#tally youngblood

[ravenstorm2011]

Any Uglies fans out there?

I feel so alone on this I don’t know anyone who reads or read these books. Like where are my people. Also does David have a last name? Or shay? I read the books forever ago and can’t remember.

[tallysgreatestfan]

It is going to come out in 2024, it is finally going to happen!

This book kindled my love for science fiction and social commentary, and set me on the path of finally accepting how different and weird I am.

Oh my god, I am so beyond happy. Finally (hopefully) people going to see just how good this is

[numptypylon]

Commission for @tallysgreatestfan of Shay and Tally from the Uglies series. I don’t know the series, but not complaining about getting to draw badass women kissing

Commission Info

[motherofmabari]

If I had a nickel for every time Scott Westerfeld fridged a male love interest for the sake of a female protagonist's development, I'd have TWO nickels, which isn't a lot but it's a great trope subversion

[susiephone]

the wildest part of uglies is that tally fully has parents who i'm like 95% sure she never sees again after she runs off to the smoke in the first book. like from what i can tell, it's basically normal for new pretties to be totally independent (well """"independent"""" by the standards of the city coddling them, but away from their parents and any wardens), and tally would've been in the ugly dorms since she was 12. i know she had contact with her parents while in the dorms, but after leaving for the smoke, idk if she ever even mentions them again.

like did sol and ellie get the cure in specials, then see their special-fied daughter on tv as an icon of the rebellion and be like "wait what the fuck"

[fortunatefires]

I'm almost done with pretties and I'm only increasingly convinced that Shay is gay and just very very deeply in the closet. I mean, she fell for David sure. But it seems to me that any queer person deeply in denial could trick themself into thinking they love someone when that person can hand you your freedom. Then when they get to new pretty town Tally even says that the people who can fight the pretty brain rot are people who have secrets, who have guilt, or shame. And who fought through the brain rot all on her own? Shay. Her closeted ass had so much turmoil that she healed her own brain. She's a lesbian. Heavily in denial, but a lesbian nonetheless.

[mylittleyuriheart]

Can someone please get on the fanfic train for the Uglies series? I need some Shay/Tally, Zane/David, or even Tally/femme Zane in my life. Or can someone pleeeaase point me in the right direction!?!

[problematic-faves-appreciation]

There are such amazing female villains in the Uglies Series by Scott Westerfeld. Trying not to spoiler, because its sadly not very well known anymore.

There is Dr Cable, the no nonsense cyborg mad scientist leader of the Cities secret service, who regularly outsmarts the heroes and has a super fun sadistic sense of humor. She seems like our typical YA dystopia villain at first, but while she has a lot lesser scenes than I remembered (reread recently) you can always sense that there is more to her. She believes she just prevents humanity from destroying itself again by fairly horrible means, and sometimes you are so close to being on her side. Her schtick is also that she deliberately surged herself to look scary, with eerie grey eyes and a crooked nose and a very angular face, but just conventionally attractive enough to still respect her, which is a cool concept.

Then there is Shay, the main character Tallys rebellious best friend, who is so angry and desperate at the system, and also has this very messy, homoerotic, jealous friendship with Tally, and ends up on different sides to her again and again. Her mental health also nosedives over the course of the series, and she becomes more and more ruthless and unhinged. I wish I could write more about that, because Tally/Shay is the most fascinating aspect of this series, and IMO it is a similar dynamic to Catradora, though its sadly only implied, not canon, and it also shows the scars this leaves a lot more and how long it takes the girls to fix it at the end.

And Tally Youngblood herself. Wow. She already starts out as an anti-hero; and many fans hate her for that, but I personally find it refreshing, trying her best but also being terrified and naive and an immature 16-year-old and having a knack for accidentally hurting her friends and ruining all her relationships. But in the third book she becomes a villain protagonist, and its amazing. And she never fully gets back to being a hero, she always stays slightly... unhinged.

(I have to warn you though, the second and third book majorly include depictions of self harm and eating disorders, and its not particularly well handled; while IMO the author does not glorify it, the characters very intensely do)

Ah, the Uglies Series. The book covers always grabbed my attention, but I never gave this series a shot. I should remedy that; the characters sound interesting! An anti-heroic protagonist who remains morally complicated after turning away from villainhood? Hell yes!

There's an Uglies movie coming out sometime this year. Don't think I'm gonna wait for the film adaptation to check out the story. The books are right there!

[resisteverything]

I just remembered that in the book “pretties”, a major dramatic plot beat is that the mandatory government issues plastic surgery they give you comes with stealth bimboification, and I think that’s really funny in hindsight.

Like I get the thematic implications, but I could easily see a fetish writer using this exact same premise in their own work and that’s funny to me.

Later books casually introduce the idea of people who consensually bimboify themselves and never explain why they do it, after the “mind rain” which was a rain that makes people no longer bimbos.

Like I am not making any of this up, it all happened.

This was the series that officially started the teen dystopia thing before hunger games made it famous, and it’s better thematically than anything following the hunger games within this genre.

[secretlyanocelot]

I had an Ai make portraits of Shay, Tally and David.

[peacefuloracle]

Every friend group should have:

A himbo (Peris)

A mean bisexual (Tally)

An even meaner lesbian (Shay)

She/theys (Astrix)

He/theys (Croy, Ho)

A token straight that’s on thin ice (Tachs)

An astrology bitch who has everyone’s birth charts memorized (Zane)

And a short king (David)

[flourdove]

I FINISHED YOUNDBLOODS (so many thoughts) about the series in a whole i think

let me talk. about X. boss x... . . .. . . his friendship with frey is so feels. the grief and how they learn from each other is so WRAAAAAH like seannan being killed by frey and then it being compared t rafi killing col that conversation was so heartbreaking(mending?) and ‘i was the boy and he was the wolf’ and how some parts of seanann became a part of x was so. they’re so tragic i love them x is one of my faves rafi is really interesting because of her like. predicament. and seeing these new things about her revealed to frey is really cool !!!! I DO wish that the necklace actually had some interesting stuff but nonetheless. still Amazing. the strain of col’s death on their relationship was a big sad i could feel the internal struggle with frey. they’re so perfect and wlel written they desreve their happy ending i headpat them :3 my daughters (i adopted them actually !)

and col !!! i love col he is my boy . he’s gone . uhm idc reincarnation au 1 2 3 go and the fucking CLIQUE for col was weird and almost?? funny? almost . like the tally youngblood cults . also scott westerfeld fucking upmmm goneing him like that just like zane for frey’s character development (and tally’s in zane’s case) is honestly so funny . TALLY ! SHAY ! croy astrix !!! someone said fausto appeared in youngbloods i do Not recall that but maybe i’m going too old. i love the interactions btween the members SPECIFICALLY ! shay and frey. that rhymes. but shay going like tally’s Big Brakes and her replacing david’s role is . shayxtallyl femslash real . im so normal about tem i lovethem they deserve the world i do find it weird that? david didn’t show up ? i mean, he ran away but i wish there was more revealed but i think the mystery adds to the story somehow.  all the nukes and stuff was a little wacky to my head especially the climax of youngbloods . i still have no idea how frey and rafi’s father even did the earthquake on paz . adn btw the futures are really sense missing at this point sara is a little.... well. yeah.

last but Not least. my favorites. the AI !!!!!!! paz is my cutie patootie the happpy energy i get from seeing paz in a scene is so indescribable . diego is so cool . theyre so dr cable vibe i love them . the rafia mistaking frey for diego is such a cool concept and i wish it was touched upon more than just that one scene. im also very very curious about what happens to diego ai and just in . diego in general . a diego-centric book would be cool but ill just write my fanfics (OC FANFIC !!!!! ocs arent really loved on ao3 sadly though rhhgh) anyway !!! big ramble !! thanks for taking the time out of your day to read this :3

[tallysgreatestfan]

So odd how long I took until I finally noticed how damn queer their relationship feels. Oh, I always loved how deep but messy and complicated their friendship was, just like mine, but I only noticed long after I accepted my own queerness that it read familiar in another way.

Not sure if they still have Pride, since in their future all prejudice seems eradicated, but I do like to imagine they have.

Sadly not canon, just strong subtext, but in the Impostors Series there are other canon wlw relationships.

[youngbloodmanifesto]

Anyone else think the Impostors series had a slightly darker tone than Uglies? I feel like by the end of most of the books there was a feeling that things were getting back on track. Maybe they weren't happy, but a cure is in the works, or Tally and David are going to do the hard work needed to save the world. At the end of every Impostors book it feels like everything gets worse and Frey ends up in the hospital with radiation *again* and needs surgery. It almost doesn't feel worth reading.

I know Scott Westerfeld wrote Impostors in response to us politics, and when he saw how even a good system can go bad. But does that have to mean the tone is dreary? Maybe I'm just a sucker for a happy ending, but I don't like when we see characters left on a positive note, only for that all to be thrown away a decade later.

Maybe it's just because I looked up to Tally so much as a kid. I want to see her flourishing. I want to know it is possible to flourish. I don't want to see heroes need full body surgery because their cells are decaying from radiation. I want the hope that Uglies had.

Or maybe book 1 Tally was a tricky and naive teen, where Frey was raised by an abusive dictator. Perhaps Impostors was doomed to its gloom.

[yourfaveisafictive]

Your fave is a fictive: Tally Youngblood from Uglies by Scott Westerfield

(request by @anendoandfriendo)

[ Image ID: a pastel horizontal striped flag ranging from green to pink from top to bottom with a picrew rendition of Tally Youngblood from Uglies by Scott Westerfield imposed over it /end ID ]

[susiephone]

If the Uglies books came out today, toxic yuri fans would be obsessed