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fogwitchoftheevermore · 7 months ago

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Hello,,, pretty please discuss renskizz at me as I've never heard of these two paired before today,,,, I'm so curious

HI absolutely can do. and i'm gonna come in with CITATIONS on the quotes in this one because i have a normal amount of emotions about these two.

so, first of all, the reason you've never heard about renskizz is because 1. not enough people are skizzleman fans and 2. their best season is third life, which is also the season where the insanity going on between ren and martyn gets the most attention from the average viewer (and from ren)

this is not an entirely one sided dynamic, because ren has an innate ability to be romantic with every single one of his friends, but like i said, most of ren's attention is on martyn, and skizz is so obsessed with this guy from day one, so it oftentimes feels one sided, or at least like skizz cares significantly more about ren than ren cares about him. but let's got into it!

so all this starts in literally the first episode of third life. while martyn is technically the first person ren recruits as an employee of renchanting, skizz is the first person ren recruits to follow him. they first encounter each other early in the first session, when ren is out in the rain and dark right near skizz's ugly ass house. skizz attempts to save him from some mobs and does a bad job, but offers ren some shelter from the storm. once inside, they do a small trade- ren asks if he can have skizz's leather, for his upcoming enchanting business, and he gives skizz a golden apple in exchange. skizz thinks this is a way uneven trade, and now skizz is tied to ren forever (all this happens around 6 minutes into skizz's first third life episode).

skizz and ren meet back up later in the first session, after ren has begun to establish renchanting more clearly, and after he's begun to recruit etho. ren, etho, and skizz decide to go check out the desert together, and this is where skizz has his first death to an enderman. every single one of skizz's deaths in third life is about ren, somehow, btw!

from there, while skizz doesn't immediately move into dogwarts, he's on their side from day one. skizz and ren (and jimmy but this ain't about him) both die to the enchanter trap. skizz is red, and ren is about to go red with the whole red winter thing. also, it should be noted- skizz looses all of his stuff to the enchanter trap. in the aftermath, bigb gives him some gold armor and half broken iron tools, just so he can make his way home safely.

when martyn kills ren to usher in red winter, about half the server initially assumes that martyn turned on ren, including skizz. skizz assumes that ren is in danger, and that he needs help. it takes him a hot second to get there (partially due to his extremely shitty armor), but he's the first person to arrive at dogwarts after this happens (about 15:25 in ren's episode 9). he shows up shouting for ren to get behind him, saying he's there to help, to protect him, with his INSANELY SHITTY ARMOR AND WEAPONS. skizz gets talked down pretty quickly, but there is no way he would've won a fight with martyn if he actually needed to get into it with him. but he's willing to do it anyways in order to keep ren safe.

once he has everything explained to him, however, skizz is instantly down. skizz's favorite thing in the world is to be a "loyal sword" (direct quote describing himself, from impulse's first episode of secret life around 14 minutes in), and ren allows him to do that so completely, in a way not a single other alliance of his ever has. skizz is willing to put his entire life and all his decisions in ren's hands, and ren is willing to take on that responsibility. both of skizz's kills in the first season are entirely to protect and support ren. does this blind faith in ren always go well for skizz? ehhhh not necessarily. but his final death, which is under ren's banner, and sees him shouting "i love you guys and i hate them" to the red army, isn't actually at ren's command. in fact, it's explicitly against ren's command, but it's skizz's final show of loyalty to and care for ren and the red army, and a decision he makes entirely on his own. so even though it kills him, he can't blame ren for it, and there's no animosity between them come the start of last life.

in the wake of skizz's death, ren also gets TWO WHOLE FINAL KILLS with the sword he named in skizz's honor, which i would just like to note. ren wields skizz as sword long after he's gone.

THEN we get last life. moments get a lot sparser here because they're on different teams, but there's important things to note. namely, that two of skizz's three deaths that season are to ren!

the most insane of the two, to me, is when ren boogey kills skizz (in skizz's episode 4). skizz is on edge when he arrives at ren's base, but he's immediately drawn in by ren anyways. they both spend the entire conversation being sickeningly sweet to each other (with skizz complimenting ren's build over and over and ren constantly complementing skizz's appearance and telling skizz he loves him). and the thing is, skizz knows from basically second one that ren is the boogey. he has that feeling when he walks up, and he knows ren is just a nice guy, but he's still very on edge the whole time, and it's obvious from how he's constantly running around/trying not to stand in one place so he can't get trapped. BUT REN MANAGES TO TRAP HIM ANYWAYS!

and not only does ren manage to trap him, but skizz CAN'T EVEN BE MAD!!! like, he dies and goes "oh, i hate him", "he's the worst", "i am broken hearted" but he also knows it's his own fault for trusting ren so wholeheartedly ("he went fishing, and he got me" "i walked right into his trap, he got me"). even while he laments having died to the trap, he's still complimenting ren's abilities in regards to building it and his charisma in getting skizz to fall for it, and it's SO FUN, i love it. skizz simply cannot help but be nice to people, but it really is clear here that he has a huge soft spot for ren. he's holding a grudge, but he can't help but compliment ren the whole time he does it.

and then, of course, there's skizz's final death. skizz and impulse come up on ren's tower after lizzie kills bigb. ren is on guard, because he's a green surrounded by three reds (though lizzie leaves very shortly after killing bigb), but he doesn't make any moves on them. it's skizz who takes the first shot, firing on ren while he reminisces about ren killing him at this same tower as his first death of the season. the two engage in a fire fight for a bit, with my favorite part of the interaction being:

ren: what do you want skizz? skizz: i want blood! (skizz's episode 7, 23:50)

it's extremely reminiscent of a conversation the two of them have in third life multiple times over. skizz repeatedly tells ren that he wants blood, that he needs to kill, once he goes red. the last time he says this is before he runs headfirst into his own death. this is a sentiment ren is deeply familiar with, and before, this need for blood was channeled into protecting ren. now, though, ren's on the other side of it, and it is scary. ren's constantly asking that skizz just leave and not make him retaliate. for all that he's terrified, he doesn't actually want to kill skizz here if he doesn't have to. or at least he doesn't want to try when he's so outnumbered and scared.

the fight continues, and skizz is doing the same thing he did in response to ren's boogey kill- complimenting him. he tells impulse over and over how skilled ren is, constantly saying that they're up against a master, even as ren is actively running away from the fight. he has an insane amount of faith in ren, and he always has. even when that faith in ren should be shaken, either because they're actively trying to kill each other or because ren, frankly, looks like a coward this whole fight, skizz can't help but be impressed with ren, and his faith remains strong. eventually, ren gets backup from cleo and scott, and skizz decides to run, but as he runs, ren works up his courage and shoots him dead. skizz is mad, but he's not mad at ren, he's mad at himself for not being able to kill anybody.

and then the two of them get separated. skizz isn't in double life, and ren isn't in limited life or secret life. and everyone has talked about how weird martyn gets in the absence of ren, but it happens to skizz too. both skizz and martyn are trying to fill the hole ren left in their lives in limited life, but they're doing it in different ways. martyn is trying to find someone (scott) to replace ren as someone he can be truly loyal to and skizz is trying to fill the hole ren left as leader, as king, not by finding that leader in someone else, but by stepping up to fill the role himself. and it doesn't work out for either of them!

skizz doesn't explicitly say that's what he's doing in limited life, but it's very clear, with the most notable example of this being skizz, just like ren, giving up his life to one of his "soldiers", by handing them an axe and saying "i need you to kill me for your own good". just like ren.

and i will say- this is not a limited life exclusive thing. skizz tries to recreate the red army in last life too, with team BEST, and it doesn't really work out there either (though it certainly goes worse for team BEST). so come secret life, skizz says "maybe i can't be ren, maybe i need to find someone else i can trust to lead me" and he TRIES in the first episode of secret life. he says, explicitly, that this is what he's doing (in the "loyal sword" conversation mentioned above, and in the small bit of conversation that proceeds that, which is around 18:40 in scott's first episode). but he can't find a single person willing to fulfill that same role, so he steps up to do it again. and it fails again.

and here's the thing about skizz trying to fill ren's shoes, trying to recreate what he had with ren and the red army every single season since then. that's how i've been interpreting skizz's actions for the entirety of the series, but also SKIZZ EXPLICITLY SAID THAT'S WHAT HE WAS DOING.

(quote starts at 1:08:01 in the imp and skizz episode about secret life)

"it's just in my nature, i'm like, i just don't- i don't care about winning. but- but i- but i'm not gonna- i'd be lying if i said it wouldn't be kinda nice. and i wanna- and i do wanna last, and i wanna be competitive, but i'm really more focused on having a great time and putting together good content, and creating alliances that are very, very strong, and are a brotherhood. like what we did with the- i mean, every season. from BEST to TIES to uh, to the Heart Foundation, like it's been a really strong family, really strong brotherhood that uh- that i've really enjoyed that- that journey in creating. and it started with ren and martyn in season one."

IT'S ALL BEEN MODELED ON DOGWARTS! IT'S ALL BEEN DOGWARTS FOR HIM THE WHOLE TIME!!! skizz has been desperately trying to recreate what he had with ren since the moment he no longer had it anymore and i think that's insanely interesting. and i choose to interpret that obsession with ren as romantic because ren and skizz are. like that. and cannot refrain from calling each other hot or telling the other that they love them or what have you, but even if you don't want to interpret it as romantic, i think their dynamic is INSANELY interesting and i need more people talking about them.

#trafficshipping #renskizz #rendog #skizzleman #AND YES I *AM* MAINTAGGING THIS BECAUSE I NEED MY DEMONS TO BE INFLICTED ON MORE PEOPLE #also i decided this post worked better if i ended it at the OFFICIAL SKIZZLEMAN ENDORSEMENT of this interpretation #but i would also like to hightlight ren's amnesia cold session of secret life #1. for the bit where ren turns the 'ren get behind me' from third life back on skizz by trying to protect him from jimmy #and 2. for the bit where ren (pretending to be tango) brings himself up to skizz and skizz instantly launches into a rant about how #he thinks ren is so cool and smart and attractive and humble #obviously the second part is a bit but like. it's always a bit. this is the 'interpreting bits genuinely' factory

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e-adlirez · 1 year ago

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Thea Stilton Treasure Seekers Review/Ramble

Behold, an impulsive ramble about a possibly-obscure trilogy that's been translated to English during quarantine-ish, adding to the obscurity.

So the Treasure Seekers, huh? :3

Coming out a little prior but more or less over the course of quarantine and thus a lot of people not having ready access to it, the Treasure Seekers is what turned out to be a trilogy of what it says on the tin: the girls hunting down cool treasures as a result of going down the world's biggest and highest-stakes scavenger hunt written a hundred-ish years prior to the present time.

Gonna be giving MAJOR spoilers for the first book in the trilogy, and there'll (probably) be one post per book in the trilogy. If you haven't read the book, here's a copy on the Internet Archive you can read before skipping ahead to the review, enjoy, it's pretty good. If you've already read the book or don't care about spoilers, please proceed below the cut :3

The story begins with the girls on summer vacation in Scotland. Shenanigans get started when they meet this old hermit woman who has in her house a mysterious heirloom tapestry with a mysterious poem on it.

The tapestry has this poem that talks about a place with sweet winds, petals that will lead you to something beneath them, something about midnight and birds, and an alabaster garden created for the "jewel of the palace" (like me to you), that is guarded by a friend with deep feet. Sounds like a whole lotta cryptic shnit the theory heads would enjoy :D

Anyway so the girls go visit Beitris (the hermit woman) the next day to return something they borrowed from her only to walk into a holdup :D

Said holdup-ers are these two grunts led by this mysterious lady hiding her identity under a black fedora and thick-framed Ray Bans. The girls deal with that situation real quick and get the guys to scarper (if you're wondering how they did that, "the police are coming"), and once it all blows over, they find that the thugs only stole the tapestry despite ransacking the entire place like raccoons. Such a realization leads to a revelation on Beitris's end, so she entrusts the girls with the tapestry's backstory in a segment I will describe as LAAANNNEEEE LOOOORRRREEEEEE (said in a MatPat voice, we'll miss you king :'])

The tapestry was a family heirloom passed down to Beitris by her grandmother Petra, who got it from her older sister Aurora Beatrix Lane, who is basically British Amelia Earhart. Wasn't into girly shnit, liked being outside and also archaeology, studied in the University of Cambridge as an Archaeology major and learned how to fly a plane, all while punting early 1900s gender norms into oblivion with her pants and motorcycle. Motorcycle queen, plane queen, archaeology queen, but then everything changed when this British Amelia Earhart did a British Amelia Earhart.

The context behind Aurora Beatrix Lane's disappearance is something relating to her work with her mentor Jan Von Klawitz, who was doing archaeology things with her and probably got up to some wild shnit, but we would never know because Aurora is very secretive about her plans and her destinations, and she only came home to the UK once, after her first trip, and that was when she gave smol child Petra the tapestry to guard because it led to "a very precious treasure", but she can't show it yet for the time being. The vibe was Aurora was planning on using the tapestry to show the treasure it hides once she's done with her archaeology shenanigans.

But then she did an Amelia Earhart but completely untraceable since she never revealed her destinations, so uh there's that :D

Back to the present, this little storytime from Beitris has gotten the girls sucked into a rabbit hole. They are now hyperfixated like nobody's business and this Aurora Beatrix Lane is JUST LIKE THEM FR, and as a result they decide that y'know what they still have a few days before classes in Mouseford starts, and while they're at it, they're gonna find Beitris's tapestry and maaayyyybeeee find the alabaster garden. First destination: Girton College at the University of Cambridge, Aurora Beatrix Lane's alma mater.

The girls take a quick jaunt to Girton by train and then by bus to have a lil' chat with the dean, who reveals to them that they're looking for the central archive if they're gonna be looking for the deets on a student from a hundred years ago, but uh the archive is closed for the day, please come tomorrow. (Wonder why, maybe it's because they rode from Scotland to Girton by train which takes a shnitload of time. /nsrs but fr tho I wonder if the original Italian had them drive over there by car-- they did rent an SUV, and going by car would be way faster, like it'll only take a seven-hour drive faster) They come back the next day, are let into the archives, and oop, they find a well-preserved diary with Aurora's initials hidden in the Stanley Library.

Y'know what that means, LANE LOOORRRREEEEE

So two months into her accompanying Jan on his excavations, she notes that Jan's been acting a bit sus lately-- being very nervous, being extremely protective over his luggage, being weird about hiding some of the relics he's found, and also a weird-ass incident where while exploring a small village's old castle, Aurora found a hidden chamber with a tome inside that Jan immediately snatched and was like "I'll take care of it don't worry, don't worry about the protocol stuff I'll be fine I'll take care of it". And then he went back to "normal" after that. Hmmmm.

A month later, while Jan was talking with one of his collaborators on their train to England, Aurora stumbled into the tome again, suspiciously in Jan's personal luggage instead of being properly archived and catalogued like it should've been. She read it, saw a thing about the Seven Treasures of the World, and that caused her protagonist genes to kick in since now she's now very tempted to look into finding them and showing them to the world.

After that, she went to some libraries to investigate and eventually decided to confront Jan about the whole treasures thing and his first reaction was he was pissed, calling Aurora a snoop and everything poking into his things. Then after calming down he said "just pretend to not see", but oh no, dear reader, Aurora was not gonna pretend to not see. She ain't gonna pretend to not see the fact that her mentor was actually a treasure hunter and collector who'd been using his occupation as an excuse to snatch some nifty treasures and keep them to himself like every European country who's stolen artifacts from Asian countries ever, ohohohooooo noooo, she's gonna do something about it.

The girls scuttle on over back to Scotland and Beitris, to find that uh oh dear, the thugs came back again and this time they were asking about the girls specifically. Beitris pulled the same trick the girls pulled to get them to leave. So NOW the thugs are looking for the girls for whatever reason and wanna know their deal. Anyway, the girls show Beitris Aurora's diary, tell her about the summary, and also that unfortunately some of the pages are missing, and the diary doesn't say shnit about the tapestry so far. Beitris helps by giving them a letter that Aurora sent to Petra about the tapestry and its treasure, but interestingly mentions that she should "only trust Robert".

Since I haven't mentioned him before, Robert Neville was Aurora's flight tutor, a flying medic, and was toootttallllyyyyy just friends with Aurora you guys they were totally just frie--

He is dead in the present time, but his nephew John Neville is a (former) lighthouse keeper for the Ar-Men lighthouse in the IÎe de Sein, Brittany, France. So the girls head on over there, land in France, insert a thing where Vi feels like she's being watched but is like "maybe it's just a me thing, I dunno".

They head over to the Île de Sein, find an old man who turns out to be John, are invited to his house, tell him about their situation, and John mentions that he himself has been researching like crazy too about Aurora ever since hers and Jan's simultaneous disappearance over the same place at the same time in the same terrible storm. And also the fact that Robert was totally devastated when he got the news and spent years looking for her. He gives them his notes that he's accumulated over decades of researching in his pastime (which amounts to just Aurora's trip to Mexico), and tells them that since Aurora was looking for seven treasures, they'll need to find out where her seven trips took place, which will not be easy because Aurora was extremely secretive, and she only made her first trip even remotely public.

First place is Mexico so might as well head on over-- oh god the holdup-ers are back to holdup.

The thugs snatch Aurora's diary and book it before the girls can do much besides get an impromptu ocean bath, and oh dear, the thugs' boss has them now, and it's not the mafia cosplayer lookin' woman. But that's something I'll address later :3

Nonetheless, they carry on since the thugs never stole John's notebook, and they use it to go to the Puuc Route in Mérida, Yucatán (sounds very specific until you realize that Mérida is the capital of the Yucatán, and one thing everyone and their mother knows about the Mayan ruins there like Chichen Itza) to find more clues.

They do some more research on the Puuc Route, find some clues about "an invisible place, guarded by the chattiest of creatures", discover that it means they have to go to Uxmal, get a dub against the unfortunately acrophobic thugs, and realize that yes, Aurora did in fact sneak another one of her diaries in there.

This one doesn't have as much Lane Lore to contribute besides a clue that the girls find leads to Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, India, a city known for its perfumes :3 sounds like "sweet winds", doesn't it? Oh and there's also something about a place with two lakes, which turns out to be Lakh Bahosi, a bird sanctuary about an hour's drive away from Kannauj. The girls head on over and try to do some investigating, but it doesn't take them that long to find a pair of grunts struggling under the weight of a very familiar tapestry while their boss was struggling to supervise them with her heels constantly digging into bird sanctuary dirt.

Anyway so the girls concoct a little scheme to steal the tapestry and the thugs fall for it like fish for a fishing lure, and they managed to scatter with the tapestry. After getting to a private space in the sanctuary, they find a clue that leads them to a set of coordinates that they find is a beeg tree. Oh and the treasure seems to be a present that was made for someone close to Mumtaz Mahal, as in "the jewel of the palace", the woman the Taj Mahal was made for; and the tapestry has a set of coordinates that is leading them to a beeg tree, with deep roots/feet. Oh hell yeah it's all comin' together.

They get to the tree, deal with the mafia lady for a little bit, find the treasure, and it turns out it's a very exquisite perfume bottle made of alabaster called "The Perfume of the Earth". They find a little note from Aurora explaining the treasure and its value and the significance of finding it, and now the girls have found the treasure Aurora had been searching for, and now's the time for a villain reveal?

So I haven't talked about him yet and have glossed over this guy for the entire ramble. See the mafia lady, Cassidy? Yeah she's not the big boss here. It's this guy who has a whole secret base in Denali National Park, Alaska, and has been overseeing everything behind the scenes. And by everything, I mean everything: He was alerted to the whole thing with Cassidy's first raid of Beitris's house, found out about the girls' involvement, and for a good half of the book, was trying to figure out what the girls' motives are for interfering with his line of work and what they might know about this whole thing he's looking for, which is the alabaster garden.

This guy has been keeping tabs on the girls through Cassidy and her thugs, who've been stalking the girls ever since France. He and Cassidy figured out in Paris that the girls are Mouseford students on vacation, and he was the one who gave the orders to snatch the journal from there. He was the one who told the goons to tail them to Mexico, and he was the one who managed to look up the girls' names, backgrounds, reasons for being in Scotland, all from the comfort of his base in Alaska. And only then, only then did he go to India himself to supervise and put a cap to his goons' buffoonery.

Who is this guy? Well, he is a treasure hunter who just wants to enjoy the treasures Aurora Beatrix Lane has hidden from his great-grandfather a hundred years ago. That's right, meet Luke Von Klawitz, the current heir to the Klawitz legacy and the treasure trove Jan Von Klawitz left behind in spite of his disappearance. Unfortunately Jan was better (and old enough) to secure a family legacy of greedy artifact hoarding.

So while the girls were in Lakh Bahosi, Luke was too with the goons and Cassidy (who is not his right-hand man and more just... a subordinate trying too hard to impress him), being the babysitter with these guys on leashes, as he tries to keep their stupidity under control. He intercepts the girls as they're about to leave Lakh Bahosi, blocking their path, and asks about the alabaster garden. The girls obviously don't spill and prolly would've gotten themselves blackbagged and interrogated had a friend they made prior to Lakh Bahosi not shown up in her dad's truck and came in clutch. (It sounds cliche and like it came out of nowhere but trust me it makes sense in-universe-- after the girls left the friend's family restaurant that they were hanging at, Luke's goons came over to interrogate them about the girls and where they went. Subtlety, who is she?)

The girls bring the perfume to a nearby university so it can be brought to a museum, send the tapestry back to Beitris, and return home to Whale Island, to read the last bits of Aurora's second journal and presumably to

So that's the book :D I put in a LOT of spoilers, but I'd say that reading the book is still worth it because you'll be able to get the connecting tissues that tie the organs of this story together. H-hopefully this all made sense . .'''

First things first, if you're not used to how Scholastic kids' novels are written, then uh, you might wanna get used to it, because the English translation of Thea Stilton is very... that. It's not beating the kids' book allegations in English, unfortunately. On the brighter side, though, it's pretty good for Scholastic standards! The pacing's very fast, but it feels about right-- gives me the same energy as diving deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole and going to all sorts of places because of the hyperfixation responsible for consuming their sanity for all of a week or so. The dialogue isn't nearly as atrocious as the worst it's capable of being (oh trust me we'll get to that). The tapestry puzzle and how the girls work towards solving it is very coherent and logical for the situation they are in at the beginning, and it's very satisfying to see everything come together and for things to slowly make more and more sense in the poem despite it being as vague and puzzle box-y as it was.

The Lane family lore is very well-thought-out, and Aurora Beatrix Lane is the perfect spiritual predecessor to the girls, what with her love for adventure, love for travel, strong moral compass, and the strong compulsion to elbow drop every single feminine social rule under the sun. I can totally buy her being someone the girls would totally hyperfixate on researching, because she feels like that kind of compelling character-- a passionate young archaeologist who decided to put her own safety on the line for the sake of what she believed in and to dunk on Klawitz and his selfish (and very illegal) goals of hoarding the treasures of the world to himself.

As for the villain, I'll be real gamers, Luke Von Klawitz is probably the most intimidating if not terrifying villain in the entire franchise. He has drones spying on every corner of the world for him, he has goons he can contact at any time and have them do his bidding (to mixed results it seems), he has cutting-edge technology that he uses for terrifying means, all in the safety and comfort of his secret underground base in Alaska where he has his little basement filled to the brim with historical artifacts he's kept all to himself to enjoy. Lemme run this through you again:

He was able to learn the girls names, the university they're studying in, and why they were in Scotland in the first place, all without ever meeting them face-to-face or having his goons interrogate them directly. All he needed to learn all of this was the (not very helpful) research by Cassidy, and a few commands put into his world-connected supercomputer.

Are you intimidated yet? I sure hope you are :D this guy's got a lotta potential is what I'm saying. He's a bit of a brat who wants what he wants and wants it immediately, but he's also a bit of a chess master who looks over things in the background while his minions do all the work for him. Really the only thing holding him back is the incompetency of his goons, and technically it's not even that they're very stupid-- Cassidy and her grunts Stan and Max are very good at swooping in out of nowhere to wreak havoc, dip in and get out before anyone can do anything about it. They're decent if not good at the job they're usually assigned: low-level grunt work. Unfortunately they're not good at much else, which drove Luke insane this entire book, haha.

The girls' dynamic with Cassidy, Stan and Max was refreshing in the sense that the girls aren't always getting punted by them, and the goons aren't always taking Ls just from physical contact with the girls. Cassidy and the goons always had the element of surprise on their side, being able to show up out of nowhere and do their thing before the girls have time to even blink; but once the girls figured out their whole shtick, it was easy to learn that they are easily outclass-able by five mouse Oxford students in braincell count and thus act accordingly. They force the girls to think fast and come up with some snappy plans on the spot, and the girls force Luke to realize he hired Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, and Tweedle Dummy as goons :D

Now uh, I have been complimenting this thing the entire time, but there is one little thing I have an issue within this book, and that is the whole... Power of Friendship thing they've got going on throughout the book.

Yes, unfortunately, the Friendship Curse has claimed this hardcover series too, and while it's not the worst here, it's still... it's still a bit atrocious :D

For instance, the conclusion Cassidy and Luke come to for the girls' reasons for interference is "friendship". Literally, Cassidy literally says to Luke, "It seems they did it out of friendship, Sir", and then Luke responds with an evil cackle and is like "FRIENDSHIP? THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP DOESN'T EXIST IN THIS WORLD! AIN'T NO WAAAAYYYYY THEY'RE NOT FIVE SCHEMERS WHO WANNA GET THE TREASURES THEMSELVES", which is like... I don't get that vibe from Luke anywhere else in the book? Luke values efficiency and getting what he wants-- he's not hired Cassidy to be all buddy-buddy with her, he hired her for a job and she has to work to fulfill said job. He just wants competent employees, and y'know what, that's valid. Not a single part in that have I seen "ew power of friendship". It's very villain for the sake of villainy kind of energy, which I don't think fits Luke with the other bits of information we get of him? He's following his great-granddad's footsteps-- not a single minute of that did that mean "the spirit of friendship doesn't exist get yo head outa the cotton candy"

Then there's... how this applies to the girls.

inhales

WHY DID THEY MAKE VIOLET THE GROUP'S FRIENDSHIP PROPHET GRAAAAHHHH

I probably would make a full-blown rant about this at some point, but one thing I never liked about any of the hardcovers was how Violet of all people is the group's assigned friendship prophet. She'd occasionally make a comment about how uh something something the power of love is the strongest of all, and every single time I don't like it :D

Sure fine you can chalk it up to character development since her early months in Mouseford, but in the earlier books it's heavily established that she's the pragmatic one, the braincell keeper, the one who keeps the girls' group ADHD on track or the one who reminds them that "hey we've been at this for a really long time and it's now 2AM, we should really turn in now". Being a friendship prophet is a Colette thing, not a Violet thing, and I'm not trying to insult Colette or anything like that. I would be far more okay with it if Colette was the one to go on about the "power of love" because she's literally the HOPELESS ROMANTIC! She's the one with her head in the clouds, the one most likely to fangirl about ships in movies, the one who chooses to ship Romeo and Juliet and pretend to not see the entire second act of said play for the sake of believing in love.

If Colette had a line where she gushed about the power of friendship, I would've just chalked it up to "that cheesy-ass statement is something she'd totally say ngl", as opposed to the jarring whiplash I get from seeing Violet of all people call upon the Power of Friendship.

Again, probably will rant about this at some point (lemme know if you're into that idea), but yeah -m-

Literally just chuck the power of friendship bits and replace them with something more practical/realistic/grounded/whateveryouwannacallit, and it's basically perfect! Even the bits where the girls make friends on their journey is believable! Those don't have to be altered at all! Geuh it drives me insane, almost to the point of wanting to do something about it....

Well, that's enough rambling for today. I can't use up all my steam on this first book-- I plan on making ramblings for the second and third books, after all.

See ya Stilton fans, and for the newcomers from Twitter, welcome :D I hope you enjoy your stay :D

#geronimo stilton #thea stilton #thea sisters #book review #book rant #book rambles #unfortunately treasure seekers 3 isn't available on the archive as far as I'm seeing :'3 #which is disappointing because GWAAAHHH #not gonna give any spoilers but it and book 1 are tied for my favorite in the trilogy #i remember reading the first treasure seekers and immediately feeling nostalgic because i severely missed the girls treasure hunting #high stakes and all that crazy stuff that the older books delivered #tangoing with some crazy villains with some hella power and not like the latter four graphic novels did #i missed that a lot so having it in treasure seekers made my at-the-time 15-year-old self very happy #ipads dieded rn but once i get it back and fixed and hopefully not factory reset i should draw some treasure seekers doodles fr #maybe something like i dunno aurora beatrix lane #who knows :]

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