#but hey! I like them!

[asexualbookbird]

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon ⭐⭐

I followed this book from it's conception, through it's editing, and hyped it's publishing date on twitter. I was genuinely excited to read it, and really thought and hoped I'd enjoy it. I wasn't a huge fan of what I read of The Bone Season, but everyone assured me this was different! And to be fair, it was! I think in my heart, though, I knew the truth because I waited so long to read this and I'm sorry to say I did not have a great time.

My problem with Samantha Shannon seems to be she creates these wonderful worlds full of interesting magic systems and characters that are fun to follow, but there's too much crammed into the book as a whole. In The Bone Season, I felt the Rephaim were unnecessary. In Priory there are too many points of view. There were things I liked, this wasn't a complete waste of time, but wow they were hard to come by in the end.

What did I like?

-Ead! Ead was clearly the main character and I think it would have worked better if it was just Her Book (I'd also settle for her and Tané, please Tané deserved more page time than she got) -Sabran. I'm surprised, but not really, that people didn't like her. She's complicated! She's mean! She loves deeply! She's a person! People just hate women who are mean lol -MAGIC! Magic comes from fruit that comes from the stars? It's fire and water and ice and air? NEAT! COOL! Cool magic systems seem to be SShannons strong point! -High fantasy with no sexual assault or threats of sexual assault. There was a little misogyny with the way Sabran and her line is treated for their ability to give birth (and no, one throw away line of "This is bad actually!" doesn't fix it lol) but it fit in context and considering no one was mean to women for being women I'll let it slide!

What didn't I like?

-LACK. OF. DRAGONS. yall there are dragons on the COVER, every time someone talked about this online, they added dragon emojis. So why, in the more than 800 pages, did dragons show up for maybe five pages TOTAL. Like if we went line by line and pieced all those lines together, it would maybe take up five pages. Ten if I'm being generous and include the dragons that are The Enemies. Which, by the way, -Dragons are Mean. I've discovered that I prefer dragons to be neutral to allies, I don't like dragon books where we are slaying dragons. It's nice that we have both here, no group of people? Creatures? Are a monolith, but I want more of the eastern dragons! They were pushed aside and we hardly saw them! We hardly saw any of them! If you promise me dragons, then deliver! The! Dragons!!!! -Writing style. I'm thinking maybe SShannon's writing style and I do not vibe at all. I'm not sure what it is about it, I know she doesn't like writing action scenes and so avoids them, and I love reading action scenes, but that didn't feel like the entire problem here? But something about this writing detached me from the characters. Yes I liked Ead, but I felt nothing about Tané, other tha wanting MORE of her. SShannon spent a lot of time saying not much at all, it's really rather impressive. -Tané in general. Part of the writing problem is the way the POVs were split. It was most obvious in Tané's storyline. She has everything stripped away from her, but the emotional impact wasn't there because we hardly spent any time with her. -The Priory. The book is named after it, but we're hardly there at all. I spent a good chunk of the first half wishing Ead would go back to the Priory, but once she was there, I wanted her to leave. The Prioress' motives also seemed iffy to me? Ead was right, why spend nearly ten years trying to keep Inys afloat and then go "actually! Nevermind! Let it burn!' -Plot....holes? Not so much holes but Convenient Plot. I was ready to ignore some of it, suspension of disbelief and all that, but nah I"m going to be picky now! The scene that stuck out the most was Ead being chased and hunted down and CONVENIENTLY wyrms attacked her pursuers and she was the one who got away. Or how about Niclays at the LITERAL LAST MOMENT deciding to have a change of heart because......plot has to move forward? Also. What the fuck happened to Ishari lol Tané noted Ishari was disappointed to be sent to Feather island, but said she hoped their paths would cross again one day! And then! Tané goes to Feather Island! And NO MENTION OF HER AT ALL! Or how abut Loth learning a VERY BIG VERY IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE NEIGHBORING KINGDOM AND THEN NO ONE MENTIONS IT UNTIL NEARLY THE END LIKE "OH YEAH BTW THE PRINCESS THERE IS COOL LOTH SAID SO" -Wrap Up. I didn't really mind the final Big Fight. I know even fans of the book have been disappointed, but honestly it's one of the strongest stretches of the book, even if it was a little hard to follow at times. What bothered me was after. I know I tend to be impatient when reading the final chapters of a book, the What Happened Next bits, but never have I been so annoyed as to have to read a wrap up from the POV of someone who WASN'T EVEN CONSCIOUS. I suppose it's better than a book where a single first person POV character is knocked unconscious mid battle and then the next scene is "and then everything was over" but come ON.

I know she had to edit this book down a LOT, which. Girl. It's 800 pages how was there MORE. So maybe my questions were answered in things that were cut, but I could not physically handle any more of this book. I got fatigue from her writing, I cannot handle more of it at once, but considering how long it takes her to finish a book (not a complaint! Everyone has a different pace!) I also would not have wanted to wait that long for a conclusion. There's no winning for me here. We were simply not meant to be. It's just that if I'm going to read a book that takes hundreds of pages to say nothing at all by an author that puts out a book once every few years at best, I'd read VE Schwab or Patrick Rothfuss.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[slavhew]

hm

[akanemnon]

But they refused

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

world's longest staring contest GO-

[writeouswriter]

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

[egophiliac]

so excited for Kalim to save the day by swiper-no-swiping this dip. you can do it! I believe in you!

god I hope this reads properly

[turnaboutdick]

episode one

[nellasbookplanet]

M9: "sometimes we don’t want to deal with a violent fight so we just polymorph our opponent into something harmless and embarrassing and leave"

BH: "we also have a non-violent method! We put our enemies in The Hole"

M9: "oh neat! And then you leave before they can climb out?"

BH: "what no we forget about them until they run out of air and die horribly"

M9:

BH: "there are so many bodies down there"

[solarpunkani]

Hot 4am take but I feel like if we want to get people more interested in making their yards a more habitable space for wildlife like insects, we have to acknowledge that ‘Don’t want bugs in your house’ is still a 100% fair and valid point of view. ‘Loves nature’ and ‘doesn’t want roaches spiders and mosquitoes in the house’ aren’t opposites.

And with that in mind, when we propose to people that spraying pesticides around houses is Not A Good Idea, Actually, I feel like we need to give an alternative asides from ‘deal with it.’

[yearning-gay]

this is my love letter to doms who get off on hurting their subs, that shit's hot you're hot and not evil nor fucked up for having a thing for that stuff i love you and you can hurt my pussy any time btw

[tubbytarchia]

I don't know what this is all I know is that LimL Joel makes me really emotional

[tio-trile]

They ended up seeing the double feature together

Draws my own version of a Barbie meme instead of the one that’s everywhere rn because I’m cooler (no

[welcometogrouchland]

ANOTHER SKETCH DUMP! Featuring more of me playing with lineless art. Batman reborn era trio (dick, damian and steph) I miss you...when will you return from war. Also featuring Steph designs bc I've seen ppl dissatisfied w/ her current look, some good mom Talia, and Jason Todd poetry club. Duke is confused not that Jason would start a poetry club but that he'd have such mid poetry opinions. (ID in Alt)

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

some misc Barn & Wally doodles from the past week or so <3 i heart them

[meringuejellyfish]

is herobrine behavior/lore not common knowledge anymore .... has the world really forgotten about the 2x2 tunnels .. trees with their leaves all gone ... the sand pyramids in the ocean ... the herobrine shrine that would apparently summon him ... the lost to time brocraft hoax livestream that further popularized herobrine as a concept (of which herobrine was just a painting from a texture pack, later removed to which the streamer would continue to act freaked out until the end) .. the original forum post from sometime in august 2010 that detailed encounters with a pseudo-player in the distance on a singleplayer world which included this screenshot

does anyone even care at all. about a herobrine so small