#the wrong way home

[the-dust-jacket]

Congratulations to the 2025 Newbery Medal winner and Honorees!

[middlegradeeveryday]

The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy

Summary: Fern’s lived at the Ranch, an off-the-grid, sustainable community in upstate New York, since she was six. The work is hard, but Fern admires the Ranch's leader, Dr. Ben. So when Fern’s mother sneaks them away in the middle of the night and says Dr. Ben is dangerous, Fern doesn't believe it. She wants desperately to go back, but her mom just keeps driving. Suddenly thrust into the treacherous, toxic, outside world, Fern thinks only about how to get home again. She has a plan, but it will take time. As that time goes by, though, Fern realizes there are things she will miss from this place—the library, a friend from school, the ocean—and there are things she learned at the Ranch that are just...not true. Now Fern will have to decide. How much is she willing to give up to return to the Ranch? Should she trust Dr. Ben’s vision for her life? Or listen to the growing feeling that she can live by her own rules?

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Book Type: Novel

[technically-human]

The hug!!

This one was once again commissioned by our dear @i-am-as-normal-as-you-are and we actually talked about this scene quite a lot. Charles is still going through it, and he doesn't even feel like he should be getting the hugs he needs. Poor boy.

[pandadrake]

Spider-Society and The Day of Lots of Involuntary Trips to Earth-19999. (Finally finished this, god damn.)

I hadn’t seen any takes on what Spider-Society was like during Spider-man: No Way Home (2021), so I thought about it too hard.

I.e. I pulled up a clip of No Way Home to see what the Peter-abduction spell would look like from Miguel’s POV, then realized he'd have no idea what he's looking at and would probably mistake it for something else.

[mmmairon]

When he. When. When he. Ough .

[mushyfart]

OHHH MY GOD,,,, MY SHAYLA😭😭😭😭MY SHAYLA😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

I hate this man, blow him up with a nuclear bomb

[naggascradle]

[valkyurii]

there are two types of elden ring fan:

the normal one

and then this guy

[elyasdoodles]

🫴

[ai-manre]

Cant believe there are still people calling Arya unkind and implying she's somehow less moral and less heroic than other characters. When she is TEN years old and does this:

As they were running toward the barn, Arya spied the crying girl sitting in the middle of the chaos, surrounded by smoke and slaughter. She grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to her feet as the others raced ahead. The girl wouldn't walk, even when slapped. Arya dragged her with her right hand while she held Needle in the left. Ahead, the night was a sullen red. The barn's on fire, she thought. Flames were licking up its sides from where a torch had fallen on straw, and she could hear the screaming of the animals trapped within. Hot Pie stepped out of the barn. "Arry, come on! Lommy's gone, leave her if she won't come!"

Stubbornly, Arya dragged all the harder, pulling the crying girl along. Hot Pie scuttled back inside, abandoning them . . . but Gendry came back, the fire shining so bright on his polished helm that the horns seemed to glow orange. He ran to them, and hoisted the crying girl up over his shoulder. "Run!"

Rushing through the barn doors was like running into a furnace. The air was swirling with smoke, the back wall a sheet of fire ground to roof. Their horses and donkeys were kicking and rearing and screaming. The poor animals, Arya thought. Then she saw the wagon, and the three men manacled to its bed. Biter was flinging himself against the chains, blood running down his arms from where the irons clasped his wrists. Rorge screamed curses, kicking at the wood. "Boy!" called Jaqen H'ghar. "Sweet boy!" [...]

Going back into that barn was the hardest thing she ever did. Smoke was pouring out the open door like a writhing black snake, and she could hear the screams of the poor animals inside, donkeys and horses and men. She chewed her lip, and darted through the doors, crouched low where the smoke wasn't quite so thick.

A donkey was caught in a ring of fire, shrieking in terror and pain. She could smell the stench of burning hair. The roof was gone up too, and things were falling down, pieces of flaming wood and bits of straw and hay. Arya put a hand over her mouth and nose. She couldn't see the wagon for the smoke, but she could still hear Biter screaming. She crawled toward the sound.

And then a wheel was looming over her. The wagon jumped and moved a half foot when Biter threw himself against his chains again. Jaqen saw her, but it was too hard to breathe, let alone talk. She threw the axe into the wagon. Rorge caught it and lifted it over his head, rivers of sooty sweat pouring down his noseless face.

Arya literally threw herself into a burning shed with falling roof, to rescue complete strangers. The worst she's risking here is not a beating or anything, she's risking her life and that too by making the active choice to go in and rescue people she does not know. Are you kidding me?? You see this and still Arya Stark isn't the kindest heroic character?

[tiredandoptimistic]

What I really enjoy about Luke and Maryse's interactions in City of Ashes is that they clearly grew up separate from each other. Both of them are in their late thirties, but they hold this image in their heads of who the other was when they were teenagers, when they were enthralled by Valentine's hateful rhetoric.

From how he describes them to Clary, it's clear that Luke looks down on the Lightwoods. He says that they were Valentine's closest lieutenants and the most dedicated to his doctrine, and yet he ignores the fact that he was Valentine's second-in-command for most of the Circle's existence. He knows that he had doubts at the time and then grew into a kind and accepting adult, but Robert and Maryse appeared dedicated to Valentine from the outside and have been separate from Luke ever since, so to him they must still be as cruel as they ever were. He sees himself as superior because he got out first, but forgets that he stuck around until Valentine literally told him to kill himself, while Robert and Maryse surrendered to the Clave voluntarily.

Then there's Maryse, who's still bitter over Luke's betrayal. Not because he turned against Valentine, but because he and Jocelyn set a trap that ended with every member of the Circle (other than the Lightwoods, Hodge, and Michael) being killed by the combined forces of the Clave and the Downworlders. Of course Maryse is being pretty hypocritical here, since she was fully in on the plan to murder a bunch of unarmed diplomats, but she does have a point that Luke and Jocelyn did nothing to protect their former friends. Their plan saved lives in the long run, but it resulted in far more bloodshed that night than Valentine's simple massacre.

After Valentine's supposed death, Jocelyn, Luke, Robert, and Maryse all went into a sort of retirement in New York City. For Luke and Jocelyn it was their mundane employment and for Maryse and Robert is was their place as Institute heads, but both couples spent fifteen years raising their kids and learning to be better people. By the time we see them in TMI, all four former circle members had come to terms with how atrocious Valentine had been and dedicated themselves to doing better with their adult lives, but since it happened in relative isolation, they all still remember each other as they were at age twenty. To Maryse, Luke is still the man who left his friends to die, and to Luke, Maryse is still the woman who stuck by a murderer until the end.

I just think it's very interesting that there are so few survivors of the Circle left in 2007, and barely any of them communicate with each other at all. Amatis was left alone in Idris, Hodge felt so abandoned by the Clave that he went back to Valentine, Robert and Maryse trapped themselves in a loveless marriage rather than give up the illusion of stability they'd built for their kids, Luke and Jocelyn denied their past until it came to find them, and Michael was killed with his family in a scheme that would never have worked if a single person came to check up on him in the ten years Valentine inhabited his life. They could have found a community through this common experience, but instead they saw each other as monsters for the things they all did.

[supersapphical]

perhaps my most esoteric but very, very passionate spn take is that i truly believe if you haven't watched season 1 supernatural with the original music cues, you have not seen season 1 supernatural.

[shouldprobablybereading]

I feel quite mean when I say that I want Lift to feel very guilty about what happened to Gavinor. Because that’s putting an unproportional amount of blame on her

But I really do wish that she does. Her actions during day two where irresponsible and childish to a degree that she is way too old to be able to excuse. And unlike most other instances of Lifts funny shenanigans of refusing to do what she is told, this time it had severe life altering consequences that can never be fixed

And I really hope that this is the turning point for her of finally accepting change and growing up to a degree. Because wether you like it or not, when you’re not the youngest, when there is someone looking up to you and you let yourself be in that position. You have a responsibility to a degree and can’t just run off and break the rules whoever you want or give dangerous advice

[liauditore]

cw// implied character death, double life nonsense

because you are love itself.

[amrv-5]

Have we ever talked about the fact that BJ likely assumed that Hawkeye would leave first. As in Hawk was drafted earlier and would assumedly get his points first and be discharged… What does it change if BJ was assuming for the whole of their time together that Hawk was going to leave first

[nicktoons-unite-incorrect-quotes]

Jimmy: I am going to pump cerebral spinal fluid through my braincells to remove the metabolic by-products of the day's thoughts

SpongeBob:

Danny:

Manny:

Jenny:

Timmy: ...What?

Jimmy: It's called sleep and it is my bed time. Nighty-night, y'all