#dragons in our midst spoilers

[accidental-spice]

Best of Walter Foley, part five: Enoch's Ghost

Four pages into the first chapter, and he's already made a pun

Gosh I love these three

Him stepping in front of Karen to protect her when there's danger

And when he dives to catch her

"A term of endearment?"

*sobbing*

GOSH I love him

I love how worried he is about Ashley, and how hard he tries to show her God's love

He really is just. The Luis from Antman of Dragons In Our Midst, huh?

Walter and Gabriel team-up my beloved

Walter being protective of Karen my beloved

*something about the vibes of how Ashley knows exactly what Walter's plan is because they know each other so well*

*snickers* ahhhhhh, Walter. This is why we love you

The very last scene. Just ALL of it. Makes me cry

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[optimizche]

Missing (Part 3) [Aemond Targaryen x Reader]

Warning: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR HOUSE OF THE DRAGON SEASON 1 EPISODE 10. Be careful!!!! And please comment with your feedback! ❤️

"I couldn't possibly-" you said, shaking your head violently, an incredulous smile on your lips. "I will burn to death."

"You must, sweet one," Jacaerys implored, the Lords gathered around the Painted Table nodding solemnly.

It was then that you turned to Prince Daemon. "I have no Valyrian blood in me, My Prince. How could I possibly even hope to bond with a dragon? Let alone ride it into battle?"

Threat of the looming war was now closer than ever.

Ever since Princess Rhaenys had flown to Dragonstone on Meleys, bringing the news of the death of King Viserys The Peaceful and the crowning of Aegon instead of the rightful, named heir, Princess Rhaenyra, chaos had erupted.

Queen Alicent and her Green Council had successfully managed to usurp the Iron Throne.

Ser Erryk had arrived to Dragonstone mere hours after Princess Rhaenys, carrying with him King Viserys' crown, the same crown Prince Daemon had placed on The Black Queen Princess Rhaenyra's head during her coronation, days after Aegon's coronation at King's Landing.

The House of the Dragon was now officially divided, ready to tear itself apart in the midst of war.

During the discussion around the Painted Table this morning at dawn, the topic of adding more dragons and dragonriders to the Black faction had arose.

Princess Rhaenyra had Syrax, Prince Daemon had Caraxes. Princess Rhaenys had Meleys while her two granddaughters, Rhaena and Baela had Morning and Moondancer respectively. Jacaerys, Lucerys and Joffrey were bonded to Vermax, Arrax and Tyraxes respectively.

This brought the number of dragons on the side of the Blacks to an impressive eight.

The Greens, Queen Alicent's party only had three dragons for her three children, Sunfyre, Dreamfyre and Vhagar each bonded to Aegon, Helaena and Aemond respectively.

Even though the Blacks vastly outnumbered the Greens in terms of dragons, Prince Daemon and the young princes Jacaerys and Lucerys were adamant that more dragonriders were needed on our side.

You yourself had been a witness to Prince Daemon awakening Vermithor, a dragon once ridden by King Jaehaerys I Targaryen.

"We need more dragons with us, little one," Prince Daemon urged, the anger at his wife being robbed of her crown palpable in his temper. "You must try to bond with one of the dragons here at Dragonstone."

Jace and Luke spoke up in your support, trying to bolster your courage. "We won't let anything happen to you."

But it was when you looked at Queen Rhaenyra, who had just suffered a miscarriage of the daughter she carried, Visenya, you found your own resolve hardening.

It was the news of Aegon's coronation that had sent The Black Queen into an early labour. Far too early, leading to considerable blood loss and the birth of a stillborn baby girl, Visenya.

While your healing powers had restored the health of the Queen and brought her to her feet, she was stricken with grief over the loss of her sixth child and only daughter. Just a few days ago, you shuddered at the memory of how the Queen had wept and cursed as she bled during her premature labours. The tragedy had shaken all of you to the core.

You knew you had to bind yourself to a dragon, even if it killed you, for the sake of the Queen.

--------

Your years of studying and training in combat had done nothing to prepare you for this moment, as you stood within one of the largest pits of Dragonstone, staring up at the beast that slumbered before you.

A female dragon, the size of a mountain, she had scales of lavender interlaced with aquamarine.

"She's… formidable," you chuckled nervously, glancing at Prince Daemon, Jace and Luke, who stood on the sidelines, nodding encouragingly along with the dragonkeepers.

Steeling yourself, you slowly approached the dragon, reaching out tentatively with your palm.

"Dohaerās!" you called out, your voice echoing in the cave, awakening the she-dragon who looked at your comparitively miniscule figure with aqua coloured eyes.

"Dohaerās!" repeating the command with a determination in your voice that impressed you, given how much anxiety was gnawing away at you.

The dragon huffed, it's breath washing over your face as it raised its head.

Please don't open your mouth, you silently begged. Please don't burn me.

"Lykirī!"

Sensing the dragon's uneasiness, you attempted to calm it, but you knew that it wasn't listening to you. One wrong move and you'd be burnt till even your bones disintegrated. But you were desperate to bond with the dragon. You didn't want to disappoint the Queen when she needed you the most.

You stepped even closer to the dragon, right in front of it and all of a sudden, it opened its mouth, letting out the most thunderous roar that shook you to your bones.

"Dohaerās!" you commanded, yet again, undeterred.

"Stand your ground, little one," came Prince Daemon's advice. "Be firm."

Taking a deep breath, you kept your eyes focused on the dragon's.

"Dohaerās!" you cried out, your own voice echoing in the cave, almost as fierce as the dragon's roar.

The silence following your cry rang through your ears and you were certain that at the very next moment, you'd be burned alive by the irritated dragon.

You closed your eyes, bracing for the worst…

Instead, you felt the nudge of the dragon's head against your still outstretched palm.

"Gods be good, you've done it," Prince Daemon exhaled.

You opened your eyes to see the she-dragon bowing its head before you, a wild and unrestrained smile breaking across your face.

You had bonded with a dragon.

"Mount her!" Jacaerys shouted, rushing to his own dragon, Vermax.

"Fly with us!" Lucerys urged, already climbing Arrax.

Suddenly emboldened, you found yourself climbing swiftly up the dragon's back, patting it encouragingly as you gave it the High Valyrian command to fly. "Sōvēs!"

Laughing, Prince Daemon clapped his hands, moving aside as your dragon now rushed toward the exit to the cave, breaking all her chains in the process.

"What will you name her?" he asked between chuckles.

"I'll call her Aquerion!" you screamed back as the dragon spread its lavender aquamarine wings, ready to fly.

Perhaps your ancestry did contain a drop of Valyrian blood after all, you thought, exhilarated by the wind in your hair as you flew skyward, Arrax and Vermax flanking Aquerion on either side.

----------

While you spent your subsequent days training and honing your dragon riding skills with Jace, Luke, Rhaena and Baela, the Black Council made a decision to send envoys to the various powerful houses of Westeros, hoping that they'd swear themselves to Queen Rhaenyra's cause.

A raven came to Dragonstone, containing a message from one of Prince Daemon's spies in King's Landing that Prince Aemond had flown on Vhagar to Storm's End to secure House Baratheon.

This elicited a roar of laughter considering that Lord Borros Baratheon was a cousin of Princess Rhaenys and a staunch supporter of King Viserys. There was no chance that he would ally himself with the Greens, you were told. He was certainly going to support Queen Rhaenyra's cause, you were told.

You weren't so convinced, knowing full well that Borros Baratheon had four unmarried daughters. A betrothal to the new King's own brother could easily sway House Baratheon over to the Greens. And given that the Greens were not above usurping the Iron Throne from its rightful heir, you knew they were now capable of anything to secure their position in the approaching war.

As much as the idea of Aemond marrying a Baratheon girl perturbed you, you were even more disturbed when it was decided that Lucerys would fly to Storm's End as an envoy of Queen Rhaenyra.

Alone.

"My Queen," you begged the night before the morning of Lucerys' departure. "Please let me accompany Luke to Storm's End. He might need me."

Over the course of the years you had come to think of Lucerys as your little brother. Naturally, you had grown very protective of him.

"There will be no need for that, my dear," Queen Rhaenyra said, waving off your suggestion. "Luke is certain to receive a warm welcome at Storm's End. House Baratheon favours Princess Rhaenys and us."

"But, My Queen, Aemond will be there," you insisted in urgent but hushed tones. "He has no love for Jace, Joffrey and especially Luke since the incident at Driftmark."

"Dearest, are you questioning my decisions now?" she asked you, a brow raised.

You were suddenly flustered. "Of course not, My Queen, I was merely concerned about-"

"Lucerys will be fine, dear," she said, giving your hand a squeeze. "He is eager to prove himself and I've made him swear to the Seven that there will be no fighting on his end with that Aemond."

You bowed your head, agreeing reluctantly to her decision, an inexplicable sense of dread overcoming you.

The very next morning as soon as dawn broke, all of you assembled in the Great Hall to say goodbye to Lucerys.

"Don't fret, little one," Prince Daemon remarked, noting your concern. "Lucerys will be fine."

"Of course!" the boy said, hugging you tightly and giving you a bright smile before moving on to hug his mother.

As much as you wanted to believe it, something in your heart made you quite unsure, leaving you feeling unsettled as you watched Lucerys take to the skies on Arrax's back.

--------

Hours had passed with no word from any raven of Lucerys safely reaching Storm's End. He had promised you and Jacaerys that he would send a raven as soon has he landed at the Baratheon stronghold.

Prince Daemon had watched your mounting anxiety, noting how you did not indulge in even one of your favourite sweetcakes at breakfast that morning.

Jacaerys could tell by how distracted you were during your morning lessons with Maester Gerardys that you were still apprehensive about Luke. You paced restlessly through the hall while Jace studied High Valyrian with the Maester, before running to consult the great almanac that sat open on the stone table nearby.

"It predicts a cruel storm at Storm's End today," you read, murmuring more to yourself than to anyone else. "Gods, Luke…"

While you were almost sure that Lucerys could deal with Aemond well enough by himself as he had already done during that night at Driftmark, you knew that Aemond and a storm made for a rather difficult combination to navigate for little Luke.

"Maester, may I be excused? I'm feeling quite unwell," you said, placing a hand on your stomach to feign a stomach ache.

Jace eyed you with suspicion, not believing your excuse for a single moment but letting you leave nevertheless.

You rushed headlong down the corridors, making your way down to the basement of the building.

The armoury, I need a weapon, you thought, a plan already formulating itself in your head as clear as day.

Sneaking into the armoury, you found a vast array of blades. Swords, daggers, spears, bows and arrows. All fashioned from either Valyrian steel or Dragonglass.

You picked a sword you knew you would be able to wield, along with a couple of Dragonglass daggers.

Prince Daemon is out searching for more dragon eggs, you thought to yourself, running toward the dragonpit before quickly changing from your gown to your riding leathers. Queen Rhaenyra is abed, resting. Princess Rhaenys is tending to Rhaena and Baela…

You found Aquerion waiting for you, the gorgeous she-dragon having already anticipated your arrival with the sound of your footsteps. Perhaps you had gotten more close to your dragon than you ever realized.

Climbing up on her back, you mounted the supple leather saddle, grasping the reins in your gloved hands, looking around for any dragonkeepers guarding her nearby. There were none present.

"Sōvēs, Aquerion!" you commanded, your voice confident and crystal clear.

As you leaned down to pat your dragon as it charged toward the entrance of the pit, you knew that you needed to get to Storm's End and quick.

--------

Aquerion, being a mighty dragon had large, well-built wings, the wingspan almost double the size of her body.

She carried you swiftly up the sky and within a few hours of flying, if the change in landscape was any suggestion, you were nearing Storm's End.

It had begun to drizzle, the clouds growing thicker and more grey the closer you flew to your destination, a thin mist permeating the air. Hampering your visibility.

Wiping a stray lock of wet hair away from your face, you silently prayed that you'd reach your destination safely.

Gods, I only hope that Lucerys is alright…

You flew straight into the eye of the storm where the wind was whipping at you, the rain coming down thick and merciless. Drenching you to the bone through your riding outfit.

You were flying right above a ravine when a blast of fire cut through the storm.

Dragonfire.

Heartbeat rising tenfold, you turned Aquerion in the direction of the fire only to find a small dragon being violently pursued by a giant one.

Arrax and Vhagar.

Despite the rain and the mist, your eyesight allowed you to make out the silhouettes of their dragonriders, Lucerys and Aemond.

"There is a debt to be paid, boy!" Aemond bellowed, chuckling ruthlessly as he pursued Luke.

"Lucerys!" you cried out for the Prince, seeing him turn to see you and Aquerion approaching from the right.

Queen Rhaenyra's son shouted your name in palpable relief, seeing your much larger dragon arrive in the middle of the chase.

"Dracarys, Aquerion!" you commanded, aiming her dragonfire at Vhagar in an attempt to distract Aemond. "Fly away, Luke!"

Your dragonfire hit Vhagar's wing, a pained screech emitted by the old dragon almost shaking you to the marrow.

On Vhagar's back, Aemond looked bewildered, looking hard through the rain and fog to see who it was who had dared to attack him.

When he spotted you on Aquerion's back, for a moment in time, Aemond looked shell-shocked.

"Dracarys!" you roared yet again, sending more dragonfire at Vhagar, aiming at her head this time as you charged head-on at her with Aquerion.

Over your shoulder, you looked to see Lucerys staring at you with worriment etched on his face, even as Arrax safely carried him out and away from Vhagar's reach, to Dragonstone.

He was safe, you thought, the ghost of a smile gracing your own face as you became distracted for a fraction of a second…

All of a sudden, it felt like the air had been knocked from your lungs, your dragon, Aquerion colliding with Vhagar.

The momentum of the push was powerful enough to send both dragons plummeting toward the ground, their roars echoing in the skies. You clutched desperately at her reins to prevent yourself from being knocked off the saddle, bracing yourself for the impact at the top of a cliff.

Vhagar fell first, with a screech, Aquerion falling a few yards away from the other dragon with a pitiful whine.

For a moment, it felt like the world itself had been plunged into darkness, unconsciousness tugging at your senses, trying to pull you under to keep you sheltered from the immense pain you felt.

A broken arm for sure. Perhaps a few broken ribs?

You fell from the back of your dragon, collapsing to the ground before hesitantly raising a hand to your abdomen, feeling blood weep from a wound there.

It almost felt like a rush of energy, when you heard footsteps approaching you, making you rise shakily to your feet as you raised your sword.

"You would dare to raise a sword against me? Your childhood friend?" Aemond asked, his own sword now unsheathed, as he stood before you, bleeding from a gash on his head.

"You would dare to attempt to slay your own kin? Your own nephew?" you asked in retaliation, stepping forward, sword raised, should he attack, a hand pressing into the wound in your abdomen.

There was no chance in seven Hells that you'd survive a swordfight against Aemond Targaryen. But you weren't going to perish without a fight.

"I see you ride a dragon now," he said, nodding toward Aquerion where the poor beast lay in pain. Recovering from the fall.

"Which Baratheon girl did you betroth yourself to?" you taunted.

It was this that sent Aemond charging at you, your swords clanging as you held the blade up to defend yourself against his every swing.

Matching his reflexes as best as you could.

"Oh, wait," you sneered, between offensive blows of your own, blows that he dodged with ease. "You've been too occupied with your sister to take someone else to wife-"

With a roar, Aemond slashed violently at you, the blade of his sword cutting into the wrist of your dominant hand. Disarming you as your fingers let go of the sword from the sudden pain.

You cried out as he pushed you onto the ground with astounding force, straddling you with his sword now at your neck. The blade pressing into the column of your bare throat.

"Kill me," you urged him, the pain in your heart far greater than the pain from any wound you had suffered. "Kill me and be done with me."

Aemond looked pained, wrenching the patch away from his eye to reveal the sapphire underneath it. To show you who he really was.

"Do you truly think I would kill you?" he asked, aghast from your words. "Do you truly think so low of me?"

"You only ever needed me around to heal your wounds, to heal your eye. I was nothing more to you than my abilities," you said, your heart breaking at the pain you felt, your own eyes burning with tears.

How had years of friendship and affection come down to this?

Hearing him growl, you felt the blade vanish from at your neck as he threw his own sword to the side, his gloved hands finding your face.

"You were my best friend. The best part of my life," he said. "I loved Helaena but I loved you more, you fool."

He pressed his forehead against yours, a single tear from his own eye falling on your cheek.

"You were my solace, the only one who ever gave me true peace. When you left, I lost a part of who I was," he said and you felt your eyelids fluttering, your strength seemingly abandoning you with every drop of blood that gushed from your abdomen. "When will you ever understand this?"

Tears now felt freely from your eyes as you whimpered quietly, a sudden relief filling you at his words. For how many years had you ached to hear them?

You felt his own chest wrack with sobs, raising your bloodstained hand to touch his cheek underneath his scar. Mixing your blood with his, flowing from his head.

"You're hurt…" he said, placing his palm over your hand, his eye examining the huge bloodstain on your waist, terrified.

"But your children? With Helaena?" you asked, struggling to keep your eyes open.

He opened his mouth to speak but your mind tuned out the words he said, too exhausted and fraught to stay awake.

Seconds later, your world turned black.

Part 4

[derpcakes]

What Makes Delicious in Dungeon’s Worldbuilding So… Delicious?

Minor spoilers for Delicious in Dungeon Volumes 1 – 5. At time of writing I’m only up to Volume 6, so please don’t spoil me any further in the comments!

I fell in love with a manga over the Christmas/new year’s break, a fantasy series called Delicious in Dungeon. Perhaps you’ve heard of it—it’s been picking up steam for a while now, and has just gotten a highly-anticipated anime adaptation. The story follows a fractured adventuring party into the depths of a strange, cursed dungeon; legend has it that at the centre of the labyrinth is the Golden City, rich with treasures, but our heroes’ current quest is to rescue one of their members from the stomach of a dragon. Flat broke from having all just died (more on that in a moment), the crew decide to forage for food inside the dungeon rather than buying supplies before they travel. An eccentric dwarf named Senshi agrees to help them out in exchange for the chance to cook the dragon when they reach it, and lo, our intrepid explorers venture forth to eat their way through the monster-filled, subterranean wilds.

While it has goofy comedic elements (and fantastic comedic timing, I might say), DiD is not just a light-hearted foodie series. Across the first few volumes I found my heart racing and my mind boggling as the stakes of the story solidified into something potentially quite dark and dire, while never losing the energy of an upbeat high fantasy romp. I found myself attached to all the characters, even ones that hadn’t initially impressed me. And in the midst of all this, I found myself marvelling at the tastiest part of this series: its worldbuilding, and the seemingly endless clever ways creator Ryoko Kui has constructed this fantasy setting so that feels like it lives and breathes.

Keep reading...

[nikibogwater]

Aight, y’all know the deal by now. I’m someone who takes stories way more seriously than I’m probably supposed to. I revel in a good emotional shake-down brought on by an epic tale. Time to put on my Sentimental Goggles and really dig into this latest Zelda game, and see if I can explain why I feel it has the darkest and hardest-hitting story of any in the series so far. TotK Spoilers begin below the cut. 

To start, we must acknowledge the precedent set by Breath of the Wild. BotW, despite being set in a post-apocalyptic wilderness teetering on the brink of destruction, is very much a story about hope. Zelda even says as much during the game’s opening: “You are the light--our light--that must shine upon Hyrule once again.” In the midst of a devastating catastrophe, one little seed of hope survived--Link. BotW follows this little seed as it at last blossoms into a force that is powerful enough to defeat the Calamity and put Hyrule back to rights. It’s a pretty straightforward and feel-good plot, even if it does have its fair share of bittersweet elements.

The thing that makes Tears of the Kingdom so effectively dark is that it begins by mercilessly ripping away that sense of hope that was a constant in its predecessor. Everything Link and Zelda fought for is undone in an instant. Hyrule is in even greater peril than before. This is no longer a tale of a budding seed of hope, it’s a frantic, desperate scramble to preserve what little remains of their world. 

Throughout much of this story, Link’s biggest motivation is reuniting with Zelda. While he serves as a light for Hyrule as a whole, Zelda has always been a light for him, and for us as the players. I don’t think it’s too much of a controversial statement to say that BotW’s iteration of Princess Zelda is the most well-developed in the series to date. Zelda has always been the heart and soul of the series, but this is especially true for BotW because she is no longer just Link’s partner in destiny or childhood friend. She is a fully-realized protagonist with a character arc that endears her to us as the players. She isn’t just important to Link, or to Hyrule at large. She’s important to us. Which is why I felt a legitimate sense of grief and despair when Link discovered that she couldn’t be rescued this time. No joke, there were a few minutes where I actually wanted to stop playing after seeing the final Dragon’s Tear memory. 

Breath of the Wild’s story is a statement of hope. By contrast, Tears of the Kingdom’s story is a question, one that most of us don’t want to even consider: What do you do when hope dies? What do you do when your light is taken away from you? The answer is perhaps as merciless as the question: you just keep going. Even if there is no Zelda waiting for you at the end of the fight (at least as far as Link knows), you still have a job to do. You still have to face the dark depths and the nightmares that dwell within. You still have to fight, even when it seems like there is no chance of winning. 

In this way, both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom feel like more than just games to me. They’re the kind of story that I carry with me into the real world. The kind that I look back on when I need to feel hopeful, or push through my own dark depths. Sure, it’s not a masterpiece of literature or anything, but it was a story that resonated with me all the same, thanks in no small part to TotK’s commitment to embracing the dark and the hopeless. There are times when it is enough to be reminded that I am strong, that I am capable of overcoming any challenge set before me. But when that challenge is no longer a puzzle or a personal flaw--when it’s say, grieving the loss of a loved one or longing to return to a happier time, it is just as comforting to be told, with brutal honesty, that yes, this feels hopeless. This feels like it could never possibly turn out alright in the end. But you must keep going. You must fight until you find your hope again, even if it can’t be the same as it was before. After all, that is what it means to be the light--their light--that must shine upon the world once again. 

[see-arcane]

i feel like the novel dracula is like step by step "how to make a monster" story, t has all the beats for it.

because jonathan harker in his quest now is no knight in shining armor to slay the dragon, duty-bound and honor-driven with the others' safety in mind, solemnly risking death for his duty. he was a pure and innocent polite young man, but one who has been turning into a wrathful, cold, hopeless lovesick killer who for vengeance would sell his soul, welcome the rope, and dive into hell to inflict judgment himself

i'm glad you can see this because god. the Potential.

The thing is, Dracula was a pioneer novel for a lot of possibilities in horror. Whether Stoker was intentional in all of it or just snuck in a bunch of happy accidents for future readers to catch is up in the air, but they are there.

The combination of different genre lenses--gothic horror start in the castle, dwindling party log on the Demeter, psychological thriller in Whitby, supernatural medical mystery in Lucy's illness, fully aware-conversion/infection threat with Mina's attack, hunt/exorcise the monster after that--all of these stand alone as their own novel-in-potentia, but also all make sense together as perspectives and intel for the characters evolve. It's an amazing medley of narratives to make the Big Narrative, and I can believe that Stoker had true intention behind all of them.

But not with what I--and a ton of others!--are uncovering with the Jonathan Harker Could Be/Become a Monster vein.

The implications for Jonathan and his potential change for the worse in mental, moral, and monstrous states are obvious to us because we get to enjoy a lot of media dedicated to the "How to Make a Monster," genre of horror/thriller. The closest I think Stoker's era had was the old tragedies where the hero trips and falls on their own hubris or some cruel circumstances forcing them into an ugly ending and evil actions.

But where a tragedy is meant only to be sad, and like Lucy and Mina's harrowing and choice-free dragging into undeath is frightening without any moral qualms, something like our good friend Jonathan standing at the edge of selling his soul for love and--overlooked by everyone else in the book!--slipping into a literal physical metamorphosis wholly unaware of the change? That had never been done. That wasn't even a possibility.

Stoker shows Jonathan is willing to exist as a monster with Mina. He's willing to deny her double-death and, quite likely, defend her from the others if they make a move to keep their oath. While holding his kukri. While the rest of the crew have no idea what kind of threat is sitting among them and what might happen if they fail to save Mina. But, spoilers, it's all bluff! Because of course it is! Happy endings abound!

If not?

Well, that would mean we really were watching the cruel foundation of something so twisted it hadn't really slipped into the literary realm at the time.

Love as corruption. The Good Man made into a Horror despite doing everything as right as he could until God seemingly tore all His protection away from his assaulted and Wafer-burned beloved. The steady slip of morality and humanity off a precipice that, in the best horror movie form, only the audience is allowed to pick up on while the heroes go on clueless about the invisible danger in their midst. Worse, there's the implication that, in true cyclic tragedy fashion, Jonathan is willing to cave to Mina the Vampire; which would imply Dracula has survived and must also be bowed to.

"But I am in hopes that I shall see more of you at Castle Dracula."

Can you imagine? Risking his mortal life to avoid the Brides' embrace, to die a man rather than be kept in the Count's cage of a castle. Only to have his traitor heart drag him spiritually blasted and red-handed back over its threshold and under the thumb of the same monster who imprisoned him to begin with. For love.

Damnation complete. And why? What brought him to such a point?

Because he was doing his job. Because he did his best to help end the monster. Because he went along with the others' societally 'proper' lead in closing Mina off, chafing all the while. Because he was, he is, always will be in love with Mina, cherishing her above God and all the things that had failed her--including himself.

How depressing. How richly, horrifically depressing.

It is ripe with potential. So much of the psychological and supernatural elements Stoker sprinkles throughout the book are. As to the particular form of monstrosity Jonathan turns to in Barking Harker? I hope to realize something unique in his transformation beyond simple vampirism. Likewise for others.

Van Helsing and the Suitors Three are due a little fresh perspective, I think. A drastic one.

[basedkikuenjoyer]

Like I said, an obvious sign telling me it's a mimic didn't stop me from thinking "but what if it isn't?" I love Frieren for the after the journey story and all but mostly because I kinda am Frieren. Fun idea for D&D nerds btw, one thing that never got translated over into most RPGs is that old-school mimics were capable of speech. Anyways, figured out how to get pics from the game's snapshot mode over to here. I like games including the ability to take pics more.

Ahead is my favorite from the main story quest, and it's big spoilers for DQ Builders 2. So like...be warned:

Someone familiar with the game might recognize and anachronism here, I shouldn't have Malroth for this part. My bro, it's something a lot of people didn't like about the story and I didn't either. There's a traitor in Moonbrooke's midst, and he turns the people against your bro. Meaning our bro Malroth gets thrown in jail and blames you. Causes a rift that sets up the grand finale. I was pissed honestly. Like...you expect me to want to sit around and build for these shitheads after that? It's a black game, the game kinda forces you to feel like a bad friend because I was ready to tell Moonbrooke to go fuck itself. No seriously, I actually did commemorate the moment:

Yeah I just sat on the tower and made them defend their own damn castle for any of the battles. Talk about good Dragon Quest design. It's like what I said about the late-stage boss fight in DQ5. Furrowfield makes you feel the threat of dudes attacking your base. Those skeletons will make you have to rebuild a bit. Progressively past that it becomes less of a threat. Sorta frontloads the fear a Minecraft creeper strikes in you. Anyways, us flying over the field. I stumbled into that early. It did nothing to diminish the impact of one of the coolest moments in the game. Especially for an older fan of DQ2.

That's Rendarak in this game, or Rhone as I'm used to it. Moonbrooke is the snowy winter land this time. Rhone is a peaceful valley tucked away in the mountains. And even the main hero of the mainline counterpart's home of Midenhall is there. This is where you should get the reveal the world is all an illusion. Smartly using an iconic moment from Dragon Quest 2 that really holds up even today. When you finally get to Hargon's Castle in that...it looks like Midenhall. Home. You can stay at an inn or buy stuff at shops but when you leave it resets your stats and inventory. Cool trick right? Though it does lead to a fun little bug you can do with cursed equipment to make the final push less of a grind.

My mind was fuckin' blown honestly. Seeing that verdant field, seeing the name Rendarak, scary monsters just casually talking about how it's all an illusion. Wild. I honestly like the more eerie, bizarre feeling of just casually stumbling across this. And good on them for designing around my ability to just run around to parts of the island when I want. That's how I found a sweet portrait of the Princess of Moonbrooke!

[apocalypticavolition]

Let's (re)Read the Hobbit! Chapter 2

Welcome back! Last time, I read The Hobbit’s first chapter, “An Unexpected Party”. This time, my note on “Roast Mutton”. Whereas the last chapter was about introducing our crew of badass height-challenged heisters, this chapter is about establishing their competence in the field. Let me tell you now, the results aren’t great! As always, expect spoilers.

Up jumped Bilbo, and putting on his dressing-gown went into the dining-room. There he saw nobody, but all the signs of a large and hurried breakfast. There was a fearful mess in the room, and piles of unwashed crocks in the kitchen. Nearly every pot and pan he possessed seemed to have been used.

Let the record show that this is what Bilbo Baggins hates.

“What about an early start?”

“You’re lucky I told the dwarves that hobbits are nocturnal!”

“Great Elephants!” said Gandalf, “you are not at all yourself this morning—you have never dusted the mantelpiece!”

Gandalf, you haven’t been in town since Bilbo’s grandpa died. How would you even know his daily routine? Do you just keep one or all of the unaccounted for palantirs in your cloak?

“Thorin and Company to Burglar Bilbo greeting! For your hospitality our sincerest thanks, and for your offer of professional assistance our grateful acceptance.”

“You can’t compliment hobbits verbally after midnight!” - Gandalf Hobbit Fact.

“...we have proceeded in advance to make requisite preparations, and shall await your respected person at the Green Dragon Inn, Bywater, at 11 a.m. sharp.”

Starting with dragons and ending with dragons. This is “bookending”!

To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast half-finished and quite unwashed-up, pushing his keys into Gandalf’s hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more.

If not for finding the ring and distracting Gandalf by reminding him of his actual mission on Middle-Earth, Bilbo would have returned to Bag-End to find himself homeless and Gandalf in the midst of a real estate scheme.

“Don’t be precise,” said Dwalin…

“Gandalf says precision gives hobbits gout!”

[Gandalf] had brought a lot of pocket-handkerchiefs, and Bilbo’s pipe and tobacco.

I’m probably going to keep giving Gandalf shit because it amuses me, but he does look out for ol’ B. B. and so do the dwarves. For all his constant whining, they’re actually pretty good traveling companions.

Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people.

Silly Bilbo, you’re only going down one road: The Great East Road! Or maybe Gandalf sent you down a bunch of detours. That would be funny to him. Still though, a very subtle bit of misalignment with the continuity.

Also, it would be funny if he was mistaking Weathertop for a castle. Not sure what other ruins he might be spying at this point, or if any particularly evil people built them. But that’s not a misalignment exactly because “as if” doesn’t mean “because it was absolutely true” and because Bilbo would totally think a watchtower was a huge fortress.

It was after tea-time; it was pouring with rain, and had been all day; his hood was dripping into his eyes, his cloak was full of water; the pony was tired and stumbled on stones; the others were too grumpy to talk.

Note that this is one of those stories of heroes on adventures and sure enough the misery of traveling is an immediate theme. I’ve seen quite a few fantasy stories later on where the heroes whine to themselves about how the stories they’ve read don’t ever talk about how miserable stuff is, but when the pre-ur fantasy text is covering it, you really have to wonder how much airport fantasy those authors internalized. Tolkien meanwhile, actually walked the walk thanks to the prematurely named war to end all wars.

“Just when a wizard would have been most useful, too,” groaned Dori and Nori (who shared the hobbit’s views about regular meals, plenty and often).

Exactly, boys. Gandalf is just over the next hill, having cast Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, laughing at you lot while reclining on a chaise lounge.

Also note that Bilbo is a dandy but he’s not the only one who is more accustomed to a regular, urbane life in the party. This may be relevant in about five minutes.

Dwarves can make a fire almost anywhere out of almost anything, wind or no wind; but they could not do it that night, not even Oin and Gloin, who were specially good at it.

I wonder if this is dwarf magic or just really good training.

Then one of the ponies took fright at nothing and bolted. He got into the river before they could catch him; and before they could get him out again, Fili and Kili were nearly drowned, and all the baggage that he carried was washed away off him.

Let’s be real here: pony smelled a troll or three and immediately bolted towards safety. Fili and Kili almost die in foreshadowing of their inevitable fates, I expect.

“These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Travellers seldom come this way now. The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded. They have seldom even heard of the king round here, and the less inquisitive you are as you go along, the less trouble you are likely to find.”

Wh- what king? Elrond is the closest thing to a king in these parts and he’s only a lord. Bree is not part of any kingdom at present. Aragorn is ten and nobody has heard of him. The dwarves have been driven out of the mountains. People don’t hear about the king in these parts for the same reason they don’t hear about alien invaders!

Off Bilbo had to go, before he could explain that he could not hoot even once like any kind of owl any more than fly like a bat. But at any rate hobbits can move quietly in woods, absolutely quietly.

And yet I never got any farther than this point in the video game because the damn trolls kept killing me.

Also there was a barrel of good drink at hand, and they were drinking out of jugs. But they were trolls.

Do trolls make barrels and jugs, or are they just stolen goods? It’s hard to tell which of the demi-humans in the Legendarium are meant to be capable of at least rudimentary civilizations and which ones are too dumb. Then again, the trolls here seem a lot smarter than I remember the ones in LotR being.

“Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. How much more d’yer want? And time’s been up our way, when yer’d have said ‘thank yer Bill’ for a nice bit o’ fat valley mutton like what this is.”

As distasteful as the trolls are, Tolkien gives them some human qualities at this point – another way he stands apart from a lot of his more immediate imitators (more recent works in the genre have caught up or even surpassed him). He doesn’t like mindless, indistinguishable hordes.

A really first-class and legendary burglar would at this point have picked the trolls’ pockets—it is nearly always worth while, if you can manage it—, pinched the very mutton off the spits, purloined the beer, and walked off without their noticing him. Others more practical but with less professional pride would perhaps have stuck a dagger into each of them before they observed it. Then the night could have been spent cheerily.

Bilbo is of course barely level one at this point, let alone legendary.

Of the various burglarious proceedings he had heard of picking the trolls’ pockets seemed the least difficult, so at last he crept behind a tree just behind William.

I guess the Took side of Bilbo is quick to rise to the forefront now that he’s out of town. The rain must have made him much too miserable to be sensible now that there’s something to do.

Trolls’ purses are the mischief, and this was no exception. “’Ere, ’oo are you?” it squeaked, as it left the pocket; and William turned round at once and grabbed Bilbo by the neck, before he could duck behind the tree.

A talking purse is another big oddity for the Legendarium – I don’t think we see any further talking objects. It’s also a bit odd that a troll would have a magic item at all, let alone that such things might be common to them in particular. On the other hand, it works perfectly as a fairy tale.

“Yes, lots,” said Bilbo, before he remembered not to give his friends away. “No none at all, not one,” he said immediately afterwards.

Fool of a Took! I mean uh, I can quite understand why Bilbo immediately ratted his companions out. Poor dude has had no preparation for any real danger.

“Poor little blighter,” said William. He had already had as much supper as he could hold; also he had had lots of beer. “Poor little blighter! Let him go!” “Not till he says what he means by lots and none at all,” said Bert. “I don’t want to have me throat cut in me sleep! Hold his toes in the fire, till he talks!”

This is another good example of the characterization of the baddies I kinda mentioned before. William is a sensitive troll and Bert is a lot more clever than the others give him credit for.

“And I won’t take that from you, Bill Huggins,” says Bert, and puts his fist in William’s eye.

Switching into present tense? I was always told that such behavior was verboten. Yet here we have Tolkien doing it. An innocuous slip not caught in editing? A deliberate stylistic choice? A glitch thanks to the poor work of properly transferring the text between editions? The world may never know unless it’s that last one, but I’m not equipped to check at present.

Before Balin, who was wondering where in all this commotion Bilbo was, knew what was happening, a sack was over his head, and he was down.

Note that Bilbo sneaks around perfectly well and only slips up because his loot literally starts talking. Balin apparently can’t see what’s going on around the fire for shit (you’d think a dwarf might have darkvision) and gets nabbed immediately. Balin may no longer be best dwarf.

Soon Dwalin lay by Balin, and Fili and Kili together, and Dori and Nori and Ori all in a heap, and Oin and Gloin and Bifur and Bofur and Bombur piled uncomfortably near the fire.

Or maybe he keeps the job. At this point they seem less like dwarves and more like another mythical race of diggers and pickax wielders: lemmings. You can’t even say Thorin looks all that good here considering that he’s just let all this happen instead of organizing his fellows into any kind of useful plan as they got whittled down one by one.

[Thorin] jumped forward to the fire, before they could leap on him. He caught up a big branch all on fire at one end; and Bert got that end in his eye before he could step aside. That put him out of the battle for a bit. Bilbo did his best. He caught hold of Tom’s leg—as well as he could, it was thick as a young tree-trunk—but he was sent spinning up into the top of some bushes, when Tom kicked the sparks up in Thorin’s face.

At least he pulls this off! But it’s still a rather lame showing from the party as a whole at this point: if just a couple of the others had shown even the slightest bit of forethought. Meanwhile, Bilbo shows that he’s not remotely competent in actual fighting – and yet he’s still apparently the most capable member of the group, since he still gets into a bush to hide. This is very damning for the dwarves, who aren’t supposed to be dandies and yet can barely manage to be as useless as Bilbo!

“We ain’t got no water, and it’s a long way to the well and all…”

This is a bit of a risky claim, Gandalf, since there’s a river right over yonder. Though I guess since the point is to get them arguing with each other, letting one of them, “Well, aktually,” this bullshit would be a good shortcut. So I guess it only didn’t work since he overestimated their intelligence!

“You’re a booby,” said William. “Booby yerself!” said Tom.

Ladies and gentlemen, the author who defined a genre!

And there they stand to this day, all alone, unless the birds perch on them; for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again.

When you think about the respective geographies of Middle-Earth and Europe, you have to wonder if these trolls aren’t at the bottom of the North Sea somewhere by now.

They were nearly suffocated, and very annoyed: they had not at all enjoyed lying there listening to the trolls making plans for roasting them and squashing them and mincing them.

Well I hope this teaches them all a valuable lesson about not ending up in sacks. You’d think the descendants of the dwarf who put Last-King Arvedui in a sack and accidentally killed him would learn.

“Why on earth didn’t you mention [the key] before?” they cried.

In Bilbo’s defense, all hobbits are under the impression that Gandalf has the magical ability to open doors. This is not remotely true but hobbits have been known to wait for hours within the immediate proximity of lovecraftian abominations while suffering from their delusion.

Two caught their eyes particularly, because of their beautiful scabbards and jewelled hilts. Gandalf and Thorin each took one of these; and Bilbo took a knife in a leather sheath.

This would be a horrible D&D campaign because there’s no balance at all to the encounters or to the loot! But hey, here’s the first of Bilbo’s rewards that the first chapter hinted at: the beloved Sting.

Then they brought up their ponies, and carried away the pots of gold, and buried them very secretly not far from the track by the river, putting a great many spells over them, just in case they ever had the chance to come back and recover them.

More dwarven magic, unless it was all Gandalf. But since it says “they”, we can safely assume that dwarves are just as capable of outright spell-casting as elves.

“I had not gone very far, however, when I met a couple of friends of mine from Rivendell.”

As stated above, he’d just gone up to the next hill (despite his obviously BS claims of scouting). The elves found him because they were confused as to why there was a mansion in the middle of nowhere.

“Please be more careful, next time, or we shall never get anywhere!”

Silly Gandalf, you’ll be getting everywhere purely because they won’t be careful…

And that’s the end of this chapter! We’re moving along quite nicely, with something kind of resembling an action sequence and strongly resembling danger to up the stakes. Most fantasy books would still be introducing the Prince V’w’l’ss’s wardrobe and long line of extramarital lovers at this point. Next time: magic maps!

[lillianawayne99]

Fireborn Prologue

Pairing: Jon Snow & Oberyn Martell X OC

Genre: NSFW AU

Word Count: 1.1k

Warnings: smut, violence, fluff, blood, death, mixes the books and show, spoilers for seasons 6-8

Synopsis: Valaena Fireborn of House Targaryen has reached Westeros after spending her life in exile. While learning about her homeland and preparing for the war ahead, she meets two men who would change her life forever and learns of a threat to all humanity.

Fireborn // Masterlist

“I am [Valaena Fireborn] of Old Valyria, and I will take what is mine. With fire and blood, I will take it.”

I didn’t remember my homeland nor had I stepped foot on Westerosi soil. I was born on Dragonstone in the midst of a raging summer storm. The following years in exile comprised of my brother ingraining one objective into me. Retake our father’s throne and kill the usurpers.

After spending my entire life in another land, I was going back to Westeros. No, not going back. I couldn’t go back to a place I didn’t remember. Nonetheless, leather boots stood on a wooden deck destined for the North.

One of my dothrakhoyi joined me, posing as my escort. Kovarro spoke the Common Tongue and was loyal to me without a fault. My advisors, khalasar, and Unsullied remained in Mereen while the former slaves and masters formed a new government of their own which benefitted all in Dragon’s Bay.

Years of heartache were coming to fruition. Neither of my siblings were capable of seizing the Iron Throne. Viserys would have squandered whatever hold the Targaryen name still possessed. Daenerys would have been too soft, too kind to make difficult decisions. If a Targaryen was to sit the throne again, it had to be me. I was the only Targaryen left with the composition of a leader.

Daenerys was fortunate to die as a child. She wouldn’t have known to defend herself when Viserys grew cruel. Death saved her from living in this world with our brother. A short childhood protected her from his attacks.

I had already spent several moons training in the yard with Ser Willem Darry when Viserys first tried to hit me. He tried several more times, his attempts gradually only occurred at night. The first night I slept with a dagger under my pillow halted his actions. He carried the scar from that night until the day he was killed by my husband.

I was lucky when it came to Khal Drogo. Viserys taught me to expect cruelty from men, but Drogo never beat nor raped me. The most feared Khal in Essos was kinder to me than the last of my kin. He chose me as his wife, his Khaleesi, and he cherished me for the rest of his life.

Drogo never raised his voice nor his hand towards me. He was a good father, husband, leader, and a fearsome warrior. He promised me Westeros. He vowed to tear down the walls of my enemies and give Rhaego the Iron Throne. If it wasn’t for the maegi and traitor, we could have spent the rest of our lives on the Great Grass Sea.

The part of me who loved without abandon died with the last of my family. How could someone believe in love when they’d only been rewarded with pain and heartache? After waking in the blood of my husband and child, love wasn’t part of my life any longer. The devotion I once possessed hardened and festered until only vengeance was left.

The hole where my heart used to be never healed, but the years dulled the grief and the bells in my hair brought me comfort. When they ring in the wind, with the gait of my midnight, or a shake of my head, I imagine Drogo with our son in the night lands.

Rhaego would be nearly old enough to learn how to shoot from horseback now. Drogo was adamant we taught our son how to be a Khal from the time he could hold his own head. Shortly after he was running through the camp, Rhaego could hold an arakh and stand in the saddle. He could have been as ferocious a warrior and leader as his father if not more.

“Khaleesi?” Kovarro’s deep voice pulled me out of my past and into the present.

“Yes, zhey qoy qoyi?” I turned away from the stern of the ship to face my companion. The setting sun behind him cast a soft glow on the crown of his ebony hair. His lips were taught and brows furrowed as he stood before me dressed in brown and gold leather.

“The ship is about to dock.”

I nodded and led him to the cabin we had shared. Repacking our saddlebags was fast work as we left all of our belongings in them apart from what we needed during the voyage. The crew unloaded their fares as Kovarro and I retrieved our horses from the animal hold.

Moons at sea caused us to walk on dry land with shaky legs and a stumbling gait as we found an inn. Kovarro and I crossed a bridge into the northern side of White Harbor and left our horses in a stable. After unsaddling the horses, we brought our bags up to our room and found a table to eat at.

I was considerably more relaxed in White Harbor than I had been in many years. My entire life, I was the princess expected to behave like royalty until I was with the Dothraki. When Drogo died and I took control of the Khalasar, I had to be a queen. Now, I was just one more noblewoman traveling.

Despite twenty years with one goal in mind, Westeros didn’t feel like home. I felt like a foreigner surrounded by men and women dressed in the Westerosi fashion. Kovarro and I may be dressed like them, but the material was constricting and difficult to move in. It hadn’t even been a day, and I was already sick for home.

I missed my loose dresses. I missed wearing trousers. I missed the clay buildings of Mereen. I missed riding my midnight at the head of my khalasar. It will take longer than I’d like before I’m ready to summon my advisors and army to Dragonstone.

“I don’t know how these people wear such tight clothing. Do you want to live here and rule these people?” Kovarro spoke in Dothraki while tugging at his shirt and shifting in his seat.

“It’s my birthright.” I responded in Dothraki, his question making me pause as I raised my spoon to my mouth.

“That wasn’t the question. Do you want to be here?” He stopped adjusting his clothes and resumed eating his food.

“Ruling here is what I’ve always wanted. It’s why I stayed in Mereen.” I gave him the safe answer, the answer I’d rehearsed in my mind every hour of every day.

“This country smells like pig shit. How can they stand living in such cramped quarters? Don’t they need space to breathe?” Kovarro had been with me since I married Drogo, he should be used to these conditions.

“This is what they’ve always known. To them, this is normal.” This was normal to me as well, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed the stench of the city.

“Is this the kind of life you want, Khaleesi? To be stuck in a crowded city that reeks of shit?” If I hadn’t lost so much to reach this place, I never would have left Mereen.

“I’ve spent most of my life in crowded cities that reek of shit.”

Next Chapter

A/N: This is the only chapter I’ve edited since I changed my writing style for Chapter 13. Chapters 1-12 are a bit more modern sounding. I’m currently undecided whether I’ll go back and edit 1-12.

Reblogs and comments are greatly appreciated!

© LillianaWayne - all rights reserved. Do not copy, modify, repost, or share on other platforms without my express, written permission.

[accidental-spice]

Best of Walter Foley part three: Circles of Seven

His friendship with Karen

Him offering to carry Ashley's bags in and out of the airport

THE FISH JOKE MY BELOVED

I just love this scene!!!!

Yes I do quote this scene every chance I get why do you ask

I love how from the point where the random old dude kinda reminds Walter why he's there onwards, he noticeably goes out of his way to help Ashley, and the others, but particularly Ashley

The scene where they start arguing and he realizes it's the cloaks influence!!!!

When he gets emotional and starts tearing up over loosing Bonnie, and how he insists on going to help Billy

WHEN HE SAVES ASHLEY'S LIFE

FEELS EVERY TIME

He KILLS ME 🤣🤣🤣

*charges a dragon*

Gosh I love him

First | Previous | Next

[taleweaver-ramblings]

#6, 12, 14, 15 and 35 for the fictional characters ask game!

6. Out of all the canon ships in any fictional world, which would you want to be your parents?

Bardon and Kale Allerion from DragonKeeper Chronicles. I feel like they would be good parents, plus I would get to grow up around dragons with a 50/50 chance of ending up a wizard.

12. If only one fictional character could be present for your death, who would you want it to be?

. . . Ok, reaaaaal quick question, is this a fictional character in addition to my family, or just a fictional character, and my family isn't there because I tragically died in the middle of an adventure? Because if it's the latter, I'm going to cheat a little and say that I want Caduceus Clay from Critical Role because then he can Revivify me and I won't be dead. (And if Revivify didn't work for whatever reason . . . well, he'd at least be an ok option for breaking the news?)

14. What fictional character would you want to be siblings with?

Ailsa or Fiachra and Fionn from The Dark King's Curse by Wyn Estelle Owens! Ailsa seems like she'd be a good sister. And while being sister to Fiachra and Fionn would have some initial downsides (namely, probably being cursed for a while), I think in the long term it would be great.

Alternatively, it's already been established that Walter Foley from Dragons in Our Midst is a pretty great friend and brother. I could live with being in his family.

15. What fictional character would you give a hug to right now?

Look, I recognize that it's a terrible idea, but I do want to hug Athelas from City Between (have for months) and there are no two ways around it. There is a risk that I will die in the attempt, but I accept that risk.

35. Out of all the fictional characters who lost their way at some point in their story, who would you want to personally find and lead back to the path (Natasha and Clint style)?

. . . The problem here is that my first-thought answer is a rather major spoiler for the series, and everyone else ends up redeemed by the end. Um . . . wait! Diarmid from Tales of Goldstone Wood! Not a major character, but still one who I wish could've gotten some better closure. (I'm sure I'm going to think of someone else as soon as I post this, but OH WELL.)

Send me another fictional ask!

[whirlybirdwhat]

crown the king (with bloody flowers) - chapter 37

Hanahaki au drabble series, in which Luffy is in love with the sea.

(Warning for Wano Spoilers before chapter 950!)

Kidd remembers Straw Hat. He had been a brat back then, at Sabaody all those years ago, not even coming up to Kidd’s shoulder and still having baby fat lining his cheeks. The youngest Supernova, the rumors had whispered, only fourteen. 

Kidd hadn’t cared about that back then. Why would he, when the rumors - when the entire world - knew that Straw Hat was a crazy bastard that had taken on the world government and won. What’s an age to a reputation like that? To a power like that? Then - then all Kidd cared about was seeing Straw Hat do some crazy shit. 

When Straw Hat crashed down the ceiling of that auction, not even breaking in his stride as he smashed his fist into the face of a celestial dragon twice his height, Kidd had gotten his wish.

And yet - he had seen, then, the way flower petals stuck in the brat’s lips as grinned. He had seen the way his lips were bloody without a hit on him, and the way he had spat onto the ground after, leaving an entire flower bud in his wake. The rumors hadn’t talked about that. 

Even after the war, with the image of Straw Hat holding his dead brother plastered about the world, petals in his wake, the rumors hadn’t talked about it.

Looking at him now, older but with lips still just as bloodied, Kidd wonders if they do now. It’s a surprise to see him here, in the midst of Wano’s prison camps, but then again - it’s Straw Hat. After two years of absence only to awake to challenge an emperor, Kidd shouldn’t be surprised at where the kid shows up. 

He’s still short. His robes sag a bit too big on him, smothering the muscle Kidd knows still must be underneath. His hands hang in front of him, bloody and scratched and sticky with petals as the sea stone drapes around them, and his feet are unsteady as he walks. Even from his cell, Kidd can see it - the gait that sways from side to side, the shakiness of his step,  the stumbling click-clack of his sandals and the clink of his chains as the guards pull him along - they’re making a spectacle of it.

Pathetic, Kidd thinks, and doesn’t quite know who he’s directing it at, bastards. 

And then - 

Then they throw Straw Hat into his fucking cell as they all cackle so loudly, and it’s all Kidd can do to not break their necks with his bare fists. Annoying bastards. He liked his solitary cell - and now he has Straw Hat to deal with? 

Hell-fucking-no - Kidd needs out of this dump not for Straw Hat to drag him down into another admiral-level mess. 

(His crew isn’t here, his crew is alone, and Killer is out there somewhere, captured just like him. His crew is strong, but they aren’t as strong as Kidd or Killer, and damn if he’ll let them get hurt because some straw hatted nuisance stirred up trouble.

(Or… at least more hurt than Kidd had let them get. What a shit captain he is, dragging them into an alliance like that.))

“DAMN YOU KAIDO!” Straw Hat screams, swears, and it’s muffled by the bandages wrapped around his face and a gurgling in his throat. “DAMN YOU!”  He stumbles to his feet, shoulders hunched, glare bright - the seas stone is dragging at his body, but even Kidd has to respect how the fire in his eye doesn’t seem to burn out even trapped like this.  “COME BACK AND FIGHT ME! BASTARDS!” 

Straw Hat’s chains clink against the prison cell. The wardens just laugh, waving him off, and suddenly, there is darkness again as they shut the cell door. 

Still, Straw Hat continues screaming, raging, an edge of desperation in his tone. He’s angry in a way Kidd has never seen him before - though, truth be told, he’s only seen him once. But if the anger he has now doesn’t top his anger when fighting a celestial dragon of all things - 

Kidd doesn’t know what could set him off.

(Or, perhaps, he does. That anger rides deep in his belly now, after all, days past when his crew was destroyed. Kidd is a pirate. Straw Hat is a pirate. 

Some things don’t change, between men like them.) 

Straw Hat smashes his cuffs against the iron bars - against the sea stone bars, Kidd’s tried to fight against them more than he would admit - but it does nothing but make more blood drip out of his robes and down his face. He starts screaming again but - 

“BASTA-ACK!” He coughs, wet and ragged in the middle of his words, and doesn’t stop. It’s a hacking cough, once that seems to drag at his throat, and he keeps coughing, over and over till it’s almost like he’s choking one it. Blood spills over his lips and onto the floor as his legs - those weak, trembling legs that Kidd already saw - give out from underneath him. He doesn’t stop coughing even then, his entire body hunched to the ground. 

He’s trying to brace himself, trying to hold his chest, but he can’t do both at once. 

Straw Hat wobbles.

Finally, Kidd finds the voice to speak. “Oi.”

Straw Hat keeps coughing.

“Oi!”

Straw Hat keeps coughing.

“OI!” Kidd snarls, and reaches a limb over to smack his back. 

Straw Hat chokes for one, horrible moment, and then blood splatters on the ground as flowers begin pouring out his mouth as ripped bandages dangle around. Beautiful ones, like marigolds and hyacinths and other flowers of all colors that Kidd will never know the name of. They stick to his bruised cheeks, his hands, the floor, his manacles, but - 

He’s finally, finally stopped coughing. 

The choking and the flowers stop too, eventually, leaving Straw Hat gasping for breath on the floor, looking small and huh - beneath the bandages, baby fat still clings to his cheeks.

He’s sixteen, Kidd recalls, a whole seven years younger than himself. 

Pathetic, he wants to think, but can’t quite make himself do so. Straw Hat walked here after all, with bandages choking his mouth and sea stone laid across his hands, and was still fierce enough that most of the guards backed off. Straw Hat has guts. 

And - Kidd realizes, surely and absolutely as Straw Hat drags himself up to sit on his heels - he’s got hanahaki. 

(He’s the first-person Kidd’s ever met that has the disease. He never quite thought it’d be like this.)

“Jaggy,” Straw hat murmurs out, the word scratching at his throat. “You’re here?”

“Tch.” Kidd snorts, not energized enough to snarl against the nickname, and settles back against the wall. “Obviously, brat.”

Straw Hat heaves out again, in and out. “… Thanks.” He murmurs again, voice still ragged. 

To this, Kidd shrugs. He didn’t - he didn’t do it to be kind. “The coughing was a bit annoying.” 

Straw Hat doesn’t say anything to that. He just keeps looking at the small window of light they have, back turned to Kidd and body still - stiller than Kidd had ever seen him. Even in his wanted posters the kid always seemed to be moving.  It unnerves him, ever so slightly.

But - whatever. Straw Hat is being quiet, not coughing, and they’ll be enough nuisances tomorrow. He can ignore the brat’s despondent look till tomorrow, and catch some sleep now.

He’s not in the mood to fight, or puff up his feathers like he would do for his rivals typically. He’s just… tired. And hurt. And he misses his crew.

(Straw Hat is alone now. He’s in the same boat.)

Kidd uses his one hand to pull his coat tighter to himself, and rests back against the wall, determinedly shutting out the world and Straw Hat’s to desperate gasps from the front of the cell. It’s… it’s fine. 

Fine.

Fine.

-

Whatever it is, it’s not fine because Kidd wakes up hours later to near-entire darkness in his cell and a shuffling, hacking in his corner. He has half a mind to lash out, because he’s alone in his cell, and noises in the dark have never meant anything good but - 

Then he remembers earlier today. He remembers Straw Hat being thrown in the cell. So, no lashing out but - 

“Damnit.” Straw Hat is whispering, cursing in his corner, and Kidd doesn’t think it’s out of any consideration for him but rather the hoarseness of his own voice. “Fuck.”

His voice cracks a bit. 

(He’s sixteen and he’s been in more wars and fought more emperors than Kidd can claim to. His own weakness burns at him.)

Kidd turns his head. There, struggling in the corner, is Straw Hat. The bandages have all been torn from his face and now lay in his hands, considerably more bloody than the last time Kidd saw them. Flowers lay scattered about Straw Hat’s entire body, and it seems he’s trying to do something with the bandages and his sea stone cuffs. 

Whatever it is, it’s not working because even in the dim moonlight Straw Hat’s eyes have lost some of their fire. Some of their rage. 

He looks… exhausted. 

(His eyes are rimmed red. Kidd doesn’t look too closely.)

He starts hacking again, not as harsh as earlier but seemingly because he doesn’t have the energy to do so harsher. The purple flowers from before - the spindly kind - fall from his lips and the sight of them makes Straw Hat grow - grow more something. Something like desperation and rage and grief but also not quite. It’s not a sight Kidd thinks he should be privy too, but prison does that to a man. It breaks down the barriers in all the wrong ways and it hurts. 

So, Kidd does something about it. 

“Oi.” He says again, like he did earlier, and yet this time Straw Hat’s response is immediate. His head snaps up, eyes flying wide, his entire body shifting into the defense. It’s easy to tell how the chains wear at him, how red his chest is from that scar, how he halfheartedly used his robes to wipe away the blood, when he’s like this. “The hell you doing, Straw Hat?”

Straw Hat just stares at him, reminiscent of a child caught doing something he shouldn’t. Kidd raises an eyebrow, and Luffy shrugs, stubbornly avoiding Kidd’s eyes as he puffs up his shoulders. “Trying to get the cuffs off.” 

Yeah, right. The brat’s a terrible liar even under the exhaustion. 

“With the bandages?” Kidd prompts, irritated, because he did not get woken up to get lied too. Luffy shrugs again, but this time holds out his hands, cuffs and bandages and all. His shoulders lilt with some unbidden weight. 

“I was trying to stuff the bandages under the cuffs so that it wouldn’t touch me.” Straw Hat says simply. “But I can’t do it like this.”

Huh. That’s… not a bad idea. If the sea stone isn’t touching him, Straw Hat can use his powers. It’s not a bad idea, yeah, except for the fact that the manacles are so skin tight it’s hard to get anything under them, and the fact that the sea-stone would be in such close proximity to the skin that even the tiniest shift would have you back where it started. 

Still, Kidd takes a look at what Straw Hat has done. It’s not much - his manacles are tighter than the others Kidd has seen around here, included his one-cuff manacles. Straw Hat’s are more like stockades, binding his wrists so close that they’re almost touching and giving him very little room to even move his elbows. He’s managed to get the tail end of a bloody bandage under his manacle, but nothing more than that.

It’s futile, and Kidd tells him as much. “It won’t work, brat. Too tight, and you’ll still feel the effects. Sides - they’ll switch ‘em out tomorrow morning with the chain ones so you can do their dirty work for them.” He dangles his own, singular chain and cuff as an example.

Straw Hat stares at him with wide, wide eyes, and then goes back to his hands. “That doesn’t matter. Chopper says I shouldn’t let Sea Stone touch me, or things will get worse. So I have to try or he’ll be mad at me. .”

Chopper - isn’t that his pet reindeer? The tiny guy? Kidd shakes his head, dispersing the thought. Who cares about that, when the brat is still trying to get the bandages under the manacles. He’s letting out noisy grunt as he does so, and it’s clear the manacles are pulling at his skin, leaving it bloody and raw with the skin peeled and everything. It doesn’t even deter the brat - he just keeps on going.

That doesn’t answer Kidd’s questions though. “What will get worse?”

(Sue him for sounding like he cares. He’s bored and Straw Hat is noisy, so obviously he has to do something.)

Straw Hat just gives him a dry look, and heaves into another coughing fit. There’s no blood this time, but it does leave Straw Hat looking even more worse for wear, tired and exhausted . He starts to lean against the wall of their little prison, his hands shaky and his head tilting gently as he still - still - goes to mess with the bandages.

Oh, Kidd realizes with a soft murmur. Oh. 

The hanahaki. The killing disease. The killing love. It gets worse with the sea stone? 

The rumors didn’t say anything about that - but then again, they didn’t talk about it at all when Straw Hat Luffy was the topic. 

Before Kidd knows it, the words are spilling out of his mouth. “Give me that, brat,”

“Wha - I’m not a brat!” Straw Hat says indignantly in that hoarse voice of his. “And no!”

“You just now noticed that I’ve been calling you a brat, brat?”

“Oi-“

“And get over yourself. The sooner you stop coughing the sooner I get to sleep, so get over here and give me that.” Kidd waits a beat. “Brat.”

Straw Hat fumes but its only for a moment before he’s scooting along the wall, too tired to get up properly, until he’s right next to Kidd. He holds out his hands and bandages petulantly, almost skeptically, his eyes piercing Kidd’s own.

Damn the brat has a glare. 

Kidd ignores this, ignores how he’s helping his rival, and grabs the brat’s tiny wrist. It isn’t gentle, isn’t kind, but it lets him see what the brat has been trying to do. Straw Hat doesn’t flinch. Just sits there, wide eyed and covered in blood and muck. 

(It’s harder to avoid the redness of his eyes this way, but Kidd forges on.) 

He’s careful as he starts using his hand to push the bandages through. The brat’s manacles make this act easier at least, a little looser than Kidd’s own cuffs, and Straw hat manages to hold still despite his trembling and shaky breaths. It takes a bit of maneuvering, a little bit of teeth, and more than a few trade backs of Stop moving, brat, and Shut it Jaggy, but eventually - eventually Straw Hat’s manacles aren’t touching his skin any more. He’s breathing easier, skin a little warmer, and there’s something Kidd doesn’t want to name in his eyes.

“That better, brat?!” Kidd bites out, trying to regain some of his image despite the way his hand is twisting the kid’s wrists around, double checking. 

“Shishishi!” Straw Hat laughs, the first real sign of whatever the fuck kind of joy is going on in his wanted poster showing its face. “Yep! Thanks Jaggy!” 

“Whatever.” Kidd settles back into the wall,  bringing a knee up and hugging it in lieu of crossing arms he doesn’t have. “Be quiet now - I want some fucking sleep in this hell hole.”

Straw Hat doesn’t respond. Kidd glances over.

That fucking asshole - he - 

He’s already sleeping on the ends of Kidd’s ratty coat, head nestled one the fabric and too-thin limbs splayed out in front of him.  Sleeping. On Kidd’s coat. The only one who was ballsy enough to do that before was - 

(An emperor, taking his crew away, a blue and white mask falling-)

-is still here, somewhere. 

Kidd has half a mind to shake him off, but - didn’t he say, all those years ago, that he wanted to see Straw Hat do something bat-shit insane? 

This has to count. He’s quiet now, at least. 

Kidd tucks his head down, and copies him, ignoring the blood staining his coat and the ground, and the ghosting flower petals stirred up by the wind. 

(The next day sees Kidd watching Luffy shake as his manacles are interchanged with cuffs that touch his skin. It has Kidd seeing Straw Hat tremble in his cell as Kidd helps him like he did this night, and days later - It seems the tiny reindeer give him a small, thankful nod as he inspects the bandages still wrapped around Straw Hats wrists. There’s an understanding there, a respect that Kidd can’t help but bristle at. 

He - He didn’t - whatever this was, it remains here, in Udon, because Kidd is a pirate and so is Straw Hat. The past remains there, and alliances are doomed to falter and fail. This wasn’t an alliance. Not even close. This was….

Whatever.

(And if there are still immortal flowers, purple and tall, stuck in the pockets of Kidd’s coat, then no one has to fucking know.)) 

[danwhobrowses]

One Piece Chapter 1007 - Initial Thoughts

Allow me to be the first to say

WHAT!?

Wh-what!? How? Why? Answers Oda, ANSWERRRRRS!

Chapter 1006 left us with an unnerving L session in the midst of Tropical Kickassery, but Oda continues the perpetual cocktease by moving to another for Chapter 1007

Spoilers for Chapter 1007, Support the Official Release as well

A Caesar cover page this time, though something did catch my eye; one penguin has ‘Senso Y...’ but I can’t seem to translate that, the nearest Penguin however has 401 written on his hat. You know what Chapter 401 was? Pirates vs CP9, and the color spread was the Straw Hats running from a Mammoth, foreshadowing maybe?

Unusual to recent chapters, we pick up where we left off with the lower floors, seems the Oniwabanshu were also defeated along with the Mimawarigumi, only Mega Forehead who dipped will remain then

Apoo is Ashook, but Drake throws Hyou some respect

Back to last week’s cliffhanger, Hyou and Omasa are close to turning and awaiting assassination by their reluctant Yakuza

Queen though has lost patience with his subordinates begging, noting how since there are no SMILEs anymore, their only purpose is now to die, but he also has a go at the Samurai, mocking them for trusting in Chopper - a pirate - to save them

Between all this I got a little laugh on how Drake in his hybrid dino form just kicked some nameless dude, like he dual wields weapons so he had to have chosen just to toe kick someone away

Just as Yattape is about to strike down Hyou though, Chopper comes in, blocking the sword with his hand/hoof as well!

Fresh faced cute Chopper is back, he did it in time!

Chopper Nuke to the rescue!

Knowing that he’d have to get to everyone, Chopper decided to administer the cure in a cloudburst counter-virus, using Cowpox to defeat Smallpox

Second Rate? Bitch you wish Queen, wait till you learn that he undid your Mummy virus too. Though I really wish Chopper just went ‘Because I am a doctor’ rather than ‘we had a timeskip to hone our skills’

Queen is reaping what he sowed as well, now the Waiters and Pleasures have turned on Queen in favour of Chopper, wanting to protect who saved them rather than the one who’s been letting them die

That’s more backgammon tiles turning as well, Chopper and Tama just single-handedly turned a vast majority of Kaido’s army against him, but it does serve to worry that the Tobi Roppo, Disasters and the threat of Big Mom’s crew and the Yonko themselves are a hefty threat, but the numbers advantage is turning around

Marco then in with the headlock, he seems to be using the arm that had its wing chopped off so likely means that he’s recovered

Monster Point finally showing up to smack some taste outta Queen’s mouth, Chopper is NOT a Tanuki - he’s a Reindeer with Tanuki-like powers

Ha the ‘Ohhhhh’ faces, especially Drake XD Dino boy is intimidated

Over with Yamato, Momo’s having a bit of a pity parade

Yamato you’re supposed to have a dragon in your pants not your tits XD Momo finally turns dragon form and even though he’s basically a pink version of Yamato’s dad he calls it an Eel

And coincidentally, CP0 have just started talking about Momo’s artificial DF, turns out it was made directly from Kaido and Vegapunk’s Lineage Factor and was going to be taking by the WG, but it was considered a failure

White-eye is on the money with the bombshell, the fruit was a success: Vegapunk copied a Devil Fruit, and Momo has it. Got two fish bois here

And then back to the Akazaya, they’re alive and treated but they don’t know who did it

But we would know that silhouette anywhere, it’s Oden! And we leave that on a break

But...I don’t buy it

We saw Oden die, Zoro is using one of his swords as we speak (those hilts don’t match either) and he hasn’t aged a second, so what’s the deal? The only way this could legit be a living breathing Oden is if Oden was sent to the future and then came back but how does he do the back bit if Toki can only send people forward

Oden also does not at all fit the shadow figure on that cliffhanger, so he can’t have been the one tending the wounds, and if he was outside in the open the Marys would see him, I’m sure someone would be like ‘WTF IS KOZUKI ODEN DOING BACK FROM THE DEAD!?’

So what’s the other options? Well, it’s not Oden, but someone’s posing as him. Cyborg Oden would lure them in to a trap, Kanjuro could be alive and made a paint Oden, it could be ninjutsu by Mega Forehead, Onimaru could’ve transformed too but I don’t see why, out there suggestion that Caribou can change shape too but he’s never demonstrated such an ability and he’s never seen Oden so I just wonder where he is in all this. There’s also the off-shot that since it’s the Fire Festival honoring the dead, this is Ghost Oden but that’d be hard to work - but if anyone could do it Oda can.

Overall, it’s a big BIG cliffhanger but one that renders me with worry over our Akazaya and now we have to simmer with a week break and possibly not even tread back on it for next chapter

We’ve replaced the questions of ‘can Chopper stop the virus’ and ‘is Hyou really gonna die’ with ‘What is Oden?’ and ‘How will people react to Dragon Momo?’ so the perpetual cocktease continues

but still, after the L session we got a huge W in Chopper curing all the Ice Oni and turning Kaido’s forces against him. While I don’t think Monster Point Chopper can beat Queen - he might have a decent go at it though - alone, anything Chopper does up to this point is a W over Queen so long as the Ice Oni has been remedied. Hyou survives for a bit longer but his strength and life force is sapped now, there is the chance he won’t last the end of the raid still.

It is worth reminding that things can still go very badly; Hawkins is nowhere to be seen (will continue to hope that he makes a face turn), Apoo is still on Kaido’s side and Perospero is still lurking in the chat, not to mention that things could still be going very bad at the top of the dome with Hybrid Kaido and BM vs the Supernovas, also the Island is still on course to flatten the Flower Capital

The questions ramp up but the raid is far, far from over.

[stranger-who-writes-fiction]

♫ Surfing on a soundwave, Swinging through the stars, Take a left at your intestine, Take your second right past mars!

On the Magic School smelly space bus! ♫

SPOILERS for Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #2!

This is a comic where, the longer I sit with a particular issue, the more I’m like, ‘yeah. Yeah. YEAH.’

It’s dense in a way that invites the reader to go through it multiple times, and rewards additional readthroughs.

Also, it helps that the art is FREAKING AMAZING.

Seriously. Evely and Lopes should draw and color everything, forever, always.

(I will honestly be shocked if they don’t get an Eisner nom for this book.)

Anyways, all of this to say: Another issue that I enjoyed. It has one of the most genuinely sweet Supergirl moments I’ve seen in the comics in a good long while.

So, if you’re looking for a quick thumbs up/thumbs down rating, thumbs up!

If you’d like some SPECIFICS, though...

THE STORY

King is an evil genius because we don’t pick up where we left off--rather, we start in the midst of the Space Bus journey.

There is technically a Big Action Scene, but I was honestly surprised by how...casually? the story progressed.

Essentially: Kara and Ruthye are forced to travel by bus because 1.) Krem stole Kara’s rocket and 2.) this corner of the universe doesn’t have the right stars, so Kara’s still recovering from being under a red sun for an extended period of time.

The bus makes occasional stops; they encounter a space dragon; Kara takes some Red Kryptonite and saves the day; they eventually arrive on a planet with a yellow sun. 

And again, all of this occurs with a kind of...breezy ease that I was not expecting at all.

I assumed that the space dragon fight would make up the final moments of the issue, after having built up the problem to a point where Kara needed to intervene.

But, noooope. The space dragon happens somewhere in the middle, which helps sell the central idea that this is simply Kara’s life. She’s been there, done that. She’s a badass who takes it all in stride.

But! Important to note! Ruthye still marvels at the sight of Kara taking out the space dragon, as well she should, because:

OH MY GOD. THE aRT.

There’s only so many times I can say, ‘it’s phenomenal, it’s gorgeous, it’s stunning’ before sounding like a broken record.

But it is. It truly is. This is the prettiest monthly book on the stands right now.

(Realizing I’ve been spelling Ruthye wrong this entire time, maybe? IDK. Apologies if I have.)

It’s in the final moments of the book that we learn what transpired after Krem shot Kara and Krypto and fled: Kara managed to get Krypto and Ruthye to a healer, and then passed out for a week. 

Ruthye and Kara recovered, buuuuut...

Krypto is still very near death because the arrow was poisoned.

The healer can’t treat him until he has a sample of the poison.

Which Krem has.

(See where this is going?)

So! Kara regains her powers! Ruthye has a super on her side! KRYPTO’S LIFE HANGS IN THE BALANCE!

Gimme. Issue. 3. STAT.

THE CHARACTERS

Very much enjoyed Ruthye in this issue!

There’s a really tricky balancing act you gotta pull off when writing child characters; you don’t want to just write them as tiny adults, but you also don’t want to be obnoxious or cloying in trying to write ‘true-to-age.’

King gives himself a bit of a cheat, by setting her up as a rock farmer from a...what would you call it. An old-fashioned planet? And thus the kind of character who had to ‘grow up fast’ and behaves more maturely than your typical pre-teen might.

BUT! IMPORTANTLY! This is tempered by placing Ruthye in situations where her (understandable) ignorance is challenged/put to the test. Like, yes, she is mature, and well-spoken, and utterly tenacious, but she’s also out of her depth, and still in need of help and guidance.

(Which is how we get to The Best Scene which I’ll get to in just a sec.)

TL;DR - this issue has really sold me on Ruthye as our POV character and I am officially Invested in the relationship between her and Kara.

Speaking of...

It’s KARA-CTERIZATION TIME!

So, okay. There’s some ‘eh’ stuff in this one, but, BUT!

We got the goods again.

And by ‘goods’ I mean this:

Whatever other nitpicks I have (and I do! Have one! Which I’ll get to!) THIS. This right here! This is Supergirl. This is Kara.

And what a beautiful line to introduce this moment:

“And it began--as most things begin when you’re dealing with Supergirl--with a moment of kindness.”

It’s the same gentle concern we saw in the previous issue, where Kara knelt down to address Ruthye eye-to-eye. 

Here, Kara’s facial expression, and the way she takes Ruthye’s hands and shows her what to do...

It’s just. SO SWEET.

Ahhhhh it’s so good. :D

So good! In fact! That the above scene offsets my one complaint, which is that Kara came off as harsh, IMO, when addressing the bus passengers, looking for Red K. 

Other good stuff from this particular portion of the book: we get Kryptonese (maybe? I think?) And a mention of Kara’s mother being strict about certain things, which is in keeping with the 2000s series version of Alura.

Ruthye also asks if Kara ever tried to avenge the death of her family/culture and she says no; Ruthye says that she heard a lifetime of regret in Kara’s response, which I suppose could be read one of two ways:

1.) That she regrets her choice not to avenge them, or 2.) that she regrets not having the option to avenge them, as there was no one person to punch, no single action that could rectify the destruction of the entire planet.

I personally prefer the second reading.

Which I suppose contradicts the recent-ish “Killers of Krypton” arc, but who knows what is and isn’t canon anymore, honestly. XD

As for the rest of the issue! I found myself thinking of a Grant Morrison interview, actually.

Morrison apparently met a Superman cosplayer at a con and that’s when the character clicked for them: “[The superman cosplayer] was so in the character, but what really got me was the way he was sitting. It was this absolutely relaxed pose with one knee up and the arm bent over, and that’s what broke Superman for me. Suddenly I realized that Superman wouldn’t be a poser, he wouldn’t be a Muscle Beach steroid guy; he’d actually be completely relaxed because nothing could hurt him. He could be so open and friendly to everyone because no one can punch him or hurt him. He can’t get a cold, or be damaged by anything you’re carrying or wearing. For me that was the power of that, whether you want to frame it as magical or not, it actually informed the stories I wanted to write. I felt I understood him in a way I hadn’t until that moment.”

That’s always stuck with me, the idea that Clark would be the most at-ease, chill guy you'd ever talk to.

And THAT, I think, is what we’re seeing here with Kara. That at-ease-ness.

But in a way that is distinct from Clark! In the above quote, it’s clear that Morrison thinks it’s Clark’s powers that are the reason he can be so relaxed and at ease.

But Kara is de-powered here. So why is she so chill?

Because Kara is an alien.

Kara’s in her element, here. She’s used to space travel, she knows the ins-and-outs, she’s not shocked by any of the weird stuff they encounter on their journey. 

Love it. LOVE. IT.

I am SO GLAD that King decided to go with Kara being the wizened mentor, as opposed to the naïve kid learning to be tough. It’s a much more interesting angle, IMO.

Also NO MENTION OF RIVALRY BETWEEN KARA AND CLARK. WOO. LET’S KEEP THIS ROLLIN’.

Alright, last, but certainly not least:

THE GOOD BOY! KRYPTO!

When I tell you I stress-read this entire comic first thing in the morning...XD

And I am STILL stressed. And a little sad that Krypto doesn’t get to go on another space adventure but! This is MIGHTY PREFERABLE to what I *thought* was going to happen, which is that Krypto would die from his injuries, and Kara would likewise be out for revenge. 

Fortunately, that is not the case! 

So like, the stakes?!?! Suddenly sky high. Find that dirtbag Krem and GET THAT POISON BACK TO THE HEALER!!

ART and MISC. STUFF THAT I LOVE

I generally don’t like to post entire pages of a comic, or panels without context, but the...reach? of this blog is extremely limited so. I think we’ll be okay. XD

So, alright! Some moments that I particularly enjoyed!

One of the panels that Mat Lopes shared early on! 

I want this lettered version on a mug.

(Also she looks very ’Grace Kelly-ish’ here.)

Love Kara’s facial expression and her line about space travel being more fun when you can fly.

From the same portion of the book--such a neat detail that Kara keeps her cash in her sleeve!

Another set of panels that I think Tom King shared a few months back.

Love Kara’s little smirk, and the, “I’m wearing a big yellow S on my chest, and a very fashionable red skirt.”

It IS fashionable. WE SUPPORT THE SKIRT, IN THIS HOUSE.

Also the slrrrrrrp. XD

It’s good.

Okay, 1.) VERY COOL SCI-FI DESIGN and 2.) that line is great. “Can you feel it, Ruthye? We’re getting closer. The stars are changing.”

Mmmm, them good cosmic Kara vibes.

Kara’s attitude about the Red K here is fun, like, ‘WELP, sometimes you turn into a monster, sometimes you don’t!’ but again, the line is what gets me.

“Did my hair move?”

“I do not believe so.”

XD

Honestly? I could post the whole comic here. Evely’s vision of ‘public transit, but space’ is just so immediately...not ‘real’, necessarily, because there’s such a fantastical element to it all, but it is fully realized. I think I used the phrase ‘lived-in’ and that’s it--this world feels like it has always existed; every grimy nook and cranny, every rando space bus traveler.

And Mat Lopes’ colors!

There are like, five distinct color palettes at work in this issue, and Lopes handles them all masterfully.

I think my favorite is the...I’ll call it ‘ethereal space aquarium’ lighting in the bus as they view the space dragon.

The glow and the shadows and the blues and pinks...

GGGGGGGGAAAHHHHHHHHHH so goooooooood

So, yeah. :D

I am very much enjoying this weird, wild ride with small, precocious Ruthye and wizened, crusty Kara. XD There’s some stuff that I don’t *love* but my goodness, it could be a lot worse!

Let us end on the beautiful title page:

[sam-roulette]

Recommending Free Old School RPGMaker Horror Games based on what Entity You Vibe With The Most

The Hunt: The Crooked Man. You play as David Hoover, a man going through a rough patch in his life who feels as though he has little prospects for a future and who cares for a mother who doesn’t even recognize him. After realizing that his house is haunted, he goes on a quest to see if he can find the previous owners and figure out what’s going on, all the while chased by a monster called the Crooked Man...

This ironically enough also applies as a recommendation to Martin kinnies. This is also one of the few games on the list where you’re expected to fight back.

The Slaughter: The Witch’s House. You play as Viola, a girl who must find a way out of the woods she’s trapped in. She eventually ends up having to enter the constantly warping witch’s house, where she has to figure out the mystery of the witch before the house kills her...

The character that’s being slaughtered is you. Literally anything can kill you and if you so much as look at an object wrong a random death will trigger. It is trying to hurt your character specifically all the time.

The Spiral: Yume Nikki. You play as Madotsuki, a recluse who refuses to leave her small apartment. When you go to sleep is when the game begins; your goal is to open 12 doors into a myriad of strange and unexplained worlds and collect artefacts which distort the main character’s body beyond recognition. I don’t know what else to say honestly; this is just as Spiral as it gets.

The Flesh: Porterminus. You play as Julie, a spunky teen who ends up getting controlled by an eldritch cat into fighting a myriad of terrifying flesh abominations to stave off an equally eldritch plot. A lot of the enemies look genuinely gnarly (especially since most of them used to be human) so big body horror warning on this one.  

The Lonely: Escaped Chasm. In this game by Temmie Chang (and the prequel to Dweller’s Path), you play as a girl who is wholly alone, waiting for her parents to come home as reality begins to fall apart around her. This one isn’t particularly long, but the atmosphere is genuinely lonely enough to make you ache, and there’s no save function, meaning you have to finish in one shot. The cut scenes also happen to be fully animated and are absolutely gorgeous.

The Eye: Your Turn to Die ~Death Game by Majority~. You play as Sara Chidouin, a kidnapped high school student who suddenly finds herself in the midst of a life or death game with ten other people. The name of the game is simple, really- after being given challenges with which to build trust and camaraderie, all contestants must vote on who among them will have to die, debating on the merits of each person’s life using all the information you’ve gathered at your disposal.

This one narrowly avoided being classified as The End by the virtue of the death game itself, which you discover more about as the characters try to plan an escape- the people running it just want to see what happens. And you, as the player, may just want to see how things play out as well.

The End: Mad Father. You play as Aya Drevis on the night of the anniversary of her mother’s death. She and her mother knew that her father was experimenting on humans, often using people deemed of little value to perfect his work in attempting to overcome death. On this night, his subjects come alive and attack, and it’s up to Aya to save her father- if he even deserves to be saved.

This one is mostly in The End for the theming of it- there’s a large theme running throughout the game, especially if you do side quests, about the meaning of life and helping people pass on to their deaths, and whether someone has the right to decide whether to hasten the inevitable.

The Dark: Forest of Drizzling Rain. You play as Shiori, a college student with amnesia who goes back to her hometown in an attempt to illuminate all the gaps in her memory. The village is haunted by the legend of Kotori Obake, said to be the ghost of a woman looking for her child, and whose arrival is always precipitated by rainfall... It’s up to Shiori and the mysterious museum owner, Suga, to figure out how to escape the spirit’s clutches.

This gets to be the Dark due to the fear of the unknown, which this game has in spades. This one also happens to have the plus of one of the protags, Suga, actually being mute but not a silent protagonist (as he communicates primarily through notes, which are displayed on screen), which was a really nice touch.

The Corruption: LiEat (1, 2, 3). You play as the lie-eating dragon Efina and her guardian, a con-artist whose name changes each game, as both travel from town to town to solve the mysteries surrounding a horror story. Each game centers around a different mystery, but the common thread is how Efina eats lies: by being in proximity to a liar, she can make lies appear as creatures to eat, and if the liar has deluded themselves enough, their lies will consume them and turn them into oil-smeared monsters.

These games are a little more tame compared to some others on this list, and are honestly a great ride for if you love parent-child interactions. (Fun fact: we loved these so much, we actually loosely based our eye-eating dragon Jon au off of it!)

The Buried: Mermaid Swamp. You play as Rin Yamazaki, a woman going on vacation with three of her friends when the car breaks down in the middle of the mountains. While they’re able to find shelter at an old mansion near a damp and dirty swamp, things start to go south when their friend Mika comes down with an unexplainable illness and a constant feeling of being drowned...

I’d go a little more detail into the Buried themes of it, but, well, that would run right into spoiler territory. Please heed the trigger warnings provided at the link.

The Vast: Witch’s Heart. You play as Claire Elford, an ordinary woman suddenly swept away into a manic search for the fabled Witch’s Heart. While every version of the story is different, every story has the same thing in common: the Heart has the power to grant someone’s deepest wish. Claire, now trapped in a mansion in the heart of the mountains with four others, must fight her way through a variety of monsters and spectres to try and find a way out, all the while exploring vast spaces hidden through portals throughout the house...

This one is Vast less because of the heights and vast places (though there are many here) but for the everpresent feeling that no matter what you do against the vastness of the universe and fate, it doesn’t matter. Getting further into it would be spoiler territory, and I feel like it’s best experienced without knowledge :)

The Desolation: OFF. You take control of the Batter, who has the sole mission of “purifying” the entire world of evil. The entire world, as it turns out, is also just incredibly unsettling.

It may not exactly be a horror game, but  it’s extremely disconcerting and you genuinely cannot get more desolate than this game. I don’t want to spoil the ending (even if the game is like over 10 years old at this point) but suffice it to say, when the credits rolled and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” started playing for the first time, I felt like everything someone ever loved was burned to the ground, and like I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

The Stranger: Ib. You play as the titular Ib, a child trapped in a haunted art gallery who has to try and get to the real world alongside two friends she finds along the way. That’s easier said than done, however, with everything in the gallery coming to life and trying to kill you...

There are a lot of things that mark this as a Stranger game, but to avoid touching on the twist, the most genuinely frightening part is That Doll Room. You’ll know it when you see it.

The Web: Close Your Eyes (Original). In this one, you play as a bouncy little Marshmallow Monk who has just escaped death row and is currently running for their life. Before too long, they find themselves in a constantly changing, distorted world, egged on by a mysterious entity called the Narrator who watches their every action and guides their every movement. The goal: get out of this alive.

This one also very narrowly avoided being branded as The Eye due to the eye imagery, the spider, the manipulation, and the Narrator, who is fully voice acted. 

[silvershears]

Alright, listen. This book honks. And I want to talk about why. No, I'm not getting into the book review scene, but please indulge me.

I never had any intention of reading this book. I'll be up front with that.

A new coworker is a newish fantasy reader who, upon discovering that I am a long-time fantasy reader who also writes and has some vague publishing background, asked, "Would you read this book and tell me what you think? I haven't read it yet, but I'm curious to hear your opinion."

Sure. Why not. I was only 50 pages into the book I was reading at the time, so why not put that on pause and give this a go? This became infinitely more complicated by the fact that my new coworker is acquaintances with his wife, and then add in that I've met this author, had a bad interaction, and decided I never wanted to read his books. Nevertheless, I was determined to give it a go anyway, and I wavered for a while on whether to even include that background here.

Wasn't I already predisposed to not like this book? Perhaps. But this book was an excellent learning opportunity, if not a good story, and I think it's important for us all to approach books we don't like this way: Each time I ran hard up against my own disgust, I paused to ask myself why I felt that way. What was it about the story, the writing, the character, the plot, the world that made me react this way, and how did that interact with the author's intent?

First of all, a disclaimer: This will have spoilers. If you intended to check this book out, perhaps don't continue further until you've read it yourself. Maybe then come back and compare your experience to mine.

> The worldbuilding is based on two-dimensional lore.

The world is comprised of what appears to be three human races split along religious lines. The three sibling gods each have their own race of followers with some individuals inheriting the magical power of their god. One is a magic associated with air and water with a father/older brother god figure; the next is a mother/middle sister associated with fire and light; the third is a little brother associated with... the hard labor of forging? It's unclear what he originally stood for, but by the time the immense lore dumps are complete, we see the little brother's transformation from a highly skilled craftsperson who takes immense pleasure in crafting gifts to his siblings into a petty, angry god bent on chaos and destruction of his siblings' domains.

What brings on this transformation? The gift of a song.

He is so enraged that his siblings gave him a song instead of a physical item like he gave them that he goes into a rage, evicts himself from the metaphorical house, and goes to live in the bowels of the world where he can forge in peace. He goes on to create all the various fantasy creature races in the world like dragons, fae, constructs, shadow demons, etc.

And his name? Keos. He's the chaos god and his name is Keos. I can forgive a poor name here an there—perhaps he never said them out loud—but add in that the sister's light/fire magic is called lumen—y'know, like what lightbulbs are measured in—and I have concerns.

Naming problems aside, the entire world's history and the racial relations all stem from a god's immensely childish reaction to a gift. I am well aware that many deity lore can be goofy or based on overblown reactions to things, but it feels so thin and flimsy that to prop the whole world and its cultures on top of it could not stand.

> Ableism is pervasive in the culture.

The story starts off with a prologue, which, as a concept, is not inherently a problem, but it was my first clue that this was not the story for me. In this world, being disfigured in any way physically marks you as an agent of the chaos god. Either these agents are killed or ostracized in order to better mitigate any mischief and evil they may commit or bring to their community. We are immediately thrust into this intensely ableist world with the birth of a child missing a hand and part of a forearm. The parents are killed and the baby taken to the woods to die.

I hate it already.

The author, being the sort of person to review their own book, states in his lengthy review: "Whatever you do, don't think for a moment that I'm blind to the tropes I've chosen to use. They serve a purpose and are conscious choices."

If this is the case—that he's aware of his tropes and they are purposeful—he must also be aware of the statement he's making by having all disabled and disfigured be labeled as evil ne'er-do-wells. Because this story takes place almost entirely within the small town of Chaenbalu where these beliefs are rampant, we're lead to believe that this is the way the whole world works. We get one glimpse of the outside world where it mentions a larger prevalence of disabled and disfigured individuals, but it's so brief and not at all explored that our understanding of the world goes mostly unchanged.

Is this part of Call's subversion of tropes? Perhaps Chaenbalu is indeed a backwards town, holding on to old traditions that the rest of the world has left behind, but the characters are so isolated they wouldn't know—and therefore we don't know whether that's the case. Bad news: It's so distasteful that I'm not interested in reading more to find out if it's just Chaenbalu that's the issue. I'm so put off by the whole concept.

> Every female character is cardboard, and they all die.

Centered in Chaenbalu is the Academy, a school with two gendered factions: the witwomen and the Master Avatars. (You'll notice that the sexism starts right off the bat with the fact that Masters get capitalized but witwoman does not.) The witwomen are trained midwives and kidnappers, sent out into the world to collect children and bring them back to the Academy as a "reap" or class of new students. The students are told that their parents submitted them to the Academy's care in a boarding-school-type thing, but that's spoiled in the prologue as being untrue.

Unfortunately, we don’t get a chance to really explore what it is the witwomen are up to, or what any of the women are like. There is only one female character with any amount of on-screen time, and even that is negligible. She acts as nothing more than a plot device, which I’ll talk about later, functioning only as an object for the main character to lust after. Anytime she is described, it is with delicate detail paid to her soft, plump, pink lips, the breasts, the hips. At every turn, she’s sexualized—and perhaps that’s due to the main character’s gaze being the narration we receive, but even in the epilogue scene when our main character is not present, the author continues to describe her this way, so perhaps it’s not a function of the main character at all. She receives no further development than who her father is, what her body is like, and how much she dislikes those marked by Keos, aka, the disabled and disfigured.

The other witapprentices and witwomen appear for two scenes, and by the end of the book, they are all dead in the midst of an attack on the Academy that serves only to move the main character's story forward. Without this attack, he would never have a story worth telling in a book. Without their deaths, the attack would not have happened. And even the romantic interest is faux-killed in order to provoke a specific emotional reaction in the main character to move the character's development forward.

> The characters are shallow.

While I can't guarantee that this problem is due to the two-dimensional worldbuilding, I personally feel they're probably related. There are a couple of friend characters around and a mentor that are all lacking in development, but let me focus on the main character.

The male students train at the Academy with the goal of becoming avatars, and then later, Master Avatars. As avatars, they are expected to go out on secret missions to retrieve magical artifacts and, if the artifact is a "dark artifact,"—that is, if it's built to do harm to another person, and by lore belongs to Keos—murder its owner.

The main character is one such student, testing to become an avatar, and worse yet, if he doesn't pass his test this go-around, he'll never be able to become an avatar and he'll instead be relegated to steward status, taking care of the upkeep of the Academy. And of course, no one wants to be a steward! You'd be a servant to everyone, and where's the action-packed fun in that?

But our main character has a motivation even more powerful than the dread of being a steward: a girl. Not just any girl. The headmaster's daughter.

To be fair, this book is not advertised as a romance. Which is good, because it's not a romance. The main character has a deadly crush. He even has a promise ring forged, ready to give it to her when he passes his test and becomes an avatar. His love for this girl is so powerful for him that it's quite literally all he thinks about, but because she's the headmaster's daughter and is also a witapprentice, he hardly ever sees her, and the times we do get them in the same scene, it's plain this relationship will literally never work out.

She may not know about his missing half an arm thanks to a magical prosthetic, but it's clear she holds on to the old ableist traditions with positive glee and with the same strength as a hippo's jaw. While our main character pines after her and even eventually when they are engaged, we are telegraphed again and again that it will never last, that she is a horrible person, and that she will never accept him with his missing hand. We know this and we watch the main character acknowledge this so many times that it is a failing of the plot that there is even a chance for her to betray him.

Which she does, of course.

This goes back to the author's assertion that he's aware of his tropes and to trust him in his plan. He sets up a male lead and throws the only female character at him, establishing the possibility for a romance—a common trope—and molds that romance into the core motivation for the male lead. She is his reason for wanting to succeed, and he waxes poetical about how terrible it would be if A) someone else got her first, or B) he didn't pass the test and he couldn't be with her. They must fall in love, yes? The author also tries to convince us that she is a likeable person, a person worthy of his devotion, all the while foreshadowing with a heavy hand that she's, frankly, ableist, racist, and a terrible person who is not at all worthy of his devotion. Ah-hah, a subversion! They are not at all meant to be together!

The problem is that she repeatedly shows her hand as a garbage human in front of him an innumerable amount. We the audience dislike her so intensely that to have her as the main character’s sole motivation is laughable. Perfectly inconceivable. A true weakness in the foundation of the plot that’s so profound that if the story struggled to stand on its weak worldbuilding, it almost certainly cannot stand on this. Her betrayal is so blatantly obvious and inevitable that his surprise is outrageous, and his hurt comes not with sympathy from us but absolute incredulity.

> The author’s prejudices taint the writing, and the writing needs editing.

I won’t talk too much in depth about a scene in which the romantic interest is stunned and the main character performs a grossly sexualized search of her body, but I will point out that later, the author writes, “he relived the seconds they had shared in the shadows...” There was no sharing of moments. She was stunned. There was nothing romantic about it.

Later, the main character is sent out on an assassination mission. The author writes, “He wondered what kind of a man he was about to kill - good or evil, father or bachelor - and whether the man would struggle.” Ah yes, an unmarried man. The opposite of having children. Of course, how silly of me to consider that being unmarried precludes me from having children, or that being married means I must have children.

At another time, a character who is well known to wear an eyepatch is described as “winking at him with his one eye.” I’m sorry, author, but that’s just blinking. I could have given him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he’d forgotten this character is missing an eye and wears an eyepatch if not for the “with his one eye.” The author knew what he was doing.

These moments aside, many scenes dwell in the melodramatic, letting emotion set the scenes awash in a horribly garish light that fails to give the scenes their weight. The point of view was pretty tight to the main character, but with odd moments where it split away to document events that happened outside of that character’s view, even within scenes where the main character is present. It felt a bit sloppy. Passive voice is rampant, with sentences and whole scenes in dire need of better editing. “Myjun was walking in step with her father...” “His flyssa was caught by Annev’s flamberge...” It made the writing dull—hobbled by too many words that meant too little, and too specific of words amidst their plain neighbors that made it dissonant.

> The plot is overstretched.

This book is 576 pages. At page 250, something occurred that made me think that perhaps I’d just witnessed the inciting incident and that now the plot would begin. At page 330, I thought the same thing. At page 400, I thought the same thing. At page 525, I realized with a jolt that I was witnessing what this book would consider the climax, and I could put what happened at page 400 the inciting incident. Until that point, there was no clear indication of what the plot actually was, and there were at least 300 pages of unnecessary story.

I understand from a bit of research that this is intended to be the first of a four part series. Realizing that puts the entire plot of this book into perspective. This climax is the point of no return for the series, with a 500-page lead up. With a bit better editing and a cleaner line, this book could have been immensely less frustrating. Perhaps all these things that bother me are the point of the book—perhaps the next books in the series will overthrow some of these expectations as the main character ventures outside Chaenbalu and sees what the rest of the world is really like. Perhaps.

Do I trust that the author will do that? No.

Am I interested enough to continue reading this series to see if it gets better? No. Do I hope it does? Sincerely. I may not like the author, and I may not have liked this book, but there are people who do and I respect that. I hope it meets their satisfaction. It’s not for me.

Do I regret reading this over the last month instead of the book I was reading and will go back to reading? Surprisingly, no. I hated it, don’t get me wrong, but I also learned a lot about why I hate it—what made it not work—and I think there’s value there, too.

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 30 of 26

Title: The Cloud Roads (2011) (The Books of the Raksura #1)

Author: Martha Wells

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction (ish), Adventure, LGBT Protagonist, Third-Person

Rating: 8/10

Date Began: 10/20/2020

Date Finished: 10/28/2020

Moon has spent most of his life as an outsider, wandering from place to place. An orphan with little clue to his origins or past, he has the ability to transform into a large, winged creature. Due to an unfortunate visual similarity to the Fell, a destructive race of marauding shapeshifters, he has to keep his identity hidden. When his current home discovers his secret, the residents assume the worst, poison him, and leave him to die.

By luck, Moon is rescued by a huge shapeshifter named Stone. According to Stone, they're both members of a species known as the Raksura, and a nearby group is in the midst of a dire crisis. Desperate to know more about his past, Moon agrees to help. He follows Stone to Indigo Cloud, a dwindling court of Raksura under threat from the Fell. While the Raksura initially distrust Moon, and Moon has difficulty adjusting to their way of life, they soon discover they need each other to survive. Moon must come to terms with his place among his newfound people and help them overcome an insidious and overwhelming enemy.  

He spoke the thought that had become increasingly obvious all day long, with every interaction he had had. “I don’t belong here.” Maybe if he had been younger, there would have been a chance, but not now. 

Stone made a derisive noise. “You’re afraid you don’t belong here. There’s a difference.” 

Moon seethed inwardly but held his temper, knowing it would give Stone a victory if he lost it. “I’ve been walking into new places all my life. I know when I don’t belong.” 

Stone sounded wry. “You’ve been here half a day, and for most of that you were asleep.” 

Moon said sourly, “I like to make quick decisions.” 

Minor spoilers and content warning(s) under the cut.

Content warnings for the book: Lots of graphic violence, action, and death. Non-graphic sexual content. Mind control/manipulation is a whole thing. R*pe is plot relevant and mentioned several times, but not depicted.  

I read Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series earlier this year and enjoyed the hell out of it (reviews here and here). Featuring fantastic writing and the most well-written perspective character I’ve ever read, I cannot recommend that series enough. So I was interested in reading other stuff by Wells, and ultimately settled on this series. Murderbot is a tough act to follow, and The Cloud Roads is MUCH different in tone/genre, but I still thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to more. 

To me, the worldbuilding is the strongest aspect of The Cloud Roads. The Three Worlds is an interesting and creative setting. Humans are completely absent-- instead, there are dozens of different sapient humanoid races. While there are some cultural analogues to our world, everything feels distinctly alien and science fiction-y. I find it interesting that there don't seem to be countries or empires as such, though I get the sense it’s intentional. The Raksura, a main focus of the novel, are based on insect colonies like bees or ants, but with social complexity more like a wolf pack. 

Moon is a good choice of protagonist for this novel due to his general ignorance of the world around him, so we get a firsthand view of someone learning about it. Furthermore, I think Wells does a great job in heavy worldbuilding without it feeling overbearing. When information is doled out, it's always because it's relevant to the situation at hand, so the learning progression feels very natural. By the end I got the sense of a vast and complex world that we'd barely scratched the surface of-- which is a good thing.  

The Raksuran culture is fascinating. Personally I find insect colonies super interesting so I love to see a fantasy race borrow some elements of that. Without going into a whole essay, the matriarchal Raksura have a biological caste system and a ruling queen responsible for a lot of the reproduction. They're separated into two main groups-- winged and not. Within those two categories are various social roles one performs for the colony. All Raksura are able to shapeshift between a smaller almost-human form and a larger, more animalistic one. Despite the insectoid inspiration, the Raksura seem to be a hybrid of mammals and reptiles. They’re... sort of dragons? Gargoyles? Dinosaurs? There’s no perfect analogy. One thing I particularly admire about the writing is how Wells manages to make the Raksura human enough to be relatable, but with pronounced animal-like behavior to make the distinction obvious. Maybe I’m a bit of a furry, too. Sue me. 

I also enjoyed reading a story where the main characters can fly. I haven't read many books like that; I just think it's neat! It adds an extra element to travel sequences, or even how the characters view and observe the world around them. Journeys in fantasy can be boring to read, but this element keeps it interesting. 

The Cloud Roads’ plot isn’t mindblowing, but I think it serves the purpose of the novel well. It’s a pretty standard stock story-- orphan/loner must set out to reclaim his heritage and a new place in society. I think this plot works here because the worldbuilding is so complex, it would be difficult to also balance a complicated story. What keeps it interesting is that Moon struggles to adapt to Raksuran society; it’s his whole character arc. He is inherently mistrustful of the others and in many cases the feeling is mutual. The Raksura initially see Moon as a means to an end; something he is acutely aware of, and Moon keeps himself deliberately detached. The emotional thrust of the story lies in certain characters genuinely wanting him to stay on his own merits, and Moon realizing he actually wants to as well. 

One thing I hope to see more of in future installments is good ol’ character development. Moon is well-realized in this novel; he’s emotionally repressed, but starts to get over it and find a place to belong over the course of the story. We also gradually learn about his past, which adds more depth and context to his behavior. But I want more from the supporting cast. Jade, Chime, Pearl, and Stone get some development but I found myself wanting to know more about them outside of the main plot and their direct relationship to Moon. All the books are written and published by now so I guess I'll see for myself. One pattern I do like with the side characters is how several are set up to be obvious antagonists, but turn out to not be so bad, or are otherwise open to changing their ways. I like how Moon’s limited perspective influences perceptions of certain characters. Also: loving Moon's Peak Bisexual Energy. I tagged him as an LGBT Protagonist since he's clearly bisexual, though it isn't a big focus in the story. Casual rep is still nice to see. 

My main challenge is the Fell, which are basically an Always Chaotic Evil race of shapeshifters similar to the Raksura, and serve as the novel’s antagonists. I personally don’t find them that compelling. They sort of remind me of Reapers from the Mass Effect series, but thus far lacking the grand ulterior motive. They just come off as pure evil without much nuance. I also have to wonder how the species has survived this far if their main method of survival is targeting entire cities and eating the inhabitants (and each other?). I’m not sure where that whole thing is going. Maybe insight in future novels will help me on this. 

I’ll be honest, while I personally enjoyed The Cloud Roads, it is pretty unusual and I don’t think it’s for everyone. If anything, I recommend reading The Murderbot Diaries before this series, but both are well-written and creative. I’m planning to read book 2, The Serpent Sea, after this one, so look forward to that!