#the book with the good intentions

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[estherdiehl]

The world won’t stop telling the same story.

Shaun Perkins, “Rules of Engagement”

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[suntails]

knighted

[ping-ski]

unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality

au belongs to @pluck-heartstrings !! if u havent read or caught up u totally should <3 (sorry for the tag)

[elliottkay]

You ever miss your hometown so much during a pandemic that you wrote a whole novel about it with magic and car chases and sexy immortal mercenaries and a sketchy secret FBI task force and adorable cats and the sweetest monster-chomping ghost dog ever? Or is it just me?

GRAND THEFT SORCERY is out now! You can read chapter one for free on my website!

The vampire lord of Los Angeles is dead, plunging the nightlife into chaos. His subjects fight over his title and his missing treasure hoard. The conflict brings werewolves, sorcerers, and djinn close to open war.

Repo man Evan Murphy knows nothing of the supernatural. He only wants a roof over his head and food for his cats. When a risky job lands him in the dungeon of a Hollywood Hills necromancer, a forgotten god offers him the power to escape—making him the target of a beautiful immortal mercenary and every monster within a hundred miles. Evan’s new magic may save the city from its shadows, but only if he can save himself.

WARNING: Grand Theft Sorcery contains explicit sex, explicit violence, explicit criticism of American law enforcement, bilingual profanity, a meet-cute that ends in homicide, conspicuous consumption, Los Angeles, demons, monsters, cops, vampires, talent agents, tautologies, street racing, attempted murder, successful murder, axe murder, motorcycle helmet murder, matching basketball hoodies, carjacking, kidnapping, brief torture, discovery of animal abuse (past/off-page), destruction of evidence, rampant traffic violations, premeditated hotel reservation with Only One Bed, desecration of the dead, awkward meetings with the ex, awkward meetings with the ex’s mom, deadly bisexuals, hypermasculine podcaster trash, acknowledgment of white privilege, false license plates, conspiracy, squatting, looting, mauling, home invasion, trespassing, witchcraft, abuse of authority, aggressive generosity, arguable cannibalism, destruction of private property, search warrant violations, outright lies, phone hacking, petty theft, grand larceny, vandalism, arson, defenestration, resisting arrest, driving under the influence of existential shock, appropriation of queer meme culture, shooting, punching, kicking, biting, couch surfing, bribery of wildlife, old timey Hollywood stereotypes, internet sexism and exploitation thereof, unflattering implications about Heaven and angels, two entirely normal cats, and the Black Dog of the Mojave.

GRAND THEFT SORCERY stands alone as a thrill ride unto itself, yet it shares a world and characters with the Good Intentions series. No prior reading required, but GI readers will recognize events and a few very familiar faces. Again, if you want a good preview, chapter one is here on my website!

Cover illustration by Julie Dillon, title design by Lee Moyer!

[nicolegmattos]

i love your tv show aziracrow/book aziracrow series so much!! i wonder what would happen if post s2 crowley met book crowley lmfao

Yeah, I wonder what would happen… 🤔 (oh, wait. I can write it lol)

Book Crowley: *entering the flat* Hm, that’s weird. I’m pretty sure this plant wasn’t here before.

Book Crowley: *sees TV Crowley lying on the floor* What the hell is this?

TV Crowley: *not looking at him* Me. Being miserable.

Book Crowley: May I ask… why?

TV Crowley: My Angel left me.

Book Crowley: He did WHAT?!

After quite extraordinary amounts of alcohol…

Book Aziraphale: Crowley, are you…? *seeing all the mess* What happened here?

Book Crowley: You did.

Book Aziraphale: Me?! I didn’t do this.

TV Crowley: You left me.

Book Aziraphale: How…? Good Lord, why are there two of you?

TV Crowley: Why is there just one of you?

Book Aziraphale: How am I supposed to know?!

Book Crowley: You’re bad, Angel.

Book Aziraphale: And you’re drunk, my dear.

Book Crowley: Why did you leave us?

Book Aziraphale: Us? I didn’t leave you. And I certainly did not leave him.

TV Crowley: *tearing up* We could’ve been us.

Book Crowley: Look what you did.

Book Aziraphale: That’s it. I’m done. I’ll come back once you’re both sober.

Book Crowley: Yeah, leave. YOU’RE GOOD AT IT!

Book Aziraphale: I DID NOT LEAVE YOU, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE!

TV Crowley: I miss him. I miss him so much.

Book Crowley: I know, I know. We’ll be alright. We don’t need them.

TV Crowley: You know that’s not true.

Book Crowley: Yeah. You’re right.

[bunnieswithknives]

Can we possibly get your version of osma? I'd be interested to see what you did with her

Here you go!! I was putting this off a bit cause, I'll be honest, the way the reveal/transition scene was handled was actually kinda upsetting for me.

I did read on her Wiki though that she's apparently a fairy which is awesome as hell. I haven't gotten to that part in the books yet but I'm glad to have something to chew on in my time of need.

[bogkeep]

it fascinates me how often a choice of first or - gasp - second person storytelling can create so much derision and discourse. having preferences is fine obviously, and as a writing choice it Does matter, because all writing choices matter. i don't really... notice?? anymore??? or like, i DO notice, but more in a "what information will the narrative give me access to" kind of way.

i know second person especially can be jarring if you're not used to it, because it's "he would not fucking say that" but for yourself. but it's also like... so many song lyrics have "you" and "i" and to me they're just. a story that exists separate from me. (to the degree lyrics exist to me at all as something other than Sounds that are part of a music piece, but that's the audio processing disorder/'did not grow up with english as a first language and never bothered to decode lyrics' of it all speaking)

i suspect a lot of derision towards first person narratives comes from a derision towards the genres in which it is a staple, rather than that it's somehow uniquely bad. there's really not much difference between a first person perspective and limited third person perspective??

[aroaceleovaldez]

i'm so happy you brought back up the topic of rick's shitty writing of anyone even remotely non white / "white passing"

with that being said, do you think the shitty script he gave to annabeth in the show has to do with him just being deeply uninterested in adapting his story to include characters of color? bc it seems like once rick encounters a character that cannot be easily erased all ethnic or racial identity of to fit them into an usamerican specifically white ass narrative, he gets lost.

i just keep thinking how the only thing that "changed" about annabeth as presented in the show was her race but her plot relevance and her characterization got downgraded severely. meanwhile percy, whiter than before (wheres the mediterranean god look......................................), got half her functions. like i just look at rick in context and i wonder if he just gives so little fuck about characters of color he cant even write a decent character arc for an adaptation of a very established persona

thoughts? thank u!

I wouldn't be surprised if it's Rick (and the writer's room, since it actually seems Rick isn't all that heavily involved if much at all with the script itself based on some interviews) just has internal biases that he refuses to reflect on. It would be a consistent trend with the uptick in offensive writing in the books themselves (see: the troglodytes in general, all the Jewish kids in CHB being in Hermes cabin, etc etc). Rick seems to want to engage with these topics but refuses to actually assess how he's approaching it and his own biases while also overemphasizing his engagement with the topics. It's a kind of big talk/words vs actions type thing to me.

[this got a wee bit long so throwing it under a cut]

I was having a couple of conversations about this topic recently - one being group reading/discussion of WottG and how, allegedly, the slightly different characterizations in that book are inspired by the actors in the show. Annabeth is repeatedly and frequently described as motherly and maternal in the book, plus some other misc characterizations that make you tilt your head and go "Wait, what about Leah made you want to write Annabeth this way?" and concerns about it leaning into stereotypes. (It's also strange, because in the show Sally is MUCH more aggressive and less maternal, and this is painted like it's supposed to be a girlboss thing cause her being too soft and motherly was too weak or something? But now book Annabeth is now being described as all soft and maternal??? What. What is happening.)

Another conversation that i had with my therapist (cause we talk about pjo a lot lol) and later repeated and discussed more with other folks on discord more specifically regarding the show was a lot of discussion about the casting. Particularly casting choices and how the writing either is refusing to take casting into consideration to respectfully approach how things would be changed to avoid problems or are actively changing the script for characters in a way that is potentially if not downright offensive. Clarisse is the number one example i bring up because a lot of people say that the reason a plus sized actress wasn't cast for her was to avoid the "fat bully" trope. The thing is, there is ALSO a POC bully trope that is just as bad if not worse, so if they were actually taking offensive tropes into consideration one would expect them to avoid that too (especially since Percy was cast as a pasty white boy - which just makes it all look worse)? (Also other plus-sized characters like Dionysus and Gabe were also cast as skinny, same with Tyson. So it just seems like they don't want to cast plus-sized actors either.)

But also they're rewriting stuff that actively puts the casting decisions into worse tropes. Like hey, why is Percy (a white guy) the one who knows the "real" versions of all these myths and is expositioning them to Annabeth (a black girl), who in the books is supposed to know more than him? Why does he know better than her for some reason and have to guide her? Why is Percy teaching Annabeth about pop culture and how to be a kid? Not to mention stuff like the show constantly encouraging the viewer to doubt or distrust characters like Grover and Clarisse and Annabeth as red herrings as to who the traitor is. Plus there's no adjustments to stuff from the books like Annabeth initially being somewhat aggressive/antagonistic towards Percy, or Clarisse's aggression and bullying towards Percy to try and circumvent those being bad tropes in the contexts of the casting.

And there's an ongoing trend of characters who are antagonistic towards Percy in the books being divided into two groups: those who continue to be antagonistic towards Percy in the show, or those who are tweaked to suddenly become kinda silly-goofy and significantly less threatening. Gabe, Dionysus, Ares, and Hades are all examples of characters that should be antagonistic towards Percy but are softened SIGNIFICANTLY and played for laughs in the show. Echidna is played as a twist antagonist because she initially because she approaches the kids as very sweet and helpful. And they're all cast as white! Meanwhile other characters like Clarisse, Luke, Zeus, etc, are still antagonistic towards Percy (plus also like Annabeth initially and again, Grover being painted as a major red herring). Plus some new additions like Hermes, Mr. Lin Manuel Miranda himself, being wholly introduced into the plot when he's not supposed to appear until book 2, and all he does is sabotage the quest. Like, it's weird! That's a weird writing decision!!!! I get wanting to get that sweet sweet LMM cameo money, but, why is Hermes an antagonist here???????? he's not even supposed to be here yet!.

We also have stuff like Poseidon (who, like many of the god/major kid pairings so far seems to have been cast to match each other appearance-wise) saving the day for Percy and being this weirdly good dad, versus the books where we get the iconic "I am sorry you were born" line and Percy and Poseidon's tension is part of their arcs. Notably, Poseidon does this by ceding to Zeus, who is actively about to start a war. While Gabe is rewritten to be a total loser, Sally is MUCH more aggressive and her yelling and screaming at young Percy is supposed to be sympathetic for some reason? If Gabe were acting like Sally does in the show, he would actually be significantly more like his book counterpart! The show is making active decisions to paint these characters the way they do!

Admittedly, part of it may just be they got overzealous with their casting (not inherently a bad thing! diverse casting is good!) and then proceeded to not consider how that casting affects the way the characters are perceived. It also doesn't bode well for certain guesses we can make going further into the show - Thalia is very at odds with Percy initially. She's a very aggressive character. They fight a lot! Also Annabeth's description already implies that they're tweaking Thalia's character to be more "tough love" versus the books where she's significantly more of a bleeding heart when she first meets Annabeth. Like, I'm very happy about Thalia's casting, her actress seems amazing, but also I'm VERY concerned with how they're going to approach her character to make sure it doesn't end up wildly offensive. Athena is similar - we can guess based on casting decisions so far that they're going to try and cast Athena as similar in appearance to Annabeth/Leah. The show has already painted Athena has antagonistic and uncaring towards her daughter. If projected trends continue, these things are not gonna be great.

And the show does seem to rarely want to engage with these topics - like the scene with the cop in the train. You can tell what they wanted to address by having Annabeth be the one to confront him. The thing is they were too cowardly to actually have that conversation! They paint the kids as being unreasonable and getting unnecessarily upset when they aren't directly being accused of destroying a room, therein painting the cop as the one in the right in that situation. The implication seems to be a little bit they were going for "Oh, this is Annabeth's hubris getting them into trouble" but. that's such a bad way to do it! That's like the worst way you could have done it! (This is also a trend in books from HoO onwards, more or less - Rick tries to engage with certain topics, often using characters of specific demographics, and then proceeds to do a really bad job of it.)

There are also some aspects that are just like - in the books, Luke being a middle-class blond-haired blue-eyed pretty white boy is relevant! Because the fact that he has privilege from that particularly in how he's perceived is part of how he came to where he is and why he acts the way he does. Percy not having those same privileges, and having aspects like constantly inherently being labeled as a trouble-maker just based on his atypical (neurodivergent) behavior and coming from a lower socioeconomical background play heavily into his character!!! Percy being both a poor and disabled kid (and implied potentially POC) plays DIRECTLY into why he feels so strongly about standing up for other disenfranchised kids (in SoM, explicitly including other disabled kids and kids of color). It directly relates to his experiences and standing up for kids who are like him because he didn't have that, versus Luke whose perceptions and goals are very self-oriented. Now, in the show, we've essentially swapped Percy and Luke's appearances, and that paints a very different narrative. And that's important to acknowledge!

[sailforvalinor]

The thing is I want an accurate but GOOD Mansfield Park adaptation so so bad but I don’t trust anyone except for 5 or 6 people on this webbed site in the depths of the undercity of the internet to make it because NO ONE understands Edmund Bertram except for me, the author, and a handful of my beloved mutuals and friends

[bowsbar]

pillowbook thoughts because ive been thinking about them all day!

[egophiliac]

Hi it's just to let you know that the official romanization of Revaan's name is Raverne ! Also they have romanized Baul's name to Baur !

Twst coming back at us again with the least expected romanization! thank you everybody (oh god my inbox) (no it's great, I literally asked for this and the reactions have been INCREDIBLE, thank you all!)

I do like Raverne though, I think it's got a nice fancy sound to it! (I had kinda suspected it was going to be an R instead of an L, so the fact that it's SO close to Laverne except for that is hilarious to me personally.) and Dragoneye Duke is honestly probably the best translation for his title, I wasn't envying the localizers that one. :') Baur instead of Baul I was NOT expecting, but in retrospect I think his name's supposed to be a reference to the Bauru crocodile, so that actually makes way more sense!

someone else also said Meleanor has become Maleanor, which is the REALLY weird one to me, because I was so surprised it was written as Mel instead of Mal in the first place?! oh god no I can't decide which one I like better. 😭 (I wonder if they might change it to Mal...they have made romanization changes before) (like I remember House of Distraction being corrected to House of Destruction in Playful Land) (I did check and she's still Mel for now, but I dunno, they might Mal her up and some point and save me from having to make a decision about which one to use) (HECK I CAN'T DECIDE)

uhhhh thank you for letting me ramble about anime names, let's just say MONOGRAMMED SWEATERS FOR EVERYONE

[suntails]

blessed be the night

[more-than-tender-curiosity]

nobody:

no one:

not even t.j. eckleberg:

me: "Sorry old sport, but Gatsby has a bigger house than you, prettier friends than you and a Rolls Royce to cart them all around in."

[glitter-stained]

Diagnosing fictional characters is so so hard like why won't they just sit down in front of me and fill up a questionnaire is that too much to ask