tabacoychanel

The Last Kingdom S4

• Saw this coming: Witger shooting his father instead of Uhtred; Beocca sacrificing himself for Young Uhtred; Brida killing Cnut personally.


• Uhtred: My whole family was taken from me. Without Beocca I have no home.


• Brida to Uhtred: Send me to Valhalla.


• Aethelred: I wish you had been as faithful to me as you were to Mercia. To live without being loved is torture. —> Toby Regbo is acting the hell out of this scene and this role generally. I love him sfm.


• I don’t like the Welsh costume choices they ugly af.


• Uhtred to Aethelflaed: Edward’s authority is under threat and men under threat do not always act with wisdom.


• Eadith fomenting Aethelflaed’s escape—love to see it!!!! Solidarity amongst women who are bartered their whole lives like chess pieces.


• Uhtred to Aethelflaed: Lady, Mercia has abandoned you. —> YO THAT’S MY SHIP. That’s my ship and it’s being dashed into tiny pieces of driftwood before my eyes. This is fine. I am fine.


• Aethelflaed: If you are asking me to choose between a ruler who is best for Mercia or who is best for me, I will choose one who is best for Mercia.


• Uhtred, to Pyrlig, on the baptism: Is my word not enough? —> ahhhh that’s the thing though, his word has never been enough. Doubt and suspicion follows him everywhere and he’s fucking sick of it.


• Uhtred, after they take his daughter hostage: They will not take what is not theirs, not as long as I live.


• Stiorra’s convo with Sigtrygg’s convo is everything omg: My father has never betrayed anyone. He was often torn between those who loved him as their own and those of his blood.


• SIgtrygg’s “the king is not a decisive man” is the understatement of the century lmao.


• Brida went full Darth Vader in the finale holy shit

The Vampire Diaries S1 through mid-S5

• Vicki: If I wanted to be treated like trash I’d go back to Tyler.


• Elena is huge on trust; Stefan keeps everything he possibly can from her. This is not a recipe for a functioning relationship.


• Damon, not Stefan, is the one who steps up to erase Jeremy’s memories of Vicki’s murder. Stefan is righteous where Damon wears his reputation like a shield. Won’t take credit for his good acts.


• Caroline: I’m worse than shallow I’m a kiddie pool.


• Caroline: You ever feel like there’s not a person in the world that loves you?


• Stefan: Why are you trying to save him? Elena: I’m not trying to save him I’m trying to save you.


• Damon: I’ll adopt the Stefan diet. Just nothing with feathers.


• Damon, tossing a football to Stefan: Don’t forget who taught you how to play this game.


• Damon: You’re pathetic when you’re fishing. Stefan: And you’re transparent when you’re deflecting.


• Elena: I’ll be with the two of you, I’ll be safe.


• Damon: Can I trust him? Elena: I’m wearing vervain, Damon. Damon: I’m not trying to compel you. Just answer me honestly—can I trust him?


• Damon: Give me the book, Stefan, or I will stab her in the neck and you and I will have a vampire girlfriend.


• Bonnie: You can’t go in there. The fire will take you out. Stefan: He’s my brother, Bonnie.


• Stefan: I’m not going to fight you. Damon: Why? I’d fight me. Stefan: Katherine’s going to play us against each other. You do know how this works, right?


• Damon to Isabel: You don’t come into my town and threaten Elena.


• Jeremy: Is it easier? Damon: Oh, it’s hard either way.


• Jeremy: I remember when my dad died I had a house full of strangers telling me how great he was. Tyler: Difference is, in your case it was true.


• Damon: If they’re not vampires then what the hell are they? Stefan: Maybe they’re ninja turtles.


• Damon to Jeremy: My father hated vampires too. Same reason yours did…Only it was 1864 and people knew how to whittle. (holds up Jeremy’s poorly carved wooden stake)


• Stefan: I was empathetic as a human and as a vampire all those feelings were amplified. Caroline: So you’re saying that now, I’m basically an insecure, neurotic control freak on crack.


• Stefan: You’re not gonna kill her. Damon: Don’t give me that goody-goody crap. Stefan: You’re not gonna kill her because I will.


• Elena: Damon, he’s Caroline’s dad. Damon: And when I kill him she’ll have one more parent than me and Stefan do.


• Damon at Klaus’s dinner party: Hey Stef, remember when you killed Dad? Might want to dial down the judgment till dessert.


• Daemon on the Mikaelsons: It’s not bad enough they’re moving into town, now they want a housewarming gift?


• Elijah: Mother made us vampires. She didn’t make us monsters. We did that to ourselves.


• Caroline: And that werewolf road leads straight to vampire boulevard.


• Daemon: Why don’t you just ask Ric if his dirty little doctor had access to the weapons. Alaric: You’re on speakerphone, dick. Elena: It’s not her, ok? I refuse to believe your luck with women is that tragic. Daemon: Who knows about your secret little slayer stash? Alaric: I’ve got weapons everywhere— here, my loft, the school, your car.


• Alaric to Damon and Stefan: Unlike some people in this room, I would like to take responsibility for the people I’ve killed.


• Klaus: Rebekah wasn’t even out of her box a day before she put a dagger in me.


• Rebekah: The Salvatores may fight like dogs but in the end they would die for each other. They know what family means. Klaus: I wanted a family. They didn’t want me.


• Rebekah to Klaus: But I realize that after a thousand years together as a family you’re the only one who’s never left me.


• Katherine: When Klaus shows up to kill us all, I’ll be in the tomb, where no vampire can enter because they can’t get out. I’ll be the safest psychotic bitch in town.


• Caroline: Do what? Be a vampire or be a parent? Because I can help you be a vampire. Abby: She’s better off without me. Caroline: No, no one is better off without their parent.


• Jeremy: When you find your sister unconscious you bring her to the hospital. Damon: Not when you have a parade of vampires at your disposal!


• Damon: I thought I could win her from you fair and square. She didn’t want me. It’s for the best. I’m better at being the bad guy anyway.


• Damon to Stefan: Have I told you lately how much I appreciate you not being the dumbest brother alive?


• Damon: So do you want the cure because she’s a vampire and she’s not meant to be that way, or because you can’t love her the way she is? Because if I’m going to ride this fairytale to its conclusion, let’s be clear about one thing—I love her either way. So if we’re doing this we’re doing this for you, brother.


• Damon: You should’ve called Stefan. Elena: I don’t trust him right now. Damon, as Stefan walks in the door: P.S. I called Stefan.


• Damon: I don’t want to do this, Elena. I’m not the good guy, remember? I lie to my brother, I take his girl, I don’t wanna do the right thing.


• Damon, shooting Klaus: That’s for Carol Lockwood.


• Rebekah: Did that hurt, having someone you love drive a dagger through your heart? Stefan: Go to hell: Rebekah: Did. That. Hurt. Stefan: Yes. Rebekah: Welcome to the last 900 years of my life.

D.B. Jackson, Thieftaker (2011) (Thieftaker #1) A private investigator in a pre-revolutionary noir Boston gets beat up by thugs—like really, graphically gets the shit beat out of him on multiple occasions and he’s also a sort of blood mage into the bargain so he’s constantly cutting himself open to power his (totally illegal!) magic. It’s historical fantasy and it somehow makes me wish for both less history and less fantasy?? How is that possible? I’m ok with magecraft being stigmatized and associated with the Salem Witch Trials, but the concept of using Latin to cast spells is so vanilla, and then he goes and gives you a verbatim English translation which takes the oomph right out of it. I don’t want to give the impression the book wasn’t gripping because it was, and I like Ethan quite a lot, but the actual plot when you examine it would not have stood up to a stiff breeze. Ethan’s emotional arc was resolved but the plot was a shambles. Bruh you are writing a m y s t e r y. Step up your game.

Erin Claiborne, A Hero at the End of the World (2014) This is what Carry On could have been had it been written by someone who was a participant in fandom rather than a lurker on the outskirts of it (which is what Rainbow Rowell was). Erin Claiborne has somehow written a coffeeshop AU where the stakes are saving-the-world high, which sounds like a contradiction in terms but isn’t. Erin Claiborne is eleveninches, one of the co-authors of the mind-bogglingly-meta Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain American on Film fic, among others. A Hero at the End of the World is paced like fanfic, not like profic (there’s an amnesia trope and a spot of random alternate-universe-hopping), and while it wasn’t exactly the story of my heart it was a delight from start to finish (which is more than I can say about Carry On which I found emotionally impenetrable). I would describe it as following Ron Weasley’s post-Hogwarts career as an Auror, I guess? After he slew Voldemort and this opened an irreparable breach between him and Harry, who now works as a barista. Written by someone who has a much better grasp of Harry’s character than of Ron’s, I would judge. I wouldn’t say Claiborne is a writer who gets me, since there is a notable lack of obsessive pining in this light fluffy cream puff of a story, but her banter is without peer. Standouts include “You pay taxes?” “Of course I don’t pay taxes, I’m rich” and when the Draco-analogue sputters in disbelief, “You were going to send my mother to Mount Unpleasant like a common criminal?” Lmao he’s less upset they’re sending Lucius to Azkaban than that Azkaban is the prison of the proletariat. Really brings the class analysis that was missing from HP (to be fair Carry On did not lack for the class lens either). Plus there is a surprising quantity of theory baked into the worldbuilding, which is neat because HP’s magic has always struck me as very logical and orderly on a micro level but on a macro level none of that shit makes any sense.

Cat Rambo, “Red in Tooth and Cog” Protagonist becomes a reluctant caretaker at a nature preserve for feral appliances. What a well-executed story! “There are no shelters for abandoned machines. We are reprocessed. Recycled. Reborn, perhaps. Probably not.”

Sam J. Miller, “Calved” “He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant.” Succeeds in being both a damning indictment of toxic masculinity and an ode to fatherhood. Actually, it does one by doing the other. I don’t think the climate change stuff was integrated as well as it could’ve been but still an extremely moving story.

Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders (2017) (Terra Ignota #2) I have read the Iliad TWICE because two different professors assigned it and I’ve never understood why it was a cornerstone of Western art until now. It definitely helped that Ada Palmer’s version was a Pacific Rim fusion AU that took place on the moon with jaeger pilots. This book was two-thirds setup and the final third packed more fireworks than all of China on Lunar New Year. I mean, there are plenty of books that are constructed like puzzle-boxes, and you have that eureka moment when all the clues slot into place, but those revelations are confined to the pages of those books. Ada Palmer’s gift is shucking you like a corn husk and showing the inside of your own brain to you. I’m not saying I was less dazed by her virtuosity in this second book than in Too Like the Lightning, and I’m aware they’re supposed to be one continuous story, but at least I was prepared for it this time—the first time it happened I just about lost consciousness.

If I had to summarize Seven Surrenders in one sentence I’d say it’s a conversation about how to make public policy decisions, how to weigh short-term vs long-term considerations (the more accurate but less useful summary would be the exploding-head emoji). How does every one of these fictional world leaders protesting “We didn’t create this system we just inherited it” still manage to show more accountability than any of our real-world political leaders in this convulsive and epochal moment lol. Does complacency stifle innovation—not in the trite “we’re a venture-capital-funded tech startup look at us Innovate” sense, but in the real sense? Is there nobility in the vocation of being a soldier, even if there is only savagery in war itself? How does Ada Palmer gild mundane events in baroque language but make a routine recitation of hereditary titles sound deranged and pathetic?

A non-exhaustive list of things that hurt me or amused me: The metaphorical resonance of Mycroft’s cyborg heart!! That every Hive has their pet name for Jehovah and Utopia’s is “The Alien.” The way Papadelias caught Saladin’s scent because Mycroft slipped up and used the same trick twice. When they’re all gathered at the G7 brothel to hear the results of the paternity test like it’s a tabloid talk show and Faust snorts, “I don’t think much can be done to keep me from being the child’s uncle” (I wouldn’t say I’ve come around to liking Felix Faust but his brain fascinates me). Whoah I did not expect the Mitsubishi to be the only Hive to go down fighting (their whole one-share-one-vote plutocracy rubbed me the wrong way for obvious I’m-a-socialist reasons). When the Utopians offer Madame their conditions for surrender and Madame fishes for information and Mushi stonewalls her with “Ma’am this is a negotiation, I will only share relevant info” that was great (I wonder if it’s Mycroft’s partiality that colors my sympathies here—he admits his bias against Thisbe but I haven’t noticed him admitting the same of Madame—either way I hate Madame and everything she stands for—I don’t hate the 18th century I just can’t relate to how she wants to build an atom bomb merely to prove she can???). I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that anarchist!Saladin is now Madame’s dog but it did surprise me that Mycroft didn’t take it as a betrayal?

Before I started Seven Surrenders the name Apollo Mojave would have rung a dim bell but now, now I see he’s the absence this book is built around. The scene where Cornel Mason tracks the truant Mycroft to Apollo’s statue and they mourn him together is so powerful (the Martian ants!!!). So, let’s talk about Mycroft’s murder trial. I get why we only see this fourteen-years-past trial now, with the weight of the first book’s events to drive it home, and it is impeccably done. All the big set-pieces are impeccably executed, Sniper outing the G7 brothel on live TV, Jehovah’s assassination on the steps of the Senate building. Even the buildup of tension to Carlyle’s first “sensayer session” with Dominic was like nothing I saw in book 1. But back to Mycroft, who murdered Apollo (or challenged him to single combat and prevailed?). It broke his heart to do it. He didn’t expect to be exonerated or celebrated for it, he just expected it to work, and Providence denied him even that. The fates are cruel. I love that Apollo was the brightest star in the Utopian filament not because he was the smartest, but because he was a skilled communicator who could translate their ideas into concepts the other Hives could understand. I think my pro-Utopia bias is showing, and it hasn’t abated, despite learning they’re just as “dirty” as the other Hives. I’m pretty proud of myself: The only time I cried reading this book was when Mycroft confessed he wasn’t finishing Apollo’s Iliad, he was writing this account instead, because this--not Apollo's words but the world he made--was the most fitting monument to his memory. And then Achilles fucking strolls out and I was like ofc!!!! Lieutenant Aimer!!! The fucking Sadcat parable ahhhh how did I not see this coming.

If I wasn't already agnostic Ada Palmer would have barred my path to atheism, not because she's changed my mind about God but because she's changed my mind about humanity.

“There is something a little good in war. Trial by combat.” “It is not strange for the deaths of saints to be accompanied by miracles.” “They saved the world.” “Made the world, more like. Two thousand, two hundred and four deaths buy one golden age.” “I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.” “We would hardly work so hard for our utopias if we let ourselves live in the illusion that they are already real.” “I did not plan this. I simply resurrected the weapons with which it was done.” “There has to be an Outsider or the next strangest will be named Outsider.” “She is an unexpected threat, outside the palette of the possible, as when a fortress city, whose death-stained towers have stopped a hundred battle lines, is brought low by a pestilence within.” “Snakes sleep most of their lives, you know—they stir only to feed.” “A kind God would have left us Bridger. A cruel One would have left us nothing. This One left you. You know how to fight this war, Achilles.” “When Utopians forge Earth’s rare metals into dragon fleets that feed on sunlight as they bear their masters across the sky-white surface of the Moon, they are wizards, even if they use science to deny it.” “If Fate had set all the treasures of this world before him, the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, the Armor of Achilles, Asclepius’s wand that raises loved ones from Hades’s hall, Papa would have chosen this.” “His Grace is an exile in time, and it is madness to him that his subjects are his by vote, and not by birth or conquest.” “My old self had been so armored in conviction that it had never hesitated. My new, raw self did not yet know to name these icy stab-wounds ‘doubt.’” “I lived in that unique and absolute philosophic calm of one who has already drunk the hemlock, or already sees his heart’s blood streaming from the wound.” “But I gave that up to teach you, gentle reader, what violence the human beast can sow when we are free.” “I didn’t have to destroy you, Cornel. I just turned all of you into 18th century aristocrats and let you do it yourselves.” “Tyrants and assassins have a great symbiosis.” “I need a companion in this world who is neither my subject nor my enemy.” “Think of our perversion as topiary. We all had the seeds in us, but it’s Madame who made them art.” “I should have but to Will a thing for it to be, yet here I was reduced to these weak tools: hands, eyes, memory. Beyond these limits I would be forever powerless … I have learned, I think, to eke out more from what this flesh can do than any human, but no finite thing can substitute for lost infinity.” “I was not Apollo’s pupil, nor his killer; Cornel was not the avenger nor the unrequited lover; we were just two people who had lost the same friend.” “Oh, miraculous chameleon, Science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith!” “As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.” “The Utopians fuel their Spaceships with whatever they can mine from the Space Rocks they’ve already reached, and the Resources on those Space Rocks limit how much further they can go. You’re the only Outpost left on my Frontier with enough Resources to let me go further.” “And thanks to Madame’s training, Dominic believes a man may only love something weaker than himself.” “Bash by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely.” “Nor would you speak with ease if you saw the better part of your heart severed on a table before you. It was the better part, not the clumsy meat pump biology had fit me with, but love’s creation, mine and Saladin’s, which Saladin planted to mark his territory, so every clock tick that measured my life’s hours was his as much as mine.” “Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied.” “Don’t let the living stay mortal and the dead stay dead because of me. Apollo, Seine Mardi, older heroes, Patriarch Voltaire, Diogenes, Odysseus, MASON who will die someday, Papa, good Spain, my Saladin, and every victim of the coming war, they all could walk the Earth another hundred years, five hundred, live to walk on Mars, on Titan, on the ship decks wrought of substances undreamt-of which will someday bear us to the Sea of Stars. If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world."

Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting (1958) Mary Stewart is PEERLESS at invoking an atmosphere of Gothic suspense but I don’t like where she went with this story. I also don’t think the house was sufficiently seductive—the house is the whole point of the genre after all (Jo Walton’s definition: “Gothic”=girl/house love affair). Our protagonist is an ingenue English governess who arrives at a creepy French chateau shrouded in secrets. She’s got her own secret—she’s fluent in French (she is in fact half-French by birth), and hiding it from her employer. The payoff for this secret—and all the other secrets—is pretty lackluster. I kept waiting for another reversal that would shake up what we (our first-person POV) thought we knew, but it never came. In fairness at 50% of Jane Eyre we had already got the madwoman in the attic reveal, so plot twists don’t always need to come backloaded, but I actually think the root of this book’s failings come from trying too hard to be the anti-Jane Eyre. Jane/Rochester is not my cuppa tea but there’s no denying the man’s magnetic appeal both to Jane and the reader. Stewart spends the whole novel vitiating that appeal (including the appeal of the all-important house), painting a disabled man as sinister and villainous—at one point our protagonist even chooses her practical English heritage over her passionate French heritage. I was ready to throw hands. Wtf, Mary Stewart? Did you think readers of Gothic romance gravitate to the genre because they dislike having strong emotions and sublime aesthetic experiences? JANE EYRE CHOSE ROCHESTER. She did not choose St. John Rivers. But then, maybe this was exactly the incensed reaction Stewart was aiming to incite in the reader. I’m glad I read this, it had me on the edge of my seat and I retract my earlier criticism: it’s not anti-Jane Eyre it’s Jane Eyre-lite.

Charlie Stross, Empire Games (2017) (Merchant Princes #7) It’s a cold-war spy novel disguised as alternate history! The characters are across-the-board milquetoast but they engage in heart-thumping espionage exercises so it’s cool. The book’s core relationship is between our protagonist, Rita, and her grandfather who defected from East Germany to the USA. Anytime a story is about one’s bond with one’s immigrant grandparent I am on board. Some shadowy arm of the US security state drafts Rita as a covert asset in their campaign of interdimensional warfare (Rita possesses the “world-walking” gene that lets her jaunt between dimensions) and they run psyops on her, and they’re all a barrel of bad apples all the way down because repeat after me kids, imperialism is by its very nature anti-democratic. I think Stross did a better job hammering the anti-imperialist argument than the pro-democratic argument, and I think he hammered both arguments rather more crudely than one ought to in a work of fiction, so I guess he’s lucky I’m more or less on the same wavelength as him politically. I emerged from this book feeling scared as hell because he’s not wrong—we’re all subject to unrelenting surveillance, in cyberspace and in meatspace, there’s no such thing as data privacy—so maybe I too should get my hands on an out-of-print copy of Man in the High Castle to use for a running key cipher?

meretricula

I actually watched Marriage Story this week and I'm confused about why it's so ~controversial when it's straight-up anti-divorce-lawyer propaganda?? If there is one thing we as a society can agree on it's our hatred of divorce lawyers.

Also watched the Taylor Swift documentary and I gotta say my problem with it was not that it was performative and fake, it was that it was boring and basic and I guess if I wanted to actually learns something about how female artists navigate the shark-infested waters of the music industry I'd just rewatch Nashville lol

don't think i mentioned this on here buti saw Knives Out and it was, as advertised, fucking brilliant. sometimes good movies are good because they activate some emotion or thought process you’d never have imagined on your own; THIS movie though? i wanted an “eat the rich” movie that was also mega hella entertaining and Rian Johnson delivered it to me in SPADES

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) Historically the market has been subordinate to, or an appendage of, society. Along came the 19th century to upset that applecart. You can’t substitute “pecuniary gain” for “social relationships” as the organizing principle of human activity without causing strife, dislocation, and suffering on a planetary scale—Polanyi calls it a “cataclysm.” Karl Polanyi is a thinker of titanic stature and his ideas have dribbled down to me via so many other thinkers that by the time I encountered the source they were well chewed over. I also think the level of granular detail we got about, say, parliamentary machinations in Prussia was of limited utility to the average lay reader. However, as far as the big picture goes, Polanyi’s work holds up. He’s so prescient that his entire final chapter is “the center cannot hold, it’s either socialism or fascism.” Another way of putting it is that, contra Econ 101, “society” is metaphysically upstream of “the individual.” It’s nonsensical to speak of “the government” meddling in “the market”: There is no market without society. It is because the market is embedded in society that we had to totally overhaul our social relations just so that market values could reign supreme. Sidenote: it’s fascinating that during the apocalyptic (in terms of how it decimated communities) transition to a market-based society you saw a lot of strange bedfellows—for instance, landlords and peasants arrayed against industrialists.

Seanan McGuire, The Unkindest Tide (2019) (October Daye #13) It’s the selkie book! Following on the heels of the Tam Lin book. It’s another Luidaeg-centric one. No lie this book is 35% Luidaeg and I’m digging it bc I relate to her sense of humor. It’s not that I don’t think Seaman McGuire’s funny; but she’s not as funny as she thinks she is, and wow does Quentin get more than his fair share of zingers. This book carries over many of the thematic concerns of the previous book, only with less “healing from trauma” and more “this is a how-not-to-parent manual.” The cruelest line was when tertiary character Liz Ryan spat at Toby, “You’re lucky one of us knows how to be a mother.” I mean OUCH. There’s a moment when Toby registers her own culpability in this clusterfuck—that she’s repeated her own mother’s mistakes by raising her own daughter to expect one set of rules where an entirely different set actually applies. Sometimes I think about that tumblr shitpost about how Frodo had to leave for the Grey Havens bc they don’t have therapists on Middle Earth …but surely they have therapists in San Francisco??? Why don’t Toby, Tybalt et al take advantage of said therapists??? What I liked: that in a world of unequal bargains and unpayable debts volition still matters; that humans understand change less well than the fae because they’re born & die in the same bodies—it’s axiomatic that mortality=change so this role-reversal felt very fresh, and seems to constitute an anti-Cartesian argument for an embodied existence (it’s literally a book about selkies). What I disliked: When the character beats hit in this series, they REALLY hit (I’m still recovering from the Simon book). Otoh everything in between is kind of wobbly. You notice it more in minor books like this precisely because there aren’t as many major beats to anchor it.

Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings (2015) (Dandelion Dynasty #1) Less than the sum of its parts. I’m circulating a petition to make Ken Liu write fairy tale retellings and only fairy tale retellings, who’s with me. The man is so good at this one thing that you wonder why he bothers doing anything else (I jest, I jest; I do not at all wonder that he tried his hand at epic fantasy rather than spend the rest of his life regretting the missed opportunity). It wasn’t that I didn’t get attached to the characters, but they’d get their heads lopped off as soon as I learned their names (or self-immolate in some other messy fashion). In theory I’m receptive to the idea of vignettes featuring one-off POVs building toward a larger story—I have, in fact, read Water Margin which is one of the ur-texts this novel is in conversation with, since it’s about BANDITS and OUTLAWS resisting an empire—but for pete’s sake there needs to be more connective tissue than this. I found our main Guile Hero, Kuni Garu, to be irresistible but by himself he was not up to the task of making the whole book hang together. Ken Liu excels at the kind of cruel reversals and bittersweet triumphs that epitomize fairy tales; even his politicking reads like parables (the antelope/horse episode!!!). But short stories are like carving a miniature figurine of fixed dimensions—you have to fit the story to the container. Novels give you a lot more latitude in designing the shape of the container but the tradeoff is you may suffer decision fatigue from having to make all these CHOICES about what to put in it. I know Ken Liu is aware of this because he’s talked about it in a blog post. Quite a gap between theory and praxis, there. I DNF’d it at 50%, life is too short and this book is too long.

Steven Brust, Teckla (1987) (Vlad Taltos #3) 3 books into a series about internecine elf mafia wars I was not expecting to be crying about a fight I had with my husband; Vlad and Cawti fight the way married people fight. I wasn’t expecting to be singing “Solidarity Forever” either. Teckla is the book where assimilationist Vlad’s revolutionary wife joins an anarchist cell, puts her body in the gears of the machine and Vlad loses half his hair from stress. I kept waiting for Brust to commit to one side or the other—can violent insurrection ever change an oppressive status quo? Does class struggle get the goods or not? Is Cawti right that strength lies in numbers & organizing the masses, or is Vlad right to be apprehensive of a paramilitary crackdown (it is after all what they did to Occupy Wall Street)? I had written Cawti off in the previous books as merely a useful sounding board for Vlad to bounce ideas off (to say Brust has a heavy hand with romance is perhaps to understate the case). Imagine my surprise when in this book she has sincere ideological commitments where Vlad has only a very Slytherin commitment to protecting the people who belong to him. The contrast does Vlad no favors. He was ready to blow up dozens of innocent people to “save” her, until he met Frantz the Ghost (which btw raises interesting worldbuilding questions about reincarnation & souls). This supposed contradiction he touts between putting abstract ideals first and putting actual people first majorly annoyed me until someone (Kelly) finally called Vlad out on it. Honestly if anybody is devaluing human lives here it is Vlad, who was about to assassinate a house full of people who have done him no harm. Kelly points out, quite rightly, “for Easterners and Teckla in this world, these aren’t problems an individual can solve” and Vlad “Bootstraps” Taltos shoots back “I’m an individual. I solved them. I got out of there and made something of myself.” Ok buddy way to miss the point. This is a world where ten-year-olds (Natalia) are reduced to pickpocketing to survive. I don’t think the narrative comes down as strongly on the revolutionaries’ side as I would, but it sure doesn’t permit Vlad to persist in the delusion that he can refuse to pick a side. I’m dying to know what happened in the decades-ago uprising that took Vlad’s grandma’s life, and apparently turned Vlad’s dad into a reactionary, and why Vlad’s grandpa thinks that conflict was unavoidable but this one is ill-advised? I loved seeing Vlad’s Ravenclaw Secondary side which caused him physical pain when he had to change a plan at the last minute lmao. I missed Morrolan and Aliera, if only for the group dynamic born of long association—in the last book I remember Aliera threatening to do something stupid and/or wave a big stick around, and Vlad and Morrolan being entirely unmoved by her theatrics, and Vlad assuring newcomer Cawti it was fine, just Aliera being Aliera. I think Kragar is the real MVP and deserves a big fat raise & some stock options for working what sounds like 80 hour weeks at a critical time for the organization. I’m starting to get a better handle on Loiash, too—seeing a cross-section of Dragaeran society brings it home to me how lonely Vlad the Perpetual Outsider must’ve been all these years, and as a support system Loiash isn’t perfect but he’s a sight better than nothing. In conclusion SOLIDARITY FOREVER (for the union makes us strong).

LOTR Reread: Appendix A: Annals of the Kings and the Rulers: I don’t know why fifteen-year-old me skipped the appendices but it would have signficantly augmented my enjoyment if I hadn’t. I’m starting with them this time and it’s the best decision I ever made in my life (why was I not apprised that like 25% of the Peter Jackson films are stitched from the appendices). Tolkien is clearly not here to tell a story in the conventional sense, because what kind of storyteller worth his salt would have shoved all that Sauruman foreshadowing, the juicy Denethor backstory, the Aragorn/Arwen courtship into the appendix??? Tolkien gives zero fucks if everybody, even walk-on cameo characters, has four different names and important locations are routinely renamed something else and this causes confusion & consternation in his readers. Because what Tolkien does care about is creating a lived-in world. Nuggets of info that stuck with me: The echoes of Pelennor Field in the founding of the Mark (which the Steward of Gondor granted to Eorl the Young to requite the late, unlooked for charge that saved Gondor’s hide), the divine origins of the breed of horses that spawned Gandalf’s Shadowfax, why they call it Helms Deep. Can you tell I’m a Rohan loyalist lmao. Amidst the babel of names that I defy anyone to keep track of one begins to discern a pattern, a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance, an ancestor who didn’t receive his due, an insult that demands an answer, and round and round it goes. Catelyn Stark was right, and Ellaria Sand was right: Where does it end? Wow what happened to the Númenorians really brought home to me that LOTR is a story about the ordeal of exile. Kate Nepvu shares her thoughts on Tor.com and my sentiments are in line with hers, re: Appendix A was presented suboptimally and I would’ve preferred a combined A & B especially since I’m approaching this material for the first time and haven’t heard 90% of these names before. As for the other appendices … I glanced at them cursorily, and if someone as smart as Kate didn’t get much out of an exhaustive “Baggins of Hobbiton” family tree I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) The consensus seems to be it works better as an immigrant narrative than as an intersex or transgender narrative. I’m not saying “he’s a TERF throw him in the dungeon with JK Rowling” i’m saying parts of this book haven’t aged well (the gender essentialism). When I was fifteen I bounced off it bc I didn’t vibe with the narrative voice but now? The only way I could be having a better time is if I was high on cough syrup. I still think Cal’s voice is overly precious but I can recognize the authentic sentiments he’s trying to convey: every few pages a line hits me like a freight train.The humor lies in the incongruence between the high subject matter and the low register in which the tale is told. Using as his frame the kind of intergenerational family saga that’s gone out of vogue, Eugenides has given us a (partial, but not less true) history of the American twentieth century. And that’s the part that has aged well. It’s not a radical take, but it’s much more critical of the status quo than I expected (Lefty’s surreal experience at his short-lived factory job stood out to me for the ferocity with which it took the worker’s side over capital’s side; also the Detroit riots as “Second American Revolution” holy smokes). Cal doesn’t have a dating history; what he does have is a family history. I found the final third of the book tough going bc “identity” takes center stage while “family” fades into the background—look, if I’m going to read a book steeped in teenage angst I expect you to do me the basic courtesy of taking the subject matter seriously! This is where Eugenides’s playful tone tells against him (alas, it worked so beautifully in the first half). The ending was perfect and poetic and I cried but I wish I didn’t have to wade through 200 pages of “the trials of puberty” to get there. I think it’s pretty inarguable Cal did not so much discover his gender identity at age fourteen as discover that being a girl sucked in every possible way, and found the first available exit strategy. Can’t blame the kid.

Nina Allan, The Dollmaker (2019) “A court dwarf wouldn’t count as a lover though—he barely even counted as a person.” “Time was a device invented by humans to keep themselves sane.” I read Nina Allan’s The Race a few years ago and it has HAUNTED me despite my inability to grok what she was doing, or indeed what was happening. I had the same experience with The Dollmaker, only this time I managed to overanalyze less and enjoy it more. Nina Allan has the unsettling gift of the obverse-Guillermo-del-Toro: instead of making the monstrous familiar she makes the familiar monstrous. I went back over the book in my head after I was done to confirm that there were minimal speculative or supernatural elements. And yet you feel the cold edge of the uncanny in the shape of the very sentences. The Dollmaker is about a dollmaker, and about repressed & lonely misfits generally, but what it really is is an experiment in the form of the novel. The sheer recursivity of it is gobsmacking, stories within stories like nesting dolls, and what are the recurring archetypes? Conniving dwarves, persecuted homosexuals, unfaithful one-eyed queens, uneven friendships and imbalanced relationships. I’ve never seen anyone integrate nesting stories to such devastating effect except maybe Juliet Marillier, who has the advantage of working explicitly in the fairy-tale-retelling tradition. What Nina Allan is doing is much closer to Ted “i will fuck you up without you even noticing” Chiang. At the end of the day I still couldn’t tell you what the book was about but I know two things: (1) Allan is a short story writer who is only lately learning to be a novelist, and it shows. (2) Allan has the courage to portray cruel people with grotesque desires who don’t apologize for who they were, and I esteem her forever for that.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011) “Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety. He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionally. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.” Genre fiction usually centers on its protagonist’s burning desire to do or be something. The (frustratingly passive) protagonist of Zone One is a cipher. His ostensible mission is to eradicate zombies in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of New York but his actual mission seems to be to banish past and future. If all writing exists on a continuum from “visceral” to “cerebral” Colson Whitehead falls squarely into the “cerebral” camp. I don’t say that to dunk on him—I’m pretty cerebral myself—just to explain why he captures the ennui of living under late-stage capitalism better than 99% of “realistic” fiction does. His satire bites; his protagonist is a guy who’s always identified more with the monstrous cyborg Other than with “normal” folks. Oh I was not expecting this fugue-like narrative to end in a jam-packed action sequence lmao. Tbh if Whitehead’s reputation hadn’t preceded him I’m not sure I’d have finished the book. It reads like a minor work from a major author, and I’m looking forward to The Underground Railroad.

Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside (Founders #1) (2018) In a staggeringly unequal city where property rights are worth more than human rights, Sancia is a thief who gets in over her head when she’s tasked with stealing something so valuable her employer can’t afford to let her live to tell of it. This book is one long series of chase scenes & would make a dope movie. Robert Jackson Bennett has certainly gotten better at building tension since City of Stairs; he doesn’t just load up the whole plate with worldbuilding anymore. Sancia acquires two major allies—one an undead revenant who periodically possesses her, the other the scion of merchant dynasty who’s trying to reform the broken system from the inside. It works out great because Clef has big chaotic dumbass energy and Gregor is nothing if not über-lawful! I will say this book managed to surprise me not once but twice in the third act, I was expecting it to fizzle out and instead I got two emotionally satisfying revelations. Is it a damn solid book? Yes. If I could go back in time would I tell my past self to just reread Six of Crows instead? Also yes.

LOTR Rewatch Spent 90% of it in panegyrics over how good the score was. I swear at this point I have a Pavlovian heartrate-speedup response to the “Riders of Rohan” fanfare—by the time we got to the big charge at Pelennor Fields (real talk how big was that brass section?? the size of a football field?) I was losing my goddamn mind. I remember now why Two Towers is my favorite—the action scenes bore me least. I didn’t even want to watch Fellowship but witcherology made me and I’m so glad she did, I DO NOT KNOW WHAT STRENGTH IS IN MY BLOOD BUT I WILL NOT LET THE WHITE CITY FALL NOR OUR PEOPLE FAIL and then he closes Boromir’s fingers around the hilt of his sword so he can go to Valhalla adfdfkjd. I also forgot that the whole reason “they’re taking the hobbits to Isengard” happened is bc Merry & Pippin threw themselves down on the chopping block as a distraction so Frodo could get away?? I hate Denethor in DIRECT proportion to how much I love his sons and I love his sons A LOT. It’s like … you can’t really hate Voldemort, so you hate Umbrage because she’s a real person? That’s why Denethor is The Worst thanks for coming to my ted talk. Friendly reminder folks make sure you watch the extended edition not the theatrical cut, otherwise you’ll miss Éowyn’s face when she finds out Aragorn is 87 years old. I had no subtitles and therefore no idea what Arwen, Elrond & co. were saying during those flashbacks but they were saying it sexily so it was fine.

My appreciation for Sam grew the most during this rewatch but my appreciation for Faramir deepened the most: his face when he heard “Osgilliath is lost” oh my baby boy would do anything not to disappoint Dad again. And I paid more attention to the elegiac quality of Tolkien’s “glory days are past” nostalgia that suffuses everything; how is it possible every third line out of Théoden’s mouth is poetry? Some things haven’t changed, anyway: Pippin singing that song still gives me chills.

me: hi it’s Karl "i have chemistry with everyone up to and including lamp posts" Urban
me: <merry + pippin’s orc captors turn on each other & they escape in the tumult> imagine if orcs just had access to lembas bread this whole fiasco coulda been avoided
atia: have you noticed liv’s eyes look almost violet sometimes bc of her clothes + the lighting
me: ”arwen evenstar, secret targaryen" --10k meta pending
me: <aragorn’s horse noses at him> this horse is my dog and aragorn is me lmao
me: ok these children you’re drafting are like TEN what the actual fuck Théoden??
atia: <the sewage drain at Helms Deep about to get blown up> oh the olympic torch guy
atia: remember when d&d said the battle of winterfell would be more epic than helm’s deep
me: to be entirely fair d&d did learn one thing from helms deep and that was to light everything exceptionally dark
atia: oh this is the extended edition where we get to see Sauruman yeet himself off that tower
atia: lotr is so terrifying when you’re a kid
me: ummm lotr is still terrifying
me: i did not realize Elrond had the gift of prophecy? Elrond for Professor of Divination 2k20
atia: i wonder if viggo found it easier to speak elvish since he speaks 3 languages
me: could be! how’s his spanish
atia: really good last time i heard it! he speaks with an argentinian accent so it’s incredibly bizarre to me when he opens his mouth and an argentinian talks
me: “none but the king of gondor may command me” yk this is the first time he’s come right out and said it “I am Isildur’s heir” every other time it’s been Gandalf or someone else filling in his backstory
atia: frodo and sam are in love fight me
me: “don’t go where i can’t follow” how u holding up bb?
atia: dying
atia: when will it stop hurting
me: “rohan has deserted us.” my dude. who was it refused to light the beacon fires lmao
atia: everybody has an arc
atia: although gimli's is just "maybe elves aren't so bad"
me: legolas doesn’t have an arc
atia: THAT SHINY SHIRT IS MINE i relate to this orc
me: hey i love the whole “merienda for the masses” concept, i am staunchly PRO SECOND BREAKFAST, but you ever feel like food in the Shire sounds kinda...bland
atia: yes even elvish food is bland
me: ik he doesn’t do anything for you but my opinion as someone who DOES find aragorn sexy is ranger!aragorn > king!aragorn it ain’t even close

hamsterwoman and i recently reconnected! since we are both taxonomically-oriented people, and since our friendship was formed just about a decade ago, we thought we’d catch up by taking stock of what books were important to us over the last ten years. I conveniently started keeping an exhaustive reading log right about the turn of the decade so that came in super useful!

• i fell headlong into the Battlestar Galactica reboot just about a decade after it aired in 2004, and was like everyone else sorely disappoint by latter seasons, and gobbled up ALL the fic. but i just remember that heady feeling of being hypnotized by my screen and not wanting to eat or sleep
• Orphan Black which i haven't seen the final season of yet
• Avatar: The Last Airbender which i marathoned straight through once on my own, once with my sister, once with my husband (the latter two times i didn't catch every single episode but enough to get caught up in the arcs, and my appreciation for EVERY combination of friendships within the gaang just grew and grew and i just miss Uncle Iroh so much)
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine which i've seen twice, the second time when i was getting hubby into it
• Black Sails all-time ultimate fave TV show hands down
• The Last Kingdom is one i'll definitely rewatch--i only just saw it this year
• The Middle (2009) criminally underrated dramedy about a middle-class white nuclear family in Indiana. the writing is phenomenal. i had fallen behind on this series because it's not available anywhere convenient, and we're a cable-cutting household, and then this year on our thirteen-hour-plane-ride to China there was the latest season of The Middle and it felt like a sign. it's really not something i woudla ever expected to be into, it's aggressively NOT genre, it's the most mundane thing ever, i reiterate the writing is so good
• Great British Bake-Off: I've watched every single season. If my sister and I can be said to have a shared fandom it is this one, when the new eps were dropping on Netflix this year we actually had a standing videochat appointment on the weekends so we could watch the latest ep together
• The Borgias and Borgia: Faith & Fear: The latter is more engaging but the former one has my preferred ship dynamic
• a grab bag of stuff that was decidedly second-tier for me: BBC Sherlock, The Good Wife, The Americans, Downton Abbey, Arrow, Jane the Virgin, Killing Eve
• oh man did i even see any movies this decade? well Mad Max: Fury Road i've seen 3 times. also Doom and The Social Network
• movies i've seen twice this decade: Pacific Rim, Stardust, The Jane Austen Book Club. i really don't watch that many movies so twice is a lot for me!

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (2014) (Stormlight Archive #2) “I don’t want my life to change because I’ve become a lighteyes … I want the lives of people like me—like I am now—to change.” Kaladin Stormblessed, ACTUAL LOVE OF MY LIFE. Contrast: Dalinar whose “well you just have to be twice as good by distinguishing yourself in the position I gave you, that’s how you change the world” rhetoric makes my skin crawl. Nah it ain’t fam. Dalinar may be be a good person who has never personally mistreated a darkeyes, but that’s beside the point. He still benefits from a highly unequal, unjust arrangement that places him at the tippy top of the social, economic & political pyramid. And the parshmen at the bottom. If the next book isn’t 100% about Parshmen Rights I’m out. this book—well there were moments i was on my feet cheering, like that four-on-one-duel where Kaladin is the only one with the cojones to jump into the ring, and Adolin’s “bridgeboy” goes from a term of disparagement to a term of endearment. When we found out the Shardbearer whom Kaladin killed in Amaram’s service was Shallan’s brother that was WELL-PLAYED SIR that punch really landed. Renarin turning out to be a Radiant is a pretty harsh indictment of the overvaluation of martial prowess, and I liked that too, but on the whole I didn’t like this book as much as Book 1 because I wanted MOAR KALADIN.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) “Nothing empire touches remains itself.” They say that science fiction is psychology and fantasy is sociology. If that’s true (and I don’t remember where I heard it) this book bucks that trend because it’s all in for both sci-fi (it’s a space opera!) and sociology. It’s been getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and I really enjoyed it. I do think it’s fair to point out it’s a story centered on whip-smart highly-educated bureaucrats and the imperial court they orbit; that the perspective of “ordinary” people is missing, and you feel the lack because in the course of the book there’s a revolution/coup?? But I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire (the author is a Byzantine scholar) the kinds of “barbarians” it attracted were always from the better-off stratum of “barbarian” society. I guess the chimney sweeps wouldn’t have been reading Catullus. Nothing empire touches remains itself.

Robert Galbraith, Lethal White (2018) (Cormoran Strike #4) The unresolved tension between the leads is A+ 10/10 but I feel like the actual mystery plot is not resolved as elegantly as I expected from JK Rowling? She’s like, the queen of tight plotting and I didn’t think she’d just round up 7 suspects only to let 6 of them off the hook with an apologetic shrug of “whoops that was a red herring.” There’s a metric shitton of gratuitous bashing of socialists & other lefties, which didn’t even faze me. What bothered me was the novel’s unevenness. The portion of it that was dedicated to character work was phenomenal. Rowling’s always had a gift for invoking petty and/or aggrieved secondary characters and she absolutely nailed it here, plus the main characters experience extraordinary personal growth while still bearing the scars of their traumas. Yet tbh Chamber of Secrets is a better mystery novel and I say this as someone who ranks Chamber of Secrets dead last on my personal “HP books, ranked” listicle.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation (2004) Pluses of academic writing: you get to raid the ENDNOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY for more texts devoted to your topic of interest. Minuses of academic writing: dense as hell, puts you to sleep. Praise be to Silvia Federici whose arguments are uncommonly lucid and contain almostno bloat, though the sections covering the New World are definitely weaker than the European sections, which is where Federici’s speciality lies. She argues that the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages were a political project, a campaign of terror designed to decimate the power of peasant women, sever them from their communities, and subjugate their reproductive capacities to doing USEFUL stuff like accumulating surplus for capitalists. The parallel between the enclosure of public commons and the enclosure of women’s bodies & labor power—all done with an eye towards private profit—is one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. What an absolutely staggering work of scholarship. So glad I sprung for the physical copy so I could annotate copiously.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1848) It’s been 20 years and I’m still salty about Jo/Laurie. This is the first time I’ve actually reread it cover-to-cover instead of just reimbibing the shippiest bits and I gotta say, props to Louisa May Alcott who is a much better writer than I recalled. Her treatment of the process and the craft of writing is also right on; the 1994 movie by contrast just has Jo climb up into the garret and don her writing hat and hey presto, a manuscript. What I’d forgotten was Alcott’s mastery of tone to skewer a character—I won’t say she rivals Jane Austen in this department but she comes close. I had also forgotten how much of Part I in particular is just Jo repressing her desire to marry Beth and cart her off to a lesbian utopia bursting with grand pianos. My girl is dead set against any of her sisters marrying, insists she’ll man up herself in order to keep the family intact, and if you only read Part I you may well conclude she’s not wrong. Part II is painful because it’s where Alcott sinks my ship. Hate to say I can see why she does it?? It’s because Amy and Laurie have the most to learn from each other, and Alcott is all about GROWING and LEARNING as a person. You know what, the text doesn’t belong to Alcott. The text belongs to all of us, and I will proclaim Death of the Author from the rooftops. Jo and Laurie love each other without labels, they’re not “romantic” or “platonic,” they set no limits on that love.

Cat Sebastian, The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017) (Turner Series #2) You know why this mlm Regency was absolutely DELIGHTFUL? Because it’s literally kidfic. They bond over the kid, that’s the story. It’s not the whole story, I just mean the arrival of the kid kicks the plot into high gear, even if there isn’t undue focus on the kid as a character in his own right. God this book is so relatable: They both have the worst case of imposter syndrome. “Neither of us is normal but have we ever thought to question whether fitting in is good, or normality is desirable?” It’s that trope where “I’ve insinuated myself into your life under false pretenses and now I’ve gone and fallen in love with you, how do I make a clean breast of it,” meanwhile your romantic interest knows FULL WELL you’re a con artist and it doesn’t lessen their attachment in the slightest. Also relatable: Lawrence likes being alone, clings to routine because unscripted social interactions give him anxiety.

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004) (Saxon Stories #1) I marathoned all three seasons of the BBC/Netflix adaptation earlier this year and I gotta say, lead actor Alexander Dreymon and his combination of martial arts background and tenderness 100% makes the character. Whoever does the score for the show also knocked it out of the park. In comparison, the book falls flat. Uhtred comes off as merely bratty rather than deeply conflicted in his loyalties, which could be a function of his extreme youth—he’s 18 I think at the end of this installment. The Danish vs Saxon identity contest is less prominent here; he pretty much accepts he’s a Saxon. @ Bernard Cornwell your English ass is showing. There isn’t a real tight three-act structure, the plot just sort of meanders along from one battle to another (which is a hallmark of Cornwell’s writing, and never bothered me in his Grail Quest trilogy which are some of my favorite books of all time, so idk why it seems like weak sauce here) . One thing that remains constant is that Uhtred becomes irrational when threatened with the loss of things or people he considers MINE. Uhtred: sees a random dog paddling along in the middle of a storm. Uhtred: IS THAT RAGNAR’S DOG. Lmao.

Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer (2017) (Stormlight Archive #3) I opened this book with some trepidation because it is Dalinar’s book, the way Book 1 was Kaladin’s book and Book 2 was Shallan’s. I mean, all the flashbacks belong to Dalinar. You can tell Brandon Sanderson built this world around Dalinar, that Dalinar is more foundational to this ‘verse than any other character. And I gotta hand it to him, when I put the book down there were actual tears in my eyes: “The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says ‘journey before destination.’ But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, he journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love to journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” I think about when Kaladin took the first oath way back in Book 1, when we first heard “journey before destination,” and I say BRAVO SIR BRAVO. I think about how Gavilar’s assassination is this primordial scene we keep circling back to; with each new book we return to the scene of the crime with a different POV and we keep peeling back the layers and upending everything we thought we knew. Other things I am here for: Shallan referring to Kaladin internally as Brightlord Brooding Eyes (I’m still recovering from how Sanderson sank my Kaladin/Shallan ship). Kaladin running into his archnemesis & ex-bully and all he can think is “Adolin would never be caughtdead in a coat three seasons out of date” lmao Kaladin x Adolin brOTP of the century. Ok but remember how I said while I was reading Book 2 “I hope Book 3 is 100% Rights for Parshmen”??? Well I called it didn’t I. Turns out humankind are the invaders—they literally rolled up from another planet which they had accidentally incinerated, they came as refugees and they proceeded to…enslave the indigenous parshmen. What. The fuck. Brandon Sanderson was born and raised in the USA, where the ideology of settler colonialism is fucking hegemonic. We are REALLY GOOD at conflating preemptive warfare with self-defense, dispossession with property rights enforcement. We tend to think of democratic self-rule as coextensive with coercive rule over alien subjects. Sanderson’s choice to dismiss out of hand the “would you give the land back to the parshmen” argument is troubling because it absolutely bolsters the settler colonial narrative that indigenous elimination is a necessary condition of settlers’ “freedom”. I realize that the parshmen are currently being led by Hitler but that’s a choice on Sanderson’s part. Giving us 95% human POVs is a choice. This is the story of humans reckoning with their blood-soaked history, not the story of parshmen throwing off their chains.

• my #1 bulletproof kink is Friends to Better Friends. like in the sense of Friends to Lovers, sure, but also just two people who are not romantically involved peeling back a layer of intimacy in their relationship
• That said, the thing I like about Friends to Lovers is the revelation of their feelings; I want them to realize they're in love with the people they are, not grow into the people they're in love with, you get me?
• I dig it when characters have to choose. When you put two things that they value before them and you say: choose. Maybe one of the things is a person they care for. Maybe one of the things is an idea or principle they cherish. It hurts SO GOOD when they have to choose.
• i love fluff. there is never enough fluff.
• at the same time i am a slut for angst with or without a happy ending
• smut is awesome! as is G-rated. I assure you I'm completely omnivorous as far as the rating goes so please write as much or as little sex as the story dictates.
• extended introspection or character studies
• i am not at all thrown by stylistically experimental choices so if you want to write pov second person, or epistolary, or incorporate social media into the fic, be my guest!
• here have a grab bag of tropes i think are gold: codependency, mutual pining, fake marriage/fake dating, praise kink, kidfic, slice of life/curtainfic, casefic, loyalty kink, hurt/comfort, time travel, amnesia, outsider POV, jealousy
• alllllll the fusion AUs! idc if it’s college or soulmark or hp or daemons or pacific rim i promise if you write it I WILL LOVE IT

• extreme underage (<14)
• graphic violence
• rape/noncon
• nominated major character death
• A/B/O
• bodyswap
• mpreg
• scat
• watersports