#pentalogy

[icy-saturday]

(CW: BODY HORROR) Here is every version of Four based on all events on Numbercide so far

(Sorry if they’re arranged backwards, but it’s supposed to be right to left)

[bates--boy]

Muir: Hey, guys, you remember when I said that I was going to write a trilogy?

TLT Fanbase: Yes...?

Muir: But then it ended up being a quadrology?

TLT Fanbase: Yes...

Muir:...

TLT Fanbase: ...Muir...

Muir: :)

TLT Fanbase: Muir!

Muir: :)c

TLT Fanbase: MUIR!!!

Muir: :3c

[mac-n-cheese-art]

i cant beweeve i never posted this one im actually happy with it

[nyxxie-is-super-gay]

Hey Tumblr, what do y'all think of the Pirates Of The Caribbean pentalogy?

I am aware most people only seem to like the first 3 films but I binge watched them all last night and I disagree with those people. Dead men tell Jo tales was pretty great. It's not my favourite but like still I don't get all the hate.

[beautiful-songbird]

Not me having six current WIPs, three of which are book series

[lovinlikeloki]

The Shadow Realm 02 Teaser

A/N: okay so it's been ages since i've done one of these but i desperately need the motivation so uh... here's a teaser pls give feedback

Warnings: None

Word Count: 239

Full Chapter Word Count: 1.2k and climbing (hopefully)

We both slowly make our way to his bed, him lying down and I sitting on a cushion on the floor next to it. Loki begins throwing a cup in the air rhythmically, I watch as it flies and falls through the air back into his hand.

I rock back and forth and hum softly as I watch him, I pick at my skin, scratching and my cuticles almost creating hangnails. I don’t even realise how excessive the skin picking is until I feel Loki’s hand softly take mine, I look up at him as he slowly guides my hand into my hair. He knows about my habits, the good and the bad and it’s clear that he’d rather I twirl my hair than pick away at my decaying skin... we’ve both come to realise that while my illusions give me a full mobility in my limbs, if I pick at my skin too much, especially at the tips of my fingers, it can crumble away when I’m in my true form.

A small smile graces my lips, and one almost ghosts his own lips too. He turns back to face the ceiling and begins throwing his cup again, my rocking soothed, my hair twirling and my humming slightly louder. This... this is comfortable, comfort beyond what I’ve ever experienced before, no words need to be spoken, no raised voices, no questions, just silence. Comfortable silence and tentative touches.

[kraniumet]

people need to watch more propaganda they need to do the labour of being emotionally affected and then following the lines of thought to their conclusions. when you're watching something like top gun: maverick, where flying on a suicide mission to cockblock a diffuse foreign nations ability to create atom bombs is a metaphor for becoming an adult, you have to be able to read lines, like one parental figure telling another "let him go", as "let him go he needs to almost die and then go on to drop bombs on civilians in other countries". extrapolate 👯‍♀️

[eddickus-demo]

(posted may 21 2022)

a finalization of the catgear pentalogy

saved dev for last!

[icy-saturday]

A fifth installment to Numbercide (now a pentalogy) has been announced on late night July 4th. It’s going to get more cataclysmic.

any remaining Algebralians will be left behind to fend for themselves against this corrosive tumor now that the objects have fled to other worlds. They now must find a way to also go to space or purge the beast or it’s too late.

The name of this fifth installment will be announced shortly.

[etirabys]

meandering post about reading Orson Scott Card again

I've been offline starting at 9pm every day (except once. I was drunk at karaoke and asked for anons at 8:30pm) for six weeks, with the result that in befuddled boredom two nights ago I picked up Orson Scott Card's Songmaster from the house bookshelf.

I read Ender's Game and three sequels when I was a teen thought the books were mid. Since those are OSC's best works I assumed he had nothing more interesting to offer me and didn't try more of him for fifteen years, but Songmaster was compelling enough that I immediately afterwards picked up The Memory of Earth, the first book of a pentalogy.

TMoE is extremely my jam: after humanity blows itself up on Earth, AIs monitor thriving human civilizations in the planets that survivors managed to escape to, and suppress any tech that enables large scale violence by exerting low key mind control via satellites. But forty million years pass, many of the satellites break down, and the AI needs help from humans to restore capabilities. Because as its control wanes, people are starting to e.g. conceive of airplanes or bombs again, and override the injunctions against entering military alliances more than two edges of connection away.

The AI is worshipped as a god all over the planet, but the fourteen year old protagonist that becomes one of the AI's agents tells the AI from the beginning that he'll break with it if its morality seems wrong to him. I like the fourteen year old – unlike Ender or Songmaster's protagonist (adult minds piloting ten year old bodies), he's a normal gifted kid who's unpopular 50% due to his ego and big mouth and 50% because he's socially inept and offends people even when he's trying to be nice.

Songmaster is also partly about a permanent solution to large-scale violence, albeit through one guy who establishes a monopoly on violence and sweeps in pax galactica. Both it and TMoE are preoccupied with the eradication of suffering from evil / human violence, which is closer to my resonant frequency than narratives about defeating particular people or ideologies. At the moment I can't think of any other book with such an insistent focus on the matter than T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's hard to make a compelling story out of, and I don't think Songmaster really succeeds, but TMoE's premise is well suited to explore that. (I'm also enjoying the matriarchal culture where everyone is expected to have multiple serial-monogamous marriages.) After reading 70% of TMoE last night I wrote:

Usually when I read fiction there's a small part of me going, how can I use this as fodder for my own growth, how can I remix or improve or react against this, how do the author and I measure against each other? (If the quality and content are at an anti-sweet spot, the small part becomes quite large and I feel all teeth towards the author.) But on occasion I read something so close that the absence of that measuring-feeling is its own sensation – ego departs, or at least is split across two bodies. There's just amity and recognition

And it's pretty interesting to feel this way about Card for, well, the reasons.

(If you're familiar with Card drama none of the following will be new to you; I'm coming to it fresh so the rest of this post is me going "uh... wow")

I vaguely knew he was a homophobic Mormon who'd gotten into fights about gay stuff, but I couldn't tell from the Ender books I read. But in Songmaster his issues spring off the page in such a weird way. Every fifth Goodreads review of this book is "Card, u gay?" because, well,

(One review, possibly from a fellow Mormon, that went "Card, it's so sinful of you to be this gay in your novel". Why did he write this book that would predictably make everyone mad...)

it's full of gay male desire. The protagonist (Ansset) is approximately a castrato and characters notice him sexually a lot. The first and only time Ansset has sex it's with a Kinsey 4-5 male character he loves, who's married to a woman but has fallen in love with Ansset. It turns out the drugs Ansset took to prolong his singing career painfully and only-kinda-figuratively explode your balls when you have your first orgasm and you'll never feel sexual desire again. (You'd think his loving teachers would have warned him of that, but, whatever, they didn't.) The other guy is literally castrated in punishment for inadvertently torturing a highly valuable castrato. It's pretty bald: GAY SEX IS ALMOST IRRESISTIBLY TEMPTING BUT YOU SHOULDN'T DO IT.

(Sidenote: both Ansset and the guy's wife are very close and have a "there's enough love to go around" attitude about the gay sex initially, before they go "wait Josif is a SERIAL MONOGAMIST... he can only love one person at a time... the moment he had the gay sex his marriage was destroyed". It's funny in a mildly stupid way that Card would set up this parable of homosexuality destroying lives and a marriage but almost everyone involved is peacefully ready to sail into an open marriage. I guess it makes sense if you want to say very clearly that THE GAY PART IS THE BAD PART)

which is fascinating to me, because... why would you tell on yourself like that

(81k also told me secondhand of an essay? interview? where Card openly says "we have to stand against legalizing gay marriage because everyone will get gay married and society will collapse", so that's informing my read of Songmaster as well)

I am pretty dang open about my personal life online but if I had a lot of feelings I thought were disgusting and immoral I would not write a novel dripping with those feelings before pointedly castrating the leads for them. Especially if it wasn't relevant to the actually highbrow themes of (checks notes) winning over your adversaries with kindness and never relinquishing your monopoly on violence. I would be so so so so embarrassed to let this go to print, it's so psychologically transparent, what was he thinking

(Well, I assume he's a very different person with different social incentives. For all I know, people in his church went "hey Orson we read your book and it's clear that you're gay but signaling strongly that you won't give into the gay feelings, we're here for you, it was really brave of you to publish this".)

[hanzajesthanza]

so essentially i'm just organizing all of these sapkowski interviews into a searchable document, ordering them by year and noting who conducted the interview

because the translations on reddit, though they're very helpful and sparked my interest in this at first anyhow, can be quite disorganized in terms of tracing when or where the interviews happened

some have only seemingly been recorded on reddit though so i'll incorporate those in soon

but so far as what's on the surviving AS zone website, i have only ten more to go so this took a shorter time than i thought it would. and i've learned many things along the way

reasoning with myself that there’s “only fourty-nine” interviews to go through here

[bookspotlight]

ebook sale!

My sci-fi series is now on sale for #IndieApril! 99c each! 🥳

It’s got close siblings, adventures in the wild, found family, flying cars, an evil king, slow burn romance, different POVs and lots of animals! 👀

And book one was an SPSFC semi-finalist! 😊

Here.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[aeithalian]

Have an observation of mine that I determined with the very legal use of pdfs and the control f function:

The phrase "I smiled" only appears 6 times in the entire ToA pentalogy.

he's glad he remembered Austin and Kayla's names (THO)

he's going crazy (THO)

he's meeting Grover (TDP)

he realizes his kids love him (TON)

he's comforting Dionysus (TON)

he's seeing Meg again after regaining godhood (TON)

The phrase "I grinned" appears 7 times.

he's going crazy (THO)

he's going crazy (TDP)

he's going crazy (TDP)

he's injured/passing out (TBM)

Piper laughed at a joke he made (TBM)

he's injured/passing out (TTT)

he's showing off his big sister (TTT)

The phrase "I laughed" appears 18 times.

4 are because he's going crazy/mentally foggy (3 in TDP, 1 in TON)

2 occur in flashbacks (Commodus in TDP and the Sybil in TTT)

4 are immediately followed by negatory words: mirthlessly and hysterically (both in THO), nervously (TBM, when Crest dies), and weakly (TON, could also fall under 'going crazy/mentally foggy')

2 are sarcastic (1 in THO, 1 in TDP)

1 is antagonistic (TON)

Which means that the remaining 5 are the only times Apollo genuinely laughs in the entire series. Which furthermore can be divided down even further when you realize:

3 are out of surprise/relief (twice in TTT when Reyna restores some of his power and once TON when he realizes he can trust Lu)

By basic math, this means that the 2 remaining times Apollo laughs in the entire series both take place in book 5. And they. both occur after his godhood is restored.

Allow me to reiterate:

THE ONLY TIMES APOLLO GENUINELY LAUGHS OUT OF JOY AND HAPPINESS AND NO OTHER REASON ARE AFTER HIS GODHOOD IS RESTORED.

Once with Dionysus. Once with Meg.

FURTHERMORE:

Our grand total for the amount of times Apollo outwardly shows and admits to feeling happiness in the entire series?

7

AND.

4 OCCUR AFTER REGAINING HIS GODHOOD.

Over half of his moments of genuine joy occur in the last four chapters of the series.

Get this man some therapy.

Furthermore, I will take this as evidence that Apollo is a giggly drunk.

(Disclaimer: this is not an exhaustive list: there are alternative phrases that include the words "smile" and "laugh" that directly refer to Apollo's actions and feelings, but that requires a lot more work and effort than I was willing to put in.)

EDIT: a masterlist of my other metas

[janmisali]

2006?? are you counting new super mario bros ds but none of its sequels?

without stepping into @janmisali ‘s turf,

mario wonder is the first bona fide super mario bros. game since 2006, making it the sixth overall after 40 years