holly black is so cool because she named the first book of tfota as "the cruel PRINCE" which really encapsulates the immaturity of cardan at that point with his lack of understanding of mortals and such hence his mistreatment towards jude and taryn. she then goes on to title the second book "the wicked KING" which, to me, I feel shows a incredible amount of growth especially at the end where he exiles jude as a ploy to get her to pardon herself (which obviously does not go in his favour) causing jude to be the one to deem him wicked although later we find out otherwise. we then have the third book titled "the queen of nothing" which, in my opinion, is a subtle nod to the queen of mirth situation not so long ago but this time jude becomes the queen of all of the fae when all she really wanted in her life was to be able to live peacefully. her becoming the queen after all her hardships and now prevailing is really special and shows just how deep holly black thought to make jude such an icon.
wait are ianthe and coronabeth identical or fraternal twins? i guess you could argue that they must be fraternal if one of them has necromancy and the other doesn't? but we also don't really know what determines whether a child is born a necromancer (aside from the necessary link to a thanergetic system, or uhhhhhh. killing your entire creche mid-coitus), so is it even genetic?
and i know they look different but how much of that is body modifications and/or Necromancer Fragility and/or Vibes
This is probably such an unpopular opinion but I remember reading TMI for the first time and a character that really stood out to me was always Amatis. She experienced so much misery in her life, and than once she broke free from it she was put back into that misery again (By Sebastian)
I absolutely adore the Graymark family 😭 wish we saw more of them in other series!!!
Also tell me why Sebastian made her head of the endarkend, okay miss bad bitch SLAY. Like I feel like she must have been a rlly good fighter (atleast when she did patrol)
I do love the way that Cordy is so obviously just running Angel Investigations all the time. She's doing budgets, chasing invoices, she's making calls, she's getting things signed that need signed. She's not just important for the visions - she's doing the actual on-the-ground things required to allow AI to function as an actual business as well as a journey towards cosmic redemption.
She's so set in this role that by the end of the first series she can just hand Angel things and he signs them without a thought. Because she's running this company. To paraphrase Anya - without her, Angel would in fact be a scared old man staring at a quarterly tax return and wetting himself.
*grabs your shoulders* look at me. it was never about the minivan, nor the purse, nor the plushy. it was about the thrill shauna gets from having control in cases where not having control is expected, is normal. she took the gun (control where it is not expected) and jeff took it from her (her control shatters). she found control in the wilderness (again, where it is not expected) and upon them being ‘rescued’, it got taken from her again (again, control shatters). it is not and has never been about the minivan, it is about the uncommon control that comes with getting it back; to shake from pure excitement (almost an erotic excitement, with the way her breath started hitching) while holding a man under gunpoint because she is in full control.
As someone who knew nothing about the world of Faerun when starting BG3, when Shadowheart was talking about being a worshipper of Shar and keeping it a secret I was like “aw babes don’t worry i don’t believe in religious persecution :)”
And then I got to those temple ruins in the under dark and realized Sharrans literally eat people sometimes and I was like “Oh. Ohhhhhhh.”
More proto Lyctors: I don’t think the original purpose of assembling everyone at Canaan House was discovering Lyctorhood. I think the purpose, originally, was just to figure out how necromancy works. Because John didn’t know.
Everything he did early on was trial and error, and after absorbing Alecto he became so powerful he could brute force anything. The necromantic theorems everyone in the Houses uses were developed later, John never needed any of that. He had no frame of reference for how ‘normal’ adepts users could channel the power he unlashed, because he’s way beyond normal.
Thinking of this bit. In NtN, John tried for a hot second to approach his new death powers like he was going to write a peer-review paper. They do corpse experiment. He tries to make it sound like a legit science. Of course it goes nowhere because the world is ending, but also because you can’t apply scientific principles to something that can’t be reproduced by others. Post Resurrection, though? Sure. Basically, he was putting the gang back together, out of affection but also because he really needed lab buddies to help him nail down the framework of something that for him was as intuitive as breathing.
A corollary to that, IMO, is that I don’t think John was sitting on a well of information that he refused to share. I think even by canon era he doesn’t have the sophisticated grasp of nercomancy-as-a-science that the Lyctors do, and I really don’t think he was sitting on the secret to perfect Lyctorhood the whole time. He watched everyone misunderstand the process because he didn’t reveal the full truth about what Alecto was, but I also very much doubt he knew what the “human” version of absorbing another soul would be until the others figured it out. I doubt he even knows an alternative is viable instead of just theoretically possible; I predict John will be very surprised to learn something like Paul exists.