#i love tamora pierce but this is the case of still being extremely critical of the stuff you love

[howlsmovinglibrary]

thank god for you, fellow former 11 year old freak obsessed with daine and numair. my copy of the book was creased to open to their first romantic scene. grappling with that as an adult was sure interesting, and yet i love tamora pierce still

proof I was not immune to wizards from a very formative age, honestly (and neither is Tamora, really, if you count how many times she describes Numair's lovely long hair).

To be honest, while I get that the romance is problematic and the age gap is :I .... Trickster's Choice is literally right there. Of all the things Tamora Pierce could get cancelled for, it's not top of the list. At least she lampshades this age gap lmao.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Character Names in Eleutherophobia

Since I’ve had a few people ask me about the character names in Eleutherophobia, I figured I’d run down the whole list.  These names are approximately in order of appearance in my various fics.  To be clear: this is not crossover fiction.  These are supposed to be nods to these characters, not the characters themselves.  Bearing that in mind, in approximate order of appearance:

Day the Earth Stood Still

Essa 412: a yeerkanization of “Boy 412,” the main character of the Septimus Heap series.  In my opinion, the second best treatment of the impact of war on children ever written into a modern fantasy series.

Leslie Burke: the deuteragonist of Bridge to Terabithia.  The character always reminded me of a younger Rachel, so I chose to give the name to the bearer of Rachel’s death.

Anne Shirley: the main character of Anne of Green Gables, who often goes underestimated for the extent to which she is a tough, complex, socially awkward heroine written in 1908.

George Little: the younger brother of the title character of Stuart Little.  Mostly named because I wanted to give David a last name that implied cowardice without being ridiculously obvious about it.

Lost World

[Steve] Carlsberg: the not-quite-antagonist of Welcome to Night Vale.

Akira 

Dr. Miranda Franklin: named for Miranda of Dr. Franklin’s Island.  Kind of a pun on my part: the plot of that book involves one of the main characters involuntarily turning into an anaconda. 

Jennifer Murdley: titular character of Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, one of the books in Bruce Coville’s Magic Shop series who learns the very hard way to love herself. 

Mrs. [Hannah] Gruen: Nancy Drew’s housekeeper.

THX 1138

Joey Costello: the deuteragonist of Tangerine, a story about two boys who have very different sets of troubles with their respective older brothers. 

Dr. Pendanski: one of the incompetent counselors from Holes by Louis Sachar.

Jodi O’Shea: far and away my most pointed literary allusion.  Jodi is a minor character in The Host by Stephenie Meyer, a book which I love (except for the extremely problematic ending, but I’ll get back to that). The Host is essentially a love story between a yeerk (Wanda) and a human (Ian) whose entire plot is driven by consent negotiations.  It’s about Wanda and Ian wishing they could be together but knowing they never will because they can’t be without violating the right to consent of the yeerk’s host, Melanie.  Melanie, meanwhile, is in love with a different guy... Who can’t be with her either without violating Wanda’s right to consent.

[SPOILER WARNING] Eventually Ian resolves this love quadrangle by putting Wanda inside a human (“Pet,” and don’t get me started on that name) who has been a controller for so long that she has forgotten how to exert her own conscious will.  Wanda and Ian presumably do the horizontal tango using that host instead, AND THIS IS TREATED AS A HAPPY ENDING.  Jodi O’Shea also meets the same fate as Pet: Jodi has forgotten how to feed herself or move on her own, so her own husband decides that they should just put her yeerk, Sunny, back in her head.  Sunny claims that Jodi is brain-dead... But Sunny is also strongly motivated to lie.  (There are also implications that Jodi’s husband becomes romantically involved with Sunny instead, a plot which is so horrifying it deserves its own blog post.)  Most importantly, all the main characters are really happy that these poor hosts are vegetables.  There is an entire subpopulation of humans who have become entirely dependent on their alien slave masters for survival... and this fact is treated as the solution to all the characters’ problems.  It’s celebrated.  And, yeah, both THX 1138 and Ghost in the Shell contain some pretty pointed commentary from me on why I find this ending to be so deeply unfortunate.  [END SPOILERS]

Ghost in the Shell

Mary Lennox: the main character of The Secret Garden, the first book without pictures I ever read on my own. 

Rose Rita: main character of The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, and arguably one of the first genderqueer characters to make it into a children’s fantasy novel.

Margaret White: the antagonist of Stephen King’s novel Carrie, obsessed with preserving the innocence (and thus the dependent ignorance) of her teenage daughter.

Sophie Hatter: main character of Howl’s Moving Castle, who does in fact make her own clothes.

[Mr.] Broxholm: the titular alien from My Teacher Flunked the Planet by Bruce Coville, one of the most awesome and profound children’s sci-fi novels I have ever read.

Anita Psammead: a nod to The Five Children and It by E. Nesbitt, one of the first ever fantasy novels written for children. 

Miss Zarves: the teacher from Sideways Stories from Wayside School who doesn’t exist, because she was accidentally assigned to teach on a floor that was never built.

Nikto 770: nod to the code phrase in Day the Earth Stood Still (the original movie, not my fic).

Kit Rodriguez: the deuteragonist of the Young Wizards series, known for his passion and tendency to care deeply for others.

Aristotle “Ari” [Mendoza]: main character of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.

Dante [Quintana]: main character of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.

Gabriel “G.T.” Stoop: the main character’s mentor in Hope Was Here.

Elijah Springfield: a teen detective from the Veritas Project series.

Lydia [Bennett]: supporting character from Pride and Prejudice.

Nick Adams: a recurring Ernest Hemingway character.

T.J. Avery: next door neighbor to the Logan family in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry.

Cecily Tallis: the narrator’s older sister (and unwitting victim) in Atonement by Ian McEwan. 

Maybeth Tillerman: one of the main characters in Homecoming by Cynthia Voight, a book that critics like to describe as “the anti-Boxcar Children” for its unflinchingly realistic portrayal of childhood homelessness.

June Boatwright: one of the protagonist’s mentors in The Secret Life of Bees.

Caitlin Somers: a Judy Blume character from Summer Sisters.

Alex Morales: main character of The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer.

Cooper-Trebond: shortening of “Alanna Cooper of Trebond” the name of the main character of Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series.

Jesse Hauptman: the protagonist’s stepdaughter and mentee in the Mercy Thompson series.

Timmy Dugan: lesser-known real name of WWII comic book hero Dum Dum Dugan, sidekick to Nick Fury and Howling Commando as part of the Marvel universe. 

Luke Castellan and Chris Rodriguez: two of the supporting characters from Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  I wouldn’t say that Luke Castellan is the first meatsuit I ever fell in love with (despite him being basically a voluntary controller and also a human dumpster fire), but I would say that he made my tendency to care too much about meatsuits in general about 1000 times worse.

“Cornelius”: okay, this one is in fact a crossover—that’s meant to be Tyler Durden, main character of Chuck Palahnuick’s Fight Club. He’s a schizophrenic, lonely guy who goes to support groups for various traumas that he never actually survived (usually under the fake name Cornelius) because that’s the only way he knows how to connect to people. 

Odette: the protagonist of Swan Lake and several subsequent adaptations, including Mercedes Lackey’s awesome The Black Swan.

Rod Allbright: another character from My Teacher is an Alien, because I love that series. 

Officer Nice: a nod to the song of the same name by Vio-Lence, one of my few non-literary allusions.

Gerald “Jerry” Cruncher: a guy who works as a porter (and remover of bodies) in of A Tale of Two Cities. 

Paul Edgecombe: main character of The Green Mile, a deeply conflicted prison guard who gets cast as Pontius Pilate in a modern-day gospel retelling.

Kate Malone: narrator of Laurie Halse Anderson’s amazingly powerful novel Catalyst.

Mae Tuck: matriarch of the titular immortal clan from Tuck Everlasting.

Annie Hughes: one of the main characters from The Iron Giant.

Kirsten Larson: one of the first characters from the American Girl series, an immigrant from Sweden who struggles to acclimate to the United States.

Adah Price: one of the co-narrators of The Poisonwood Bible, a disabled polymath who loves palindromes and puzzles.

Iris Chase: a society lady and heiress from The Blind Assassin, which chronicles family dysfunction and its unique impact on women over several generations. 

Dawn Schafer: part of the enormous rotating cast of protagonists from The Babysitters’ Club series, and one of my favorite characters as a kid.

Henry Case: main character of the genre-creating cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

Parvana Weera: a tough, outgoing young woman whose struggle to keep her family safe during the American invasion of her home in Afghanistan forms the main plot of The Breadwinner.

Raven Madison: main character of Vampire Kisses, who spends a little too much time in her intense fantasy worlds and not quite enough connected to reality. 

Mr. [Bob] Grey: pseudonym used by the creature also known as Pennywise the Clown and simply “It” in several of Stephen King’s novels.

Ms. [Mary] Logan: mother of the main character in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, because I love that book.

Karana Nicoleño: although Karana, the main character of Island of the Blue Dolphins, doesn’t technically have a last name, her tribe is historically referred to as the Nicoleño.

Total Recall 

Vicky Austin: main character of A Ring of Endless Light, a book about coming to terms with dying—and about the many complex shades of victim blaming that can occur in light of unquantifiable tragedy.

Samuel Cornick: roommate to the eponymous Mercy Thompson of the bestselling Patricia Briggs series, a werewolf-doctor who continuously struggles to find meaning in an excessively long life and one of my favorite characters of all time.

The Thing from Another World

Seth Clearwater: a minor character in Eclipse, one of the youngest werewolves of the Quileute pack.

Captain William Nasland: one of the more obscure characters to hold the title Captain America; retconned into the role following Steve Rogers’s “death” in 1945.  Acts as both a hero and a villain because he has a well-intentioned but also closed-minded idea of what Captain America should be. 

Allison Chapman: main character of Sharing Sam, K.A. Applegate’s lesser-known novel about teenage basketball geeks who back their way into understanding the life, the universe, and everything.

Simon Grace: one of the main characters of the Spiderwick Chronicles.

Giselle Villard: one of the main characters from the Mystic comic book series who is awesome, tough... and more than a little power-hungry.

As far as I can tell, that’s it for the character names in Eleutherophobia.  I mentioned here why Marco’s last name is Alvarez and Cassie’s is Day in my series.  There are a few dozen other allusions as well (Tom and Bonnie bastardizing the “tears in the rain” speech from Blade Runner, Cassie quoting the epigraph from Home of the Brave, several nods to Remnants and Everworld and The One and Only Ivan, Marco making jokes about Lost World and Alien) and obviously all my fic titles are from classic sci-fi movies while all my song nods are The Best of 1990—2000, but as far as I know that’s it for allusions. If there are any that I missed, or that you’re still wondering about, let me know and I’ll happily clarify.