#because fuck Anne McCaffrey that's why!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[neopronouns-in-action]

Neopronouns in Action #045: Viva La Revolution

Neopronouns: rhe/rhek/rhel/rhellis which follow the same rules as he/him/his/himself.

Replace he with rhe

Replace him with rhek

Replace his with rhel

Replace himself with rhellis

EX:

"He is going to adopt a new puppy soon, as soon as he gets a fence set up around his yard so the puppy can go outside without him having to walk it. His uncle is going to help set up the fence, since he has a set of power tools he’s letting him use, since he lost his. He's going to buy toys and train the puppy himself.”

Becomes:

"Rhe is going to adopt a new puppy soon, as soon as rhe gets a fence set up around rhel yard so the puppy can go outside without rhek having to walk it. Rhel uncle is going to help set up the fence, since he has a set of power tools he’s letting rhek use, since rhe lost rhel. Rhe's going to buy toys and train the puppy rhellis.”

= = =

Suddenly shoved off the dragon's back, rhe had no time to brace rhellis before rhe slammed into the ground with enough force to violently knock the air from rhel lungs.

Pain burst all down rhel side where rhe'd landed, and not just from the fall. The sand rhe had landed on was burning hot. With rhel arms tied behind rhel back, rhe struggled to get to rhel feet, gasping in pain, rhel voice muffled through the cloth still tied over rhel mouth.

"Hey, be careful!" A voice shouted from somewhere above. A moment later a massive shadow fell over rhek again, and rhe felt the impact on the ground as another dragon landed practically on top of rhek, blocking out the sun with its shining red hide.

Two clawed hands, each the size of rhel head grabbed rhek around the middle before rhe had time to react, and then rhe was in the air again.

The dragon had barely taken two wingbeats upward before there came a metallic screech like clashing metal, and then the entire world was spinning and jarring as rhe was knocked violently loose from the red dragon's grip and sent slamming once more into the burning sand.

Dragons were roaring and shrieking overhead, and the men were roaring right along with them, and rhe couldn't make out a single word. They were fighting over rhek, and where rhe should be placed, that much was clear. The red dragon had not wanted rhek to be left on the burning sand. The gold dragon's rider, the same man who had kidnapped rhek, clearly disagreed.

Rhe was not going to stick around to see who won the argument. Rhe had managed to stumble to rhel feet, hissing at the white hot pain as rhel bare feet touched the sand with all rhel weight on top.

Unable to see anything further than the small patch of sunlight rhe was in, rhe made for the direction that seemed to be the furthest from the fighting dragons overhead.

The shadows passed over rhek, but did nothing to ease the temperature of the sand. Then suddenly rhe found cool, solid stone beneath rhel, only slightly easing the burning lain in rhel feet.

Rhel eyes were adjusting to the darkness, so rhe found the first thing that looked like shelter, and leapt behind it. It was a large up raised portion of rock like a counter, tall enough for rhek to crouch behind to get the wright of rhel feet.

The sounds of the dragonfight were still raging over the crater, which, as rhe scanned the area, was so far rhel only known way of escaping the eyrie. There were no doorways or stairs or even other openings in the rock that rhe could see from rhel current position.

Rhe crawled to the furthest edge of rhel hiding spot and craned rhel neck to try and see if there was an escape rout across on the other side. But the sunlight stabbing down into the center opening was too bright, and rhe couldn't see past it.

And it was only then, as rhe stared hard at the sunlight, that rhe finally noticed the whole reason rhe had been brought here in the first place.

On the far side of the patch if sunlight, sparkling with dazzling reflections, was what was unmistakably a dragon's egg. The egg of the queen dragon, who rhe had been brought here to be soul-bonded with.

The dragonmen needed a new queen, and needed a rider for that queen, and they thought they could get one by assaulting rhel family's farm, kidnapping rhek, and treating rhek like some object, less even than an animal.

The dragonmen had gotten used to the idea that they could bully and threaten people into doing whatever they wanted, with no consequences.

Rhe was going to prove them wrong.

[rjalker]

Anyways, here's a writing prompt. I don't give a shit.

A young woman (or you know, trans person who hasn't realized they're trans yet, or, fuck, a trans person who does know they're trans. That's not going to stop this shit from happening. ''you can't do that I'm not a woman'' isn't gonna fucking do anything) is kidnapped away from her family and all she knows by dragonriders, who tell her that she has been Chosen™ to be the new Woman of the Dragons™ by soul-bonding with the newest Dragon Queen™ that is going to hatch.

Yes, the dragonriders did beat her father black and blue for trying to hide her. Yes, they did kill all of her family's livestock and not /even/ feed them to their dragons to punish her family for trying to protect her.

Yes, they expect her to have no problem with any of this and tell her that once she soul bonds with the queen, she'll learn to appreciate the Privilege™ and Luxury™ she is going to receive for this Highest of Honors™.

Yes, she will be forced to be a fucking broodmare for these men, just like her dragon queen will be. Their only jobs are to make babies for the Dragonmen™ and well no actually that's not true, she will also have to act as servant to whichever Honorable and Handsome™ man's dragon is the first to mate with the dragon queen, because fucking the queen is how leadership is decided among these men.

She tries to escape multiple times and is dragged back kicking and screaming and eventually tied up. Eventually she's dumped into the dragon's nest and in front of the egg that will hatch the next dragon queen.

Eventually the egg hatches, and the new baby dragon queen is born, and soul bonds with our poor protagonist.

Then she's untied, and the Dragonmen™ assume that because she's now soulbonded to the queen, that means everything they've done is magically forgiven and forgotten and she won't try to run away.

Well, they're right that she doesn't try to run away.

What she does do is take the first knife she can find, and uses it to stab her kidnapper to death. He can't risk fighting back without injuring the infant queen, who is held protectively in our protagonist's other arm, plus she had the element of surprise and the follow through to keep stabbing when the first one doesn't kill him instantly. His dragon, now with the soulbond shattered, flees rather than attempt any kind of vengeance on his daughter's bonded rider.

You cannot take on a whole army of Dragonmen™ by yourself with just a kitchen knife (which she upgrades to a proper combat knife by looting the body of her first victim), but thankfully she doesn't have to, because everyone else who's been oppressed by the Dragonmen™ was literally already starting their rebellion in a much more stealthy manner, and she's got perfect fucking timing to join in.

All of the Dragonmen™ except for those who were actively fighting back (most of whom were locked in the dungeon being starved to death) are killed. If their dragons fight back, they're also killed. Most of the dragons, though, are better people than their riders were, and are more than happy to see the revolt succeed.

Why?

Because fuck Anne McCaffrey, that's why.

[rosieblogstuff]

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

44 😲 in my main AO3 account. 2 others in my older account = 46!

I didn't realize I had that many things!

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

270,883

3. What fandoms do you write for?

All 44 of those works in my main AO3 are MacGyver 2016. One is a crossover with The Rookie. The other two at Star Trek TOS and Star Wars fics.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Table + Flashlight + IEDs

Mac + (Wilderness + Training + Survival) + Jack

Lost Causes

Lake + Stick + Fever

4 Times the LAPD Didn’t Pull Jack Over + 1 Time They Did 

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try to! I often respond to a chapter's comments when I post the next chapter of a longfic. And sometimes I just space on it and respond a year later when I notice I failed to respond.

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Oh definitely my X-ray + Penny flashfic, Bad Penny. Most of the comments are variations on HOW DARE YOU!!!

There are a couple other flashfics with pretty ambiguous endings, too.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

That's a hard one. Most of my fics have a happy or at least comforty ending. Maybe... uhh.... Electricity + Combustion ? which I literally labeled "whump with a fluffy ending". I also have two Jack Lives fics so that's always a happy situation at the end...

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I haven't. A few weird comments but I mostly scratch my head and ignore them. Anybody who hates on my fics will be getting a very long and nasty reply, followed by their comment being deleted.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Nope, no smutty fanfics here. I did have a romance I posted for another fandom awhile back (and never finished), and I've written fade-to-black stuff in my orig fic novels.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Just one! My Macgyver 2016+The Rookie cops-vs-spies crossover, in which some LAPD officers keep coming across a black GTO involved in shenangains around LA: 4 Times the LAPD Didn’t Pull Jack Over + 1 Time They Did

It's probably the funniest thing I've ever written, and the ending is one of my very favorites. Also possibly the only gen fic ever posted in The Rookie fandom, although I don't look over there much.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yes. Somebody stole all my completed fics from FF.net last year. There was a big Tumblr post about some site full of stolen fics, and sure enough, there mine were. I asked to have them remove, got not reply. I haven't posted anything to FF.net since then.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I'm aware of.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes, but not for a long time. I used to frequently co-write fics in my first fandom.

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

I'm going to go with Washington State Ferry M/V Wenatchee. Who doesn't love a good ferry boat? It's an irconic style, fun if you're walking on, handy if you need to drive on, saves you hours of driving around Puget Sound by land. Also just a very nice-looking ship.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

Ugh, wow. I have a couple dozen things I kinda like but might never finish. My favorite, and least likely because I've made the least progress on it, is a MacGyver fic about Patti having plotted out her revenge better, and tring to fuck over the team by having listed Jack as her replacement... which of course gives him access to high-level secrets like Oversight's identity. Much drama ensues.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Ramping a story up. Characters. Make a story fully story-shaped.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Endings. 😫

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Hmmm I don't think I've ever needed to. Like most things in writing, I'm not against it in theory, but it can be done well or badly.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Anne McCaffrey's Pern, back in the paper fanzine days. Prior to joining AO3 in like 2019, I had 0 fanfics posted on the internet but a few in zines listed on Ebay. 😂

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

This is IMPOSSIBLE to answer. I could answer it differently every day for the next couple weeks. Anything I already mentions plus a couple more!

[hauntedfalcon]

thinking about how my husband lamented that Rings of Power doesn't do much with the Valar. thinking about how the Queen of Numenor says faith is a thin thread to hang a nation from, which runs counter to... most of recorded human history, not to mention Tolkien's works, where multiple nations of men awaited their True King to deliver them into a golden age, and Boromir's declaration that "Gondor needs no king" signified faithlessness and that was a negative thing. thinking about how there are articles out there to explain why Galadriel was upset in Rings of Power, to explain that she turned her back on elf heaven, on the selfsame far green country with whose description Gandalf moved us all to tears in Return of the King, and she chose ruin and the world

thinking yet again about how Cersei Lannister blows up a whole church because the Sparrows had become more influential than the crown, and a handful of episodes later she says "hey smallfolk, come into the castle keep to stay safe from this battle" and the smallfolk... do it, instead of saying "fuck no, that's the lady with the wildfire who killed our beloved priests and committed the worst possible blasphemies, and this matters to us because we are peasants and the only thing in our lives is work and religion" and there were no further repercussions because apparently the influential state religion of Westeros was one building and a cool catchphrase

thinking about Tess of the Road, which I almost did not finish because wow it's grueling to be a woman in a fantasy novel isn't it? thinking about the spiritual epiphany it grants its title character in the midst of a kneejerk "Catholicism but even more oppressive" setting because it reads easily I guess (see also all the Dragon Age games). still haven't unpacked all my thoughts from that one tbh but it's rolling around in there and it will be for a while

thinking about how almost nobody wants to write characters who have relationships with their gods, even in fantasy, a genre where characters could have very literal relationships with their gods, be they adversarial or positive or realistically messy. thinking about how writers seem not to want to touch that, either because it's too messy or because of an impression that society is beyond that. thinking about how this extends beyond the fantasy genre. thinking about how sterile Station Eleven's post-apocalypse felt and how part of that was a lack of folk practices or any spiritualism apart from the antagonist's obviously bad oppressive pseudo-Christianity. thinking about Anne McCaffrey insisting there is no religion on Pern in the far future, versus, like, everything about Deep Space Nine. thinking about how Battlestar Galactica felt ballsy as fuck for having monotheistic Cylons and polytheistic humans, but in the end that thread and the implications of robots worshiping a god just... never went anywhere

thinking about how, when religion is included in a work of fiction, it’s almost always with a wink wink, nudge nudge, you know and I know how backward and bogus this is, but it’s almost never played straight, much less validated in the narrative (I love you Netflix’s Shadow and Bone). and when it is portrayed as a positive influence in people's lives, it's in the vaguest, always culturally-Christian, terms of "light" and "darkness" and "hope". thinking about how Midnight Mass told a story about people who took so much comfort in their religion that even after it turned them into vampires and destroyed their community they sang hymns as the sun rose, and how that was such a foreign thing that a lot of the audience found it unbelievable

thinking about the extra layer of hypocrisy in defending a work of fantasy by saying "it was just like that back then" when a) there was no back then because it's fantasy, and b) the work in question ignores the foundational role religion played throughout the medieval Europe all these fantasy worlds use as a template

thinking about how art is meant to nurture the soul, but increasingly neglects to grant one to its characters

thinking about how if we can't imagine a world where people have a spiritual life that isn't just a tool of oppression, how can we create one

thinking about how much I love the Queen's Thief series and Arthdal Chronicles

[emblazonet]

Nerilka's Story

Can someone explain why this book exists, please?

It's fucking TINY and it took me over a month to get through, and it somehow managed to make me hate characters from Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, which is an incredible feat, because I loved Moreta and the cast.

I liked Nerilka in Moreta. She was fine.

Being in her head was like someone rubbing a cheesegrater on my skull.

As usual, spoilers follow for a book that's been out since 1986.

I mean, Anne McCaffrey did succeed in writing a first-person book that is exactly like a person writing shit down in a diary with very little filter and with no real sense of plot, and if I wanted that, I would go read a real person's diary, because it sure as fuck couldn't be more boring than this.

The first half of the book is just Nerilka (Rill) being all like 'wah I was mean to my family and now they're dead' which, like, valid thing to be sad about. Her dad sucks, which we know from Moreta. Great, we can maybe have tension with him—wait no. Suddenly the focus then moves on to Rill's flouncy stepmother who is just a really boring charicature of a stock villain. She's pretty and brainless and lords it over Nerilka and it's flat and boring and comes across as pretty misogynistic honestly.

McCaffrey's weird bloodline shit is extra gross in this. The drudges come off as subhuman in intelligence, who must be managed and herded. (And then all the parts later on where Alessan needs to have a person of the right bloodline to marry and I'm just like.... why.) There's no magic or anything that runs through bloodlines. There's no scientific reason why nobles matter more than other people. It's just stated to matter for some reason with no back up. If the caste system was like, nuanced or something—a drudge struggles to be thought of as intelligent or something, in another Pern story even!—then I'd be more tolerant, but this seems like an unconscious bias, and therefore it irks me.

The other issue with the first half of the book is that it's a really shoddy rehash of stuff that already happened in Moreta. Yawn.

I was relieved at first when Rill finally got to Ruatha hold where hopefully she could have some characters to interact with—the telling instead of showing was by this point irritating the everloving fuck out of me. Unfortunately it's just 'here's some boring vaccine logistics' for pages. Then finally Moreta dies which introduces some conflict...

And instead of anything compelling we end up with Mega Depressed Emotional Shutdown Alessan who basically gets a complete personality wipe, because that's how grief works right? And then suddenly he's making some stupid shitty suicide bargain to Rill. "You can kill me once I put a bun in your oven, but don't worry, I won't beat you!" WOW.

WOW. (There's no 'omg you were Lady Nerilka all along!' moment in any of the book, by the way, despite her travelling incognito. Everyone just already knew. That dialogue might have been fun! Can't have that.)

(There's also no scene where Rill and Alessan reminisce over Suriana, the one person they loved in common, because that also might be fun or have emotional resonance.)

And then Alessan is a zombie for the rest of the book. Look, yes, grief changes people, sure, but like. Maybe we can cut out realism in the TELEPATHIC DRAGON book to maybe not have a previously-likeable dude turn into 'not beating my wife is my one redeeming quality haha I have no emotions anymore.'

Like he gets four sons and doesn't emote until there's a daughter???

And Rill's like "This is fine, he has no real emotion for me except pragmatic approval, but I like being pregnant so it's a happy ending after all!"

(This book has some weird moments about pregnancy. Like the whole bit with the runner giving birth where Rill says runners are so much more advanced than humans because they don't wail and weep and curse in pain. What. What is that. Why is that. That's fucking weird, Anne! That's a weird thing to say! I love my random animal birth scenes to have an Obligatory Misogynist moment to make the narrator sound like she's Not Like Other Women, that's fucking great.)

Anyway this book fucking sucked and I'm going to pretend it never happened in order to go on enjoying Moreta.

1/10 YIKES

[urrone]

Writing Tag Game

Tagged by @swaps55​. Thank you, lovely! Tagging whoever wants to do this next! 

How many works do you have on AO3?

Okay so this is slightly complicated by the fact that I have two pseuds, so for one it’s 22 and for the other it’s 11

What’s your total AO3 word count?

209021 and 48539

What are your top 5 fics by kudos? (there’s a chance I’m about to offend the hell out of some of my new followers but here goes.)(also this is all for my main pseud bc the top count on the other is 4)

What Remains - A Wincest fic featuring amnesia and a small town in Texas. 

Shape I’m In - a hockey fic I coauthored

Never Lived a Time Better Spent In Love - a different hockey fic where two dudes retire and adopt a baby

Actually, Plenty - a sequel to the fic in the number one spot, written about six years after I posted the first one and left the fandom

Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same - Wincest holiday fic. My greatest claim to fame in fandom is that astolat read this and recced it. 

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Always. As a reader it makes me sad when I have this big emotional feeling about a fic and gush about it to the author and it’s just crickets. Also I just appreciate the fuck out of anyone who takes the time to leave a comment and tell me that they liked something I wrote. 

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Oh definitely lathbora viran which is just this short one shot I did out of a much larger idea I had but just didn’t feel like writing. So I just wrote the angsty ending. 

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

You know, I don’t know? Like maybe You’re Good For Me (a hockey fic) because absolutely nothing bad or angsty happens in it at all? Like 95% of my fics end happily but I’m an angst queen so there’s always a black lining. 

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

A couple. The first was literally twenty years ago when I put the popslash boys (and girls) into Anne McCaffrey’s world of Pern with All the Heart Can Know. (This is incredibly embarrassing so please don’t tell me if you click this link.) 

I’ve also written jaeger curtain fic with the hockey boys in Pacific Rim, under Scenes From the Apocalypse.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not that I can recall. -- ETA that I forgot that I got blasted on the hockey anon for my first hockey fic, which I’ve since expunged from the internet because the main pairing involved someone who has since been accused of sexual assault. 

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I have. The smuttiest thing I’ve ever written is an Oiler boys threesome, Hold You Down.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I’ve ever seen. 

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I did but it’s the fic that I’ve since expunged from existence. 

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Mildred, A College AU is a J2 fic I co-authored with one of my besties. I also coauthored the aforementioned Shape I’m In, which started its life as chat fic on twitter. That’s it so far. Co-authoring is so much harder than just doing it yourself though. 

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

That I’ve written or read? I used to say that Rodney McKay/John Shepard from Stargate Atlantis were my OTP of OTPs and that still feels correct in my heart, but I’ve never written them. I honestly don’t know what my favorite ship to write is. 

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I’d love to have the motivation to finish anything, tbh. But I had so many plans for Scenes From the Apocalypse that I don’t think I’ll ever actually write down. 

What are your writing strengths?

Conveying emotion with sparse phrasing, dialogue, making people cry. 

What are your writing weaknesses?

Writing in anything other than tight third person present. 

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’m of the firm belief that it should only be done if you get a native speaker to spot check you. 

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I was rewriting scenes for The Princess Bride at 13, but the first fic I posted for was popslash and I am not afraid to talk about it. 

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Right now it’s gravity, my Julie and the Phantoms fic. I think it’s one that best displays my strengths and also one that you can really see my growth as an author if you’ve been with me the last twenty years. Also I read it out loud to my best friend while we were in the same room and we both had to take a cry break. 

[kariachi]

This is it y’all, a day literal months in the coming- here and now I shall liveblog Dragon’s Kin, by Anne and Todd McCaffrey. By which I mean I will read Dragon’s Kin and take note of anything interesting, valuable, or just that comes to my mind. I have never read this book, it’s still in the plastic packaging it came in, I have never read a Todd book.

We’ll see if I survive.

Before I even open the damn thing, I am looking at the image of the McCaffreys on the back and let me say they look like they should be villains in a comedy western.

A Pass brings with it increased earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic activity, due to the whole ‘other celestial body coming in hot’ thing. Which actually makes a lot of sense, certainly more than anything else relating to Threadfall. (“charred bone” is this a fungus or a wildfire)

“Under the leadership of the Lord Holders and Weyrleaders-” *screams into aether*

It took until 16 years prior to the 3rd Pass for the Northern Continent to run out of surface coal and have to start actually digging for the shit

Everybody: Whers? Bah, not much to them, not good for much. Journeyman Miner Natalon: But consider, they might be awesome MasterMiner Britell: Hmmm, I’m keeping an eye on this one...

Chapter 1: “In early morning light I see: A distant dragon come to me”

We meet our main character, Kindan. His sister is getting married, good for her. Shame about the plot that’s going to happen later.

Having a watchwher gets you private housing. Also aw, the wher took their name from Kindan’s father that’s so sweet.

This just in, two boys can’t hang with dragons, settle instead for the simple pleasure of watchwher washing

Zenor: Dragons look like they’re soft, not like watchwhers Kindan: Bitch-

So our biggest asshole so far is a Tarik and honestly I’d be sending him back to the Hall with a nice long report of exactly how much of a fuckwit he is. And I’ve only known him a few pages.

And we meet the other major character- Nuella- who is apparently Somebody though who we have no idea

Oh gods Kindan’s mother is dead, his sister is marrying and leaving, and his father and Dask’s fates are in the fucking summary. Boy is about to have a time.

He has brothers! Well thank fuck.

Whers have external ears

Also I have only known Dask for two paragraphs but I love him

“Then Dask gave a little happy chirp, flapped his wings once, and vanished.” Whers can between, alone and from the ground. Apparently Dask does it all the time go he can avoid the lights from the camp.

Dask is brown, I was figuring but nice to know

Kindan, assuming dragons are harder to wash because they’re fucking massive and need oiling and shit (whers, the dragonkin for the common working fucker)

Chapter 2: “It’s skin is bronze, it’s eyes are green; It’s the loveliest dragon I’ve ever seen”

Damn Kindan’s family is a mess, his brothers are all dicks, his sisters are supposeldy dicks but we haven’t seen them, and the only decent fuckers are leaving or dying

Kindan’s Sister: Kaylek, my brother who loves to sing but couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, you shall sing at my wedding Master Harper: Over my dead body he will!

Kindan’s siblings may be shit, but he’ll be damned if he allows them to talked bad about by some non-relative and he’s stubborn as a wher himself about it

Am I reading a fucking fairytale film? The new Harper is a dick until he realises ‘oh wait, this kid isn’t complete shit, I shouldn’t have said the seriously horrible things I did’

(Seriously “to think your mother died giving birth to you”, I want Dask to eat him too)

Well it’s nice to see that the ‘whers fly at night because the air is thicker’ thing is only speculation by people with no fucking teachings with regard to that shit. At least so far.

Kindan really just went on a paragraph long internal monologue about the value of miners to the function and survival of Pern and for all he doesn’t in his heart want to be one I kinda want to see him grow into it now. Stories of stepping away from what’s expected of you and forging your own path are great (I’ve been writing some) but stories of falling in love with what before looked like something to be avoided can also be nice.

And now we get a two paragraph internal monologue about how awesome whers are. Best miners ever.

“Traditionally, the marriage ceremony was performed in the morning, timed so that as the couple completed their marriage vows, the sun would rise, signifying the warmth of the new relationship and how it would lighten not only the bride and groom but also all those associated with them.” Awwww!!!!

“However, such a ceremony would mean Dask could not attend. So Jofri had come up with the idea of performing the ceremony with the setting sun, instead, and lighting a bonfire as the final vows were made.” Awwwwwww!!!!!!!

For all the shit you hear and see relating to whers in earlier and later periods (that they’re ugly, and disliked, and kept chained up)  it’s so nice to see Dask truly be part of the family, so much so that they changed the fucking wedding to accommodate him. I want this to be the tradition of handler families now. And then we have to remember that one of the other handlers for the camp straight up fucking left because Tarik was being a dick to his wher and he wasn’t having it. Yes, give me wher love.

Oh my gods Dask flying about with a glow in his claws to act as a spotlight as his handler’s daughter walks down the aisle this is so sweet!

And he’s singing along to the music!

He’s doing the groom too! Dask is a gift!

“For now that these two are one, we are all more,“ Master Zist intoned. He placed Silstra’s hand in Terregar’s and kissed each lightly on the cheek. “To Terregar and Silstra!”

The crowd stood up and roared back: “To Terregar and Silstra!”

“Long life and happiness!” Master Zist intoned.

“Long life and happiness!” the crowd roared back.

Kindan and Nuella officially meet.

Nuella, taking advantage of Kindan not wanting to get given chores on this the night of his sister’s wedding and her own presumed misbehavior to get him to keep her well away from any authority.

Nuella is sheltered as fuck, she hasn’t even seen a mashed potato before

Ah, she’s the twin of the big boss’s son. Don’t know why she’s being so fucking hidden I mean good fuck, but, at least we know who she is.

Aw, Zenor is her bestfriend. Not that she has many options but still

Seven fucking brothers! And an unknown number of sisters! No wonder their mother died having the last one, she birthed at least nine surviving children! Do you know how many she’d have had to have to get those numbers? Was she born pregnant, wtf?

Chapter 3: “Watch-wher, whatch-wher in the night; Guard our Hold, keep it right; When the morning sun does come; Watch-wher, then you job is done”

Aw, Kindan’s relationship with the his brothers is healing

Also Zist is a fucking taskmaster. He gets results but damn, man, chill.

The big boss’s son is apparently a sickly child

Dask has been in A Mood which is a never a good sign when you’re talking about your security critter

Miners’ children all just ‘it’s too quiet, something is wrong’ like they’re fucking birds. Not that they’re wrong, mind, but still

Welp, bad air was released and sparked before Dask could warn the miners (I assume a pocket got opened as somebody else struck some stone) and now we’ve got a cave-in. Dask got out and is now killing himself trying to rescue the miners.

Damn his father and his brothers in one day. And Dask fucking dying in his arms after managing to save the survivors despite bleeding out with his handler dead (which, even if whers can outlive their handlers he had to have felt, he’s dragonkin he’d have noticed the bond breaking, he was doing this despite knowing that he wouldn’t find Danil alive on the other side. Was he this dedicated to his work, was he hoping to save Danil’s boys, we’ll never know).

Pour one out for Danil, who did his damnedest to take care of his children, and for Dask, who was too damn good for us.

Zenor survived, but his father is also dead. He and Kaylek saved the poor boy’s life in exchange for their own. Gods the last thoughts that must’ve been going through that man’s head, as he realized that the mine was collapsing and he had brought his son in with him despite him not being near old enough...

Seriously y’all I’m crying

Chapter 4: “I am too big to cry; And my voice is too shy; To sing my sad, sad song; Or say the words I long; To say to you- good-bye, good-bye.”

The book says Kindan is the youngest of nine. It also says he has seven brothers and plural sisters. And the sisters at least lasted long enough to give him shit growing up. The book lies to me.

Okay so, Kindan’s got two siblings remaining- Jakris and Tofir- one of whom has been fostered to I think a sister of theirs? Kindan doesn’t note who ‘Terra and her husband’ are otherwise so I assume it’s another older sister and another of which has been fostered to Crom Hold where he’ll be learning art and maybe someday mapmaking. Kindan is still in the camp.

Zenor wants to take over his dad’s role of miner like boy you are ten stop

Ah, Kindan wants to stay.

If somebody would light Tarik on fire please? Especially given that he’s sitting here claiming the mining will be better without them when it’s already been stated that the shift with a wher gets more ore out of the ground per shift than the the others because the wher itself is a fantastic digger.

Zist: We need someone to raise Kindan Natalon: So good of you to volunteer Zist: o.o

Nobody likes Tarik, good, send the man back to Crom, let them deal with his ass.

And more confirmation that Kindan has sisters, I really need this book to make up it’s mind

Nuella is upset she’ll have to avoid the Harper’s cottage with Kindan living in it

Zist: If I’m going to raise this child then damnit I’m making him a harper

We’re getting much character stuff but not much actually interesting

Chimney got clogged at the big boss’s house, Kindan managed to save the lot by coming by and noticing, the existence of Nuella is now known to him.

Kindan can keep a secret, he is taking  to harpering well

Mine’s having a lot of minor accidents

And now big boss’s wife’s baby is coming early, these fuckers just cannot catch a break

Nuella and her brother switching places back and forth so she can be involved in shit. Also she has some mind for healing

Zist had a daughter at one point- Carissa. Nice name

Also the baby is fine, a month early but fine. She doesn’t have a name yet, I will keep y’all updated

Chapter 5: “A baby’s cry, a mother’s sigh; Sweet things make a day go by”

Zist, having Kindan run around the camp telling adults what they need to do: It’ll be an interesting challenge for you Kindan, Telling the big boss that Zist offered to do his administrative work: He said it would be an interesting challenge for him

Oh shit Nuella is blind! Honestly, fucking slow clap for not making a big deal of it so far

The Traders have women of rank. I know this is a second Interval story but still, worth noting. Shit hasn’t gone completely to shit for the women yet

Nuella is having a crisis because she has no information including on things like ‘women don’t have to bake or be mothers, there are in fact options’. All of this is not helped by her mother stressing out about whether little Larissa is going to go blind like her sister did. Apparently shit went downhill when she was three and now her life is stress and isolation.

Okay, so Natalon’s mother was blind, and now his daughter is blind, and he’s trying to hide it from everybody for fear people are going to think there’s something wrong with him and will stop working with them and that nobody will want to marry his son. He’s given up on Nuella marrying. I want to smack him and adopt his children out to good homes.

Kindan, age 11, starting to realize girls can in fact be cute

Also they’re disguising her so she can play at the ‘yay there’s finally some new company for a few days’ Gather

Even Tarik’s fucking cronies don’t like him!

Nuella’s parents and brother are aware she’s there. No scene will be made.

Nuella getting to dance while Zist chides Kindan about not setting up his also 11-yo friends. “They’re too young to match, and you’re too young to be a matchmaker.”

Ooo, the mysterious missing 8th apprentice was a wherhandler and decided fuck that noise. Can’t blame him, I wouldn’t want ot deal with Tarik either

The assumption is he’d rather face his master’s wrath than work there, which peeps nothign that they’d all rather die than face their own masters’ wraths, and the noting that he may well have been worried about losing his wher to all this shit. Which makes sense with how hostile Tarik has made the place for them

Chapter 6: “Cromcoal, Cromcoal, burning bright; Warm the cold of winter’s night; Cromcoal Cromcoal, underground; Where the best of all coal’s found”

They are calling a dragon to take them to someone called Aleesa for, presumably, a wher egg. We are nearly halfway through this book, by the way, which is a little fucking late to finally be bringing in the wher egg but sure, fine.

Aleesa is the handle or a gold wher. Apparently the title for that is Master. So you get Weyrwomen and Whermasters. That’s pretty cool.

Kindan sees a dragon take note of the ‘we need a dragon’ flag and “Zist listened appreciatively and guided him to crafting a better tale, so that by the end of a sevenday, Kindan’s story took a full fifteen minutes to tell and left all eyes peering up to the sky, hoping for a glimpse of their own.”

Zist has Timed It before. Apparently he accidentally spooked a dragon hatchling when he was younger and they Impressed his friend and at some point he timed it to go back and help himself fix the damage the panicked bronze did. A bronze whose rider is now a Weyrleader, by the by. He’s figuring if it seems like they’ll miss their meeting to get the egg then hopefully they can Time It to get there on time.

Telgar Weyrleader D’gan shows up a week late, bitches about it not being an emergency, talks shit about everybody and everything, is lucky to leave with his life (I’d have killed him). Zist is, I assume, about to call Benden to actually get shit done.

“So, Kindan, what did you think of your first look at a dragon?” “Oh, they’re pretty enough, but you’d never fit one in a mine.”

Benden Weyrleader M’tal, being a proper fucking dragonrider who understands what his fucking duties are, is going to get shit done

People out here respecting whers and their importance, you love to see it.

Chapter 7: “Watch-wher, watch-wher in the mine; Help save life, yours and mine; Guide us in the darkest night; With your keen unfailing sight”

Gaminth reassuring Kindan as they travel Between.

“-to keep the hatchling warm until it’s second, tougher coat came in” Do, do whers shed their skin like birds molt baby fluff? Start with soft wherlet skin and then shed that for tough wher skin? I am amazed and also that’s adorable.

So, you’ve gotta convince the gold to let you pick one of her eggs to take with you. I presume if she says no and you press the matter she eats you.

Oh gods wherhandlers blood their children to their whers! Oh my gods that’s adorable! Make the babies pack! Gods how strong is that did Dask now how many of them were dead dear gods now I’m sad again-

Talking to the queen wher, being polite, sending her mental images, Kindan is a Good Boy

Wher eggs glow! Dimly but they glow! Also good boy Kindan, compliment those eggs!

Also they are half the size of dragon eggs and have wrinkles. (I assume wher eggs are more like snake eggs at first...)

“Eeny, meeny, tipsy, teeny, ah vu bumberosha, nineteen hundred and two, I pick you.” And he gets one with a ring around it in wrinkle.

Aleesa is a fucking Queen, sending Kindan, Zist, a Weyrleader, and the big boss away with a simple “You bore me.” She does make sure to compliment Kindan on a job well done and to reinforce that she expects her payment (which she’d have gotten either way, by the way, wher eggs are pricey and you’re paying for a shot at being allowed to have one)

On the topic of feeding wherlets:

“We’ve been experimenting, actually, on the best post-hatching meal. Watch-whers are not as insatiable as dragons, but they will gulp down meat and sometimes choke, as you know.” She pinned Kindan with a fiery glare, and he nodded as if he knew exactly what she meant. “D’you have oats?”

Kindan nodded, glancing over at Natalon to be sure he was also listening to Aleesa.

“Then arrange to get fresh blood from whoever butchers at the camp. Make porridge of the oats, using water, and add the blood as the oats thicken in the pot. I’d say a half-pail a day should be sufficient. If you keep the blood cool, a pailful should last over a day or two, no trouble. Most camps or Holds slaughter every other day. Feed it was often as it wants, and some of the liver and lungs that might go to waste otherwise. Don’t start meat hunks until three months, when it has enough back teeth to chew with. You can continue with porridge feeds in the morning until the hatchling starts to coats out.”

So the fuckers don’t start with all their teeth on top of everything.

Chapter 8: “Watch-wher, watch-wher in the egg; Grant to me the boon I beg”

This delight of a child is making porridge constantly so that it’ll be ready when the bab hatches. And then when it starts hatching he immediately darts for the porridge.

Bab eats like a fucking garbage disposal

She is also currently assumed to be green and apparently whers have notable enough bits to tell sex even if you can’t be sure of color

Kindan do not call the bab ugly, she is doing her best

“Did it give you a name?” “I didn’t ask.” “It is enough like a dragon to know it’s own name?” “I don’t know.”

“She’s not as big as I thought she would be.“

“Big enough to have the appetite of nine dragons,“ Kindan, almost proudly.

This girl is adorable

The Harper followed him out to the shed and greeted Zenor, who hadn’t moved from the spot in which Kindan had left him. The hatchling had been trying to crawl up his legs, her hungry bleek more insistent.

She has been blooded but not named. Kindan is moving in with her.

Nuella you’re a doll but if you can not assume that a baby can eat whatever an adult can eat, especially when Kindan is working off the knowledge of someone who actually, ya know, has experience with this shit? It’d be great.

The bab is now named Kisk and it’s pretty apparent she named her own damn self, for all that she didn’t use words.

Kindan, in a very 11-yo moment, wonders whether the WherMaster actually knows anything about raising whers since weaning his early worked out fine

Wherlet playing, I repeat, wherlet playing, far too adorable

Kisk is going to be a good little guard, already rooting out people who are where they shouldn’t be

Tarik’s wife likes whers! And is teaching her children to like whers! As all good people should!

Cristov, son of Tarik the Dick, is trying to make up his own mind about whers and-

Kisk darted her tongue out and licked Cristov’s outstretched hand before he could pull it bac,k. She made a sad, don’t-you-like-me noise at Cristov

Tarik: *talks shit like he’s got anything going for him* His Wife: *is gonna fucking smack him if he doesn’t start with some basic decency*

Kisk keeping Kindan up all damn night

Chapter 9: “Walk, baby, walk, come to me; Soon, baby, soon, you’ll walk away from me”

And now they’re trying to say Zenor and Nuella were born and raised in the camp despite saying earlier in the book that they’d been there less than a year two years ago.

Also at 3 months Kisk is 12 hands high at the shoulder and 40 from nose to tail. Which is about 4 ft by 13 ft, and still growing.

Kindan, hit with the sudden realization that oh, yeah, being a wherhandler is going to mean not being a harper

Nuella if anything the fact Kindan can’t see in the dark and doesn’t know where he’s going is all the more reason it’d be better training for Kisk to lead him than you, who knows this tunnel like the back of her hand, blind or no

Ooo, Tarik the Dick had a camp the failed, so now he’s all sour because his nephew’s doing better than him.

M’tal is here, Telgar is still bitches (what is it with Telgar being assholes?) and whers apparently don’t have the same problems with oiling and shit dragons do despite growing far faster which makes no damn sense but sure

Whers and dragons can chat amongst themselves, to the surprise of noone, or at least not me.

Nuella’s sweet on Zenor and honestly, go for it kiddo

Kisk is starting to learn.

Chapter 10: Hot air rises, cold air falls; These are thermodynamic laws

(Fuckers expect me to believe the Pernese couldn’t keep the word ‘year’ but ‘thermodynamic’ survived)

Nuella theorizing that whers see heat because she can feel it. I want to say it’s because she’s twelve and, as kids do, thinks she knows everything, but the more I read the more I’m fairly sure it’s just that the McCaffrey’s want her to be Amazing and The Best (which, ugh) and so are just, doing this. It doesn’t work.

Dragonriders here looking for a potential goldrider (very clearly Nuella from the conversation) and lamenting that based on the dragon’s description she might be blind and therefor ‘unable to Impress’ and just- Shit that makes you wanna throw things

Ya know they did so good before they revealed Nuella is blind. She was just another kid then, it was nice, but now... I love her but my hackles are raising

Also can I just say that whers seeing heat is the stupidest thing I’ve heard yet, given everything we know about their anatomy leads to them seeing in the darkness like everything else with massive fucking eyes and a nocturnal disposition.

Operation: Teach Whers to Bespeak Dragons During Emergencies is a go

Nuella claiming that whers can’t be taught to Between because nobody can see heat like they (apparently) can and we’re to take this as gospel despite the like, second thing Dask ever did on-page being to Between on his lonesome. Did these people not have editors? It didn’t seem so bad at first but as time goes on and we get more shit that contradicts other shit (we got contradicting information within pages of each other for fuck’s sake) I am slowly losing my mind

Tarik continues to be a dick and refuses to shore up his tunnels correctly. And he wonders why he lost his fucking camp.

Kindan saw through Kisk’s eyes during hide-and-seek

Chapter 11: “Watch-wher, watch-wher, guard us all; With your dragon-summoning call”

Turns out wherhandlers don’t take well to some dragonrider coming by and trying to teach them about their whers.

Nuella is being offered the chance to go teach whers to chat with dragons.

Everyone is supportive even while she has a quick little existential breakdown that’s probably been building for a while

We skip forward to Nuella going via dragon to Lemos to start her work. Dragons like her and she takes well to Between

Wherhandlers really can’t do well learning from dragonriders because their critters are so different

Nuella is good at what she does.

There’s far too much of old men going ‘*gasp* this child suddenly reminds me of [blank] they are amazing’ though

Whers and their handlers are learning

Turns out, surprise surprise, whers are awesome

Chapter 12: “Harper, harper, sing me a song; Give me a tune that lasts all day long”

Feels like it’s trying too hard...

Tarik the Dick has caused a cave-in and now is refusing to do anything about it because he is, well, see above

There is a now a team of rescuers, mostly kids, out to save the day via secret passage and wher

Nuella: Lolanth, I need your rider to send word to the MasterMiner and also get the pumps pulling air out the mines Lolanth: I have told my rider, and called Gaminth, he and his are coming, and I’ve called Ista, they’re coming, and I’ve told the miners-

Lolanth is a Good Dragon who apparently does not go halfsies

Lolanth got everyone and their grandmother to this camp within thirty seconds

On the one hand, blind characters getting to be awesome, one the other, this is really leaning towards Magically Disabled. Nobody can hear things like Nuella can, nobody can work with whers like Nuella can, nobody is as smart as Nuella is, she’s 12 and better than the majority of the adults around her, just, if they could fucking chill for five minutes.

Also people are alive on the other side of the cave-in

Finally Kindan remembers that Dask could Between, and I promise you it’s going to turn out that he was a miracle and only Nuella (who has no idea what’s on the other side of the cave-in) can show Kisk where she needs to go

Wow, it’s like I’m magic

Chapter 13: “Watch-wher, watch-wher, do you know; All the places you can go?”

I’m glad everybody who survived the cave-in is saved but we just got a fucking paragraph “But it is I who have been blind” speech from Nuella’s father and just. Kill me, please.

And Kisk has decided to swap handlers and be Nuelsk now.

And Kindan is going off to become a Harper.

~~

Okay, not the worst book I’ve read. There were places that needed editing, there was a lot of shit that contradicted each other (Kindan’s everchanging number of siblings just being one example), it had plenty of the McCaffrey’s trademark Totally Accurate Science, and the longer I spent reading it the more it felt like one of those ‘see, disabled people can also do things and be capable’ stories complete with a fucking “But it is I who have been blind” (literal quote, kill me now). And this shit is from 2003. On the plus side though, there’s plenty of quality wher content and the kids are fun when the writers aren’t on their little Not A Soapbox.

Overall, a 6/10, if someone wrote an anosmiac character this way I’d want their head on a stick no matter how badass they were.

[shipfishwrites]

The Dolphins’ Bell: Initial Thoughts

According to Anne McCaffrey, a story is when events happen in a row... at least according to the somewhat painful mess that is The Dolphins’ Bell. (Honestly, as is according to many of her books. I read the Rowan a while back because the physical copy I had was an important gift, and gods that “novel” is actually three bad novellas glued together.)

I just really want a shipfish story that’s about the fucking shipfish. I know I’m a weirdo for even caring, the dolphins were so peripheral and so tacked-on to the whole setting but I just -- Jim Tillek isn’t even a dolphineer. And he’s the main character of the story about how the dolphins saved the day. (Except it was actually Jim Tillek who saved the day.)

There are, I think, 54 characters named in this story: 18 dolphins and 36 humans. The story is only 60 pages long. 29 of those names fly at you in the first seven pages, as I noted in a previous post, because nothing makes you like characters more that having a zillion of them thrown in your face with little indication of who matters!

Also I hate that Theo Force got Lessa’d. As soon as she became Tillek’s love interest, she started nagging and lost half her sass.

Oh, can someone fucking tell me why the top dolphin is the Tillek?? Why aren’t they a Force??? Why was Teresa called out as the Speaker for Dolphins and then never spoke again?? I actually did sort of like TIllek through this story, but he... was done disservice; his relationship with Theo feels forced to me. Tillek reads as aro to me, somewhere in the greyro and grey-ace zone.

I’ve gotten off topic. Basically I liked riding around in Jim Tillek’s head seeing what was going on during the evac of Landing and the subsequent weeks. But everything seemed jerkily staged in medias res: I still don’t know what rank or respect Tillek had that meant people just Listened To Him at the start of the story (I think it was offhandedly mentioned he got extra personal effects tonnage on the ship because he was a pilot??), there are several awkward “and this is the result of X event” moments were X event wasn’t mentioned at all, there were too many fucking named individuals, and not enough actual characters. My heart for a dolphin with personal depth.

Basically, it was clumsy.

I have a lot of questions about this story. I think for this one I need to do a dramatis personae, maybe a two-parter plot summary, maayybe a breakdown of ships, and at least some kind of cursory geographic survey. 

Next after this is The Ford of Red Hanrahan and it mentioned “Wind Blossom’s photosensitive uglies” in the first couple paragraphs so I’m not looking forward to reading hate on my favorite dragonkin...

[riotbrrrd]

I would love to hear about the debate on fantasy and sci-fi!

Well to be fair I was mostly thinking about this conversation I had a few weeks ago with @athenenoctua9 on my sideblog, so the only thing I can do is expand on it but it’s probably just going to be a long rambling

But you asked for it so what I have to say is that “where to draw the line” is a question that authors since the fifties have been… I don’t want to say struggling with, but playing with for sure.

Because yeah, you could argue that there is a very clear distinction between what Arthur Clarke and J.R.R. Tolkien offer as authors, and that the stories have nothing in common. But between these two obvious examples lies a multitude of stories that are grey areas, of stories that are not one or the other, but both, and these stories make us ask interesting questions.

Like, it’s fun and possible to play with both genres at once. Space opera in particular is rife with examples of adventurers on far away planets that have nothing to do with our little earth except to justify that there are humans there - and those planets are filled to the brim with fantasy tropes. Frank Herbert’s Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, all have humans colonizing far away planets - but these series also have telekinesis, giant monsters and, in McCaffrey’s case, fucking dragons. And it’s not just because those authors in particular made an effort either - well, they did, but finding tropes that come from hero’s journey type stories is not a surprise. If anything it is a natural fallout after, like, Jules Verne’s books, where sure, science is important, but the adventure is more important, so we’ll tweak the laws of physics just a little bit to allow for the cool stuff to happen - and isn’t that what magic is? Isn’t it a way to explain the unexplicable? Isn’t that what Arthur Clarke himself meant in his third law?

And I use a lot of examples that are identified as sci-fi, because to be fair I do make the distinction, but we could start with fantasy, and ask: is it only made of its setting? If we choose to consider that sci-fi is necessarily based off scientific theories and new technologies, does fantasy need to ignore it all? When does it stop being fantasy? If the setting is industrial revolution england, is it still fantasy? If there’s running waters and public lighting, does it stop being fantasy? If there are guns? And cars? And cellphones? If there’s time travel, is it sci-fi or fantasy? What about dimension hopping: magic or multiverse theory? What if it’s a long time ago but in a galaxy far away?

But also: made-up things are made-up. “Escapism litterature” is the same kind of litterature whether the made-up thing is spaceships or castles. “Where do we draw the line” can be an exercise in relativism: if zombies are real, why not vampires, if aliens are real, why not dragons, if you can get a chip in your head that gives you perfect photographic memory, why not one that gives you telekinesis? Why does suspension of disbelief has to stop at the conventions of a genre? Bear with me for one second: one of the reason why I love reading science-fiction from the 50s is because I love seeing what people of the past dreamed what the future would look like. But people don’t just dream about what technology could become, people have always dreamed and will continue to dream about flying, moving objects with their minds and sending their thoughts directtly to their loved ones, and whether they implement this by saying “it’s magic” or “it’s sufficiently advanced technology” does not matter - the dream matters.

What I’m trying to say is: in the case that interests us, Round Table Of Guys Who Can Just Do That is only semantically different from Standard Medieval Fantasy Setting With Magic. Because magic is also a thing that people Can Just Do. Call it “mutation” if you want, but mutation as in “X-Men mutation” is magic already. It’s magic with a fancy name to make it sound like it’s science.

You haven’t been following me for long so I’ll give you the short version of the thing that has Kept Me Awake for the last year and a half or something, but: I don’t want to abide by this. I don’t want to say that science-fiction and fantasy are only separated by aesthetics - mostly because then, we’d have to admit that you could tell any sci-fi story in a fantasy setting and any fantasy story in a sci-fi setting and 1) we don’t do that, 2) I cannot imagine why anyone would ever want to write a story where people can’t just take a fucking shower whenever they want, if they had the choice to do so and it wouldn’t impact on the story at all.

BUT ALSO BECAUSE I have to recognize that if they are different things, they’re two ends of a spectrum, and in the middle of it exists a giant, messy festival of Stories That Are Both. And that these Stories That Are Both force us to ask ourselves what is magic in our worlds. And I like that. And I want this to keep going.

But in practice that just means when I’m tired and see posts like that I kinda roll my eyes extra hard because “round table of super heroes” is just the normal round table, don’t let yourselves be fooled by the wording of it.

[lemonsharks]

So I’m rereading the dragonriders of pern series and I am having two (2) thoughts

1) WHy did we completely abandon the subplot of Fax’s 37+ children, some of whom would presumably have been entitled and angry at so abruptly being stripped of their status? 

Like ... that would have been a hella interesting thing to bring back in right as our heroes are getting comfortable, perhaps preventing them from bonking the red star out of orbit and ensuring an actual need for dragonriders going forward 

2) Oh my god everyone here is a CHILD and Lessa, pre-search (pre-MANORA) would have made a terrible fuckin Holder. She knows how to use her psychic powers to get people to do what she wants but also, also, absolutely no idea how to manage a municipality and frankly a very shitty temperament for the job 

But also: EVERYONE is a CHILD and they NEED AN ADULT, WHERE IS THE ADULT. 

bonus 3): Oh, THIS is why the 2016 election was such a cluster for me to watch, because my country elected a fucking anne mccaffrey villain. -_-

[friendshiptothemax]

Hey guys! Sorry for taking a while to get back to this! Spent time hanging out with my fam, but now I’m back. My episode party in LA was pretty sweet except that the grill caught on fire and we had to extinguish it out! My parents’ party in Texas was also awesome. My dad didn’t know I was coming, and when my best friend and I pulled up, he started to tease her for being early before he saw me and he got all choked up!! Also my high school creative writer came, and my dad’s best friend showed up in Red cosplay (and when we opened the door he was down on his knees facing away with his hands behind his head and said he’ll only talk with Elizabeth Keen, which was v. funny). An awesome episode weekend all around! I also loved the reception from you guys – I got a lot of really sweet comments from you that I really appreciated. You guys are the best!

Now a few little BTS details that I promised:

The thing I’m most proud of that made it into episode 618 is the Weepies song at the end. Something a lot of people know The Blacklist for is our music – JB loves to pick out the perfect songs for each episode. I put The Weepies in my very first draft and was delighted to see them make it all the way to the final cut – it’s actually quite a high honor from JB, that he likes my taste in music!

My other favorite thing is the Ms. Pac-Man stuff. When I started writing the outline, all that was written there from Aram when Ressler gives him the quarters is “What’s this?” I think Aram is a really fun character, and I wanted to give him something more distinct to say, so I put Aram saying he used to hold the high score in Ms. Pac-Man. What is really cool about that is the second part, at the end of the scene, where Ressler calls it back, was added by the Johns later. It was a fun “yes-and” – they saw my original joke, and they liked it enough to build on it! Even more flattering? They’ve shot a callback to it in another scene this season! I’ve created a part of Aram’s character, y’all!

So a few notes on the development of the episode. Typically, when lower-level writers/assistants pitch for the show, we don’t know the specifics of where the plot will be in that episode. We might know the general arc, but not exactly what the B/C/D stories in the episode will be, and I was no exception. My idea was specifically that there was a true-crime podcaster who was killing people to make it look like the crime was resurfacing. The seed of this idea was my love for this true crime explosion that’s going on right now (if you love Serial, Making a Murderer, the Keepers, etc, my go-to recommendation is Criminal, which is a really excellent podcast). What intrigued me is that you listen to a true crime podcast, you are putting an extreme amount of trust the podcaster to give you all of the facts – when they might have biases you don’t realize.

My original idea had what I called the “wrong things for the right reasons” ending, where in the end, we find out that Tobias is innocent, the professor is guilty of the original murders, and Kimberly has been committing the new ones because she fervently believes the police got the wrong guy and is willing to go vigilante to correct their mistake. This is what I pitched in the room, BUT, from pretty much that first pitch, JB got really excited by what I call the “spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman.jpg” ending, where Kimberly kills people because she believes Tobias is innocent, but after she gets him out, she learns that he really did do the original murders.

The Spiderman ending stayed for a really long time! We were well into breaking the episode when we realized it didn’t really work – it made the final two acts SO CLUNKY. There had to be a scene where they each realized the other was a murderer, learned why the other did it, and we got their perspective on how they felt about the other being a murderer. Which was A LOT. It also left us without an innocent person for the FBI to be rushing to save (we call this the “muffin”).

At one point earlier on we had discussed the version where Kimberly had been the killer all along, which I hated when we initially discussed it. I couldn’t get my head around why, if she’d gotten away with it all of those years ago, she would not only return to her old ways, but also make a podcast about it? It seemed like a very broad villain move to me. But then, when we were banging our heads against the wall trying to get the Spiderman ending to work, someone suggested that she had done all of this, from the very beginning, out of love for Tobias and suddenly it was like *angels singing sound effect* and everything fell into place!! It’s funny how that works sometimes – I’m sure some of you fic writers can relate! Sometimes it seems really hard until just one little puzzle piece makes it all work. And thus you got the ending you saw on screen.

In my position as script coordinator, I name probably about a quarter of the characters on the show, so I didn’t have a ton of names in the bank that I really, really wanted to use, but I did get a few special ones in there. Tobias is for Tobias the Animorph, who I knew I was going to get a tattoo of to celebrate my first episode (he doesn’t have a canon last name, but I have used Tobias Carlyle in fic before). Kimberly is for my college roommate, who has done some radio work. I wish I could have used her full name, but her last name is REALLY FUCKING METAL. Imagine that her name is, like, Kimberly Swordsteel. It’s not quite that, but you get the idea. I knew the Johns would never let me get away with using it, so I just gave her a random last name (she was still honored!). I wish I could have named the professor after one of my faves, but since he was a creepo obviously that would not be a compliment, so I named him after Anne McCaffrey, the author of Dragonriders of Pern. Everyone else is just a jumble of first and last names from my Facebook feed.

Anyway, I hope you liked it! I had a great time writing it and an even better time watching it on the TV! I decided I wanted to be a TV writer back in 2007 when I was in the height of my Heroes fandom, so that I can say I wrote an episode of something on NBC twelve years later is pretty fucking surreal! As I’ve said in other places, James Spader is a master of his craft, and it was an absolute honor to have him perform words I wrote. I couldn’t have been luckier for my first episode.

I’m also really excited because I’ve been asked to record DVD commentary for this episode, which I’m looking forward to! :)

[rjalker]

Will be updated as I read further.

This list does not include random dragons who appear for one scene to get tears in their wings fixed, or random one-off humans we never see again.

= = =

Physically disabled characters in The Dragonriders of Pern so far who are not just disabled due to old age:

Master Oldive - top healer for the whole planet, has a hunch back. So far just a side character and we don't really get to know him at all.

Readis - has an atrophied leg from being poisoned by an alien sea urchin as a kid. Struggles to walk and balance on it. Was given a horse to ride on, but no other mobility aids. Is a main character in The Dolphins of Pern.

Thella - became chronically ill after catching some unnamed virus. Is one of the main characters and villain in The Renegades of Pern. Had scars on her face from the unknown virus. Was made disabled to show how evil she is. She's dead now. She's also the best character in this whole series so far.

Bethany - was born with a clubbed foot. Doesn't want to have kids because she doesn't want to pass on her disability because Anne McCaffrey sucks. Stay tuned for updates.

Camo - probably has Down syndrome but it's not specified. Is described as and treated like a child even though he's an adult. Is a servant any time we see him. And I don't think the servants on this planet get paid.

Guy whose name I forgot - Lost a foot in a fishing accident, became homeless because his captain kicked him off as soon as they reached land and no one wanted to hire him. Became a spy for Thella in the homeless camps to help her recruit people for her revolt. Is now dead. Minor character at best.

= = =

Neurodivergent characters in The Dragonriders of Pern so far:

uhh kid whose name I just forgot. He's autistic and Super Uber Duper Magically Smart because autism gives you magical reading powers and that's why he's not really an R slur!!!!!! Stay tuned for updates.

Lytol - chronic depression because his dragon died

= = =

Characters who should be disabled but aren't:

Ruth - do I even need to elaborate

Jaxom - should definitely be suffing some long term effects from catching firehead. Light sensitivty at the very fucking least, along with all the other symptoms that would cause. Come on.

[tryingthisfangirlthing]

Love, I’ve Missed You In A Million Different Ways (How Is It We Keep On Writing Tragedies Together?) 3/14-ish

So this is part 3 of my @bering-and-wells-exchange gift for @dapperdorian. This section kept kicking my behind, and I wasn’t happy with it, and I wasn’t happy with it but I had a plan to follow. Then last Friday this idea bowled me over out of left field, and exploded, and, well. It’s not soft longing, more like love-hate if-things-were-different repressed wanting.

And warning for implied major character death.

3. She Would Have Given Everything

“I never want to meet you like this again,” Myka bit out, as she grabbed Helena's hand and jumped them both to the posh downtown lobby.

“Well, don't.” Helena lifted one shoulder. “But I'm not going to aside while this plague wrecks —”

“If you want to help, go back to your lab. You are not Batman! Or — Batwoman, or whoever. One of these days you're going to get yourself killed!” And her concern was very real. “And we need you.”

“That fictional, pouty, playboy Gary Stu? I should hope not!” Helena arched her eyebrows at Myka, and shook her head in disbelief. “Quite frankly, I’m offended that comparison even occurred to you.”

“Helena, you’re not super,” Myka hissed at her. “And you have —”

A loud crash rang out above them. Amanda lost the queen, Steve relayed.

On it. “Get out of here, and stay out,” Myka grit out, and jumped back to the 10th floor to search.

Higher than 10. Lower than 15. Closer to 15 than 10, judging by the volume of the ruckus. Coming higher, the screech of metal giving way under demonic claws. Elevator shaft. To confirm, she jumped several floors below, inside the shaft.

The breathless cold split second of everywhere and nowhere. Steeling herself against the rushing freefall, the crack of instinctual panic. Up, look up.

A forked tail, lashing out, snagged her hair. That was too close. Closing her eyes, she jumped again, without those strands.

Solid ground beneath her feet, no large, otherworldly presence. Definitely in the elevator, and climbing, Steve. Then she fell onto all fours, shaky and ungainly.

“Don't you dare talk to me about risking my life, when they need you just as much.” A fierce murmur in her ear, and a vial was pressed against her hand. “Drink.”

Myka opened her eyes just in time to see the swarm zipping up the avenue, Helena flinging a grenade through the doors into the middle of it. Flame burst through the cloud of insects, licking at wings and silencing snapping mandibles. The drones are here. First wave is dealt with, but I'm sure more are coming.

Copy. She could hear the frown in Steve's thoughts. We need to get these civilians out of here.

Shit. Why here? It wasn't a food source for them (like the nuclear power plant just outside of town) or on the dessert menu (the slaughterhouse just across the county line) or even a good nesting spot (no large, open yet enclosed spaces).

Better here than almost anywhere else.

Office complex on a Saturday afternoon… You have a point.

Helena gave you something. Take it.

You connected her, too? A miserable foreboding rose in Myka's throat. But that was Pete's forte, not hers.

Safer for everyone, was all Steve offered in return.

Myka uncorked the vial and drank. It didn't happen all at once, but her heartbeat slowed, a new energy crackling through her veins.

“What was that stuff?” She called across the lobby, as she straightened, rising, testing her knees.

“Just something I cooked up.” Helena didn't spare her a glance, alternating between eyeing the street outside and a flashing gadget on the marble floor by her feet.

“Yeah, I got that much.” She rolled her shoulders, checking for any aches.

“Well, I don't have the time to explain the various biochemical process involved,” Helena snapped.

“I was pre-med, you know. Before —” She couldn't find the words for — this madness. “Before.”

“I didn't know,” Helena said, softly, and Myka glanced at her to find that this was the thing that got her attention. A kind of sorrow flickered in her dark eyes, and Myka almost wondered if she was thinking, for the first time, about how her screw-up had affected everyone else.

“I was going to switch over to pre-law, though.” She brushed it off. Something wasn't quite right, that last jump... “Just didn't know how to tell my dad. You kind of saved me the trouble.” Because the last thing she needed was pity from Helena fucking Wells.

Helena nodded, slowly, her gaze wandering back to the now-beeping device at her feet. “I was a writer, before.”

“I know. Writer, inventor, physicist, all-around polymath.” Something in Myka's back clicked into place, and all her atoms lined up again — sans that shorn-off hair, she reminded herself, running the flat of her hand over the ragged curls. If she tried to reassemble more matter than was there…

You good to go?

“You did?” There shouldn't be that much surprise in Helena's voice, for someone once heralded as “the next Jules Verne or Anne McCaffrey.”

Yep. Where?

They were all huddled in a storage closet on the 7th floor, eight weekend workaholics, one with a kid. Steve was shielding them all from the creature’s senses for now, but the effort it was taking him slipped over their connection as well.

She jumped.

Her eidetic memory served her unspeakably well, in that she could look at a roomful of people and know exactly how to reassemble them. “Hold hands, please,” as she reached for Steve to one side of her and the nearest civilian on the other. “No disabilities or chronic conditions?”

“Asthma,” one person in the back piped up.

“All right, noted. Shouldn't be a problem.” Where to?

Mall on King and McAllister. It was a good three blocks away, but definitely out of any potential lines of fire. Myka drew on all of her focus, making sure she could feel every one of them, and jumped.

A tug, a weight on her core, as she pulled them all through spacetime. Head throbbing as she stumbled onto the sidewalk, relief flooding her as they all came through all right.

Steve tightened his grip, wrapping his other arm around her to keep her from falling.

“You all right?” It was almost startling to her his voice in her ear, after so often hearing it only in her head.

“I will be,” she muttered.

“Get back to Helena. She'll look after you while you rest up.”

“Where the hell are Amanda and Pete?” Why couldn't one of them babysit me?

Amanda and Pete are doing their damn best to contain that queen.

Fine.

So she sucked in a breath and, for the third time in what felt like as many minutes, she jumped back to that damn lobby.

— Nearly jumped straight into Helena, careened as she shifted her destination at the last moment, Helena's startled “oh!” loud in her ear. Helena's arms wrapped around her, as she came to rest back in reality again.

“We've really got to stop meeting like this.” Low, teasing, warm breath feathering over her ear.

Myka let herself sag forward. “Screw you,” she muttered.

“You're quite welcome to, some other time.”

I just learned way more about you two than I ever wanted to know.

Butt out, Steve! And she could practically feel the same sentiment emanating from Helena, though she couldn't hear her directly.

Kinda hard right now, sorry.

Helena guided her over to a red leather armchair, Myka dragging her feet one after another. At least she shouldn't be crucial to operations now, unless they needed a scout, or bait, or a distraction, or a split-second save. Again.

Myka bent over, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, hair falling in her face. Tried not to feel awkward about how sweaty and gross she was making this nice chair.

She heard Helena make some kind of round of the space, muttering to herself, occasionally British-cursing at some gadget or another. Myka focused on breathing and getting her presence of mind back together. “Do you have another of those pick-me-ups?”

“I wouldn't recommend downing two in a row. Just as a precaution.”

“Okay.” She lifted her head, to watch as Helena watched the exterior. A laptop balanced on the narrow reception desk, floor plan of the building on display, surrounded by sporadically flashing indicators of, something, and now Helena paid this more attention than the view through the glass doors. A flash-bang off too their left, building lights flicking off and on again.

“Don’t tell me it wrecked the wiring somewhere.” God, she was getting fucking tired. Both right now, and of everything.

“That was me. Experimental chain-lightning —” she caught Myka's look — “Basically a super-sized swarm taser. Or, attempt at one.” And she frowned at the screen.

“Great. You can knock them out. Now just jump this entire freakshow back off of our plane of existence already.”

“Yes, thank you, I’ve been working on that for the past six months already.” Annoyance crackled through her voice.

“Stopping every time there's even the faintest hint of an attack to go play Batman with us. Or really more Lois Lane.” Myka knew only the vaguest of comic book premises from Pete. “Or whoever the mad scientist is. Harley Quinn, maybe?”

“That is low.” Helena's voice shuddered.

“I Encountered Aliens From Another Dimension,” Claims Sci-Fi Author; The Secret Crackpot Side of Physics’ Once-Rising Star; Local Mother Institutionalized, Daughter Left In Uncle's Care; the headlines flashed across her memory, and she hung her head again. “You're right. I'm sorry.”

Helena hummed vaguely. It wasn't quite acceptance, but Myka would take it.

“Hopper, 10 o'clock.” Myka winced inwardly as its spines shattered window after window on its zigzag path through downtown, thirty feet above ground.

“Yes, I'm aware. How about you do your job and let me do mine?”

“Sorry,” Myka muttered. “Just trying to be helpful.”

“Well, you're not.”

“Besides, I wouldn't exactly call this your job.”

Can you cool it with the negative energies? Really making things difficult right now.

Myka braced herself against the loud crash upstairs, the way the entire building shivered with the massive impact. Then a loud kreee! and the creature fell to the ground outside, writhing on its back, screaming as it melted from its eight feet down.

“What — did you coat the building in something? Or has someone nearby recently discovered the power of carapace-melting acid shields?”

A wicker café chair across the side street burst into flames, and Helena swore.

“Is that going to melt through the cement?” It would be kind of impressive, if this stuff did manage that trick. It almost looked like it might, as the hopper's screams died down to a low gurgle.

“It shouldn't. It should only react with their exoskeletons but —”

“It is.” The last of the creature utterly dissolved, the acidic puddle was now carving itself its own little pondspace, sinking into the middle of the intersection.

A loud sigh. “That's what field tests are for.”

“Really? In the middle of the city?” Myka stood, outrage eating away at her. “You are utterly insane.”

Helena glared at her, and for a split second, Myka was glad those piercing eyes weren't super. “Oh, I'm sorry. Was I supposed to try to lure one out into the middle of bloody nowhere, and try to contain it, just to douse it in deadly acid, and hear from you, ‘Oh, how could you, Helena? Doing something so dangerous on your own! You're too important and we need you working to fix this reality tear you ripped open! Think about others for once!’” Her mimic was mocking, annoyingly accurate for this familiar argument.

Stop it! Fight later!

If Helena heard Steve, she gave no sign. “Myka Bering, my entire life right now is dedicated to mitigating the damage I've caused the best I know how, and I don't need to hear that sort of shite from you!”

She was trembling; they both were. In her peripheral, something burst into flames; a window shattered, smoking shrapnel landing on the entryway carpet.

Myka kicked at it, and found herself swaying on her feet. “You set up a minefield?”

“A perimeter, yes. For the moment.”

“How did you lug all this stuff here on short notice?” She hadn't helped, she knew. She rested her head in her hands again.

(“You're lucky,” she'd told Pete once. “Your powers don't leave you feeling like three-day-old roadkill afterwards.”

“Yeah,” he'd returned, “but I do spend like a billion dollars on tacos now. Besides, your powers are way cooler. I'm just a regular guy who can lift a bunch of stuff.”

Myka had surrendered to eating sugar, in frankly pathetic quantities, to combat the roadkill feeling the day after. But that wasn't something she'd tell anyone, not even her best friend.)

“I didn't.” As nonchalant as you please.

Myka looked up, narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means, I didn't do it on short notice.” Helena glanced at her, assessingly. “It means I set up what I hoped would be a lure for the queen here. And once she's gone, the rest should shut down.”

“And you didn't think to tell us?” Myka was striding across the room, reaching out to — to strangle her, probably.

She told me, Steve interjected, and Myka stilled. The queen showed up sooner than anyone expected.

Pete might as well have punched her in the gut. We're supposed to be a team, Steve.

“Because we all know how much faith you have in my work.” Helena's momentary smile was saccharine, sardonic.

She sucked in a breath, mind reeling like the colors of a kaleidoscope. “I think you're brilliant,” slipped out. “You've got no common sense, but you're a genius. You're, what, five years older than me? And you've found a whole other universe. Like something out of one of your books.” Helena was staring at her, lips parted, that melting gaze soft and shocked. “You're just so stupid, and — and selfish sometimes!”

Incoming! Myka!

She didn't think, just grabbed Helena and jumped.

But she didn't have some destination in mind, not even some instinctive concept of safe harbor. And now Helena was here with her, floating in this strange stillness that was everywhere and nowhere. I'm sorry, she tried to say, but there was no way to hear.

Like being thrown under a waterfall, she had no idea which way was up, air, reality. Stupid stupid, she'd been so tired, she hadn't thought — and wasn't that what she always accused Helena of? The thing she feared most in herself, the not thinking, the reason for rules... So stupid.

She tried to picture the lobby they'd left, tried to reach for any anchor.

There, that stupid blinking laptop, she could almost see it, and the ceiling plaster raining down, the claws and slobbering mandibles and gigantic five-eyed frilled head.

She pushed Helena away, through, pushed her to stumble onto that ragged red lobby carpet, and then Myka met the monster's claws.

It thrashed, resisted, but Myka yanked it with her, and then everything went black.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

thank you so much omg Name of the Wind is SO FRUSTRATING, I tried reading it and just did NOT like the protagonist or the writing style or ANYTHING, and people KEEP RECOMMENDING IT TO ME

mhmhmhMHMHM you have come to the RIGHT PLACE

Okay, so first, a disclaimer: I read Name of the Wind four and a bit years ago and, despite my usually excellent memory for plots and characters, retained exactly jack and shit of the whole thing except for the arguments I wrote in my head about my frustration.  But like...I’ve been holding onto those for a long time, so just.  Sit tight and listen to me complain for a minute, I deserve this.

First and foremost, it’s pitched as this revolutionary take on...something, and if my life and the lives of everyone I love depended on it, I couldn’t tell you what it’s supposed to revolutionize.  It’s not even a particularly well-executed piece on Magic Has A Price, which is what I usually hear about (what with the very academic, scientific take on magic), the fucking early Dresden Files are better at that.  (Shit y’all, remember Toby Daye, the series I haven’t shut up about?  Magic Has A Price masterpiece right there.)  I mean, goddamn, @Patrick Rothfuss, I’m really sorry, but you’re never going to do Magic Is A Science better than Fullmetal Alchemist, which basically invented equivalent exchange, so just put that one to bed.  For actual revolutionary takes on various genres, I’d suggest Imperial Radch (scifi), The Wrath and the Dawn (fairy tale retelling), Stormdancer (steampunk/fantasy), Sunshine (paranormal urban), and Kencyrath Chronicles (epic fantasy).

Second, the main character is not likable.  There.  I said it.  I found Kvothe absolutely fucking insufferable in every way.  His “modern” self telling the story was, like, a little more tolerable, but for the majority of the novel he’s an arrogant twit too convinced of his own cleverness to drag his head out of his ass for long enough to actually get anything done.  It’s possible to do a very self-confident, clever character in a way that their arrogance is actually charming--King Arthur: Legend of the Sword comes to mind.  Shit, son, so does Roy Mustang, and half the other characters in FMA.  In books, I’d rec maybe Captive Prince (Laurent).  It’s important, if you’re doing that, to make sure that the character can actually put their money where their mouth is and do the thing they’re bragging about, or else make it a Learning Experience that sticks with them.  Kvothe ain’t that.  Kvothe is just completely baselessly sure that he’s going to be the best from the very beginning, despite evidence to the contrary, and I found it intolerably annoying.

Third, the universe is interesting, the magic is kind of a neat concept for all that it’s (from what I can tell) an Eragon bootleg, which is, of course, the child of LOTR and Star Wars almost exactly. But the writing style was like a fucking textbook.  I mean.  Goddamn.  Not exactly sweeping me away into the infinite Imagisphere with that.  And I’m not--my standards for evocative prose are not that high, the Animorphs books were written for thirteen-year-olds, but fuck me NotW was not remotely achieving it.  If you’re going to frontload that kind of technical jargon, you need to make it the point of the book, like The Martian, which is very up front about being a science ramble that enjoys what it’s doing, or else find a good balance like Sabriel, which is heavy on the technical angle of Abhorsen magic and glyphs and shit without sacrificing the characters.

Fourth, I dimly recall a girl who’s there for like a hot minute as a love interest?  I don’t think I remember any others?  So, you know...points off for that one.  It’s the 21st century.  Women, POC, the homosexual agenda, they should all be in there.  Thanks.

Fifth, the whole urban setup gets a lot of time and attention, but it’s just not...well done?  It’s just not.  It does not give a cohesive sense of place, nor an emotional connection to the people in that place.  Please, for the love of God, Jesus, and any other deities you want to throw in there, read the first book in the Kencyrath series, it is called God Stalk and it’s very good at this.  I’d also say Toby Daye, but that’s about a real place (San Francisco) rather than a fantasy setting, like NotW and God Stalk.

Sixth, and this is a writerly complaint, not an opinion, but: right, so, in the “modern” day when Kvothe is telling the story, some grand disaster is underway, right?  Am I making that up?  See, I’d never know if I was making it up, because it does not get a single goddamn mention in the main bulk of the novel.  That is a clear and evident sign that you need to critically reevaluate what part of the timeline is the main novel.  I’m not saying that your novel necessarily needs to be the worst day/month/week of your character’s life, but if you could have included the entire text of the novel in a page or two of emotionally laden dialogue or memories, you probably should have.  And don’t come at me with “Oh, Name of the Wind is the first in a series, things get underway later in the series” because if your FIRST BOOK does not grab me, I’m absolutely not giving you ANOTHER BOOK to get it done.  You want to set up some kind of heartwrenching Things Were Different Once arrangement?  Make me care about your characters and then drop bits of backstory as we go, or include a prologue, or get over your fear of flashbacks and use them judiciously. Crucially, give them a relationship to The Way Things Were and then use that relationship to make your reader upset for them.  Again, Toby Daye is a great example.  So is the Imperial Radch series by Anne Leckie.

Which brings me to seventh, which is that I am APPALLED that over the course of that entire goddamn book, there was not one single interpersonal relationship I ever came to give a damn about.  I think there was the girl, I think Kvothe might have had one (1) friend, I think there was a teacher?  And there was the kid Bast in the “modern” day, who I retained more of than literally anyone/anything else because he was the only person I gave a flying fuck about.  Again, I, the writer, am horrified about this, far more so than I, the reader.  The main thing that original content creators should take away from fanfic culture is that your readers will almost universally care more about the relationships between characters than anything else.  You are going to need a pretty balls-out crazy good universe and plot to smooth over a general lack of engaging relationships, and NotW just isn’t that good.  So, like, let that be a lesson.  I’m not recommending anything for this because this should be obvious.

EIGHTH, what...was the plot of the first book?  No, seriously, I was asking this when I finished it, too.  The only plot points I recall now are Kvothe deciding that he wanted to do The Magic, Kvothe conning his way into The School For The Magic (in, if I recall correctly, kind of a FMA ripoff?), something about a library for The Magic, a bunch of technical stuff about The Magic and Kvothe being an arrogant twit, and Kvothe getting whipped.  From what I remember, the entire book basically seemed to lead up to Kvothe getting whipped and ended shortly thereafter.  And, uh...how should I put this.  That’s.  Not a plot.  Again, that’s maybe a couple paragraphs of conversation between Kvothe and someone he cares about regarding the scars on his back, not an entire fucking novel.  Again, this should be obvious, I’m not recommending anything.

Anyway, TL;DR, NotW is ultimately a forgettable fantasy novel without anything in particular to distinguish it from a myriad of other unremarkably flawed fantasy novels, and I wouldn’t have any opinions on it whatsoever if people didn’t keep pitching it to me as the Second Coming of Tolkien, leGuin, McCaffrey, and fuck knows who else.  

A collection of the content I recommended here and why I recced them, plus some others:

Imperial Radch, Ann Leckie (unique scifi, excellent example of emotionally resonant flashbacks)

The Wrath and The Dawn, Renee Ahdieh (unique fairy tale retelling)

Stormdancer, Jay Kristoff (unique steampunk fantasy)

Sunshine, Robin McKinley (unique paranormal urban fantasy)

Kencyrath Chronicles, PC Hodgell (unique epic fantasy, well-executed fantasy cities and colleges)

Fullmetal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa (magic with a price, scientific magic, charmingly arrogant characters) (manga or Brotherhood anime)

October Daye, Seanan McGuire (magic with a price, emotionally resonant memories/prologue, well-executed urban locale)

Captive Prince, CS Pacat (charmingly arrogant/engagingly arrogant characters, well-executed political scheming)

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, dir. Guy Ritchie (charmingly arrogant characters, concise worldbuilding)

The Martian, Andy Weir (technical frontloading without being unreadable)

Sabriel, Garth Nix (technical magic and worldbuilding without losing character engagement)

Source and Shield Series, Moira J. Moore (unique urban non-Earth fantasy, charmingly arrogant characters, emotionally resonant conversations about the past)

Temeraire Series, Naomi Novik (technical worldbuilding without being unreadable, having a fucking plot in each book even if your overall plot is extremely big-picture and doesn’t show up until later)

The Wicked + The Divine, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (unique folklore retelling/urban fantasy, charmingly arrogant characters, having some fucking diversity)

[toxicnotebook]

This time on Toxie Yells About Books, my like:dislike ratio was 60:40. Still in the black, folks!

Elric: The Dreaming City

Baby P. Craig Russell art!! A bit rough, but that’s to be expected. I always like seeing the early work of my favorite artists: it shows that no one is at their best in their 20s, which is very reassuring to me, ha!

Also, this was my first Elric story! I loved it, and I fully intend to devour the small pile of Elric books I got from my store.

Tales From Outer Suburbia

Surrealist perfection. Saying anything else would ruin the experience, so I’m just going to strongly encourage you all to pick this up and leave it at that.

Do Sparrows Like Bach?

A book about the weirder experiments that scientists have conducted. A bit fluffy, sure, but sometimes you just want to read about wacky science hijinks. I enjoyed it for what it was.

The Coelura

An Anne McCaffrey novella that’s a sci-fi fairytale with Fantasy Court Politics? HELL YES. I LOVED THIS. Highly recommended, get an illustrated version if you can.

Wonders of the Invisible World

It’s Patricia McKillip, so of course it’s good. Seriously. I have never read anything bad by her. Even at her worst, she still towers over the majority of fantasy books.

Also, Charles de Lint, one of my favorite authors, wrote the introduction to this collection. He names Patricia as one of his main influences, and while I was reading this collection I was definitely reminded of his work. One story, “The Keplie”, would have not been out of place in Newford. Now, I am not saying he copied her- considering he was invited to write the introduction to this collection, it’s safe to say Patricia also doesn’t believe he copied her. What I am saying is he picked one of the best writers possible to learn from, and has used those lessons to help improve his own work. It was super interesting to me, a person who has read quite a bit from both authors, to see the influence in action, so to speak.

Anyways. Buy this book if you have any sort of interest in fantasy, you won’t be disappointed!

Men Explain Things To Me: And Other Essays

A+ name choice. The essays were quite good, although my favorite were the last two. I feel like the rest of the collection would have been more meaningful to someone who’s a little less familiar with feminism. Also, I was a little iffy on some of her stances regarding Middle Eastern women, but this collection is a bit old. Maybe her views have shifted a bit. Still, a good read overall.

Keeping You A Secret

Okay. Listen, my fellow sapphic ladies: I know this is a classic in our community. But. I have some major fucking problems with this book.

First off, it’s never a good sign when I’m reading a book and I’m constantly thinking “But WHY do you like her??” Most of their conversation were awkward and short, which didn’t change when they got together. There was one throwaway line that ran along the lines of “We talked all night and had A Deep Connection”, but hey, here’s an idea: why not SHOW the reader that conversation instead of TELLING us in a SENTENCE? Because from what I’m seeing? They have no reason to love each other, much less to the point where the main character calls her girlfriend “soulmate”.

Second, holy shit the love interest stalked the main character? And deliberately withheld information that RUINED THE MAIN CHARACTER’S LIFE?? WHY DIDN’T THE MC GET MAD? WHY IS SHE STILL DATING HER? WHY DIDN’T SHE GET MAD? Christ almighty, if that was me I would have DUMPED her ass. In an actually dumpster.

I’m sorry, but this book? Should not be considered a classic. It’s terrible, which surprised me since I’ve like other books by Peters. What the hell happened with this one?

Scythe

The world building is just terrible. Civilization stops progressing when death has been conquered? Are you fucking kidding me? Have you met a human? Humans get bored and progress regardless of anything. I seriously doubt eradication of death would stop that.

Also, the book emphasized that all diseases and accidents has been conquered, but what about the normal deterioration of biological bodies? Do you really expect me to believe that (a) the ENTIRE POPULATION has access to cell regeneration technology, and (b) no one thought it would be a terrible fucking idea to give access to everyone? Scientists don’t research hangover cures because they know it would cause a devastating uptick in drinking, I cannot imagine someone wouldn’t go “Hey, wait a minute....”

Or, if they did make that tech, they wouldn’t sell it at an extraordinary price tag. Maybe there’s a decent explanation in the later part of the book, but I just couldn’t get past the first couple of chapters.

Stars of Fortune

I wanted to give Nora Roberts a chance, and according to the reviews I read after I started wondering what the hell was going on with this book, I picked the worst possible choice. Next time, I’ll pick a fan favorite that has had proper editing done.

A Discovery Of Witches

Well, this was disappointing. The writing is technically excellent- I thoroughly enjoyed reading Harkness’ prose. Her world ideas are pretty great- vampires as scientists, the relationship between witches & daemons & vampires, how the supernatural beings are different genetically, and the main mystery behind the manuscript were genuinely interesting. The problem was her characters.

The secondary characters were flat as hell. The villain might as well have twirled a mustache. I did like seeing an actual relationship build between the MC and her vampire love interest, but that was all throw away as soon as things got dangerous; it was replaced with that dumb protective/possessive vampire and passive MC relationship that’s so prevalent in modern urban fantasy. I am so, so very tired of that trope.

The thing that made me put the book down is the fact that the vampire boyfriend had to tell the witch MC about basic witch powers. Listen, the MC didn’t practice magic, but she grew up with witch aunts who tried to train her and were VERY OPEN about their powers. Are your seriously expecting me to believe she wouldn’t know witch basics. And that she wouldn’t know about the law that forbids witch/vampire relationships, even though her aunt HATES vampires? Really??

Great prose, good ideas, but poor character building. What a shame.

[baronvontribble]

I read a ton of fantasy growing up, but for some reason I never read much sci-fi (despite loving science). Later in life it always seemed too overwhelming to get into a new genera when I had no point of reference to judge quality before dropping the money/time on a book. But reading some of your FO fics and later your original drabbles reminded me that I still wanted to get into sci-fi more. So my question is, do you have a list of recommendations of good sci-fi books?

Anne McCaffrey and Isaac Asimov are two fairly nonthreatening scifi writers that I like to recommend to people who are new to the genre. I also handed my wife a lot of off-the-beaten-path Ray Bradbury if that helps, but anyone who’s read Fahrenheit 451 in school might be biased against him because they read it in school and he’s also fairly wordy and metaphorical in his style so don’t try to skim-read his books.

Specific recs are as follows:

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin: Miserable gut-shot ending, but I get the feeling that the author was forced to do it and didn’t like it either. Otherwise, it’s a great example of early queer scifi. Also a great example of her writing style in general if you like it. Weird, isn’t it? That’s just how she is. It’s wonderful. Also a great read if you start feeling bad about your writing style being too unprofessional, because holy fuck is her writing unprofessional. She’s like scifi’s kooky vodka aunt.

The Positronic Man, by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg: This is the more definitive version as compared to the original short-ish story, The Bicentennial Man. It’s very well fleshed-out and absolutely nothing like the movie, so if the movie soured you on the story, put it out of your brain. About the only similarities are some of the names. Andrew isn’t even white. Great story and a great introduction to the author.

Crystal Singer, by Anne McCaffrey: This book has so much sex in it. I went back on a reread and was floored by how much sex there was. Like, I read this when I was ten?? Holy fuck. Anyway, good book. Especially if you’ve got a music background like me. This is some of the cleanest integration of music into a story that I’ve seen in a long time, which seems to be a theme of this author’s other works too, such as…

The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey: No sex, but it’s essentially a series of short stories in the life of a disabled person in a “shell” who flies a ship. Big inspiration for me right here, and it gets crazier when you realize that she wrote this about half a century before Vocaloid was invented. Also there’s an entire religion developed around the works of Bob Dylan? This later became a series which included collabs by other authors, much like many of her works tend to do.

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov: Again, series of short stories. This time they’re interconnected by a framing device of a young man having an interview with an old woman who was the best/first robopsychologist in the world. All the stories are gripping and engaging with elements of humor and wit. And then if you haven’t gotten your fill of this guy writing robots yet, you’ve got…

The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov: Read in order. Fourth book will make you cry. Daneel is a precious cinnamon roll and Elijah is a potato. I’ve literally seen this series recommended on queer book lists because the two main characters get that close. Elijah says “because I love him” at one point. Go hug your robot, Elijah. I think he loves you too.

Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov: I always recommend this one to cap off the last four if I can, and you’ll see why when you read it. Don’t read it until after you’ve read the last four though. Trust me. It’s necessary. This is the one in my stories where Harkness gets annoyed enough with the twist to throw the book at his human’s head because it made him feel an emotion. Seldon’s ever so slightly a dipshit, but I think that’s meant to separate him from both who he becomes in the Foundation series as well as to separate him from Elijah as a character. This is a great intro to the Foundation series if you get into that, but that’s deep sociological storytelling and it ain’t got robots in it, so it’s not on this list.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Phillip K. Dick: Good if you like unsettling, but fair warning: negative portrayal of robots to an extent. They’re played as somewhat immoral. Keep that in mind while reading. This is the book that Blade Runner was very loosely based on. At least there’s no deeply uncomfortable sexual assault scene in it. Also: animal cruelty CW. I’m just saying. It’s a fucked up book and Dick was a fucked up man. Only included because it’s a “classic” in the robot subgenre.

I Sing The Body Electric, by Ray Bradbury: Series of wacky short stories. I included excerpts in one of my fics. The titular story is, however, one of the best robot stories ever written. Worth it for that alone. If you like the wacky stories enough, read more Bradbury when you’re done. Yes, he’s always like that. He’s from Chicago.

And finally, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley: Scifi’s cool mom. She reads books too. And references them. It’s nothing like what you think it is. Good read.

I’m not gonna recommend the usual Classic Shit ‘cause it’s boring and sexist and you’ve probably already had it recommended to you. This is just how I like to introduce the genre to people: with friendly, easy authors who have good characters and unique styles. Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein are fun and all, but they’re kind of hardcore sciencey for a beginner, so don’t let anyone bully you for not being into them if you don’t wanna be into them.

Have fun, kiddo.