#rambling: book 1

[botlabyrinth]

sally’s “i want him to know who he is, before your family tries to tell him who they want him to be.” and poseidon saying “he will be stronger for it on the other side. his mother raised him well.” and he is. percy is stronger on the other side. we’ve seen it so clearly through his quest. his confusion at how you have to earn the gods’ love, earn their respect. his conversation with annabeth on the train about it. his unwillingness to accept the ways of the gods. him realizing his mother wanted to keep him away from this world, and annabeth being the one to tell him that maybe it was for the better that sally did that. so that he wouldn’t be like them. annabeth’s “he isn’t that way. he’s better than that. maybe i was that way once. but i don’t want to be that way anymore.” the way percy would’ve turned out with a similar worldview to annabeth’s if he had been sent to camp so early on. and annabeth’s worldview changing so quickly after meeting percy. sally jackson raised that kid right. you would think that as a demigod, the half god side of percy is what’s important. but that’s not what makes him the hero. it’s the half mortal side of him that does. his humanity, his mortality, his mother. that is why percy is the hero that he is.

[turtlespancake]

i love seeing out of context posts about long-running stories with deep lore because it's always shit like "MAJOR SPOILER WARNING!! i can't believe that the metallic athenaeum's envoy actually used never-ending dance of the 57th universe on rionne as if she's not LITERALLY the incarnate of august?!?!" it's like buddy boy thank you for the spoiler tag but all of those words are incomprehensible without at least 5 years of foreshadowed knowledge, 7 different fan theories, and 21 wiki entries

[willoillo]

I am in the process of rereading The Dragonet Prophecy and I just got to Gill

And I had the most horrifying thought

I like the headcanon that before he was gone Gill recognized Tsunami, to some extent. Not as his daughter necessarily, but as Coral-- it's a neat headcanon, it makes it more tragic, and Tsunami is the spitting image of her mother.

Gill is too dehydrated to speak. Part of what makes what happened to him terrifying is the fact that he makes no sound as he tries to attack Tsunami.

... Seawings don't need to speak to communicate. They have Aquatic.

Tsunami doesn't know Aquatic.

[eskildit]

i think a lot about hot sauce and jeannemary. two young girls so ready to kill and to die. a comparison made all the worse when you recall that hot sauce lost all her family to the cohort, that she can specifically recall fourth style necromancy (using corpses as bombs). a fourteen and thirteen year old that could easily have been on opposite sides of the same front line. 

[serendipitous-girl]

if i was yuu i would probably go insane while in the twst universe. like seeing strange creatures, magic is real, having to deal with so many overblots, continuously having to fight to survive, and personally missing my old life. my family, my friends, would they think i'm dead? i would be terrified that i would never return. i would realistically go insane if i was in their position

[kirvee]

I HATE YOU ALEX I HATE YOU SO MUCH FUCK YOU ALEX

[waxdream]

In flatland, are the irregular shapes a metaphor for disability or being lgbtqia+? Or intersex? Or all of them?

I only ask because the narrative seems to draw inspiration from both. Gender in Flatland is determined by whether or not you're a shape or a line segment. The lower classes of triangles are irregular, and they are dehumanised (deconfigured?) To the point that they are considered to have smaller brains by the narrative based on angle size. I personally think that due to flatland's satire, and hints throughout the text, A square is an unreliable and biased narrator who is indoctrinated fully in the society of flatland. So what he says about the angle of triangles, and the smartness of women, shouldn't necessarily be taken for granted. I would be interested to know if the part about the triangles is a reference to phrenology and how stupid it is, but I digress.

Irregular flatlanders are reconfigured at birth. This suggests it's considered a disability, however, the irregularity doesn't seem to be disabling. In fact, the only effect it has on the person is that it makes their class impossible to determine - something which would have social effects. We also only see evidence of male children being born irregular, which is a common stereotype of autism, and the coupling with 'social detriments' being the result of irregularity, it could lead to this conclusion. However, I doubt that Abbot was commenting on this in 1884, though that doesn't prevent modern readers from taking it in this direction. I just think that he wouldn't have written 'reconfiguration' into the story, a deadly process of creating "regular" children if it was a metaphore for disability - it was often a lot more common after all to hide disabled folk away. Although, if any historians out there know about parallels in victorian society, I'd be really interested.

I'm most convinced by my reading that Abbott was talking about intersex children when writing about reconfiguration. Most of Flatland is a social commentary after all - following the wrongs of victorian society on how classes are treated, with a larger focus on women. Now, with sight recognition in flatland, women are mistaken for squares from certain angles, and sometimes for circles. Imagine if you will, an irregular semicircle - a male who would often be mistaken for a woman. Considering the sexism Abbott talks about in this world, I think that irregularity being a metaphor for being intersex is plausible. Especially since the children are reconfigured at a very young age.

When I first read the book, I read irregularity as a disability and nothing more. But now I'm thinking about it more, I really would love to know other's opinions. The book is old, and I'm not sure if my thoughts are plausible - but then again, it seems implausible that the book is mocking the sexism in victorian society. Yet it does - lots of evidence points to Abbott being a protofeminist writer. It's not a stretch to me that he might hold a stance against the mutilation of intersex children. Or perhaps a stance against conversion therapy. Let me know I guess :)

[jules-ln]

Some people: Don't compare Achilles to Apollo, Apollo hated Achilles 😡

Me: Achilles and Apollo are so similar that it implies that by the end of the war, when Achilles is basically being killed by Apollo, his divine equivalent, that he was dying by his own hand, meaning that his death was ultimately his fault

In a similar way Hector being killed by Athena, the Goddess most similar to him, means that his death too, was the result of his own choices

[somegrumpynerd]

How absolutely wild must it have been for Nightmare to have like, minimum-to-no contact with mortals for hundreds of years and then the first two he has any regular close interactions with are Killer and Dust.

Like he must have a book in his castle somewhere of all the observations he kept like he was studying a new species

[szollibisz]

Curtwen intricate rituals save me... Save me curtwen intricate rituals........

I think about it so much like. All they had was those few times a year they saw each other and maybe some letters or phone calls in between. They had to shape what little they had into something resembling a proper relationship, that truly, neither of them were built for.

I think they felt the same way about a lot of it they just never told each other. Both of them would be too embarrassed to admit that sweeping a room for bugs felt like doing mundane chores together, or that standing back to back in a gunfight made them feel safer than anything else in the world.

I think they just wordlessly constructed these rituals to get the affection and love they both craved but could never ask for. Their wrestling matches had elaborate rules and prizes, their nightly outings to bars were romantic dates in earnest, their mindgames and records on missions could only happen because they trusted and admired each other so much and their letter writing habits included code phrases only they understood.

What makes me go so crazy is how they must've held on to these for years as the best moments of their lives, even after the fall when the memories became soured. They picked up each other's habits and built so much out of so little, all while they rarely if ever truly expressed how much that meant to them.

[valhallavalgrace]

How are you adjusting to the whole Norse mythology situation?

LEO: I’ve mostly been bugging some of the older einherjar, and Hunding, a little bit, to figure this place out. Do you know how cool it is that some people have been here since the industrial revolution?? There's no way that I'm the first of my dad's kids to make it here. I just don't know who to talk to about it.

((Leo's coping mechanism re: Norse mythology is just hating himself more bc of course he doesn't belong in his own afterlife. but he won't admit that to anyone bc he doesn't know who can be vulnerable with.))

prev ask

[itsscottiesstark]

My own personal Roman Empire is the deleted scene from S01E03 (written in the script book Neil wrote) where back in 1800 just when Aziraphale was about to open his bookshop, Gabriel arrived ready to get him back to Heaven "as a promotion" and when Crowley overhead them (carrying chocolates and waving at Aziraphale excitedly from outside the shop) he put up a whole ass performance, with a bunch of different characters voiced by him making funny voices mind you, so Gabriel would think getting Aziraphale back to heaven was a good thing for Crowley. His plan obviously worked and Gabriel let Aziraphale stay on earth to battle his "arch nemesis".

Neil also wrote that the producers suggested he cut scenes like the crucifixion, or the Bastille, or even our beloved 1941 church scene. Nobody actually suggested he cut the 1800 scene but Neil chose it anyway. As much as I would have loved to see Crowley mouthing "chocolates" excitedly through a window at Aziraphale behind the archangel's back, I'm so very grateful we didn't lose one of the other scenes.

Who knows, maybe we'll get to see it later on 👀 *crosses fingers*

[coquelicoq]

what i love about the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi of it all is that...it's not just that he's famous and therefore widely recognizable wherever he goes. like yes that is very funny because he was an exorcist before he became a famous actor, which means he CHOSE, on purpose, a day job that would make it harder to hide his double life/secret identity from the hordes of his adoring public, but it's more than that. it's not just that he's famous, it's that he's famous specifically for being an ACTOR, aka a person whose job it is to dissimulate, to make believe, to inhabit roles and emotions other than his own. like he decided he was going to become as visible as possible (which again was literally not necessary! he could have gone into any other career for his day job!!) but in such a way that everyone would see him but no one would see him - they would just see his various made-up personas, including the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi persona. i can't decide if he's a genius or if he just made so many absurd decisions that they canceled each other out and circled back around to working out. he's either playing 9-dimensional chess or he's eating the pieces. too soon to say.

[ispridestillasin]

So I'm replaying Book 1 right now and I got to the part where that one npc says he's so close to switching dorms because of Riddle and now I have an au where Ace and Deuce switched to the Ramshackle Dorm after Book 1. Because I love Riddle but my goldfish memory ass would actually have a meltdown if he punished me for a rule that I couldn't even remember. (Replaying that part in the game actually made want to cry in frustration.)

So now we have Adeuce living it up in the Ramshackle dorm with Yuu even after Book 1 happens. Yuu keeps catching them attempting to sneak into each others rooms and at some point just calls a dorm meeting to tell them to move in together for fucks sake.

[cirr0stratus]

thinking about frodo and sam and how their characters are near identical to stanislaus katzinsky and paul baumer and how they are both fictional men of different statuses that were created during the horrors of world war one by two people who used their incredible poetic voices to cope with the realities of warfare and how the relationship that these characters have transcends friendship and brotherhood and even romantic love because what they have is so much more important than that, it’s so much more. how there isn’t a word for the relationship that they have, and people like me are stuck thinking about these quotes and being completely normal about them

“We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have had a single thought in common – now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.”

“you lay close to me. I'd be dearly glad to see you have a sleep. Id keep watch over you; and anyway, if you lay near, with my arm round you, no one could come pawing you without your Sam knowing it.”

“A little soldier and a clear voice, and if anyone were to caress him he would hardly understand, this soldier with the big boots and the shut heart, who marches because he is wearing big boots, and has forgotten all else but marching. Beyond the sky-line is a country with flowers, lying so still that he would like to weep. There are sights there that he has not forgotten, because he never possessed them – perplexing, yet lost to him. Are not his twenty summers there?

Is my face wet, and where am I? Kat stands before me, his gigantic, stooping shadow falls upon me, like home. He speaks gently, he smiles and goes back to the fire.

Then he says: "It's done."”

“Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no”

“Kat my friend, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the poor, thin moustache, Kat, whom I know as I know no other man, Kat with whom I have shared these years—it is impossible that perhaps I shall not see Kat again”

“'If you don't come back, sir, then I shan't, that's certain,' said Sam. 'Don't you leave him! they said to me. Leave him! I said. I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they'll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with,”

[misteria247]

Ya know what I want? For journals 1 and 2 to be printed one day! I mean journal 3 is so interesting and intriguing! I'm loving the lore and the creatures, cryptids and anomalies and how detailed everything is! And to know that there's even more of it in the other two journals and that we're not able to have it is honestly disheartening.

Maybe someday Alex will gift us with them! I mean he's given us the Book of Bill so maybe??? Perhaps???