#this is also a book which really really gets into entropy which

[july-19th-club]

forced myself to finish this book even though by the last hundred pages or so all i was doing was picking apart the post-catholicism of it all. bc i feel like it's important to read shit you don't gel with . just because. even though the whole way through i was like they HAVE to prove it's not real. they HAVE to. so not the point of any of it but i was desperate for them to Find The Body etc. and of course instead they have mystical time travel experiences and all that because that is the kind of book the actual star is but i was desperate for them to realize that the star you see is the actual star. and then it wasn't

[lichqueenlibrarian]

Hi! Ignore this if you don’t feel like it, but I wanted to check out some of the Star Trek tos novels. If you have any favourites/recs I’d love to hear them!!

Oooooh I love this kind of question!! This answer got really long… I tried to stay away from any information that couldn’t be found in the books’ summaries.

The Wounded Sky, and Spock’s World by Diane Duane. I love them, they rewired my brain a little bit, I still think about them months later.

The Wounded Sky has the crew of the Enterprise testing a new device, when the tests get interrupted by Klingons, things start to get weird and now the Enterprise crew have to fix the fabric of the universe itself.

Spock’s World- Vulcan is experiencing a crisis, Spock, Sarek, Amanda, and the Enterprise have to go back to the planet and hopefully help the planet’s council make a decision that could impact the whole Federation. Interspersed with moments from Vulcan’s history.

The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah Spock, James Kirk, and Dr McCoy arrive on Vulcan to bring a wounded crewman to Vulcan’s doctors to hopefully save his life, using a new procedure whose other patient is Spock’s mother. Accidents around the hospital prompt Spock, James Kirk, McCoy, and Sarek to investigate while Spock and Sarek try to navigate their precarious familial relationship. There’s a sequel, The IDIC Epidemic. Excellent if you like Sarek and Amanda, and wanted to see things get patched up between them and Spock.

The Price of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. This is about as notorious as Killing Time, it’s entirely bonkers and that’s the main appeal for me. It features the Romulan Commander from the TOS episode The Enterprise Incident. This one is a bit difficult to summarize without spoiling things, it’s older and the writing can be a bit opaque, but I thought it was fun.

More under the cut cos this post got out of hand.

The Joy Machine by James Gunn based on the script by Theodore Sturgeon. I just finished this one recently, and I really enjoyed it. It has that certain TOS era something and the author has a strong grasp on Kirk. It also gives Uhura some stuff to do, which I always like. It’s nice to see other members of the crew get some time. Kirk and the Enterprise are sent to the planet Timshel, previously a paradise for intellectual pursuits, the arts, a beautiful jewel of a planet which has gone dark. They haven’t accepted visitors for two years, and two agents from the Federation have been sent to investigate and haven’t been heard from since.

Uhura’s Song by Janet Kagan. A mysterious and fatal disease is plaguing the feline people of Eeiauo, the Enterprise is in orbit so their medical staff can help, but it isn’t looking good. Based on a secret shared between Uhura and an Eeiauoan diplomat, the Enterprise sets out to find a cure. Loved the aliens, Uhura and Spock get some really great moments together and separately, I would’ve loved to see this be a TOS episode or movie…

The Entropy Effect by Vonda N McIntyre. Spock has the worst time. The Enterprise is tasked with transporting a dangerous man, only for him to escape and commit murder! Spock’s got to try and find a way to fix what happened by going back in time.

The Pandora Principle by Carolyn Clowes. HOW DID IT TAKE ME THIS FAR INTO THE LIST TO REMEMBER THIS ONE!? I love this book. The Enterprise captures a derelict Romulan Bird of Prey and brings it back to Earth so Starfleet can investigate. Except it’s not so innocent as it seems, and the Enterprise has to go back to the planet Hellguard in the hopes that Spock’s protégée Saavik will remember something to prevent the Romulans’ plan from succeeding. Reading this did firmly convince me that Spock is Saavik’s parental figure, he is a girl dad.

The Final Reflection by John M Ford. Novel within a novel- the crew of the Enterprise come back from shore leave obsessed with a new book about the early days of the Federation’s relationship with the Klingon Empire, from the perspective of a Klingon Captain.

Yesterday’s Son by A.C Crispin. The Romulans attack a scientific outpost of Federation scientists studying The Guardian of Forever. Spock goes back in time to meet his son by Zarabeth. There’s a sequel for this one as well, Time for Yesterday. Really excellent Spock moments, his relationship with his son is difficult, Bones and Jim get to have a bit of fun.

I’m probably forgetting a bunch of books but this list is getting really out of hand.

[ceaselesswatchersspecialboy]

Okay so I know this is a silly ask but like—there are so many interesting things with certain episodes that would change if Stanford/bill was around in them. So I wanna ask about things from certain eps and stuff! Just a few simple ones(I really love this au btw it’s so interesting!!)

—How did bill respond to Mabel dating Gideon?? Or did it not happen in some way cause of him?

—Does he help Stanley scare kids on summerween? Or does he do trick or treating instead?

—So like- Did the sock opera bill plot never happen or was it just a somewhat normal play? Did he end up helping out Mabel?

I love the silly asks so much. For as messed up as the au is when you think about it, it is also still Gravity Falls, and there’s a lot of wacky hijinks afoot that I also love to think about!

— Bill was so close to adding assaulting a child to his criminal record. Mabel is his favourite out of the two at this point in time, with his relationship with Dipper still being tense at best, and he hates to see her free and chaotic spirit held down by a nine year old who’s more hair than flesh. I mean seriously! Shooting Star is a Star that needs to shine bright and unleash her boundless energy onto the world. She can’t do that if she’s being made miserable and boring.

I can see him arguing with Stan over the whole arranged couple thing, try and snap some sense back into his old, sagging brain.

I got my own Book of Bill today finally, and so a bit of this is based on the Vinegar Pete section, which, historical inaccuracies regarding one of my special interests aside, did show a pretty interesting to side to Bill, and how he is willing to give people power in the name of freeing them of their chains, alongside causing entropy. This is kind of like that, in a way.

Thinking more on it, he might even end up being there during the final confrontation — for a few reasons. Not sure which route is most plausible yet though. Either way, it’d probably be the first time he actively protects the kids from danger, namely because A) He likes Mabel B) Stan would go into a state if anything happened to these kids, which wouldn’t benefit his situation at all.

He isn’t super attached to them yet, so he lacks the same vulnerability his future self will have.

— I mentioned this in a previous ask today but Bill and Stan have a tradition of who can scare kids the most on Summerween or Halloween, so he’d be at home with Stan doing that. He’d be annoyed to know he missed the Summerween Trickster. The guy owed him money. And he missed out on eating him too? His night is ruined (he’s being dramatic).

— I haven’t fully worked out Sock Opera yet, but I do have a thing in mind where Bill is desperately trying to sabotage Dipper’s attempts with the laptop, because he really is getting way too close. His issue is he has to be more careful about it. Not really his forte. I’m not sure if that’d work alongside the original plot of that episode, or if I’ll have to scrap it and come up with something else. I’ll have to come back to this I fear.

[canmom]

a theme in art that fascinates me is imagining the ultra-long-duration future of humanity, in which our forms become increasingly abstracted and strange to us.

i encountered pop-rock duo Zager and Evans' song In the Year 2525 from, naturally, a Fallout: New Vegas music mod. idk if this embed will work for you or if it gets copyright-slapped, you might have to click...

...but anyway, it follows an imagined 10,000 year future of humanity in ~1010 year increments, projecting various things that might occur. its concerns are, naturally, terribly 1969: babies selected from the bottom of a 'long glass tube', behaviour-controlling pills, bodies atrophying because everything done by machines, at some point God shows up - not a mention of computers, they weren't even on the horizon. the song has spawned numerous parodies and variants, from a Jewish version to the theme song of 90s American action show Cleopatra 2525.

I feel like what makes it work is the tone: the rising and falling minor arcs, the sense of resignation in the lyrics. far more than the specific scenarios imagined, which are a bit corny, there is that glimpse of the disorienting feeling that the forms we inhabit now are just an emphemeral passing phase, and how vast the possibility space of life could be.

Man After Man (1990) by Dougal Dixon takes another approach: using the tools of speculative biology, Dixon tries to imagine all sorts of strange hominids that could emerge out of us. you most likely know it from the Seasons Greasons meme, in which we become a screaming furry ape biting a larger, fluffier screaming ape. but Dixon has many weirder ideas. CM Kosemen went for a similar project in 2006 titled All Tomorrows. I regret to say I have read neither of those books, so I'll have to leave it at that.

of course, the GOAT on this subject is Don Hertzfeldt (who we visited way back on AN89). starting with his film The Meaning of Life, which I recently watched at the GSFF, the long-term weird future of humanity became a recurring central theme in Hertzfeldt's work.

Hertzfeldt's film is almost entirely without dialogue. a huge variety of human characters walk across the screen to and fro; then the timeline accelerates and increasingly weird designs appear, interspersed with representation of timing of the solar system. at the end, two characters have a discussion in a nonsense language where only words that vaguely resemble 'meaning of life' can be discerned. the larger character seems to scoff at the smaller one's question, leaving the smaller staring out at the universe.

of course, the best-known version is probably that time he did an intro for the Simpsons, which speedruns a similar idea in about a minute and a half.

like with the eponymous phrase in The Meaning of Life, the film depicts some kind of heavily decayed signal being preserved even as everything else changes around it. it throws in a lot of Rejected-style surrealism for humour, but there's still a core affirmation: 'still love you homar', text reading 'I will never forget you' - a willful absurdity in the face of everything else arounding it underlining that entropy will win and everything must become unrecognisable.

the substance of the theme becomes more concrete in Hertzfeldt's three-part film It's Such A Beautiful Day, which tells the slow, relentless story of a character losing his memories, identity and cognitive abilities to dementia. to spoil the final moment of the film, which you should really watch... at the last minute, as it seems certain the character will finally die, the film - which has been entirely grounded so far - swerves into narrating the character's immortality, outliving humanity and watching until the heat death of the universe. it is performed as a desperate and tragic choice by the narrator to switch into a different story, but it also serves to underline by its absurdity how all of our defining information will decohere and our fate is the same as Bob's.

(I won't go into World of Tomorrow for now, though it is probably Hertzfeldt's best work, because I really need to rewatch it - I don't feel confident summarising it and its relevance to the theme right now lol)

I have a strange desire to see what happens next for humanity. 'I' get to bear witness to this brief... maybe 70, 80 years if average life expectancy stays where it is. I can absorb as much information as I can into the whorls of my brain's neural network, encode it in various communicable forms so that what I have learned and what I value can outlive me. but once I'm gone, only memories of me and artefacts I have left behind can continue to affect the world. I might still have a distinguishable causal effect on the world in decades, perhaps hundreds of years after I'm gone. after that my existence is indistinguishable from noise. and subjective-experience wise, I don't get to see it anyway!

but what if I didn't go? what if we got to live forever?

when I imagine getting to see the far future, I imagine the current me getting to see it, as if I got to step in a time machine. but the creature I become will be native to that time period.

let us imagine the set of states available to a brain. we can provisionally think of it comprising a dynamics model and stores of information such as memories, but that might prove insufficient. regardless: these things in combination learn to build an approximate model of the outside world and my place in it. they evolve with time. storing new memories causes older ones to decay gradually. the dynamics model is reinforced by the habits of thinking it performs.

it is a theorem that a one-dimensional system undergoing a random walk will eventually visit every possible state available to it an infinite number of times. but a 3D system is only 34% likely to return to its starting point, and an N-dimensional system becomes increasingly unlikely to ever return there as the dimensions increase. moreover, any two points undergoing a random walk in a high-dimensional space will grow infinitely far apart in the same way.

if we imagine the evolution of the brain as being like a random walk (perhaps through some lower-dimensional latent space rather than the space of all possible neuron firings, except the latent space and architecture may well change as the brain learns new environments and the possibility to self-modify comes into existence)... I guess that means that in the long durée, 'I' will become increasingly alien to the current me, and also everyone I know presently. what difference does it make that one person in a hundred thousand years has a special causal chain leading back to the 'me' that exists now, and another doesn't?

you could say there is some anchor or attractor in the space, some persistent life goal or set of values or 'inner law', which you would orbit even as the world transforms drastically around you. we try to stay consistent with ourselves, after all. but my experience is: dubious. I have changed a lot in some ways, less so in others; themes from when I was a lot younger seem to recur unexpectedly. I can read a story I wrote a decade ago and still recognise the voice of it. but it feels like it is a set of different timescales of change rather than anything being fundamentally immutable.

replication, attractor states, the nebulous goal-seeking structures that are being called 'diverse intelligence': these things can keep a pattern around. but only so long.

in one timeline, I die at a distinct point: all the processes shut down more or less at once, the organising principle decoheres, and the assembly of matter ceases to be an organism as it was just a moment earlier. in another timeline, 'I' disappear gradually as memories are overwritten and by brain learns to act differently; there is no definite point where I definitively cease to be the same person.

(some human relationships end abruptly, such as in a big fight, or a death. others end through a gradual divergence. I have experienced this many times in even the short period I've been alive. sometimes though, a stable feedback loop keeps the two people close over a very long period, even as they change. these feel special, they accumulate far more memories, they are more painful if they break. two or more humans might live happily together for 70 years, easily enough. but could a relationship last indefinitely? over billions of years?)

so what sort of mind could take it all in? comprehend all the different eras and forms?

I think about associative memory. to crudely oversimplify, we consolidate and store short-term memories accumulated through a day during sleep into a long-term form. kirsanov says they go into the neocortex but I am not sure this is as settled as I thought; it doesn't really matter. when awake, we retrieve memories associatively: something will 'remind you of' something else that might be relevant. however, it would follow that only so much information can be retrieved for processing at once.

to make the inevitable analogy to artificial neural networks and computers, we don't have anything so simple or precise as a 'context window', but at any given time I feel like there must be only so much 'bandwidth' to pull in additional memories into the working memory 'cache'. imagine if you could have a vast 'library' of semantic and episodic memories, and look up something relevant very quickly, but you can only 'read one book' (or a few books) at a time. and the way you think and behave depends significantly on the books you pull out.

at that point you have to be a creature who can perform many different 'characters'. you might have memories of both, but your 25th-century-sona might be very different from your 41st-century-sona. you are sort of inescapably plural. shoggoth wearing a mask, etc. etc., you know where I'm going with this.

is this necessary? would it be possible to have a 'brain' that can consider vastly more information at once in parallel, like the planet-running Minds in Iain M Banks? or is there some kind of linear bottleneck, the putative 'main thread' which may or may not be identifiable with 'consciousness'? even without a bottleneck, it takes time for information to propagate. you could pile neurons onto a brain, letting its broad plasticity adapt them to whatever function it might need, but at some point it's more like a vast space where multiple 'wavelets' of collective thought-excitation are moving around and interacting with each other than a unified thing.

but perhaps that is no obstacle: perhaps a process in there could just duplicate instances of itself and have some mechanism to reconcile them periodically and pass information between these units, and the whole thing can be a nice little universe-contemplating superorganism. until some nodes start to defect. but oh dangit, we just invented multicellularity again. and GPUs. and... human society?

so perhaps that's the resolution to my little wish: this little 'node' right here may only be able to consider the parts of history that it's exposed to, but it's a component in a larger system. it can receive compressed representations of thoughts from other nodes, and send them in turn. we call that 'language'. that's what you're reading right now, hi!

well, that's nice and pretty and all, but it still leaves us with entropy and the arrow of time. maybe the superorganism will eventually see the whole future, but its older memories still decay, and I am not the superorganism.

in the absence of a total perspective vortex, then... without the means to know 'halloween'...

well, that leaves constructing fantasies of it, as an artistic gesture, a game to play in the present. it will absolutely certainly get everything wrong and one day feel as dated as Zager and Evans. it still calls to me, though - to fully dissolve what is familiar, and take no arbitrary assumption. who can say why.

[youandthemountains]

What are some of your favorite trek novels? sorry if this question is hard to answer, I'm looking into reading some myself but I know it can be hit-or-miss with a lot of them 😅

Oooh no, thank you for asking!!!

I am by no means an expert - @electronickingdomfox is definitely more widely read in terms of trek books.

Obviously I'm also biased, but as a Bones Enjoyer, my favorite trek books I've read so far have been:

Dreams of the Raven by Carmen Carter - so good for bones backstory, especially what he was like as a fresh faced intern and how his beliefs and self perception changed over time. Very good if you enjoy pacifist, anti-hierarchial organization bones. It's very much a bones-centric triumvirate book. It's also had some of the best writing of bones as a doctor specifically that I've read so far, in terms of how his career shaped his worldview and how he interacts with people. It even gets into the different constitution of the work - for instance there's scenes in the autopsy room where Kirk wonders how McCoy works down there. There's also other medical staff with different personalities which also helps bones shine - really highlights that what stands out about him isn't just that he's the Doctor Character, which can sometimes be his flattened role, but the way he chooses to handle his position. The plot itself gets a little silly but I adore the character work.

Sarek by AC Crispin - an interesting look into Spock's relationship with his family, with plenty of triumvirate scenes and a really beautiful sense of how he sees McCoy as a comfort. Also really beautiful and mournful story about Sarek and Amanda, as she passes away. A lot about grief and the ways a family deals with it so def a warning for that too.

The Autobiography of Mr. Spock by Una McCormack - SO MUCH good stuff in here, ties later trek into Spock's life so well and bones is so ever present in it <3. Such a good Spock character study, lots of interesting insight into his beliefs and psychology bc it's the perspective of him reflecting on his life so you see more of how he changed and grew. Loved a lot of what they added to his early life, and his relationships and how his perspectives changed as he grew older and learned more. Like I particularly enjoyed all the insight into his family life, and how during the 5YM he was only aware of the parts of his life story you understand as a child, but over time has learned about wider things going on that affected the events in his family's life which in turn affected how they raised him, who could only react to their actions without knowing their context. Also enjoy its perspective on Vulcan in general - a very good shades of gray book.

Shadows on the Sun by Michael Jan Friedman - I can only half recommend this book honestly. It's a McCoy's Divorce book which actually I do enjoy and some of his characterization makes sense in terms of how he was in their marriage. I also like the idea of McCoy having a little chip on his shoulder about growing up lower class - fully just a characterization I made up that this book and some other beta canon leans into. As the book goes on though, McCoys written a little too damsel in distress-y and just seems way less competent in general which is annoying. Also while I do believe he'd still carry love for everyone he's loved including his ex-wife, I don't believe he'd go back to her or become her affair partner like the book has him do near the end (after these scenes where she gets him drunk and basically forces some kisses on him, like WHAT is going on here.)

Haven't yet read, but recommend:

Diane Duane books including The Wounded Sky, Spock's World, the Rihannsu series. Haven't yet read them because they're my treat for when I run out of trek novels. Every quote I've seen from them looks sooo enticing.

The Entropy Effect - again haven't read it yet, looks great

Ex Machina - have not yet read, intriguing quotes

[scary-grace]

Shigaraki x Reader WIP Poll

I started but didn't finish a bunch of fics for Halloween, and in an effort to distract myself from everything I'd like to get into them! Below are excerpts from four fics I got a decent start on. Once you've read them, vote in the poll at the bottom for which one you think I should finish first!

Necromancer Shigaraki

            Tomura stares at your body, torn. You’re just barely dead. He watched you take your last breaths only seconds ago, and he knows even without touching you that your skin’s still warm, your blood still liquid, your brain still alight with electrical impulses. You’re the perfect candidate for a resurrection, and Tomura needs a perfect candidate, or it’s not going to work. Spirits of the restless dead might be drawn to Tomura like moths to a bug zapper, but the real money in necromancy comes through resurrections, and Tomura’s never done one successfully.

            That was fine while Tomura’s master was still in charge, but when he was captured, his guild disbanded. Tomura and his friends had to find a new home, and their new guildmaster gives zero shits about potential and all the shits about results, which means that Tomura’s inability to manage a complete resurrection has gone from an awkward conversation to a significant problem. Tomura’s friends have made themselves useful to the Hassaikai guild already. If Tomura can’t, he’ll be out on his ear.

            He needs to resurrect somebody, and he needs to do it fast. You’d be the ideal subject if your last words hadn’t been a demand to do the exact opposite.

Demon Shigaraki

In all of Tomura’s depictions, he’s missing something – his index and middle finger off his left hand. Offering him yours should get his attention. You adjust your grip on the handle of the knife and speak. “I conjure you, Shigaraki Tomura, instrument of destruction and symbol of fear. Come to me.”

            The circle hums to life around you. The book said it would do that. The book also said to explain. “Someone took everything away from me. I want to pay him back, but I can’t.” Bitterness fills the back of your throat, stings your eyes. Your hatred for Keigo chokes off your voice for a moment. “Shigaraki Tomura, spirit of entropy, dominion of grief, vengeance is mine. Help me claim it.”

     You set your hand on top of the ninth symbol, spreading your thumb, fourth, and fifth fingers wide, leaving a clear strike at your index and middle fingers. Seeing them there, isolated on the red-chalked concrete floor, turns your stomach. How hard will you have to strike to amputate them? What if you can’t do it? This is insane. You need to move on. Move towns, move countries, dye your hair and change your name, go under and surface again somewhere far from Takami Keigo, where you’ll never hear his name again. Is vengeance against the guy who did you wrong really worth mutilating yourself? Do you really hate him that much?            

Yes. You do.

Crossroads Demon Shigaraki

Tomura doesn’t know how time passes for humans when they’re alive, but he knows how it passes for you because of how you wake up. Most of the souls at Tomura’s crossroads were dead before they knew what hit them, and they wake up slowly, peacefully. They seem to know they’re dead already. They get up fast and walk faster, dissolving into nothingness past the edge of the crossroads before they even realize that Tomura’s there. But you knew what hit you. You know something went wrong. Tomura knows, because when you wake up, you lurch upright, clawing at your chest and struggling to breathe.

You’re dead. You don’t need to breathe. You don’t need to shiver, either, but your spirit’s shaking all over as you press your hands against your chest, touch along your arms and legs, reach up to the back of your head and press down hard. Tomura remembers what your body looked like on the road, and you must remember, too, because with every injury you can’t find, your panic increases. Your hands keep returning to your chest, the back of your head, like you’re trying to hold your body together.

You don’t have a body anymore. There’s nothing there, and Tomura doesn’t like the way watching you makes him feel. “Hey,” he says, and you freeze in place. “Pull it together. You’re dead.”

Cyborg Shigaraki

You work your fingers beneath the net, pulling it up and away from his neck so you can cut it away without getting the knife anywhere near his skin. Once you’ve made the necessary cuts, you get to work unwrapping it, sliding your hand behind his head and lifting it as gently as you can manage as you tug the net free. He’s almost dead weight, but not quite. When you lower his head back to the sand, you take a moment to move his hair out of his face.

            You get a shock from there. His eyes are open, their irises blood-red, and there are scars over his eye and the corner of his mouth. As you watch, he blinks slowly, then focuses on you. The voice that passes through his cracked lips is raspy and quiet, so quiet that you have to lean in to hear. “Leave me.”

            “I can’t do that,” you say. You can’t call for an ambulance – there’s no cell service down here, and in the time it would take you to get back in range, it’ll be too late. “Nobody should be alone when they –��            

“Won’t die.” He coughs, and a spatter of blood exits his mouth. Blood wells up around the driftwood spar, too. “Once I take it out.”

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 25 of Nona the Ninth

So this chapter has a broken Gideon skull, which in this book seems to mean people being deceitful, and something is definitely up because Gideon is like 2-3 times as much Gideon as she normally is in this chapter, and I don't think that's an impression I only have because I've recently been through 3/4 of book full of Nona POV

Throughout this chapter, Gideon is referred to as "the corpse" or "the corpse prince" frequently, and I just feel like I should point out that we've gotten to the point where there are actually two different walking and talking corpses in this scene and both of them could plausibly be referred to as a prince. Even though Naberius's body is not currently being controlled by Ianthe, Naberius himself was a prince before he died

Hmm

That's all the definitions, I think Gideon just made this one up. Also, it's not a good day when you learn a new ethnic slur from the dictionary

Pyrrha acts like Gideon said "yes" here, but she didn't. That's like, a combination of "yes" and "nope"

It's hilarious, and I think actually accurate, that she's still terrified of the needle even though she is literally immune to needles now

"Judith Deuteros for some reason" really just sums up Judith's whole role in this story, doesn't it? It also would make a great blog title for a Judith fanblog, someone should get on that

Poor Judith! It's been a hot minute since Judith actually said something in a language that someone other than Nona can understand, so I really do hope it still is Judith in her body, and not someone or something else in there now

Right, so this could potentially mean:

The whole time since she impaled herself on the fence (unlikely since Gideon was stealth-narrating the entirety of Harrow the Ninth)

The whole time since Pyrrha and Nona met up with BOE at the end of Harrow the Ninth (since BOE had Gideon's body at that point, I think it's entirely possible that Gideon's soul transferred back into it from Harrow's body when she came into its proximity)

The whole time since John reacquired Gideon's body and made his modifications to it, and possibly also brought Gideon's soul back to it at that point

She could also just mean "the whole time I've been in New Rho" or "the whole time you've been in the barracks" but obviously she's been awake for longer than that since she was around to receive medals and stuff from John

Wiktionary says a "rusk" is a "weaning food for children" but doesn't give any kind of information on what specific food it is, or if it's just a general word for that kind of food

So Ianthe can "shut her off" somehow. I'm not sure if I buy that it was Gideon's idea to come here. I don't think she likes Ianthe, I don't think she would have thought New Rho would be a fun place to be, and even if she actually wanted to go to Ninth House like she says later I don't think she could have predicted that she'd be in a position for that to happen here and there are much easier and more straightforward ways for her to get to the Ninth House if she'd stayed with John

An interesting question is whether or not she would have won a fight with Ianthe's entropy field. I tend to think not, because a literal bar of metal didn't survive the entropy field, and even though she has some, like, I guess artificial preservation from being John's daughter she wasn't immune to direct physical damage because of that and even John himself wasn't immune to being taken apart into bits by Mercy, and since Mercy made the OG entropy field I'm sure it probably works using the same principle as whatever she did to John. Gideon may still survive the entropy field somehow, but if the entropy field was still functional it would actually be a great way for Palamedes to get a blood sample from her for Tomb-opening purposes, and so I think John would be extremely against having any such thing anywhere near Gideon's body. So I'm sticking with my theory that this was Ianthe's idea. She intentionally showed Gideon's body during the broadcast, she did that on purpose, although I guess if Gideon was "turned off" during that time she might not know that

Man, thanks for nothing, Gideon

Significant things that happened in the River at the end of the last book:

G1deon and a bunch of ghosts scared Number Seven off and it went to New Rho

Augustine was eaten by the Stoma

Harrow's and Palamedes' River bubbles ceased to exist

The Mithraeum was submerged in the River and sank very far down, unknown currently if John and Ianthe managed to save it

I can't think of why any of these things would make it safe for non-Lyctors to travel safely through the River. The ghosts all make themselves scarce around resurrection beasts, but I'm sure Ianthe and Gideon's journey didn't start out in the presence of a resurrection beast and I don't think the ghosts are the reason why River travel is dangerous for non-Lyctors

Blatant lies, lmao

She's so bad at lying, she starts off with "I don't want anything anymore" and finishes with "I want to go to the Ninth House because I have unfinished business there", and I suspect both of those things are at least partly lies. But I think she's right that John would probably give her a medal for killing this collection of people at this point, including Corona I think

But I suspect that she is the one who wants to go back to the Ninth House, for some undisclosed reason, and she's not acting on John or Ianthe's wishes here. If John wanted her to go back to the Ninth House she would already be there yesterday. If Ianthe wanted her to go there, I don't think she would have put up that entropy field, and she might even have tried to do some deal with BOE where she exchanged Gideon for the Sixth House. Also, I don't think Ianthe actually gives a shit about the Ninth House or anything that happened there. And there's no one else left in John's circuit at this point

Man, when Pyrrha said she was heavy, I just thought it was because she was tall and full of muscle. How damn strong is Pyrrha, exactly?

No, hold on, let me math this

A normal adult human has 11 kg of bones. Cortical bone makes up 80% of bone mass and has an average density of 1908 kg/m3, and cancellus bone makes up 20% and has an average density of 1178 kg/m3, so that is an average density of 1762 kg/m3 over all. There are 1,000,000 cm3 in 1 m3, so 11 kg / 1762 kg/m3 * 1,000,000 cm3/m3 is 6,242.9 cm3 of bone. Titanium has a density of 4.506 g/cm3. 6,242.9 cm3 * 4.506 g/cm3 is 28,130.5 g or a little over 28 kg. Since bones usually weigh 11 kg, that's only 17 extra kg of bone, so she only actually weighs about 37 and a half more pounds than usual. She says "titanium plex", which is not a real thing, but I can't imagine that titanium plex would actually be more dense than titanium, so I think it checks out that she would just be somewhat heavier than expected and not ridiculously heavy or something like that

That's a great question that I'd love to see answered. Is the fence also going to turn out to be some kind of holy object infused with a power even higher than John?

Speaking of holes, I remember back a long time ago I reblogged that one poll that mentioned stigmata sex, and people assured me that while the stigmata were actually in the book, the stigmata sex was not. Are Gideon's holes the stigmata? Does that count as stigmata? I think it's in the wrong place, isn't it?

So, thanergy is cell death, but it seems like dead bodies radiate thanergy even if no cell death is occurring, because John's cryo bodies were generating thanergy for him even after he'd completely stopped them from rotting. So Gideon's body is somehow preserved due to being related to John, but in a way that doesn't involve being infused with thalergy as she suggests for the blood sample, because as we know from the last chapter, body + soul + thalergy = living person, and Gideon isn't a living person, so she must be missing one of those, and it's not her body or her soul. The preservation only applies to the bounds of her body, and her body is still radiating thanergy, apparently enough that it would kill the blood sample?

She got her whole childhood fantasy of a famous and powerful parent who gave her everything she wanted, but that person turned out to be John, and now she's stuck with him and Ianthe and being used as figurehead for John's military, and he spent just enough effort on her to make sure that her body can't be used against him but didn't fix the gaping holes in her chest, and the person she sacrificed herself for is missing and possibly dead, and someone else is in her body instead

I mean, Ianthe was keeping her locked up behind the entropy field. I wonder if she's had a lot of that from John, too

[my-jokes-are-my-armour]

About the fire and the ice

I am not always on board with the show on the artistic direction. More often than not, framing is poor and the composition not really interesting. Sometimes there are interesting idea coming out of nowhere or challenging perspectives but the visual aspect doesn't seem the most rewarding. BUT, they are still pushing a lot of informations in our eyes and telling substories in the details. And there are often something more to get out of this. I enjoy that a lot.

One of this little thing they do from the start is one of the late lore point of the books. They just teased us so far, and that is linked to Ithiline's prophecy, the wild hunt and the White Frost.

In the books, things are quite vague about the Frost but I can easily imagine it to be an environmental subtext. In the game, they have their own vision about it. But I have also my little reading that I found growing more and more throught the series. And this is shown so far, not told.

Fire and ice are everywhere in the show. Cold tones against warm ones. Blue and red are omnipresent in some characters. A part of it is from the nation color code but for some, this is more symbolic. In general, every character has its code / symbols and or colors. (One day, I will publish my essay on the costumes lol). Finding those symbols at specific moments is like foreshadowing or telling a substory.

For example : Ciri eating a rat and subsequently calling Dara ratboy in S1. Her having killed a rat and exposed it in her room in S2. Her meeting a group of misfits called the Rats in S3 and fowards.

Now, some events are connected with some little things that seems random but are not. Like the rat, the connection is made clear at some point. The White Frost is connected with chaos, Hen Ichaer powers and symbolically with fire magic, which is the most destructive of all.

Did you noticed that everytime a huge amount of magic or a core elder blood power is used, it snows afterward. And the biggest connection is made in the infamous Blood Origins prequel.

Here some exemples :

Sodden battle - Yennefer channels a huge amount of fire magic, mages uses all sort of chaos powers. The next day, the day is normal nearby, but there is now falling on the battlefield.

Mousesack holds a magic barrier for hours. Ciri shatters a monolith with her scream; power scream being the first manifestation of her elder blood heritage. Later on the battle field it snows and when Mousesack is killed (probably a day later) we can still see the snow on the griund and the building around.

Ciri is possessed by Voleth Meirh, she uses her inter sphere travel. Later when everything is calm again, it snows. This is discreet (also I couldn't take a shot where we see it clearly) and it happens a lot in Kaer Morhen so it can go unnoticed as well, but this is there again.

Overall Ciri, before the end of S3 is attached to snow and winter. We will cover that in the next part.

Now the connection is in Blood Origin. It is done with Jaskier in the intro and outro, and most importantly with Balor :

Seanchai appears on a battlefield, freezes time, she is associated with elder blood symbols with the flowers, makes Jaskier travel to an unknown location - maybe another sphere, and... it snows there. Also the contrast is voluntary shown in the colors : fire and blood in the first place, cold and blue tones in the second.

The same applies to Balor... let see how it builds and ends.

Entropy, chaos and sources

In Blood Origin, the elves magic is "weak" but pure. It is equilibrium and natural. It feels a lot like the druidic powers of Mousesack. It doesn't seem to damage the world around or if it does, this is slow to show effect. But chaos magic works with a compromised balance. You have to take from something to channel it. It seems fair trade but the balance is twisted and involves often destduction. Something has to die, to make it work. And if you don't have anything to sacrifice, it will take from you.

Draining the power from a source, counters the destructive effect on oneself, but what about the source itself ?

In Blood Origin, Zacharee feels the chaos magic like a pollution coming from the monoliths. In the main series, some other elves are also sensible to the imbalance, like Toruviel, and probably the Dryads too.

Spoilers here : Mixing the books and the show, elves are a very developed civilisation but built on massive "flows" to their survival : they live too long and reproduce too slow, and they consume natural ressources without adaptation as they do not know agriculture. So their population can grow exponentially when they are in a fast age, and suffers a lot when ressources begin to diminish. Their solution is to leave their world behind, travel to another sphere and eat a new world.

Elves from the Continent have conquered the world of dwarves and gnomes and ages passing their blood weakened, they lost most of their powers and forgot about how their ancestor travelled, and the Conjunction of the Spheres "sealed" the worlds away for a time. The prophecy of Ithiline comes from the generational attemps to revive elder blood through genetic selection, in order to have an individual that can reopen the gate of the worlds. It should have been an elf but Lara Doren fell in love with a human and broke the first attempt, leading to Ciri in the end.

Blood Origin follows that line here, not always with great coherence because the lore isn't explored fully, and more evocative. It lets the viewer to search for the hints. But the part that interests me is the consequences of the use of chaos and the death of the worlds from the White Frost.

In the series, they kept the conquerant elves that leaps from one world to another, consuming their ressources. It comes out with the Merwyn arc, reviving old stories and wanting to do the same to save her people. But the ancient elves, those who came first to conquer, are not mentioned, neither is their homeland. The gate through the world is explored through the monolith and we see different spheres. The one that interests me is the desert one with the chaos entities. Because this is the first time we see the White Frost.

When Balor travels in the desert sphere and makes the sacrifice to obtain chaos, he basically becomes a "source". Instantly the ground around him freeze and it begins to snow. And something invisible walks behind him. As if the entities weren't bodyless but were existing on another plan of reality.

The thing is that it illustrates what could be their take on the White Frost. It seems to come from the sources empowerment and to be the result of something like entropy.

For the chaos magic to be used a sacrifice has to be made and the energy come from one place to another through the conduit of the caster. The more energy they use, the colder their surrounding becomes.

Now, in the show, this idea embedded a lot in Ciri's journey to unveil her power. But, they didn't explain the concept of sources very well. They did it a bit in S3 but they didn't attach it to Ciri properly.

Magic need a source to take from. Yennefer teaches Ciri to sense them in the elements. Water and earth are shown for example. And fire is forbidden because : you are the source and usually it consumes you. Rience consumed his soul to master it. Yennefer consumed her own magic habilities for a time but she used existing flames to generate hers.

But Ciri can control fire without counterparts from herself, like Balor. That is because she is a source. So in the show, they symbolised her power with the colors and the implicite meaning attached to it. And those colors are attached to the prophecy itself.

The prophecy

Ithiline's prophecy opposes the fire and the ice in the semantics.

"I tell you that the time of the sword and axe approaches, the time of the Wolf's Blizzard. The Time of the White Frost and White Light, the Time of Madness and Disdain, Tedd Deireadh, the Final Age. The world will perish amidst ice and be reborn with the new sun. Reborn of the Elder Blood, of Hen Ichaer, of a planted seed. A seed that will not sprout but burst into flames!"

I am highlighting here the vocabulary that evokes cold and white, on one side, and the fire and red, on the other.

This color code has been respected in the visual grammar of the series in many aspect, especially with those who are involved in the imagerie around the Hen Ichaer. And this is very present for Ciri, as I said, throught the wakening of her powers.

S1 and S2, she is mostly seen in cold environments and with pale colors or some blue, which is also associated with Cintra in many ways so we have to dissociate that, and take only the things that are atttached to her supranatural nature.

S3, there is a shift as her power awakens strongly. The desert part leads to the moment she embraces the fire and almost let it take over her.

A seed that will not sprout but burst into flames...

And that imagery and color code is shared by :

The women of elder blood

Those who have the elder blood don't necessarily get the special powers. Sometimes it is dormant and passed on the next generation. Like Calanthe for example.

Lara Dorren : if we don't take the possible connection with Éile and Fjall from the start of the special blood of Ciri, the show gives us also the first known brick toward Hen Ichaer and her tale as the same contrast of cold and hot than Ciri's prophecy.

And when a severe frost descended in the night, Lara breathed her last on the forested hilltop, giving birth to a tiny daughter, whom she protected with the remains of the warmth still flickering in her. And though she was surrounded by the blizzard, the night and the winter, spring suddenly bloomed on the hilltop and feainnewedd flowers blossomed. Even today do those flowers bloom in only two places: in Dol Blathanna and on the hilltop where Lara Dorren aep Shiadhal perished.

This imagery is conserved in the conscient dream of Ciri through the Dol Durza. Especially when the interference from the Wild Hunt is revealed.

Note : I put a little purple/pink over the Feainnewedd flower because this symbole appears also a lot around the women of elder blood.

Falka : I can't put very precisely when Falka is born and where she is in the lineage because there is a wierd mix of children, with Lara Doren descendant chidren and hers. What is clear is that Falka is part elf and she is heavily associated with fire. She is considered as malevolent and she was burned alive.

"An avenger will be born of my blood,"she cried. "From my tainted Elder Blood will be born the avenger of the nations and of the world! He will avenge my torment! Death, death and vengeance to all of you and your kin!" Only this much was she able to cry out before the flame consumed her.

In the show Falka is associated with fire in two scenes : Stregobor telling his version of her story. And then, she appears in Ciri's delusion in the desert as she almost succumb to the fire.

Falka becomes her chosen name after she takes her first life and joins the Rats. There is a strong metaphor with the fire and the forbidden line never to cross that is to kill someone. Both take something from you that is lost forever.

Francesca : She is supposedly pure elf. And she demonstrates life and death kind of magic. She is a flipping coin. She can be protective and soft, but also vengeful and destructive. She goes to one side to another as the traumas pill up for her.

Her soft side shows her mostly in blue colors and her vengeful side in red. The pike is during the siege of Aretuza, when she let the pain and anger consume her after Filavandrel's death. She looks at the ring of fire floating above the school and make it drops on everyone. The fire reflecting in her eyes is a metaphor that links those three women in a way.

She is not the Hen Ichaer of the prophecy, she doesn't have Ciri's powers even if she is powerful, but she is pursuing her relentlessly. Doing so, she repeats some errors of the past, reflecting on Merwyn arc.

Note : that the other strong symbol attached to her is a rose. I will maybe dive into that analyse another day.

Conclusion :

This is not the last time we will see this colors and symbols used around Ciri during her journey and it will be interesting to see what they highlight with it. I have some things to look for to try to validate my theory on the Frost once and for all😅. Maybe in S4, probably more in S5. So I will continue to look for the snow 😉.

Next time, I might dive into the flowers or another strong symbol used all along or hidden in plain sight.

[cosmoknightchaos]

Hey:)

Oh yeah if it wasn’t noticed in the ask thingy i answered summer killed a guy

Uhm,,, literally do any question for any oc. I would love to hear you talk about sky because I love her a lot but I know you wanna talk about the directors:)

Mroowwww meow:333

Cracks knuckles Alright! Here we go!

Below the cut is every single question, answered about Sky. And if I couldn't answer it with Sky, I answered it with her ET's Coffee Shop equivalent, Phoebe Kepler. Enjoy.

1. Does your OC have a voice claim, if so who?

Sky's (and Phoebe's) voice claim is Penelope Scott! Here's to hoping I don't have to change that, but if I don't find a better voice claim for KMJ, I'm probably gonna change Sky to be British as well.

2. Who's your OCs best friend? How did they become best friends?

Sky, unfortunately, is a bit lonely in the Horizon. At least time is weird there so she's not really aware of how long she's alone! Sky has Ru, of course, and the shapeshifters (occasionally accompanied by Entropy) will stop by from time to time, but she doesn't really have a best friend.

Similarly, Phoebe is a bit lonely, but not to the same extent as Sky. She's pretty close to her boss, ET, as well as having a couple friends around the city. But she doesn't really have a specific best friend.

3. What song describes your OC?

Arguably one of the biggest tragedies in my career as an OC writer is the fact that Sky doesn't really have any songs attached to her. Which pisses me off.

I have a few songs that I associate with her in my brain, but none that really describe her. You Only Know by Phemiec and Alone Together by Fall Out Boy are Sky songs, and Rat (linked in question one) and Sweet Hibiscus Tea, both by Penelope Scott, are Phoebe songs.

4. What song describes your OC and their partner/love interest?

Along Together, which I mentioned above, is a Skaide song. Cannot for the life of me explain why. It just has the right vibes.

I'll. I'll let Tristen hijack this question because I'm fucking insane about Keplerroe. They are AWFUL. The Death of Peace of Mind by Bad Omens is both a Keplerroe song and Tristen's number one song. As a quick heads up, it's a biiiit graphic. This Is Love by Air Traffic Controller is also a good Keplerroe song.

5. Do you ship your OC with a Canon character? If so who?

Jaide is canon to A Hat in Time so yes.

6. If your OC is in a fantasy setting, what profession would they be in the modern day?

So. So you'll never guess what the big change between WTSS and ETCS is.

Sky in a modern setting is Phoebe. Yeah.

7. Vice-Versa! If your OC is in the modern day, what fantasy class would they be? Would they be a different race?

Phoebe in a fantasy setting is Sky!

8. What hobbies does your OC have? What do they do to unwind?

Sky really likes reading! She reads as many books as she can get her hands on- occasionally books from purple time rifts can fall through the fabric of time and land in the Horizon, and Sky collects those. Entropy has also "borrowed" a couple books from various planets (and probably other dimensions as well). Sky also gardens! She has a fairly extensive garden in her yard and grows a lot of goofy Horizon-native plants.

Phoebe, unfortunately, lives in an apartment and is not allowed to have an extensive garden. However she does have a couple small plants that she can grow inside. She's still a bookworm, and in addition to that, Phoebe will take walks through the local city parks to unwind.

9. How does your OC handle their physical health? Do they take care of themselves?

Sky handles her health fairly well! She has plenty of time to.

Phoebe isn't as good at taking care of herself. She certainly tries, but she's also a tired gal in her early twenties who is living check to check and has school on top of that. Physically, she's not in the best shape, but fortunately for her, her boss is very determined to make sure she takes care of herself, and has forced her to take a day or two of paid sick leave to recover.

10. How does your OC handle their mental health? Do they take care of themselves?

Sky has good mental health! Every now and then the loneliness will get to her or she'll get really frustrated with King and she'll spiral a bit, but she's good at recovering.

Similarly, Phoebe has pretty damn good mental health for being a tired early-twenties gal. She's stressed with school (trade school for culinary arts!) and very much in need of a good night's sleep, but besides that she's doing surprisingly well!

11. What was your inspiration for your OC?

I've said this so many times at this point, but Sky started out as Queen Vanessa and somehow ended up at the complete opposite. I don't think I can say much else on her inspiration due to spoilers, but I really wanted to give the girls specifically an older sister character. Wendy from Gravity Falls helped with characterization.

Phoebe came from taking Sky and placing her in a more modern story. Phoebe herself doesn't have many inspirations, but a lot of her character is just me experimenting with putting Sky in situations :)

12. Does your OC interact with other people's OC? If so, who's their best OC friend?

YES!!! YES SHE DOES!!!!!! SKY'S GIRLFRIEND IS THE BEST WOMAN IN THE ENTIRE WORLD AND HER NAME IS JAIDE AND SHE BELONGS TO @artblock-tm AND I LOVE THE TWO OF THEM SO SO SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!! THEY ARE EVERYTHING TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Of course, there's the entire Skaide Found Family, along with the cast of RP6, including @/therealnoot's wonderful motherfucker Jinx.

I have restrained myself from having Phoebe interact with other OCs because that is a very slippery slope into spoiler territory, but I do have a list of OCs I want her to interact with once spoilers are no longer an issue! Such as. The entire Skaide found family.

13. Does your OC have a rival? How did it start?

Oh boy guys does Sky have any rivals? Guys I'm not sure. I can't think of anyone guys

Sky has King Moonjumper! And it started with him being a self-absorbed asshole! Which... isn't really true but it definitely is KMJ's fault. They fight because King wants out of the Horizon and Sky's trying to stop him from doing that because it will fuck up the time-space continuum or something like that.

Phoebe doesn't really have any specific rival, but she does have her narrative foil (And later main antagonist), Angelo! They get along for a while and then things go rough and they fight to the death. Typical girl things you know

14. Who's a character your OC cannot stand! It's on sight when they see them!

Once again, King Moonjumper! Bitch.

As for Phoebe. TRISTEN FUCKING KANNAROE. OHOHO THIS MOTHERFUCKER. Not only is it on sight for Phoebe but it is on sight for me as well. And also most of the rest of the cast. It's a fucking tragedy that Phoebe isn't the one who kills him because she deserves it.

15. Will your OC ever retire? Do you see them making it?

This one is a bit too close to spoilers, so I'll be skipping it. Sorry.

16. How's their relationship with their parents? Are they alive?

Sky... doesn't really have parents! She has Uncle Entropy, but that's it.

Phoebe has a good relationship with her parents! They don't talk too much because Phoebe is busy with work and trade school, but she tries to keep in touch.

17. If your OC has kids, are they a good parent? Do they ever feel guilty if they have to leave them?

Skipping this one because Sky/Phoebe doesn't have kids and never will! Older sibling figure ftw :))))

18. What are their pronouns? What would they like to be called?

Both use she/her! Sky is genderqueer, and Phoebe is probably also genderqueer but too busy to question her gender identity.

19. What's their sexuality? What's their love language both giving and receiving?

Asexual panromantic for both!

20. If they fight, what's their weapon of choice?

Sky has, of course, her kickass chained blades! Combined with her crystal magic, Sky is a very good fighter :)

Phoebe doesn't have weapons for a majority of the story. She has a super plot-relevant pocket knife that Angelo gives her early on, and she does wield Tachycardia (aka TickTach) once, but it's not until just before the climax of the story that Phoebe receives her signature chained blades.

21. What song best describes their relationship with their enemy?

One of the songs I mentioned in question 3, You Only Know, is both a Sky and King Moonjumper song! Even though it doesn't really describe their relationship. It just fits both of them.

Once again, I was cursed with not relating very many songs to Sky. And I can't even begin to talk about Phoebe's various antagonists throughout the story, but please revisit question 4 for some of the songs.

22. Fight or Flight? Are they a lover or a fighter?

Fight! Sky and Phoebe are both super kind people, but they're also stubborn and willing to fight for what they believe!

23. Is your OC reliable? Can I call them up at two in the morning if I have a flat tire?

Absolutely. Sky would be over in a heartbeat with a spare tire and help you replace it. Phoebe would be pissed you woke her up, and probably wouldn't drive out to wherever you are, but she would tell you who to call instead or give you instructions on how to fix it. Sky's a bit more reliable because she's less tired, but both are super trustworthy.

24. Can they play any instruments? If so, what do they play?

Although Phoebe and Sky do not play an instrument, if they were to, it would be clarinet. That would also be the instrument that Sky's main music motif is in!

25. Are they the kind of person who can't resist a good song? Can I catch your OC singing to themselves while they do the dishes?

ABSOLUTELY. Both Sky and Phoebe would love listening to music while doing chores. Heck, Phoebe already does that.

26. What flower do you associate your OC with?

Fictional-ass flowers. The Horizon has goofy flowers that Entropy has spread to literally every piece of media they touch, and Sky/Phoebe is one of three characters associated with these specific flowers- and yes, they do serve some mild narrative importance. Entropy and Tranquility are the other two.

27. What's their spirit tamagotchi? Or an animal you associate them with?

CATS! Sky and Phoebe both have a cat!! There's, of course, the iconic bushcat Ru, but Phoebe has befriended a stray cat who she's nicknamed Rue!!

28. What clique would they be in? (Draw them in the clothes of said group!)

Not drawing this because I am tiiiiired

Sky would not be very cliquey! She tries to be friends with everyone :)

Phoebe would also not like to be in any cliques, but she naturally gravitates to the smart kids.

29. Imagine a mood board for your OC! What's on it? (Make it if you want!)

I will get back to this one I promise. I will do this. Not now though because I want to be done with this.

30. My OC and your OC are friends. This isn't a question. I'm not asking. (How do they respond?)

JOKES ON YOU, SKY IS ALREADY FRIENDS WITH YOUR OCS!!!!

Phoebe would also be friends with your OCs!! Despite the different circumstances, they are the same person at their core, so she would love meeting Ameya and the rest of your OCs :)

[monstersdownthepath]

Got a bit inspired by the WotR CRPG's Lich path, but what changes, if any, would you make to the Lich template to fit an Archlich, from DnD's older editions (Forgotten Realms wiki indicates they were first mentioned back in 2e, and last in 4e, not very common though)? It may not entirely fit Golarion's cosmology of Undead = Bad, but I find the idea of a spellcaster going into Lichdom for altruistic reasons (like, say, needing an emotionless, painless, nigh-inexhaustible army to stem the tides of the Abyss) fascinating. If nothing else, it might get the Church of Pharasma more interested in a particular cause to get this Lich to up and die peacefully and willingly. And I mention 'changes' since apparently the process of becoming an Archlich was both more difficult, but could yield greater power. Although I can't really find anything to support this claim otherwise, can't find any pages on stats on the topic and searching up 'Archlich' just makes Vecna show up.

-----

Oh wow that's bizarre, I had no idea there was a Good-aligned Lich equivalent in older editions! I'm a little baffled by the fact they didn't think to name themselves anything more creative than just "Better Lich," but the implications of their existence and their creation process sort of does make them Better Liches. If what I'm reading here is correct, the primary difference between becoming an Archlich and a normal Lich is that a normal Lich takes shortcuts in their paths to power, forcing other creatures to bear the brunt of the trauma of their transformation, draining life and soul from others away to sustain themselves. Meanwhile, the Archlich must undergo a quest to discover a 'secret spell' and must learn every single spell required in the ritual; they cannot skimp on any detail, their ascension cannot be done another way, and carries a very real and very intimidatingly large chance that all their preparations are rendered meaningless and the ritual fails by pure bad luck.

Interesting! There's something to be said about the rewards that come from rejecting the path of least resistance.

Also, I wouldn't say Undead are always Bad And Evil, but as we've discussed at length on this blog, in the Pathfinder universe it's very difficult to be an undead that's Good-aligned and especially difficult to STAY good once the transformation is finished. Becoming undead for altruistic and good reasons doesn't change the fact that your soul will now itch to cause destruction and entropy. The urge can certainly be steered in acceptable directions, and in fact in the very video game you've mentioned it's one of the more powerful and useful Mythic paths for doing exactly that in the way you've suggested... but in-game it doesn't stop Pharasma from leering at you, and to complete your transformation into a full-power Lich in WotR you do in fact have to purge Good from your soul. Even your mentor, Zacharius, became a lich for an ostensibly good reason, only for undeath to slowly warp him into something ruthless and pragmatic.

... anyway, that wasn't your question. You asked what I would do to make the Archlich! The good news is that I do happen to have the book their stats appear in (Monsters of Faerun), stats I apparently never read or never found interesting enough to retain, but the bad news is that they're not especially different from a regular Lich, with a few notable exceptions:

--Archliches cannot be Turned by Good-aligned Clerics and are immune to channeled positive energy.

--Archliches have a constant Water Walk effect on themselves.

--The Paralyzing Touch of an Archlich sets the victim in a death-like state of suspended animation, during which the creature does not need to eat, breathe, or drink.

--Archliches can send their spirit outwards from themselves 3/day in a manner akin to, but not quite, Astral Projection.

There's apparently some more details in even earlier books, such as the ability for an Archlich to destroy any Undead being they create with a touch (presumably to end their service), immunity to the attacks and spells of any creature with 6 or less Hit Dice, and perhaps most impressively the ability to passively regenerate spell slots, but I do not have access to that particular book (Lost Ships) at this time to confirm for certain.

[cambriancrew]

What is Young Wizards, is it anything like The Aepects by L C Mawson at all????

(And if it isn't that's even more of an excuse to Tell Us About Young Wizards!! Win-win!!!)

AHHH YES. We could talk about Young Wizards literally for hours.

So. It's, in a nutshell, a series by @/dduane Diane Duane, about teenagers who get the ability to use magic, which is enacted primarily by use of the wizardly language The Speech, in exchange for using it to fight the Lone Power who created death and entropy. The main wizard characters are Nita Callahan, a nerdy bookworm with an affinity for plants; her best friend Kit Rodriguez, who has an affinity for mechanical things; and Nita's little sister Dairine, who is a geek whose Wizards manual is a walking laptop. The books are incredibly inventive, with places in them like an alternate universe Manhattan where cars and other vehicles are alive; multiple distant planets, each with amazing aliens; the bottom of the ocean; Ireland where the myths really are true; a Mars where people's ideas of Mars from various forms of media including War of the Worlds and Marvin the Martian from Looney Tunes are present.

They're also beautifully diverse and life affirming. The Senior Advisory wizards are a gay couple. Kit is Hispanic. One major side character is black and autistic. There's other various queer characters. The series deals with serious topics like bullying, cancer, death and loss. But there's a throughthread of determination and hope.

Also, supportive adults! Parents who really care about their kids and support their wizardry! Family dynamics that are actually really good! (Most of the time. Nita and Dairine have their moments lol.)

And then there's the Oath. It's so wonderful, we patterned our Code of Conduct partly on it. There's many different versions, but the one we love the most is as follows:

In Life's name and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve that which grows and lives well in its own way. Nor will I change any creature unless its growth or life or that of the system of which it is a part are threatened, or threaten another.

To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so, looking always to the Heart of Time where all our sundered times are one and all our myriad worlds lie whole in That from which they preceeded.

Also an art version of the Oath:

I can't seem to find the original creator of the art, it was someone on Tumblr but Tumblr search isn't helping, as usual.

We want two tattoos based on this series. One would be Wizard's Knot plus the first little part of the Oath, "In Life's name and for Life's sake". The other would be the traditional greeting of the Lone Power: "Fairest and Fallen, greetings and defiance." Probably would have that one surrounding the semicolon for depression survival, as suicidality is our personal battle with this universe's version of the Lone Power.

They're also super cheap to get as ebooks through the author's own website, as long as you're not in the UK due to Brexit.

We cannot recommend this series highly enough. If you do end up buying the series and reading it, let us know! We'd love to hear what you think. :)

[relleytrots]

1, 7, 14, 19 for the VtM player asks <3

1. Are you a VtM player, storyteller, both or neither? If neither, how do you get your VtM fix?

I'm ol' Relleytrots! Been a forever Storyteller since my teens, in accordance with Stevy's First Law of Roleplaying - whoever has the idea will end up doing all the work. I'm usually the one advocating for giving this game a try, as well as the one who already has the books, and also I enjoy it. Not that I haven't enjoyed kicking back under the supervision of @pathogenic and @mxviatrix in the last few years, but that's a whole new thing for me, really.

7. What is your favourite discipline? Why?

In V5, it's Oblivion. Oblivion takes my two favourites from classic original recipe Vampire and melds them together, reaching deep down into the aesthetic and concept of the Abyss and saying - what if, right, what if it was all actually the one thing? I am vaguely aware that the thing the Lasombra Antediluvian sank down into and became one with and the thing underneath Stygia that all the wraiths are terrified of and the thing at the centre of the Black Spiral are not ackshuwally the same thing, but they feel like they could be. And if I get to mash up cool shadow powers and funky entropy powers and yer actual necromancy and make some of my beloved characters kiss about it - great.

Too many goddamn powers, though. And too many arbitrary, silly prerequisites as a clunky way to keep Ceremonies away from the Lasombra.

14. Who is the (in character) oldest and the (in character) youngest? Would they like each other?

The oldest is Lamorne - pre-Christian Cornish warlord Embraced in ol' Byzantium. The youngest is Sorcha - born in the year 2000. They have met, sort of, nominally, in Sorcha's near-death experiences. Insofar as they can get on, they do. Lamorne is very invested in her continued survival and prosperity. Sorcha is fascinated by their oldest "living" ancestor, the other end of the bloodline and the ancient Prince of Glasgow.

19. Which character is least spoken about? Speak about them now!

Kind of did, just then! Drustanus of Lamorna, Sir Tristan Prince of Glasgow, Lamorne of the Obsidian Mask. The forbidden blorbo. Methuselae are tricky creatures, not really something I like to overdetail or overexpose. I like them as a vague and distant influence on modern age games... but I've given into temptation a couple of times now, because what's the point of having an idea if you never use it?

God forbid I ever run a Dark Ages game set in Glasgow, because Sir Tristan will be right there, low-key regretting that his pre-torpor confessional has become the stuff of chivalric legend, and high-key leaning into it because the Lord has handed him this bounty.

[doomerpatrol]

2024 Comic Log with Overall Ratings

Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui [5/5]: incredibly funny, charming, full of interesting worldbuilding and compelling characters, some strong themes of entropy and consumption/desire and connection/ecology

Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison [5/5]: a darkly creative challenge to the Ubermensch masculinism that dominates comics

The Flash by Mark Waid [4/5]: breezily readable exploration of a character that I think has ebbs and flows, but generally features atypically fun time-travel plots and a great cast

The Flash by Grant Morrison & Mark Millar [4/5]: a solid continuation of Waid's themes and priorities that pushes Flash to his absolute limits

Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon [2/5]: tries to be mutant assimilationist, but can't even do that fucking correctly

X-23 by Craig Kyle & Chris Yost [3/5]: perfectly fine, a little hacky in its treatment of motherhood, but a nice and heartfelt contemporary take on the Wolverine: Weapon X story

JLA by Grant Morrison [5/5]: incredible, maybe Morrison's best ongoing achievement

Seven Soldiers by Grant Morrison [3/5]: very cool idea that doesn't really stick the landing but has a lot of bright spots and fabulous art

Batman: No Man's Land by Greg Rucka (and others) [3/5]: a crossover that features some of the best Batman stories and characterization, and also some of the worst; very much carried by the strength of its premise, best realized by Greg Rucka's stories

Animal Man by Grant Morrison [4/5]: features some of the best single issues I've ever read

All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison [5/5]: needs to be read. beautiful.

Grant Morrison's Batman Epic (includes: Batman, Final Crisis, Batman and Robin, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Batman Incorporated) [5/5]: despite having some questionable character decisions and being dense in a way that can be tiring, I love how it redeems Bruce from one of his worst periods and pulls together his values and history cohesively while injecting some great new ideas and consistent motifs - the idea of a hole at the center of everything, the constant imagery of spirals and recurrence, really stuck with me over time.

Action Comics by Grant Morrison [2/5]: frenetic, but very obviously shows Morrison straining against The New 52 reboot, and doesn't live up to its initial promise of a young Superman of the people, and ends on a sour note that seems to reflect Morrison's justified disillusionment with the industry

Detective Comics by Greg Rucka [3/5]: carried by the lovely monochromatic artwork, sets up some interesting ideas like Bruce's bodyguard but ultimately gets cannibalized by crossovers (coincidentally when the best art disappears)

Wolverine by Greg Rucka [4/5]: features Logan in lone wanderer mode, with some awkward threads that don't really go anywhere but also don't trip up the rest of the story too badly

Catwoman by Ed Brubaker [4/5]: peters out in the last third, but the first two are holistically great noir fiction, and have amazing illustrations

Hawkeye by Matt Fraction [5/5]: beautiful artwork by David Aja and Matt Hollingsworth paired with a compelling, clinically criss-cross structure both in paneling and serialization. astonishing that this book works as well as it does considering its protagonist is 1) typically boring and 2) a huge fuck-up

Punisher / Franken-Castle by Rick Remender [2/5]: fails to live up to its premise because Brian Michael Bendis had dibs on all the important characters, so it just throws everything out the window and does some random shit for a bit

Batman: Hush by Jeph Loeb [3/5]: perfectly fine blockbuster action-mystery with an eyeroll main antagonist

Detective Comics by Scott Snyder [3/5]: starts out strong, finishes super weak. I am pretty uninterested in hackneyed evil-since-childhood villains (see also: Hush), and I find the cynicism which runs through all its plots really poorly executed

Venom by Rick Remender [2/5]: fails to live up to its premise by trying to be a Peter Parker book (and also, briefly and inexplicably, a Ghost Rider book)

Black Widow by Marjorie Liu [4/5]: really gorgeous artwork from Daniel Acuna. I think the plot is a little convoluted and underbaked, but its spy-thriller antics were still quite enjoyable to read, and it has some surprisingly strong emotional beats for a character I'm not super-invested in

Birds of Prey by Gail Simone [4/5]: good cheesy fun with great character writing, though a rushed (and largely unnecessary) final act

Batman: Face the Face by James Robinson [3/5]: a "One Year Later" storyline that has some nice Bruce/Tim moments, but its main Two-Face plot is empty calories

Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four Epic (includes Dark Reign: Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four, FF [Future Foundation]) [5/5]: another series where, even though I can find it overwhelmingly dense or breakneck in pacing, its thematic payoff is so triumphant that I admire it a lot anyway; probably my second favorite FF run, full of fun sci-fi concepts, moving character beats, and creative changes to the team's structure like the Future Foundation

Superman: Up, Up, and Away by Kurt Busiek and Geoff Johns [5/5]: compared to Face to Face - the other big "One Year Later" return - it's literally no contest; incredibly charming, great art, thematic cohesion

[thecurioustale]

My Incredible Expanding List of "High Priority" Creative Works to Read / Watch / Play / Etc. 😰

(No spoilers of any kind in this outburst.)

My To-Read / To-Watch / To-Listen list is where media go to die the long and quiet death of entropy and ice. 😓

Some people, it's like they can read a book a week, or watch a movie a day, or get through a whole TV series every month, or whatever. Not just for a short season, but regularly and indefinitely. It's an integrated part of their lifestyle.

Inconceivable!!

For me it is wildly hard to get around to starting media that I genuinely do want to get to. The reason why is a topic for another day, but I just want to marvel publicly with you at the absurdity of my Current Efforts. All of the following are assigned High Priority:

My sister got me a Nintendo Switch for my birthday this year, and included with it both of the new mainline Zelda games (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom) as well as Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The Pokémon game is my latest Actually Doing It effort; I actually began playing it last week. I told myself that I would absolutely play at least one of these games because I can't have my sister getting me a present that expensive and then me not doing anything with it. And I will say that I am enjoying the game as much as I could have hoped! It's a very pleasant escapist fantasy with very low mental overhead, which my stressed-out, brain-fog-addled self sorely needs.

I would also like to replay the original Life Is Strange (Season 1) ahead of the upcoming sequel with Max Caulfield in it, as well as the prequel and the other two mainline Life Is Strange games. And I bought the entire Life Is Strange comic as it was coming out, and want to read it all the way through when the actual game is fresh in my memory.

Now that I have a Switch I want to get and play Metroid Dread, because I've been avoiding spoilers for it all this time and I would like to stop doing that, and I would also really like to have a new Metroid gameplay experience.

I asked my friend and number one fan Fip for a recommendation of suggested reading to learn more about Incan and pre-Incan Quechua-speaking peoples so that I could better characterize aspects of Cherry's character in Galaxy Federal. She recommended The Saga of the Borderlands. I've bought a used copy of the first book, The Days of the Deer, and it is literally the top book on my Pile of Books by my bed. I've even committed to trying to read the two other books in the trilogy in Spanish (since there is no English translation) if I enjoy the first one.

Fip herself has a number of works that I have been itching to read for quite some time, both out of artistic solidarity as a fellow artist and also because I'm just genuinely interested in what kinds of things a person who likes my work would create with their work.

I have long wanted to read Almost Nowhere ever since another online friend of mine, nostalgebraist, finished writing it, but I told myself that I would read his earlier work Floornight first and so they're both on my List. I'm actually kind of afraid to read these because his work The Northern Caves was heavily inspiring for me with regard to the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel and my fear is that I'm going to read these other works and discover heavy serendipitous overlap, just because I think he and I sometimes tend to have quite similar ideas (albeit thinking about them differently).

Another friend's mom recommended a book to me that my dad recommended like 20 years ago, The Map that Changed the World. This is another book that I've already bought, again used, and it is sitting right under The Days of the Deer in the Pile beside my bed. (And is the only other unread book in said Pile; the others are The Lord of the Rings, which I managed to finally reread a number of months ago, and my own book Tokens of Zeal: Words from a Vanished Age.) I am really looking forward to pleasantly surprising my friend's mom with word that I've read this book, and it would be a nice homage to Dad to finally read it as well.

I've been trying to complete my "Grand Tour of the Virus Comix Online Empire"—i.e., all the online works by Winston Rowntree—for like three years now. As part of this tour I've been sending him detailed notes, but it's been so long since my peopleWatching watchthrough that I'm going to have to rewatch it to compose notes. (I didn't think to start sending him notes until I got to the old Captain Estar webcomic.) I "rushed" my Captain Estar notes when I learned that he was doing a rebooted novelization of the same premise, which became Shirley Estar Goes to Heaven and which I highly recommend you read. There's a new peopleWatching season coming out in a year or two so now I want to expedite that, but I also have to go through all of Subnormality (the best webcomic of all time) and various other works of his.

This is all just the stuff at the highest level of priority for me to get to. There are, like, three more tiers below this—all of them longer. And I'm prolly gonna be playing Pokémon Arceus for months, because I am taking my sweet time with it. (I don't get to play video games nearly as often as I would like to, and this one is a really cathartic end-of-day treat, which is proving especially helpful because of the health problems that are making it difficult for me to get to sleep sometimes.) Oh lord and I haven't even touched on any YouTube videos or music works! 😰

And then, of course, there is my own creative work also pressing for my time.

I just find it maddening and ludicrous and comical and tragic all at once that I am so slow at both consuming and creating work.

I am molasses in January. 😭😭😭 How do y'all do it?!!

Actually, I don't know if I would truly want to consume a high amount of choice media on the regular. I know this sounds melodramatic, but, whenever some consumer activity competes for my extremely limited leisure time, I'm like "I have to finish writing as many of my books as possible before I die," and I really mean it. And I also have a kind of tainted image of people who spend all their time consuming media due to the fact that my abusive mom spent most of her time watching TV and reading books when I was a kid. That worked its way into me as a worldview that "You have to do more than just consume; you have to do something with the energy that comes from digesting the things you consume." Which I realize isn't objectively true...but it also kinda totally aesthetically is true, at least if you're an artist or have the soul of an artist, which I grant most people are not and do not.

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 24 of Nona the Ninth

The return of the Gideon skull!

For the record, that's when I figured out what they had done

Good news: you finally get to talk face-to-face with your necromancer who you a weirdly intense codependent relationship with and haven't been able to talk to in ages. Bad news: he looks and sounds exactly like Naberius Tern. Do you press the button?

The whole thing where Corona had to pretend to be a necromancer with Ianthe's help must have really contributed to their relationship being this weird sort of incestuous thing. From the last book I sort of got the impression that Ianthe felt like she was Corona's protector, and from what she said last chapter about still planning some way to be with Corona and the fact that she's been actively searching multiple planets for her, it sounds like she had plans to continue that relationship even after she became a Lyctor. I'm not sure if it was made clear at any point if their parents were in on this whole thing or not, but based on their relationship, I feel like they probably weren't? And maybe if they had discovered that Corona wasn't actually a necromancer, something like the Harrow Nova AU would have happened with her. I bet Corona is now glad to have escaped that situation and she's definitely unhappy with how Ianthe treated/is treating Babs, but she still has this weird and twisted up relationship with her

I'm not sure what Pyrrha was pretending here? It sounded like she'd told Ianthe what had happened. Or did Ianthe think she still had Lyctor powers, even when she was Pyrrha and not G1deon?

I'm dying to know what Pyrrha was going to say about Nona's yelling

I never really stopped and thought about the fact that Mercy must have been the one to make the entropy field. Palamedes calculated that it would result in permanent brain damage for Camilla if he did it, and Gideon probably only survived because she's Gideon, but Mercy and Cristabel must have tested this out at some point, right? Was Cristabel just extra thalergenic or something, or did she suffer permanent brain damage? Or did Mercy not run through the whole test herself? Or does the Eighth House have a natural advantage here as was suggested in Gideon the Ninth?

If blood wards age, and get weaker with age, doesn't that mean that John's blood ward on the Tomb should be pretty worn out now after 10,000 years?

It did seem clear to me that Nona's regeneration was much better than Harrow's was in Harrow the Ninth, but I figured that meant it was just like, regular Lyctor-level regeneration. It's interesting that it's actually faster than Lyctor-level regeneration, which maybe also supports her being Alecto, since John's powers came from Alecto and he seems to be the only person more powerful than the Lyctors. But if I understand correctly, I think Lyctors can survive headshots like the one Nona got, or at least BOE thinks they can, and I can't imagine that they didn't try to headshot a Lyctor at least once, since that seems to be their basic MO for killing necromancers

I hope this is not foreshadowing for something, but it probably is

We're 2.75 books into this story and this is the Griddlehark first kiss we get, where Harrow's body is being occupied by someone who definitely isn't Harrow and Gideon is kinda sorta dead and has huge open wounds all down her front

Also, I feel like Nona should be more frightened when a body that she identified as definitely being dead suddenly opens its eyes

That means that Gideon didn't only uh, wake up, I guess, because Nona arrived and has been mobile and able to brush her teeth for a while, because the only other option is that Ianthe manually brushes her teeth for her, and that seems unlikely

I really cannot think of a single time when Mercy would have seen Gideon's body. She saw Gideon's eyes at the end of Harrow the Ninth, and recognized them immediately, but I don't think she ever saw Gideon's body at any point? Unless BOE showed it to her that time when she sent Harrow to kill the planet that just happened to be right next to where We Suffer and Co. were and was like, hey, have fun, I'll be back in 4 hours? I guess she showed up at some point during As Yet Unsent to heal Judith, too, which must have been before that point, so maybe she saw it then?

You punched her out of an airlock, and then she tried to kill you in the incinerator, and then you shot her in the head. This is just how tales of epic romance go in this universe

This is what it means to love in this story isn't it? To own, to squeeze, to cosset, and to destroy

Just a guess, but I think John did not in fact allow her to bring Gideon with her and Ianthe just did it anyway

Is this why people have been saying that Pyrrha must remember the world from before she was resurrected, because she still remembers disco?

So far necromancer/cavalier relationships have been entirely a social construct, there are different rules for them and different ideas about what they mean and how they work across all nine Houses, and we've had cavaliers that switched necromancers, like Protesilaus, like this isn't a soulmate AU. I don't think there should be anything necromantically binding any particular necromancer to their cavalier unless they've actually Lyctorfied. So I can believe that Ianthe has some special necromantic connection to Babs but I don't think there's any reason for Palamedes to have a special necromantic connection to Camilla? Unless the like one step they took towards Lyctorhood counts? But Harrow was able to use necromancy through Gideon when they did the construct challenge back at Canaan House, and they hadn't taken any steps towards Lyctorhood at that point. Even if the phrase "one flesh, one end" somehow has necromantic power, Harrow and Gideon hadn't said that to each other yet at that point

Ianthe put a ward of some kind on her a while back, I wonder if that is protecting her from Number Seven somewhat?

I hope that's like, Nona describing ribs, and not actual teeth in her chest, because why would they be there? It can't have been a modification that John made, because Palamedes claims that her wounds are the same as they were earlier

That does confirm that the only reason Corona came to the barracks was to get Ianthe to put that ward on Judith

Ok, I have a prediction now, which is that since Nona is probably Alecto, or at least mostly Alecto, with maybe some Gideon and/or Harrow residue, when they go to open the Tomb the thing that Pyrrha was afraid of earlier where Nona's soul gets vacuumed out of her body into Gideon is actually going to happen for real with Alecto, and then they will have to try to figure out how to get Harrow's soul back into her body before it dies, and probably also have to deal with Alecto waking up as herself, whatever that turns out to mean

Which is probably why the next book is called Alecto the Ninth

I like how the one thing that breaks her out of pretending to be dead is the thought of getting poked with a needle, haha

So now I have to wonder though, what kind of partly-dead state is she actually in now? And why has she been pretending to be dead? I doubt she would be on Ianthe's side of things and she considers all of these people friends, except for Judith probably

[checkoutmybookshelf]

The One That Takes Place on an Adult Film Set

So if Grave Peril was where we really got to know the Red Court and really dig into one type of vampire, this is where we get the rest of the vampires. This book is a weird amalgamation of Harry breaking an entropy curse on a porn set and Harry LARP-ing the fast few chapters of Dracula. There is just so much weird mirroring in this book too, everything from Harry learning about the real nature of his relationship to Thomas, which mirrors Lara and Inari's relationship to Harry's "porn stars are people too" stance that gets really contradicted by the fact that the only non-Ex-Mrs.-Genosa casualty is the single mother of two who keeps a roof over their heads and food on the table by starring in porn films. Like...For all Harry's protestations of open-mindedness, the entire *premise* of the adult film chunks of this book are "we are punishing porn stars for being porn stars." So let's talk Blood Rites.

This is your SPOILER WARNING and also your CONTENT WARNING for discussions of sex, pornography, and mental assault.

There are three main thrusts to this book (pun sort of intended, but I feel bad about it). There's Harry's Family Stuff and the White Court, there is the Black Court, and there is Arturo Genosa and the adult film. Let's take those in reverse order, because that just feels easiest.

The thing that pulls Harry into this book is Thomas Wraith showing up and asking Harry to help a buddy of his who is cursed. Arturo Genosa apparently really likes sticking his dick in crazy, because he has three ex-wives who have banded together after finding out that he's planning to marry again, but the new bride does not have to sign the same prenup they did, which will screw them out of their shares of Genosa's estate when he dies. Unfortunately, because fax machines are not great, the name of the new bride is smudged to hell and back, so rather than trying to decipher it and target just one person, the ex-wife brigade adopts a spray-and-pray method (double entendre also intended, and I feel less bad about this one). So they basically curse the studio and every woman around Genosa is in the firing line, which is what Harry has been hired to stop.

This gets WEIRDLY slapstick at times, since someone tries to take Harry out with a blowgun, and a frozen turkey quite literally falls from the sky. What is decidedly not slapstick is the sheer level of catty woman-on-woman violence, pettiness, and vitriol. Like, yes, this bullying and violence dynamic exists and deserves page time, but the point is WILDLY undercut when you drop the whole conflict into a highly sexually charged environment and trip into classic horror tropes like the final girl, the brides of Dracula (which is absolutely the vibe in the Wraith Deeps), and punishing sex workers for sex work. You've just basically undercut any other point you're trying to make, because you haven't subverted jack shit and you are so buried in tropes and heteronormative sex that any sense beyond "women are literal monsters" gets completely eclipsed. Like, I'm genuinely shocked that Butcher didn't somehow work a vagina dentata or a sarlacc joke into this book.

Now, running in the background of Harry and the Porn Film is Mavra, a Black Court vampire who is full-on coming for Harry and working to rebuild her court. Harry decides that the best course of action here is to go old school: Find the nest and burn it out before the baby vamps can hurt anyone else. Which, frankly? I support. The Black Court can and should get wiped off the face of the earth. And for the most part, this section is just fun to read. Harry, Murphy, and Kincaid--with Ebenezer McCoy as their wheelman--track the scourge of vampires to their lair in a homeless shelter and proceed to wreck shop on them. Harry even manages to get a group of captured kids out of there in one piece. Well, the kids are in one piece. Harry gets his hand dry-roasted because his shields aren't designed for thermal regulation. That's going to be extremely relevant in terms of lore and character building for the next few books, until Butcher basically forgets about it. But in general, it's a kickass quest and is largely successful.

My only real beef with this scene is the five or so minutes where Murphy is traversing a set of lasers wired to claymore mines and Kincaid has to take her pants off to buy her a quarter inch of space. Which like, is fair enough in practical terms, but Kincaid, Harry, and the book itself sexualize this in a way that is just absolutely gross and unnecessary, and I'm pretty sure it was 100% just so that Harry could smirk about Murphy gunfighting in panties with a little bow on them. Which made me want to take his staff and clock him across the jaw. Multiple times. This was not required, and it just keeps adding to the pattern of sexualizing women in deadly situations...holy crap, did we accidentally wander into a Joss Whedon project?

This scene does set up Murphy and Kincaid's relationship though, which will be relevant for like...maybe one other book? So fine. It also highlights that Kincaid and the White Council DO NOT get along, since he and McCoy draw on each other on sight and Harry almost doesn't manage to talk them down. So we do get some interesting insight into who the White Council does and does not approve of.

I suppose I have to stop stalling now, and actually address the White Court and the Family Stuff.

For any of this book to make sense, we need to know a little bit of history. Mostly that Lord Wraith, Thomas, Lara, and Inari's father, had just the biggest boner for Harry's mother, Margaret Le Fay. Margaret spent a lot of time in the White Court, gave birth to Thomas, and then peaced out. On her way out the door though, she cursed Lord Wraith so that his hunger--the demon that makes him a White Court vampire--couldn't feed. So he hasn't been able to feed since before Harry was born, is dangerously weak--but somehow still strong enough to be STRONGLY implied to be grooming and assaulting his children--and is losing power internally. So yes, Daddy Wraith is a piece of utter garbage, and when we start the book, Inari and Lara are both working for Genosa. Thomas is trying to spare Inari from ever becoming a White Court vampire, while Lara is actively yeeting her AT HARRY to try to awaken her hunger. This is just a bad situation all around.

That said though, this is the book where Harry starts to really gather family--blood family--around him, because in addition to leaving a curse for Lord Wraith, Margaret left mental messages for both her sons that they unlock in this book, so they would know who and what they are to each other in case she wasn't there to connect them.

And as much as I hate to admit feels for anything in this book, the messages she left and the emotional rollercoaster of discovering that you HAVE a brother and that you actually LIKE that brother gave me feels. Harry and Thomas desperately need each other, and now they have each other, and they can trust each other. That's huge for both of them. They both have to play that information very close to the chest, but THEY know, and that's kind of the important thing.

That also makes the end of this book, in the Wraith Deeps, even more complicated because family plus politics is never NOT messy. Lara full-on stages a coup to take control of the White Court, thanks to Harry outing Lord Wraith's curse and utter disregard for any of his children to her. The way it shakes out though, is with Lara in charge, Inari free, and Thomas living with Harry because Lara banished his ass.

Again though, we have Murphy being mentally and physically assaulted in the Deeps, and no, Butcher, him being "the lord of the freaking nation of sexual predators" (p. 330) does not go any distance to excusing or defending it. Like...Perhaps we could STAHP assaulting women everywhere? For five minutes?

Overall, I think this is one of the more forgettable early Dresden Files books, and it falls into horror and vampire tropes way too easily, even when Harry himself is trying to insist that he's open-minded or chivalrous. Clearing out the Black Court hideout was fun, and Harry and Thomas knowing about each other was lovely, but honestly the rest of this book is SO WEIRD about sex and consent and lust that it really did out me off.

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I ALMOST FORGOT ABOUT MOUSE!!! Mouse is the goodest boi, and the best thing to come out of the book. He is a Foo Dog who adopts Harry, and that's basically it in this book, but keep an eye out, because Mouse is the BEST.