#archipelago Books

[garadinervi]

Mahmoud Darwish, Point of view, in A River Dies of Thirst. Journals, [Athar al-Farasha. Yawmiyyat], Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, Archipelago Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2009, p. 86

[expendablemudge]

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE, a flawed Dutch gem via Archipelago Books, gets 4* #BookRecommendation here:

[roughghosts]

A tale of two travellers, you and I: In the Absence of Presence by Mahmoud Darwish

A tale of two travellers, you and I: In the Absence of Presence by Mahmoud Darwish

Allow me to see you, now that you have left me and I have left you, safe and sound like pure prose on a stone that may turn green or yellow in your absence. Allow me to gather you and your name, just as passersby gather the olives that harvesters forgot under pebbles. Let us then go together, you and I, on two paths: You, to a second life promised to you by language, in a reader who might survive…

[dopscratch]

this is for like the 5 people who are really into the httyd books and delicious in dungeon

if people like it enough i might actually do more than this dumb ten minute doodle

idk i feel like httyd books and delicious in dungeon share a few themes

especially with the eat or be eaten sort of thing

maybe im just overextending but

something might be happening...

[every-sanji]

[avnasace]

for some reason i need furina and scara to be bitchy best friends

i need scara and furina complaining about arlecchino

i need them venting about how much their respective gods fucked them up

i need them bonding over reinventing themselves

they would actually be such an iconic duo

[poibynt]

Just finished HTTYD book 4 (I am relistening to the series completely out of order why not) & the Hysterics, specifically Norbert, clock Hiccup and Fishlegs as Hooligans pretty damn fast. This might just be assumption, seeing as Hooligans are the most likely people to be on the Island of Vilany since it neighbours Berk but that's not a total given. Not to fall into my forever habit of fleshing out and complicating fantasy settings to be more realistic but is there a possibility that different viking tribes have distinctive clothing which marks who they are, or maybe that they speak different dialects? Its been a while but I remember something about there being like 70 something words for rain 'in the Berk language' not Norse, in the first book (I think I could be wrong). Also, in 8 Hiccup says that Ugg runes are hard to read, thus meaning the Ugglythugs have a mildly different writing system to Hooligans (or...shit handwriting (carvewriting?) but also so does literally everyone in this series so). They have to all be speaking Norse since there's never any issues with communication throughout the series. Hiccup is shown to be a bit of a polyglot but other characters never seem to struggle to understand each other. However, it would make sense if different tribes have drifted away from the standard Norse that was likely spoken during the OG Wilderwest days enough to have distinctive accents or maybe mild dialects (like, tribes closer together who interact way more have kept in lingiustic lockstep so the Hooligans and Bogburglers have very similar vocab but just some different accents whereas the Hooligans and the Beserks would have less in common & their Norse would sound more dialectical to eachother) OR maybe the tribes have existed as distinct groups since before the Wilderwest unification/were created and maintained during that time period and to maintain a cohesive nation (what....the fuck did the OG Wilderwest look like actually? Like politically, how did it operate? That is a whole other post but I'm assuming there was some element of centralisation and unification seeing as how it's talked about in the series) standardised Norse grew in popularity but the original languages of the tribes still influenced speakers and fused with the standard Norse. Which would make sense with the 70+ Hooligan words for rain, since historically it seems like native names for flora, fauna and the natural world stick around since imposed or adopted languages often don't have replacement words for these things or don't need to rename all the birds or whatever. Idk, maybe Hooligans have really distinctive helmets! People who know more about linguistics than me feel free to muse, ponder and or contradict me.

[wickedcriminal]

What do you think Hiccup the younger's relationship is like with his niece and nephew, Zephyr and Nuffink? He lowkey looks like one of those fun uncle who lets the kids get away with alot of things. Also Zeph and Nuff are going to be so confused that their dad and uncle share the same first name lol 😂

Younger ADORES those kids. And he comes in a package of three, so Elder's kids not only get Uncle Hiccup, they also get Uncle Fish and Aunt Cami <3

They spoil those kids. Little Fish loves to take them on walks and naps and the kids pick up the bad habit of ankle-biting from their dear aunt Camicazi <3 And Minicup definitely lets them get away with a lot of things, using the royalty card to justify it, of course

He'll teach them dragonese, too, because these kids get to grow up around dragons!

The kids are certainly confused as to why Hiccup and Hiccup share the same name, but they call Elder "dad" anyway so it's not too life changing, lmao. If anything they're going to be mixing up the Fishlegses names! Probably have to call one "uncle Fish" and the other "uncle Legs", lmao!

[fictional-at-heart]

So my brother and I have a sort of HTTYD World War II AU (it’s mainly our original characters, but Hiccup, Tuffnut, and Skulder are in there), and I just had to share a snippet we came up with tonight; we made the comment of how Hiccup and the Joneses wouldn’t smoke, but Stoick would, and Gobber? Well, he’d smoke like a fiend! He’d never be seen without a cigarette in his mouth:

Hiccup one day (sometime after the war ended), staring at Gobber:

Gobber: “What?”

Hiccup: “… how do you still have teeth? And lungs?”

Gobber: “Smokin’s good for the lungs! You know what I say: a pack a day keeps the doctor away!”

Hiccup, scoffing: “More like a pack a day calls the doctor…”

Gobber: “Oh, you’ve been spending too much time around those Jones boys.”

Stoick: “Their uncle was always the same way. Why, in the Great War-“

Hiccup, softly: “World War I…”

Stoick: “GREAT WAR, we were in the trenches one day, and every time I broke out a smoke, I’d feel his eyes on me. And sure enough, I look over and there he is. Staring at me, and I say ah! What’s it to you? And he says ‘you keep smoking them and it ain’t gonna be Germans that kill ya.’ So I told him it’s gonna be ripe old age! You know what he did? *clutches his chest and gasps* and then says ‘gonna be them smokes!”

[hanzajesthanza]

crossbow bolts & goodbyes

i love it when ciri steps into geralt's role in the endings to the story :')

from the lesser evil, one of the original short stories and before ciri had even been concieved of as a character:

to the very end on the stairs in lady of the lake:

asides from "geralt quickly covered ciri with his body" and "very good, but if you ever do that again, i'll tan your hide"—that ciri successfully pulls off the same move, deflects the crossbow bolt with her sword, like geralt has :') oh, witcher and witcher girl...

and in this same vein, it should also be mentioned, geralt and nenneke's parting at the end of the voice of reason:

to ciri and geralt's parting in something ends, something begins:

[dogslayslaw]

I found this book on one of our bookshelves at home. I like looking through the shelves because there's always a mysterious book I've never seen before. Lately I've been spotting Soviet histories/literature. I found a biography on Stalin, which I found interesting, but not as much as this. I only got a few pages into that to know it probably wouldn't go into a lot of the atrocities. Personally, I like viewing the events through the eyes of the common people, the victims. You don't see that much in history textbooks! So I picked this one up (The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn), the word "gulag" catching my eye:

So I flipped it over and opened it, finding an interesting hand written note/warning by a woman who I'm not even sure is alive anymore and an author's note on the back which was also intriguing.

Now I had to read this! Yes, I'm very much in the right frame of mind right now, so Elaine's warning doesn't mean that much to me right now. If you can't read it, I did make alt text for every image I put here.

The book itself is partially researched and partially an autobiography to describe what it was like to be in the Gulag (and how it was to be arrested and such).

This is apparently the first of 3 volumes, though we only have this one. I haven't gotten far in it either; I'm only 10 pages in. But let me say, Elaine was right... Currently it's describing the arrests of citizens, which is traumatizing enough. Knowing the Gulag was even worse is just an eerie experience. I might update my thoughts as I read on, but no promises.

ANYWAY I recommend this book for anyone interested in stuff like this. Even if you're not, you should look into it anyway because I think it's important to learn about just how bad totalitarian governments are (FUCK THE KGB AND FUCK STALIN)

[garadinervi]

Mahmoud Darwish (محمود درويش), Beyond identification, in A River Dies of Thirst. Journals, [Athar al-Farasha. Yawmiyyat], Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, Archipelago Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2009, p. 7

[incorrect-thuggory-quotes]

Thuggory: It's very cold! I regret not having brought along the sweater my mother made me months ago. If only the dragons hadn't started a siege against us! 🥶

[roughghosts]

Poetry as an act of resistance: A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish

A great poet is one who makes me small when I write, and great when I read. A River Dies of Thirst, the last volume of Mahmoud Darwish’s work to be released in Arabic, just eight months before his death in 2008, offers a precious opportunity to spend a little more time with a great poet as he casts a sorrowful eye at his beloved Palestine, and reflects on love, life, time, and memory. But more…

[dopscratch]

i kid you not when i say i looked up these two at 4 am hoping for some crumbs but jere you are writing a whole fanfic ( thank you so much🤩).

I personally haven't read the httyd books only the series and movies. If you don't mind could u give a mini summary as u plan to write after book 8? If not i hope you have a wonderful day/ night!

(If uave tons of other questions but don't want to spam so ill just leave this here)

AUDHJSHDHD thank you so much for sending an ask i literally have none ever HAHA

im glad you enjoy the concept :)

the books are very different fron the movies in a large number of ways! in the books, vikings stat out with dragons, and hiccup's main problem is training his own, which he can't do by the normal strategy of yelling- a) because he's not the best yeller and b) because his little green hunting dragon, toothless, is as disobedient as it gets (and smaller than everyone else's to boot!)

in the books, vikings typically have hunting dragon(s) which are smaller and usually dog-sized, as well as a riding dragon, which is larger and obviously ridable. hiccup's riding dragon is a scraggly feathery dragon called the Windwalker who was rescued from slavery :)

one of the biggest differences as well, is that dragons can speak. most are just as intelligent as humans, some even more so, and they're generally cruel by nature. their culture encourages them to act selfishly and it's worked out pretty well for them, hence why most vikings train theirs by fear or exerting power. hiccup, who is nerdy enough to have sat out where the wild dragons are and literally learned their language has been attempting to train HIS by speaking to them, which has some mixed results. windwalker is actually quite mellow and loyal, since hiccup's probably the first person to show him kindness. toothless is just a little brat with a stammer, but he does have softness in his heart deep deep down.

characterization-wise, everyone's a lot different as well.

hiccup, as stated before is a nerd who'll rattle off dragon facts in dangerous situations while fishlegs is more of the sarcastic romantic, basically think of it like the movies swapped their personalities. he also has bright red Heroic Hair that stands straight up and they robbed that from him in the movies and i will never forgive them. hes also an excellent swordfighter and its just about the only traditionally viking thing he's good at :). also, his mother is never kidnapped by dragons- but she IS gone often, out questing. her name is valhallarama and she is an absolute beast of a woman they definitley nerfed her when they turned her to valka

fishlegs is a skinny little loser (affectionate) who's allergic to dragons, has a plethora of other medical conditions too, and is acrually an orphan and was raised by a long-eared caretaker dragon. he's also hiccup's best and only friend at the start of the series. he's arguably worse at being a viking as hiccup is and they both bond over how they wish society would allow them to not be brainless fighters. his dragon is a lazy common-or-garden-or-basic-brown named horrorcow, she's both a pacifist and a vegetarian. when he was catching his dragon, he actually wanted to grab a nadder, which is long and serpentine because nadder is a pun on adder and i have no idea why the movies didn't see that

snotlout is hiccup's cousin and hates him more than anything in the world, and not in a ha-ha funny way either. he legitamately wishes hiccup were dead or never born because he hates to see this "runt" next in line for chief instead of him. he is constantly literally trying to make hiccup's life miserable or literally murder him and once again this is not played for laughs. his dragon's a mean monstrous nightmare- a hunting dragon only the chief and descendanrs of should have- named fireworm, and she is very full of herself. hookfang is actually one of stoick's monstrous nightmares!

another main character is camicazi, who appears in book 3 onward and she was so powerful they had to split her into three characters in the movies (she's sorta like if you took the thorston twins and astrid and mashed them all together, then added another sprinkle of chaos). she's a short little kid from another tribe of all-female warriors called the bog-burgalars and an excellent escape artist. she has a mood dragon- a serpentine, color-changing dragon named stormfly who can actually speak the human language too. she's not very helpful though since shes a pathological liar.

the main villain is named alvin the treacherous and he's a ridicuoulsly resiliant guy who reaaaally wants hiccup dead for a multitide of reasons we don't need to get into now since hw won't really appear in my work haha

i think ive gotten a lot of basics down, but obviously there's a ton more! in regards to knowledge for my crossover though thats essentially some of the main points you need to know. by the 8th book, hiccup has been on a multitide of adventures (and has nearly died or gotten eaten on all of them) but the world hasn't changed irreparably yet :). i plan on writing it in a way that can accomodate people with no knowledge of httyd, since most of it will be from the touden party's pov exploring the world! you'll be getting plenty of detailed descriptions of some of the dragon species as laios's nerdiness will help show

i would absolutely reccomend checking out the books, though! you can usually find them at your local library, and there's also the entire series of audiobooks on youtube! there's a very dedicated group of people on here who love the httyd books including me who would love to help you get into them as well, if that's what you'd like!

i'll round this off with a few of my renditions of some of the characters i've drawn :)

i hope this was helpful, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask me! i love getting asks but never do lol

[every-sanji]