#carrion and hob just sounds good

[variousqueerthings]

the abarat tag exists! it has posts on it! (woo!)

anyway shuffles in here with the rarepair (I assume) of christopher carrion/finnegan hob

no they haven't actually interacted, but listen:

canonically hopeless romantics in ways that have hurt them so so much, and made them afraid of loving again, but also they can't help themselves...

were both duped and manipulated by the same woman in the exact same way (boa really played them like cheap kazoos huh)

the themes of night-and-day as something that need to be reconciled carried within both of them

specifically the whole fairytale element of "marriage to heal the kingdom" type story, first subverted with boa dying and then again by her resurrecting and being evil....... then possibly deconstructed by being very gay? (well, that and maybe the fact that it isn't a marriage that was really needed to heal the abarat, so much as candy's different perspective, so they can just do it without all that pressure on them)

finnegan is a fixer and carrion is a fucking mess

also finnegan needing to fix things/be Heroic is something to unpack as well, considering these books are continuously flipping character Types on their heads and I think carrion might like being supportive as a way of building some form of selfhood/finnegan learning to be cared for...

smthinsmthin on that above note carrion could conceivably save finnegan's life right now, considering finnegan is basically boa's hostage and carrion is trying to learn how to do right/interesting reversed damsel in distress tropes?

pretty boys -- I understand that mr clive barker's illustrations and descriptions of carrion have not been giving us pretty boy, but he's got that pathetic goth boy swag to finnegan's jock-hero type pretty

both flamboyant and performative

they hate each other on principle, simply because their stories have had boa in the middle up until a certain point, but she's been deliberately stoking up that enmity/manipulating that story, so now the scales have fallen from their eyes, what better way to counter that than by realising that they... quite like each other when they actually meet, perhaps even-

barker has yet to give us as much queerness in this text as in his other ones, and it's been enough years that I think he could get away with it more in a YA than back in 2003

also as an extra, both of them retiring out of the idea of kingdom/prince type shit, because neither of them have seen that sort of setup have good results (although of course, abarat wasn't really feudal by the time candy came along, so much as just... the idea of an aristocracy as something still to be respected? anyway, tear that down, especially now that most of the aristocracy is just straight up dead), and just retiring to one of the islands

wonders which time would suit them.... feel like a dawn-or-dusk would be their preference...

[teal-deer]

Abarat -- Absolute Midnight (spoilers)

ok hello fellow uh... 5? fans? of abarat? on tumblr, I got the interlibrary loan of Absolute Midnight WITH ILLUSTRATIONS and I finished it and here’s some thoughts These will sound like whining or like I hated it, but I actually did enjoy it, I just also have Some Problems and I wanna rant.

1) who the fuck is Gazza? Gazz? Whatever his name is? I hate him. What the fuck is the point of this character? He feels randomly shoehorned in just to give Candy ANOTHER goddamn love interest and I’m like MALINGO IS RIGHT THERE? WHY ARE YOU DOING THE YA LOVE TRIANGLE THING? And unlike Malingo (or arguably Letheo who I felt was going that way in book 2, or Chris Carrion or Finnegan Hob who I felt Barker was going with until he remembered that they’re each a minimum of 16 years older than Candy and then went WHOOPS), I literally have NO IDEA what Gazza looks like, I don’t think he gets a single illustration. He comes out of nowhere, he oscillates wildly between “huge asshole” and “infatuated with Candy,” the ONLY thing I can remember about him is that he was  fisherman, I guess. He has no development, and Candy just... instantly falls in love with him despite having one (1) conversation with him which began with him trying to stab her. And I confess -- I’m an asexual grey-romantic 34 year old, so yeah, romance is always confusing to me, but this one realllly strains credibility. And I’m kind of feeling justified because I haven’t seen a single fanart of this guy, ever, and I’ve seen fanart of *all kinds* of minor characters.

And like I’m not normally a shipper. But holy jeez. Malingo: a truly wonderful person who clearly loves candy and is also very attractive, who had instant chemistry with Candy when they met and a very well developed backstory who has been around for 3 books, who smells like pumpkin spice and looks like a friendly joyful jack-o-lantern... and then HELLO SUDDENLY A RANDOM ASSHOLE who we don’t even know what he looks like.

I’m just. I’m upset about this! What the hell, Barker, why did you feel the need to shoehorn in a Typical YA Love Interest? (Possibly, I missed something? Some part where he got character development or a backstory beyond “random fisherman”? Is he secretly the Commexo Kid or something? the small child that gets killed to show how evil Mater Motley is had more character development than this dude). I kept kind of hoping that she’d have her love at first sight crush and he’d then get killed just to prove Carrion’s point about loving and losing because he was *so* annoying but no, he’s just still there at the end, whining about everything, negging Candy, and generally just being arbitrary.

2) As usual for Abarat Barker suffers from Too Much Stuff Happening Gotta Get It All Out ASAP so nobody gets to rest and we just careen as fast as possible from Thing to Thing AAAAAAAAAAAAAAa but that’s okay because it’s mostly pretty cool & interesting

3) Boa Is Evil. I’ve seen some people complain that this wasn’t foreshadowed well and it came out of left field, but... having just re-read the other two... I do think Barker didn’t foreshadow it very well and he could have done a lot more, annnd I think he hadn’t quite started down that line of thinking until Days of Magic: Nights of War, B U T, I will say that there were weird mysteries about Boa we didn’t know of from the first time we learned of her, and I’d always gotten the feeling that a) Christopher wasn’t just a spurned entitled man, that something else was going on there and b) there had to be more to Boa than just Pretty Sparkle Perfectly Good Princess Embodiment of All Goodness (TM). I do think she gets wayyy too far into Cartoonishly Evil though, like, she went from Perfect Princess to Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain, and I can’t tell if this is just Clive kinda writing badly, or if there was a “real” Boa who was somewhere between and that removing her more just removed the “bad” parts and everything else was absorbed into Candy. Or something. You know it’s bad when Mater Motley is the more nuanced villain here... Also, the Fantamoya have some SPLAININ to do as to why they saved this bitch in the first place, with the power they have they HAD to have known she was Like That, but also had to have had some other reason for doing so. I feel like they did more to Candy than just put Boa there...

4) The illustrations in this one are a lot more foreboding and a lot more abstract. And I get it, this is the darkest of the three books, but at the same time it’s at the expense of things like... well, what the hell does Gazza even look like (is that even his name, I can’t remember, I had to return the book to the library). At this point, I wish Clive would do a Dramatis Personae thing, sort of like the Almanac he did in Book 1, because there’s A LOT of characters now and I’m starting to lose track.

5) If you’re gonna give Chris Carrion a redemption arc -- and I am HERE for it -- he’s gotta start doing good acts. Starting with going up against his grandma and against Boa. But I *am* here for the possibility -- I actually thought he was a nuanced character in Book 1 even, and I normally hate dudes who go “she broke up with me so I’m now gonna be eeeevil” but hey! turns out it was way more complicated than that and he was actually justified in trying to assassinate her.

6) Did Letheo die in book 2? I actually can’t remember o_O

7) That’s a HELL of a cliffhanger to end on, wow! I wonder, also, if the Abarat is a kind of inverted torus of a sort, like... a multi-dimensional shape, so at the edges the water still appears to fall down, but there’s really two sides to the “plate” (the other side being wherever Candy, Malingo, and That Guy just ended up), with the Twenty-Fifth being a column in the middle that connects both; possibly where the Izabella “comes back” from falling off the edge.

8) That Glyph at the end was super dope

9) How many world-ending cosmic horror factions can one universe hold anyway!? Jeeeeez

10) I’m really glad I got spoilered for Malingo surviving because I might have just given up there what with What’s His Name coming on the scene and then Malingo apparently getting fridged. Also, his head flapping around is really funny. I wonder how long it’ll take him to grow a new body? Also I am amused by Geshrat giving birth to flappy severed heads, apparently, but also like “that’s probably less trouble than giving birth to a whole baby actually if the head is baby sized”

ok rambling rant over