#solya/marek

[goldgust]

That one mirror scene from Uprooted

[hollow-vok]

« They made a portrait together, sun and moon »

This sentence means a lot to me, no joke

This playlist is so good...who made it?? (It was me ofc)

[onmentalsafari]

Wrote a mareksolya ship manifesto

[is-today-tomorrow-in-nz]

Uprooted vs Grishaverse

I finally finished uprooted and I wanted to share my two cents on where Naomi Novik delivers while LB fails.

Warning: spoilers

Backgrounds:

1) Both the stories were written in first POV of the protagonist.

2) Both are dealing with an immortal, youthful looking male wizard(/grisha) and a reluctant, low self-esteemed, female protagonist.

3) Both are set up in a war torn country with an expanding evil element threatening to swallow the country whole.

However the similarities end there.

1) First POV:

Although Noami uses First POV for Agnieszka, it is not restrictive like Alina's. We can see the universe clearly through her eyes and how she views the magic system. We could also read the other characters and see their strengths and flaws through her eyes. This is completely lost in the Grishaverse. We only see Alina's low self-esteem rambles, her unhealthy attachment to Mal and her judgemental censure of others characters We don't understand the universe, or the true nature of the characters. This makes the Grishaverse restricted universe, although we know how vast it is.

2) Strong female lead:

Agnieszka is a village born, free thinker and an independent girl. She is passionate and compassionate. She cares for her family, her best friend, her village and its people. Although she did not expected to be picked she does not stagnate as the story unfolds. At first she is reluctant and useless in learning magic but once she understands why she needs the magic, she pulls the magic by its horns and masters it. Unlike Alina, she practices and fails and yet she does not give up. Nieshka is by no means a girlboss but she knows what she wants and is unafraid to seek it. She knows when to standup and seize her power and when to let go. Naomi handles her beautifully that we want to know more about what's going on in her mind. Nieshka's life is lived by her rules. When Sarkan flees from his tower she does not run after him. She lets him go. She understands his nature and she also understands hers. She chooses to stay behind and heal the forests around her. This, right here, is proper feminism. Not Alina's ballerina farm.

3) Strong characters:

Sarkan, Solya, Kasia, Alosha, Marek, Vladimir and many others. We see them all through Nieshka but Naomi has portrayed each one of them beautifully. They are not one dimensional. We see how Sarkan is withdrawn from the world with the weight of immortality, choosing to surround himself with books and magic instead. We can see Kasia's pain, her love for Nieshka, her jealousy and the hurt of her mother's betrayal. We can see Marek's boarish nature, his hot headedness and love for his mother which ultimately led to his downfall. Every character has a story arc and a journey to fullfil on their own and Naomi does it wonderfully. We see them through Nieshka's eyes but we see the whole person not just her characterization. LB fails in this aspect. After book 2&3, we see many characters simply as an extension of Alina. They all profess their fealty and choose to stay with her even when she does not show them the same respect. Alina is labelled as virtuous although we see no evidence of it. In other words, the characters in Grishaverse are mere mindless, plot devices that are supposed to love Alina because she is the protagonist. They seize to exist outside of Alina which cripples the story telling in Grishaverse.

4) Vastness of the universe

One of the key nature of a fantasy story is the vastness of the universe. The reader when journeying through the story must feel the endlessness of the universe. Eg. The Lord of the Rings. This offers the readers a real submersive experience. We see it lacking in the Grishaverse. Although there are different countries and people, we can feel the boxed nature of the universe. This when combined with Alina's restricred POV, one dimentional side characters(spanning across different countries) and blatant favouritism shown to some characters we feel suffocated inside the Grishaverse. Naomi's universe feels vast, unexplored and unending making it a true fantasy experience.

5) Sarkan

We can see plenty of similarities between the Darkling and the Dargon. A lonely wizard, fighting alone against evil(/corrupt government). The people and the Royal family don't like him but keep him around as a neccessay evil. However, we can see the stark contrast in how Naomi handles Sarkan. For one, she does not think a seventeen year girl knows better than an age old wizard. Sarkan and Nieshka's magic are different but Naomi finds a way to blend them and makes them work with each other. She lets Nieshka form her own judgement of Sarkan instead of force feeding it like LB did to Alina. She gives a chance to the Dragon to tell him his story which gives us an additional understanding. Naomi shows and tells while LB just tells.

There are so many other intricate details which made Uprooted more enchanting to read. Naomi as a writer made me want more. Her universe has potential and Naomi handles it very effectively. The same, however, could not be said about the Grishaverse. The Grishaverse had immense potential compared to Uprooted but due to LB's restrictive story telling, it leaves the readers with a huge disappointment and fails to live upto it's potential.

[theobscurepotato]

Dear Yuletide Writer 2024

Dear Yuletide Writer:

First off, thank you! I hope you are as excited about your assignment as I am to receive it. Hopefully the lateness of my Yuletide letter didn’t panic you too much! I enjoy a wide variety of fic, and these are truly some of my favorite canons, so really you can’t go wrong...but if you are looking for a spark of inspiration, I hope this letter provides it.  

General Likes/Dislikes: 

Things I love in a Yuletide fic: M/M, UST, hurt/comfort, banter, happy endings. When I look at the canons I chose, one consistent theme is that they all end on a note of hope, yet the characters I chose within these canons don't always get to experience that. I think, more than anything, what I would love to see is a chance for these characters to catch a glimmer of it for themselves (or for each other, in the canons where I've selected a pairing). 

Things I generally don’t like in a Yuletide fic: AU’s set outside of the canon setting (coffee shop, etc), MPREG, graphic gore, body horror, unhappy endings. That being said, if you have a wild idea that goes against these, these are definitely more loose guidelines than DNW’s. 

___

Coldfire Trilogy

Damien Vryce/Gerald Tarrant Not sure if there will ever be a Yuletide where I don't request CFT fic. I do write frequently for this fandom, but just because I write in a certain style, please don’t restrict yourself to my “usual” topics. For this canon especially, I’m excited to read what you want to write.  I’m starting my millionth re-read of the trilogy, so I am excited to read anything set either during canon, or a post-canon fix-it. Give me all the banter. Give me all the UST. Give me Gerald Tarrant doing something kind (while doing mental gymnastics to justify it to himself as FOR SELFISH REASONS ONLY). Give me Damien forgetting to agonize over what GT is and just enjoying a moment with him (bonus points for him Prophet!fanboying). Give me physical contact of some sort between them, give me the soul bond! I ship these two hard, but I am happy to read pre-slash/gen.

Dimension20: Escape from the Bloodkeep

Leiland (Kraz-Thun) I watched Escape from the Bloodkeep 2 months ago(?) and once I was done, I immediately restarted it and watched the series again. Bloodkeep has some of my favorite Dropout cast characters, but of course it was Matt Mercer’s Leiland who stole the show for me. Someone on Reddit summed up Leiland as “All that dark power and regal lineage turned into a benny hill skit” and in response I can only say, that’s exactly why I’m here. I am happy with both pre and post-canon fic, gen or shippy (and not picky on ship). I’d really love to see Leiland navigate how to be Leiland, and not Kraz-Thun, and getting more comfortable in the “evil” found family he has created. Galfast Hamhead, while not requested, is of course 1000% welcome in any story.  Yoroiden Samurai Troopers (Ronin Warriors)

Shuten/Rajura

This was my first real fandom, well over two decades ago now, and Shuten/Rajura was my first ship. I definitely carried a binder plastered outside with the Masho chibi from Amanda Swiftgold’s page and stuffed to the brim with too much printed fic from Mink’s Yaoi Cake archive. This was a rare ship even then, and I am absolutely fine with gen, and fics that include all the Masho. I would of course love a fix-it fic, but I am open to exploring missing canon scenes also. I would enjoy a fic either from Rajura or Shuten’s perspective that grapples with their encounter out on the tracks, and that sprinkles in some of their shared complex history. Feel free to bend canon details in terms of what the armor enables. 

Uprooted

Solya/Marek These two have taken up residence in my brain and will not leave me alone. They truly enable each other in a way that is absolutely toxic, but I would love a fic that lets them attempt to do better by each other. I would prefer that Marek lives in your fic, whether that means exploring pre-canon events, or a missing scene during their story, and I would definitely enjoy a fix-it (just think of the hurt/comfort possibilities!) where they get to figure out their version of a happy ending. How do they navigate a world where they both wield less power? Would they be able to make their peace enough with that to carve out something new? Or would they chafe against that lack of power, and it would be that struggle that entwines them further?

[crowbito]

For micro fic: 34. bauble

ahh thank you for the prompt!! <3 it got a little long for a micro fic, oops.

bauble (572 words, Solya/Marek)

Marek’s suite is more or less what one would expect of a man of his status. Sumptuously appointed, as befits the second prince of Polnya; the heavy, high quality furniture is dinged and dented, one bedpost suspiciously chipped away at, like it had the dubious honour of playing an imaginary enemy. They look like they belonged to a spoiled boy who liked to play with swords and for whom consequences were few and far between, though the toy swords have been replaced by the real weaponry that now adorns the walls.

He is a boy no longer, after all. Which is why it is curious that the shelf beside his bed should have a broken whittled horse, and a withered rose that—bafflingly—has a preservation spell worked upon it by none other than the Sword herself.

Solya notices all of these details the first time he is invited to Marek’s chambers, though he finds the bed—and everything that it can be used for—by far the most interesting thing in the room. Besides Marek himself, of course.

The strange collection—if two disparate objects can be considered as such—stays in his mind, though. He could simply ask Marek why he has set them aside, but he loathes admitting ignorance on any subject, even one that he cannot conceivably be expected to know. (When he inquires, idly, about the rose to Alosha, she gives him an impatient look and claims to have no idea what he’s speaking of.)

He considers, and discards, the notion that they are somehow valuable sentimentally. Marek is the opposite of sentimental. He finds value only in that which is useful to him, and a broken toy and a dead flower are not that.

Solya knows that much, but he still trades Ragostok an undisclosed favour for the sapphire brooch he spies the Splendid creating one day. It almost isn’t worth it, for the knowing way Ragostok smirks at him after, but Marek has pretty manners when he can be bothered to use them and thanks Solya well for the brooch.

It’s a struggle not to frown when he sees it on the shelf with the horse and the rose, and he supposes he hasn’t actually managed it when Marek says, stiffly, “Sigmund whittled that horse for me when I was six.”

The rose is a faded shade of blue, which Solya has only seen beyond Polnya—and in Queen Hanna’s garden, when she still diligently tended it. What an oversight; he should have made the connection far earlier.

“You couldn’t find a suitable bauble from your father to add to the collection?” Solya asks mildly; it’s an awkward question, but it goes some way towards lightening the tense mood.

“No. I only want one thing from him.”

The crown, of course.

Solya glances at the toy horse—laying on its side, broken-off hind legs next to it. Is the damage from being thrown at a wall in a fit of childish rage? But even if it is, Marek went to the trouble of picking up the pieces and preserving them, along with a last memento from his mother. Well, there are other ways to secure the crown beyond the removal of the current heir, though they are more difficult.

“Why are we talking about the king now?” Marek asks, his eyes dark and intent. Solya smiles, and turns his thoughts to more immediate matters.

[kiraru21]

Uprooted fan cast

This is my dreamcast. 

Agnieszka (Saoirse Ronan)

Sarkan - the dragon (Colin Morgan)

Kasia (Lily James)

The Falcon (Tom Felton)

Prince Marek (Liam Hemsworth)

The Queen (Charlize Theron)

Alosha (Angela Bassett)

[ewa-jednak-chce-spac]

Uprooted, for the fandom ask ;)

the character i least understand: that chick from Kralia, who wanted to make fun of Agnieszka ;P

interactions i enjoyed the most: Agnieszka and Sarkan’s <3

the character who scares me the most: all magical creatures from the Wood

the character who is mostly like me: Agnieszka with a bit of Sarkan

hottest looks character: none? I mean, it’s a book without an adaptation, so I may guess only by looking at the fanarts, but it’s hard to choose Sarkan, if you know that in the book he’s described as average looking

one thing i dislike about my fave character: about Agnieszka? um... um... nothing?

one thing i like about my hated character: hm... let’s say it’s Marek; I like the fact that he truly loved his mother and that despite all his bad qualities, Naomi Novik was able to write his death in such way that it made me sad

a quote or scene that haunts me: hard to tell

a death that left me indifferent: I think that none - all of them saddened me :(

a character i wish died but didn’t: that book is an example of medium in which in the end I wish that everyone survived instead :(

my ship that never sailed: um... Solya x Kasia? XD it’s the only ship that somehow suits the criteria

[saessenach]

He turned a cold certain look over them like the sweep of a scythe. “For however many of them will be left,” he said. I shivered.

 “You still don’t think this is a good idea. Even after Jerzy.” A thin plume of smoke still rose from the Wood, where the heart-tree burned: we’d seen it yesterday. 

“It’s a dreadful idea,” the Dragon said. “But letting Marek lead you and Solya in there without me is a still-worse one. At least I have some idea what to expect. Come: we don’t have much time.” 

Agnieszka and Sarkan, from Naomi Novik’s Uprooted

[hollow-vok]

Solya and Marek's moodboard side by side...

[sometimesreading]

Oh that is really interesting!! I guess I always completely forget about him in between reads tbh (I, too, find him fairly uninteresting). I just always hate him on sight with how he enters the narrative. (Then get overly emotional about him not either dying horribly or being embarrassingly incompetent during his next appearance as some form of justice when I’m up WAY too late reading...)

I really like that analysis, though! And his death, when it does come, feels so brutally unnecessary, and unemotional, that it definitely has a lot more impact than if he died earlier, or had actually been awful.

I’m genuinely mad that ONLY Marek & the Falcon survived the forest raid (well enough to finish fighting, at least) and there’s talk of the skill with which Marek fights, after the Dragon talked mad shit about him earlier.

Make the Prince bad at fighting! With a couple of guards barely protecting him or smth!! His doesn’t deserve the skill!!!

[s0lavellan]

Does Uprooted count as series?

Absolutely!!

❤ Favorite Male: Sarkan 

❤ Favorite Female: Agnieszka

❤ Favorite Pairing: Agnieszka x Sarkan 

✖ Least Favorite Character: Prince Marek

✔ who’s most like me: definitely Agnieszka lol I’m also a klutz

❤ most attractive: Sarkan

❤ three more characters that I like: Kasia, Solya, and...no third one comes to mind so I’m just gonna go with those two. 

send me a series and I’ll tell you...

[wherestoriescomefrom]

The Oldest Story in the World

hi i got really obsessed with Uprooted by Naomi Novik during a week where i have a paper and a presentations and i just had to get this out of my system. 

“You loved her.”

It was a statement. Not a question – as firm and rooted as the wood, as old as the valley, as endless as The Spindle. She was looking at him accusingly, holding up the small black book. The small letters of her name scribbled in the corner of the notebook.

He looked at her, his eyes steely.

“The woman who wrote this. You loved her,” she continued.

“I did,” he said, his tones clipped.

“What was she like?” asked Katerina. “She was my grandmother, after all. Of a sort.”

“Great-great-great Grandmother,” said Sarkan harshly. He didn’t like the kind of ownership that others could have. He didn’t like it – she was still his, she was his and his alone.

“Whichever,” said Katerina. She tossed her hair behind, and Sarkan involuntarily clenched. It was so like her – so impossibly like her, that he felt a surge of anger.

Sarkan shut his eyes. “She looked like you.”

When he opened his eyes, Katerina looked surprised. “Like me?” asked Katerina.

“Exactly like you.”

“Was that why -?”

“Yes,” said Sarkan. When Katerina had come to him – when she had said she had magic, he had been unable to comprehend anything beyond her hair, her eyes, her body. She wasn’t exactly her – not the same tiny fingers, the scar on her back, the same freckles on her shoulders, those were missing. Her dress wasn’t torn and messy, her hair were neatly tied – like some awful version of her, a version which was neat. And she spoke politely, she didn’t demand things of him; she didn’t shout at him at all.

It was painful. It was too much of a reminder of her – a ghost of her, pressing herself into the places that she had lived, where she had been – the untidy kitchen, which Katerina had cleaned. The room where she had put flowers, and on and on and on.

“Oh,” said Katerina. “What was her name?”

“Agnieszka,” said Sarkan softly.

Her name came alive then – the curtains fluttered, the plants crept a little closer to the window. There was a hush in the kitchen.

“What happened?” asked Katerina. “You don’t – have to –” she said. “I just – I just want to know –”

“I suppose she went into the Wood and never returned. Agnieszka gave up herself for the corruption to never return again,” said Sarkan.

“But she was nearly three hundred years old,” said Katerina quietly. “How could she have died?”

“I suppose being three hundred had something to do with it,” said Sarkan sarcastically. “Wizards become more powerful over the years, but they do die. They become weaker, eventually – even if their magic becomes more refined.”

Katerina touched the notebook. “What was she like?”

Sarkan felt the years then – he had aged, he had white hair now. Alosha was dead, Kasia was dead, Ballo was long dead, Solya was gone, the wood had become uncorrupted since Agnieszka died. Even the smaller heroes of the story were long gone – Wensa was gone, Marek was dead, Vladimir was dead. He was a monument to a lost people. They were history, almost certainly – every person of the story had inscribed themselves into the books of the world – but the people were gone.

The history books would never have remembered Agnieszka the right way. They wouldn’t remember how she had sticks in her hair, how she walked barefoot into the wood. They didn’t know the way Agnieszka pronounced her fulmia – they didn’t know the idiotic girl’s affinity to get into trouble, they didn’t know how she laughed at him, how she impatiently got cross with him.

They’d gotten soft in their old age. Less shouting matches, more small arguments, grumbled irritations. Kisses pressed by her on his cheek, calming him down – knowing everything he did in the day, and then getting him angry all over again.

“She was damnably intolerable,” he said finally. “She was irritating, she got on my nerves everyday – she ruined my library, and she almost certainly ruined my spells and my magic.”

“Her magic… was like mine?” asked Katerina cautiously.

He nodded tightly. “A mess. Just like yours. I tried to categorise it, I tried to understand what she did. It’s not meant to be understood, I suppose. It’s just meant to be worked with.”

“That’s how you knew how to train me,” said Katerina. “You worked with this magic before.”

“She’d have known better,” said Sarkan harshly. “She would have said something annoying, like, ‘you know none of that matters, Sarkan,’ and I would have strangled her. I haven’t the slightest what she meant – but I knew her. Her magic was a story – not the kind of story that has been printed and written down, but a story that has been told for a long time, over the years, by thousands of voices.”

He paused.

“I sound like her,” he said, frustrated.

“Are you both the story?” asked Katerina.

“There are a thousand stories about us,” said Sarkan finally.

Katerina touched her braid. “But there’s one story – the one about how Agnieszka the witch made the Dragon fall in love.”

Sarkan said nothing. “The oldest story in the world, girl,” he said crushingly.

“It’s a good story,” said Katerina in a small voice. “My favourite.”

“Love is a good story, nothing more,” he said. “How would you know – you’re so young, how would you know how much it takes to love? How well you have to know the person, how easily you’d be able to hurt her. How many times you did. How they eventually die – the happily ever after doesn’t come, girl. You’re left alone, thirty years after her death with barely enough life in you for more stories.”

“You miss her, don’t you?” asked Katerina.

“How could I not,” he said angrily. “She didn’t even have the decency to let me die first.”

“I’m sorry,” said Katerina. “I didn’t mean to –”

“I can see you did not,” said Sarkan. “Now go away. And you’d better be learning the corruption spells Yaga has written in her first notebook.”

Katerina turns around. She hesitates – and he senses it. He had turned to the kitchen, to where Agnieszka kept her herbs. He needed some of the ginger tea she would make. His throat had been giving him trouble.

She turns around again, and she presses the black notebook in his hand.

“She would be proud of you,” said Katerina. She looks, for a minute, as if she’d say something more. As if she’d tell him more about a woman that he knew for three hundred years and she never did.

And she was gone. Sarkan opened the black notebook – his now wrinkled fingers floated over the words she had written, codifying small spells which should not have worked. How she had laughed when he had been annoyed when they did, how much she shouted at him when he made her cross.

There was a rose pressed between the pages.

She came to him then – the illusion of the rose they had created, her fingers in his, her eyes wide and searching him, their magic mixing together, her lips smiling softly, her hair in tangles, her skirt already torn in some corner or the other.

How impossibly frustrating Agnieszka had become – how – how – how capable of causing him tears. The pages of the notebook caught the tears, laughing at him – reminding him as Agnieszka would have, that no matter how cross and angry he had been, how determined to have walls and nothing more – he had loved her. He had loved the impossible person who had written these words.

And there was nothing more he could do about it.

[theobscurepotato]

Yuletide Recs, Part 1

Still reading my way through this year's offerings, but here are a few stories that I especially loved:

The Noble Art of Falconry by misura (Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik)

“The Dragon doesn’t do rescues,” Solya said.

“He will for me,” Marek said with the supreme confidence born of being young and privileged.

Spot-on characterization of both Solya & Marek. A great pre-canon scene.

rear-view mirror by houndstoothed (Jurassic Park)

The burden of family. Lex and Tim, after the island.

I love Yuletide precisely because of fics like this one: a complex character-driven story that takes the canon and emotionally elevates it.

The Price of Salvation by Jubileen (A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens)

Scrooge received only one visit from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come.

Jacob Marley came many times.

This story brought tears to my eyes when I read it. Like the classic it builds from, this is an absolutely beautiful redemption story.

and my very excellent gifts:

delirium, or something like it by maleficaria, taywen (Golden Kamuy)

Ogata and Yuusaku get stranded in a cabin in the middle of a snow storm. It doesn’t quite go as expected.

Reading this fic was the equivalent of sitting down to a multi-course meal made entirely of your favorite dishes. The h/c, the forced closeness, the humor, the feelings...absolutely everything I could want from these two.

Winter Solstice by StraysInfiltrator (Coldfire Trilogy)

He had no place here, nor any right to take comfort in it. Yet with a deep sigh he pushed the carved panels open, and in he walked. The domed skylight rose above him, and the slanted evening light shimmered down over splendid garlands decked in tinsel and glass.

A clever and touching missing scene from canon. Made my heart ache in the best way.

[crowbito]

Micro Story ask: 1. don't leave

...and I'll leave the pairing up to you. 🙂

thanks for requesting! <3 not sure why my mind went to Marek/Solya but uhhh here we are.

don’t leave

Solya was Named for his eyes. He’d always prided himself on them—on his ability to see what others could not, to look beneath, to see through illusion and deception. He had no qualms about using such measures to his own ends, but he would never fall for them himself.

Even now, he knows the vision before him is false; conjured by his slumbering mind, and his grief. But he cannot look away; instead, he overlooks all the ways that the Marek of his dreams is wrong. His image is perfect, of course, as Solya’s visual memory is perfect, but this Marek is too accommodating. Too eager to please Solya.

And Solya is too weak; he leans into the vision’s touch, though he knows, instinctively, that the calluses on his hands are not quite right, and he does not taste like Marek. It’s enough. It has to be enough.

“You need to wake up now, Falcon,” his prince—his liege—murmurs.

Solya scowls, so Marek kisses him again, until he relaxes.

“Solya.” He shivers; Marek has no magic, but he still speaks Solya’s Name like he means to invoke it. “Wake up.”

“Don’t,” Solya starts to say, “don’t leave m—” and then he is awake, hand outstretched in a musty room in Gidna. Leagues away from the capital; further still from Marek’s bones.

His eyes are wet when he presses his empty hand to them.

[waywardwiz]

Solya ‘The Falcon’ and Prince Marek (Naomi Novik, Uprooted)