carlyle-sass - Tumblr blog

[carlyle-sass]

god the mental image of this is so fucking funny to me. just kipps loosing it over lovkwood's idea, probably still with the red marks of the goggles around his eyes, all while lucy, holly and george just silently sip their hot chocolates and exchange glances because they already expected him to come up with an insane plan and are probably surprised he didn't say anything sooner

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Yet another thing I find absolutely wonderful about how Jonathan Stroud wrote Lucy Carlyle is how he betrays her with the narrative.

In The Screaming Staircase, at the start of her story, Lucy gives us an idea of how she wants to be perceived; unaffected, unbothered, unburdened by fear or particularly revelatory emotions. She drops horrifically painful realities about her childhood on us as if she were describing a dull gray rock she found on the ground. She tries very, very hard to school her emotions around Lockwood and George. And if she had been written by anyone else, she might have fallen prey to the "strong independent female character" tar pit of a stereotype.

But then along comes Annabel Ward's ghost.

And the narrative looks at Lucy and says "I know how you wish to present yourself, but that's not who you are."

And Lucy is repeatedly shown to be incredibly Sensitive in so many ways. She is under the influence of the ghost of Annie Ward, but the emotions are still partly Lucy's. And most of the time she has the emotional intelligence to differentiate which feelings are hers and which ones are Annie's, and where they overlap. She chokes up with empathy on multiple occasions in the process of uncovering what happened to Annie Ward. She becomes enflamed with the desire for justice for someone who was murdered decades before she was born. She's shown that by her very nature, her emotions are her strength and not her weakness. Because she has a narrative that loves her and isn't lazy about her. She is the narrator and she tells us who she is, but the narrative shows her and us who she really is.

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i wish i had a floating evil skull to follow me around and when we went to the grocery store she would say something like my liege we must purchase the strawberry cream cheese for the coming days and i would be like oh fuck youre so right and put it in my cart and then we would walk down the next aisle together our beautiful life

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Lucy Carlyle 💗💗💗😽

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Holly: Unbelievable. I asked you to do one simple thing-

Kipps: Simple?! More like impossible! I stood in front of that store for hours before I realized the doors weren’t automatic.

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One of the things I love most about Lockwood is that he is the textbook example of the "one who is scared to love" but instead of being extremely cold and callous all the time like your normal tragic backstory male mc, he can't stop himself from loving.

The thing is, we know he tries. (See THB). He tries to keep everyone at a distance, tries to be cold and calculating, but he can't do it. He wants to be Sherlock Holmes, highly functioning sociopath, but he can't do it.

And it shows up in the smallest ways: how immediately understanding he is of Lucy when she doesn't want to explain what happened at Jacobs' even though he is interviewing her for a job. How he stood up for the bratty nightwatch kid when Ned was bullying him, simply because he didn't like watching someone smaller get picked on. Or when he mercifully changed the bet with Kipps, because at the end of the day it was a petty bet to begin with, and they had just been through so much together, and honestly it didn't matter anymore. There was no reason to humilate anyone. How he will always protect another agent, even if they are Fittes. Heck, he even stands up for the Fittes' agents, saying "they're just kids like us." It's the adults he has beef with.

Lucy mentions that any news of a death by ghost-touch weighs on Lockwood. He is incredibly patient with Danny Skinner and perturbed that a kid this young is in his living room alone.

All three of them think of Lucy as the one with the bleeding heart. She's a Listener, a feeler, the one who is most affected by the past suffering of the ghosts. But that's for the dead.

Lockwood is a bleeding heart for the living. He tries not to be. He hates it. Because caring means risking hurt. Caring means you can lose what you care about. But for as hard as he tries to pretend he doesn't, for as good as he is at acting like nothing can phase him, it does.

Lockwood is scared of loving. But he can't stop.

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You know who I think we don't talk about enough? Robin. One of the few things I dislike about the books is how flippantly he is discussed — the way Lockwood sort of jokes about how he has "past on" in Lucy's interview, and how George and Lucy talk about how she is the best assistant they have ever had, because Robin "panicked and ran off the roof." The nonchalance seems too calloused, even for Lockwood and George, especially given what we learn later about Lockwood's goal to protect people. So here are some thoughts I have:

I think Robin was fairly young, inexperienced, and one of the only people they could even hire. I think George and Lockwood found him a bit annoying— they were far from great friends with him. But the company was young, and they needed a third person. Robin kinda looked at Lockwood as an older brother. Despite Robin's general inexperience and skittishess, he wanted the job. Lockwood told him, time and time again, that he didn't have to stay. Robin wanted to stay. Wanted to get braver. And Lockwood did everything he could to help make Robin a better agent. Always had his back, tried to keep him safe. Gave him fencing lessons. He never liked Robin. But he was there for him.

And then the accident happened. There was nothing Lockwood or George could have done. They had tried to correct his skittish behavior before. They had trained him. They had done everything except fire him. And it wasn't enough. The guilt would have been crushing if Lockwood and George hadn't made an unspoken vow with each other not to talk about it. To use buisness terms only. No discussion of Robin as a friend, as a younger brother. He was simply a tragically inexperienced agent who didn't take their advice. A little on the annoying side. Good kid, a bit of a pest.

Like everything else, Lockwood stores this away deep inside him. Another person who died after being around him.

When Danny Skinner shows up in the living room, Lockwood's blood freezes. His air, his build — it's all Robin.

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soft worldbuilding in L&Co is so special to me especially how telling talents are:

Sight is associated with with people who look after others, who are always at the look out for danger, the ones who constantly see death and are tied to it no matter what (kipps (with talent and then with goggles), lockwood, skull (in life))

Listening is the warning sign, the haunting before haunting ever began, it gets into one's head and makes you trapped in there with voices of times long passed (lucy, kat)

Touch, in the world where one touch kills, is the most high risk, a conscious decision to put yourself into one's shoes and feel what they felt, ache with empathy all alone in a world of constant pain (lucy)

and having a bit of every talent makes one less vulnerable to psychic effects, but that means that you are fully submerged into haunting, into the past, once you are confronted by it, and in this profession it's constantly there and around you (george, holly, flo)

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locklyle incorrect quotes (inspired by this post!) LOCKWOOD & CO. (2023)

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I hope Anthony Lockwood is having a good day today

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five more minutes

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I made some vaguely Christmassy Lockwood and Co art for the secret Santa exchange on the Lockwood & Co discord, and the lovely person I was paired with gave me permission to post it here :)

Merry Christmas, and I hope you all have a lovely day, regardless of if you celebrate!

(Also the art I received from my secret Santa was so fricken cute 😭)

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She doesnt like him much

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Lockwood: If you were to receive compliments on your appearance what would you prefer? Pretty, beautiful, etc?

Holly: Use your imagination.

Lockwood: You both look very flammable!

Holly:. . .

Lucy: Stop using your imagination.

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George: I personally don't think it's possible to come up with a crazier plan.

Lucy: We could attack them with hummus.

George: I stand corrected.

Lucy: Just keeping things in perspective.

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Feel like the Lockwood & Co. fandom might like to know about The Woman In Black, an eighties horror novel following a Mr. Kipps, who when he is young sees the titular ghost, whose arrival always presages the death of a child.

In the stage adaptation, when the ghost reappears at the end of the play, Kipps is older and can no longer see her.