It's a metaphor, see?

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Hannibal Advent 🍖🍴🍷 Fannibals Aren’t Done ↳ Day 4 ✦ 1x04 Œuf

[omnisexualhanniballecter]

🔥 fannibals aren’t done ↠ fave quotes series: 🎁 Hannibal Advent edition // 1x01 Apéritif

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Hannibal Advent 🍖🍴🍷 Fannibals Aren’t Done ↳ Day 2 ✦ 1x02 Amuse-bouche

[afaultinourmetaphors]

I would like to talk about my favorite quote of the story.

“Blue realizes there is no end to the stories he can tell. For Black is no more than a kind of blankness, a hole in the texture of things, and one story can fill this hole as well as any other.”

To me, this quote is representative of everything the story had been telling. The names of the characters for instance. White, Black, Brown, and Blue. 

In my mind, the first time I read these names, I organized them in this matter.

Brown: The beginning. Soil. Rich with things to help everything grow. The start  of knowledge and the controller of survival. Hidden. Basic. Unremembered by most it affects.

White: Nothingness. The purity of nothingness. Simplistic existence, without much change. An absence of color.

Black: The combination of every color. Draws in the eye. Exists purely in it’s own space without leaving, without occupying more than asked. Complete, ominous, unknown. Repetitive. The surety of not knowing. Curiosity. 

Blue: Easy to combine. Primary color. The basis of new, with the surety of old. Hidden potential, varying colors. The expanse of the sky and ocean, and the reflection between them. Ever deep, absorbing, terrifying in it’s own lack of knowledge of itself. Depth. 

That is what I associate with these colors, and what I expected to associate with these characters. I think what I expected reflects my experience with the characters pretty accurately. 

I chose the quote above because of the character and color descriptions. Black very much becomes a canvas for Blue. Blue is absorbed in his own thoughts while he should be watching Black, but Black is so steady and repetitive, Blue is losing himself in it.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

The City of Glass took a bit of rereading on my part. I really liked the story, and the way it captures dissolving into obsession, however, the name thing took me reading a few of the sentences over to understand what was what with who. However, his use of description and situational awareness kept me interested and engaged. I liked the confusion around the name, to me that kind of plot point is intriguing. It probably helps that I don’t find that particular troupe very confusing, but I thought it really added something to the story.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

There are a lot of things that need to be addressed about this book- the characterization, the premise, the outcome of this adventure. Instead, I’m going to talk about none of those things, because all I can think about is the butchering of one of my favorite things in the world: the German language. I don’t appreciate that the author just punched in the phrase “my little bitch” to google translate, when really it would not have taken that long to ask someone who actually speaks German. 

When it comes to realism in books, I’m incredibly skeptical and very picky. And I don’t mean the realism of a cow escaping to India, because we have already established that that is the reality of the book. You don’t question the light sabers in Star Wars because it’s a reality of the world, in the same way, we don’t question the characters, because that’s the premise of the book. But little things, like milking heifers for some reason, and improper German really rub me the wrong way. I know they’re little things, but they’re some of the easiest things to get right.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

(Okay... I guess one of the joys of life is making the same mistake a thousand times. I posted this to my other blog again.)

What I’m liking most about this book is its ridiculousness. The idea that they could board a plane at all. That Shalom is able to get a circumcision. The entire premise of this book is so ridiculous that sometimes I just forget how ridiculous it is until I look back on it. I can’t tell if I like that or not.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

The lottery

I've actually read this piece several times before and I remember how it had shocked me the first time I read it. I love the buildup of this piece and the vague but specific characterization. It creates not a fondness for the characters, but it builds an illusion of "normal" before crushing that.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

Holy Cow has a really great concept. The narrator is funny and relate able, and the story tugs at the heartstrings. The main character’s poor use of slang really bothers me, but otherwise I adore her. I’m starting to get used to it, but it still feels offputting to me because she isn’t using real slang. Shes using Disney Channel slang that no real person has ever actually used.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

Willa

What this piece really made me wonder about was how often they had had the conversation they had at the end of the story. It seems unusual to me to that he would have been in denial that long. The story implies that time is very hard to keep track of for them, which may be why it took him so long to realize, but in my mind I feel like time simply repeats and that they are stuck in a loop of that night. I could be looking at it completely wrong because they do in fact leave at the end, but to me I feel like when the night comes again, they end up back at the station. 

[afaultinourmetaphors]

I really like the phrase he used at the end of page nine, “heteronormalization incarnate”. The idea that monsters break the normal gender roles, which makes them monstrous. This is a theme that has never really gone away. Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and even children’s shows like The Power Puff Girls. People fear change, and part of that is fear of being different, which makes different seem monstrous. By portraying monsters as those who don’t fit the heteronormative mold, people who fit that are portrayed as monstrous. It creates an environment that justifies treating them poorly and killing them.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

I forgot about this while we were reading it.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

The closer I get to the end of this book, the less I like it. The blatant misogyny, the unnecessary cuts in text, the slew of characters that don’t actually further the plot- all of it just adds up to a poor book. The core of the book is great, but the execution is irritating and uninteresting. As much as I hate the musical (which everyone knows I am no stranger to voicing this opinion) they took a book that did not have much going for it, and turned it into an amazing stage production, that took the interesting parts of the book, and left out the rest.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

Reading Phantom of The Opera like

[afaultinourmetaphors]

(okay, so these are all super late because I accidentally posted them to my other blog last week, which earned me some weird messages. Oops.) 

I want to discuss the graveyard scene, where Christine is visiting her father’s grave. It is a huge information drop, which can be extremely important to the story, and did give the reader a lot of valuable information. However, for me, it was completely overshadowed by what it showed us about Erik’s character.

I read this section out loud to my cousin because I needed a second opinion (she’s a lit major and we often skype about books) and when I was done reading, her little sister shouted from the other room “WOW WHAT A PISSBABY. I BET HE CALLS HIMSELF A ‘NICE GUY’ LATER IN THE BOOK TOO.” And I really could not have said it better than this eleven year old. 

Erik sees another man near Christine and unleashes a literal avalanche of skulls upon him. He is petty, jealous, and in the words of an eleven year old a “total pissbaby”. His ‘love’ is violent, possessive, controlling, and downright unnerving.

[afaultinourmetaphors]

I honestly really hate the way this is written. I think the core idea of the book is phenomenal, and I think the musical did a wonderful job highlighting that. The book does not quite do itself justice, and I find that mortifying. The whole book looks like it was written by a journalist, which it was. All of the excerpts from “memoirs” and “first person accounts” are confusing, irritating, and do nothing to advance the story. All they do is create this unbearable break in the text. It is like watching a sixth grader attempt to meet word count by continuously adding “very” next to every adjective. 

My journalism professor gave a lecture on adding quotes to stories last week, and the reasons he gave were exactly what makes this book so unbearable for me to read.

1. We add quotes because it makes the story interesting.

Journalists add quotes because people prefer to hear true stories from first person accounts. It makes people feel like they were there when the story runs right into a first person account of what happened. It also makes the facts seem more solid, because an eyewitness is vouching for them. 

2. We get to pick and choose what’s necessary.

It allows journalists to spin the story to represent a certain idea, even if it is not entirely true.

3. So we don’t have to talk.

Journalists add quotes to tell the story without actually having to write a story. Well placed quotes means the journalists cans say very little, and still put together a story.

Leroux uses quotes for all of these reasons, and most irritatingly, the last one especially. This is a fiction work. I expect you to write it. While it can be a cool literary device to add in a few fake newspaper articles, the excess at which he uses it makes the whole book seem like a very long, very boring New York Times article and I do not enjoy reading it.

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Twilight may be trash but at least they cast actual native americans to play natives

[brigwife-deactivated20240426]

The Twilight franchise was basically a great cast all trapped in hell together