'god damn I totally get why Hal reacted the way he did to Bolaire wearing Misha, considering what he knows of Bolaire; and why he was so unreceptive to all the accusations Bolaire made about Thjazi during the Convergence. His reaction was incredibly understandable from the perspective of a guy who is already fucking REELING from so many revelations about a man he loved'
AND 'I think Hal was horrified that Bolaire insinuated that because of Thjazi, Hal might technically be his owner if Thimble isn't, and given the history of the Orcs under Azgra, no wonder this instigated such a disgusted reaction.'
AND 'that doesn't make any of Hal's words justified. It was, in fact, incredibly fucked up that Hal IMMEDIATELY aggressively pinned Bolaire to a sofa rather than simply asking if Misha was alright; and was ONLY concerned with Thjazi hurting Misha, not Bolaire, when Thjazi swung for him; and was so dismissive of Bolaire when he was trying to talk openly for the first time about how Thjazi mistreated him and reduced him to an owned object, in front of a room of people who predominantly love & glaze Thjazi'
AND 'this clearly negatively impacted his relationship with Bolaire and I think Hal realised that and regretted it, when Bolaire was apologising constantly and promising to leave the life he had built with Hal at its centre, and when he specifically asked Azune to help him rather than Hal'
AND 'I think Hal has so much on his plate with the Creed and the incredible work he did with KoTher'ai, his fears for his family and his complex feelings for Thjazi, that it's completely possible that he won't acknowledge this for a long time'
AND 'I think they both need time apart so Bolaire can figure out who he is without Hal, and Hal can come to his own conclusions about whether their friendship was 'real' or not'
AND 'the revelation of how little Hal cares about Bolaire in comparison to other important people in his life (Thjazi, Misha) is going to be devastating for our fucked-up little mask guy who has codependently entangled their lives'
AND 'this will be very good for Bolaire in the long run if the Seekers become part of his wider friendship/support network, which will in turn be VERY good for Hal because their whole ish wasn't healthy in any way and Hal has enough going on that he genuinely can't give Bolaire the emotional support he needs right now'
AND 'I think this is all far more crunchy and interesting than if they had just spoken about their problems like normal people and hugged it out'
When a book is bad, oh well, the failed artistry of one rube, maybe co-authors. But when a movie is bad, and you consider the military-like scale of production, man-hours, the money involved: you must understand, it feels like I’ve been at war with the world for 29 years.
#when a book is bad you can be like. wow what a fascinating insight into One Guy's personal issues#when a movie is bad it's like. hundreds of people thousands of hours and millions of dollars were marshalled to make this thing#and it Completely Sucks (@specialagentartemis)
i'm really shocked that no one mentions it on this site of all places but azune nayar is genuinely one of the most autistic characters ive ever witnessed in my god damn life. the way he makes a point to present as little interiority as possible, his obsession with notation lists and organization, and absolutely 100% most of all his radical swapping between a face of competence and stoicism vs "immature" emotional breakdowns so severe they almost read as age regression. like brother
I just would like to thank everyone who ever reblogs this so that it somehow ends up back on my dash because I usually need the reminder (especially the drinking water one)
keyleth and percy's little spat when they're setting up the bombs is so interesting to me because it's something of an inversion of their characters. season one keyleth probably would've been the one to uplift taryon with a narration in order to calm him down and percy would've been the one to snap at them because he thinks they're wasting time when more important things are at stake as he becomes more tunnel-visioned on his goal. it just goes to show how open, patient and hopeful percy has become over the course of the series, while keyleth has become less optimistic and more desperate and frightened when faced with the possibility that she might lose her friends and the man she loves.
Paige did not know the story of La Belle et la Bete, but Arcturus didn't know that she didn't know which means that Paige handed Arcturus a love story between a human woman and an inhuman man, told him she thought he'd like some reading material... and he still thought she was no longer into him.
I need people to be okay with characters being ugly. And I’m not getting bogged down in “ugly being a social construct yada yada.” Yall know what I mean. I need for people to stop making fan art that claims to represent canon that openly ignores major character descriptions by making them conventionally hot.
Palamades Sextus? Canonically weak and stringy. When he smiles he becomes beautiful. But he has resting bitch face. Why is a good chunk of the fan art him looking like a scruffy prince? Or like lanky muscles and boyish charm like a Netflix romcom heart throb? Stop. That’s a wet piece of yarn.
The biggest one that kills me is Paige Mahoney. Paige has been tortured mentally and physically for four books. She canonically has scars on her face, arms, palms, and basically her whole body. She has bloodless purplish lips cus of low oxygen. Stop drawing her in moody purplish black honey lip balm. That’s not a slay. It’s a circulation fuck up, bestie. She is constantly covered in mud and blood and gross water and bruises and scabs. Why are we pretending she is a button nosed, porcelain skinned movie star? Yes she has blonde hair and blue eyes but that’s where the starlet vibes stop.Homie does parkour and shoves her soul out of her own body as a weapon. She is almost always bleeding from her nose or wincing at her messed up wrist or disheveled from following a lead. People feminizing her to the extreme weirds me out.
Y’all need to be okay loving a character without forcing beauty standards on them.
just developed a string of (tentative) bone season theories everybody...i'm sure somebody's already dived into this but i don't care because i want to talk about it!!
(spoilers for the dark mirror)
this is a scene from book one that i entirely completely forgot about. i logged it when i was vlogging, assumed it was referencing something i forgot about from a future book. i don't think it is?????
then i was thinking about the first card of the tarot reading, the card which symbolizes the past and/or the root cause of the situation/challenge
and initially i think we all just brushed past it because paige was adamant it was her father and that's all there was to her past
but the more i think about the dark mirror the more i'm...skeptical
we have so many references to cade's family and heritage, the way fitzours and mahoney both reference bears, the vagueness of paige's mother (who was she? did she die? did she disappear? was she a dreamwalker?) and on top of that there's the mystery of paige's relationship with the poltergeists + the scars on her hand that read KIN
paige's relationship with the poltergeists starts when she's young, it helps awaken her gift (and the poltergeist who first touches her is a woman she sees in a poppy field), but more than that, there is that prophecy from book four that references "THE SCION" which you'd think would just the scion republic, but "scion" also means descendant (kin), which could suggest that paige is a descendent of [blank]
which brings us back to the five of cups — was the thing paige lost not her father but her mother? if he is the one whose cups of water are spilled, it's HIS GRIEF and HIS DISAPPOINTMENT and HIS LOSS that he cannot move on from - paige is standing behind him (trying to talk him out of his grief?) but he doesn't answer...
but we do know that her father left her something in his will, something that jaxon doesn't understand (because it's irish? because it's amaurotic? because it's a secret or a message between paige and her father? because it's a family heirloom?)
and all of this family stuff - with her father yes but also the hints at her mother and the absence left by her disappearance/death - suggests that if that memory of blood is from paige's past, and it doesn't have to do with the dublin incursion (which happened when she was six and did not yet understand or know about her gift), then surely it has something to do with her early childhood and/or her mother and/or her father
but if we go back to the five of cups for a second, the five of cups is associated with the element of WATER, and water is often a symbol of feelings or emotion
i haven't been able to figure out what the hell she's implying by all this talk of water (am i stupid or are we all in the dark here) but there's no way this isn't all connected!!!!
this is just someone else's interpretation of water in tarot (The Moon card it sounds like?), but it's an interesting idea that speaks a lot about ancestors and reflections and judgement and life after death...
i do wonder how much of this water / dark mirror stuff comes back to the her (first) memory of blood - especially because there's the age old adage "blood runs thicker than water" etc etc
admittedly i also wonder if any of this also has to do with the prometheus and pandora stuff (or any of the other greek myths like adonis or persephone etc) because assuming jax is right (unfortunately, he usually is, isn't he?) then if the greek myths are correct and real and true and all came from the rephs, then is each myth about a different reph or are the stories all about the same reph(s)?
because adonis's story uses blood as well and his story is the origin of the amaranth WHICH BLOOMS WHEN PAIGE AND WARDEN KISS...
i just feel like if samantha shannon is listing out myths for us to pay attention to.......this one has some serious weight to it, especially when we know that paige and warden's connection made the windflower bloom in the real world
that would imply that arcturus is adonis (NASHIRA GREW SO JEALOUS OF THE PAIR THAT SHE SLAUGHTERED HIM AND PAIGE CRIED THAT SINGLE TEAR WHEN HE WAS "DEAD"...) and i guess that means that [Zeus] allowed [Arcturus] to spend half the year in life and half the year in death, even as paige is implied by jaxon to be persephone who would spend half her time in the syndicate and half her time in the free world...
and of course, we can't forget that death is an external influence, that it works differently for paige (and arcturus) - and even now the world is changing around her (them) but ultimately that change occurs because the two of them choose to stay together as the lovers
now here's where we get a little crazy - because i still don't know if this passage was cut because sam changed her mind and the story (and it's now and always will be irrelevant) OR if this passage was cut because she had to backtrack and rewrite this or reintroduce this at a later moment. if i was smart i'd assume it's dead in the water but she didn't entirely cut the word "thaumaturge." it's mentioned in passing by jaxon in book one and then in passing during didion's interlude poem in book two.
and yes, in theory this is a comment made in jest, about a concept that is suggestedly not real, but you have to wonder...because of objectively, zeitgeist aside, paige is someone with unprecedented mastery of the aether's secrets, whether she's aware of it or not.
this is one of the opening passages of the dark mirror - when paige is still trapped by the white aster - and even though it could be about anything, especially because she gets taken to oxford against her will, i have to wonder if it's bigger than that
then there's the "old secret" that seb mentions in book one, that paige has some sort of strange connection to death (the netherworld? the aether?) - initially i assumed that the "cords" he mentioned were the silver and gold cords, that it was her connection with arcturus that occurred in oxford that joined her to flesh and sarx but now i wonder...i wonder if she had that connection the whole time, even before warden...or rather, before she met him...[in this life?]
(sorry i do also also wonder if paige has a connection to the rephs and the netherworld that she ummmm was made to forget about ...)
(are we sure her early memory of blood is from earth and not the netherworld?) ((yeah yeah that's a little crazy.....or is it.....))
i know jax said this is in passing, as a snide comment (and possibly a real warning) but fatal flaws are very important in greek mythology and to the gods themselves and i wonder......i guess i just wonder if these two have been through all this before.......if he's ALWAYS been her fatal flaw....
then again, there are frequent mentions to paige's mortality
and that last one specifically will haunt me until it gets resolved, i think!
if we're all thinking the same thing - surely prometheus would be arcturus, if paige is implied to be pandora - then what crime did arcturus commit? (he's been known to commit two - acting against the suzerain and loving paige....) if he's the one who "pilfered fire from zeus" then possibly that could mean giving clairvoyance to the humans......?
side bar, i do find it interesting that arcturus' specific gift is "wisdom in the past" and memory and looking backward - especially because that can feel like a curse...or a mountain...like wouldn't it be crazy if he was punished for [x crime here] by being given this gift?
especially when he uses it later to help paige get her memories back from the white aster
and if we look at pandora's story, she's the first human woman (jaxon calls paige EVE...) (relevance of dreamwalkers here? maybe it isn't necessarily paige herself but her kin?) but then each god gifted her with things. she supposedly brings a jar to earth with plagues and evil, and after she lets out nearly all of them on earth, the last thing that remains is hope....
and then of course there's the unspeakable transgression by the mothallath that rended the veils in the first place...
i do wonder if that transgression is either rephs partnering with humans or giving clairvoyance to humans (or it could be both in theory)..... but i feel like that goes against the golden cord in a lot of ways. because it seems like paige and arcturus' connection strengthens the veils. - if only because the amaranth bloomed when they kissed plus paige can bring arcturus back to life from latency and ALSO there's that whole crazy moment in the colosseum when she kills all the emim because of the power of the golden cord
it's almost like the golden cord (the connection, the love, the care, the partnership between rephs and humans?) is the hope that pandora saves in the end - especially when we know that rephs can safely take aura from offering humans, to seemingly no detriment
there's no end to this just as there's no real concrete theory to this, i just needed to put all my thoughts and questions in one place. i do worry that i'm just the last person to come to all these (vague) conclusions but that's what i get for putting off my read of the dark mirror, i guess!
God this is amazing and it's making me think so many things, I'm just going to ramble for a bit
I truly think that the transgression of the Mothallath has to do with giving clairvoyance to humans, I haven't fully figured out how Paige and Arcturus's relationship fits into it because nothing about it seems like a transgression.
Maybe the reason the Mothallath could cross the veil was because they had relationships with humans like the one Paige and Arcturus have. Maybe the transgression that started weakening the netherworld was something to do with the misuse of such relationships. Idk I'm thinking maybe the Sargas finding out and trying to use humans for their benefit therefore corrupting relationships between humans and rephs and that made the veil weaken. I might be misremembering but I'm pretty sure arcturus told Paige about someone else crossing the veil when the weakening of the netherworld started, but I could be making that up.
I really want to find out more about Paige's mum because I think there is something going on with Cade and his whole family of dream walkers. Also, he says his family died in a fire, I think it makes sense if someone killed them.
And I really want to understand what Paige was talking about with the water at the end of the dark mirror because I don't fully understand what she means. I feel like I almost do but not fully and I can't stop thinking about it.
