#while there’s clearly a lot of thought put into the worldbuilding and plot; it still ultimately feels like it’s built around the romance

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

Adrift In Starlight

space opera adventure romance

a courtesan is hired to seduce the soon-to-be-wife of a famous actor

a historian who’s focused on her career & has no idea her marriage has been arranged by her rich parents

after a museum tour they and two co-workers accidentally resurrect an ancient alien artifact and end up on the run from the law, traveling from planet to planet

pan nonbinary transfemme MC, touch-averse ace MC

[bthump]

Idk I too want better for Casca but I really dislike the hype for Casca potentially becoming an apostle, these users put it far better than i would:

https://www.tumblr.com/deripmaver/723418827650727936/why-i-am-a-hater-of-the-apostle-casca

https://www.tumblr.com/deripmaver/723493450382802944/im-so-happy-to-find-another-casca-apostle-hater https://

I skimmed these posts to see whether there were any points made that I felt like "responding" to, and there's a few.

First, Casca being a good person has nothing to do with anything except people not wanting her to become a monster, which I obviously don't vibe with because I think the concept of a good person becoming a monster fucks hard, which is one reason I like Berserk a whole lot. And I think a potential Moonbaby sacrifice would fit perfectly with one of the "good person" sacrifice examples they give: the 'person you loved the most and hated the most' sacrifice motivation, since it's intertwined with Griffith in some metaphysical way and it could be a two for the price of one deal. It's almost too on the nose.

Second, I don't think it necessitates Casca joining Griffith. Griffith seems to be out of the Godhand now, incarnated on the physical realm, presumably no longer presiding over sacrifices, and my favourite worldbuilding pet theory is actually that the godhand and Griffith will be at odds. Something's gotta threaten the godhand's existence since something wiped out the last cycle that we saw in Skull Knight's memory, and an incarnate fifth that appears right on schedule seems like just the thing.

Third, Casca's apostle trauma is, if anything, a sign in favour of her becoming an apostle since like, everyone in Berserk is at least tempted to symbolically become their abuser/rapist/nemesis as part of gaining power, eg:

Why can't Casca get in on the interesting and complicated moral and emotional greys here? This is good shit, I want it for Casca. I want her to be tempted to become what she fears, to escape her own sense of powerlessness through abandoning her morals. It's just a more direct version of Guts wanting to become a monster since that's rooted in rape trauma and both the narrative and Guts himself equates monsters to both his rapist and abuser.

I didn't see them mention the fact that apostles are compelled to love Griffith which to me seems like one of the best arguments against it (though again, I skimmed so maybe I missed it), but Ganishka resisted that, and Casca has a long history of repressing her love for Griffith so I think it could actually be a neat, and overcomeable extension of her human feelings.

Another big and better argument against it, particularly after the last couple chapters, is that Miura clearly just did not give a shit about Casca lol. And I mean I already knew that, one reason I thought the apostle Casca theory held water is that it would be a way for Miura to avoid writing Casca's trauma realistically and instead veer into one big dramatic moment followed by fantastical metaphor while keeping her a less nuanced plot point, albeit a more active and fun one than she had been so far. Instead his way of avoiding writing Casca's trauma realistically was to have her faint any time she thinks about it and then take away her personality AGAIN. So yeah, unfortunately I just don't think Miura wanted Casca to be badass and actively affect the plot. Idk if he ever knew what to do with her after deciding not to kill her off just to motivate Guts post-Eclipse.

Finally I just don't know if there's really time for that anymore. My vision was an Empire Strikes Back style end of second act downturn. Casca becomes a monster and sets a new arc in motion, Guts falls into despair and succumbs to the armour, shit gets real and interesting again for a while. Instead Guts' second act downturn is being mad that Griffith is still a god lol. She could definitely still go apostle at the climax of the story, and you better believe I'm still rooting for that, but idk if it'd be as satisfying lol. But I guess we'll see.

Anyway yeah you're free to disagree with any of my hot takes, but you're not gonna convince me Casca shouldn't become an apostle, because my reasoning ultimately boils down to "I would enjoy it." I would certainly enjoy it a hell of a lot more than fainting damsel in distress Casca which is what we're dealing with right now lol. If your reasoning boils down to "I would not enjoy it" then I probably won't convince you either, and that's fine. We'll find out what's going to happen eventually.

And finally I want to err on the side of caution and make it clear that I have no interest in arguing with the user you linked, and I hope you're not planning to be like, some kind of anonymous go-between linking posts back and forth. I used the linked posts as a bouncing off point to explain some of my reasoning, and that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned.

[pulchrasilva]

Sorry if this is random, but not many people are in the rswr fandom so you may be flooded with questions for the next week.

how related do you think Roman from sanders sides is to Roman from rswr? I know they address it in the first episode a little, but it’s still unclear to me. They seem very different in terms of personality and goals. It can’t be a coincidence because Thomas sanders wouldn’t just use one of the names of his well established characters for nothing.

sorry again, this was really long.

No need to apologise for sending me asks! I'm always happy to talk, especially about roleslaying

This is a topic that's been rattling around my head for a while so here goes

I would agree with you there, sanders sides and roleslaying with roman are very different. Different universe, characters, message, tone, etc. I think there's probably no in-universe connection between the two series tbh (although it can be fun to imagine the roleslaying universe as the creation of princey, for example).

Some people call roleslaying a spin-off of sanders sides but I'm not a fan of that tbh. It's a show that involves a guy who makes another show, not a spin off. Roleslaying has a much larger cast of entirely new characters, much more worldbuilding and whats looking to be a more complicated plot. Spin-offs usually take place at least in the same universe as the original media, but that's clearly not whats happening here.

Plus if it was a spin-off or if sanders sides had any real in-universe significance to roleslaying, "doc" Janus probably would have had more than 5 minutes screen time and Roman would be more similar to side!Roman

Personally, I think that dnd is the kind of game where someone who has an established oc might choose to adapt them to fit a new universe, because people are very attached to their ocs and it's fun! I do feel that at it's core, roleslaying is just thomas and his friends having fun and telling us a cool story as theu do it.

So Roman was taken from the sanders sides universe because he was an established character who Thomas enjoyed playing, and then he created a new character based partially on side!Roman and partially adapted to better fit the context of the campaign. A prince really wouldn't have fit with the story they're telling here, and changing that part of Princey changes a lot of Roman's character so we end up with a very different person. But they have the same name because rswr!Roman came from side!Roman.

When it comes to doc Janus, some people might say that he was there as a way to grab sanders sides fans' attention and in some ways I'd agree. But I also think his inclusion in the story (and likely any inclusion of other ts characters in the future) probably started from AJ thinking "hey my friend has these cool ocs, and the character he's playing is already inspired by them, I bet he'd enjoy it if we put some of his ocs into the campaign!" But doc janus isn't plot relevant or anything because at the end of the day, roleslaying isn't supposed to be a spin-off or sanders sides focused at all

So. This got a bit longer than I was expecting but to summarise. I think that the roleslaying and sanders sides universes are totally separate, but they have references between them just for fun. It's like the equivalent of putting a character into a private campaign as a reference to an inside joke, except theres an audience who's also in on it

I know my mutuals have a lot of thoughts on this topic too so if anyone else has something to say, go ahead! This is just how I personally think of the 2 universes and what I'm guessing the intentions are behind how they reference each other

[semper-legens]

101. The Sunbearer Trials, by Aiden Thomas

Owned: No, library Page count: 401 My summary: It’s time for the Trials. Ten semidióses will be chosen today to compete for the title of Sunbearer. The winner will gain the crown - and the loser will have the honour of being sacrificed to keep the Obsidian gods at bay. Teo didn’t expect to be chosen - he’s the son of a Jade, not a prestigious Gold - but he and another Jade are selected by Sol to compete. Now they’re fighting for their lives to keep out of the bottom spot, but is something strange happening at these Trials? Why are the other competitors acting so out of character? And just what was Sol thinking in all of this? My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

The Sunbearer Trials! I'm always down for a bit of LGBT+ YA, and I've liked Aiden Thomas' previous work, Cemetery Boys. Though I thought that book suffered from being not particularly subtle at times, overall I enjoyed the world, setting, characters, and plot, and so after reading the summary for this one, I decided to give it a shot. And, overall, I'm glad I did. While I still had some of the same problems with Thomas' writing, the world and characters were expansive and interesting enough to engage me, and when the sequel to this comes out, I'm probably going to give it a read. What can I say? I'm a sucker for YA fantasy.

Our main character is Teo, the trans son of the goddess of birds, Quetzal. He's a Jade (more on that later) so he didn't expect to be chosen for the Trials. Unfortunately for him, he's the protagonist. He's joined by Niya, his friend who is the daughter of the Earth god Tierra, and Xio, the youngest competitor, fellow Jade, and son of Mala Suerte, god of bad luck. Niya is fun as hell, she’s a boisterous lass who acts without thinking roughly 110% of the time. Xio is shyer, more retiring, and very out of his depth. And Teo himself is bitter about being a Jade (and about his relationship with Aurelio, a Gold, dying) and fighting to keep all of his friends safe. He’s less worried about Niya than himself and Xio, however. Teo’s a good YA protagonist - he’s got a strong sense of justice, finds himself leaping into danger rather than listening to caution, and has a good instinct when something’s wrong. His voice is compelling and I found myself very much liking him. In general, actually, all the characters here are pretty well-defined - despite there being ten semidióses and a handful of gods as well as auxiliary characters to keep track of, I never struggled in remembering who everyone was and the short version of what their deals were.

And the worldbuilding here is so cool! This is a sort of alternate Mexico without so much of the colonialism - the gods are clearly inspired by Aztec mythology (like Quetzal) and a lot of the world is based on classic Mexican iconography, such as the alebrijes. Thomas has put a lot of thought and creativity into how the cities of Reino del Sol work, and the various powers and blessings gifted to the semidióses. And much of the language is Spanish-inspired rather than English-inspired; semidiós instead of demigod, TuTube instead of YouTube, Mexican candy rather than white American candy. It’s really neat, very much in line with the worldbuilding of Cemetery Boys.

Now, I do have a few criticisms here. As I said with Cemetery Boys, the writing here isn’t exactly subtle. Teo’s wings are the best example - he keeps them bound under his shirt at first because they’re the brown of girl wings, not the green that boys have. But when he stops hiding his wings, they change to green dramatically. Gee, I wonder what this is a metaphor for? It’s not like the writing’s bad, it’s just not keeping its subtext...sub. Xio and Teo have a heart-to-heart about being trans that sounds like it came straight out of a ‘how to talk to your trans friend’ handbook. The Golds missing out on normal lives and childhoods because of their Gold status is hammered home again and again. I just feel like this could have done with another draft to make it that much less overt, you know? It’s also notable that there are fair few transmascs in this book, but no (mentioned) trans women. None of this stopped me enjoying the book, but it did keep me from completely loving it.

Next up, some short stories that are allegedly horror, and prove once again that I should stop judging books by their covers.

[lumienn]

Re-reading my own fic + reaction

Once upon a time, back when Yashahime was airing, I posted a few chapters of my sessrin fic titled 'Ice King, Icing' on AO3. I eventually ran out of steam, life got in the way (as it always does) plus I had some negative experiences within the fandom which got to me.

It's been at least a year since I last touched it, and I barely remember the plot.

So now that I've got my laptop back, it's time for a reread with fresh eyes. Let's see if it's any good!

Chapter 1:

Okay, I'm recalling the story a little now. The end result is a lot better than I thought it was at the time, I put a lot of research into everything (and I needed to, because I know nothing about 90% of the things I was writing about here). I enjoyed reading the worldbuilding just as much as I enjoyed writing and imagining it. This chapter shows glimpses of a modern world where humans and youkai coexist, and how they manage to do it.

While writing, I was worried the setting descriptions may be too much, but it feels just right to me as a reader. There's just a LOT of effort that went into this chapter and I'm glad it shows.

I feel like I should have more criticism for this chapter but somehow I don't. So here's the fun fact of the chapter instead: Rin was originally supposed to work at the cafe Kagome and Sango go to! The original draft had a more detailed description of the cafe for that reason, but I scrapped it and gave her a normal office job because it didn't feel right. I still wanted the cafe to have a personal connection to one of the characters, so I had Kohaku design it instead.

Chapter 2:

So some interesting plot points are introduced in this chapter. This story was basically based on three what ifs- what if Sesshomaru's good side came out before he met Rin? What if he didn't give Rin the choice to travel with him, and sent her away instead? And what if we still had time travel in this modern AU?

This is where the story and Sesshomaru and Rin's relationship deviates from canon. I love canon, obviously, but I was so intrigued by these questions. So Ice King, Icing was born, lol.

I also wanted Rin to roast Sess

I don't have any complaints for this chapter either. I caught a couple of grammatical errors, but shh. Also I was clearly having so much fun writing it.

Fun fact of the chapter: Kagome still has her purification powers and is still a reincarnation of Kikyo. But Inuyasha and Kikyo are inconsequential characters to each other here. Kagome is from the year 2318, and travelled 300 years in the past- to 2018- which is the year this story is set.

Chapter 3:

Another chapter where I was worried the descriptions and story of Rin's life may be too much, but it wasn't. Homegirl is out here living the life we can only dream of :')

We finally get a good chunk of Sess POV here, and the characterization is satisfactory. Again, big sigh of relief- he was SO difficult to write. I also had an evil chuckle reading Rin's flashbacks and Kaede's worries that her childhood saviors may have found her again- yes, lady, that's THE POINT. We are HERE for some hurt/comfort. Also eviler chuckling at my past self for managing to sneak in some Captain America trio references.

This reread is turning out a lot better than I expected. I'm really enjoying this a lot!

Fun fact of the chapter: The subject line of Jaken's email seems to reference the kdrama 'A Business Proposal', but Ice King Icing did it first :) (chapter posted in April 2021, drama released in 2022)

Chapter 4:

Kagome to the rescue! That's all I'll say ;)

Okay no. I shouldn't be surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this chapter, again, the whole fic is a banger. It has everything I want in a sessrin fic- not surprising, because I wrote it myself. I remember writing the balcony scene and Sesshomaru's realization and giggling to myself at how hilarious it was. Plot forcing them to spend time together by making him hide her from his father= a romcom classic that I'll never get tired of.

Fun fact of the chapter (and mild spoiler): the mystery girl that has been following Kagome will be revealed in the next chapter, along with her motives.

Conclusion:

As I said in the chapter notes, this fic isn't abandoned. I've just gone on hiatus from all my fics for a while because irl is taking up all my time and energy. I enjoyed writing this fic a lot though, and I will definitely update and try to complete it. Just not sure when.

[a-library-cat]

A review of Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao @xiranjayzhao

Publishing info:

First Edition published in 2021 by Penguin Teen Canada. My copy is a first edition that I purchased brand new.

General info:

This book is for a young adult audience. Genres include Sci-fi, fantasy, and LGBT+. One main character and POV. A love triangle that turns into a polycule.

StoryGraph page

My overall score is 5 out of 5 stars, and I would recommend this book to sci-fi lovers, mech anime fans, Chinese history buffs, and people sick of YA love triangles. Notes under the cut (spoilers):

Wu Zetian said Fuck the patriarchy. Also gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.

This is one of those books that probably wouldn't have been rated as high, if I hadn't burned through it in 2 hours. Not because it's an easy or short read, but because it's one of those books that you can't put down once you start it. I already had my eye on this book before publication, simply because the author went viral (for completely unrelated reasons) before the book was out. It was also one of those books that I knew I would fall in love with, so it was one of the rare instances where I bought a book brand new without reading it first, because I knew I would like it. I love this book and story so much that I have to keep myself from preordering the sequel, Heavenly Tyrant. Give coin, receive sequel?

Pros:

The worldbuilding is based off of mecha anime tropes, Chinese mythology, and the life of the real Emperor Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history. It sounds like a weird combination, but it all works really well together.

I love the characters. Zhao clearly is very attached to all their characters, because they're all written very well. They're all horrible people, but they are also people that you want to see succeed, and by the end of the book you're rooting for them. Your heart is also breaking for them. I love Li Shimin so much, he deserved better.

The love triangle is so good! A lot of people joke about how love triangles are dumb and how everything would be solved if they just all fucked together. Of course, this isn't necessarily true with every love triangle, but Zhao made it work! They even made it an essential plot point, so it would tie back into the narrative and character arcs.

A! content! warning! I love this! This is a very dark book, with dark themes and explicit violence at some parts, so it was much appreciated! I wish more books would do this so I don't have to rely on Does the Dog Die.

Cons:

This books feels rushed, in a "I had a fucking word limit" way. I believe Zhao confirmed that Penguin made them cut their word limit down significantly, so I can't necessarily fault them for it, but it's still disappointing.

Zhao also said that the original script was a lot darker and more explicit, and all I can say is I want the directors cut. To be serious, I feel like this series would've had more room to breathe as an adult sci-fi rather than YA, but I'm not sure what Zhao wanted and what their literary agent thought would sell. I can only hope Penguin gave them more wiggle room for the sequel.

These characters are not... good people, to be blunt. While this isn't a con for me personally, a lot of people like reading books where the protagonist is also a hero/good person, so I feel like I should add this for those people. Tbh the real Wu Zetian was shady and Zhao does not seem like the kind of person to sugarcoat history for a wider audience.

If you made it this far go check out Zhao's YouTube for more info on Iron Widow, Wu Zetian, and Chinese mythology/history/culture!

[edotfightme]

The Harder Path That Could Have Been Walked

So I'm doing a live reaction to my own 10,000 word fic that I forgot I wrote. Link here. You'll probably have to read the fic to understand my reactions because I am not keying them to each part.

A lot of this is me complaining about my own writing.

Let's go!

-----<>-----

What the fuck are these tags? WHAT DO YOU MEAN KIND OF???

Why did I tag sad racoons?

Wtf do you mean "don't summon void dragons" why is that in the tags???

I finally got past the tags.

This is a lot of worldbuilding in the notes let me check how much. 540 words of worldbuilding in the tags alone.

Wtf where did I find that language what does it say?

I can't understand a single word that was said before it translated to English it doesn't really work for an effect like I clearly intended. Plus the paragraphing makes it hard to read.

Bruh the first part was badly written we're starting off strong.

Oh shit, I started recognizing the second part. Ish. Holy shit it's like a core memory was unlocked. I remember thinking this was super cool. Let adult (questionable) me be the judge of that.

Hang on I think I realized why the hook was so shit. I was trying to keep his identity hidden. Still sucked though but good on you younger me. Still too many paragraphing issues. This was before I sorted those out methinks.

Holy shit Technoblade was still alive when I wrote this. Just had a moment while I thought of it.

Eww more text I can't read. Gonna scroll to the bottom to see if I translated it. MF I DIDN'T TRANSLATE FOR EVERYONE???? Where is the fic on my computer I need to figure out the translation- I'll finish this first hold on.

Lmao Tommy got put in his place. Should've put some sort of descriptor on the text so people knew how the Piglin was talking and which ones were talking. It's too intuitive.

"What are they saying?" I wanna know that as well Techno.

I just looked for the document and couldn't find it. The meanings will be lost to time.

Oh shit I forgot about the racoons. I gave Tommy a ton of racoons. That must be the sad racoons I mentioned. Wtf am I going to do with a bunch of racoons???

I wish I didn't press 'enter' so much jfc. Learn to write a paragraph little me. Number 1 thing I'll tell myself if I ever time travel is to write a god damn paragraph. This is exhausting to read.

Ewww I forgot about "pog".

Lol he scared the shit outta everyone you go kiddo!

The references to the bits are actually pretty funny though. I just wish I could understand WHATEVER THE FUCK THE PIGLINS ARE SAYING!!!

Also the lack of racism in this book infuriates me. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone racism, but could they be just a tad bit more racist to properly set up that they are the bad guys. The cult stuff isn't enough. We need to really hate these guys. TREAT THEM LIKE SHIT!

Lmao Tommy just had a moment where he's just fucking experiencing a past life. Which is mood. Like when you're walking in a crowd and you lock eyes with a familiar stranger and you stop for a moment to stare, wondering who they could've been to you. But then the moment shatters and you're left standing with the broken remains of what could never be.

The pacing and plot convenience is shit though (where is the racism? The foreign and silent curiosity of who you are?) let me just continue the fic.

I WANT TO FUCKING READ THIS FIC NOT A TON OF GLYPHS! The whole fic will be like this god dammit. I didn't realize this was my era before I learnt how to write foreign languages.

Haha. The random moment where it's just gibberish and then "fuck".

For those of you who aren't reading alongside me, here's piglin dialouge for reference:

"ᛟᚺ! ᚺᛁ! ᛁᛟᚢ ᛊᛈᛖᚨᚲ ᛈᛁᚷᛚᛁᛊᚺ?! ᛏᚺᚨᛏ×ᛊ ᚷᚱᛖᚨᛏ! ᛗᛁ ᚾᚨᛗᛖ ᛁᛊ ᛉᛖᛈᚺᛁᚱᚢᛊ!"

wtf does that even say???

"... that good old pogtopia look in his eyes" what was younger me smoking???? I can picture the exact expression but jesus christ kid are you alright?

Why the fuck can Phil speak english? Are they all speaking a different language? What is happening right now?

"The door to their cell swung open and Mr "Goes missing and freaks everyone the fuck out but is fine since he joined a cult" runs in." Holy shit little me you fucking killed him.

"Don't worry mate you won't be sacrificed." What kind of reassurance is that? I know it's like that on purpose but it's terrible. The unknown is scarier than the known. That's what I was banking on with Sinners.

"Eventually, Wilbur stopped looking like he was 5 minutes away from war crimes and now looked like he was 2 seconds away from war crimes for a different reason." I'm sorry but these quotes are something else. Where is the comma? You could've made this a beautiful paragraph but it's just a sentence. DESCRIBE THE ANGUISH!

Which corner is Wilbur staring at? Shouldn't he just like... glare at Phil with murder in his eyes? Also why is Tommy the attack dog? I get that Wilbur is roleplaying a drama club goth but shouldn't Techno logically be the protective one here? Or them all trying to shuffle each other behind themselves like some weird fight. And Phil's just standing there confused and vaguely exasperated, like it's someone else's emotions.

Don't make me rewrite this fic I don't want to touch it again.

Lmao them being so distracted by roleplaying drama kid goths and they forget to escape. Most realistic thing I've seen so far.

WAIT THIS IS ME PRE-PANIC ATTACKS THAT EXPLAINS SO MUCH.

Plaininnit lol that's actually a good one. Also why are they answering? Make him fight for the info you muppets! But the mental disorders though.

What was the point of that entire prison scene? It looks like it served no purpose. It didn't move the plot forward at all! It just served to show us that Phil can also speak normal? Like- we could've had that later?

At last, a piece of dialogue I think I understand! The X must be an apostrophe then.

Why is Wilbur speaking in percentages? I should've had Techno's chat run a poll and the odds not looking too good.

Why is Phil in the cult council? Did I explain that? Idk if it was in the worldbuilding or later...

Why'd Tommy also shout in another language? What is with younger me and making reading difficult? I can tell why this one was so poorly recieved, nobody wants to translate a book to read it.

Eww I used "snapped" twice in the same sentence.

Why is Tommy suddenly mute now? I know I had a reason, I just can't remember it.

Hang on I gotta scroll up and read some world-building rq.

Wait fuck what is the techno quote??? oh right- "WELCOME HOME THESEUS!" Just got to the part where Tommy mimes his name across.

*to the music of where is the justice* "Where is the pacing?"

Why the music memory thing? I know what I'm meaning for the audience to ask themselves but why did I do that? I should've introduced that later on. It would've made a better plot.

Lmao the warped fungus bit was funny though.

Bruh I nailed the creepy elder thing on the head. I don't know why I'm just good at writing sleazeballs taking advantage of kids (not sexually, just in a way that grates uncomfortably against the reader). I don't know where that comes from.

WAIT I THINK I MIGHT'VE REMEMBERED A PLOT POINT! Are all of Wilbur's snakes lavaproof? Is that why I had the scene?

Oh that is disgusting what is wrong with you little me? I should've tagged cannibalism. It feels like cannibalism.

The pandora's vault Dream being grounded bit is funny and I live for it. Little me had ideas. Offputting ideas but ideas.

Lol Elder took the jukebox.

This is so uncomfortable to read but not in the way an Elder scene is. Just Phil thinking that Tommy's eyes being red means he's happy but it's fake. And Phil hating it when Tommy's eyes are blue is just tragic. Because it comes across as Phil hating it when Tommy is himself and then he's happy when Tommy wakes up brainwashed but Tommy came to him for comfort because he was fucked I just- Little me you are one messed up kid.

HAHA He named Cat "Dream" because it envokes bad memories.

Oh wait that's what the beneath the surface intention was. The surface reference was that the colours reminded him of the people.

Phil dropped Ancient Debris on his foot. Wouldn't it be fucked up if Mojang added a weight limit in Minecraft?

KRISTEN!!!!

The typos in her description though... I want to cry.

OMG KRISTEN IS HIS THING! That's actually adorable though. Little me knows how to make me aww.

More Techno vs the Warped Fungus bit I am living for it.

What is with the blue and red strobe lights that are Tommy's eyes? What is wrong with him? Little me? Explain?

Wait why is everyone just vibin in the castle? What's with that? Also Phil being a moron for Kristen and she's just being a little shit. Dream joined a nether fortress as well lmao.

Oh that's what the warped fungus bit joke was for. So he could still be lava-proof.

BRUH WHY DID I WRITE THAT??? I SPOILED THE PLOT TWIST!

Wait why are we singing ten duel commandments? Did I organize the ending to that song? that sucks.

OH MY GOD I WROTE A CHILD GROOMER??? Holy shit that is foul. I was a child when I wrote this. What the fuck? No wonder why I was getting the heebie jeebies. I literally wrote the Elder as a character that is grooming Theseus.

The wills part was so out of place idk.

Double use of worried kill me now.

Oh damn the Phil and Kristen scene hit. That one definetly didn't feel out of place.

OH SHIT I didn't expect Phil to pull Tommy out of his ass. The jail scene looks important now.

They found him. Chat. It's only a matter of time.

Aww trauma babies. Them all being so traumatized that they're fully on alert and watching for fireworks.

LMAO SHIT HITS THE FAN AND PHIL DIPS WHAT A CHAMP.

Also the fact that I'm pretty sure the Elder was placing Tommy into a drugged trance and basically hypnotising him is fucked up. Younger me you are messed up.

Kristen's entrance was pretty darn good. Like the crows being death and just everyone and everything knowing who exactly is gracing their halls is terrifying and excellent.

Philza for the save finally! Let's go!

Lmao Techno's mates at the Bastion being right bastards and telling the gossip I am living for it.

OH shit, the author notes at the end. The entire flock was there. Damn, Elder was not escaping with his life after grooming one of his kids.

-----<>-----

And that's it! I hope you enjoyed my commentary on my 10,000-word book. I actually found it enjoyable to rediscover my own book. I can understand how other people got put off by it but after slogging through the dialogue I couldn't fucking read it was a decent story. A few issues but overall a fun experience.

[mixelation]

I finished Axiom's End! Here's my review:

I’ve always been kind of fascinated with celebrities writing books (PLEASE read Tyra Banks’s Modelland if you want a wild time). So Lindsay Ellis’s Axiom’s End has been on my radar for a while… and I did follow the recent Ellis “cancellation” a bit (which is why I previously joked that just reading this book could start an internet fight), but I do want to emphasize that I’m pretty neutral to her and to her work in general. I used to like her Nostalgia Chick reviews and I sometimes put her newer stuff on because I like listening to video essays while doing chores. One reason I wanted to read Axiom’s End is that while Ellis clearly demonstrates she can consume narratives with a critical eye, I wanted to see how that translated into actual writing.

I also want to emphasize that the way her novel was advertised to me was Ellis herself pushing it as a New York Times bestseller. I am therefore going to review it through that lens, rather than how I might review a random book I picked up or something self-published. At that standard, the book is pretty flawed in several ways, so if you think that's a harsh stance to take I suggest not reading further.

So, was it actually good?

It was… okay. I can see someone liking this book if they’re a fan of first contact stories or alien-human adventure stories and don’t mind some flaws. There are some interesting themes in the novel, but it felt very much to me like… either very amateurish writing, or someone’s early draft they decided to publish because they were sick of writing it.

What is Axiom’s End about?

I would pitch it to someone as a young adult/new adult first contact story, where the main character gets caught up in both a conspiracy by the US government and a conspiracy by the aliens. I would also add, in this hypothetical pitch, that I don’t think this book was marketed as YA despite the strong YA vibes… and you can make of that statement what you want.

The main character, Cora Sabino, has recently dropped out of college, moved back in with her mom and younger siblings, and just started a new job in data entry. Her tragic backstory is that her dad is a wikileaks-type character and recently leaked a memo hinting that first contact with aliens has already been made. There was also a mysterious meteor strike about a month earlier, which has gotten all the alien conspiracy fans very excited… and then while Cora is at work, there just happens to be another one!

Through a series of only slightly convoluted events, Cora ends up entwined with an alien named Ampersand, who also happens to be on the run from his own alien government… and also in search of his fellow renegade aliens (“the Fremda group”), all of who are refugees from a “genetic purge.”

What did I like about the book?

I actually don’t really like scifi, but I do like fantasy dressed up as aliens, which is what this book is! If you like stories with lots of alien worldbuilding in terms of society and biology, along with a healthy dash of unlikely alien-human relationships, without any really “hard” scifi in sight, this story might be for you.

I thought the best pieces of this book were the parts where Cora barely had any idea what was going on and blindly flailing through the plot. There’s a sequence of events where she wakes up to find an alien is piloting her body from afar to break into Google, then there’s some sort of EMP and breaks her free of his control and shuts everything down, then she finds her aunt’s coworker’s van with keys still inside and the alien “”dead”” in the back, and then she drives into the desert with zero plan. And then the alien wakes up and…. feeds her canned corn.

There are a lot of weird parts like this. But I also wish the weirdness had been leaned into harder because scenes like “eating corn out of a can in the desert because the alien caring for you doesn’t understanding human food” were the most fun and interesting parts, and also these moments are the only times where Cora is really making her own decisions (more on this later).

I read some reviews on Amazon and Goodreads before posting this, and positive reviews largely sighted the alien as their favorite part. Ampersand is depicted as distinctly non-human and Very DIfferent, but still grows attached to Cora. I think this is a story element that could appeal to a lot of readers. Ampersand is nine feet tall and “post-natural”-- meaning he’s basically a nervous system inside a synthetic body. His logic and motivations follow his own, non-human logic. His mannerisms are more bird-like than human.

I think the biggest running theme of Axiom’s End is communication. The “Fremda group” of aliens that are being hosted by the US government have outright refused any type of communication, right up until one of them randomly decides to speak to one of his handlers (who just so happens to be Cora’s aunt) and then dies pretty soon after. Cora ends up stuck on this adventure because Ampersand, the alien renegade trying to find and rescue the Fremda group, implants a chip in her head that allows him to speak to her, and so she ends up his “interpreter” to speak to other humans, including the CIA (Ampersand can understand English but his alien biology does not allow him to speak it). She also quickly becomes a semi-expert in alien body language due to observation. I like communication across barriers as a theme… but as I will explain later, I also think riding this theme kind of made the novel shoot itself in the foot.

Finally, the story is set in 2007 and there are a lot of pop culture references. I can see this being really annoying to some readers, but I liked it.

So what are these flaws you’re talking about?

Hooooo boy. I guess I’ll start with some nitpicking: the writing itself is mediocre at best.

Don’t get me wrong; there are some parts of this book that are well-written. I like that the book starts with the leaked memo about aliens. I like the opening scene, where Cora’s car dies and she has to ask her mom for a lift to work, only for us to find out her mom gave her money to fix the car and Cora used it to buy concert tickets. I felt this was an efficient way to tease the plot and also define Cora’s character.

The first part that made me go “hmm, maybe this isn’t so good” is when the meteor strikes while Cora is at work. It happens while she’s desperately and anxiously googling for news about her father, and the force from the impact breaks all the windows in the room she’s in. Cora then decides to leave work and take the bus home, and we’re told there’s lots of traffic because people are freaking out, but… we don’t get descriptions of what anyone else is doing, or what people freaking out looks like. We get a flat summary of what Cora does, but even the windows all shattering doesn’t yield any sensory or emotional details. We are told things, but not shown.

Then Cora gets home to find her aunt– the one who works with the aliens– and repeats the entire story via dialogue. We just read what happened! This is the literary equivalent of having a flashback to a previous part of the episode. We don’t get any new details or insights via this conversation, except that Cora mentions freaking out and trying to call her aunt. Why weren’t we just shown this? Why did we get no indication of Cora “freaking out” at all, besides her mentioning it off-hand after the fact? I thought maybe Ellis was trying to make Cora the type of person who deals with stress by defaulting to apathy, but this sort of characterization needs some signposting for the reader… and also the whole rest of the book continues to be written like this. Things happen, and the descriptions are often hard to follow and/or devoid of the sort of sensory details that gives writing “flavor.”

There are of course descriptions that are fine. There are also lines like, “[S]he stumbled into the marsh part of the marsh.” Now, I would be forgiving of a few oddly worded lines, but the writing is stiff and largely uninteresting throughout.

I think Ellis also struggled with dialogue. None of the voices of individual characters’ voices are particularly unique (except for Ampersand, who chooses weird alien-y phrases and makes up English words to describe alien concepts), and Cora in particular occasionally just says things no person would say (and it’s not meant to be a personality quirk). For example: “Well,” she said, “as a young white female of the species, I’m less likely to be looked at with suspicion by others, especially men.”

Another annoying aspect of the way the story develops is that a lot of exposition comes in the form of info-dumps via dialogue. I think “have characters talk about it” is a common piece of writing advice for exposition, but these conversations stop all plot and character development and do not flow organically at all. It often seems like Cora is asking questions just because Ellis wants something explained right then, not because it feels like the natural or in-character thing for Cora to say right then. This is the type of writing strategy I think a lot of readers who are into the worldbuilding being explained might be into (I’ve noticed some popular “rational” fanfic uses this strategy, for example)... but it’s a personal pet peeve of mine.

Speaking of Cora’s characterization, I didn’t feel it was… very good? There are moments where we get glimpses of a personality (for example, Cora cares deeply about her family and her dogs and is willing to put herself in danger to protect them), but a lot of Cora’s motivations seem to simply be that the story needs her to make a particular decision.

Some negative reviews I saw complained that the narrative never really justifies why Cora is the main character, and I… sort of agree. I’m okay with the series of happenstance that led to Ampersand kidnapping Cora to get to her aunt and implanting the chip that lets him communicate, then Cora reverse-kidnapping him back and the both of them ending up in the middle of the desert together… someone has to be the main character, after all! But I think the logic of why Ampersand wanted to keep Cora as his interpreter/mediator once he had access to more resources (but also had to communicate with the CIA and military) wasn’t very good. Why does he trust her over other humans? Does he think Cora could do a better job than other humans? Why? There are some inferences we could make, but the logical and emotional flow of the narrative could have been improved by adding, for example, a scene that cements Ampersand’s trust in Cora, or a scene where her ability to navigate basic human interactions prove undeniably useful to him.

And for that matter, why does Cora want to help him? She states that she thinks helping him can help her family a few times, but we never really see how this is supposed to play out, and her logic for why she’s terrified of her family being hurt is based on something a conspiracy theorist coworker says to her one time. Cora says exactly once that the idea of being a mediator excites her, but we aren’t told why. She mentions having been a linguistics major before dropping out, but this is only mentioned to explain why she knows a certain thing about linguistics rather than to have her be interested in alien language. Does interpreting make her feel special? Does she feel like it’s giving her life more direction? Aside from saying she’s excited or optimistic, she never seems particularly interested in or curious about the aliens, nor does she show strong feelings about how they’re being treated or finding out some of them have died. Sure, she occasionally asks Ampersand some questions, but she describes it as just being “small talk” and they feel more like an excuse for exposition than something Cora herself wants to know. This gets worse in the final part of the book, when she’s fleeing from the bad aliens with [SPOILER], even though she’s been told the bad aliens won’t hurt humans who aren’t intervening with their pursuit of [SPOILER]... so why is she so dedicated to saving [SPOILER]?

(I will say, before anyone gets mad at me for being unfair, in the fourth part I do think we are “shown” (as opposed to “told about”) her attachment to Ampersand more strongly.)

So Cora is bland and without strong motivation, and she’s also infuriatingly agentless throughout about half the book. The entire third part of the novel features Ampersand hanging out in a military base with the other aliens before they depart from the planet to flee the bad alien pursuing them (why they have to wait is never really explained very well, BTW). Cora acts as the aliens’ interpreter while on the base and… basically only takes orders from people. She doesn’t seem to have a goal at all throughout this section, and the whole story seems to completely stop. We get some moments between Cora and Ampersand, but mostly the “point” seems to be poorly delivered worldbuilding and exposition via dialogue.

But, well, okay– one could argue that since communication between humans and aliens is a major theme of this book, it follows naturally that the focus would be conversations over things actually happening. I could get on board with this, except “communication” in this book is… less of a realized theme, and more of a plot device to keep Cora around for the plot.

It is established when Cora and Ampersand first meet that he has been making bad plans due to not understanding humans and how Earth works. I thought this was established alright, and that the obvious next step was for Cora to help him with her everywoman human knowledge. She makes this exact argument to him and he agrees and the plot sort of does this for a while… and then they end up on the military base.

On the military base, Cora basically speaks for Ampersand to various people (remember: he understands English perfectly well, although some implications/unspoken things are puzzling to him). Her “interpreting” is a mix of repeating Ampersand verbatim and blatantly paraphrasing him to seem “less dangerous.” This isn’t subtle word changes or putting on a gentle affect or attempting to contextualize what he’s saying in what she knows of alien culture, the way a professional interpreter might. She just blatantly leaves out information or completely rewords what he says. In a mild example, there’s a scene where Ampersand does an autopsy of an alien body and allows human scientists to watch. He tells Cora, “I require a receptacle for waste.” She turns around to the scientists/military guys and says, “Can anyone get me a bucket?”

Why is this word change a big deal? Because “bucket” and “receptacle for waste” do not communicate the same thing. Here, Cora is assuming without input from either “sides” of the conversation between Ampersand and the onlookers that the best item for the situation is a bucket. Ampersand likely didn’t care, but the room full of government scientists would have probably wanted to know what the requested bucket was for in order to determine what sort of receptacle they’d like to use for an alien autopsy… biohazardous waste bucket? Something sterile for sample collection? Cora has no idea; she just made this call on her own!

I read most of part three waiting for Cora’s bad interpreting to backfire on her (one of the CIA agents even threatens if he discovers her to be lying about what Ampersand says), but it just… doesn’t. This was meant to be Cora doing a good job as a communicator, and she was fundamentally bad at it.

Another aspect of the communication theme is that both Ampersand and Cora comment over and over that there are simply things about the aliens that humans will never be able to understand… but Cora is constantly able to intuit or just “know” things about Ampersand and other aliens. Some of it you can brush off as her learning behavioral cues via exposure, but a lot of it just comes off as the catch-22 between “reader needs to know what’s happening” and “there’s no way for POV to know what’s happening” leading into… “The POV character will just make an educated guess and we will all assume it’s correct.” That solution is one that I find sympathetic and would “forgive” if it only happened once or twice…. But it happens what feels like every other page, and the overall message doesn’t even seem to be “it’s difficult but we can figure each other out!!” Cora can just figure it out when it’s necessary for conveying plot to the reader.

Overall, most of the philosophizing in the book seemed immature to me, and more “pontificate at the reader” rather than a thoughtful exploration of the themes via character and plot. I think a lot of stories about Deep Themes start off this way in the early drafts when the writer is still grappling with what they want to say but haven’t quite figured out how to say it… and for some reason it never progressed beyond an “early draft” stage.

I think those were all the “big” flaws I noticed, but here are some nitpickier ones:

The drama about her father being the whistleblower on the first contact thing is completely irrelevant. It causes public upheaval and Bush resigns (remember, this takes place in 2007), but Cora spends 95% of the book either isolated in a military bunker or in the middle of nowhere and this never affects her. I realize her father is likely included because he will appear in later books, but he could be completely removed from this novel and it would make no difference. Because Cora’s aunt worked directly with the aliens, she could have served as Cora’s sole connection to the whole conspiracy, and any family drama you want could have come from her mom alone. I liked the little articles and emails and blog pieces between chapters, but the text would have been more “flavorful” if they’d been from a diversity of writers in different styles.

The aliens are supposed to be powerful and nigh-unstoppable, but they’re easily evaded by… running away or hiding or just grabbing something and putting it in your pocket while their eyes are on someone else. There’s a scene at the end where Cora and Ampersand have a conversation while watching bad guy aliens from “a city block” distance away and they are just ignored. I think the firdgelogic explanation is that the aliens simply do not care, so they’re ignoring the human shenanigans, but it still broke the tension for me.

They also just never really explain the Genome. It’s the big plot McGuffin and I can guess what it’s for but… we’re never really told super explicitly why everyone wants it, and I have no idea what the consequences are when it [SPOILERS] at the end.

Conclusions

I thought the book was alright (I finished it in like a week, didn’t I?). It has some gaping flaws, but it also has some fun parts, and while the alien worldbuilding didn’t interest me too much, I can see how someone with different personal tastes might be really into it. However, I also think it ending up on the NYT bestseller list is… pretty indicative of how that list has very little to do with quality for how “prestigious” it’s considered.

[watery-melon-baller]

I think that, overall, only four good things came out of Danny Phantom season three:

1) Frostbite. I like that he can serve as another ghostly mentor figure to Danny, even if he is coming pretty late in the game, and he adds some decent worldbuilding.

2) Danny’s ice powers and ice core. There area lot of fun things to be done with these, especially in fanon, but even in the show they can make fights more interesting and dynamic. It’s a new element to play around with without it being too overly obtrusive. It does come a little out of nowhere, and just adds to Danny being absolutely OP, but I can look past that and see it as a net positive.

3) The episode Forever Phantom. This and the episode I’m going to discuss in point four are the only two episodes I feel truly hold up and are genuinely good in this season. There are some others that can be fun to watch, but they’re overall pretty mediocre. That’s not to mention the fair share of flops that just completely missed the mark. Forever Phantom works because it pulls its focus back in to grounded problems. A lot of season three has the issue of being all action, no breaks; the writers try to up the stakes, but it doesn’t work because there’s nothing to tie it back, and therefore it has little meaning. It’s just spectacle. What Forever Phantom does is give us a conflict with stakes that are much lower, but at the same time have a very pointed effect on Danny’s life. That’s able to keep viewers invested. The tone, also, just works a bit better for me than a lot of other season three episodes; some of the humor really works. Finally, we get Amorpho. He’s a very interesting antagonist; his morally gray motivations and general presence make him interesting to watch, and his direct goal to screw with people (and Danny specifically) brings up some good situations.

4) The episode D-Stabilized. This one holds up, and even excels, in a different way than Forever Phantom. Forever Phantom was an excellent example of how this show does a low-stakes, humor-driven episode. D-Stabilized shows off the potential for more plot-driven dramatic storytelling. One thing of the episode’s major strengths is its use of the characters. It was a good decision to take Valerie, Danny, and Danielle as a focus. They in particular did a good job with Danielle; while she definitely didn’t get enough screen time in the overall series to be fully realized as a character, this episode was a good step in the right direction, making use of the limited time they had. Through the focus the episode puts on her, the writers do a good job of fleshing her out into more of her own character (seperate from Danny), but keeping her familiar as well. As for Valerie, she was criminally underutilized in season 3. Nevertheless, her inclusion in the episode definitely improved it. She’s one of Danny Phantom’s strongest characters. To be perfectly honest, she’s probably a more developed and realized character than Tucker or Sam, despite the fact that the latter two are part of the core cast. She has a level of depth those two simply don’t have, with more thought-out motivations and traits that make her more belivable and three-dimensional. As such, D-Stablized took advantage of her strong character and arc to further it, staying true to her motivations and personality. And, critically, the characters are in character. This was an issue that season three had a lot more than the previous seasons of the show. D-Stabilized being able to succeed in this was critical to making it a good episode. Another thing D-Stablized handles well is its narrative. As I mentioned earlier, it gives us a strong and continuity-driven plot which helps to push many of the series’ ongoing points. It continues the thread begun by Kindred Spirits, bringing back Danielle and Vlad’s cloning plan. This is a compelling choice, as for much of season three Vlad has been exaggerated and his motivations twisted out of proportion. His previous motivations, to get rid of Jack and take his family, and more than that his critical trait of wanting love above all but not realizing that one needs to give back to get it, has been largely dropped in favor of a more generic set. His main goals are now shown to be world domination, power, and wealth, which makes little sense for his character. But that is beside the point; to bring us back on topic, the choice to bring back Vlad’s cloning plot demonstrates that he still does hold the desires he was shown to have previously: he wants a ‘perfect son’. It brings his character more in line with earlier seasons, bringing back that more compelling scenario. Another thread it continues is Valerie’s arc. I touched on this briefly earlier when I discussed characters, but to go into more depth, this episode gives us excellent insight into her life and motivations, wholly building off of what we already know about her. It fits in with what we’ve learned, but the events of the episode’s narrative also push Valerie into growing. It makes excellent use of her established anti-hero tendancies, showing how despite her prejudices she still has morals, and it trying to good even if it is somewhat misguided with regards to Danny and her unwavering hatred of ghosts. Especially considering how we’ve seen virtually nothing of her over season 3, the inclusion of Valerie and ties to her storyline certainly helped this episode exceed the rest. The action was dramatic, the development was logical and satisfying, and the characters and interactions are well handled and compelling. This is not even to mention the episode’s ending, where Valerie figures out about Vlad. This was clearly setting up more, but the arc got cut off before it could reach its completion. It is a real shame that we didn’t get a conclusion to this storyline, as it would have been really interesting to see how Valerie would handle the shift to her worldview, and how that could affect Danny and Amity Park.

[hopeswriting]

I meant to do a post about my thoughts on the Daily Life Arc now that I finished rereading it, but I can't seem to find the time and it's been a while now, and if I keep it up I'll forget what my thoughts are to begin with lol, so here's the long story short:

I know it's a long arc, as in it starts being boring and more or less unbearable past some point, because the "gag of the chapter" format only takes you so far, and not actually very far if Amano's humor doesn't work on you much, if at all. I don't think it's an arc you can reread right away/soon either, lest you feel that one flaw even faster.

And I felt it too, starting with the fourty-something chapters I felt like it was dragging on too much, though to be fair that probably had to do too with the fact I knew things much more interesting were coming after that.

Still, all that said, like, it's an enjoyable arc. Amano's humor happens to work on me, and she does it really well, and I liked reading the arc. There are some chapters where you're really asking yourself why they were written for lol, but even then you read it for the characters, and it somehow keeps you going.

And like, even though I think Amano could have seen the fact the comedy was going to turn repetitive and thus boring at some point, and try to diversify it or something, it's just how comedy/humor/gags works? Some jokes land and some doesn't, but for me at least a lot more of them worked than not.

The DLA is a good enough arc is what I'm saying.

------

On than note and on the contrary, of course it's fine if you think it's a bad arc, to each their opinion, but personally I really don't agree it's an unnecessary one.

I'm saying this because apparently it's not uncommon to advice new fans to skip the arc and directly start with the Kokuyo one? (Or so I learned on TV Tropes anyway, this might or might not be still relevent/accurate.)

Now don't get me wrong, the DLA does fail to hook the readers to the story for the reasons stated above, I agree with that, but it literally introduces the main character? And all the other characters, and gets us to know them, and establishes the dynamics between them and why they're the way they are, and, though only in a more or less superficial manner (and more than less) by design of the arc's purpose (not being deep in any way lol), it still gives us an insight into the characters and why they're the way they are. A glimpse into the core of their personality, the "stakes" of their characters, the flaws they have to overcome.

And all that in the context of their daily life, so if you skip it to go directly to the arc that challenges them, you can't appreciate fully how they rise to the challenge, how it shows their growth or reasserts their core values. You can't know how much or what it means, for example, off the top of my head, to have Yamamoto sacrifice his arm to beat Ken, when only a year ago he tried to kill himself over his broken arm. Or Hibari losing against Mukuro, thus telling us how much of a real threat he was. Or Tsuna screaming at Lancia for having hurt his friends, anger on his face, clearly despite himself, that Dame-Tsuna.

All these just wouldn't hit you the same, and it'd be such a shame? I mean I guess the ones who start with the Kokuyo arc go back to read the DLA, or you could compromise like the anime did by splitting the DLA between more serious arcs, but like I said I personally don't find the DLA that bad, so I still wouldn't advice it lol.

Even if, I suppose, it'd mean they might give up on the manga somewhere through the DLA, but like? Some mangas just don't speak to you, and that's fine, and it'd be a little of a shame from my POV as a KHR fan, but still, no big deal.

------

I'm still very impressed with how smoothly Amano went from a gag manga to a shonen one, and how she made it so the DLA still fits with the rest. I mean the sudden change in tone/stakes/etc is jarring, sure, but it's all based on stuff she introduced in the DLA, which she presumably came up with with no intention to ever make it something deeper/more meaningful.

It's easy to believe the foreshadowing, and generally speaking the worldbuilding was planned all along, which, again, probably not, and like? Super impressive.

(Though once more don't get me wrong, there are inconsistencies/plot holes in Amano's plotlines and worldbuilding, but not, like, at their seams, if I can say it like that? It's more often in the details, and it's fairly easy to fill in the blanks ourselves.)

------

Finally it was a lot of fun to rediscover the characters in a new light, and a bit of a disbelieving surprise tbh.

For context before I started my reread of the manga, all this time I was going with the time I read/watched it years ago plus the times I skimmed it, but mostly by all the fanon I was consuming. And it's not to say fanon is wrong per se, but it latched on one to three character's traits, or slapped an easy character archetype on them easy to "relate" to within, and apparently never looked back lol. And also often dialed up those traits (good or bad) in a very noticeable manner.

What I'm saying is, fanon is, in fact, wrong sometimes zldnslsz, and the characters are much more nuanced even in the DLA! (Which still leaves us at a more or less superficial level, because, you know lol, but still!)

------

To name the ones that stood out to me the most:

Nana isn't abused by Iemitsu, nor is she unhappy in her marriage despite Iemitsu being an absent husband (which is not relevent in the context of the DLA, but still, you can tell). She isn't an abusive mother to Tsuna either, and she is literally never an airhead. She literally just isn't, she actually does react very normally to the crazy Reborn brings with him, but much like Yamamoto as long as no one gets hurt (or walks it off), she just brushes it off.

And she has friends she goes listen to piano recitals with, and tries to save on money by eating rests, and gets in two-way arguments with Tsuna, and raises his allowance if he gets better grades to push him to work harder, and all around is just your average mom that really didn't read as just The Mom, if you know what I mean.

She has her flaws, definitely, she's not a great mom, namely is apparently used to call Tsuna Dame-Tsuna, but she's not just that.

She takes care of him, worries over him, and seems to be the only one who hasn't given up on him yet when the story starts. She supports him (though sometimes in a tactless to hurtful way), praises him when he does well, and trusts him to watch over the kids.

She's not that bad is what I'm saying, and 100% redeemable (that is, if you think she needs to be redeemed to begin with, which I actually do think she does, calling Tsuna Dame of all things is just a really shitty thing to do.)

(Though it's interesting to note that she doesn't do it again after what happened with Kyoko iirc, even if she might very well still talk to him in a belittling way at times. I just wish Amano would have commit fully to acknowledge it and resolve it, what with already having made it Kyoko's Dying Will Regret.)

(Edit: I had forgotten but she literally forgets his birthday while preparing someone else's birthday, so I take back that she is 100% redeemable because it's being too nice. But my point still stands.)

------

Haru is literally such a fun character, it makes me even more sad now to know what Amano did with her (nothing ansknslq 😭😂).

She's unhinged, has zero impulse control, does not reflect on the consequences of her lack of impulse control as Tsuna points it out, is ready and willing to throw hands at any given moment and is unapologetic of it, and is the one Amano actually calls an airhead.

The only problem she had with the mafia is that she thought Tsuna was forcing it on Reborn, and when she confirmed it was all true she literally didn't even blink at it, and immediately called herself the future Decimo's wife djosdkkd.

On that note she is literally mafia right from her first appearance, is more or less involved in almost all the mafia shenanigans, was right there with Tsuna & Co when they went to destroy the Tomaso's headquarters.

And like?? Amano could just have left it at that if she wasn't going to do anything else/more with it. Haru had so much potential, and not only Amano did nothing with it, she actually watered her down and took away all her distinct character's traits 😭.

------

Hibari is so much more feral and playful than his fanon cool, overpowered, quiet badass counterpart. Which I love too, don't get me wrong, but these two sides of him don't have to be exclusive!

He talks and smiles and jokes often, and shows off and casually insults you, and licks the blood away from his lips after having beaten bloody other middle schoolers who dared to defy him (I know this happens in the Kokuyo arc, but it illustrates my point the best).

Not much more to add than that, we should just acknowledge that and put it in our works more often.

------

Gokudera is a compelling character from the get go, and as far as the DLA goes, he's the most compelling character second to Tsuna. He's the only one to actually have flashbacks and a backstory. And what stood out to me the most that I don't see often in fanon, is that he's really a good friend.

Yes he has a short fuse and snaps easily and is easy to anger, but he's not always angry. And is seen having and being capable of positive exchanges outside of Tsuna (I'm thinking Yamamoto namely, who's made with Ryohei to be the one he gets angry with the most).

And yes he holds Tsuna on a pedestal and sees him through heavily tinted pink glasses, but even through that he's earnestly a good friend. And tries his best, and is hardworking and overachieving, so much so he messes up without meaning to, but he only ever has honest, straight-forward good intentions behind it all (well, maybe not always lol).

I love him a lot more now is what I'm saying.

------

And Tsuna. I'm not sure I'll be able to articulate my thoughts properly, but like... he's just your average teenager. Which of course is his whole thing, and I'm saying it in a very not judgy way whatsoever, but he's often made to be at least a little more than that, namely about his bullying.

Like, it's kind of dramatised in fics? And I'm not going to elaborate on that more because it might come out wrong and I don't want that, but it's just, like—canonically he is just bullied, simple as that. Like many other teenagers are.

And it's all in a "chill" way (for unfortunate lack of a better word, I don't mean to trivialize bullying at all, it's wrong and unfair and never deserved or okay, just so we're clear), and by the time the story starts Tsuna is used to it and has given up fighting against it, and actually finds refuge and a twisted comfort in embracing his Dame-Tsuna's monicker, because at least he's not gonna hit rock bottom deeper than that if he does.

And I'm not actually going anywhere with this, it's just? It hit me how differently canon and fanon portray his bullying.

Back on the note of him being a (below) average teenager, Tsuna is not an uwu pure cinnamon roll too good for this world.

He's literally so quick to judge and criticise, whether in his head or out loud when he knows more the person (namely Haru lol, poor girl), it was actually a bit of a shock tbh lol. He snaps easily, and is lazy, does not want to try even one bit, and is happy to run away from his responsibilities whenever he can.

And not only I'm not saying that in a judgy way this time either, but I'm actually saying it in a good way. He really felt like your average middle schooler, and it was so refreshing to see. That, plus the fact the narrative never holds it against him, let alone punishes him for it even if he's made to grow out of these traits, and it's literally part of his character arc, is kind of unique for the shonen genre (maybe, I'm not exactly a specialist of shonen mangas lol).

And I can see why you'd want to change it in fics, but personally I think it really makes his character's arc even more meaningful.

[thatonegreyghost]

Ohh, how about 11, 25, and 51 for the fanfic writing asks?

Hi Salamander!!!! Taking this one question at a time;

11: do you write scenes in order, or do you jump around?

Honestly it depends on what's most convenient at the time. For example, I have that snippet from Hunger that you saw, plus an entire chapter for 4's Company that comes much later on(maybe. I'll probably get there in the next few chapters). So when I have story elements that I know I want, I use them as general outlines and plot my story around that, which helps organize the flow. Other than that, the chapters happen as they want to. I just write them down.

25: What is your favorite part of the writing process?

WORLDBUILDING MY BELOVED!!!! I love worldbuilding so much; just the fun that comes with constructing a society, a city, even just a small group of people. A great example of this is from my short story Trouble(P.S. please let me know if y'all wanna read that I'm super proud of it), where I had to construct a society where every citizen had a superpower(think My Hero Academia if it was centered on a grown man and the kid he accidently adopts). I had to do a lot of thought exercises to get the world and society and laws to fit, and most of the time I found myself planning out really specific details that wouldn't even make it into the final story! I love constructing a world and understanding how the world I'm writing works.

51: Does what you like to read differ from what you like to write?

Not drastically. I grew up falling in love with science fiction, thriller novels, and mystery books; the holy trinity for me was Percy Jackson, Encyclopedia Brown, and Goosebumps. And my love of science fiction and all it's sub-genres is what influences my writing so heavily, along with other authors! I believe I've mentioned this in another post, but my writing style is heavily influenced by authors who made a serious impact on my worldview through their writing, and that includes fanfic authors! I will say that I didn't particularly like romance novels(and for the most part still don't), and that's because of two things; 1, my parents are genuinely in love and treat each other with respect, so the typical straight romance novel showcases a completely different relationship type than what I grew up exposed to and 2, I'm queer. Traditional romance novels have a bad habit of putting the partners on unequal footing, and making one completely dependent on the other. That never sat right with me, even when I was too young to understand why. Getting older, i realized it was for the same reason I didn't understand the 'deadbeat dad' stereotype when I was younger, and when I figured out I was ace, everything else clicked. THAT BEING SAID... romance in fanfic? Top tier, 10/10, best romances in existence!!! Partners who actually care about each other, have equal footing in the relationship, communicate, and aren't dependent on each other while still managing to show their affection clearly? That's the shit I grew up with!!!!!

[samkee00]

She-Ra Spoilers Ahead!!!

I just finished She-Ra and the Princesses of Power so I figured I’d slap down a few of my immediate thoughts. I’m not a great writer and I don’t always know how to put my thoughts into words, but I wanted to try.

- I got Catradora spoiled for me early on, so I looked at a lot of their interactions through a lens of that being the end result. For the first few seasons, I was like “that shouldn’t happen, this relationship is too riddled with trauma and abuse to end up healthy”. Between now and then, though, I’ve seen/read several things on seeing characters as parts of a story instead of as “real” people. Catra’s arc and her relationship with Adora are obviously much faster-paced “recoveries” than would (healthily) happen in real life, but that’s an artifact of the medium. The messages of the story still come through clearly, and the fact that there are things that need to heal is pointedly noted. Basically, I guess what I’m saying is “I ship it”.

- Catra and Adora’s reaction to Shadowweaver’s sacrifice felt really notably real and genuine to me. I feel like this is a part where some people might say “she was horrible to them, especially Catra. Why would they care?” without stopping to think about what she was to them. From what we see, she’s effectively their only parental figure growing up, someone whose affection and approval they, or at least Catra, desperately worked for. Unfortunately, being abused doesn’t always stop you from loving someone. It can make you feel like you aren’t doing enough for the person you love, like you could be better. I’m not a fan of the “redeems self, dies” trope, but Shadowweaver’s end felt like less of a redemption and more of an apology. I think it works. I do question why they couldn’t all go into the passageway and then have her block it off, but whatever, Plot

- Still really disappointed with the relative lack of general worldbuilding throughout the show, especially the first three, maybe even four!!! out of five seasons. Background characters only existed in places to move the plot along, when I really feel like they should’ve also been there to provide atmosphere and tell us about the world. There were tons of different races depicted throughout the show, and none of them (IIRC) were ever given a name. For most kingdoms and the Fright Zone, we never really even saw the citizenry. Catra, Scorpia?, and I guess Swiftwind were the only non-extremely human adjacent, non-horde clone people who were really given any role. Rogelio barely counts, he was played off as a joke (like I complained about before).

- Wish we would’ve gotten a bit more epilogue, or at least were shown more of the characters we’ve met at the end. Kyle, Rogelio, and Lonnie especially come to mind. We got a whole episode about them, they left the Fright Zone, and then..... nothing, really.

- I REALLY shouldn’t want Hordak to actually have a happy ending with Entrapta... Like I mentioned earlier with Catradora, there is a ton of trauma and abuse involved, and obviously he committed so many atrocities of his own volition and with no remorse, and has done almost nothing to redeem himself. but they’re so cute........ this is such a stupid point and I realize I just said a lot to say I think Catradora is justified while I have NO reasoning or excuse for this. The show just (obviously intentionally) played them up to be cute with each other!!! Really though, if they make another season or an extended epilogue or something, I do hope Hordak is shown as being punished for and atoning for all the incredibly bad shit he’s done. Shadowweaver got out of it by dying. Hordak needs to work for his forgiveness, or at least his freedom.

[demenior]

Dem’s Big Post About The Spn Fics Part 1/2

aka The Wrap Up to celebrate To Exist Again and To Become a Man now being finished!

(This will be a long post. This is your only warning.)

Admittedly this is a bit of a weird thing to be doing, but I wanted to try it out for 3 reasons: 

I love talking about my own work and 

It functions really well as a self-reflective tool for me to improve on, and 

I can answer some big questions people might have because there was a LOT of worldbuilding in these stories. 

We’ll start off with reflective stuff, and move into the juicier world-building focused stuff later into the post. There will be major spoilers for both fics to come!

To begin with a funny anecdote, Why Did I Write These Stories?

I was beginning to write and work out the story that I wanted to write for Spn (what will now be To Destroy a Man. As I was writing the scene, I realized I had a LOT of ideas and while I was trying to avoid as much exposition as I could, it became quickly apparent that I was needing to create my own au (this scene eventually became chapter 34 of To Become a Man). A short prequel seemed like a good idea, to quickly hash out the ‘prior’ events that I needed to go through so all the readers could be on the same page. While plotting out prequel points, I realized Sam and Dean were going to have drastically different experiences during the same time period, and I was trying to figure out who’s pov would be better for which scenes, and how to keep momentum when they’re going through such radically different types of changes. Ultimately I decided to split their povs, which I also thought would be a fun project! And I naively assumed each pov would take about 2 chapters each, rounding out to maybe 15k total.

I had my ending points: Dean n Cas soul-merged and (basically) married, Cas on the lam from heaven and a complete anomaly, and Sam juiced up full of powers and a weird mix of archangel and antichrist but still 100% human and ready to fight God. 

Now I needed to add weight to these changes, so I wrote 200k of build-up.

Am I proud of these fics?

OF COURSE I AM!!! These are the longest fics I’ve ever written AND finished AND in the fastest freakin turnaround ever (both were finished writing, barring edits, in like 6 months holy shit)

I didn’t write a single scene that I “didn’t” want to write. If I had trouble writing it, as in it was fighting me, I scrapped it. Most obviously was the scene in Dean’s pov where he and Sam were intended to meet some other hunters and Dean declines working with them because he’s nervous about being outed as queer. It was meant to be a good scene! I wanted to introduce some new characters! But it just wasn’t working so I said ‘thank you, next!’. 

But it means this story was an absolute joy to write. Because for a while all I was doing was ‘if I wanted to write one scene into supernatural, what would I write?’ and then just DID that!! It’s why there’s a lot of ‘Salmondean do dumb shit or have really dumb heartfelt conversations’ scenes.

Would I change anything?

If I’d been less eager to start sharing, I might have planned out the story beats a little tighter so there were less ‘soft’ chapters and a draw/pull for people to come back and keep reading. I felt Dean’s story specifically lagged at points and could have used some tighter editing (there was a noticeable lull in directed movement between Dean n Cas getting together, until Sam corrupts Amy).

I also probably would have held Sam’s story until I’d finished Dean’s so I could make the two line up better! Probably could have inserted more scenes into Sam’s fic that way, and made sure things were a little more consistent. In an ideal world one concept I had was to release 1 chapter from each pov every week that would correspond to the same time frame so we’d be getting real-time SalmonDean pov narrative. Unfortunately that didn’t work!

The biggest takeaway overall is for me to focus more on what moves the plot, and to make my scenes do more than 1 thing so I can cut down on wordcount and increase my efficiency. 

Of course every writer will find things they want to fix in anything they’ve ever written, so these are minor “mistakes” at best. I’m so dang proud of these fics. 

Onto more interesting things!

How Did I Put These Fics Together (because it’s different than anything I’ve ever done before)

Normally when I write a story, I plan out the beats I need to hit, see where I need to insert any kind of foreshadowing/buildup, and then write from A to B to C and so on and so forth. Hence, this is why I can normally post things as I complete chapters, because it’s all a linear progression. 

For these two stories, rather than linear plot/a normal story structure, I just sat and free-wrote any and every scene that came to mind and then pieced them into a kinda-linear form like putting a quilt together. You’ll note that this is why there’s not a lot of internal callback or a feeling of sense of time flowing within the fic (save for points where I went back and specifically edited it in). How long does the story take place over? Hard to say! Your author has the barest grasp on linear time even on a good day (how many times did I say ‘see you on [wrong day]’ at the end of chapters lmaaoooo)

This also meant EXTENSIVE editing on the back end once I decided in what order I wanted my ‘quilt pieces’ to be. Hard to say if this is a bonus or a negative!

But I did want to try and capture the vibe of the lives they lead, as a bit of a ‘slice of life’-style story, when the slice of life is the profound weirdness of the Winchester roaming life, and how things are status quo- until everyone almost dies oh shit!! And then they have to keep living because no therapy we die/undie like Winchesters. Do I think I captured this effectively? Hmm. Good question. 

Dem where the FUCK did the inspiration for a lot of the magic and creature weirdness even come from?

Honestly? Music, primarily. And completely mishearing lyrics!

Nightwish ‘Ever Dream’: the line is ‘my song can but borrow you grace’ and because my brain is scrambled eggs on a good day, I heard ‘grace’ ‘song’ and ‘borrow’ in that order and have had, for YEARS, the mental image of Cas borrowing Dean’s soul to power himself up for battle.

From there I’ve always been enamored with the ‘wavelength of celestial intent’ descriptor that Cas drops in s6 for “what he is”. 

I also really like ocean metaphors mostly because I’ve been obsessed with the ocean and things in it since I was like… 5??? So really this was me just rolling with what I know lmao. I love using (somewhat) accurate scientific metaphors for very intangible things!

I was also finishing my degree in biology/ecology while writing these fics and I think it shows

Stars ‘The Night Starts Here’ gives us the series title and the fic titles. Except for ‘To Exist Again’. TEA was almost titled ‘The Upwards Fall’ because I wanted all 3 of the Main Stories to have titles from this song, but I couldn’t make anything else work in tandem with the series name ‘The Love It Takes’ while also working for Sam’s personal story. So Sam, as always, is the rebel <3

Stars ‘Up In Our Bedroom, After The War’ is basically the vibes of the whole story. TFW has been, literally, to hell and back!!! There’s a bit of melancholy and sadness, a lingering dark, but the chance of a bright new tomorrow and a soft start.

Let’s Talk About Themes in The Story! What were you looking to accomplish? 

My earliest notes for TFW are, as follows:

Dean’s journey of self-discovery (who am I when I’m not trying to be Dad?)

Dean wants to settle down! He wants a big family! He wants to be domestic!

Basically: Dean doesn’t want to have a short life of hunting. He wants to live!

Dean’s journey of realizing he’s bi, and him accepting that

Dean’s relationship to Sam is both older brother/parent 

And continuing Dean balancing these roles while also letting Sam be an adult 

Dean’s Big Issues/Fears about never being good enough for people to want to stay with him (these are effectively highlighted in that Cas thinks he’s not useful enough to be wanted)

Sub Plot:

Castiel’s autonomy

Cas’ fall from grace, to trying to restore Heaven, to wrecking it further

He’s majorly depressed by the end of s7 (before purgatory)

Wants to stay in Purgatory but doesn’t tell Dean

Remains depressed after leaving, but resolved to keep living on because he’s clearly meant for something

After the seraphim reveal: does he have free will?! How does he grapple with this? How does he live in a way he can be proud of?

And lastly

Sam gets his powers back CAUSE THATS HOT

where tf did they go????

he got them from Lucifer?????

sleeper agent??????

Sam is The Chosen One

Accepts that he is More Than Human and to celebrate all parts of him

Lucifer and Sam friends?? Work together????

Sam needs autonomy in his choices/his life

If you compare these to the overall arc of TFW within the two stories, I think I got a lot of them! But you’ll also note a lot of these things aren’t concrete goals that are easily measurable (ex: Dean wants to learn to bake pie. In chapter 1 he starts a fire in the kitchen. By the end of the story he finally makes A Good Pie.) part of the lack of concrete milestones was why I felt it was important to tell Dean (and Cas’) story by going back to the point they meet, in s4! Dean’s gradual change towards his feelings for Cas, his relationship to Sam (heavily influenced by the s7 events of this fic) and then his own relationship with himself were such slow burns that I felt it would be a disservice to try and cram a change like that into a timeline like “1 year”.

I felt like these subtle changes and adjustments actually felt a lot truer to life-- people often change in very small, gradual ways over time, even without realizing it and often times not consistently! If only we could all gain skills like the sims, where we can easily level up and remain at that high level of performance! 

So the Guy Who Ate Satan, A Celestial Nuke that Developed Sentience, and Dean walk into a bar…

Sam’s story in Spn The Show has always been a ‘chosen one’ kind of narrative. Sam is living with one foot in the realm of the monsters, and I wanted to bring that back full force! It really makes sense for him that he should only continue to grow in power, might, and magic!! As the story progresses.

Cas also got a power up! I do desperately love in the show that he was kind of a grunt/nothing angel, and so even when he defected to TFW he was a huge help for them, but in the scale of things he was an annoying fly to most other angels. It really worked for the underdog story of s4/5. In this I wanted to give him a power up, and originally it was actually going to be close contact with Sam that eventually changed Cas into something unknown (you can still see traces of this in ch34 of TBAM, where Death remarks ‘Castiel could be [Sam’s] first creation’. But for a combo of reasons: how Sam’s magic needed to have intent, the entire concept of free will and consent, and how much I wanted Dean and Cas to have their effect on each other, I decided to go with the route that Cas has actually always been something angel-adjacent rather than becoming something new. TFW/Supernatural has always been about free will and making your own story, so I amplified that with Cas.

Dean has always been A Normal Guy, which is part of the appeal of him and Sam (2 normal dudes!) taking on the Very Not Normal. As explained above, Sam’s story is ‘normal guy finds out he’s the chosen one’ and so, in a story about very large concepts and huge monsters and acts of magic, I felt it was very important to keep Dean as normal as possible. To the point it became a running gag to me, personally, in that ‘no matter what cool shit happens around him, Dean has to stay as Just A Guy’. And it’s a very humanizing role that allows the story to have the scale it does!

What were the most important themes in your story?

Sam’s Autonomy

I wasn’t even going to include the plot about Lucifer’s death in this story— that was going to come up in a later story, actually! And rather than Sam having ate Lucifer, the original idea was that they’d become a SamandLucifer entity (this harkens back to a concept I wanted to write when Swan Song first aired). 

That storyline would have involved a lot of mental ‘Sam and Lucifer discuss what it means to live, which one of them is more worthy of life and if they do deserve to destroy the world for the pain they’ve been forced to go through, just to create the dichotomy of good and evil for everyone else’ discussions. There would be a lot of talk about how Sam hates and fears Lucifer for the pain Lucifer put on Sam, how Lucifer hates Sam because he and Sam are the same but Sam’s brother loves him anyways, etc. 

Ultimately that was scrapped because Sam’s entire story in the show is always about how the world and everyone around him manipulates him and that he never actually gets to make choices about his own life or body that aren’t influenced or part of someone elses’ design. And that always bothered me that Sam was never allowed to be himself without having to be ashamed of it, and I wanted to make sure that Sam’s triumph of being proud of himself/proudly choosing to exist (again) was evident in his story

In the end I needed Sam to have this visceral win over his tormentor. As the story shows, in this case Lucifer was abused and put into a position where he was incapable of empathy and could only express himself in violence. Sam even understands this! But it doesn’t change the fact that Lucifer tortured Sam in unimaginable ways for thousands of years. 

With that in mind I didn’t like the idea of Lucifer and Sam having “co-ownership” of their new identity, so I made the choice that Sam had to be the survivor. This tied in well with Sam’s new crusade to restore free will to the universe, because he’s breaking the narrative of his own story!

While Castiel wasn’t a pov character, his own autonomy and free will was equally as important. You’ll note that many, many paragraphs and conversations revolved around that theme and that in the end Cas followed himself (and love!) which ensured his freedom of self <3

The Brothers are WEIRD PEOPLE!!!! And Codependent to a Worrying Degree, but It’s Also How They Survive

It’s very hard to show “unusual” relationships when you’re writing from the pov of the two people who don’t think there’s anything weird about their relationship. Sure, they say ‘yeah it’s probably weird that we still share a bed’ but that’s kinda more in line with ‘I had a nightmare and I want to be close to the person who makes me feel safe’. Hashtag normalize co-sleeping when you need it!!!

From there I did try to point out how the boys have a weird perception of lifestyle in the little things they did. 

From thrifting everything from clothes to appliances to books (thrifting is a valid lifestyle! It’s incredibly handy when you’re on a budget.) 

To never actually having condiments or knowing how to use a dishwasher cause they’ve lived in a car, a motel room, or squatted in old houses their whole life.

I tried to have them wear each others’ clothes or casually swap things as much as possible. They live out of each others’ pockets!

Also the brothers are just weird people!! It’s hard to show from their pov, cause they don’t know how far off from normal they are, but like…

Everything about Sam and Amelia was NOT right like holy shit those two were wilding in their grief. They are very lucky things worked out for them and that they got to be hashtag Weird Girls together

Dean explicitly, in the story, gets horny after killing stuff!! Violence has done a number on his psyche and he’s gotten some wires crossed that maybe shouldn’t have been, or maybe could be worked out in a safe space but… uh… how likely do we think Dean is gonna go find a safe space to deal with any of his shit???

LOVE!!! Love is truly what this whole story is all about

If you’ve read the stories, you know how much emphasis I put on love. Love is the strongest force in the Spn Universe! It’s what averted the apocalypse and saved the world (Swan Song), it’s what created free will (Cas’ entire arc!) I love love!!!!

I went out of my way to not put any definitions on platonic love vs romantic love because I think love is love is love and how you express that is the difference. Neither is more powerful than the other because LOVE is powerful!! Sam and Cas are the most important people in Dean’s life and he loves them equally! He shows this by giving Cas kisses and stealing Sam’s socks.

It’s a personal pet peeve of mine when I have to hear explanations like ‘I love you, like a brother’ or ‘I love you, but like, as a friend because I’m a lesbian and you’re a man’ etc etc in media. If you have to continuously define how your characters love each other, then I don’t think you’re doing a good job of portraying their relationship. So you’ll see that I never put those parameters in any conversation. Dean DOES muse that he loves Cas differently than he loves Sam or Bobby, specifically because there is a romantic and sexual tone that his feelings for Cas takes, but not because he loves Cas more or less than he loves Sam or Bobby.

Which means, if you haven’t realized it yet, the Series + Fic Titles are meant to be a complete sentence because the power of love IS the thesis of this series:

The Love It Takes To Exist Again (Sam’s journey!)

The Love It Takes To Become a Man (Dean’s journey!)

The Love It Takes To Destroy a Man (TBA)

And now for fun stuff. Behind the scenes!!

What’s Something People Probably Don’t Know?

The demonic fungal/hydrothermal vent growth on Sam’s arm was thrown in literally as I was posting the chapter because I had just finished a 48 hour cram session of writing a report on tube worms for an ecology class (I was chanting my tube worm song as I wrote it) and it ended up being a HUGE hit with both readers and myself. But it was so last minute I had trouble fitting it in more throughout the rest of Sam’s story!

Cas’ orders? That may or may not have bound him to Dean and removed his free will? Were written into Sam’s story and I went ‘oh SHIT that’s compelling’ and then left them there as a ‘guess I’ll figure that out when I get to Dean’s story lol’

Originally Dean and Cas were supposed to get together after having their souls bonded, and have been in a UST limbo the entire time before that. Mostly because I think the entire concept of ‘we just got married of the soul I guess we should try dating?’ is very funny. CLEARLY the two of them were way more eager to fall in love than I anticipated (thank you Cas for your honesty) but you can still see shades of this original idea here and there (especially in ch35 of TBAM)

I never intended Dean and Benny to connect so well!! Benny was going to reunite with Andrea, she was going to live, and they were going to go off into the world and leave the story. And, uh, here we are. I’m still debating if I need to adjust the relationship tag or not haha. Polyamory is fun, especially when I was planning for Sam to be the polyamorous brother...

Speaking of, I can’t believe I forgot about Sam and his sexuality! If I rewrote TEA I would have had Sam contemplate more on his lack of sexual appetite due to trauma, up until he meets Benny and he gets to rediscover how he wants to be a sexual person

Many of Sam and Dean’s absolutely stupid sibling conversations were lifted near-verbatim from conversations I’ve had with my siblings

And lastly...

Dem where’s Kevin????????????? Where is our sweet baby boy????????

He’s SAFE!! He’s in the Hunter pipeline somewhere cause Sam handed him off to Bobby’s people. He and his mom are safe and at some point they probably got rib sigils like SalmonDean did against angels, but for demons. I didn’t have room in this story for him!!! But my baby boy is SAFE and I want to get him back to university because it’s WHAT HE DESERVES!!!!

To that point: god there were/are SO many characters that I just didn’t include in the story so far because I didn’t feel comfortable including them without stalling the story for them. To that point: pretty much everyone who is alive/dead in s8 is that way in this story, except Bobby who gets to live.

[Check Out Part 2 for reader questions!]

[shihalyfie]

Out of curiosity, I’ve noticed you don’t touch on tri, any particular reason? I know a lot of fans myself included don’t care for it but I don’t wanna assume that’s the case

I had a feeling I was going to get this question eventually, and I tussled with myself for quite a while on whether I should answer it publicly or privately, since this is a blog I’d like to mostly dedicate to appreciating the nuances and themes within Adventure and 02 and how carefully they handled all of the topics within, and I’d like to hold back on negativity for the most part (just because I talk about there being a meaningful reason behind most creative decisions in Adventure and 02 doesn’t mean I necessarily like all of them, I just don’t feel like this is the place to be adding those kinds of personal sentiments, because this is meant to be an analysis blog, not a review blog). That said, my meta has been getting a lot of traction lately (thank you so much! I really appreciate it!) and I do feel like this question must have crossed people’s minds at some point since it is a bit of an elephant in the room, so I think people have the right to know the answer.

To those of you reading this who are fans of tri., I sincerely apologize, since some less than kind things are going to be in this answer (although I do hope that maybe the tag would have successfully caught in some blacklists for those trying to avoid this kind of negativity).

The short version of the answer is that “I couldn’t get it to work, and I don’t have the energy to do it.” The long version of the answer is that I did actually try to analyze and pick apart tri. in detail a year ago, but unlike with Adventure and 02, where looking at it deeply and trying to extract details out of it revealed that a lot of it did make sense or at least have a reason behind it, looking at tri. with this level of depth made it fall apart even more. The contradictions and things that don’t make sense aren’t just one or two things you could safely ignore like with, say, Armor Evolution to the Unknown or Tag Tamers or Hurricane Touchdown, but practically permeate the entire text of it (and this is especially the case when you bring 02 into play, but even if you were to isolate Adventure into a vacuum, there are too many things that still don’t make sense), and it’s on every level as well; not just plot and worldbuilding, but also meaningful theme.

In the end, I don’t think this is just something that can be chalked up to mere happenstance, and I think the core of the problem is something that can be accurately summarized in the story of the two tri. scriptwriters who were fans of the original series, but kept getting their scripts rejected because it wasn’t “mature” enough. It’s not limited to just this incident, and it permeates a lot of the sentiments behind what you hear in tri. staff testimony -- a constant sentiment that the original series was a “kids’ show” that didn’t go into any kind of meaningful depth, and that the new series was meant to be “mature” in comparison. This is very, very painful for me to read, as someone who adores the original series because it had a significant level of depth and nuance that so many kids’ shows at the time wouldn’t even dare (and sometimes even to its detriment, since I’ve often complained how the series was too subtle for its own good, or kept going into things that would go over its target audience’s heads) -- contrast the statement about 02 that they wanted it to be a lighter series at first, but felt that it would be wrong to shy away from important things they wanted to say.

The entire premise of the series doesn’t work if you take even a single Adventure episode into account (45, which singlehandedly dismantles most of how tri. is even supposed to work), and there’s this thread of acting like the morality of killing/the morality of friendly fire was somehow new to this series when it comprised a whole quarter of Adventure and nearly the entirety of 02, and with so many other sentiments like this, the only conclusion I can reach is that they cared so much about that “maturity” that actually paying any mind to the series it was meant to be a sequel to was that low on the priority list. For me, who's mainly here to pay respect to the level of detail and thought and depth that the original Adventure and 02 staff put into their series, it just feels unfair to expect me to bend over backwards and compromise the integrity of the analysis just to make it “comply” with a series that never intended to be consistent or make sense in the first place.

Even if you do selectively include tri. elements, the more you try to involve, the more all of the contradictory facts and themes between Adventure/02 and tri. come into conflict like two magnets with the wrong sides facing each other, and you are repeatedly going to come into crossroads where you will have to commit to one over the other. At that point, the sheer level of speculation and workarounds to make it happen, and the things you'd have to toss out or modify from what was originally meant to be a comprehensive analysis, make it into less of an analysis and more headcanon and fanfiction. Which is perfectly fine if you want to go that route, I mean -- it's just that this isn't what this blog is for, because I'm trying to analyze and inspect what (the very uniformly consistent) Adventure and 02 were trying to say before another series (one that clearly had zero fundamental interest in maintaining any of that) came around fifteen years later. I include Kizuna mainly because it is incredibly easy to fit in comparison, given that it not only had original staff, but also is clearly made with just as much attention to detail and focus on meaningful theme as the original series was, and so it’s fairly easy to integrate it into an Adventure/02 analysis without much trouble -- in fact, Kizuna additions conversely often enhance and further elaborate on things that were already in the original series, so the helpful additions it adds far outweigh the work it takes to include it -- but that’s not the case for tri. at all.

Nevertheless, as I said, this is not a blog meant to focus on negativity. There are people who found something in tri. that spoke to them, or don’t really put so much weight into what the staff said or thought, and would like to see it in a way that works for them. I personally encourage this sentiment; just because I happen to be someone who treasures Adventure and 02′s integrity so much that I refuse to compromise does not mean I should inflict these feelings on others who don’t see it the same way. Because of that, I personally felt it was better to simply not cover it, rather than derailing every single analysis to make an aside about everything about tri. that doesn’t make sense, because that’s also going to be hurtful to anyone who does like one or more of the series and wants to make it work. But, after all, this blog is my personal analysis and way of seeing the series, and I cannot see it in a way that makes it work (and especially don’t have the energy to make an attempt for something I do in my free time), and so I would rather just pass the baton to those who feel more up to it instead; in other words, I’m not trying to invalidate tri.’s existence for those who want to make it work, and rather my stance is “I can’t figure out a way to make it work myself, so I will leave the reasoning to you.” Moreover, I’ve implied this a few times, but a lot of the ideas on this blog or in any of my analyses are not things I came up with on my own, but from sharing ideas and having discussions with friends in my private time, and I feel like I would be doing them a disservice by weaponizing all of the insightful things they’ve given me to dunk on something else. I love 02 a lot, and one of its major themes was trying to make the most positively productive thing you can out of what you have, and advocating for people to maybe appreciate something they may not have thought about before feels like a better use of my time.

If you are interested in my analysis of tri. from last year, I still keep it on hand mainly because -- well, to be frank about it, nearly every tri. diehard fan I’ve had a personal encounter with has said some very nasty things to me about how I’m not “smart” enough to appreciate the series, or how I’m being “unfair” about it, or how I’m not a “real fan” for not singing its praises, and so I mainly put this together as a collected document and proof of how I (and the few others who helped me put it together) did actually make due diligence and put proper scrutiny into trying to make it work (and couldn’t). (If you happen to identify as a tri. diehard fan and have not said this kind of thing to people, I sincerely apologize and want to make clear that I don’t want to pin the entire tri. fanbase as this kind of person; this was just my personal experience.) I wrote it mainly as catharsis and for the sake of other people who were interested in a detailed analysis, and also for the sake of other people who might have gotten these kinds of dismissive insults and wanted confirmation that their feelings weren’t baseless, or for bridging the gap between people who did like the series but want to understand why there are people who don’t (this apparently was a testimony from a few people who read it). That’s also why I’m linking it right now, since I imagine that there might be people curious about said aforementioned analysis after I’d just brought it up. However, I do warn that there is a lot of frustrated negativity, and that there is a sense of bias in that I wrote this “going in with doubt” instead of the more positive attitude I have with Adventure or 02 in that I assume there was a good reason for everything, and, frankly, if you like tri., I don’t actually suggest reading it or bringing that kind of negativity about something you like into your view. I also ask that people understand that the linked document is where I dumped all of my feelings cathartically and I do not enjoy dwelling on it further, nor bringing up this document when it doesn’t feel necessary, so I apologize, and I hope the stance I just expressed won’t taint anyone’s opinion of me too much...^^

[deadmomjokes]

First time Stormlight Archives Read-thru: The Way of Kings Part One

Since I actually somehow made it through the library’s waitlist to get my Icarusian hands on a copy of this thing, and because I am a completionist who cannot leave character arcs unfinished, I’m dragging y’all with me on this adventure that I guarantee you doesn’t need to be this long.

Yes I’m salty about it and it’s gonna take some serious literary magic to make me NOT salty about it because trying to hold this book at a decent angle activated my carpal tunnel issues and now I can’t feel my pinky finger and my thumb is tingling. So yeah. It better be worth it.

Anyway, we just finished Part One. Wait, “we” you ask? Oh yeah, my husband loves worldbuilding and hard magic systems, so we’re taking turns reading chapters aloud so that we don’t have to hold onto the book twice as long so we can both read it, and we can keep reminding each other of what’s what.

ANYWAY, we just finished Part One, so have my thoughts, positives, negatives, and overall impressions. Then get your road trip snacks because like I said, I don’t do things halfway and I already started this journey so here we mcfreakin go I guess.

The Good Stuff

There’s some pretty good lines so far.

B. Sandy actually appears to know what he’s talking about with drawing and sewing? Wild.

I’m digging how the currency system is, like, also functional. The pieces of currency act as lights and power sources and stuff. Neat.

The two main characters from this section are: depressed mom friend and his Conscience, and a snarky nerd with delusions of criminal grandeur, and between them they have exactly 0.84 brain cells. These all belong to Jiminy Cricket the literal airhead the Conscience.

Depressed softboy who just wants to be a good big brother? Well darn it, you found my weakness. I’ll pull up my “adoption papers” folder.

Each chapter from a new POV has a unique voice. Rather hard to pull off in writing, but very clearly and expertly done here.

I have some questions moving forward, which is always a plus. However...

The Bad Stuff

I really, REALLY don’t like feeling like I’m the dumbest person in the room. While he did manage to avoid infodumping, Mr. Sanderson also managed to make me feel like I’m missing vital information at basically every turn. And not in the “ooh, what a mystery” kind of way-- in the “what the freak am looking at, I have zero idea what you’re describing because you’re using in-universe jargon.” This piecemeal revelation thing works for the characters’ stories and plots; I’m all for that! I’m intrigued at what’s up with Ms. Davar, and exactly how Kal ended up where he is, what’s up with the war, etc. The problem is with handling the worldbuilding this way when you’re trying to situate these mystery plots in said world. It is not immersive for me; it is distracting, frustrating, and makes it hard for me to focus on the story. A few points handled this way would have been fine, but I lost track of how many times I had to stop and groan because yet another new term was getting lobbed at me and my comprehension of the situation depended on having an understanding of the world which he just hadn’t given us yet. I’m really over it.

I get that we were trying to establish her character, but I could have done without these lead-up chapters with Shallan. I wasn’t at all as interested in her as I was with Kaladin. We could have learned all that we needed-- her family situation, her big plan, her big mouth, her skills, her mysterious past and the weird stuff about her father that we still haven’t learned fully yet-- in media res when she’s already Jasnah’s ward. It felt kind of tire-spinny, though I admit it was fun at times.

The sentences and wording get sticky at times. Especially with reading it out loud, there are quite a few places that make my brain stumble because the words sound wrong next to each other, or the same word appears in the sentence too many times, and so on.

There’s a lot going on that just isn’t important. This ties back in to the first point, but we’re getting so much information about this world that it becomes tiring and tiresome to keep track of all the different things we’re learning about-- cultural rules around slaves, ‘safehands’, eye color, and so on; ‘fabrials’; the currency denominations; a whole religious system, some of which appears to be important but also has a bunch of tiddly little details that don’t; a caste system; a military structure; however the freak the ecosystem works and all the different animals and plants; the weather systems; etc ad nauseum. How much of this is important to know? I don’t know! That’s what’s frustrating about it! So much of it seems like by-the-way kind of stuff, but some of it could end up being important, so here I am wondering what’s gonna be on the quiz and what’s just for fun.

Impressions and Thoughts

Why must carcinization haunt me even in escapist fantasy?

Am not a fan of the phrase “skyeels” and “poisonous skyeels.” Don’t like that one bit.

Dudes are religiously required to be himbos, and girls are religiously expected to be scholars and nerds. Am love.

I’m getting increasingly concerned by the death-blood-collection ominous mystery quotes at the beginning of each chapter.

I’ve only known Sylphrena for a day and a half but if anything happens to her I would.... Not.... Not harm anyone or myself because she would be sad. 😭

I was warned about “suicidal ideation” being a thing, but I’m going to put a little brighter of a warning label on that and say that if anyone is about to read this and gets upset or triggered by suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts, be very careful and know that’s kind of all a thing. Not sure how much a thing it’ll be moving forward, I’m hoping “not”, but, yeah. That was an attempt, not just ideation, tho I’m grateful for the person who warned me because if it had come out of nowhere instead of just being a step further than what I expected, I’d be really, really not okay.

Yalb is the real MVP.

Verdict Thus Far

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is “I will actually find strength to abandon this book because I’m so done” and 10 is “I’m willing to give up sleep to read more,” I’m sitting at a 6.5 right now. Good, and I’m looking forward to continuing, but I have a little ways to go before I’m hooked. But thumbs up, thanks for convincing me! (from everyone except my tingling numb fingers, I should have tried the ebook instead -_-)

[moonshinesapphic]

So you were disappointed in Throne of Glass...

 (DISCLAIMER: This post does not intend to offend anyone who loves ToG. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and likes and dislikes and is allowed to express that. This post is meant to share books that have similar qualities to ToG for people who were disappointed in the series, like myself, but anyone who does like ToG can absolutely find great recs here! However, if you don’t want to hear anything ToG critical I recommend skipping over this post. Thank you!)

So last week I finally got rid of all my ToG books. I was mostly relieved that I now have more room on my bookshelf but I also felt a little sad. It was a series I really enjoyed when I first read it two years ago, and on some level it will always have a special place for me. It was one of the many books that got me back into reading after a five year slump, it’s the reason I became friends with the wonderful Nicole (@/rainbowbooktheif on Instagram) who was the first person irl to make me feel less alone as a bookish nerd, and it, unintentionally, helped me hone my critical reading skills. However, I slowly began to care less and less for the story and characters as the series progressed and ended up not reading the last two books because I just stopped caring. I wondered why a series that I loved so much in the beginning went down hill so fast for me, but in the process of falling out of love with ToG I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about the series! The lack of diversity (and misrepresentation/mistreatment of diverse characters when they were there), sexism, lazy editing and lackluster world building, among other things, came up many times for me and other former ToG fans when discussing why we became disappointed in the series. But the pitch for the book (badass morally gray assassin taking down a tyrant king for her freedom, so cool!) and some of the elements (romance, female friendships, magic, trials) sounded so amazing even though in the end it was executed poorly. So, I decided to compile a list of books that I have read and loved that have some elements and themes of ToG. This list is by no means exhaustive and is limited by the books that I have read (which is not many when you look at how many books exist in the world) so I would love to see your recommendations! Please feel free to add onto this post any recs that you have! Now onto the list!

1) Graceling by Kristin Cashore

I read this book the summer before I started ToG and completely loved it. It was one of the early books that got me back into reading and it was honestly the perfect book for that. It was exciting and I couldn’t put it down. It follows an assassin for a tyrannical king who begins to realize her own gifts for killing are more then she ever thought they could be. Cashore does a fantastic job developing the lead character Katsa and the ways that she dolls out information to the readers slowly is impeccable. While this book is technically the first in a trilogy of books taking place in the Graceling world, it can be read as a standalone fantasy (which I feel like are very rare). Another part of this book that I really loved was the romance. I usually don’t read very many straight romances (due to the sexist/problematic aspects many of the ones that I’ve read have) but the relationship between Katsa and Po is honestly a breath of fresh air when you’re used to a lot of toxicity and sexism with cishet romances in books. The two take care of each other and their relationship is very balanced. There are no gender roles pushed on either of them and they truly grow to become a team throughout the story and it’s wonderful to see! I would consider Katsa and Po, while canonically cis (there isn’t any explicit queer rep in this book), both quite androgynous characters who often express themselves in a fluid manner which I really appreciate. Over all this is an amazing classic YA fantasy that everyone should check out!

Synopsis: “Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight—she’s a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king’s thug.

She never expects to fall in love with beautiful Prince Po.

She never expects to learn the truth behind her Grace—or the terrible secret that lies hidden far away . . . a secret that could destroy all seven kingdoms with words alone.

With elegant, evocative prose and a cast of unforgettable characters, debut author Kristin Cashore creates a mesmerizing world, a death-defying adventure, and a heart-racing romance that will consume you, hold you captive, and leave you wanting more.”

2) Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

This book is the first in a five book series about three royal sisters raised to battle it out for the throne. I must admit the first book in the series is a little lackluster due to the fact that it’s setting up a lot but the second book just blows everything out of the water in a fantastic way. This series is dark and bloody and intriguing. I got completely hooked on this series and it brought out a lot of emotion to the point where I was gasping and shouting and throwing my book around as I was reading it (I got very invested)! I think that’s one of the things SJM can do well is get you hooked on her characters and Kendare can do the same (if not better). I love the dynamic between the sisters, this book does a great job at exploring the darker side of familial and female/female relationships (mostly platonic.. there isn’t very much queer rep unfortunately) that I really appreciate. The magic system and wolrdbuliding are also something that I enjoyed and I though was quite well done. Kendare does a good job at weaving in worldbuilding and magic system seamlessly into the story and I love that so much. Three Dark Crowns is just a fun and exciting series that I think anyone who loves fantasy YA should check out!

Synopsis: “ In every generation on the island of Fennbirn, a set of triplets is born—three queens, all equal heirs to the crown and each possessor of a coveted magic. Mirabella is a fierce elemental, able to spark hungry flames or vicious storms at the snap of her fingers. Katharine is a poisoner, one who can ingest the deadliest poisons without so much as a stomachache. Arsinoe, a naturalist, is said to have the ability to bloom the reddest rose and control the fiercest of lions.

But becoming the Queen Crowned isn’t solely a matter of royal birth. Each sister has to fight for it. And it’s not just a game of win or lose…it’s life or death. The night the sisters turn sixteen, the battle begins.

The last queen standing gets the crown. “

3) The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

So a little disclaimer, this book is one of my favorite fantasy books of all time. I read it over the span of a few months last summer (its a long one guys...800+ pages) and it was one of the greatest, most well thought out fantasy books I’d ever had the pleasure of reading. I loved the characters, the world, the plot, the magic system etc. I loved everything! There’s some great political intrigue, dragon riders, epic battles, prophecies, weddings, funerals, romance and just general badassery and kickassery happening. Shannon clearly put so much time and effort into this book and it shows. That kind of dedication that shows is something that I really appreciate in a book, especially a fantasy book. Another aspect that I loved so so much is the diversity in this book. It came so naturally and didn’t at all feel like tokenism. The characters, with their differing genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages, and nationalities etc, and their relationships with each other are truly what made the story. This book also has one of the BEST f/f romances I’ve ever read (as a queer woman I really loved that representation so much and felt very connected to both of those characters). Priory is a long one but if you have the time I highly recommend it.

Synopsis: “ A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep. “

4) Truthwitch by Susan Dennard

As a queer woman, I’m always a little on edge when someone mentions f/f friendship in a book. This is entirely because of the erasure many many f/f romances experience when they are just brushed off as friendships (we’ve all heard the term “gal pals”). It’s frustrating and even though I love a good f/f friendship when the f/f romances get erased and replaced by friendships it gets exhausting. However, Truthwitch is a true f/f friendship that I can fully get behind! Dennard is an author that I had been following for writing tips for a while before I finally picked up her book. I knew that she’s someone who is invested in making her series diverse, even if she herself doesn’t fit into those categories, and accepts criticism because she want’s to do her characters justice. That’s something I really appreciate seeing from white cishet authors and is one of the reasons I picked up Truthwitch. It’s so much fun and the heart of the story truly is the relationship between the two leads Safi and Iseult. Their friendship reminds me a lot of my relationship with my friends. Books about f/f relationships (romantic or otherwise) are few and far between so I really love that this book exists. Strong platonic relationships are so often pushed aside for cishet romantic ones so it’s SO refreshing to see a series where the book would not exist without Safi and Iseult’s bond. They are truly soulmates and their relationship with each other is the most important one in their lives and that is just beautiful. Not to mention this book has got an awesome magic system and is building up to an amazing fantasy series! There’s pirates, priestesses, princes and, of course, witches! It’s loads of fun all around!

Synopsis: “ Young witches Safiya and Iseult have a habit of finding trouble. After clashing with a powerful Guildmaster and his ruthless Bloodwitch bodyguard, the friends are forced to flee their home.

Safi must avoid capture at all costs as she's a rare Truthwitch, able to discern truth from lies. Many would kill for her magic, so Safi must keep it hidden - lest she be used in the struggle between empires. And Iseult's true powers are hidden even from herself.

In a chance encounter at Court, Safi meets Prince Merik and makes him a reluctant ally. However, his help may not slow down the Bloodwitch now hot on the girls' heels. All Safi and Iseult want is their freedom, but danger lies ahead. With war coming, treaties breaking and a magical contagion sweeping the land, the friends will have to fight emperors and mercenaries alike. For some will stop at nothing to get their hands on a Truthwitch. “

5) Monstress by Marjorie Liu (Writer) and Sana Takeda (Illustrator) 

Another disclaimer! This book is my favorite graphic novel, period. There is really nothing like Monstress out there and I think that it’s criminally underrated. Liu and Takeda are the perfect combo of writer/artist to make this GN come together. I’m constantly in awe of the world, characters, and story Liu built and the frankly stunning art Takeda creates to go along with it. It’s steampunk and dark and dirty and beautiful. The lead character, Maika, is one of the few truly morally gray characters that I’ve read. Her decisions will make you question if you’re a good person because you still love her despite the fact that she just killed that guy... and that guy... and those other guys. This graphic novel series is very reflective of the dark animes (like Tokyo Ghoul and Castlevania) that we are seeing more recently and I personally believe Monstress would make a fantastic animated series if it were ever to get an adaption. This book has also some great representation of queer women (Maika herself is a queer, disabled, WoC). It’s totally the norm for the world and all of the lead female characters are queer, which I just love. This story has amazing woldbulding, magic, characters etc. It’ll give you everything from giant dead gods, to talking cats with multiple tails, to demonically possessed teenage girls who need to eat people. It’s honestly amazing. (I would give a major trigger warning for blood/gore so as long as you know you can handle that I think you should check it out!)

Synopsis: “ Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900's Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steam punk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers. “

6) The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen

I never thought I would love a cishet romance as much as I love this one but here I am. The Bridge Kingdom is not really the kind of book I would normally pick up but it was on sale on kindle so I thought “why not!” And I was not disappointed. This story follows the assassin princess, Lara, who was raised to be married off to her fathers rival kingdom and kill the king. However, things get sticky when she begins to actually fall for the king and starts to realize that her father isn’t exactly who he says he is. Not only was this romance steamy as hell (this is an ADULT book folks so there are some explicit sex scenes, beware) but the world is super cool. The political intrigue was something I really enjoyed and I loved to see the world unfold from Lara’s eyes. I also totally loved Lara’s character. She’s complicated and cutthroat but ultimately want’s to do what’s right and is a character made to change and develop. I usually don’t go for that character trope that Lara fits into (beautiful and badass and despite being the MCs they somehow end up being very bland...) but Jensen managed to create a very mature and ever changing version of the YA trope that I ended up loving completely. If you love steamy fantasy romances with cool worlds and intriguing characters this is absolutely the book for you!

Synopsis: “ Lara has only one thought for her husband on their wedding day: I will bring your kingdom to its knees. A princess trained from childhood to be a lethal spy, Lara knows that the Bridge Kingdom represents both legendary evil - and legendary promise. The only route through a storm-ravaged world, the Bridge Kingdom controls all trade and travel between lands, allowing its ruler to enrich himself and deprive his enemies, including Lara's homeland. So when she is sent as a bride under the guise of fulfilling a treaty of peace, Lara is prepared to do whatever it takes to fracture the defenses of the impenetrable Bridge Kingdom.

But as she infiltrates her new home - a lush paradise surrounded by tempest seas - and comes to know her new husband, Aren, Lara begins to question where the true evil resides. Around her, she sees a kingdom fighting for survival, and in Aren, a man fiercely protective of his people. As her mission drives her to deeper understanding of the fight to possess the bridge, Lara finds the simmering attraction between her and Aren impossible to ignore. Her goal nearly within reach, Lara will have to decide her own fate: Will she be the destroyer of a king or the savior of her people? “