#not necessarily being reverted to childhood again

[aparticularbandit]

but also for someone who has definitely played around with amnesia and rebuilding and reliving and such stuff in fic before (just because i never posted it doesn't mean i didn't play around with it), i. now kind of want to figure out how to play around with that with junko. the scenario would need to be different. but.

[no-where-new-hero]

✨ love your fandom asks ✨ #16, please! 👀

hehe thank you @gogandmagog for sending this ask! excuse me while i blather about emily of new moon again :))

16. a tiny detail in canon that you want more people to appreciate

I can't say this is necessarily a tiny detail and also I've yelled it to the skies before, but the fact that Dean's voice is very nearly the last thing we hear at the end of Emily's Quest is something I love to harp on. Because if LMM were content with Dean just being a symbol of the patriarchy or judgmental masculinity or whatever, it would be so nice and easy to write him off in the middle of the novel. The last thing he could write to Emily is the long-overdue praise for The Moral of the Rose, and that would be that. But no, he intrudes, almost more overtly than Teddy in the middle of Emily and Teddy's happy ending.

I don't think LMM intended this to be sinister--I think she saw this as closure, that Dean gives Emily the Disappointed House, that he finally seems to revert to the safe and comforting friendship of her childhood. But it persists this strange triangulation of Emily, Dean, and Teddy that the entire third book is strung across, either intentionally or not. I was actually flipping through Emily's Quest earlier today (as one does) and got caught at the part where Emily learns of Ilse and Teddy's engagement:

"Well," she said aloud to Emily-in-the-glass. "I've spilled my cup of life's wine on the ground--somehow. And she will give me no more. So I must go thirsty. Would--would it have been different if I had gone to him that night he called. If I only knew!" She thought she could see Dean's ironical, compassionate eyes.

Why does she think of Dean here? You'd think her whole psyche would be focused on missing Teddy. But she thinks of Dean--either from a sudden new sympathy with him, who also lost his love and is left with his own "what ifs," or because she's so used to seeing herself through his eyes that she thinks of herself as he might, with a kind of dry secondhand kindness that's more acceptable than facing her own feelings on the matter. I don't know. But again, where Teddy is, Dean comes also. And that's a very odd flavor to temper Emily's eventual happily ever after with and something that I refuse to overlook.