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sanctamater · 6 months ago

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Time will pass slowly, as it always does – a dredge of minutes turned to hours, monotony and repetition. The good lady finds little fault in allowing this – the thrill of it that runs through her; the way every touch, every movement makes her breathless. The end of the week will come, just as the dawn does, just as the stars do the same; and, well – if Meredith is amenable to such a thing; and the good lady is certain she is, does she not deserve a reward after days spent in service and toil? Do they both not? The more scrupulous within the Maker’s flock might call this hedonism. The good lady calls it something else entirely.

How wicked her laughter is; soft – muffled by her hand at the reaction such a simple action elicits. This is a dangerous game; one she has always delighted in playing with such a skilled opponent – to see such a formidable woman flush so, to hear that sound – Maker forgive her, but it strikes her so; old memories and games she had left behind at the Riverside that had never truly been forgotten now made new. Meredith Stannard may command an army and rule a city with an iron fist, but here – she bends to her.

“ A great deal many things, Knight-Commander. Perhaps you may be of help in achieving them. ” Well – at least some of what she wants; simple things, really – small things. Things Meredith would never notice; unlike the things she does not ask of her lover, knowing they will never be given freely. The ability to wake with her still in her arms, the allotment of more time. Instead, she focuses on the now; plush lips pursing, brows raised in thought as she regards the Knight-Commander in her silvery armor, her golden crown – not a picture of devoutness, no; but one of divinity. The line of her body curves as she takes a breath, then another; studying her paramour from her vantage point, holding her gaze intently; hungrily. This is not a game she can win; but this match, perhaps, might go to her; and soft thighs part ever so slightly; the fine silk of her dress to settle between her legs – allowing Meredith to come closer yet. Right where I want you. And for all her pleasure at being chased, there is a sense of satisfaction here that drives her – the Knight-Commander is cornered; on the edge of falling into a pretty trap – and she has yet to realise it. Her own skin is warm, flushed; hypersensitive to the very idea of touch ( Meredith’s hands on her waist, her hips; in her hair, upon her legs ); and decisively does she extend her leg, hooking her foot against a spot she knows so well at the back of Meredith’s knee; tugging her closer yet. “ While I have your attention, I would most appreciate it if you were able to sign and return this month’s invoices by this evening, please; alongside your orders for the next month. I am, after all, drowning in paperwork – and you wouldn’t want to make my week difficult. Would you, my dear? ” Much of her success, after all, can be attributed to the beautiful woman between her legs. To make a point, the foot at the back of her knee moves – pressing in, up and down. “ There are also some new designs for longswords from one of my smiths… You might find them rather wicked. If they do happen to intrigue you, do let me know in four days time – or I will send them to the Circle at Ostwick. ”

How am I ever to deny the Maker's most faithful servant?

Such a declaration stands in as a promise, only alluding to what their end of week dinner shall entail. It is something she will hold the Good Lady accountable to, though there is not one single doubt that she will want it just as well, if not more so, than the Knight-Commander. It is that thought — and that thought alone — that will see her through the next three days. Perhaps she is terrible, but then, would the Good Lady indulge her just so if she wasn't?

Likely not.

"Then I will do my part to ensure that I am... rewarded," That grin stays prominent, baring teeth in a wolfish way, though her eyes look downwards to track Amelia's hand as it draws away from the silk, cotton, and leather adorning her hips in favour of twirling one curl of blonde, and in the very moment, Meredith can only guess her course of action, yet she does not quite anticipate how such a simple ( and arguably, light ) tug on her scalp elicits a sound that is almost a moan, hailing from the depths of her throat. To save face, she just barely manages to purse her lips together, muffling the sound and sharply clearing her throat — but the sudden tinge of blush to her cheeks gives her away, plain as day. Perhaps she'd been just a little too close to the line demarcating what is allowed in public and in private, and one drawn for good reason.

But as Lady Amelia pulls away, Meredith's own restraint is tested, watching the way she turns and walks (hips swaying intentionally so, she is certain), leaves her stack of reports, and places herself upon her desk, beckoning her forward with such a charged order, one that invites the thought of a particularly inappropriate course of action.

"My, I wonder what such a lady would want of me?" Intrigued, nevertheless, the Knight-Commander obeys, long strides closing the distance in merely a few steps. Even still, as Amelia sits on her desk, she towers over her, though the gap is lessened with its help. Stood ever so close — and ever so careful in full armour — piercing eyes find their counterpart, tongue swiping over the front of her teeth. She contemplates, for just a moment, how pretty Amelia would look strewn about her desk, with parchment falling to the floor, with a hand up her skirts, and the sounds she would make...

Maker...

Instead, Meredith inhales sharply, holding it in for a moment's reprieve.

...aid your humble servant.

"What can I do for you?"

#i have no icons on my pc rn but.#tw: suggestive #whOO WHEE.............#THE LIVES OF THE CATHOLIC AND THE FREAKY #idolbound #🕊️❝ ( verse. ) she tells the tales but is never part of them. she watches and remains above what she sees.

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weirdly-specific-but-ok · 8 months ago

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MORNING NEWS WITH ASMI!

11 Oct 2024

WELL HERE WE ARE AGAIN GOOD MORNING MAGGOTS! It's not currently morning (well it is in Texas) and I have decided to make another cursed morning paper (this is the first one, for reference).

FIRST, THE NEWS:

My old strawberry Kellogg's cereal got hard (/not the ao3 way) and weird because the packet wasn't shut. Luckily it was almost over and now I have a new strawberry Kellogg's cereal. It is crispy. Yay!

Hurricane Milton has exited Florida.

The friend whom I was wondering if they had a tumblr and then it turns out they thought tumblr died in like 2016? WELL UPDATE, THEY USED TO HAVE A TUMBLR AGES AGO SO I GUESS I WAS KIND OF RIGHT?

Biden tells Trump to "Get a life, man," over misinformation about the Milton situation.

Everyone was wondering why Apple removed its seahorse emoji. Turns out there was never a seahorse emoji. Or a robber emoji. What the fuck is going on. Are clouds real? Am I real? Are you real?

The adorable baby hippo Moo Deng is now inspiring makeup looks. What a fashion icon. And apparently I remind my college friends of her. If I were an animal, I would be Moo Deng. Not a hippo, specifically Moo Deng the Pygmy Hippo.

You are loved, actually.

WONDERFUL! NOW THE WEATHER:

Australia: Turns out it was not hot. It was fucking storming. The one time I try to cater to the southern bitches and this is what I get.

Asia: Bit cloudy with a lot of sun (or as my laptop weather app, which is for some fucking reason in French, says: très ensoleillé).

North America: Whee whee go round round winds.

South America: Wet.

Africa: Not wet.

Antarctica: Fucking green.

THE SOLUTIONS TO YESTERDAY'S CROSSWORD ARE:

A sad watermelon: Meloncholy (I'm fucking hilarious don't kill me)

Ancient Greek Chicken Man: Diogenes

A river in Egypt: Denial

Flesh mounds of pre-cheese: Boobs.

The only correct word for tuberculosis or whatever it's called: Consumption (no I'm not two centuries late to everything)

AND TODAY'S:

TOODLES HAVE A LOVELY DAY! I LOVE YOU.

#what the fuck am i doing #crossword puzzle #weirdly specific but ok #asmi #maggots #morning news with asmi #tumblr shit

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lazuliquetzal · 1 year ago

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Whee Fight Scenes! (This Is A Seirei no Moribito Advertisement)

For the past couple of years I have been almost exclusively writing fanfiction for action-fantasy video games which has led to me developing opinions on writing fight scenes. I used to hate writing them because what even happen fight, really, like what the hell??? But now I’ve learned to tolerate them! Sometimes I even enjoy writing them! So now I will share my wisdom with you.

(Disclaimer: This post was written so I could avoid writing a fight scene.)

My credentials: I occasionally write fight scenes in my action-fantasy video game fanfictions, and I have seen Seirei no Moribito the anime several times. I do not claim to be an expert on fight scenes, but I do claim to love Seirei no Moribito to bits.

Part 1. The Set Up

There’s this excellent anime about a mercenary on a life-long quest for redemption who ends up taking a cursed prince under her protection. It’s about unraveling propaganda and colonialism, and also about kicking ass. The first time I watched this anime, when I got to the episode 3 rice field fight, I thought, “holy shit, I see now that a good fight scene requires not only a kick-ass fight, but also narrative/emotional build up in order to give the scene weight and tension.”

Like, lots of anime have excellent and extremely iconic fights, but this was the show that really made the writing aspect of it stick in my brain. Seirei no Moribito is also an adaptation of a book, which might why this stood out to me: the way its fight scenes are constructed are not as reliant on the actual visuals so much as they are on everything else (the animation for the fight is gorgeous, too, like, just watch this show please it’s so good). That said, I haven’t actually read the book. But I have seen this show several times and the rice field fight gets me so hype.

(And also every other fight scene. I’m never over episode 13. If you have to watch only one (1) episode of Seirei no Moribito, watch episode 13. But also, don’t do that. Watch the entire thing you coward.)

Anyway. What’s going on in Seirei no Moribito episode 3?

Part 1a. The Narrative Stage

Ep3 is early on in the series. The rice field fight is not the first action scene, but it is the first fight scene. This is what we know going in:

Balsa, our main character, is a formidable mercenary with a practical mind and a strong sense of honor. She has sworn to protect Chagum, the prince of the Empire. Her goal is to keep Chagum alive at all costs, because saving his life is crucial to her personal goal of redemption.

The Emperor (Chagum’s father) has dispatched his elite warriors to kill the prince, as they believe that he is possessed by an evil water spirit. Their goal is to kill the prince because the evil water spirit is a bad omen for the empire, and they believe that killing the prince will save the kingdom.

Balsa’s spear is damaged, and she is outnumbered. She has the disadvantage.

We are, of course, rooting for Balsa and Chagum at this point in the story. Balsa’s our main character, she’s super cool, and child assassination is a bad look. We know that Balsa is strong: we’ve seen her do athletic stunts, and it’s been alluded to that she is extremely skilled with the spear. This fight is the first time we get to see her use it, so it’s very exciting to the viewer. We want to see her in action.

Part 1b. The Emotional Stage

Chagum doesn’t have much of a personality at this point: we know he’s a child prince, and we know his dad wants to kill him. So we don’t know him well, but he’s already sympathetic due to circumstance.

When Balsa and Chagum get to the rice fields, they are almost home-free. They’ve spent a lot of effort trying to redirect the emperor’s warriors and the plan almost worked. We are extremely close to safety, so the fact that this is when the emperor’s elite catch up is very tense and frustrating.

All this puts the audience in the mindset of: oh man, they’re so close, I really need Balsa to win! I don’t want the kid die! You can taste the safety, you are almost there—it’s the type of tension that gets you invested in the outcome of the fight.

Part 1c. The Physical Stage

The first half, and the faster-paced portion of the fight takes place in a rice field at night (a classic). Wide open, with water to splash in, and nowhere to hide. It’s right on the edge of the thick forest, which gives Balsa and Chagum an immediate goal: get to the denser terrain so that they might break line of sight of their pursuers.

The second half of the fight is less of a fight and more of a close-up, emotional moment of action. It takes place in a clearing by the edge of the forest.

The physical location of the fight ties in with the short-term goals of the characters: the open field forces Balsa into direct confrontation even though she wants to run, and the clearing by the edge of the forest gives Jin (one of the emperor’s warriors) the illusion of privacy when he tries to kill Chagum, and it gives Balsa cover to hide until she can intervene.

Part 1 – TL;DR

Even before you get to the actual fight, the setup of the fight has inherent tension and intrigue. One can reasonably assume that Balsa and Chagum will survive, because this is episode 3 of a 26 episode anime. But you don’t know if her damaged spear will hold out. You don’t know why the emperor wants Chagum dead. You don’t know if Balsa will kill the emperor’s guards, or if she’ll be able to make a clean getaway with the prince. All these uncertainties create mystery, which creates tension. And tension is what makes the fight fun.

Part 2. The Purpose

I mentioned earlier that this is the first actual fight in the show.

It’s the payoff for a bunch of little questions that have cropped up so far. How strong is Balsa? Is she good enough to win, even when outnumbered? What does her fighting style look like?

A lot of action stories have big fight early on, and that’s because a well-done fight scene squeezes in a massive amount of characterization. In this fight, we learn a lot about Balsa, and we learn a lot about the Emperor and the difference between the Emperor and the people who work for him.

Some questions that get explored: How do they think under pressure? What kind of fighting do they do? Are they strategic? Reactive? Brute force or trickster? How do they solve problems? How far are these people willing to go to achieve their goals?

There’s a moment in this fight when Balsa is wounded, and the emperor’s warriors retrieve Prince Chagum. Balsa ends up retreating into the forest. Jin says something along the lines of: she’s a mercenary, she works for money and she’s already been paid; she won’t risk her life to come back and get the prince.

But she does. Even though she’s been wounded, and even though she had the perfect opportunity to walk away, she comes back and saves Prince Chagum at the expense of her own health. Balsa keeps her promises; Balsa’s personal quest for redemption is more important to her than her life. We know her, now!

Fight scenes are great for characterization because it’s a deviation from status quo. A person’s default state is not “battle,” and stories thrive on extraordinary circumstances. “How does this character change/act/perform under pressure?” is a really great characterization question, and a fight scene is the opportunity to show the answer rather than tell it.

Fight scenes are also great for thematic debate. You get the opportunity to literalize the conflict between different philosophies via characters fighting each other. EZ story moment. You know that one Howard Ashman quote about how, in musicals, the characters sing when they’re too emotional to speak? That’s what fight scenes are to me. The characters fight when they can’t talk to each other.

And then, of course, a fight scene is also moving the plot along. The conflict is happening, information is being exchanged/discovered/buried. Some characters life, some characters get hurt, some characters die. A fight scene is a way to physically bring characters to the state they need to be in for the story to progress (in the right emotional state, the right physical state, the right location, etc). Lots of things going on, which is good—you want all of your scenes to be purposeful.

Part 3. The Details

All of that had to do with the zoomed-out, overall story view of the fight (how the fight fits into the overall story). I am now going to continue to gush about the episode 3 rice field fight up close (how does the fight scene work in isolation). Because Seirei no Moribito rocks.

Part 3a. The Setting

I already mentioned the open rice field/dense forest dichotomy and how that affects the characters’ short-term goals. It’s also a great choice to establish Balsa’s superior technical ability with her spear. The rice field is wide open and relatively flat—no obstructions or distractions, with everyone on equal ground. There are no tricks to pull, no environmental quirks to exploit: this is a clean fight between Balsa and the emperor’s warriors. When she comes out on top, it’s because she’s better than them.

Depending on the character, it might be better to change the terrain. Have the stealthy warrior fight in a forest, where they can appear and reappear and use their sneakiness to their advantage. Put a trickster in a situation where they can improvise traps. There is an aspect of your character that you want to show off, so set the stage so that they can show off. It’ll be totally badass and fun.

Part 3b. The Short-Term Goals

When you read a story, you can reasonably assume that the protagonist will stay alive (especially if you are not near the end of the story). Knowing the outcome can make a story stale if you're not careful. You can lose tension if there’s no risk. Some stories try to create a world/tone/atmosphere so that anyone can die. A lot don’t because that’s a little depressing.

My friend @yellowocaballero has an excellent post on this regarding OP protagonists, but to summarize: if you know the protagonist is always going to win the physical fight, you have to make the win condition not about that. Balsa isn’t OP, but giving characters goals beyond “win the fight” can make a fight so much more interesting.

In the rice field fight, Balsa does not have to defeat the emperor's warriors: she has to get Chagum and herself away alive. Her goal is to make a clean getaway. When the warriors show up, she makes the decision to confront them, and her goal is not just to win, but to win so decisively that they won’t be able to follow her. When Chagum gets caught, she changes her goal to ‘keep him safe at all costs, no matter the harm done to myself’, and she gets seriously wounded. She can succeed in some goals, but fail in others, and the story reacts and keeps changing. It’s the same principle behind why rolling a nat 1 is so entertaining in D&D. The more you fail, the more creative you have to get.

Part 3c. Monkey Brain

There is just something so cool and so satisfying and so fun about seeing a character kick ass. There is also something very cool and very satisfying about seeing a character get beat up. The rice field fight has it all: Balsa kicking ass, and also getting beat up. It’s fun! Fight scenes that know exactly why they are cool are just so good. Hell yeah, overindulge and use every single weapon despite how impractical they are. Yes please show someone pulling off an unrealistic move for the coolness factor. Absolutely include the explosion-that-would-definitely-kill-but-doesn’t.

Part 3 — TL;DR

If you want the fight to be cool, make it cool! Set it in a cool place! Give your characters opportunities to show off! Make it interesting by changing the win conditions! Conflicting goals forces characters to prioritize and it makes scenes fun!

Part 4. Words???

Unfortunately, as mentioned, Seirei no Moribito is an anime and I haven’t read the book so I cannot analyze and gush about its prose in this section. Otherwise, the advertisement would continue. You’re safe for the moment.

Re: prose, there’s probably a post out there that goes over the language of fight scenes better than I ever could. I write with the diction of a middle-grade author because I read PJatO too much as a child and it rewrote my DNA. This is not a bad thing, this is just a fact. So I’m just gonna fire off fight scene writing advice I heard from around:

Filter words — if you want a more immersive reading experience, you want to avoid filtering the action through the narration. So use sentences like: “Her arm hurt” as opposed to “she felt her arm hurt”. But if you’re trying to distance the reader, like recreating the feeling of shock/dissociation, then filter words would help achieve that effect.

Make the rhythm of your prose match the energy of the fight. Short and choppy feels fast in the brain. Long and wordy feels overwhelming. Fragmented sentences and run-ons are chaotic. Customize the vibes.

Establish the important details of the setting beforehand so that you don’t have to stop the action to describe the specific placement of a relevant tree stump. I think I heard this one from Brandon Sanderson on a podcast somewhere, but I think about it a lot when I write because blocking is hard enough and it's even harder when you have to stop and attempt to translate the movie in your head into words. I can’t tell you how to block a fight scene. We need to find someone else who is smarter that can tell us.

Part 5. The Point

Fight Scenes are Fun, actually. They can be really effective if you set them up properly! If you know what you want to do with them, you can arrange it to be as cool as possible! You don’t have to be in a visual medium to make fights fun. You just have to figure out how to translate the cool bits into prose, which I think is mostly done through giving your fight cool shit on both the macro story level scale and the micro scene level scale.

Also, watch Seirei no Moribito.

#i got a comment somewhere that was complimenting my fight scenes which. thank you! fight scenes stress me the FUCK out #but i do think i've gotten a lot better at them since i've started writing so i figured i'd write something about what i learned #and by what i learned i mean. gush about #seirei no moribito #tav this is not a response to your one post about fight scenes earlier that was a coincidence #lazuli talks #writing

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drinkyourvillainjuice · 3 months ago

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Author played Monster Sweethearts yesterday on a recommendation from xer discord! Xe liked it a lot! It's a lesbian game about dating various monster girls, including a werewolf, vampire, and creature from the black lagoon!

Here is a spoilery, disorganised off-the-cuff--I'm not necessarily gonna call it review because it is more focused on specific critiques that I thought about? but I guess 'review' works--below the cut. This is literally in the order I scrambled my thoughts down this morning so uh, don't interpret it as importance I guess.

So the grammar/typos are a little rough. I'm not gonna rag on it too hard bc this is a PWYW game by one person, but there's enough their/there/they're and suchlike that it gets a bit distracting, esp. because sometimes there are word substitutions which make sentences hard to parse.

Bae's route: why is there a QTEeeee. it's a VN plz don't make me rapidly click things. (there's two QTEs in the entire game, this is a click icons on screen, the other is press certain keys, which is MUCH preferable, but still kinda jarring in a game where everything else is just clicking an option every now and then)

Xanthe's route: the second half of it is messy. like the threat posed by the antagonists feels really inconsistent, esp since both Xanthe and Jaylene can slip away from them on a few occasions but on others they're like unstoppable. similar for how they can be overpowered in a fight: it doesn't seem to take that much for them to get beat up in a couple circumstances. Also the twins like roofie Jaylene but also drink the roofie? are they just stupid? if they knocked themselves out how is one of them suddenly in a pit with Jaylene? I dunno the conflict was interesting but the staging was very messy.

Lien's route: kinda gets plotholes later on. if the doctor is Jaylene's bio mom why did she need to run all those tests on her. did she not know who she was initially? it's confusing. Jaylene scratches the doctor like twice in a row and that comes over as odd. uhh it doesn't really sit with the revelation about being a monster for long enough and it wastes the opportunity to compare Lien and Jaylene's situations. also the sheriff is being kind of a huge asshole and that's glossed over? idk I really think it could have gone more into the impact of learning something foundational about yourself is not what you thought and that's too bad because I actually found myself really warming up to Lien fast, she's great.

Blake's route: parts of the plot are kinda haphazard. the girls are worried about some kind of stalker and then are like 'whee, let's go to the woods and look for cryptids!'. uhh why does the captor just let Blake crawl around with impunity. it kind of diminishes the threat when Blake sneaks around so easily. the twist of who the butcher is feels kind of... whatever because the character only exists in Blake's route so the impact isn't really what it could be. which is too bad because that is a fuuuucked uuuup situation and I think the concept is really interesting but because we've had little time to get to know that character the reveal is flat. it also just completely glosses over Jaylene being revealed to be a monster? like Blake doesn't even really react to it. Also Blake walks off getting stabbed. twice. only the second time does it properly stick.

but, looking at the game as a whole, I like the music, I like the characters for the most part, and it's rare in an otome where I'm enthused to check out everyone (like if I could pick everyone from the start I maybe would have been whatever about one or two, but still. there's some moments with really good writing (just sometimes they get undermined by the grammar). I laughed out loud a few times and that usually indicates something has to be pretty funny. I enjoyed fucked up bad ends and some of the gorier CGs are rad. I enjoy everyone being gay as fuck. There's some really solid storytelling. The bad endings are mostly the type of stuff that sticks with you and I like that because it usually signifies effective horror. oh and yeah most of the horror was pretty great.

Also why the fuck do me and Lien look so alike.

#recc #monster sweethearts

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fantasticgothicpeachsludge · 1 year ago

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Killed her mother who was a harbinger when she was just a whee little guy god that’s so iconic of her slay king

#arlecchino #SHE HAD A FUNERAL FOR HER PET SPIDER IM GONNA COMMIT DIE SHES SO #genshin

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riverlarking · 6 months ago

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new icon whee cute cute cute

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skypirateb · 2 months ago

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guess who read over 25 books in three months

THE GRIMMELINGS by Rachael King

i wish this book had existed when i was 13. drawing on scottish folklore, this book is about Ella, a desperately lonely 13 year old who lives up in mackenzie country with her sister, mother, and grandmother. it's witchy, mysterious, melancholic, and beautiful. it feels like it was written just for me. very keen to get my hands on RED ROCKS, also by King and with a similar premise (ETA: i grabbed it yesterday from my local indie shop, whee~), but given the high country, lakeside, small town setting of THE GRIMMELINGS i feel like this one is always going to be my particular favourite.

STARS AND SMOKE by Marie Lu

to be clear, i put this on my tbr because it sounded like the MCs would have the dynamic of one of my otps. i was wrong, but STARS AND SMOKE was still a great time. winter was much softer and more thoughtful than i expected; i was low-key picturing chiba mamoru the whole time. and syndney is just great. it's about a spy organisation contracting the biggest pop star in the world as an agent for a one-off, which is super goofy especially given the ages of the MCs, but idk. the character work is strong enough to hold it together through the eye-rolling It's Spy Fiction Don't Worry About It moments. i also read the sequel ICON AND INFERNO and will be seeking out book 3 whenever it drops.

MAX by Avi Duckor-Jones

more local fiction eyo. max is on the cusp of adulthood and struggling with his identity as a closeted gay adoptee in the late 90s/early 00s. while his sexuality is one of the major threads of the narrative, overall this book is about family, both the ones we're born with and the ones we make for ourselves, and how we construct our identities through our relationships with the people around us. it lives in my heart now.

DRACULA by Bram Stoker

i've wanted to get on the DRACULA DAILY train for a while but given the premise i was determined to actually read the novel first. i. did not expect it to be THIS good. i was gonna knock down the rating bc mina didn't have a gun, but then at the 11th hour she got a gun, so like. what was i supposed to do. anyway i was expecting the prose to make this one a bit of a slog especially given my edition has tiny text and still manages to be 400 pages, but i knocked it out in six days bc i could not. put. it. down. IT WAS SO GOOD. i totally get why this took stoker like a decade to finish as well bc the way everything is structured is so complex and interlocking that it makes me want to shrivel up and die even thinking about the effort it would have taken to pull this off. anyway. loved it. can't wait for may lol.

I KISSED SHARA WHEELER by Casey McQuiston

this was a re-read but i wanted to mention it bc it still fucks, and honestly it hit even harder this time. i have been going through Some Stuff and revisiting these unhinged queers gave me some clarity on that. there's not a single born regular person in this bar and i love all of them. put "i've kissed like, all my homies" on a t-shirt immediately.

SISTERSONG by Lucy Holland

i was unsure if i'd like this one or not. i'm pretty much Done with stories written by well-intentioned feminists re-telling a myth from The Female Perspective given how few of them any of them add anything truly groundbreaking to the text they're working with. SISTERSONG worked for me, though. maybe it's bc i'm not up to my eyeballs in pre-saxon briton the way i am with ancient greece? anyway i really appreciated how ugly and complex the relationships were between the three pov characters, and there was a subtextual reveal at the end that made me want to throw the book through the window (complimentary).

THE BOOK THIEF by Marcus Zusak

i really liked the tone of this one. i liked the conceit of the narrator, how it added a flexible logic to the structure of the narrative. i liked how it felt honest about the cruelty of the period without wading into vouyerism. i liked max' surreal illustrations. i was also suprised at how quick it was to smash out given it's over 500 pages. idk, if you're going to read this, the word of a gentile 20 years late to the party isn't going to make it any more pressing. it's just a book i'm still thinking about is all.

THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA by Scott Lynch

okay this was really fun. it's very basically about a group of con artists lead by the eponymous locke lamora with a kind of fantastical early renaissance italy setting. i was really impressed by the attention to detail in making so many small moments link together and double back on each other and just like, the craft involved, y'know? more than once something paid off and i thought we were done with that idea only for it to pay off again in an even more extraordinary way later on, and i just gotta respect that. very keen to re-read with an eye to those details.

SOLOMON'S CROWN by Natasha Siegel

this is a heavily fictionalised story about the relationship between richard i of england and philip ii of france. i was reading it like "captive prince speed run (complimentary)?", so if you know that series that will give you an idea of the shape of the relationship siegel sketches out for them (tho granted with a lot less trauma). i thought what siegel had to say in the author's notes was super interesting! a lot of historical fiction about real people exists in this murky space where it's unclear just how true to life an author is trying to be. siegel dispences with that immediately, which prompted me to think more deeply about the genre as a whole, and what we can achieve as people from marginalised groups by writing ourselves back into these histories. i also just felt it was a really honest for an author of historical fiction to say up front that this story has been so heavily fictionalised, making it clear from the outset what she was trying to achieve by telling this particular story this particular way. more of that from historical fiction authors, please.

THE FOXHOLE COURT by Nora Sakavic

i wanted to like this more than i did, because on paper it's very My Trash, but i just didn't click with it at all. i still haven't been able to articulate why and it's kind of bothering me, i think it might have something to do with how unfocused it feels for a lot of the middle.

EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS by John Green

reading john green in 2025 like a cool person i like green's non-fiction a lot more than his fiction, i think even when i was the right age for his fiction it wouldn't have been my thing. this is less the kind of non-fiction history book i normally read (500-page tomes with 15% of the page count dedicated to bibliographies and appendices) and more a well-articulated and compelling argument about why we should give a shit about diseases that don't directly impact our (read: people in rich nations) daily lives. i actually talked to someone at a new year's party who turns out works for a leprosy foundation, and a lot of the things she was talking about really resonated with the ideas and themes in green's book. that reinforced for me how artificial the continued existence of these curable infectious diseases actually is. green is arguing the case for TB specifically, but i think the arguments that he makes are equally true for leprosy, for polio, for malaria, for measles...... diseases that rich nations are used to thinking of as "a thing of the past" and so have turned our attention—and so, crucially, our resources—away from.

currently i'm reading THE EMPEROR OF MALDIES by siddharta mukherjee, which actually is one of those 500 page non-fiction tomes, so that's slowed me right down coming into the second quarter of the year. i've got a lot to keep me busy, tho, including the new nnedi okorafor novel DEATH OF THE AUTHOR, ASSASSIN'S APPRENTICE by robin hobb, and probably more that i'm forgetting. oh i also found my old copy of THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING series at mum's last week and i definitely want to re-read that because it's been like 15 years and i'm still thinking about THE ILL-MADE KNIGHT, specifically.

#pk reads stuff #new tag who dis

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