#victoriocity spoilers

[leliesblou]

[hephaestuscrew]

Books and reading are really important to Clara Entwhistle. She bonds with Jasper the cabbie over having read The Grey Book, with Titus Byrne over Captain Swift novels, and with a random pickpocket over Figgler's Prestidigitation. She sees the right reading material as a potential solution to any uncertainty in her life. Trilling's Arts of Detection can teach her how to be a detective. Posner's A Guide to Business for Gentlemen can tell her how to make Fleet-Entwhistle Investigations a success. She only moved to London in the first place because she read Horrocks' Tales from the City in the Harrogate Herald.

I find this particularly interesting because we have significant evidence that Clara's access to reading material has been tightly controlled and subject to judgement for most of her life. She tells Fleet, "once, when I was young, Mother caught me reading a sensation novel and threatened to send me to the Mesmer Institute". She considers this a formative enough experience that it's one of the first facts she lists when wanting to share information about herself with Fleet. As a child, her reading choices were something shameful, something that indicated she wasn't the kind of young woman her mother wanted her to be. And even as an adult, arriving into London for the first time, she is chastised by her mother for wanting to buy a newspaper: "What need have you for a newspaper?... You can read my copy of this month's All a Lady Need Know. Disagreement resolved." In the world Clara has been trapped in, the ladylike thing is to only access a very limited sphere of appropriate information and not to read anything that falls outside of that sphere. And those boundaries of ladylike-ness will be rigidly enforced.

So perhaps it's no wonder that after Clara arrives in London, she's devouring everything from taxi regulation manuals to adventure novels, repeatedly calling the librarian for recommendations in the middle of the night, taking out 20 books at a time and then realising she's underestimated how long it will take her to read them. No wonder she's so often telling people about books she's read. For Clara Entwhistle, being able to do any of those things openly is a new and thrilling kind of freedom.

[more-better-words]

'What I’m talking about, Miss Entwhistle, is a future where machines can reason, where they can imagine. Where they can think. Just like humans.’

‘Please aim higher,’ said Fleet.

[captainjonnitkessler]

I just love how skeptical Fleet is. Like sir. Sir you are a cyborg brought back from the dead by dark and unknown sciences and you are drawing the line at the concept that a big dog might be mauling people. I support you fully but I'm dying to know what your logic looks like

[the-illustrative-interloper]

I think Fleet should get to be a lil’ inhuman and scary sometimes. As a treat.

[unmechanism]

can you even imagine what I'm feeling rn ??

[queenbirbs]

Fleet: I had this idea…

Clara: Yes?

Fleet: I thought you might like to go to the theatre.

Clara: I’m sorry?

Fleet: The theatre. Today. Catch a matinee.

Clara: Archibald Fleet, are you inviting me to a social activity? Like a friend might?

[icescrabblerjerky]

Absolutely fucking ADORED season three of Victoriocity but am in awe of/annoyed by the fanfic bait they are laying like OH MY GOD.

Stuffed into a phone booth up close and personal for an entire phone call

Given a plot device that could LITERALLY be interpreted in that they had to take off all their clothes or be pursued (I KNOW WHY THEY DIDN'T DO THAT BUT OH MY GOD)

CLARA LITERALLY THROWS A RING AT FLEET

FLEET THEN OFFERS TO BUY HER A NEW ONE???

THEY are MAYBE going on a DATE???

This is CIS BAITING akin to The X-Files lol.

[dathen]

I think Sasha Rackett and Archie Fleet should hang out and have a group existential crisis over being Formerly Dead

[leliesblou]

Have a low quality meme

[hephaestuscrew]

Thinking about the protective way Clara tells Fleet not to go into DeVries' dangerous-looking training set-up, and about how when Septimus mentions Fleet's friend Fleet's immediate assumption is that he must mean Clara, and about "This is Miss Clara Entwhistle, my partner - in business, my business partner." / "I'm also his friend, but he doesn't like to say it.", and about how Fleet rarely smiles but he smiles to himself at Clara having a good idea (and Clara notices the change in his expression), and about how Clara is trying to work out Fleet's birthday through a process of elimination, and about how Fleet tries twice to shut down the conversation with Frances Byrne that's making Clara uncomfortable, and about how panicked and angry he sounds after realising she's been poisoned...

[more-better-words]

Speaking of conversations we need to be having, can we talk about how DeVries is now BATMAN?!?

(sorry, Night Baron, no, he is 110% The Bat)

[lydia-bell]

Clara Entwhistle in the foundry

Me getting a new fic idea:

[unmechanism]

FLEET IS A SAGITTARIUS !!!!!!

[maandarinee]

reading the Victoriocity novel and this is making me insane. Fleet is the piña colada of mental health <3

[littleacebee]

I really loved High Vaultage and I have many thoughts about it but one of the things I extremely enjoyed is how there was a chance to give a descriptions and writers decided to describe 101 chairs Clara and Fleet sat in.