you with an empty/confused feeling? i love undertale because it WILL force you to think about things like that. i mean, if the result wasn't gonna affect you in SOME way, why would you go through all of that trouble in the first place? you had your reasons, as the player of any video game where you know your choices matter. would you have carried out the entire thing if you knew what was coming? the answer to that is only relevant to yourself.

[tolkien-feels]

So @theleakypen said this a while ago

And I, being both a simple person who will take any excuse to talk about Rosie Cotton, and a busy person who really shouldn't be writing essays about anything, decided to compromise by giving the tldr version of a hypothetical essay

I’ll be the first to admit there's very little Rosie canon, so anything said about her is up for discussion. But then again, the same goes for a lot of Tolkien characters and that’s never stopped anyone from conjecturing, so I won’t let it stop me either.

I actually want to begin this with something that’s not clear-cut canon: the unpublished epilogue. More precisely, a part of it that is referenced in RotK:

Master Samwise stood at the door and looked away eastward. He drew Mistress Rose to him, and set his arm about her.

‘March the twenty-fifth!’ he said. ‘This day seventeen years ago, Rose wife, I didn’t think I should ever see thee again. But I kept on hoping.’

‘I never hoped at all, Sam,’ she said, ‘not until that very day and then suddenly I did. About noon it was, and I felt so glad that I began singing. And mother said: ‘Quiet, lass! There’s ruffians about.’ And I said: ‘Let them come! Their time will soon be over. Sam’s coming back.’ And you came.’

‘I did,’ said Sam. ‘To the most belovedest place in all the world. To my Rose and my garden.’

I’ll skip over Rosie’s inexplicable intuition (though of course that’s an important Tolkien trope, and usually reserved for particularly special characters), and just focus on the actual events of the day. According to Rosie, she thought Sam was dead, but suddenly (though it made no logical sense), she began to sing in defiance of evil, with bold, sudden hope. Now, is it me or have we heard this story before? Anyone remember Sam refusing to bid the stars farewell and singing in the tower of Cirith Ungol? What about Fingon harping a song of Valinor in Morgoth’s own realm? And of course, Luthien singing in Tol-in-Gaurhoth is legendary. Songs of hope in defiance of evil after the loss of a loved one are. A pattern. But Rosie bends this pattern in two very significant ways.

The first is that the lost one is supposed to answer the song. That’s the whole point of it! That’s how they’re found! But Rosie’s song goes unanswered. For me, that really changes my reading of her half-serious impatience when Sam finally returns to the Shire (”You haven’t hurried, have you?”) - at first I had just assumed this showed just how little hobbits of the Shire understand the Quest, and while I still think that plays a large part, there’s more to it. Tolkien’s very worldbuilding rules dictate that Sam should come back to her when she sings, but he takes forever to do that, and all the while Rosie isn’t sure if her hope will pay off. I can see where she’s coming from with her impatience!

The other way Rosie breaks the pattern is that she doesn’t play the role of rescuer. Or at least it’s not immediately obvious that she does. But I think Rosie does rescue Sam in a way, from the darkness of the Quest and the horror of finding the Shire so changed by the Scouring. Thinking along these lines, I can’t help but think of Luthien healing the winter of Thingol with the touch of her hand. Perhaps Rosie does something similar. Unlike Luthien, Rosie belongs to the aftermath of a great quest. She belongs to the part of the story where the land is turned green by the happy couple -- which, in a way, Sam does, and I see no reason why Rosie doesn’t help in her own way, though the book never openly mentions it.

I’d even risk saying that besides the Silmarillion, LotR itself presents a parallel: Rosie and Sam are a smaller scale of Arwen and Aragorn (who are a small scale of Luthien and Beren, who are a small scale of Melian and Thingol...) Not only do both of these LotR relationships go way back to events that happen before the story, but they also seem to both represent the same hard work of building up what was torn down by the war.

In a letter, Tolkien once mentioned that "I think the simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, and the ‘longing for Elves’, and sheer beauty."

Rosie, in her very ordinary, humble way, is no less important than Melian and Luthien and Arwen - she's both a symbol of hope and a bringer of life. Far from just being an afterthought to give Sam a happy ending, she is herself part of the Quest. Frodo set out to save the Shire - she stays behind and eventually saves it too by making it the green, sweet place it is meant to be.

In all of this, I don’t mean to make Rosie some kind of... extraordinary, queenly, fated person. Much like Sam, I think the entire point of her character is the heroism of ordinary people. She doesn’t have to be outstanding in every way to be important.

I could probably keep going and talk about how whatever little we know of her personality points to her being rather similar to Sam (listens to stories with shining eyes, thinks highly of Frodo, treats courage and loyalty as a matter of common-sense, very practical, close to her family), but this is already longer than I meant it to be so I’ll leave it at that.

[who-ever-said-i-was-nice]

Heya, could I ask for the ikevamp boys finding mc passed out at the table surrounded by work? Uni's been killing me lately. If all of them is too much then just Leonardo, Jean, Comte, Theo and Mozart? Thanks x

I cried five times while making this.

Dear Anon! Thanks sooo mush for the request. 😘I’m sorry for taking this looooong I also have a shit ton of work but HERE IT IS. I hope things get better for you and good luck!😘❤️❤️ I added a different type of uni to each of the guys just to make it interesting. @nad-zeta your daily dose of Theo. XD. Love you. Hope you enjoy! Ok here we go!

Ikevamp boys x an overworked mc

Leonardo

he just woke up from one of his naps and he decided he’s going to have a snack most probably mc

as he’s walking towards kitchen he spots you sleeping on one of the tables in the library surrounded by a huge pile of books, pens and papers

now he knew that you refused to give up on the uni you where going to when you came here but he’s still a bit surprised

he walks up to you and takes a peek at what you are studying 

architecture

more specifically some designs he came up with

*eyes emoji*

after the initial shock of finding out you where studying his work he smiles and picks you up and caries you to your bed

from that moment on he will always help you with whatever you are studying and always makes sure you take breaks

Comte

he was walking around socializing with the residents when he stumbled upon you snoozing on the dining table buried in a mountain of book

ha was aware of your studies and offered to let you off work completely

but you insisted on dedicating 4 days a week on housework

however this meant you had to study like crazy

when he saw you there he already knew what’s wrong

he panicked internally but calmly walked to your side

he didn’t insist one knowing what exactly you where studying but this was so convenient he just had to take a look

finance studies

well damn

finds it very amazing that you manege to work and study that at the same time

sighs and carefully picks you up and takes you to bed

after that he makes sure you get enough rest in between study sessions

he will spoil you a bit more and offer to help with your studies

Jean

ok so we know poor baby can’t read

he doesn’t get why you are so passionate about your university

what did you call your studies? Linguistics? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

he has no idea what you are talking about but he loves you and loves that you have a passion

when he sees you passed out in your room in a very uncomfortable position surrounded by books...

...panic

oh wait no panic you probably just fell asleep ‘cause you where tiered

wait tiered?

panic

he will pick you up and take you to your room, makes sure you are tucked it

from that moment on he will make sure you get enough rest

Isaac

precious little bean

on one hand he understands why you are so passionate about your studies on the other he is worried

one time you where working late into the night and he asked you to stop and you brought up the argument that he does the same

so he decided not to stop you

however when he finds you passed out in the gazebo...

nope.

he is panicked and scared and angry at himself for not realizing sooner

he hurries to your side when one of your books catches his eye

you are studying quantum physics?

say what?

ok he now has a whole lot of respect for you

he will gently shake you awake

“ Mmmhmm...I did my essay” “Y/N it’s me, wake up”

you immediately wake up

“ Don’t ever do that again. You scared me.”

Now you guys study together so cute

Napoleon

UMMMMMM boy

if he saw you just hanging off a table passed out he will have a heart attack

then he will realize that you are just sleeping and you are not dead so he will calm down a bit

he can’t resist the urge to take a look at what you are studying either

politics

interesting.

so you want a  politics degree

what you will do with it he has no idea. After all you are in a different time period, but he thinks  it’s good to have a goal

what he doesn’t think is good is over working your self

“nunuche wake up” “noooooooooo I won’t wake up unless you do what I do to wake you up”

so he will kiss you and you agree to wake up how adorable i  think i’m going to cry over my own work damn I’m weird  

If he ever see you looking even a little tiered he will steal you away and you will cuddle

Arthotthur

Heart attack nr.2

oh no wait my bird is just sleeping

he’s not happy

ok let me rephrase that

he’s happy that you are happy but he’s not ok with the fact that you have overworked yourself and on top of that he’s beating himself up for not noticing earlier

he’s debating whether you’d be more pissed if he carried you to your room* or if he woke you up when something catches his attentive eye

you where studying to get a bachelor's degree in English whaaaaaat!

will go through your notes and

when he finds out you want to become a writer.....

Omg fanboy mode: activate

“ I didn’t know I had such an effect on you Luv”

you: say wut? Arthur I became writer because I wanted to

Now you two run around n the corridors smiling like dorks and narrating random events when your free and he writes next to you when you study   ( to keep and eye on you. He loves you so much)

* if that doesn’t apply to you I’m sorry. I try to write from another persons prospective, but a lot of my writing is based of my reactions to a situation or my personality. In this case I’d be pissed if he left my stuff there or went into my room ( it’s my sanctuary ok my disaster). And waking me up oh no bitch run. But on a serious note don’t be mad if it doesn’t fit your description, and if it didn’t and you want me to change something feel free to let me know. Ok next victim:

Theo

to say he’s pissed is an understatement

he’s pissed at you for taking it to far but he’s pissed at himself a lot little more for not noticing sooner

like his bff he’ll also be contemplating taking you to bed rather then yelling you awake like witch one will end up in a bigger slap

then he notices what you are studying

art

when you are done with this you are literally going to get an art degree

Theo ex. has stopped working

he is getting emotional on the inside

 will gently take you to bed and tuck you in

he’ll pat your head “ Creative Hondjie”. He has such a gentle smile on his face god I can picture it I’m crying

from then on when you have a project he will help criticize you and he will help you progress with your art

 will be keeping an eye on you 25/7 yes 25 this guy will create a time loop if it meant that you had more time to do the things you love (ahem Theo) xd  no

all in all he will be just a little softer with you, but only you. And will also deny it if somebody points it out

Vincent

Let’s all just sit down, take a moment and appreciate Vincent

He will see you passed out and he will PANIC

he will rush up to you and make sure you are ok

also waking you up in the process

he will ask what you are studying

“sooo you want to become a chef”

Pffffffff we all know poor baby is parallel with cooking

like he will burn water

is super supportive tho gee who would have thought

this boy is an angel and will help you cook

Jesus I hope Comte has fire insurance

you have a lot of fun with him and he will actually end up learning a few things form you.

will make sure you never overwork yourself again

 Dazai

this dork almost stepped on you

you had passed out under you window , ‘cause you had been studying on the floor

and this guy came waltzing in through the window

“Toshiko-san? Toshikooooo shit”

*cricket sounds* yup

he will squat down next to you and poke your cheek

“ what are you doing on the floor?” you: “what are you doing in my room?”

OOOOH GOT ‘EM

you two of you will laugh about it and he will ask you what you are studying

you proudly shove your text book under his nose

“ well well Toshiko-san want’s to take care of small animals?”

you: Yes, like Isaac

he’s not really fazed by you falling asleep but  will make sure you don’t overwork and if he sees you getting tired he will crack a few terrible jokes to lighten your mood and then he will proceed to steel you away

Mozart

ok now clean freak here is going to be worried

not panicked just worried

uhum Wolf you keep telling yourself that

you where studying in the music room while Wolf was playing

suddenly he heard a thump

he stopped and looked around only to find you passed out on the table

seems like the all-nighter combined with the music led you to fall asleep

he’s frozen for a hot second until he realizes you are just sleeping

he will slowly walk up to you and poke you with a broom ‘cause he doesn’t want to touch you

Jkjk

he will go up to you and gently attempt to shake you awake when he notices what your studying

 you where studying music

“Marry me?”

he will wake you up and question you about it

from that moment on he actually helps you a little when you don’t get something and you study in the music room at all times because” it’s noisy outside”

we know you just care about her Mozart

Sebastian

he flicks your forehead

that’s it. Thant’s the canon

no I’m kidding he knows how much you study and is worried about you even before you pass out

and when you do that’s it

he scoops you up and takes you to your bed

he only flicks your forehead when you wake up

yeah you get an ear full from him

he asks what you are studying and tell him you want a degree in history

ok suddenly he’s not mad at you

from that moment on he always makes sure you are not over working

he actually shows you his notebook and you find it fascinating 

now you both collectively stalk the residents

William

y’all aren’t ready for this

when he sees you passed out in the garden he’s ready to pull out a gun and kill anyone and everyone who dared harm you

then he realizes you’re actually sleeping and he calms down a bit ( he’ll keep the gun tho shhhhh don’t tell Comte)

he will gently pat your hair and just look at you

when you wake up he will ask you what you are studying

you are a complete blushing mess when you tell him you want to become an actress

he’s shooketh and also really happy at the same time

now he takes you with him to the theater and he gives you a role to play and he watches while you practice

he’s also super attentive and will never let you overwork yourself again

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed! Stay safe everyone! 😘😘😘

[crow-in-a-teapot]

tower of nero spoilers

i have just finished the tower of nero. and before i go searching for other people’s thoughts and art and more of the characters i love so much, i want to write down some of my own thoughts because i know as soon as i delve into that ‘ton spoilers’ hashtag there are going to be complaints and criticisms and so much that i don’t want to hear, or essays that’ll make me upset, or things that’ll change my perception on the book (because on this website people really love to hate the trials of apollo).

i want to start with: i loved it. it didn’t feel earth-shattering or huge and momentous like some of my favourite riordanverse books (house of hades, the blood of olympus, the last olympian and maybe some of the magnus chase books take those pedestals for me) but it was satisfying. and i think it was satisfying because it in no way felt like an ending. whether because eventually rick will write that will-and-nico-go-through-tartarus-and-save-bob novella, or because we (or at least i) will continue writing and imagining and creating for this world i don’t know. he didn’t wrap up the story in a perfect little bow like ‘nineteen years later’, he simply put it on pause. gave us a glimpse of where every character was at at the end.

the only thing that makes me so angry and upset is that i did manage to get some spoilers for moments that i know would have been so good to experience for the first time if i hadn’t been spoiled for them. the moment where rachel mentions penguins in a mansion near her house, nico getting mental health advice from mr d, the fact that will and nico were going to be in the book for so much of the story, but the big thing was literally spoiled for me two days ago, it was the reason i sat down to read it as fast as possible because i was terrified of getting more spoiled and not being able to experience the moments for myself, was that piper had a girlfriend. i know that reading that for the first time would have been so cool and surprising, and the fact that when it came up for a moment in the last couple pages all i felt was disappointment because it was spoiled for me and because it was now tinged with whatever that person was saying about her having a girlfriend.

but i still had some warm fuzzy moments, the two parts where apollo thinks he’s going to die but nico comes up behind him - so good. impeccable. 

Leader Guy spat. ‘Now, I kill you.’

He raised his sword... and froze. His face turned pale. His skin began to shrivel. His beard fell out whisker by whisker like dead pine needles. Finally, his skin crumbled away, along with his clothes and flesh, until Leader Guy was nothing but a bleached-white skeleton, holding a sword in his bony hands. 

Standing behind him, his hand on the skeleton’s shoulder, was Nico di Angelo.

and

Nero raised his hand, ready to give the kill command, when behind me a mighty BOOM! shook the chamber. Half our enemies were thrown off their feet. Cracks sprouted in the windowsand the marble columns. Ceiling tiles broke, raining dust like split bags of flour. 

I turned to see the impenetrable blast doors lying twisted and broken, a strangely emaciated red bull standing in the breach. Behind it stood Nico di Angelo.

gods. poetic brilliance. i can’t believe i’m still a nico di angelo stannie in the year 2021. in five years i have not changed (ever since the tv show announcement last summer i have managed to morph into myself from 2017)

from here i’m not sure where to go next i kind of want to go through everything, except it’ll be more difficult than my tyrant’s tomb reaction because i wasn’t reading on a kindle and thus can’t just do funny little reactions to screenshots of quotes, so i’ll just skim through the book page by page and see what i can comment on (i’m not planning on doing analysis today, no thank you, just enjoying the end of my childhood and trying to squeeze as much out of it as possible)

i have an emotional attachment to mr. snake from the very first chapter, and am very upset that he’ll never get off on his baltimore stop and get to see his wife, lu had no reason to shoot and kill him like that.

that brings me to lu, i liked her, it was interesting to see how rick kind of brought in not only the overarching theme of abuse, but also people who let the abuse happen, i have more i could say on this i’m too lazy to right now, and i promised no analysis - or the fact that Lu had conspired to make the show non-lethal to spare Meg’s feelings rather than - oh, I don’t know - refusing to do Nero’s dirty work in the first place and getting Meg out of that house of horrors. 

And are you any better? taunted a small voice in my brain. How many times have you stood up to Zeus?

Okay, small voice. Fair point. Tyrants are not easy to opppose or walk away from, especially when you depend on them for everything.

the parallels to meg and lester heading to percy’s apartment, and then to camp half blood to the hidden oracle was so cool to read, every callback to the hidden oracle just there to remind us readers exactly how far apollo has come and how he’s changed; the entire chapter with sally, paul and estelle just felt sickly sweet, it just didn’t seem real how wholesome and good that family is, like i get why apollo broke down and just sobbed in that shower.

also rick really saying acab again in toa, i thought he was done after that elf cop chapter in magnus chase (the magnus chase series is a masterpiece) but apparently not, with A ‘good cop’ is still a cop... still a part of the mind game.

the grey sisters, i forgot about them completely but this threw me back into was it the sea of monsters when annabeth summoned them? i’m not sure, it could have been the lightning thief either, they really remind me of the disney hercules movie. the whole ganymede paragraph was gold, i love gods being canonically confirmed lgbt in the riordanverse. i also love the whole eye-tossing part - 

‘He will crush our eye,’ Anger cried, ‘if we don’t recite our verses!’

‘I will not!’

‘We will all die!’ Wasp said. ‘He is crazy!’

‘I AM NOT!’

‘Fine, you win!’ Tempest howled.

also, the explanation for why dionysus chooses to look the way he does was perfect, because it was something i often wondered about and wasn’t expecting to get an explanation for, and i imagine the whole mythological dionysus to look like.. well like a more feminine apollo i guess, beautiful in a gender non-comforming way.

Other Olympians could never comprehend why Dionysus chose this form when he could look like anything he wanted. In ancient times, he’d been famous for his youthful beauty that defied gender.

... 

In retaliation, Dionysus had decided to look and act as ungodly as possible. He was like a child refusing to tuck in his shirt, comb his hair or brush his teeth, just to show his parents how little he cared.

every scene with nico at camp just BREAKS ME, i would throw in screenshots of every damn quote but unfortunately, as said above, cannot and would rather not type every one; we’ll start with, obviously apollo confirming to him that jason is dead. 

He didn’t look angry exactly. He looked as if he’d been hit in the gut not just once but so many times over the course of so many years that he was beginning to lose perspective on what it meant to be in pain. He swayed on his feet. He blinked. Then he flinched, jerking his hands away from Meg’s as if he’d just remembered his own touch was poison.

ugh then will talking about how nico’s doing, confirming that he’s suffering with ptsd, mr d giving him advice, helping him sort though what voices in his head are real and which ones aren’t, then the paragraph that just recounts every horrific thing poor nico has been through, how will has to reassure him that he’s okay and ‘with friends’ when he wakes up after shadow travel

will’s kindness to apollo, buying him clothes, and apollo finding seymour the leopard’s head in his bed, put there by mr d aaaa AAAA A A A A A THE ORDINARY, EVERYDAY CAMP HALF BLOOD THINGS..

i could go on for years and years about how much i appreciate rachel having a big role in this book, and the visit to her apartment, everything, her art, the fact that she got what she wanted, she’s going to PARIS to study ART, she isn’t forced to be someone she’s not by her dad, and gets to be a big part of a demigod mission and not stand on the sidelines for once.

i love that her landscapes are still visions, that she still paints the quests demigods go on - the burning maze, jason’s funeral pyre, caligula’s ships; and how nico ~appreciates art~

‘And, hey, di Angelo -’ she pushed him playfully away from the canvas he’d been ogling - ‘don’t brush against the art! I don’t care about the paintings, but if you get any colour on you, you’ll ruin that whole black-and-white aesthetic you’ve got going.’

i. love. rachel.

WILL GLOWS!! THE HEADCANONS FROM LIKE FIVE YEARS AGO THAT YOU’D SEE FLOATING AROUND ABOUT HIM MANIPULATING LIGHT!! CONFIRMED!! CANON!! AMAZING

I AM  OBSESSED WITH THE TROGS, I LOVE THEM, THEY ARE GREAT, not gonna lie, i was expecting something more dramatic and spooky with how worried will was and how dionysus was going.. visiting the cavern-runners isn’t ♫ good for your mental health  ♫ but the little hat frog gremlins were a good addition. i like them very much and their funky little soup shenanigans. quoting the ghost king himself: trogs good. nice hats. (IM SORRY I KEEP MENTIONING HIM BUT I JUST) also how apollo starts wishing for breadsticks a s ajoke and theY STRAIGHT UP HAVE BREADSTICKS? HUH? WHERE DID THEY GET THE BREADSTICKS FROM??

yeah, i’m also still very much upset by every mention of jason grace, it’s funny how ever since his death in the burning maze i have grown to love him more and more and that’s not fun for me, for that boy to become one of my main comfort character’s and have his death and sacrifice and nobility mentioned every few chapters. i’m pretty sure i cried when he appeared to talk in apollo’s dreams, and this time the tears weren’t from the effort of keeping my eyes open and working for hours straight reading this book (i remember staying up until 2am to finish the sequel to beautiful, broken things, it was very much worth it)

‘All right, Jason. We miss you, though.’

ALSO. THE FACT THAT THIS KID. THIS CHILD. HAD TO THINK ‘BUT IF A HERO ISN’T READY TO LOSE EVERYTHING FOR A GREATER CAUSE, IS THAT PERSON REALLY A HERO?’ A KID ISN’T SUPPOSED TO THINK ABOUT THAT AND BE READY TO SACRIFICE THEMSELVES FOR THE GREATER GOOD,, i,, ugh,, he’s supposed to be finishing school and designing temples not being the perfect hero and soldier,, spain without the s,,

as @couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name said: ‘thinking about how ghost! Jason didn’t seem to understand why Apollo was so upset about his death because he’s been raised to believe a hero’s sacrifice is noble and his life doesn’t matter in the grand scheme and also if he doesn’t understand why the person who watched him get horrifically killed is so torn up over his death he probably doesn’t even realize his other friends are grieving him..’

IM SO UPSET THE ARROW OF DODONA IS DEAD D: IT WAS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE CHARACTERS ALL THE FUNNIEST MOMENTS WERE BECAUSE OF THAT ARROW AND IT'S DEATH WAS SO SAD WTH LIKE WE FIND OUT HOW USELESS THE ARROW FELT AND HOW THE GROVE OF DODONA ALL THOUGHT IT WOULD BE CRAP AND WOULD FAIL APOLLO AND THEN ONCE WE FEEL BAD FOR IT, IT DIES??

the entire python battle was pretty grim, there is a part of me that's like because this is the last book series i would have loved say the magnus chase and kane chronicles gang in a giant battle with everyone like the battle of manhattan but even more dramatic, but even so, i did appreciate that python battle and the whole almost-falling-into-the-depths-of-tartarus thing.

him talking to artemis was cool, but JESUS: 'I turned and strode out of my room, trying to recall how the god Apollo walked.' like that HURTS. it was such a huge culture shock for apollo to go throught this huge character arc and be so human and understand the pain of others, to be around gods again who are so.. apathetic. also, zeus. 'Interesting how he put that: I had done him proud. I had been useful in making him look good. My heart did not melt. I did not feel that this was a warm-and-fuzzy reconciliation with my father. Let's be honest: some fathers don't deserve that. Some aren't capable of it.'

OKAY OKAY SO THE END?? CHIRON TALKING TO A CAT (BAST) AND A SEVERED HEAD (MIMIR) ABOUT SHARED PROBLEMS WITHIN THE PANTHEONS!! WILL AND NICO RECEIVING A PROPHECY FROM RACHEL TO GO TO TARTARUS AND SAVE BOB!! THE HUNTERS OF ARTEMIS, INCLUDING THALIA AND REYNA BEING BEST FRIENDS (qpr.. qpr..) HUNTING THE TEUMESSIAN FOX!! PERCY, ANNABETH AND GROVER, THE ORIGINAL TRIO, GOING ON A CHAOTIC ROAD TRIP TOGETHER!! - SO MANY STAND-ALONE SET -UPS PFSJSJSJ

okay quick word on the reunions at the end: funny little elephant visitation program with livia and hannibal. love that for them. calypso and leo's relationship seems rocky and complicated, but that's to be expected, i think even if they do get properly back together again it might not last long, because it does pretty much feel like a teenage relationship where the two aren't very compatible, but we'll see. hazel and frank are so funny with their gold plated necklaces. lavinia - tap-dance icon. almost cried at the mention of jason's temple-extension plan again. percy not being sure about what he wants to do in college is accurate and i like that that's left to be up-for-interpretation (rick does THE MOST for the fanfic writers pfsjsj). i am OBSESSED with aeithales, like i hate deserts so the burning maze setting is not my favourite but GOD that HOUSE, the vibes are off-the-charts. i'd love a house made of living trees that's also a greenhouse filled with dryads. meg gets a unicorn. that is so great.

i kind of wish the book hadn't ended with 'Call on me. I will be there for you.' because every time I imagine the friends theme song and i don't think that's the vibe he was going for, BUT i do love him talking to meg, that was genuinely emotional - 'You'll come back?' she asked. 'Always,' I promised. 'The sun always comes back.' ; i really wish it had ended with that, but i guess apollo does tend to break fourth walls and talk to the readers, like a lot of the protagonists of riordanverse books.

[yangsrose]

I Latte you a lot

Word count: ~1.1k words

Warnings: none

Authors notes: Second installment to this series!!! I tried to keep this as gender neutral as I could so if I accidentally messed up somewhere please tell me >.< Also peep Jaehyun’s cameo in this because he was in the gif so I added him in adkjlbfn edit I’m adding this after finishing writing it his cameo turned out to be a whole main character oh god

Find the “Christmas with NCT” masterlist here

You were currently an icicle. Well, not literally, more like you felt like one. On the coldest day of the year, you decided to go out, deciding that dressing cute would be better than dressing warm. And boy were you wrong. You tried finding a café where it seemed not too crowded inside so that you could do your work, but it seemed like everyone had the same idea as you to escape the cold weather outside. After a long time of searching, you finally found a café that seemed somewhat empty. 

As you walked in, you almost felt as if you were walking into a hallmark movie. The warm air enveloped you immediately after you opened the door. The smell of freshly roasted coffee beans rose up from behind the counter, and the entire café was decorated to resemble a very homely, cute, and cozy area. A wave of serenity hit you, and you were sure that if you had the chance to, you would never leave the small café. 

“Hi! What can I get for you?” a barista asked from behind the counter. You walked up to him and placed your order, opting to order a hot coffee as a way to warm up your insides. After placing your order, you were directed to the left side of the counter so that you could wait there to pick up your order. 

“Coffee for y/n!” You walked over to get your coffee from the barista, and when you made eye contact with him, you thought that time had stopped. In front of you was probably, no definitely, the most handsome person that you had ever seen. 

His eyes were a warm brown, and held a sense of comfort and familiarity, almost parallel to the feeling of seeing an old friend after a long time. His hair was parted in the middle, giving him a mature yet young vibe. His smile was inviting, and you found your face heating up at the way that his eyes scrunched up a bit, and the way that his cheeks showed his little whiskers and dimple. You looked at his name tag and saw a small “Johnny” engraved in the golden plate.

You thanked him and kept your eyes trained to the ground, refusing to make eye contact with him, knowing that it would just lead to you embarrassing yourself. You made your way to an empty table, and pulled out your laptop and notes to start your work. After a while of working, you were finished with your coffee. You didn’t opt to throw away your cup immediately though, instead opting to finish your work and then get rid of your cup. 

From behind the corner, Johnny stared at you with an anxious look in his eyes, noticing how you still hadn’t thrown away your cup. He contemplated going over to you and starting a conversation, but was held back due to the fact that you didn’t know each other. He watched you intently, keeping a tissue and cookie for backup in case you threw away the cup. 

After what seemed like forever, you finally got up and packed up all of your belongings. You picked up your empty cup to throw away, but before you did, something caught your eye. On the label of your order, you saw a message - actually, it looked more like an essay- written on it. 

“Hi I uhh didn’t know how to ask for your number so I’m doing it in the most cliche and stereotypical way but here’s mine if you want to save it! Or you can throw it away if you’re creeped out by it I wouldn’t mind. -Johnny (the barista who gave you your coffee incase you didn’t know) 

You looked around the café, trying to find Johnny in the small café. Even though he was a large person, he had somehow disappeared in the small café. The barista who initially took your order saw your plight and called you over to the counter, smiling as if he had a secret to hide. 

“You’re looking for Johnny right? He just ran to the back after he saw you read the message on your cup. If you want, I can ask him to come outside and talk to you.”

“No it’s fine! I’ll just text him with the number that he gave me.” you responded, feeling your cheeks heat up. Thank you though-” you stopped, trying to find a name tag that would have his name on it. 

“Jaehyun.” the other man said smiling. 

“Thanks Jaehyun. I’ll get going now. See you later!” you said, smiling and waving at him. He smiled and waved back at you, and waited until you left the café to go get Johnny. 

“They’re gone now. You’re safe.”

“What did they say? Did they throw away the cup? Did they yell at you? I probably scared them off oh my gosh-”

“They said they would text you now stop worrying.” Jaehyun reassured the taller man, internally shaking his head and face palming. Johnny’ nerves didn’t stop however, they just amplified as he awaited your response. 

After closing the café, Jaehyun started wiping down the counters. He heard a high pitched scream, and just as he was about to go investigate, he saw Johnny run up to him and stuck his phone in Jaehyun’s face before screaming “THEY TEXTED ME!!” Jaehyun slightly scoffed before muttering a “what did I tell you” and went back to his work, smiling a little at the new relationship that was blossoming. 

“Hey Johnny can you help me with the-” Jaehyun was cut off at the sight of Johnny hunched over, smiling goofily at his phone. He rolled his eyes and sighed picking up all the equipment that had to be washed. He took a picture of the state that Johnny was in before leaving however, hoping to show you the next time you came into the café. 

Little did he know that you were currently in the same state as Johnny, giggling and texting him back, feeling like a teenager who had just confessed their feelings to their crush. 

Maybe it was fate or destiny that led you to this certain coffee shop, but one this was for certain. You two were made for each other.

[otp-holic]

hi!! u know how if a story can be "predictable" it means it is good storytelling? (the opposite of what marvel did with Wandavision, for instance). I was wondering how do plot twists fit in this? I hope you can understand what I'm asking here lol I wanted your point of view on the matter bc ur such an awesome writer!

Wow anon, this is an AMAZING ASK. Thank you.

And I blushed SO HARD at your compliment because 99.9% of the time I write words of fiction I just feel I’m rambling (as I do here) and not telling a story, so your compliment WARMED MY HEART SO SO SO MUCH. Seriously looking at your last sentence for a couple of minutes in awe and surprise 💛

Regarding your actual question… Well, since I ramble, the short one for me would be that I live in an “in between” world. I like predictable and I like plot twists (and I consider them both good storytelling) as long as any of that makes sense with the characters.

And yes, I brought in the characters there because I cannot give you an academic answer (lots of storytelling books and essays from smarter people than me for that), but my own view on the subject… which ALWAYS comes from the characters.

I love fiction but my love for fiction is rooted in me loving/hating/feeling something for the characters I’m sharing my time with: so if fiction gives me well built characters with great interactions, I can read/watch anything. ANYTHING. They are the main key-driver for me.

From that point of view, I could say I agree with the thesis that predictable = good… because (for example in fanfic) i could read the same premise, with a similar plot and a parallel evolution a million times… and finding the thrill on the prose, or the dialogue, or the slight differences on how the writers perceive the characters, their layers and relationships.

But I don’t see predictable as dull either, because narrative and character evolution can be built in so many ways that doesn’t have to do with complicated plot-twists: Imagine a character with some kind of agoraphobia and their recovery process. You could read about their days, how they are all the same, how they spend their ays at home, their relationships, how they water their plants, how they talk to their mother… all days are the same, but they keep giving you small bits of information (wow they are now talking to three people; wow that plant by the window died…) and maybe at some point you’ll read how they went to the mailbox because they were talking on the phone. And you FEEL SOMETHING (MAYBE GASP?) This is a pretty simplified trope/thing but I think it illustrates how something predictable could be HUGE being so small.

(And, well, what do we consider a plot-twist anyway? Is “AND THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED” a plot-twist or are we talking about “They were all dead from the beginning?” )

Where does that leave the HUGE plot-twist? In the same place as “predictability”. In evolution making sense… As a narrator you can lay out the characters, make them three dimensional but still “keep information” that you use to build and build until you unleash something unexpected. That would be the place of a well done plot twist in the way I see fiction.

A plot-twist that, when I go back to reading/watching after the BIG reveal I could find how the narrator had laid out the clues and that goes along with everything they were telling me about the character (in the same way as the simplified example from before, really, but with something bigger).

Shit, I could talk about fiction and especially characters all day, but in short (again), if I had to choose between predictability and shocking plot twists that don’t make sense… I’m afraid I would have to agree with the original thesis that says “predictable = good”. But that’s just my view as a person whose enjoyment of fiction always comes from the characters, so I totally understand anybody thinking differently.

I don’t know if I made any sense there, but I LOVED LOVED thinking about this and getting to ramble about it. So thank you anon for your question and your lovely words.

I ALSO WOULD LOVE TO HEAR WHAT YOU ALL PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THIS! :)

[czarojay]

//This is gonna be a long, probably not properly formatted post, but i just couldn’t help but gush about and ramble about this. Also prepare for a wall of text why everyone is the traitor /hj//

I just have so many thoughts on what happened yesterday. Like all the foreshadowings and plotholes and plotlines have been set in motion, completed or filled. And it makes my little writer soul happy, you know?

It was obvious Techno and Wilbur would be the traitors, since Wilbur multiple times said so himself and Techno literally murdered Tubbo in cold blood. Maybe not so much cold blood cause “hE WAS PEER PRESSURED” and stressed af, but you get the point. 

We knew Philza would join Dream SMP pretty much, since Wilbur showed him the script on stream recently. Also like Traitor Philza anyone? How many posts have you seen of the ultimate traitor being Philza? I have seen lots, but in the end weren’t like half the people traitors? Niki betrayed Pogtopia subtly by leaving and building another city, but i guess this depends on your point of view and opinion, since in the final battle she did fight for Pogtopia. Wilbur was the traitor (everyone knows that) by blowing up Manburg, when it all seemed to go right. Techno was the traitor to Pogtopia, but was also betrayed by Pogtopia. Techno was here to abolish government not make another, but at the first time, he knew what he was getting into. Tommy spoke about taking back L’Manburg for two months, since the election, so I do not know why the surprise. While I agree with Techno that they were just terrorists, because Schlatt was elected, voted, not a tyrant in full meaning of that word (this is so complicated, i love this). Eret was the traitor to Dream for a change, because he wanted to help and join Pogtopia, but was also betrayed by Dream, who had supposedly no way of knowing Eret was going to betray them, he just took the crown and plopped it down on our cottagecore lesbian George, who either sleeps or builds cute houses. 

Also Philza being the one to slay Wilbur is just amazing, because there are so many possibilities motives. Philza said he couldn’t kill Wilbur, but he looked on the people of Manburg, L’Manburg, Pogtopia and Dream SMP, Badlands, he looked at all the people gathered here, staring up at him and he said he couldn’t kill his son. Wilbur said he was the one who destroyed L’Manburg, His L’manburg and ordered Philza to murder him. And he did. But why?

Did Philza kill Wilbur, because he knew, that even with Schlatt gone, Wilbur would continue to cause wars and battles and death and pain? Did Philza kill Wilbur, because he knew that Tommy looks up to Wilbur and wouldn’t be able to not let himself be manipulated? Did Philza kill Wilbur, because he thought nothing else could stop him from becoming a monster? Did Philza kill Wilbur, his son, because he couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to help his son, while one is traumatised, staring at them from where he miraculously survived the explosion and the other one was betrayed, but also a traitor and he just needed to do something? Did Philza kill Wilbur, because he looked at the blown up land and he heard his son begging for death and he at that moment was the only person who could make a change? 

Hell if i know, there are too many posssibilities, but what i DO know is that i’m going to meet theories and conspiracies across my tumblr dash for weeks and I will be able to read all your amazing essays and I just can’t wait for it you know?

Chekhov’s gun. We knew L’Manburg would blow up. It would make no sense for it to not blow up after a month of it being the major plot device, one of the few things to keep it going. It needed to happen or otherwise the plot wouldn’t make sense. If this was a book and not minecraft roleplay, I bet everyone would be angry that the Wilbur character didn’t blow up as he said he would through half of the third book of the series! Sure there would be people happy that he didn’t, but let’s all be honest here, all the AUs would feature him blowing it up, it was really the only way for there not to be a massive plothole.

Tubbo becoming a president wasn’t that to be expected before the stream, but during the conversation with Quackity it was hinted towards. We all thought it would be Tommy who’d been hinted towards in the “You’re never going to be a president, Tommy” speech of Wilbur. And to be fair, he was a president for like 1.2 seconds, before he went back to get his discs which as exasperated leave me, because come on you’ve been at these discs for like almost HALF A YEAR WOW, make me happy cause it means more plot to come, chekhov’s gun right? I’m not sure if this applies here though, since they’ve already been used. We’ll wait and see right? Tubbo became a president like he was supposed to become. We all expected him to become the vice president, since Tommy always titled him his right hand man and the parallels were too strong. From Secretary of State through Schlatt’s right hand man through a traitor to end as the President of L’Manburg. Or New L’Manburg should I say?

And it’s even worse when you think about how Wilbur appointed Tommy KNOWING L’Manburg would blow up in a moment. He wanted to give him everything he could ever want and then steal it away the next second, violently, not leaving a shred of hope for it to return. Because, you see, with the discs? Tommy always could fight for them, steal them, get them back. Physical small objects, but worth so much. But L’Manburg? Tommy just got it back, his second home, his people, his place and Wilbur planned to immediately rip it away violently. Tommy would rage, he’d curse, he’d plan revenge. Which is exactly the reason Tubbo is the better choice to be a president. 

Tubbo doesn’t hold grudges, so unless he’s manipulated, not many wars will be initiated by him. He was one of the people who tried to fight the wither, he was the one who immediately jumped to gathering people and making plans for the future of their country. He was the one who made plans to rebuild their nation stronger and better. He jumped to making and building and communicating rather than fighting, which seems to me like something a good leader would do. 

Wilbur as the president barely did things, mostly used pretty words or fought. Only later in Pogtopia he actually did most of the stuff in their ravine, but he still left grinding and food for Techno and in the end he went insane and no good leader should be an insane one. Schlatt? Schlatt wanted to chop down the trees, kill the animals and destroy the nature. He may have been a better, closer and an actually elected leader compared to Wilbur, but that doesn’t mean he was a good leader. So it is possible Tubbo will be the best leader yet. 

But will he even be able to be truly a leader? Tubbo said himself he’s not sure how the whole president thing goes and he agreed to just call it a friend group, so they’re not demolished by Technoblade again, so he’s never going to be truly a leader, especially since Philza joined and everyone looks up to Philza. They’re not going to have a leader, because Techno will kill anyone who even hints towards it and Dream would probably do that as well. Or so he says, but then he made Dream SMP a kingdom, a proper kingdom with a true king. Because let’s agree, Eret was never a leader before. He was just there, sitting pretty in his forest. There was no true kingdom before, just a group of people who decided to play along for the sake of the spy. But even then, it seems pretty hypocrytical of Dream, doesn’t it? He says down with the government, with organized nations, presidents and leaders and yet...

King George has happened. But at what cost, I would say sadly and possibly crying if I didn’t expect it to happen. It was bound to happen since the very first WHITE FLAGS, TOMORROW, OR YOU’RE DEAD. He’s earned no right to the title, he didn’t participate in this war, he hardly does anything on the server. He’s just an heir. Dream forcefully removed the last monarch, so George could become the king and I feel this is going to be a big thing in future, since it wasn’t that focused on during the last streams. I think so at least? We’ll see. 

There’s just so many things to cover here, possibilities are WILD, the lore is just SO HEAVY and I am Thriving, capital T. But isn’t the whole fandom? We’re all loving it here, right? And I want to write even more, but at the same time, I’ve already got 1.5 k words and I’m afraid nobody will read it if i continue, SO HAVE A GOOD DAY IF YOU READ SO FAR. SUBSCRIBE TO PHILZA.

[universallywriting]

How is it like living without a fandom? I’ve been in so deep in so many fandoms (BBRAE buddiees~) that idk how that is anymore

Hell yeah BBRae buddies! I'm so excited to get the Beast Boy Loves Raven comic (Gabriel Picolo be still my heart). That's the one perk about getting into comic book characters - you inevitably get more content, lol.

(I'm not diagnosed with autism, although I have a strong suspicion that I am autistic, so when I use autism terms in the following answer I want to be clear that I do not have any official medical diagnosis of autism.)

While I do regularly hyperfixate on fandom, I wouldn't really consider fandoms my special interest. My special interest is writing, which includes analyzing movies, shows, books, etc, as well as creating my own.

When I don't have a fandom, I typically just gravitate back towards the more general category of my special interest. I start reading more, getting more books from the library. I've had periods of my life where I was reading an average of 3 books a day.

I start planning more OC ideas and writing my OC stuff a lot more. I really just pivot into a fandom that consists of one - just me. I really enjoy playing alone and thinking about this stuff, even without anyone to bounce ideas off of. I wrote book reviews and essays just for me when I was a kid growing up, because that's what I found fun.

But being without a larger fandom sucks, because I really do love online interaction. I feel safer and more secure communicating through text instead of voice, so when I have a fandom I feel like I'm actually getting socialization. I feel like I'm making friends.

For me, being without a fandom mostly just feels lonely. The thing I love about fandom is that community aspect. It meshes in perfectly with all these autistic concepts of "parallel play" and basically fits how a lot of neurodivergent people like to communicate - through things that they're passionate about, without small talk or things like that. When I'm in fandom, I have a community. And when I'm not, the world is a much lonelier place with a lot less people who understand.

But I have clung very hard to my previous fandom friends, so it's not nearly so lonely this time around! <3

[writingjoycebyers]

Oooooh myohmy! Less than 48 hours and I'll be done with exam season. And I'll be back on here, a brand new writing spree, back to creativity!!!

If anyone has ficlet asks or headcanon ideas, my ask box is back open.

Feel free to send me song recs too, cause I really want to write jopper song fics!

Also I'm planning to write a multi chapter jopper fic on here. If you have any ideas for that or anything you'd like to read, drop me a message too.

My very vague ideas so far:

*Jopper and time traveling (I know it's cliché but I've got an idea. I'm confusing myself with that though)

*Jopper college roommates au (I've been wanting to do that for ages)

*the friendzone story - which would focus on Joyce and lonnie quite a bit

*reinvent my old jopper fic which shows parallels between young and adult jopper.

I've also got some Joyce and Bob one shot ideas:

*high school Joyce and Bob memories (did she really not know who he was?)

*Their dating story, first kiss, getting to know the boys

*a ton of jealous hopper

I also want to write more Joyce being a mentor for eleven. And yeah. I've got too much Joyce ideas on my mind.

But yeah... I'm still opening my asks again. Hehe🤷‍♀️

Another idea for the multi chapter thing I had: what if after each chapter I'd take asks on what you guys would like to see happen next? Or maybe I'm exaggerating cause this is just a small jopper blog and no one would read it anyways. Lol.

Okay, I'm back to my last 48h of studying now.

xx writingjoycebyers

And yes, I know my ask box is packed. But I'd just love to see new ideas popping up on my last day of the semester!!!! And I need inspo. Just try not to make the same ask twice in a short time. I'm not ignoring you but real life... And I might need some time. I can't guarantee I'll answer everything but usually I'll get to it at some point.

(me rn whenever I appear somewhere else than at my desk)

(me rn when I think of all the pages I still have to write for the last essay of the semester)

(me when you guys send me asks or even random messages that are somehow Joyce or ST related. Send me a random emoji and I'd be happy too lol)

Bonus: this song screams jopper to me atm.

[purplebass]

James Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs: 1001 Nights and Layla and Majnun

Yet another essay/analysis about James Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs and the references of their story with classic Middle East literature books such as “1001 Nights” and “Layla and Majnun” and how those books might have inspired some TLH storylines.

Similarities between “1001 Nights” characters and James and Cordelia

The Layla references by James and Alastair

The Scheherezade storyteller

The metaphor of James and Cordelia’s relationship

Cordelia as James’s link to this world

In the Classic Reimagined with Shadowhunters characters book, Cordelia and James are pictured as Scheherazade and sultan Shahryar from “1001 Nights”, and she is probably telling him a story in that art. This book is a collection of folk tales and it is often referred to as “Arabian Nights” and has elements of different Middle East cultures. In short, the sultan Shahryar marries virgin women and then he kills them after the night they spend together. After some time, there aren’t virgins anymore, so the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, offers herself as the next wife/queen and survives because for 1000 nights she tells the sultan a story, which she never finishes, to keep him curious. The sultan spares her life because he wants to know how the stories end, and after 3 years (1,001 days) she finishes the stories but the sultan has fallen in love with her and he doesn’t kill her. 

Like Scheherazade, Cordelia likes books and likes to tell stories. Cordelia is Persian and this collection of tales also contains Persian elements, and the name Scheherazade means “of noble lineage” from Middle Persian. Cordelia also offered herself to marry James to save him from facing judgement from the Clave.

The name of the Sultan, Shaharyar, means “holder of the realm” as king/prince, because the “shah” was the crown king/prince/emperor in Persia/Iran. James loves to read as well and he has expressed several times in CoG2 that he wants to hear Cordelia’s stories. 

“Night” in Arabic is “Layla”, which is not only the title of “1001 Nights” in Arabic (“Alf Laylah wa-Laylah”), but it also refers to “Layla and Majnun”. The only time James calls Cordelia “Layla” is when he has the scalding fever and is in and out of consciousness. Alastair also calls Cordelia “Layla”, which is not just super cute but also a reference to their Persian heritage and it also refers to the aesthetic behind Cordelia and James. Cordelia is the night and James the day, but Cordelia is also the fire and James is the shadow. Cordelia is also a heroine like Scheherazade, of course. In literature, the Scheherazade storyteller is also someone who tells a story and is fighting with death, which means that they are telling their story to the reader but they know that they don’t have much time because death is around the corner. If you consider the trouble happening in CoG2, every character of TLH risks to die, especially since we have different POVs and each character tells their own story from their perspective. The only character writer in TLH is Lucie, who also notices how life is terrible and unpredictable, while she only wanted to put joy into her stories:

She felt somewhere in the core of her heart the truth of what her mother had just said. And one should put truth in books, she thought, but this would never be the sort of thing she put in the pages of The Beautiful Cordelia. Books were about experiencing joy. This was the raw and awful stuff of life.

It was much too terrible.

When James has the scalding fever, Cordelia reads him poems and tells him about “Layla and Majnun” by Nizami. From Days Past: Cirenworth Hall, 1900:

She read him the poems of Nizami, and especially the story of Layla and Majnun, one she clearly loved and had known since she was very small. Her cheeks grew unexpectedly red at the more romantic parts: the poor boy falling in love with the beautiful Layla on first sight, wandering mad in the desert when they were separated.

If we were to analyze this, we could say that it reflects James and Cordelia’s story to some degree. James didn’t fall for Cordelia at first sight because he had the gracelet in most of the times they met through the years, but when the gracelet is off and especially after this moment with Cordelia tending to him while he was sick, James is not able to keep her out of his mind even when he later meets Grace again in Idris. Now I don’t know what will happen, but until the gracelet is off, James will act as doesn’t love Cordelia unless their bond breaks the spell of the gracelet. Or Cortana could destroy the gracelet? The last part of this section I reported above “wandering mad in the desert when they were separated” made me think about the shadow’s realm. The realm is like a desert because there is nobody around, and when James goes there before he finally meets Belial, it’s deserted as there is no one there (even if I guess there are demons, but it’s mostly a lonely place). Cordelia is the only one who went to the shadow realm with James and seems to be a threat to Belial in that dimension, because of Cortana. Will James go back to the shadow realm and will Cordelia have to look for him again like at the end of CoG2? That could have been a foreshadowing for the ending and of James and Cordelia finally meeting Belial, but who knows if that won’t come into play again in the future. James could be unable to go back to the normal world and he could be stuck in the realm. Just a thought.

Even when James has the scalding fever and travels to the shadow realm, Cordelia is the only one who is able to bring him back and to their world, which means that there is a link between them, something in Cordelia and James both, a pull. Perhaps it’s the affection they feel for each other, the fiery passion that they could unleash after the gracelet is finally off. Like we saw in the whispering room. That was raw and unrelenting passion, the metaphor of Cordelia and James as a couple: fire and shadow. Cordelia is the fire/match that lit James on fire. Here’s more quotes from Chapter 3, Days Past: Cirenworth Hall, 1900 to support this idea:

He reached for her, and the shadow that was his hand caught hers, darkness against flesh. He wondered how his touch felt to her. His whole body was tensed, like a horse shying from thunder. The room smelled of lightning.

“James, you must hold on. You must. Don’t go anywhere,” Cordelia said. “Stay with me.”

“ ‘ I sought not fire, yet is my heart all flame. Layla, this love is not of earth.’   ”

He shuddered and felt himself come back to this world fully, felt his body return to the space he occupied. 

Note: There is also a parallel scene where it’s Alastair who tells Cordelia to stay with him, which could be a hint that Alastair might be the link for Cordelia to stay in this world if she ever falls into the shadow realm with James, perhaps (like Lucie could also be another link for James as his sister). In the flashback from Chapter 20, Days Past: Cirenworth Hall, 1898:

When he looked suspicious, she said, “I could use some help, Alastair. You see how careless my form is.” Alastair came and took the knife from her. “Very careless,” he agreed. “I know swordplay comes naturally to you, but not everything will. You must slow down. Pay attention to your feet. Now, follow my gestures. That’s it, Layla. Stay with me.” And she would.

To reinforce the parallelism between famous Middle East literature and English literature, we also have “The Beautiful Cordelia”, which is not a real book but a story in the making, since Lucie started writing it when she was 12 and she still hasn’t finished it. It’s also a story-within-the-story like the narrative in “1001 Nights”. Lucie is also telling her own story to the readers, and in CoG2 she is writing about Cordelia who is a beautiful red haired woman. Cruel Prince James, inspired by her brother James, is one of the characters of her book even though we don’t know if he is the Lord Hawke who adored Cordelia and supposedly is her main love interest.

One thing that differs in “1001 Nights” and “Layla and Majnun” is the ending. The first has a happy ending because Scheherazade and Shahryar fall in love and she doesn’t die because she becomes queen. In the other book, however, which is sort of a “Romeo and Juliet” love story, the ending is not happy. Layla’s father doesn’t want her to be with Majnun, because he considers the man mentally unstable (Majnun means “crazy”). In the end Layla marries someone else and Majnun roams in the desert because he can’t accept to live in a world without her. They die without seeing each other again, both heartbroken because they can’t be with the other person. 

Now don’t take the books word for word. They are inspirations for the main story for sure, but the good thing of inspirations is that they never have the same ending of the original.

Thanks for reading! I know it’s quite long, but I don’t have the gift of brevity, I’m sorry. 🤣

[revolutionary-demosthenes]

Louis de Manoël de Végobre (Pt. 1/2)

Essay 11

Louis de Manoël de Végobre. A friend (or more?) of John Laurens and Francis Kinloch, a lawyer, a scientist. I wanted to learn more about him after I reblogged that last quote, and found some interesting things so I figured I’d share them with you!

Keep in mind: I'm still doing research and finding new things about De Végobre... only it all has to be (google) translated because most of the writings on him are in French. So keep in mind the margin of translation errors while reading this. This first one will just talk about De Végobre’s life in general, and in the next one I’ll talk more about his sexuality and relationships. 

Louis de Manoël de Végobre was born on November 12, 1752, to Charles de Manoel de Vegobre and Louise de Vignolles-de-La-Valette. I assume he was probably named after his mother. He had several siblings, but sadly (as with John Laurens) some of them died very young.

I was unable to find much more about his childhood, so fast forward to 1774. 

De Végobre was a friend of the Chauvets, a family in Francis Kinloch and John Laurens’s social circle in Geneva in 1774. He taught Laurens math, and they became good friends. After Laurens left for England, De Végobre kept up a correspondence with him... one that was obviously not completely reciprocated, as this is what Végobre said in the beginning of a letter to John Laurens on February 18, 1775:

“Sir,

There is the second; shall a third be? I dont know, but you know. When I have wrote [&] sent an epistle, I am always imagining the history of it; I long to see it [illegible], arriving, read, and answered; I Keep in my memory its date, I calculate the time of its arrival, and I impatiently expect the time of receiving an answer. This longed for answer arrives at length; then I am contented, and beginning another letter I prepare myself for enjoying still such a pleasure. But—if no answer… What must I think? I am concerned, sometimes a little angry. How does my friend do? Is he sick, absent, or idle in answering? Suspense is a hard thing.

I have wrote to you on the 24th of December, you have not yet answered. If you are guilty of negligence, pray do not aggravate your fault by a longer delay. Fault, I say; indeed I think it to be a fault to let pass over a great time without answering the letter of one who deserved answer. There is the end of my chiding, and I hope my thanks will soon began: I mean, that my second stroke shall get me an answer. Indeed, I would be sorry if your continued silence would hinder me from setting pen to paper a third letter.”

“Suspense is a hard thing.” Pull those heartstrings, Louis!

“I would be sorry if your continued silence would hinder me from setting pen to paper for a third letter.” This is so hilarious and sarcastic. Like, “I would be so sorry, John, if I didn’t write you again because you DON’T EVER WRITE BACK... that would be really sad, John.” 

At the end of this same letter, De Végobre also mentions, “Kinloch will not write to you, as he says, being a little angry with you because you dont answer his letter…” So basically, it seems these three were very close in Geneva, but Laurens didn’t write to Kinloch and De Végobre nearly as much as they wanted. And they let him know this was the case. Some possible explanations for this:

Laurens was busy. Studying law.

Laurens being jealous and it being painful for him to remember Geneva and his friends there. This one is more speculative, but since Laurens didn’t want to leave Geneva, and seemed very happy there, it’s possible that the letters Kinloch and De Végobre sent made Laurens feel jealous that he wasn't in Geneva with them. 

Maybe Laurens was just “idle in answering.” This was not unusual for him.

Anyway. For age reference here, in 1776 De Végobre would’ve been around 24, and Kinloch 21.

De Végobre finished learning law around this time, and became a lawyer. 

After Laurens left for London, a young man (aged 18) came to Geneva, and his name was Gabriel Manigault. He and Végobre became friends, and according to Evolution of a Federalist, William Loughton Smith of Charlestown (1758-1812) by George C. Rogers, jr:

“De Vegobre in a letter of June 7, 1776, after thanking Laurens for ‘the pretty Swift,’ told of being charmed with Manigault, whom he taught geometry and who taught him French and English belles-lettres. They often walked together and on Saturday evenings would visit Kinloch, who lived one league in the country and there they might stay until Sunday or even Monday."

In some ways it seems here that Gabriel replaced Laurens. He was a new student of De Végobre’s, who also was teaching De Végobre English, something Laurens did as well. De Végobre wrote Laurens on Dec. 24 1774, “For (putting aside all friendship) you have been my first teacher in English tongue, at every progress I made in this language, at every delight (and many are) I always remember that I am obliged to you for that...”

Gabriel was also a friend of Kinloch’s, it appears, since he and De Végobre were apparently staying multiple days with him regularly. 

However, the trail on De Végobre runs pretty cold after 1776. He eventually came back to Geneva in 1784. According to the book La France protestante: ou, Vies des protestants français qui se sont fait un nom dans l'histoire depuis les premiers temps de la réformation jusqu'à la reconnaissance du principe de la liberté des cultes par l'Assemblée nationale; ouvrage précéde d'une notice historique sur le protestantisme en France, suivi de pièces justificatives, et rédigé sur des documents en grand partie inédits, Volumes 7-8 by Eugene and Émile Haag*, “[De Végobre] was appointed secretary of the first appellations then lord of the commands of Peney and Champagne; but political events stripped him both of his place and his fortune.”

There’s also a possible letter from him to Laurens from 1781, but I think it’s in a private archive.

De Végobre left Geneva for unclear reasons. (La France Protestante Vol. 7-8 by Eugene and Emile Haag simply says “Domestic affairs, then political circumstances kept him away from Geneva for several years, where he did not return until 1784.”) The political circumstances, however, may have been the Genevan Revolution.

“In 1814 Geneva having recovered its independence, de Végobre became a member of the Representative Council, where he sat until 1833 and where he displayed great activity. In 1815 he was appointed judge of the Supreme Court, and he held the office until in 1826, when, believing that his strength was declining, he resigned.” (from La France Protestante, Vol. 7-8 by Eugene and Émile Haag.)

De Végobre was interested in science, particularly physics. He was knowledgable enough that he even filled in for a sick science professor Marc-Auguste Pictet once!

De Végobre did not have many published works. There’s one called Discours pour servir d'introduction à un ouvrage posthume de François-André Naville, ci-devant conseiller d'Etat de la République de Genève, and another titled Sur le jury dans les procès criminels.

As for De Végobre’s personality, he seems to have been a pretty affectionate friend and generous as well. A man who knew De Végobre said that it was “by his amiable and serene character that he shone; neither sad trials, nor the age which often makes selfish and morose, did not alter in him this benevolence, this warmth of heart which made him so precious to his friends.”**

De Végobre never married. Again quoting La France Protestante, Vol 7-8 by Eugene and Émile Haag, “He [De Végobre] lived with his sister Anne Charlotte, who died Sept. 28, 1840 [...] This young lady also left fond memories. Although her fortune was small, her charity was inexhaustible. She was one of the founders of the Asile des orphelines de Genève, an establishment which until its last day was the object of her constant care.”

The “founding an orphanage” draws some Eliza Hamilton parallels. 

Louis de Manoël de Végobre died in 1840, at around 88 years old.

*all the quotes from this book were google translated from French, and because of the long title, in the rest of this post I just refer to this book as “La France Protestante, Vol. 7-8.”

**google translated from French 

[imbellarosa]

Hiii! I was wondering if you read fanfic?? And if so, what are your fav tropes/works??

Hi!!!! I read A LOT of fic from A LOT of fandoms! My fav tropes are either flat comedy or enemies to friends to lovers or friends to lovers or something like that! I only read happy endings, but I don’t mind some angst in the middle. Idk what fandom you’re looking for so I’m gonna give you a list of some of my all time favs from EVERY fandom, and I’ll add one that I’ve written!

Walk That Mile by purpledaisy- 150k words 1D enemies to friends to lovers road trip AU across the US for a fun, banter-y time with some real communication issues that really get resolved well. People always say that a rom com should have a good answer for “why can’t they be together NOW?” And this one does it really well! No real angst, and a lot of fun. 

Have Love, Will Travel by @kingsofeverything - 97k words 1D YouTubers on a roadtrip AU! If you liked the first one on this list, you’re gonna love this one too! Sweet and long and full of the memories you would make on a road trip. Lots of laughs with this one, and I wish I could see the “Have Road, Will Travel” video series irl! 

Tell Me Now, Tell Me Now by @vanillabeanniall - 55k words 1D Miraculous Ladybug AU but you don’t need to watch the show to ADORE it - I know that I sure do!! Funny and sweet and SUPER ironic, with superheroes and Paris mixed in and great characters! Who wouldn’t love it?

So Let’s Cross the Lines We’ve Lost by thecoloursneverfade - 165k words 1D friends to enemies to friends to lovers uni AU that was one of the first that I read in the fandom and really made me fall in love! Good friends, some angst, hard convos that lead to real growth, and lots of really great characters. This feels real, for a lack of a better word, and is always compelling. 

Ain’t That A Kick in the Head by keysmashlesbian, wreckingtomlinson (karasunonolibero) - 23k words 1D comedy AU ft. football player!Louis, Disaster gay!Harry, memes, frogs, head dives, Blue Coolattas (whatever those are), and a very sassy Red Robin waitress named Fiona. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read it, and I always laugh, and I always find something new to fall in love with. 

Leave it To the Breeze by @hattalove - 82k words 1D GBBO AU. This one feels like a warm hug. It’s gentle, fun, has great characters, believable angst, has you rooting for more than one of the characters to win, and is also hilarious, somehow. I’ve read this fic over and over and over, and I especially do it when I have time before a new season of GBBO. Also, have snacks!! It makes me hungry

The Section by bananaheathen - 11k words 1D Uni AU with grad student TAs, sophomore undergrads, art classes, movie analysis, and final essays as methods of seduction. Also, nicknames, nude models, a Halloween party, and absolutely shameless flirting. I loved it, and laughed the whole way through. 

I’ve Heard it Both Ways by @adoredontour - 26k words 1D Psych AU. I love this one. I love the fic, I love psych, I love the author. I’ve read most of her works, but this one has such a special place in my heart. Go read it!! 

Play it All Night Long by janine_tangerine - 43k words SPN radio AU with DJ!Dean and bartender!Cas, with music, annoying coworkers, sassy siblings, and lots of love. WHOAH WHATS THIS A LIVEJOURNAL FIC??? I know but I read this ages ago, and it has music EMBEDDED WITHIN THE FIC! It was my first introduction to Bob Dylan, who remains one of my favorite artists of all time. 

Crossroads State by Mercy - 51k words SPN slice of life AU with Mechanic!Dean, Teacher!Cas, Law Student!Sam, and lovely lovely moments. All sweet, some tension, but no real angst. I read this forever ago, and still come back and back and back to it. 

Peace and Good Luck to All Men by KismetJeska - 31k words SPN College Au. DO YOU MEAN THE BEST CHRISTMAS FIC EVER OF ALL TIME??? I read this on the first day of December every year, and it makes me laugh every time. Cas falls in love with his sister’s boyfriend, Gabe and Luke are in a seduction competition, Michael is tired of everyone, and Dean doesn’t know what hit him. 

For All You Young Hockey Players, Pay Attention by @thursdaysfallenangel - 144k words SPN enemies to lovers hockey AU. Just. Please go read this. Gorgeous and still one of the best fics in the whole fandom, imo. Cas is the new transfer on Dean’s team, and Dean doesn’t like change. 

The Complete Works of Emmanuel Allen by @violue - 54k words SPN small town AU ft. writer!Cas and local business owner!Dean. Dean meets his favorite author, but does not know it’s him. Shenanigans ensue, with a lovely warm feel. Dean builds a mausoleum and owns cats and lives in the woods. Cas needs a change of scene. Sam thinks everyone needs some more company. 

The Mirror by cloudyjenn - 25k words SPN parallel universe AU. This was one of the first fics I ever read, and I still love it. Dean touches an enchanted mirror and travels through universes in search of an answer to a question he hasn’t asked. Full of love, family, and companionship. 

Asunder by rageprufrock - 24k words SPN AU with Social worker!Dean, Doctor!Cas, Sober!Sam, and RUBY!!! Ugh I love this fic for Ruby alone. This one is more bittersweet. Dean hasn’t spoken to Sam in years due to his struggles with addiction. Sam, now sober, is getting married, and has invited him. Dean can’t face his family alone. 

But It’s a Good Refrain by lady_ragnell - 23k words Merlin Radio AU! Merlin has an anonymous gossip radio show, and someone calls in to put Arthur on blast! Morgana is a fan, Arthur is not amused, and a sort of enemies to lovers thing occurs. Just lovely, and it makes me laugh every time. 

And Like the Cycle of the Year, We Begin Again by @katherynefromphilly - 208k words Merlin canon compliant. This is the Season 6 we should have had. If you’re at all into this fandom, go read it - it’s still an all time fav for me. Hundreds of years later, Arthur walks out of the lake. Merlin has been waiting. 

Give The Dragon a Chili by @supercalvin - 47k words Merlin magical AU based on the story in New Zealand of the cat stealing someone’s underwear. Merlin’s dragon is sort of a thief. 

Fundamental Imperfection by Starlingthefool - 12k words Merlin famous author AU. Arthur likes Dickens. Merlin does not. They get into it on a panel, and twitter stan wars ensue. And enemies to friends to lovers where literary arguments are an expression of love, and stories are magical. 

The Student Prince by FayJay - 145k words Merlin Uni AU. What a classic!! It’s a magical realism royal enemies to friends to lovers AU ft. a dragon in the walls, a lovely gay soc, Gwen as a Muggle, and some really great characters and moments. Do yourself a favor and go read this one. 

Call it Love by @dalek-in-heels - 30k words Merlin RPF. UGH THIS ONE!!! Okay 1.) the author is one of my best friends, and she’s amazing! 2.) lovely fic that takes place at the end of Merlin, and still has one of my all-time favorite misunderstandings in fic ever. “Yogurty Heart” is my favorite way to say I love you. 

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by @watsonshoneybee - 35k words Sherlock AU canon compliant through season 3. This one is sad, but the title is taken off of one of my favorite books, and the writing is gorgeous - as is the characterization. Happy ending, though! I promise! So the journey is all worth it! 

In All of the Lives We Are by @dalek-in-heels - 20k words The Magicians canon compliant through the first half of season 3. Sarah does it again and writes one of the best fics I’ve ever read. Art as therapy, a sweet love story in more than one universe, and finding the will to keep going through the worst days. The writers of the actual show should have read this fic and put it on the screen. This is my canon. 

A Happy Ending? Sure Enough by me (imbellarosa) - 8k words The Magicians canon compliant up to season 4. This is the only one of mine I’m putting on the list, because I still really like this one! You need some context, but not much? Idk, just if you want to see how *I* write!