#read her novels

[thaidakar-is-hot]

Watching the BBC Jane Austen adaptations and I’m just imagining a Mistborn P&P <3

Elizabeth a secret Mistborn, Darcy something cool, like a Tin-eye or thug. Lydia no Allomancy at all, but Wickam? He’s a rioter! :OOOOOOOOOO “That Zinc tongued raven STOLE OUR GIRL!” Elizabeth of course, goes and kicks ass. I mean, she’s a Mistborn, and this isn’t REALLY Regency England.

[airoarts]

yellowfang, i wish you were here. my sister is dying.

ID in alt and under cut

ID: digital painting of Cinderpelt and Brightpaw from Warriors. They are two cats curled around each other. Brightpaw, a ginger-and-white cat, is badly injured with cobwebs as bandages around her face and other injuries. She is unconscious and lying on her side in a moss nest. Cinderpelt, a gray cat, is curled around her with her tail over Brightpaw's back, looking at her with concern. They are in a shaded den surrounded by autumnal ferns, with a pool of water in the corner, and a strip of bright sunlight illuminating their faces. end ID.

[lunar-oceansong]

the Traveler, upon deciding that Furina and Wanderer were fairly similar, set them up to be pen pals. they've been sending letters back and forth to each other for months.

...when Furina opens her latest letter from the mysterious Wanderer, and sees how he describes the "busy little bee" Sethos, she chokes on her tea-

and then starts packing her bags immediately for her first ever trip to Sumeru because what you have just described in your letter, dear Wandy, is a crush, and by the archons she HAS to witness this-

[xinyuehui]

Mu jiejie~~~~ (*´ﾉ∀`*)

Love Game in Eastern Fantasy · 2024

[licorishh]

no way she's alive ?? yea those mental health breaks because social media makes people suck are wild huh

[chefscook]

I always wonder how they’re doing between episodes

[the-lesbian-orpheus]

Babysitting is great because the kids I babysit asked me if I like Minecraft and we talked about it and I ended up briefly explaining GeminiTay and these 6 and 9 year old boys now think this fantasy princess that hunts down her friends heads for fun is one of the top 15 coolest people

Gotta say I agree

[ghostinghome]

more 41 shin yoosung,,,,

[micamicster]

"I'm... I'm here to tell you..." To tell him what? That it's fine? That I don't hate you? That everything is fine? That I don't blame you for having killed Jin ZiXuan? It was impossible. But she couldn't say anything that was the opposite either. And so, she didn't know what else she could say to Wei Wei WuXian, under such circumstances. It was just that she felt like she had to see this brother of hers once more. / "You ran so fast, I could hardly get a look at you."

The Untamed vs Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat

[crowlion]

[syn0vial]

i appreciate that in the boba fett expanded universe canon, we have multiple moments from multiple authors that boil down to "despite his reputation/appearance, boba fett is not fearless, and is in fact doing his level best right now to walk calmly away from this objectively terrifying situation rather than breaking into a fucking sprint in the opposite direction"

[xxplastic-cubexx]

🧙‍♀️🐈‍⬛

[sneakingpasta]

Divorced birds just wants to be alone with his romance novels

[notbecauseofvictories]

also I've spent the last couple weeks reading some older historical romance novels, and my made up, wholly unverified hypothesis that in the 2000s romance authors finally grasped that the old-fashioned "no, don't! stop, you brute" etc. scenes were not really landing with audiences anymore. So they faced a conundrum about the future of the genre. Ultimately, I think they chose to quietly stop writing those heroes, and switch them out for a more sensitive model. Still dark and brooding! But with limits, often a Heart of Gold, and more general emotional intelligence.

Still, somewhere out there is a parallel universe where these authors decided to take the opposite approach---to write heroines as unhinged, cruel, impulsive, and emotionally ignorant as their heroes. I don't know if I want to live there, but I wouldn't mind a trip to their library sometime.

[khattikeri]

one of my favorite things about mdzs is that for how heavily its plot involves politics of classism and misogyny... even the characters most directly impacted by it can't and don't free themselves from it. literally the closest exception is mianmian.

meng yao being the "son of a whore" wasn't some sort of commie awakening for him that led him to wanting everyone to be socially equal. he played the political game, climbed the ladders, sucked up to and backstabbed and murdered people, including other prostitutes who actually had nothing to do with how he and his mother were treated at the brothel he grew up in.

he put in so much extra excessive effort for even a fraction of the same respect that members of gentry cultivation clans got. and he did deserve to be treated more humanely! but he feeds into the exact same system that created him, leading to his own undoing.

his efforts were for a fragile upward mobility that was never going to hold up. he never surpassed his origins nor did he empower others in similar stations, because the society he lives in is not one that would accept that.

the second he got caught and all those crimes exposed, he was scapegoated to hell and back, replacing wei wuxian as society's terrible one-sidedly evil boogeyman overnight.

speaking of not-quite male gentry, i think it's interesting that wei wuxian explicitly doesn't try to climb the ladders in BOTH lives, knowing full well that anything he does will be punished just for the sheer fact that he is wei wuxian.

wei wuxian is scolded for giving intelligent and correct answers in school. lan wangji does the same and is praised.

wei wuxian occasionally lounges around with fellow disciples and is punished. jiang cheng does the same and mostly escapes.

wei wuxian refuses to carry his sword around in public (after losing his golden core, which nobody knows) and is scorned as an arrogant upstart. nie huaisang has been doing the EXACT SAME THING for YEARS and nobody bats an eye.

unlike jin guangyao, wei wuxian knew subconsciously from the start that his acceptance was superficial and that he could be cast out any time. when he was 10 and recently taken in by the jiangs, he canonically would not eat or use "too much" food and water because he thought they'd find him a nuisance for "wasting their things" and kick him back out.

now away from just the classism, yu ziyuan is a proud and strong noblewoman in a society that belittles and derides women for everything they do. her strong cultivation doesn't matter. she's victim to the vicious rumors of her husband loving another woman who is strong like her but apparently had a more likeable personality.

it doesn't matter even if jiang fengmian didn't cheat or that wei wuxian is wei changze's son with cangse sanren; yu ziyuan can't bear with the humiliation of herself (and by extension her children) not being "good enough". she's ridiculed for "failing" in that one duty as a wife, mother, and woman.

she lashes out and takes out that anger on everyone present for years, giving her children lasting trauma and also being a key element in how the jiang family and yunmeng jiang sect are effectively wiped out at the hands of the wen clan.

madam jin doesn't even have a name outside of the fact that she's married to jin guangshan. i don't even remember reading anything that indicates if she's a strong or weak cultivator, or what, which in itself proves that to most people, it doesn't matter. she's "just" a woman.

of course she's angry at her husband's affairs and all the bastard children they bring in. but she also can't do anything about them, so she lashes out at the few people she can: servants. non-cultivators, probably. those very same bastard children.

shoutout to meng yao getting shoved down a flight of stairs at age fourteen, because if madam jin tried that move against her husband instead, it would make her lose even more face, which as a noblewoman she'd never do.

and that's not getting into how jiang yanli is consistently sidelined for being physically weak.

that's not getting into how mianmian was actually a good cultivator, but was mocked by everyone around her for trying to stand up for wei wuxian when everyone was turning on him. how everyone scoffed at luo qingyang's words as "just some lovesick woman" who "obviously wants to marry or bed him since he saved her".

luo qingyang is the only one of these characters who HASN'T died. she didn't play society's games like jin guangyao. she didn't dig her heels in confidence of her own abilities like wei wuxian.

she didn't bitterly lash out like yu ziyuan and madam jin. she didn't gently accept it like jiang yanli.

she just LEFT.

she married an ordinary merchant and cultivates separately from mainstream cultivation society, and therein found her own peace and happiness.

mxtx doesn't bother with particularly class conscious or feminist vocabulary to hand-hold readers into understanding these disparities, but that choice highlights them & the deeply entrenched politics of their society even more. i really love it.

[elumish]

I've added a "vibes" column to my romance novel spreadsheet as another way to narrow down books that otherwise have similar tags (for example, the spreadsheet currently has five books (one of which I might remove because I DNF'd it for being unexpectedly a Christian romance) with the tags "She's the target," "Bodyguard," and "Forced proximity/living together", but they are definitely not all similar books).

And these vibes are probably the most subjective thing in the spreadsheet, so I want to try to be careful not to have them just be my opinions on the books. But I am so tempted to add a vibe that's just "The straights are not okay."