#post book 3

[greensapphic]

"Bill is a true gentleman!"

NEVERMIND DO NOT TRUST HIS CRAZY ASS😨😨

[starii-void]

going to chb must be crazy like imagine sharing a camp with

-one of the strongest demigods ever who's saved the world like at least 3 times, fought multiple gods & titans and WON (and is a tartarus survivor)

-the literal main architect of OLYMPUS who's also saved the world multiple times (also tartarus survivor)

-THE lord of the wild who's also close friends with the first two (and has helped save the world multiple times)

-an emo kid from the 1930s who again helped save the world and is also a tartarus survivor (TWICE)

-a son of apollo who survived tartarus with nothing but cargo shorts and sheer will (pun intended)

-the main designer and builder for the argo II, also the first hephaestus kid to have fire powers since hundreds of years ago (did i mention killed gaea? no? yeah he did that too)

-a girl who somehow charmspeak-ed gaea into falling back asleep (also side note daughter of super famous actor because why not)

-pretty much everybody is a two-time war veteran

-THE GOD APOLLO who just sometimes comes down to visit in the form of a teenage boy

-did i mention dionysus, god of wine madness and theatre

-also chiron, trainer of pretty much every greek hero ever

[paintedcrows]

Thinking about that old man

[adriles]

when we’re done with our overwhelming grief we’ll eat i guess

[lunarrosette]

I understand bill cipher bc if I fumbled Stanford pines I’d also start the apocalypse

[raccoonhusband]

[triona-tribblescore]

I WANNA DRAAWW!! RAHHHGG!! Absolutely swamped with college work, im so tired TT (hence whatever tf this is lmao)

[sharpmouth]

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

[shebsart]

Im sick with flu so naturally I picked up my newly bought copy of Howl's Moving Castle which includes DWJ interviews in the back.

And im in love with the way she tells these stories feels like a part of her books.

And my favorite:

The magic in the mundane :)

edit: I'm copying the ID by @princess-of-purple-prose below, thank you!

[ID: Excerpts of printed text which read:

I suppose there's also a biographical element in that Sophie is the eldest of three sisters, and so am I. The idea for Sophie grew out of the time I discovered I had a very severe milk allergy. I almost lost the use of my legs and had to walk with the aid of a stick. I was moderately young, but because of this I suddenly became old.

I had to wait until I knew what Wizard Howl was like. I began to discover Howl about the time when one of my sons took to spending several hours in the bathroom every morning and I got really, really, really annoyed with him.

Where were you when you wrote it? I wrote the book the way I write everything, stretched out on the big sofa in my sitting room, in everyone's way. This often annoys my husband rather a lot.

which made me burst out laughing. I laughed and laughed at the seven league boot, and when I came to the bit where Sophie accidentally makes Howl's suit twenty times too big for him, I laughed so much that I fell off the sofa. My husband was really irritated by this time. He snapped, "You can't be making yourself laugh!" And I gasped, "But I am, I am!" and rolled about on the floor.

Are any of your relatives or friends included in the book? Yes, well the thing that started me off writing the book was a friend of mine who never does her laundry. She has it around the place in huge bags for often as much as a year. When she does tip it all out and try to wash it, she discovers all sorts of clothes that she has forgotten she had.

Which is your favourite part of the book and why? I like the book all over, but I suppose if I had to choose a bit, I'd choose the place where Howl gets a cold. It so happened that when I was writing this bit, my husband caught a bad cold. He is the world's most histrionic cold catcher. He moans, he coughs, he piles on the pathos, he makes strange noises, he blows his nose exactly like a bassoon in a tunnel, he demands bacon sandwiches at all hours, and he is liable to appear (usually wrapped in someone else's dressing gown) at any time, announcing that he is dying of neglect and boredom. So all I had to do was write it down. End ID]

[khawla-gfm2]

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[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

[turtletoria]

the krampus incident from the book of bill if it was out of character and stupid

[squidwithelbows]

we're so back, aftg nation, let's gooo

[tsarjozinzbazin]

Snow blindness

[ckret2]

I might tweak some details later (jewelry? take the ribbon off the bow?) but I've about got a Scalene design I like. The lipstick is really the centerpiece of the design. Now let's infodump! With more art!

🔺 Notice her lines are a a little curvy. It's not for artistic effect. She's got a Fictional Polygon Physical Disorder that makes her bendier than she should be—meaning, among other things, sides that curve and flex.

🔺 It's also the kind of condition with symptoms that are romanticized by people who don't grok that it's a debilitating medical condition. Sides that curve and flex? How exotic! This went to her head in the wrong ways.

🔺 Bill was born with the same condition. You know how squishy and blobby he was as a baby? Thaaat's genetic! He was a lot squishier than most babies! And, consequently, more adorable.

🔺Scalene dreamed of being a famous super model. Was actually a teen beauty queen at mid-tier beauty pageants. She thinks it's always somebody else's fault she wasn't more successful.

🔺 She took Bill to his first baby beauty pageant the day he was born. He did, in fact, have a Best Baby Ever award presented to him by the mayor, but to be fair he was only competing against like 6 other babies and who's going to withhold a trophy from a newborn on his birthday? Anyway the 6-12 month group and 12-24 month groups also each had a Best Baby Ever award.

🔺 This was an absolutely bonkers thing for Scalene to do.

🔺 What's that small scrunkly thing doing at a pageant, he can't even see color yet.

🔺 Their fictional squishy medical condition doesn't just accidentally make shapes cute. It's the kind of condition that affects just about all parts of the body: sides won't stay straight, poor muscle tone resulting in instability & weakness, poor motor coordination & clumsiness, back aches & pains (well, triangles don't have "backs." side aches?), easily dislocated joints, and increasingly skewed sides with age. Just about everyone in Scalene's family is born equilateral and ends up extremely scalene after young adulthood. The rest of her family have normal relationships with their condition, she's the only one who's weird about it

🔺 She was very rough on her body in pursuit of pageantry success, but her physical symptoms & associated chronic pain got a lot worse due to having a kid; she had to retire from pageantry for good. She doesn't blame Bill for this at all. Out loud, to his face. (If she hadn't been so rough on herself in pageants, having a kid probably wouldn't have impacted her health this much. She doesn't consider this.)

🔺 She's weirdly intent on seeing Bill become the success she wasn't. He's her little golden child, he deserves to be seen as the greatest! He'll show them how great he is for mommy, won't he? He won't let mommy down, will he? When he's very young, she takes him to child pageants—he'll appreciate the lessons they taught him when he's older—and this lasts until he finds out he can get out of it by pyrokinetically setting the stage on fire.

🔺 She jokes ("jokes") that she didn't realize that when she was having a kid, she was firing herself from the pageant circuit so she could hire & train her own replacement. These jokes had no long-term impact on Bill at all!!!

(Compare/contrast: how we're told Stan's "You watch the movie, you scare the girl, the girl snuggles up next to you, next thing you know you gotta raise a kid, your life falls apart" is repeating something he heard his dad say.)

🔺 Did you know that squeaky baby shoes are sometimes medical devices? Squeakers help children with poor muscle tone and delayed motor skills learn how to walk correctly: it makes them want to walk on their heels instead of their toes so they can hear the squeak. Did you know sometimes oversized squeaky baby shoes are worn by young kids who need ankle braces? Did you know that kids with poor motor coordination can take a longer time to learn complicated motor skills like tying shoelaces rather than using shoes with velcro straps? It sure is interesting that baby Bill's most defining visual feature is oversized squeaky sneakers with velcro straps and that he kept wearing velcro shoes until he was 16!

🔺 As a baby, Bill's angles were technically supposed to be equilateral,* but thanks to his inherited condition, his angles were so loose his top corner practically formed a right angle. Not good: the closer a triangle creeps to being obtuse, the more likely he'll have muscle strain and medical issues from his organs being squished out of place by his own exoskeleton.

(*supposed to be equilateral: but after receiving treatment, they discovered his angles were still 60º, 60º, and 60.1º, which is mathematically impossible for a triangle... on a euclidean plane. But on a non-euclidean 3D plane, such as in spherical geometry, a triangle's angles can add up to more than 180º... and it's this slight 3D flex to Bill's body that lets him see up into the third dimension.)

🔺 For his first few years of life he actually had a hypotenuse, until physical therapy and side braces helped him improve his muscle tone. Sometimes he still reflexively refers to his base as his hypotenuse. It's fine, sweetie, it's nothing to be embarrassed about, mommy had a hypotenuse too. Don't tell anyone.

🔺 Scalene took baby Billy to a lot of doctors as a kid, just like how she was taken to a lot of doctors! Doctor for his side braces, doctor for his physical therapy, doctor for his shoes... doctor for his eye when he started talking about seeing white glitter at the edge of his vision. Scalene didn't have that symptom, but the eye doc said their condition does occasionally come with visual problems—blurred vision, lazy eye, visual field defects... It sounds like Bill's main field of vision is unobstructed, but if the visual snow he's getting in his peripheral vision is distracting him and confusing his little toddler mind into thinking it's something real, they can give him a medication that'll narrow his field of view. From the sound of it, he's not seeing anything important at the edge of his vision, anyway.

And she only wants what's best for her golden child.

🔺 Scalene's "bow" is actually a medical device: sort of like a medical corset, it helps tug and press her anatomy into place to reduce pain. Bill started wearing one preventatively—if he can keep everything in place when he's young, it'll take longer for his angles to skew when he's older. Like wearing a retainer when you get your braces out.

🔺 He has a cane for the same reason—he doesn't need it NOW when he's young, but he might as well keep it on hand, by age 35 he'll probably want to stand more often than float and when he's standing he'll probably want the extra support! Even if he doesn't need it by 35, he will eventually!!

🔺 Bill doesn't medically need a bow tie in the third dimension either; but he adapted it to help tie his 3D exoskeleton on.

🔺 A trillion years later, Bill suspects that his mutation to see the third dimension came, at least in part, from his mom's medical condition. Except, she didn't have that vision. Nobody else with the condition on her side of the family had that vision. It's not a known symptom of the condition. His dad had stuff going on with his eye too, did he get it from his dad's side? A mix of both? Just a standalone random mutation? He doesn't know; and with the rest of his species dead, there's no way for him to find out.

But back to Scalene!

🔺 She's not quite red, she's rose gold. However she doesn't like it. She thinks it's a sort of pinkish brown and very dull. She uses makeup to make herself look redder. Note how bright red her sides are: in a species where only your edges are visible, body paint is the most common form of makeup+fashion. She's pleased her baby came out gold-gold, it's much cuter. Bill knows she's rose gold, but he only saw her with her makeup off when she was tired or sick; he remembers her painted red.

🔺 She adores her Billy; but she somewhat sees him as an extension of her will. She thinks he's just perfect and will tell anyone who asks; but she also demands he be perfect and is furious when he isn't. She'll protect him from ANY perceived external threat; but she'll tough love him into being the kind of success she thinks he should be. He learns early that when he screws up, he can often redirect his mother's anger by pointing his finger and saying it's someone else's fault, and she'll bring the wrath of heaven down on them. Woe to the teacher who gives Bill an F on a test.

🔺 I'm on a quest to write Bill as a foil to the entire cast of Gravity Falls, and that extends to writing his family as a foil to the entire cast's families. Scalene's a blend of Pacifica's mom and Caryn: beautiful, proud of her beauty, afraid of losing her youth, self-aggrandizing, quick to lie about her & her family's (false/exaggerated) accomplishments—and very aware of the fact that you can say anything about woo-woo mystical matters and nobody can prove you wrong.

🔺 So she takes it great when they figure out Bill is, like, legit psychic. And by "takes it great" I mean "starts a cult."

There's what I've got on Scalene. Fortunately, I got to keep all my pre-TBOB headcanons about Bill's mom, I only had to change her shape & color. I already had medical trauma baked right into the family!

(Preemptive disclaimer before I get any "but she doesn't look 2D" comments: we all understand that the baby Bill picture we see in the book is a psychically-generated 3D approximation of Bill's 2D Euclidean form, right? And that drawing a 3D baby Bill design alongside rigidly 2D parent designs would make it look like even in the second dimension Bill already had a 3D body, right? So, if we're drawing a 3D baby Bill and want to convey that they looked similar to him, we have to draw his parents in a similar art style, right? Okay, great.)

[ilonacho]

Sad book club📚