my grotto of keepsakes from what (fantasy, probably) stories have been on my mind, which is right now likely to be Critical Role stuff
& A Song of Ice and Fire
You ever get so stressed by current events that you devote yourself temporarily to some project or another just to keep you from endlessly checking how things are going?
literally every time Particularly Stressful News happens, Mort starts getting notes again, and its always bittersweet to me. Like, on the one hand it reminds me of how much shit sucks right now. But on the other hand, i'm glad people find comfort in Mort and his silly little hat. i'm glad he's making people's days a little bit better still.
friends, foes, and strangers i get that not all of you are routinely reading posts about frankenstein but if i see one more post about "well if you think about patrilineal naming conventions the creature's name IS frankenstein" i will pick up a sniper rifle and dedicate my life to picking you off one by one
you receive a name because somewhere, at some point, someone cared enough to give you one. you have a name when you have someone who cares enough to call you by it. the creature does not, has never had these things. he has no people to whom he belongs, no one who would give him a name or call him by any that he might give himself. the only names his ostensible "father" gives him are demon, monster, fiend.
there is no "if you think about it." the creature does not have a name because he was expressly denied one by the only person who could have bestowed it. the bastard child only gets his father's name if it's given, and the only thing in the world victor ever gives him is life.
#fantastic op so true#but I’d like to note Victor does give the creature a few other things#number one a rocking bod#number two approximately every complex and mental illness on the planet#finally and most importantly number three something/someone to act against#everything else the creature gives himself#but anyway yes op is so right one of the most fundamental parts of Frankenstein is the repurcussions of refusing to claim your child#something something the child who never felt the love of the village will burn it down to feel it’s warmth
IT MAY NOT BE BECAUSE OF AGE BUT HE DID WATCH HER WASTE AWAY— AND VERY WELL COULDVE MOURNED WHAT SHE WAS LIKE BEFORE.
After the mourns, it was like she was slowly bleeding out- she’s so scared and so sleepless and clearly being terrorized, she’s not the same. He sees her and aches with worry, he tries to do what he can but ultimately he’s helpless, like so many empty-feeling words.
She did also metaphorically “make him run” when she got caught by the drowned gods and “climbed the cliff edge and took the plunge” when she fell back into the sea. A plunge he later took after her. When he was going to fall to his death, he took some form of comfort in Cora waiting for him down there or else he wouldn’t have said it to the others.
I know damn well they all missed pre-Moors Cora but this is Kade Posting bc Pork Soda is one perspective.
He misses what they had after confection, so, so badly. The friendship, the banter, when Cora wasn’t sleepless and a few whispers away from withdrawing. The man was readily willing to relive his prism trauma in order to give Sumi the details she’d need to lie her way into the logic dorms just to help her.
“5,000 footsteps in your wet dress, back to the house with your arms around my neck” and “spinning like pinwheels in the sun” MAN- (I also wanna point out “you took my hand and you made me run” and relate it to how they run together during and after Mislaid)
OK. SO not the point of the book and I Know this but. kade, best man to (n)ever exist, love of my life, can he just. NOT BE MADE SAD.
also I Know it would Probably not be good for him to back to Prism, I do and I understand and he's Needed at the school. but. cmon how freaking cool would goblin king kade be in a slightly worse timeline---
so i just finished my yearly reread of @seananmcguire's Wayward Children series, and Mislaid in Parts Half-Known is a strong contender for my new favorite of them. some spoilers under the cut.
lately, i've been trying to consume more media that's generally hopeful (mostly as a means of combatting seasonal depression, and also general depression as i'm currently sitting at home with a respiratory illness that is kicking my ass). obviously it's hard to know going in to something new how it's gonna be, but like, Wayward Children has generally been on the optimistic side. and goddamn, i was not disappointed.
it's hard to put into words, but there's always been a sort of feeling of lingering hope in these books. hope that the various characters can get back through their doors, or barring that, hope that they can find peace (mostly Kade, whose story is very relatable even if we came at it from different directions). and Mislaid in Parts Half-Known really nailed that, and was pay off for a lot of it. characters are presented with the option to take the easy way (having Antsy find their doors, regardless of whether or not they're "ready"), and they choose not to. Kade goes back to Prism and confronts that. Antsy stays in the Shop to be better (this, incidentally, is also a theme in another thing i was consuming at the same time as this, so that was fun). and Cora gets her door back (may have broken down crying at this).
i loved it. i'll be thinking about this one for a while.
The Biggest TearJerker in Mislaid in Parts Half-Known
Putting this under the cut so Wayward Children readers aren't spoiled for Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, given it literally came out a few days ago.
Kade's door was there the whole time. It was right in the attic, and he could have accessed it if he were sure.
Yet when Kade returns to his door, he is scared. Scared that the same fairies who chased him out will banish him and his friends again, and guilty that he killed a goblin king because he was told it is the right thing to do. When he considers staying, it's not to find his home, but to face justice for what he considers a heinous crime.
It's also the first time I've seen Kade not be the reasonable one in the group. He's been the person that reminds the kids that they need to keep their heads together. But back in Prism? He freezes up, and breaks down right when they find a way out thanks to Antsy. The trauma comes rushing back. Sumi and Cora have to reason with him, to point out children are conditioned to trust the adults they like.
We also find out more about the family that disowned him. His father wanted his child to be tough, and sent Kade to country cousins that would make him "stronger". And he became tough, coming to trust the fairies that kidnapped him because they taught him how to be the tough hero that his dad wanted. But when Kade came back and was. out of the closet, none of Kade's family wanted the new him back. The adults in both worlds that were supposed to protect Kade failed, from the fairies to Kade's own parents. No wonder he doesn't talk about it.
Now Kade's door is closed. He truly can't go back if he wants. Another door may open up, or Antsy might be able to open a door from the Shop of Lost Things for children that need to go to Eleanor West's Home, but Kade knows that Eleanor needs him. So does the school. He also knows that Prism isn't the paradise that he remembers as a child. It was a shinier version of his family's expectations. What's real is Eleanor's love, and the friendships that he builds with others.
Kade, sweet precious Kade, I wish I could give you a hug and reassure you that you are a good person.
want to reread every heart a doorway again… it created a new and very specific emotion somewhere between vibrancy, wistfulness, springtime, and mourning that I don’t think it is possible to replicate elsewhere
Belief in wayward children is soooo interesting to me
Spoilers for Every Heart a Doorway and Where Drowned girls go ahead
The act of believing is absolutely integral to this series. On some level: everyone knows the doors are real,
The people at the twin schools believe this to be fact, even if Whitethorn is designed to brainwash the belief out of its students and the teachers are nameless.
The principal, real and fake, both believe these doors are real, the kids on some level, believe these doors are real.
Cora starts Where Drowned Girls Go fully believing in The Doors and The Moors and the drowned gods that haunt her, she wants that haunting to stop so badly that she goes to whitethorn. There, they begin “teaching her to forget”
And yet.
She never forgets, she aches and yearns like everyone else there. She aches to feel water surround her, but she believes this is “helping” in so far as the rainbows and voices are fading and that will keep being the case as long as she stays up for air. It’s illustrated when she’s listening to Regan struggle during her “graduation”.
“Cora wouldn’t wait to be a Jack-o-lantern. Anything that meant she was still Cora in some way, and not the puppet of the Drowned Gods. She listened to Regan and she yearned, wishing with everything she had to be in the other girl’s shoes.”
Everyone aches and everyone years until they can bend themselves into the box whitethorn wants and then they can leave. Maybe.
Then Sumi shows up. The ultimate, absolute immovable object. She believes in what she wants and will bend and snap any system like perfectly tempered chocolate if it tries to change her. She knows for full blown fact how her story ends, she knows she goes home and she can extended that knowing to others, Cora included.
Cora comes to be a little more like Sumi, believing that she is more than strong enough to face down the Drowned Gods and tell them no. And she is. She makes their rainbows her own and she stops hearing their voices and plots an escape route for them all.
Cora and Sumi are good case studies on what belief can do in this world and that brings me to the reason Every Heart a Doorway is in the spoilers.
Doctor Katherine Lundy.
Kade says during the first book that Lundy thinks in stories. She thinks in beginnings, middles and endings.
Lundy is given a very high position of power, Eleanor’s right hand and the kids therapist, she uses this power well and treats her patients kindly. The kids love her, Eleanor loves her, Kade loves her and she loves them all in turn.
Everyone trusts Lundy
Everyone believes Lundy.
So when she tells the kids that lightning is more likely to strike twice in the same place than they are to find their door home, they believe her.
This is a belief Lundy carries into her grave and I think it’s a belief that dies with her.
The Wolcott twins go home after she dies, Nancy goes home shortly after everything has settled, a door from Confection opens DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THE SCHOOL at the end of Where Drowned Girls Go.
It’s easier to openly believe in an everyday nightmare then to admit you believe in a beautiful dream, so the kids took Lundy at her word and locked up any hope they had left. Especially when the only women with a counter opinion accidentally looks like a hypocrite because her door is literally still there waiting for her.
I think Lundy’s belief leaked out into the students and kept many of them there. Of course this doesn’t make her bad or a villain by any means. I think she’s a testament to words having mass, unintended affects on people. Affects so deep it can change the very world around them.
I don’t know how to end this ramble thingy but I needed to thought vomit about these books they make me crazzyyyyyyy
I'm working on mapping out a compass of all the worlds we know, because the one on the wiki is super outdated. I'm trying to figure out how to place minor directions, and also what they mean. Like, so many worlds are Rhyme, but what does that mean????? From the name, it sounds like patterns. Like parallels and repetition and fate, but I'm not sure that entirely fits. Any suggestions or reminders would be great, been I while since I reread 1 or 3.
Okay, so, the ones I can remember right now are Whimsy, Wild, Linearity and Reason.
Reason is essentially consistent internal logic (I think) Kade says confection probably has a strong underpinning of reason. Things will always be about a days walk from each other unless something interesting happens: key word being always.
Time doesn’t have to happen in order, but reason says that if Sumi is dead: she never comes back, the queen never dies and Rini is never born.
These are consistent things in a nonsense world so it has an underpinning of reason. And we know that’s not default considering Eleanor’s world doesn’t seem to have this. So that’s at least one of them defined.
I'm catching up on the wayward children series and man, I just love Sumi so much, she is loud and (at least appears) insensitive and she's annoying and colourful and weird and she's all that so unapologetically.
Just. She's so much. She's a swarm of butterflies (and some of them have knives). She's sunshine so bright it'll burn your eyes and glitter that might be harmless or it might be made of glass shards, she's wise and she's dangerous she's utterly ridiculous, she's pure nonsense and yet half the time she makes more sense than anyone else
turnnoffyourmind
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prguitarman
titsay
yousharknotpass
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snowghoul
