#sartorias-deles

[aelin9]

meanwhile there's Mel

[speckledsolanaceae]

Inda’s on sale for the next few days if anyone wants to peer into my heart.

If I loved this series less I would be able to talk about it more (eloquently), but these books have such a profound and intricate sense of events—what drives the people who motivate change, for better or worse. Its characters are complex and rarely flat, and while the series is about battle, politics, and war, and the people are always flawed, its heartache is spectacularly, beautifully woven.

Sherwood Smith calls these books the historical arc, and I think they capture the way history moves, all while allowing you to see the people who created it and why they did. To me, it’s a masterwork of character and sociological storytelling, from the complexities of love and loyalty to the absence of both.

And if you enjoy the first book, I’m pretty damn sure you’ll love the second (and hopefully the third and fourth too).

[greatshell-rider]

my first tries at inda!!

[inktog]

Voting for "third person with a distinct narrator" but specifically: I like Sherwood Smith's tendency to write what seems like third person omniscient—and works well as third person omniscient, with fairly seamless head-hopping—but is in fact an in-universe historical record written by an archivist with mind-reading powers and their own biases.

[inktog]

"Ah-ye" is such a phonetically pleasing swear I might start saying it in reality

[bellaroles]

I'm also going to reminiscing about books I like via my old fan arts.

1. Chrestomaci series. I really like this series. And of course, my most reread is the Lives of Christopher Chant.

2. Deep Secret. I love this as much as Howl's moving castle. Also as I'm getting older, I found myself rereading this more and more.

3. The Chronicles of Prydain.

Read this in my teens. Still remembering it fondly. I first read it via audiobook. And it was excellent! Keeping me up all night wanting to know what happen next.

4. Crown Duel.

Favorite childhood read. I still try to keep up with the world of Sartorias-deles to this day. (Ah but this is still my most favorite after so many books in the same series)

5.Stormlight archive.

Also my most favorite is book I the Way of Kings. The story of Kaladin in this book is so inspiring for my younger self. Now I just wasn't that invested in the story after book 3. Still I will try to get into it again maybe after the series is finished. Maybe a long long time in the future lol.

6. Earthsea series.

My favorite series. Read them via audiobook the first time. Reread many times, especially The tombs of Atuan and the Other Wind. Couldn't believe how thin the books were when I first got them lol. Such an epic story told in such a few words. Every line is so impactful. I got a special edition just for keeps because my paperbacks are nearly falling apart.

7. The Old Kingdom.

I love the original triology. Also firstly read them via audiobook. Couldn't sleep all night because I'm so afraid lol. I also read the later additions but didn't like them as much.

8. The Riddlemaster triology.

To be honest I read it all at once. So confused I won't read it again lol. But it was very imaginative. Actually my favorite of Patricia A. McKillip's is the forgotten beast of Eld. But I didn't keep my fan art of that one.

9.the Sally Lockhart series.

Well I like this more than Philip Pullman's more famous series lol. But they're very different in genre. Victorian kickass female detective story. That's exactly my type. This has its ups and downs places but still it's very exciting!

10. Wildwood dancing.

This is what a perfect signatured Juliet Marillier's work looks like. Well I like many of her books but if I have to choose one as my favorite then this is it! Fairy tales cleverly retold in such a unique ways. Sweet childhood friends to lovers romance. Close Family members that supports each other. This has it all.

[peppers-ghost-posts]

Hadand: I became queen by standing between a usurper and a usurped throne, and cutting off the bastard’s hand. 

Danet: I became queen by using my forensic accounting skills 

[aelin9]

I love her

The YA fantasy duology Crown Duel used to be one of my favorite series, so here is a portrait of its heroine Mel that I labored over. I wanted to catch the defiant anger that motivates her for about 90% of the series. Given how dirty and ragged she is, this would be Mel from the first book, where she's fleeing her enemies through the wilds, carried by her anger, idealism, a good chunk of spunk, and a badly damaged leg.

[aelin9]

I'm squirming at how vulnerable Mel makes herself here. Admitting to her greatest insecurity and weakness? (Unknowingly) to her bitterest enemy? I can't watch 🙈

[speckledsolanaceae]

The Sierlaef is unlike his father and grandmother in not choosing his own sex, but he’s like them in that he’s already found a favorite.

+

And if he’s picked Kies as his favorite for the rest of his life, like his father picked dear Uncle Sindan at about the same age, well, he could have picked far worse.

—Chapter 25, from Hadand to Joret, First Book

*looks RIGHT at Evred* romantic monogamy doomed you genetically

[greatshell-rider]

your honor i ADORE her

[setnet]

#the way some people do it feels pretty dang millenarian in a way #'the battle to come will be followed by a new purified world in which the believers will be rewarded' y'know?

ok fuck. so i was writing these tags and thinking about examples where this - rebuilding, restitution, the aftermath - is a larger part of the story - cashore's bitterblue, monette's doctrine of labyrinths, in some ways and subversions grrm's a feast for crows.

and i realised I'd fully overlooked sherwood smith's crown duel (which I read at the impressionable age of 12 or so) where Mel and Bran set out to undertake a rebellion against the tyrant king without any plans for who will rule and how they will rebuild afterwards. and they get fully called out on it. People saying to their faces yeah we didn't join you because you didn't seem to have a plan for what to do after the tyrant king was defeated. and, in the end, theyonly succeed because someone else with much deeper laid plans, including policy plans for rebuilding, brings them into his rebellion. so ends the first half of the story.

the second half shifts register into comedy of manners/slow burn romance. it doesn't precisely centre the politics/rebuilding but it's still a very central part of the story that the new king-in-waiting is having to gently unpick the policies of a bad king while doing his damnedest not to piss anyone off bad enough to set off a counter-revolution.

thinking about... walking back from mordor. this is a personal shorthand for a lot of things, but it mainly relates to the question of what comes after. so the dark lord is defeated, so the war is won, what now?

In a literal sense, sam and frodo don't walk back from mordor. They're rescued and airlifted to safety and healing. they don't have to do the whole ugly slog across the polluted lands in reverse. the eagles are deux ex machina in that sense, but it doesn't feel unearned after frodo and sam have gone to the brink of their own destruction in destroying the ring.

but in a more psychological sense, frodo and sam spend the rest of their lives walking back from mordor, where mordor is the shadow of the ring and the wounds they experienced from their journey and from carrying it.

the scouring of the shire is about walking back from mordor, when the shadow of mordor comes to your door. it's about undoing the pointless and cruel rules imposed by sharkey-saruman and frodo keeping the hobbits from killing surrendered enemies.

I'm fascinated by the after. maybe it comes of reading history, I don't know. few of the sff books I read seem to be similarly fascinated. authors don't seem to be so keen on the hard slog of rebuilding as they are on the revolution.

[falliblefabrial]

A badly photoshopped picture i tried to make fit my mental image of Tau from Inda. I don’t think his jaw is this square but there are not a lot of pictures of men with very long hair

[inktog]

Friend without a tumblr asked:

🎵 Chara Undertale for the fanmix meme? or if you already have (pretty sure you’ve made UT/dr mixes before?), uhh, most recent ship you’ve started shipping

I have not made a Chara fanmix and I'm not going to because, as much as like to use fanmixing as an excuse to broaden my musical palette, I think any reasonable Chara mix would need to be an order of magnitude more graphically violent than anything I currently listen to, and I'm just not up to the task right now. I'm not strong enough.

This playlist is about when the world ends and your nephew gets kidnapped by the authors of Hell to bait you into surrender, and he's all you have left, and even though you barely know him you have to go get him, so you play along and let them kidnap you and you have to watch him get raped and tortured on the regular, and you pretend you don't care because they turned you, let them think you hate each other, and maybe you do resent him a little and resent yourself for resenting him, and you can save the world but it's a shot in the dark, there are too many millions of variables, and of course you want to give him the best life he can possibly have, but you desperately need his help, but you can't rely on him, but you need him, and in any case you have to teach him morals first.

Not a ship, per se, but I am obsessed with their relationship.

[elise-nic]

Out of all the characters to be willing to put people in contact with one another, no one in universe saw this coming.

[octo-crafts]

Start of July update:

DNF'd the Liaden reread and Lotharingia

For WoT, started a Crown of Swords but haven't gotten very far, still have not read any discworld this year.

Read I'm Glad My Mother Died by Jeannette McCurdy as a non-fiction book. Very good!

Started reading Green Rider by Kristen Britain as a book I own, but am not very far.

Did not read any queer non-fiction.

Almost through the Rise of the Alliance arc in Sartorias-Deles, and while it's still not as good as Inda (Inda was spectacular), the series no longer feels like a chore.

Started reading the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh and like, I enjoyed what I've read of the Alliance Union series. It has it's flaws but overall its quite good space opera. Foreigner is on a whole nother level. I'm only one book in and already I can tell that this one will probably be living in my brain beside Vorkosigan Saga for YEARS to come

Reading goals for 2024

Read more fun non-fiction (fun is a loose definition. If its a class/research reading i like, it counts. If its a class reading I hate, it doesn't)

Finish reading Discworld

Finish re-reading Wheel of Time

Read more of my physical tbr