Thirty-something, Australian/Kiwi. Art and writing blog, mostly fandom, mostly Pride and Prejudice-adjacent. You can find me at AO3.
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The Sevenwaters guide to ‘Is this dude a good guy?’
Eammon, seems nice, childhood friend, always courteous: keeps obliquely threatening Liadan’s baby in front of her because he’s bitter she rejected him. Some Other Dude’s Baby is his second worst enemy, behind the Other Dude. For some reason thinks ‘I am going to punish your baby for his father’s crimes’ is a statement that will make Liadan change her mind and decide it’s a great idea to marry him.
Bran, ostensibly an ostentatiously rude, redpilled logic bro who doesn’t like women (actually a childhood abuse survivor who had a terrible adoptive ‘uncle’ and an enabling ‘aunt,’ terrified of stepfathers, women, not being in control of everything all the time, and the dark): extremely upset that Liadan made out with him after having a baby. Demands to know why baby’s deadbeat father isn’t doing a proper job of looking after said baby, since Liadan is clearly a terrible judge of character who would expose an innocent and vulnerable little baby to a dangerous man like himself (doesn’t realise he’s the deadbeat in question).
#bran says he hates Eammon because Eammon backstabs his allies but the real reason is Eammon is like his not-actually-uncle#I’m re-RE-reading and pondering Themes#I need a sevenwaters tag
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Liadan, listening to Ciaràn telling a story: woah, I don’t like this description of the hero’s true love. Sounds a little too much like my sister. Is he sweet on her?
Liadan, later, telling a story to the painted men: anyway, my heroine’s true love was a guy who looked [suspiciously like an exact description of Bran, minus the tattoos].
#all these books feature a potted variation of the plot in fireside oratory#the only real difference is that Liadan’s description is less horny#I need a sevenwaters tag
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Netflix, trying to drum up interest in their Pride and Prejudice adaptation after Persuasion bombed: we’re AXING the wet shirt scene! Because it objectifies men, which for some reason we have a problem with in this specific instance but not any other of our shows! What do you think of that, Janeites?
Janeites, not even looking up from their Pinterest board of fashion plates: that scene was invented for the BBC and is hotly contested for subverting the actual themes of the Pemberley encounter. That you don’t understand this suggests that you don’t understand the text. Pass.
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Wrap up thoughts sevenwaters thoughts: Seer of Sevenwaters is oddly cute for a story that revolves around a giant sea monster (who was kidnapped because, like a selkie, she can shed her skin and was unluckily caught without it by an opportunist. Unlike a selkie she’s quite ready to kill at basically all times). Fun that the love interest is, for once, not even a part-time warrior but an honest-to-god poet making ends meet as a diplomat. Loved that the flagship of the painted men is the Liadan. There’s a delightful scene in which our 16yo heroine, destined to be a Druid and facing a crisis of confidence because she has done what she previously thought was unthinkable and fallen in love, rails at her moderate, middle aged mentor about how he couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to give up a lifetime of chaste service to the gods in the most teenagery speech of the entire series and he goes 😐🙄, which is about a thousand times funnier if you read the books in quick succession, because her mentor is Ciaràn, who famously said ‘fuck being a Druid and duty, I’m going to elope with my same-age niece because it’s true love and also I’ll become a sorcerer!’ three books earlier and only returned to being a Druid after his daughter grew up and got married. I’ll be honest and say I don’t love the audiobook narrator for this book (whom I think also did DotF) because she’s a bit histrionic. It needs dialling back about three notches in both cases.
The title of Flame of Sevenwaters is in poor taste for a book about a burn victim. It’s a much more sob-inducing kind of book, but ymmv depending on how much of a dog person you are. Much animal death, near-death and misadventure occurs. Little Finbar (Finbar II) is adorable and a very realistic take on a little kid who has secrets too big for his age on account of being a seer. The love interest being a stray dog (fairy curse, long story) for 90% of the story is…a little weird. Dude’s first action when he comes back into possession of a fully human brain and is still figuring out again how things like hands and language work is to grab Our Heroine and go ‘you…wife?’ and then grumble that he’s supposes he’s not allowed to sleep on the end of her bed anymore for now, promptly followed up with her falling over him because he’s decided to sleep in the doorway. It rhymes with Daughter of the Forest in a nicely satisfactory way — a heroine with damaged hands, a flock of men transformed into beasts relying on her to break a curse, big fire at the climax, but with less heartbreak and more mostly-reasonable authority figures. It’s also nice that Ciaràn, having staged an entirely necessary coup in fairy and resigned himself to living a lonely life apart from his family, whom he has only relatively recently reconciled himself to, is basically immediately undermined by his great-nephew (Finbar) going ‘can I come visit on weekends to see you and my friends (I have friends now!) please please please please uncle?’
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‘Child of a trickster god’ actually a surprisingly common romantasy background, but it does make sense if you want a character who is always getting into scrapes despite their best efforts not to, while also sprinkling a healthy dose of familial resentment into their personality.
#cathal 🤝 mercy thompson#although mercy’s dad is at least affectionate#and he mostly gets people killed by accident rather than murdering bc he’s bored#cathal’s dad is just a monster#I need a Sevenwaters tag#mercy thompson
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Funniest thing about Heir to Sevenwaters is the love interest being a (5/8th-)fairy prince raised as a foundling who is a determined skeptic whose reaction to being forcibly confronted with the fact that the reason weird magic things keep happening around him (‘no they don’t! Magic isn’t real and I’m normal! Normal!’) and the reason he’s unusually lucky and gifted is that he’s not human is pissy, simmering rage.
#‘I don’t do magic but also I carry around a bunch of home made charms and yes sometimes I scry but that’s not magic for Reasons’#‘what reasons?’#‘mainly just cope tbh’#the sequel trilogy is a bit more straightforward romantasy than the originals but somehow have a higher death count per book#I need a sevenwaters tag
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Sound designing a vampire being hit in the face with a shovel is... challenging. Who would've guessed.
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Juliet Marillier: I haven’t made my main character, a girl whose brothers have been turned into swans, suffer in a way more than her baseline average in a whole chapter…*cracks knuckles* time to write a feast scene in which her hosts/captors (unaware of swan thing) display a surprise roast swan as the pièce de résistance.
(‘It’s weird that Sorcha is such a strict vegetarian even while starving,’ no it ISN’T. She’s alarmingly aware that there’s an uncomfortably high chance that any given creature might be a person under a curse.)
#meanwhile her future mother in law (neither of them realise this yet but Anne has publicly berated her son about inappropriate behaviour) is#counting her vomiting fits and drawing the wrong conclusion#RIP Anne your granddaughters would have loved you and your commitment to running a tight ship on household matters#daughter of the forest#I need a sevenwaters tag
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happy "closer to 2050 than 2000" day everyone
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you used to be able to go onto a tag after finishing a movie and see all sorts of gifsets. now you have to comb through reader insert fanfiction. we used to be a society
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More Sevenwaters stuff: I do enjoy that magical textile work becomes a running theme in these books (although only Sorcha’s original task of the nettle shirts is painful). Liadan making a necklace for her sister and eventually her niece to wear to protect her out of threads from the old favourite clothes of every member of the family (a cord powerful enough that a malicious pendant hung from it is rendered weak), and later making a baby blanket out of the same, Niamh making a little doll for her lonely little daughter that is almost alive and comforts both her daughter and all the nieces. And then there’s Margery making Sorcha’s (wedding) dress and unknown members of the painted men making baby Johnny a tiny shirt so he can be warm and look fittingly flamboyant, and the tapestries Aisling and her daughters make and so on and so forth. Something about making something soft and cozy out of love being so powerful an act that it becomes an act of literal magic.
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Lmao, maybe the best fitting option.
Too many himbo hero/sneaky heroines plots out there. Where are the just and straightforward heroine with a sneaky boyfriend subversions?
Fry and Leela except if Fry was smart.
Eowyn and Grima Wormtongue if Grima weren’t evil and also gross.
C’mon. Someone must have done it.
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Too many himbo hero/sneaky heroines plots out there. Where are the just and straightforward heroine with a sneaky boyfriend subversions?
Fry and Leela except if Fry was smart.
Eowyn and Grima Wormtongue if Grima weren’t evil and also gross.
C’mon. Someone must have done it.
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we all got that one interest that all of our followers ignore in perfect sync no matter how much we post about it
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Also:
— the noble forest fair folk working the family bloodline prophecy to produce Johnny, who is warlike and brave, yet just and kind vs the swamp fairies going ‘that’s all very well but what about the bit where he’s also supposed to be a nerd that can sit still and remember what day to perform which religious rituals? This is ridiculous, let’s make a backup’ and producing Fainne as a Nailed It (aka bit funny looking but does the job) prophetic heroine through their own meddling.
— Fainne, whose grandfather once attempted to confess his love by telling his eventual wife a story about a man who fell in love with a mermaid who loved his music, having her sweetheart’s life saved because fairies turned him into a selkie rather than letting him drown, and then having to sing to coax him back to shore.
And, on CotP, it’s never explicitly gestured to, but my firm opinion is that, while Conor’s given reason for giving Fainne a chance is that he loves and trusts her father and feels bad about what happened to both her parents, the deeper reason he trusts her is that she shows up at Sevenwaters in company with a tiny owl (who is actually a fairy) that she rescued on her way there, and Conor’s nickname for her grandmother (his beloved baby sister) was Little Owl.
Symbols, see. Shows up with a symbol of her heroine grandmother and just as much stubborn determination to protect people, even if she looks like and has the magical abilities of her villainess grandmother.
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