#SYWTBAW

[dduane]

Ms. Duane, as the fall season rolls around, it brings with it a thought that has plagued my mind ever since I read SYWTBAW: if I step on a crunchy leaf for fun, will the trees get mad at me?

I doubt it. Canonical material suggests you’d have to engage in far more wholesale interference. (And with designated artwork. Not all fallen leaves are art.) 😄

[shortforemily]

Dear tumblrverse: if I am going to haunt these halls again I need the Youths to stop clogging the “young wizards” tag with fanfic about That TERF’s characters and return it to its rightful owners (neurodivergent adults who have cried over a spaceship at least once)

[aeide-thea]

saw a post that got me thinking abt that whole 'yr brain doesn't fully mature until age 25 (at which point it abruptly congeals like an aspic)' pseudoscience fictoid again, and—

the other thing that gets me about it, besides my previously-registered complaint that the notion of a hard stop on plasticity at the quarter-century mark is depressing as fuck for those of us past that age who need to believe change is still possible, is that it's yet another instance of people looking to substitute a hard-and-fast rule for the active, careful exercise of their own judgment—life isn't a binary where pre-25 nothing goes and post-25 anything goes! you have to actively think about how to behave well and how to treat others well, whatever your age and whatever theirs!

[ferociouscharm]

I just remembered that dragon with dementia in SYWTBAW and I made myself feel sad.

[crystal-lioness]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRjjw-pRg4Y Posting this for Diane Duane to see and any other SYWTBAW readers Tell me this song is not perfect for Nita??? You can’t.  Ugh! /Slaps hands on desk

[smileystudies]

21.04.2020 // Week 5 of 2020 Quarantine Challenge

Tuesday - What is your favourite book?

This is a damn tall order so I’m going to list three that have had the most impact on me as a person: So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, and the classic Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. One gives me a dream of what I could be, one helped me see who I was, and one inspired me to follow the path I’m on now 🥰

P.D. si estás curiosx, mi libro favorito en español es Hija de la fortuna de Isabel Allende, que me renovó mi amor para la literatura hispánica

[errantryraptor]

why does anyone like h*rry p*tter when so you want to be a wizard is Right There

[ssilverstreak]

My Ideal SYWTBAW Trailer (if a movie ever got made)

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "In Life's name and for Life's sake-"]

[Scene, Nita and Kit meeting for the first time]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "-I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life."]

[Scene, Nita and Kit meeting Fred:

Fred: I’ve learned that the Naming of Lights has gone missing-]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "I will guard growth-]

[Scene: Nita talking with Liused about the Battle of Trees]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "-and ease pain."]

[Scene: Kit helping the Lotus.]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way-"]

[Scene: Shot of NYC as they're on the train, glittering and beautiful.

Nita: “Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million on that island alone.”

Fred: Doesn’t it worry you, packing all that life together? What if a meteor hits it? What if there’s a starflare? If something should happen to all that life—how terrible!]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "-and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened."]

[Scene: Panover of dark NYC]

[Scene: Attack by the carnivorous helicopter]

[Scene: Them running from sentient cabs]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "To these ends, in the practice of my Art-"]

[Scene: Walking on air to get to the worldgate]

[Scene: Talking with Tom and Carl in their kitchen as they fix Fred.]

[Scene: Stealing The Book of Night with Moon]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "-I will put aside fear for courage-"]

[Scene: Nita confronting the bullies.]

[Scene: Fighting the cabs in dark NYC, the Lotus helping]

[Scene: The group facing off against the Lone One.

Nita and Kit: "Fairest and Fallen; Greetings and Defiance!"]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "-and death for life-"]

[Scene: Battle in Central Park, the trees and statues coming to their aid]

[Scene: Reading from The Book of Night with Moon]

[Scene: Horror on Nita's and Kit's faces.

Nita: "Oh my God. The sun. He put out the sun."]

[Black, voiceover, Nita reading: "-when it is right to do so-"]

[Scene: Nita changing The Lone One's name in The Book of Night with Moon]

[Black, voiceover, Nita's voice pauses, then finishes: "-till Universe's end."]

[Scene: Nita and Fred in Timeheart.

Nita: "Fred. Did we do right?"

Fred: Go find out.]

[Scene: Shot of Nita's Manual laying on a table, So You Want To Be A Wizard gleaming softly in golden letters against the red cover.]

[oviraptoridae]

tonight we are yw posting

[dduane]

So You Want To Be A Wizard: In the tunnels

[klexos]

Design isn’t totally finalized yet, still have revisions from class and overall I’m not totally happy about it considering how little time I had to work on it-  but I thought I’d post anyways - 

So You Want to be a Wizard cover, done for class!

[lookirebloggedathing]

Where did you meet your books?

[dandelion-wings]

Okay I went to bed thinking about Fischl’s Daryl-style Ordeal, but I woke up thinking about Lisa’s Nita-style one. And also about prices for power, and Lisa’s trepidation about that re: her Vision, and how that might interplay with how much clearer wizardry is on the subject and how wizards have to be willing. This steals very heavily from SYWTBAW, both the whole plot/Ordeal segment and Nita changing the Lone Power’s name, but I’m not trying to be original here, I’m just being recklessly self-indulgent.

(For clarity, Lisa is probably 13-14 here and more idealistic than her adult version, because both of those are kind of requirements for taking up wizardry!)

---

The pages of the Book of the Abyss are like thin steel, so cold that they burn her hands as Lisa turns them. Letters are scorched into them, etched with fire and lighting; in the Speech, but they seem to twist and turn on the page, symbols and syllables that she's only seen before as beautiful distorting into ugly, jagged lines that hurt her eyes to look at. A headache grows in her skull as she skims the pages.

Any minute now, the Abyss Mages will be here. They'll read the book and re-stabilize the Abyss with it, the same way that the most senior wizards keep Teyvat stable by reading the Book of the Petrified Tree. If it was that alone, Lisa would wonder the point of keeping it away from them. The Abyss isn't in the Book of the Petrified Tree, isn't part of the Powers' creation. She understands the appeal of letting it fall apart and dissolve away, but... that's still entropy, isn't it?  There's life in the Abyss, whatever awful forms it takes. That's what she's signed herself up to fight *against*.

Unless it's meant to be read by someone else. By her, by a wizard, the way the Book of the Petrified Tree is. But Lisa doesn't understand why it would be any better if a wizard reads it. What's described here is terrible, twisted, horrible and horrifying, the ongoing torture and transformation of a whole people that Celestia so cruelly condemned with their masters. It's not something that Lisa wants to have any part of speaking into being. Especially with the way it ends, the tight knot of Speech winding into a curling closed circle of something that cannot be, can never be, undone.

*"Condemned, forever, unredeemable and unredeemed."*

It isn't fair, Lisa thinks, with the furious conviction that her parents and teachers are already trying to beat out of her, the conviction that they sigh and attribute to her youth. It's just like her Vision--they didn't ask for this, are paying a price they never agreed to and were never even told would have to be paid. She won't read those words. And she won't let anyone else read them either. Her manual is clear: she can't destroy this Book without destroying the other. But the Book of the Petrified Tree changes, sometimes, as Teyvat changes. Why can't this one?

The words are etched into the pages. With fire and lightning, she thinks again, and reaches for her Vision. This will take precision and control, but Lisa is very good at those. With one hand at her throat, she holds the other over the cold-steel page and lets a tiny lance of lighting crackle from it, scraping at the twisted symbols of the Speech, etching them into new forms, new shapes. The glow of it nearly blinds her, leaves spots in her eyes when she's finished that are slow to blink away.

But that's only the first half of this. The Books are only real, truly real, when read aloud. Lisa flips back to the beginning of the relevant section, puts her hands on either side of the burning-cold book, and begins to read. The manual has told her what happens to those who read the Book of the Abyss. But at least she knows the price she'll be paying.

Immediately, she can feel that burning seep through her, into her, from her hands and her eyes and her mouth into her blood and her flesh and her bones. It tears at her, rushes painfully through her, saps her breath as if fire is filling her limbs and frost biting at her tongue. The headache grows stronger, her temples pounding, her eyes watering until she can barely see the page. Her life is being torn away from her in strips, if the manual is right, and the manual is always correct. Hours, days, years of her life with every line and every page.

A thought occurs to her, dark and seductive, curling like a cool breeze through the burning. She doesn't have to do this. She can stop any time, and the loss will stop, too. She doesn't have to give herself up to the whims of the Powers, doesn't have to pay this price for people who don't deserve it, who she's never seen, who will never even know to be grateful for it. She can close the book and go home and continue her studies, qualify for the Sumeru Academia like she's always intended, become a renowned scholar, teach generations more....

Lisa has never heard this voice before, the voice that comes so close to being her own, sounding like her own thoughts in her own head. But she isn't such a fool that she can't recognize the Lone Power speaking to her. And if it's paying her its personal attention--that means what she's doing is threatening it. Even with her eyes blurred and aching, her head pounding like a drum, her breath wheezing in her chest with every word, Lisa smiles in sharp satisfaction. She continues to read.

This is a price greater than even what she's come to suspect her Vision may cost her, and she knows that. But it's a price she knew upfront. The Powers never misled her about what they wanted, never pretended that they were giving her a gift when they were actually striking a deal. She made it for the knowledge they offered, for the ability to understand the world; she cared more about being able to hear the trees speak and the rocks sigh and the winds whisper, to hear their names in the Speech and sense in every syllable what they were made of, than she did about the power to change the words and change the world's nature with them. But one comes with the other. She can't understand the world and leave it untouched.

Cackling surrounds her as the Abyss Mages come upon her at last. Cackling that turns to cries of dismay as they hear the words falling from her lips, the whole world leaning in around her to hear itself described. They're too late to stop her from reading out the last sentence, the single line she changed in the short time she had, the only one she needed to: *"Condemned but not lost, to be someday redeemed."*

Any more is beyond the power of any one wizard, even at the height of their power, in the blossom of their Ordeal. Lisa had understood that the moment she started skimming through the Book. It will take many more wizards many more long years to effect any change. But she has made it *possible*.

[waffle-sorter]

OH!

For the last several books, Nita has been working on developing her precognitive talent. And early on in that process somebody - I want to say Tom, but I’m not sure - mentions that there was something in her Ordeal that suggested she had such a talent. And for years I’ve been unable to find what that’s about.

But today I found it. Text from the Magic Carpet version of SYWTBAW:

As Kit spoke, Nita became aware of a roaring away at the edge of her hearing and a blurring at the limits of her vision. Both effects grew and strengthened to the overwhelming point almost before she realized what was happening. And then it was too late. She was seeing and hearing everything that would happen for miles and miles around at quarter to eleven, as if the building were transparent, as if she had eyes that could pierce stone and ears that could hear a leaf fall blocks away. The words and thoughts of a million minds poured down on her in a roaring onslaught like a wave crashing down on a swimmer, and she was washed away, helpless. Too many sights, commonplace and strange, glad and frightening, jostled and crowded all around her, and squeezing her eyes shut made no difference - the sights were in her mind.

And the kicker: Kit doesn’t experience the same sort of thing. How have I spent so many years and rereads not noticing this?

Edit: Stop. I am aware of the dream. I hold that Nita's Ordeal hadn't started yet, and that it therefore is not the answer. But more importantly, even if it is, that doesn't mean the passage I cited isn't also.

[fencesandfrogs]

Cutting today’s walk short because it is way muggier than I realized and I have to take my meds and I promised la chiquita I’d read her a chapter of sywtbaw

[leorahm]

This is how I always imagined the Lotus from the alternative New York in SYWTBAW. I’m thinking this guy might have missed his world gate...