#pendragon d.j. machale

[lcain1341]

LISTEN. I'M A PJO FAN THROUGH AND THROUGH.

But Pendragon deserved an adaptation.

Bobby Pendragon is what everyone wanted Percy Jackson to become.

[haveyoureadthisseries-poll]

1. The Merchant of Death

2. The Lost City of Faar

3. The Never War

4. The Reality Bug

5. Black Water

6. The Rivers of Zadaa

7. The Quillan Games

8. The Pilgrims of Rayne

9. Raven Rise

10. Soldiers of Halla

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[roseunspindle]

Books I Want to Get to in 2023

[noybusiness]

Thanks for the mention, @minalblood! I'm glad I helped keep up your enthusiasm for continuing. Now in the home stretch!

Mary, why didn't you just knock the nice policewoman unconscious before she could take John, the way a normal person would? 😉 You'd have been out of town in moments, and she's a fraction your size (I hate to say it, but Betty doesn't make a very convincing officer for the 1970s; today, yes, but not then).

Poor Kyle. Once John's name is cleared, his folks will think he lost the plot, committed suicide and tried to frame John for it.

It was good to see Maggie in the almost-flesh and see how close she and Lata were, which hadn't been mentioned much before. She looks not unlike Mary and Dean, too. Given that it was a vampire who was said to have killed her, I have a slight suspicion we might have seen her again in Season 2 and learned she was actually turned instead of killed.

Erebus's bracelet is like the Sword of Shannara in Terry Brooks's Shannara series (which was made into a TV show called The Shannara Chronicles on MTV that is actually quite good despite diverging from the books a lot, but in ways that actually do more with the post-apocalyptic theme the books set up and the individual characters). It gives its wielder the power of truth to use on others but they have to endure it themself first. 

Also, I appreciate them using one of the relatively obscure primordial Greek deities. A Dictionary of Classical Mythology was one of the first books my parents gave me to read as a little kid. My early passions were Greek mythology and family trees (which I combined in a family tree poster of the Greek gods, heroes and monsters - the heroes and monsters are all related to the gods and therefore to each other - for Home Room in middle school).

I don't think Millie, John or Mary has canonically been taken in on suspicion of being delusional, but it's an interesting idea and would make a good fanfic (although Mary would be sprung by her parents pretty quickly, I imagine, legally or not). In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we learned Buffy had been briefly institutionalized before the first season after she famously burned down the gym to destroy vampires at her old high school in LA, before moving to Sunnydale.

Would definitely be interested in those real-time notes!

 "There are two kinds of people in this world. People who hate and fear clowns... and clowns." - The Quillan Games by D.J. MacHale

I'm back and I'm so sorry! I won't make any promises for the last 2 ep of the Winchesters, but I will be reviewing/rewatching them anyways just ... who knows when, I dont!

But let's get started on You've got a Friend 1x11.

I hopefully will be a bit less rambly since O have a draft of my thoughts already written for this and its less... as Im watching (i can post that too if yall wanna but dunno if ull understand my handwriting)

We begin where we left off and I love that we have this scene of them needing to clean up, adds realism, adds dimension to the world. Love also that we begin with Lata being the Lata we all love - dejected in this case about her chimera paw was ruined. Queue Carlos with the teasing. The 2 of em banter a bit before Mary redirects us all to the matter at hand.

And Mary has come a long way in these episodes, because she may not join the banter (still closed off somewhat as opposed to Carlos and Lata's easy repartee) but she is going off of it and adding them into her area of interest.

But all stops when John come in blood soaked and in shock - Mary instantly worried he might be hurt, but nope, not this time.

I am so happy to see them portray the actual shock and numbness John is feeling, then the guilt and sadness, just all the reaction to Kyle's death really. And considering the survivor's guilt John is lugging around, it makes it even more heartbreaking. I also love seeing that Mary is the level headed one here - she,.imo, is clearly pushing down the grief to focus on John's issues here, hell we see very little of her grieving in this episode and everytime we do, she's quick to redirect that feeling into action - sometimes into violence point blank. She does it here, asking what the Akrida could want, she does it even moreso with Millie, where she does open up a bit since Millie is offering comfort, but then it turns into Millie coming with a plan which directly leads to Mary wanting to storm the police station guns blazing and the ep ends with Mary and John discussing Kyle (also god Mary looks absolutely exhausted here, fuck) but Mary derails it by saying they need to find Dean instead. She's def not allowing herself the moment to deal with Kyle's death which may prove relevant when discussing next episode.

I'd forgotten this ep was the Lata episode. Like ep 8 was Carlos', this one is Lata's. And god does it hurt.

1st, move the feather boa, Carlos!

2nd, I do genuinely believe Lata and Maggie were together. Everything in this episode points that way to me (but especialy the sweetpea nickname) We'll round back to this though.

The other thing we note in the sequence in Maggie's room is how close Carlos and Lata are to each other. Which we knew, but I always love seeing it again in action.

Before we continue with the emotional core of this ep, we have to get back to plot with Betty! I love Betty..I also can't blame her for being ....hesitant to say the least. Like imagine what she's seen so far: the guy who, before leaving to the marines illegally, proposed to her, is suddently interacting with, apparently, imfamous Mary Campbell, who is seen at several murder/investigation scenes suddenly appears ro have killed someone? And she already knows John had anger issues before hand. Like i get her here. And still shes trying to be nice while doing her job.

Which leads me to the next part, her job. So the detective... he's wording (even with him being really Akrida) echoes a lot of corrupt cop rethoric which only gets further emphasized when he later threatens to have John... killed 'accidently'. And, on top of them, speaking pf policw corruption even a 'good cop' like Betty becomes complicit simply because of the power the Akrida gained via the detective role cuz she was unwittingly helping them throughout.

But god, was John a bit too cocky here. (My notes have this marked as "this is why you let villains monologue, John!"). Especially since he actually doesn't have any info on Dean. (Love that we see the pic of Dean, missed him) l.

Meanwhile Lata and Carlos have found the bracelet and it's fucked them over. Also, I fucking hate the shadows thing, very creepy. Also also it reminds me of the daeva that Meg uses in s1 of SPN. I'm also reminded of SPN with the story the detective tells John about how they'll get rid of him - SPN's own crooked cop ep featured exactly this sorta plan too, but in killing Dean.

Really though, the main thing I found interesting upon rewatch is just how much Lata is our Dean mirror in this one. Specifically, in getting targeted by the bracelet she's forced to relive a trauma (Sania's death) via Carlos acting as substitute, only this time she succeeds where prior she thought she failed (which lemme make clear, no, Lata was at no point and in no way at fault, but she did internalize that guilt - much like Dean tends to internalize guilt) . Which Dean, much like Lata ends up doing when getting involved with this universe, ends up reliving a trauma (his parents death - Mary especially) of something he failed, in his mind, to prevent/save via rescuing this universe's Mary. And much like Lata, who can't undo what happened to Sania, but can "begin to make it better" (the Hey Jude line just hit me so I had to use it), so too can Dean. It won't change what happened in his life, wont save his mom, but it will help him heal nonetheless.

Adding to this Maggie? Who opperates as a Cas parallel here - she was Lata's person, who shared everything with Lata but Lata couldn't in turn for fear of judgement/shame, who notably is dead and thus Lata can't ever reveal her secret to. Well, it hurts is what it does.

But watching this I noticed another interesting thing though, for all that the bracelet seems to work like Osiris (pulling on the guilt the person feels is most agregious), the bracelet actually seems to want the wearer to get out. Carlos is taken just as Lata begins wondering which secret it's trying to make her face and is sent to Sania's room - direct answer. Then later,.even more blatant, using Maggie's face, tries to get Lata to disclose the secret, but Lata talks around it instead til the creature takes her too.

It seems like Erebus had a test for his warriors, one he wanted them to win.

Throughout all of Lata's story, I was seething. I truly hate her family and Carlos was 100% saying exactly what I was thinking.

Another thing I appreciated though, about Carlos, is the emotional maturity. Yes they were dying and yes it was urgent that Lata disclose her secret but Carlos made certain to reassure her throughout. Tried to give her as much space as possible.

In other thoughts, Lata's mom making that "vs family" distinction, uuuh it rattled sth in me only to them have Lata say "my parents would never look at m the same way"? In the Dean Winchester show? God, the echoes of John's shitty parenting were deafening. Bur yes to eveything Carlos said. It truly wasnt Lata's fault.

And I adore also the ending conversation between Lata and Carlos (both wearing blue and god I want Carlos' coat) because yes, this kind of stuff shouldn't be forced out on anither persons whim. Lata doesn't have to tell John and Mary anything, it is her story to tell, but also yes, Carlos is right to reassure her that if she wants to share it with them, they'll likely react well like he did. And yes the reason this particular scene hit so hard is partially personal, but because of that it drove me insane in SPN where there was a tendency for people to push other to open up at their own whim (and yes, Sam did it often to mutiple people, hounding them until they cracked and spilled whatever trauma they were trying to deal with but then have nothing to give in return, no comfort or even really reaction, and yes he most of all did it to Dean a lot and it did puss me off) So yea, love this episode for the Lata and Carlos of it all!

Also I have a few questions, when Millie was trying to convince Betty about the supernatural, at one point she said "it's not like-" and cut off. She was trying to defend against the accusation of 'playing make believe). Also, Betty says sth like "Mary, I expected.this from" with relation once more to her not believing in monsters soooo.... has Mary ever been taken in under suspicion of being delusional? Was Millie? Or John?! I've questions ok i need y'alls opinions on this one.

Also, I would've soo cracked if the Akrida asked about Dean, cuz I def miss him a lot and id fucking gush about him at that point.

Anyways, that's it for this one. See you guys next time where we'll be clowning (have I mentioned I hate clowns?)

@noybusiness thanks for push earlier this month, i needed that a lot and thanks for the support for this rewatch ❤

@shallowseeker thanks the new posts, been inspiring me to get back to writing this ❤

[maximilff]

tagged by @laurabenanti to list my top 9 books

the song of achilles by madeline miller book of all time

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid (my current read!)

life or death by michael robotham

the harry potter series (prisoner of azkaban is my fav. fuck jkr but like god those books are good)

the hunger games trilogy by suzanne collins

they both die at the end + the first to die at the end by adam silvera (they can't be separated 🥺)

the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky

the pendragon series by d.j. machale (nostalgic series from high school that i just finished. i think books 2 and 7 were my favs)

the hobbit by j.r.r. tolkien

tagging @sophiedevreaux @stardreamt @evelyns @henwilsons @morozovamaximoff

[bumpintheroad]

I remember reading alot as a kid and for me personally, Pendragon by D.J MacHale would of been the series I would say really shaped me. Then came Percy Jackson lol

i’ve never heard of pendragon! but it’s interesting to see what sparks our hobbies, ya know?

[bettinalevyisdetermined]

Are there any mangas or books you could recomend cuz i finaly got through my "still need/want to read this" pile and idk what do read next

Ooh, empty to-read pile? Congrats!

I don't really read manga, I prefer watching anime. :P

Have you ever read the Pendragon series? That one's my favorite. I listened to all the audiobooks for the first time in like a decade, and it still held up for me. There's 10 books in it, so there's a lot of story to go through. Plus everything else that D.J. MacHale has written is really great, in my opinion. ^_^

[tandonshows]

Have you ever wanted to be whisked away to a magical world where you could make a difference?

This week, Harrison Prince, writer and host of the upcoming Ruff Boys podcast, joins to talk about the Young Adult Sci-Fi series, The Pendragon Adventure by D.J. MacHale.

We discuss how the books helped Harrison escape during a tumultuous time, the way the first book's format broke the rules of writing, and how the series helped Harrison to start to hone his own craft.Tangents include whether books have to be good to be worthwhile, controversial reader takes, and Matthew McConaughey.

Part 1 & 2 of this conversation are available now. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or find You Are What You Love on your favorite podcast app now!

[bi-luminescentdragon]

Some good book series I forgot (or almost forgot) about but really enjoyed and would like to share(possibly read again in the near future):

The Morganville Vampire series by Rachel Caine

Cirque Du Freak series by Darren Shan

Pendragon series by D.J. MacHale

Shadow Falls by C.C. Hunter (not my favorite but it appealed to my inner teen lol)

Life After series by Julie Hall

Dirty Blood series by Heather Hildenbrand

The Testing Trilogy by Joelle Charbonneau

The Tide series by Anthony J. Melchiorri

The Extinction Cycle by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

The Extinction Cycle: Dark Age series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith and Anthony J Melciorri

The Deadland Saga by Rachel Aukes

The Zulu Chronicles by Steven Konkoly

The Scattered and the Dead series by Tim McBain and L.T. Vargus

Slow Burn series by Bobby Adair

Vampires are in red and zombie or zombie like creatures are in purple :)

[pendragonthegreat]

DJM interview 05/21/2024 - some hypothetical tv show talk

skip to 53:26 for Pendragon stuff- the rest of this interview is mostly ayaotd related.

i've transcribed the relevant stuff below the cut if you can't listen, but in summary:

dj is still trying to get pendragon adapted and his exact words were "I just started a new effort with some new people." this is not even close to confirmation because pendragon has gotten almost adapted like this a few times so don't get too excited! but i really like hearing that he's still trying and he has something of a lead.

he wants it to be a tv series as opposed to a series of movies, with each book being a season, and he specifically put emphasis on expanding on stuff that's not in the books (the example he uses is character backstories)

he wants to age bobby up to around 16 or 17 at the beginning of the story

interviewer: If you had a chance to turn, like, SYLO Chronicles or Pendragon into a series, TV show or a series of films, would you want to?

DJ: Sure. In fact, I'm working to get Pendragon- I've been trying for years to get Pendragon on the screen in some way, shape, or form, uh, I just started a new effort with some new people, so... Who knows how it'll turn out. But the idea is to actually do a TV series.

[interviewer mentions Saint Dane and DJ says he wants Benedict Cumberbatch to play him. okay skipping forward a little bit]

DJ: How many times have you seen a movie based on a book that you really love, and even if it's good, and I'll put H arry P otter into this category, it's pretty good, but there's always that, "yeah, but they left so much out. Oh god, you're missing this, you're missing this." So you've gotta take this much and squeeze it into this much. The idea with a Pendragon is, I would love to be able to do a series where each book is a season... Now you're taking this much, and you've gotta blow it out even more. So you can get into the backstories of the different characters and do much more detail on it. So my dream would be, besides getting it done, is.. and that would be enough, frankly, the idea is that there's someone who never read the books but watched the series, and that sends them to say, "well, I'm gonna read Merchant of Death," the first book, and have them say, "yeah, the book was good but they left a lot out." [something hard to hear but i think he's saying he wants it to be the other way]

Interviewer: And you were smart enough that every book, the main character, Bobby Pendragon, grows a year with every book. So you know, he starts at 14, ends at 24 [monty note: this isn't true it's more like 1 year per two books and he's 18 by the end] and like grows and learns the course of- and you could do that as a show, rather than just having a kid be a perpetual kid.

other interviewer: And the audience that reads them grows with the character.

DJ: Well... except. I mean, that was the plan, I remember doing an interview when the Merchant of Death first came out and I said, my ideal here is to have 14-year-olds pick up this book and grow up with Bobby Pendragon as each year comes out. And I remember just going, good luck with that. That'll never work.

[everyone laughs]

DJ: and it did! It did work! But TV's a little different. Or I should say, screen is a little bit different. So for the scripts I've been writing for Pendragon, I've actually aged him up to begin with, to 16 or 17. To start with. Because, the thing is, one of the things about, I mean you guys haven't read all the Pendragon books, but he starts at 14, and as much as he's very capable and he's smart, and he's all that kind of stuff, he's almost a passenger for the first couple books. Um, and a lot of other people are doing his fighting for him. And this is a little kid, but he still does plenty of stuff, but it's way easier to accept a 14-year-old doing plenty of stuff when you're just reading about it, than to actually depict it on screen. So it's like, I think he's gotta be a little bit older to begin with, right off the bat.

And because... wouldn't it be great to make ten seasons of TV series, let's be real, [something like it's not gonna happen]. I can't wait till season 6 for him to start kicking ass.

And, just being a film producer that I am, the fact that H arry P otter pulled that off, pretty remarkable. And I think it was as much because those books are just a phenomenon that Warner Brothers stayed with it and stayed with it as the kids aged and whatnot. Lightning's not gonna strike twice. So you don't wanna be casting little kids that you have to deal with them growing up. I'd rather cast a 20-year-old as a 16-year-old, which is the norm.

[rarely-conscious]

Reading anything right now? Do you enjoy reading? What genres?

I am veeeery slowly making my way back through the Pendragon series by D.J. MacHale. Like basically everything I read it’s sci-fi/fantasy coz that’s just the kind of media I generally like to consume :)

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

Book 1 only for all of these.

Humans are weird, I have the data by Betty Adams

Clean Sweep by Illona Andrews . This is a complicated one genre wise, because there are vampires and werewolves and witches, but they're from alien planets, werewolves are the result of genetic modification, vampires have advanced tech, etc. So fantasy would make sense too?

Cluster by Piers Anthony

Proxima by stephen baxter

Prime Suspects: A Clone Detective Mystery by Jim Bernheimer

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Nova Express William Burroughs,

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer

Reset by Sarina Dahlan

Omnitopia dawn by Diane Duane

The Dreaming Void by peter Hamilton

Valor's Choice (Huff, Tanya)

Eye to Eye (Jinks, Catherine)

Revan (Karpyshyn, Drew)

Babel (Kuang, R.F.)

The Wandering Earth (Liu, Cixin)

The Merchant of Death (MacHale, D.J.)

Maybe Next Time (Major, Cesca)

The Host (Meyer, Stephenie)

Cloud Atlas (Mitchell, David)

Wild Massive (Moore, Scotto)

Nyxia (Reintgen, Scott )

Revelation Space (Reynolds, Alastair)

Robots vs. Fairies (Parisien, Dominik)

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Taylor, Dennis E.)

Spin (Wilson, Robert Charles)

Artifice (Woolfson, Alex)

Androne (Worrell, Dwain)

hello! many of these are queued.

the following are in formats or genres that I’m not currently accepting for this blog:

Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of (very good) non-linked short fiction.

R.F. Kuang’s Babel is fantasy.

Robots vs. Fairies (ed. Parisien and Wolfe) is a collection of non-linked short fiction.

Alex Woolfson’s Artifice is a graphic novel.

and I had questions about the following:

Olivia Blake’s The Atlas Six appears to be fantasy — is there something in later books that would make it science fiction?

William S. Burroughs, Nova Express — you said book 1 only, but Nova Express is book 2 of The Nova Trilogy. did you want Nova Express specifically or did you want book 1, The Soft Machine?

Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth — this appears to be the title of a short fiction collection containing the title story. has the story itself been published in standalone format (outside of a magazine/similar)? if so, could you or someone else point me towards it?

D.J. MacHale, The Merchant of Death — while parallel worlds are integral to the Pendragon books, my impression is that the handling of them (and of travel between them) is primarily fantastic rather than scientific/science-fictional. could you, or someone else, clarify the extent of the science fiction aspects of the series?

[psychedelic-charm]

I can't make out the titles of the books in this drawing. There so tiny.

I think they might be the following:

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. by Lili Anolik

Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Eloise at the Plaza by Kay Thompson

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine of Hippo

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Aesop's Fables by Aesop

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Liar's Club by Mary Karr

Pendragon by D.J. MacHale

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The rest of the books are hard to decipher. I'm assuming a lot of Caroline's library consists of memoirs and dark academia books.

Caroline Calloway’s artistic process,

[gettingfrilly]

You’ve answered most of them already but E (young wild and ed), H, L, R. Thanks!

Hi hello ty :)

E: If you wrote a sequel to [insert fic], what would it be about?

edd getting high a not panic inducing amount and bumpin ugglies with eddy

H: How would you describe your style?

RUSHED lol. gotta get to the juicy bits. im def more action and dialogue oriented, too impatient for lots of exposition or more flowery prose. i also try really hard to show, not tell, à la the robot devil's advice.

L: How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

not enough! like i said before, i'm very impatient lol. need to get the content out so i can get the dopamine hits from engagement. i do make sure to slowly read my fic out loud to myself at least once, tho. and i usually go back and read bits to myself frequently while writing. i'm not a first draft kind of person, it's all one draft that i'm continuously rereading and editing while writing.

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

D.J. MacHale (specifically his Pendragon series) and, for better or worse, James Patterson ( specifically how he writes Maximum Ride.) I devoured those books when I was a kid so they definitely inform how I write today. also, loath i am to admit it, there's probably some jk rowling in my writing too, considering how many times i read and reread the harry potter books as a kid. now that i think about it, all my favorite book series as a kid were about teenagers fighting against fascism.

as for fanfic authors, silentwalrus on ao3 is a huge inspiration and someone i aspire to write like.

also i really can't not mention Takumi Miyajima when talking about writing. Tales of Symphonia is my favorite game of all time, and when dabbling with ideas for original fiction, ToS's plot and story themes are a HUGE inspiration.

[incorrect-pendragon-quotes]

Saint Dane: Remember, learning is always a great reason for criminal things.

Naymeer: I wonder what a dado rod would do to a marshmallow

(Five minutes later)

Saint Dane and Naymeer, with marshmallows in their hair: It explodes.