#or maybe inkheart

[maandarinee]

screaming, rereading Inkspell and Orpheus is "20, 25, idk" according to Farid?????

I first read that book when I was a kid, so my mental image has always been "ah yes, An Adult", but that's full Brat age???

no wonder he's like That aghsjdkd

[intertexts]

man. i miss cornelia funke....

[lostandbackagain]

this is one of my favorite theses in the inkworld each way it plays out is so!!

elinor's dad valued his books over her and her sisters to the point she internalizes it and becomes the same kind of hermit he was, before and after the folcharts come back into her life. basta was groomed into believing he was inherently unlovable except by capricorn so he'd do anything to keep that small remaining amount of love. brianna realizes if dustfinger wasn't dead then he had to have abandoned her, so the next person to give her their full attention? she'll throw away every other relationship she has for them, the same way she was thrown away. the verbal abuse violante endured as a kid (and currently, because 19 is still a kid) influenced the kind of mother she is and she doesn't even realize until it's almost too late that she's done to jacopo what the adder did to her! and I've already talked about the physical abuse from farid's birth family influencing how he forms severely anxious relationships.

and none of these are just character padding! all of these characters influence the plot so heavily by becoming traumatized and by working through it and I don't have any idea how she pulled it off

[feydrautha]

Post a poll with 5 favorite characters and let others decide which is their favorite

got tagged by @lucy-ghoul @emobatsy and @gloriadenton, thanks to all of you!

Tagging @derry-rain @ectochoir @chuckroughly @hegodamask @peppermintfreak and whoever else is interested

[mischievoussilvertongue]

[leatherbookmark]

Done with Inkdeath! As I thought, I'm sad to say goodbye to this world :( But it was soooo good to reread it and relive all the stuff that made me crazy as a kid hehe

[books-coffee-and-the-woods]

Actually now that I think about it, maybe I will return anything serious to the library and just reread Dolphin Diaries

[peppermintfreak]

Hi tonight I decided to add like twenty inkheart characters to the hunger games sim for shits and giggles (old men were exempts) so here are some highlights I thought were funny.

Pairing meggie with doria was apparently a very bad idea as she pursued to immediately bury him six feet underground on day one lmao.

She also kept shooting people and getting explosives from random sponsors, effectively getting the highest bodycount of five only to die of hypothermia on the last day.

Somehow roxane's death went past my radar and i haven't realised this until i skimmed thru everyone's cause of deaths and found out she was set on fire by none other than mo at the very beginning of the game 💀 apparently basta didn't take this very well and proceeded to track him down and kill him on day one. Avenge her, king!

Dustfinger attempted to climb a tree for no apparent reason only to fall from it and die. Sootbird did the EXACT same on the same day, of course not before he'd snapped the piper's neck. The art of seduction is not for the streets.

Basta and firefox kept teaming up despite coming from different districts and jumping people. What did fenoglio mean by this?

Unstoppable force (mother and son duo) meets immovable object (two redheads)

A mother daughter bonding moment. Ignore cosimo and darius in the back.

No commentary on this lol. Bro can't even aim.

[all-thestories-aretrue]

How am I just now finding out about the colour of revenge??? I haven't particularly kept up with Cornelia Funke, but I do search her every 6 months or so. But HOLY SHIT ANOTHER INKWORLD BOOK IM FREAKING OUT.

I also found those GORGEOUS STUNNING BEAUTIFUL 20th anniversary editions and I must admit I am trying very hard to not spend an obscene amount of money on a copy.

[zelekhia]

you know, looking at this and seeing the burn scars (awesome detail btw) it just occured to me that while fenoglio tells us basta burnt his arms, supposedly noone knows (because he always wears long sleeves). But like, wouldn't his hands be burnt as well? And yet that is never described.

Inkheart was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, and all my love was for foxy face Basta❤️ that superstitious bastard was and is my favorite character.

[the-apocrypha]

anything related to dream's german accent from "the fourth dimension"? I've been obsessed with that little detail since you first posted that fic ❤️

OMG yes. The original fic, for reference. Also, asking for a friend, does 800 words count as short?

They stand in perfect silence on the forest path, Dream’s phone balanced in the palm of his hand as it records. The sound of the bird's song is made into an aesthetically pleasing series of bars on a line, on the app, and below it an hourglass spins as the song is compared to millions of other stored bird calls around the world.

Pacific wren appears first.

Below it, reed warbler.

Then, at last—sedge wren.

“It must be,” Dream murmurs. He loses patience and pulls the phone back toward himself, tapping at it. “These other two are not native species, they would not be—no. Pacific. And… India. It must be the sedge wren, there is—” He taps some more, and then a recorded bird call plays from the phone. “Yes?”

Dream is looking at Hob.

It sounds the same to Hob, but then, Hob has long proven that he has neither the senses nor the temperament for birding. Why Dream insists on consulting him at these turns is an ongoing mystery.

“Definitely,” Hob says.

Dream's nose scrunches.

"Definitely not?" Hob tries.

“If only—” Dream's brows draw together as he abandons the phone to squint into the bushes where the birdsong has been coming from. The binoculars come up, and then back down again. The squint gains agitation.

There is contention, amongst the birding community, about what constitutes a “rare bird spotting”. Some people hold that the bird must be seen, while others will settle for call identification only. This is to say nothing of the debate regarding rare birds unintentionally captured in the background of photographs, noticed days or weeks later.

“Show yourself,” Dream mutters, with a scowl fit to light the brush on fire.

Hob has a little gander about the path while he waits, like an airplane in a holding pattern. Further down the trail, there’s supposed to be a boardwalk over a wetland that he suspects will take at least an hour to traverse for all the birds expected to be nested there. He’s brought a book for that particular layover. It’s even not in English, at Dream’s insistence that Inkheart was best enjoyed in its original text, and also of an appropriate reading level for Hob’s current faculty with the German language.

He takes a picture, as he waits, of Dream with binoculars to the sky. It matches the other thousand of them on his phone. Binoculars at the beach. Binoculars at the park. Binoculars out the train window.

Eventually, Dream’s shoulders slump, and he lets the binoculars drop. He pockets his phone.

The bird song has gone.

“Sorry, love,” Hob offers, with a consoling hand between Dream’s shoulderblades.

“Such are the trials of ornithology,” Dream sighs.

“There’ll be other birds,” Hob tells him, and with gentle pressure, he gets Dream’s feet moving down the path again. “Maybe you’ll get that, uh, gargagney you wanted instead.”

“Garganey.”

“S’what I said.”

Dream trudges down the path.

They make it approximately a hundred feet before Dream’s head suddenly snaps up, and he has the binoculars up as quick as a flash.

A second later, Hob is unceremoniously yanked closer.

“Look!” Dream hisses, shoving binoculars in front of Hob’s eyes. “Look, look, up there, third branch from the top, just to the right, it’s a peewit.”

“A what.”

The sound of fingers on glass patters away as Hob takes approximately an eon to find the little bird that Dream had somehow spotted out of the corner of his eye perched fifty feet up a tree.

“It is not actually called a peewit,” Hob says.

Dream ignores him.

Hob shakes his head, and lowers the binoculars to watch Dream race through the Merlin menu to find the peewit's dedicated page. He holds out the binoculars in preparation, and sure enough, thirty seconds later Dream snatches them up to verify his identification.

Hob returns to his holding pattern.

“Hey,” he says, at length. “Is that the peewit’s call?”

Dream looks up from his phone. “Mm?”

Hob gestures at thin air. “That?”

There’s a wok wok wok wok wok wok wok overhead.

Dream shakes his head, and returns to his phone. “A squirrel, Hob.” Only, of course, they are speaking German and so it is Eichhörnchen.

“A what?” Hob asks, suppressing a grin.

“Ein Eichhörnchen,” Dream repeats. He glances up briefly.

Hob’s pretend expression of confusion passes muster.

“A squirrel,” Dream translates impatiently, and then switches back to the binoculars.

One of Hob’s greatest sorrows in life is that Dream has learned to minimize his accented English over the last few years. It had been Hob Gatling, and vhatches and seh Dhreaming, every word just a little bit imperfect and all the more wonderful for it. Now, it is only when Dream’s focus slips that Hob is allowed these little gifts from him.

Skuurl.

Hob turns into another holding pattern, and grins to himself.

[knight-of-the-graces]

Hey, um… with the whole “Bluejay!Jason” concept… has anybody ever considered it as an Inkheart reference instead of just a play off his name?

Follow me here, and sorry in advance, this turned into a ramble.

In the second book of the Inkheart trilogy, Inkspell, one of the main protagonists adopts a Robin Hood-esque approach to defeating the tyrant king, and adopts the name of ‘The Bluejay’ from famous folk legends and songs written by a beloved poet and often sung by travelling minstrels. He’s -Inkspell spoilers ahead, though this book is unironically older than I am- known for toppling said tyrant’s throne through the binding of a magic book (a recurring theme throughout the series, if you’ve never read it, which you should). He’s a champion among the Motley Folk, who were that world’s equivalent to a travelling circus and also regularly aid him in his quest to topple the Adderhead (the tyrant king mentioned above), and sought to help the poor and downtrodden. The Bluejay is aided and abetted by his family and friends, which include a shapeshifting wife, a daughter with the ability to make anything she reads come true, a fire-dancer who can speak to the flames, and a knife-throwing 'circus' prince with a black bear companion. (They're not called the Motley Folk for no reason, people!)

Now, consider for a moment: Little Jason Todd, in the local library, absolutely devouring the Inkheart series. It's everything a little kid could dream of in a fantasy book! And there's three of these fat books, what more could you possibly want? And he has an excuse to sit in a warm, safe building for a few hours.

Now imagine, Inkspell becomes his comfort book. Of course it does- every kid had one, and I can't imagine an orphan who grew up alone on the streets of Gotham picking anything other than a story about a strange man helping the opressed and downtrodden in a land he grows to call his own with the help of his family- and The Bluejay is an excellent father to his daughter, too, of course Jason pictured himself as part of that family, as whisked away into that world.

And of course, the rest of the series is wonderful too -Inkheart is where it all began, after all, and Inkdeath is the final triumph over evil!-, but Inkspell is a story about becoming. About learning to be more than you were born as- after all, if Mo the simple bookbinder could become the hero The Bluejay, what could Jason the street orphan become?

Maybe, instead of discovering this book in a library, he found it in the trash. And maybe he wondered, as he read it, why anyone would ever want to throw away the tale of Mo the Blujay, of Meggie the Silvertongue, of Resa the brave swift, of Dustfinger the loyal Fire-Dancer? (And maybe the last one took a while to get there, but he did get there! Eventually! And maybe Jason can understand why it took Dustfinger so long to truly come to trust someone again, because trust is a terribly dangerous thing to give to someone, because you can never really know what they'll do with it.) Maybe he read it through without knowing anything about Capricorn or The Shadow or why they feared the man named Basta, because they hadn't thrown away the first book, only the second. Maybe he wept for the death of Dustfinger, at the very end, because he didn't know that Death wouldn't keep him, because they hadn't thrown away the third book.

Maybe Inkspell found its place among his most treasured possessions. Maybe, when he met Batman and Bruce Wayne in one night and his life changed forever, Inkspell came with him, with its familiar story and characters and world and sorrows.

Maybe one of the first things Bruce did, upon seeing Jason reading that same battered old paperback, was to order Inkheart and Inkdeath and leave them in his room. Maybe that was when Jason started to realize that he wasn't going to leave forever.

(Maybe Jason and Dick would play Motley Folk together, because Dick was in the circus and could most certainly throw knives, even if it gave Bruce a heart attack every time he saw it.)

And maybe, after he could no longer have Robin, he remembered that old paperback book, that old story and that old world, and he thought of a new name for himself.

Bluejay, he thought, as he picked up the book that had been his constant companion for so many years. I'll be The Bluejay.

(I don't really know what this is. I saw some Bluejay!Jason art the other day and just started thinking of the Inkheart trilogy and the fact that Jason would absolutely have read it and probably loved it. And then it spiralled.)

[askponyinuyasha]

@ask-inkheart: You have very pretty eyes! Like a kitty!

@tekbro: meows

Inuyasha: Tch, cats... I'm... more of a dog person.

[Edit: Forgot to add the read-more cut above the PNGs, whoops]

(High-res transparent PNGs below the cut)

Inkheart was especially fun to draw for me. I love her mane. It's serving 90s shojo anime protag. A little Mini Moon, maybe a little CCS.

Tekbro made me really fight to get a cat in the MLP style, because the cats that exist in canon all look terrible XD

[thedevilsfamiliar]

Mf sprouts from his ashes like a phoenix

think of how different the batman plotline would be if they cremated jason

[teaboot]

What are your favorite pieces of media?

hhhhng Uhhhh

growing up, probably The Pendragon Chronicles- from what I recall it's a series of books about a kid who has to correct cataclysmic events on a bunch of separate worlds caused by a being who intends to end life on all of them.

One world is Modern Earth, where he's the only one able to use the portal to travel to other worlds, one is 1920's Past Earth, one is Future Earth in a sort of cyberpunk setting, one is a desert planet in the midst of war, one is a jungle world in which the dominant species is a race of bipedal cats, one is a water world where all food is farmed on a series of island-sized boats.. and I think that's all of them, unless I'm forgetting?

And on each world there's one guardian, and they meet up and fight and shit, and they can't blow their cover on any world, and each world has a large, distinct world-ending event brewing- The water one may lose their source of food, for example, and in future-earth people are wasting away in a virtual reality game they become addicted to.

It's one of the rare long series of teen books that I feel had a pretty satisfying ending despite the huge buildup, and I'd really recommend it to anyone interested.

I also really like X-Men, and Trigun, and while I haven't seen the new Percy Jackson series it was UNCONTESTED my number one favourite- I still have it on my shelf, absolute A+.

Aaaaand.... I enjoy the Batman Fandom more than most of the comics themselves but I'm in there, too. Was a homestuck cosplayer back in the day, as well. Loved Gravity Falls, loved Steven Universe.

Six Underground ins my favourite "sick at home" comfort movie. Also the only two John Wick movies in existence, shame they never made more sequels. Lord of the Rings. The Princess Diaries. Stardust. Ella Enchanted.

Oh, and the Inkheart books were FABULOUS. Really, they read like nothing else, just such a fantastic and unique flavour in fantasy!

Uhhhhh. Hellboy, too. Hell's Paradise. Bleach. Darker Than Black I vaguely remember enjoying, but I have the DISTINCT MEMORY of despising season two, so fuck that shit, whatever it was.

And I remember... oh, maybe twelve years ago, now? Really liking the spy series Nikita, and the urban fantasy Lost Girl, though I don't think I finished either.

Oh, and Elementary is a must-watch!

Poirot, too, and Perry Mason, and Midsommer Murders.

Also Blown Away, glassmaking reality series, and Forged In Fire, a bladesmith reality series.

Kitchen Nightmares, Hotel Hell, Hell's Kitchen, all good.

Puppet History. Watcher. Game Changer.

And webcomics Dead End and Check Please.

................I may need to spend more time on this

[angelofmusic1997]

Inkworld... again

I finally decided to read the Ink Trilogy--I guess it's more of a series now?--again. It's been literally 10 years since I last re-read any of the books. I remember every single scene of "Inkheart" as though I had just read it a few days ago. This book is still such an amazing read. This time I'm trying it out as an audiobook. I've never heard anyone else do character voices, so I'm a little bit thrown off with Lynn Redgrave's voice for Dustfinger. Every other character (so far) is just as imagined. I'm only a third of the way through the audiobook, but I've loved every minute of it. I've started the initial sketch for a painting of Dustfinger, but based it on the movie version (Paul Bettany was such a good Dustfinger!). I might try doing a more book-accurate painting (or maybe a few) later down the line. I'm so excited to read my way through the first three books, to finally be prepped to read through the fourth book of this once-trilogy!