Various Book Fandoms @ghafaherondaleandmore - Tumblr Blog

rosiethorns88

Faerie got your tail. The QON prologue killin’ me over here.

landofpetrichor

balekin-is-cardan’s-dad-theory debunked

“Take the boy away,” the High King said. “Rear him as you see fit.”

Lady Asha did not flinch. “I will rear him as befits his station. He is a prince, after all, and your son.”

Ok

As scared as I am for the TV show of TGT and SOC, since it’s a “high budget fan fiction” MAYBE MALINA WONT BE CANON, LIKE MY HOPES ARE LOW BUT MAYBE SHELL END UP WITH LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE

fangirlinghard-spoilerson

The cruel prince by Witequeen

queen-suren

Love it

The anti the hunger games tag is mostly about the movies and I’m glad because those books slap

xandrei

Dirtyhands had come to see the rough work done.

emjenenla

Why didn’t Cardan want Balekin dead?

The mistake I think a lot of people make when talking about Cardan and Balekin is in assuming that because Cardan doesn’t want Balekin dead he loves him and thinks he can change. I’m not sure either of those are true. Cardan does not seem to think that Balekin will ever be better than he is and acknowledges that he’s dangerous. Also, I don’t think Cardan really understands how he feels about Balekin. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Cardan loves him, but he also doesn’t hate him. It’s all very confused and Cardan isn’t sure how to deal with it.

Cardan’s refusal to kill is something that he’s extremely vocal about throughout the series, even if it seems counterintuitive to his character. I think that the core of this lies in this quote:

“When my father sent me away, at first I tried to prove that I was nothing like he thought me. But when that didn’t work, I tried to be exactly what he believed I was instead. If he thought I was bad, I would be worse. If he thought I was cruel, I would be horrifying. I would live down to his every expectation. If I couldn’t have his favor, then I would have his wrath.” (TWK AH pp 265-266)

Cardan has made himself a Bad PersonTM because that’s the only way he could get the attention he craves, but no matter what he’s done, he’s always held onto the fact that he’s never killed. That’s his touchstone. No matter how bad he is, he still won’t kill to get people out of his way, unlike basically every other person he knows (the only characters I can say with reasonable certainty would never kill for personal gain are Heather and Oak). As long as Cardan holds onto his refusal to kill he feels that he is better than Balekin and Dain and Eldred and Asha and everyone else who has ever hurt or manipulated him. He has ground to stand on to disdain them.

If you truly look at it, Cardan spends a decent portion of TWK basically begging Jude not to kill Balekin. He’s constantly telling her and spies that, “I know it would be simpler if we were to just kill him, but we can solve this problem in other ways. We do not need to stoop to his level.” Ultimately, Jude ignores him. While killing Balekin is important for Jude’s character arc and taking back her own agency after a month of pretending to be in Balekin’s power, it has the opposite effect on Cardan.

Jude is Cardan’s seneschal which means that her actions are seen as extensions of Cardan’s will. The way Cardan sees it, if he was actually a real king he should have been able to stop Jude from killing Balekin. Because he couldn’t, that means that the blame indirectly falls on him. In his eyes, Jude’s murder of Balekin is the same as if he’d murdered of Balekin himself.

This means that Cardan no longer has any moral high ground. He can’t hate Balekin for the opportunistic murder of their siblings for power because Cardan did the same thing. By killing Balekin, at least from Cardan’s point of view, Jude removes the barrier between himself and his abusers. He is now as bad as they are so he can’t argue that what they did to him was wrong. Of course, in all actuality Cardan’s hands are clean of Balekin’s blood and even if they weren’t, that doesn’t make the things Balekin did to him any less wrong. He is not guilty and there was nothing he could have done, but that doesn’t mean he sees it that way.

While there might be an aspect of protecting Jude in banishing her, I think that one of the main reasons Cardan banishes her beyond revenge for doing the one thing he asked her not to do is that it separates her actions from him. By punishing Jude, Cardan grants the impression that his and Jude’s actions are separate, that she didn’t kill Balekin on his orders. This allows him to at least pretend he doesn’t feel guilty about Balekin’s murder (which he should be able to do as long as no one outright asks him about it) and to continue to pretend that he is a better person than Balekin was (which he is, even if he doesn’t feel like it).

queen-suren

thank you so much for this analysis!! it’s so good. And i think you’re right

camisala01-art

I’m back and with a drawing of Izzy Lightwood (and columbine flowers) ;)

(From The Shadowhunter Chronicles by @cassandraclare )

consul-lightwood-bane

This is so pretty

ironsided

Epic Reads is cancelled.

queen-suren

i get jude too wtf??

ghafaherondaleandmore

I mean she seems annoying, but I 100% would not do my own selection, I think they’re dumb and basically a glorified version of the bachelor, and I couldn’t get through the first book in the Selection series because of it. And yeah, I fucking hate when people spend forever not making decisions

rosiethorns88

A new Wicked King papercraft exclusively designed for a campfire mug item in the @illumicrate April 2019 box. (which was an AMAZING box to be a part of!)

This was a concept I’ve been sitting on ever since The Wicked King’s promotional excerpt was released last year and Illumicrate was super kind to allow me to explore it for their mug design! It really only took one sentence to inspire such a fanciful piece: “Papery moths fly above our heads, circling up as though tragically drawn to the light of the stars.” Artwork © Holly Black.

Keep reading

tourneyofashvara

Zélie

Redbubble | Ko-fi

rosiethorns88

This was a custom-made papercraft request as part of the top prize of a giveaway hosted by @LitJoyCrate back in June 2019! @infernally_yours on IG requested a papercraft of the starfall scene from A Court of Mist and Fury! You could almost say this is a direct sequel scene to my previous Starfall papercraft?

It was fun to revisit these two with some new approaches to their character design. Originally I had a more complex weave of vellum for Feyre’s dress, but nothing was sticking to the surface of that super glitter card stock, so it was simplified - but that’s not such a bad thing?