koi I just saw ur response to my ask :) thank u for the details!!! I can just see the choice conversation going down... but also sy who thinks it's better bc at least here he's alive even if he's ground down to dirt lmao but how do you explain that? that you know the taste of death and that it lingers in your throat? nope, way too deep and inexplicable. but I think that kind of thing would wander in the eyes sometimes, and the hope is always that nobody sees it, but if there's someone who's always looking... sy, stop looking like the devil is touching the back of your neck
ahhh sorry for all that I just really like this au 🥹 I hope I didnt overstep
NO BC YOU ACTUALLY BRING UP SMTH THATS BEEN ON MY MIND.. like one of the big things about this is sy's inner conflict because he despises sqq for having control over his life but at the same time he knows things could have been really worse without sqq's intervention. like if sqq hadn't believed sy then at best he would have sy thrown off the mountain and left to fend for himself, and at worse sqq could have killed him or tried him for an assassination attempt. so its like... its fucked up but sy owes sqq for almost everything, from his position, to the food he eats, to the clothes on his back. sy didnt know there was another transmigrator in this world when he appeared, so up until meeting sqh his survival was due to sqq. and on some fucked up level he feels like he owes sqq for saving him
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i'm sure it's been said but i feel like both Raxtus and Ronodin can be argued as "the only gay kid in the family and consequently shunned/rejected" and it's like. so weird bc Mull is so Mormon he'd probably rather eat his shorts than even acknowledge the possible existence of gays but
i mean. Raxtus literally has a fairy form. he's a fairy dragon.
Ronodin was just emo lol
and they both get so thoroughly rejected and sidelined by their families their whole lives and it turns Raxtus into an awkward but basically decent guy who runs back to the approval of his family once he's performed masculinity/violence enough to be accepted, only to then realize that he's basically just being used and still not fully trusted/accepted and having to betray them to save his real friends
(who sadly are probably actually homophobic but that's ok bc they're not dragon-phobic so that works out for him)
while Ronodin's like "fuck it. chaos and murder then!" and can you really blame him? he spent his entire life trying to conform to the "right" (in this case, Light) way of life, started spending time with the outgroup and learned to question things, then was told he was "too corrupt" to remain in his home
like. the symbolism is right there.
it's so funny, because sure Raxtus isn't a bad guy, but Ronodin definitely is and he pretty much gets sent to a type of hell at the end of Dragonwatch
and while Raxtus gets kind of a happy ending, like, him becoming an effective killer in a war and being accepted by his dad for being Good At Murder in the first Fablehaven series is presented as a happy ending. if Celebrant didn't wind up being the main villain for Dragonwatch, that probably would've been the end of it! gay kid learns how to soldier and is finally accepted by his homophobic family bc he's finally aggressive enough for them to love him
(i mean i have MANY issues with Celebrant being the main villain later and the reasons he's framed as bad but like. that's a separate rant lol)
the queer reading is right there. but also it's very bad and you can tell completely unintentional. or at the very least highly repressed. idk man i don't look into Mull as a personal individual bc i doubt i'll like what i see and i don't care that much but Dragonwatch was SO MUCH MORE MORMON than Fablehaven already was and it's so weird, seeing the fingerprints of it all over.
i feel like he either has a new editor or he's been doing this for long enough and sold enough books that he has the clout to veto changes made by editors or SOMETHING, bc i feel like? he's gotten worse?? and more unfiltered?? that or something happened and he's like. even more religious than before or something idk
like fablehaven was just kinda generic/bland fantasy with some fun ideas for magic items/powers/one sentence character premises, with just a hint of sus Mormon ideology, and then Dragonwatch just went. Full Mormon.
but then there's somehow even more weirdly queer shit. like. he's repressing so hard he's approaching queer from the other side??
idk man i wish this deeply mediocre man's writing wasn't a formative piece of middle school reading, leading to me still giving more of a shit than i really should over questionable children's literature now
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