i have a powerpoint

fandom blog! currently alex rider posting

[eliotquillon]

HELLO AMAZING ALEX RIDER BLOG two questions that have been ruminating within me: 1)do you have any thoughts on how bad Ian was as a parent? Because on one hand: Alex turned out Like That under him. On the other, I do not trust a single word out of Jones' mouth, and it's possible that he was just trying to connect with hobbies he knew about rather than just training him to be a spy. And of course, he didn't send Alex to a private school, which saved us all from Alex becoming the worst child to ever exist 2)Would Jack leaving in a world where Scorpia Rising was delayed have ruined Alex any worse than what happened in canon?

gonna answer these in reverse order, just because i have a LOT to say about #1:

2) not sure i really understand the question—i guess if you mean ‘what would happen if jack decided to move back to chicago without alex’ and scorpia rising never happened, then i think alex would be angry for a very long time…but i think as an adult, he would learn to forgive her. (after all, jack was only in her twenties when ian died, and suddenly she’s trapped in a foreign country with guardianship of a teenage boy—you’d reach a breaking point once MI6 got involved, too). i suppose the real question is what happens to alex in a world where jack leaves of her own accord; the ‘good ending’ would be him getting adopted by the pleasures anyway, although he’d likely still have some of the same teething problems we see in never say die, and the bad ending would be mi6 further tightening their grasp and using jack’s departure as a way to isolate alex even further. in which case, alex would be way more messed up than he is in scorpia rising. lol.

1) i think ian wasn’t a very good guardian (i hesitate to call him a ‘parent’) for a variety of reasons that have little to do with jones’ claim that he was training alex up deliberately; i concur that jones is unreliable and was probably just bullshitting to get a reaction. for one, there’s the fact that ian stayed working for mi6 at all once he became alex’s guardian—sure, ian loved his job, but he also knew the risks of it, and it’s ultimately an act of supreme selfishness to continue working in a field like that when you have a child at home (one who has already been orphaned as a result of this same career, mind you!). you mention the private school thing, but ian’s reasoning for sending alex to a state school isn’t ideological—it’s purely to ‘toughen him up’ (and alex was bullied his first few weeks at brookland for the way that he talked) which, idk, is not the best reason to pick a school for your child. i mean there’s a million reasons to send your child to a state school but that’s just a very weird one. and on the very few occasions we do hear anything concrete about ian, he comes off as very cold and distant; #neverforget that the american edition of stormbreaker had to insert some extra lines about ian and how he’d help alex with his homework because of how stony he comes off in the uk editions. but this is all circumstantial. there are two big smoking gun pieces of evidence that prove to me ian was a shitty guardian, and they both come from alex himself:

SKELETON KEY:

while ruminating on what his life might have been like were he raised by his parents (family is The theme in skeleton key), alex comments ‘he might have been a softer person. he probably would have had more friends’. this is, i think, pretty damning, because the implication here is that being raised by ian made alex into a harder person with fewer friends, and this is coming from alex himself. it’s also worth pointing out that alex is exceptionally bad at playing into the happy families ruse throughout the novel—he playacts at being part of a nuclear family with the pleasures, troy and turner, and sarov, and all three of those attempts crash and burn (the only one that comes close to success is alex’s holiday with the pleasures, which is a neat bit of accidental foreshadowing for the adoption). it’s not exactly a great indicator of ian’s parenting if alex can’t even pretend to be part of a regular parent/child dynamic.

SPY TRAP:

don’t get me wrong, spy trap sucks when it comes to breaking continuity, but alex’s monologue about ian in this short story is absolutely gutting and i think probably the most damning thing. alex claims he was never afraid of ian, but admits he ‘never really knew him’. he says that ian ‘was preparing me. he wanted me to be like him’. and then there’s this whole speech:

I wish he’d talked to me. I know he couldn’t tell me about his work but after he’d died, after I found out the truth…it made me sad. We’d had all these great times together. Sometimes, when he took me away with him, I thought I was the luckiest boy in the world. But, in fact, he was manipulating me. What gave him the right to decide what I was going to be? I suppose all adults—mums and dads—have dreams for their kids. But that doesn’t mean they have to trick them and lie to them and hide things from them. I don’t even know what Ian really felt about me. Did he like me or did he just want to use me?

yeah. needless to say this is not exactly a ringing endorsement of ian’s parenting skills—bear in mind spy trap is allegedly set post skeleton key, so well before jones ever raises the idea of ian deliberately grooming alex (i say allegedly, because i suspect that over the years ahorz has gradually moved towards making the ‘ian was training alex on purpose’ theory canon and spy trap’s whole purpose was to solidify this retcon, but whatever). but even if we take out the implication that alex himself believes ian was forcing him down a path he didn’t want to be on, the rest of ian’s characterisation here—opaque, unknowable, apparently cold to the point where alex wasn’t even sure if he liked him—is very damning as a parental figure.

anyway. i’m pretty firmly team ‘ian wasn’t necessarily a bad person’, but i am ALSO team ‘ian was a bad parent’. say what you will about john rider (who i actually think kind of sucked as a person, lol) but i don’t think he would’ve raised alex with this much detachment. i do think a lot of ian’s parenting issues can be blamed on the very heavily implied john-ian estrangement (and how much alex grew up to look like john) but at the same time, weird to take out your brother issues on his orphaned son lol. ANYWAY!

[eliotquillon]

I'm actually curious as to why you think John was a bad person (mainly because he was Mr Backstory NPC for me).

LOL okay maybe i went a little far in my last alex rider post when i called john a ‘bad person’, but i do stand by the fact that i don’t think he’s all good. the one scene we have of john rider pov is in snakehead’s bonus coda chapter, and maybe it’s just me but i’ve always been struck by how…callous he seems? certainly he appears very cold; he doesn’t spare a single thought for ian (who, even if the plane hadn’t been blown up, john would’ve never seen again), and he expresses a distinct lack of sympathy for ash. it’s easy to look at russian roulette and brush off john’s cruelty (because he can be exceptionally cruel in that book, including towards yassen) as ‘he was in deep cover’, but the best lies always have a degree of truth in them—i think for john to have fooled scorpia for so long, and to be capable of doing the kinds of things that cover required him to do, some kernel of ‘hunter’ must have been real. we’re told by ash in snakehead that it wasn’t really clear if john ever (ever!!!!) told helen that his scorpia cover was faked or if he really did just let her believe that he’d suddenly turned violent and distant for real, and, for all that ash is an unreliable narrator, i think the fact that that ambiguity is even pointed out to us is probably proof that john didn’t tell her. it’s certainly never debunked, anyway, and it’s one of the very few things we’re told about helen at all.

but to cut a long story short: for all that john and ian appear to have been estranged by the time of john’s death (i have a separate post on that), i think they were probably cut from roughly the same cloth. and while there’s a million different interpretations of ian, 99% of them do agree on the fact that, whatever kind of man he was, it wasn’t an uncomplicated, 10000% morally pure one. i think the same is true for john. did john do great things for his country? yes. but it doesn’t make him a good person, or a good husband, or a good father. the big lesson alex learns in scorpia (or is supposed to learn) is that he doesn’t need to follow in john’s footsteps; he can be his own person. it takes him nearly 400 pages to come to terms with that. even though blunt and jones make a pretty good attempt at convincing us that john was an angel, i think john being a good person always and forever undermines that fundamental message of adults, even idolised dead parents, not being perfect, and that alex needs to be his own man. and i also don’t trust a word out of blunt’s mouth, tbh—doesn’t it seem a bit like he’s going too hard on evangelising john’s virtues?—but that’s by the by.

also, there’s the fact that john’s specific military history means he probably committed war crimes in northern ireland. so there’s that. (he was in the belfast parachute regiment in the late 1970s, which was famously a really calm and normal time for the troubles in northern ireland and there was no violence committed by the british army there at all. this is probably just ahorz himself being a weirdo politically as opposed to a deep cut hint about john being a bad guy, but what a fucking biographical detail.)

[snaplight-anxiety]

Alex rider fails because Anthony Horowitz was so set on having a timeline that nothing works. Two weeks later one week later a few days later. He wanted to write endless stories about a teenage spy but that inherently doesn’t work with the story he told. The whole point is that those adventures weren’t sustainable. Something had to give and it did. Jack died Alex metaphorically killed himself and then moved literally across an ocean and a continent. His old life was dead. Anything in the new books just feels like a mockery of that. Jack and Alex moving back to the old house after reuniting so they can just continue their lives there again. It’s like some sort of puppetry of corpses. Their lives are dead. They couldn’t have kept living them. They’re trying to anyways. Alex ended the cycle and now Horowitz has half resurrected it but it doesn’t work to anyone who read Scorpia Rising because they know that thing should be dead.

[dullahan-solo]

brooo i wish i hadn’t read the new alex rider books, now i have a new fucking ship with zero fandom presence. what do you MEAN there’s no Freddy x Alex content on tumblr i am STARVING

[flowersforzoe11]

okay upon thinking about it more (i.e. being a little older) i actually can't even blame Alex 1% for joining Scorpia

like MI6 recruits you twice. sends you off to the CIA bc they bragged about you

and the minute you ask for ANYTHING (which involves you seeing the very assassin they told you to avoid) they gaslight the shit out of you and barely apologize for it

joining the amazon of terrorism is actually a quite reasonable crashout after those 2-3 months. like something had to give, so might as well fuck around (go to venice) and find out (find your destiny)

[im-postering]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/66507520/chapters/171527425

After finally getting out of the spy game, Alex Rider faces his hardest challenge yet: reintegrating with his peers and regaining a social life. Luckily, with the support of his best mate Tom and the people he managed to befriend in the gaps between missions, it's definitely doable.

A collection of assorted POVs on Alex's return to school, as a sequel to 'dubious military guardianship arrangement'

[truly-sincerely]

Me, reading an Alex Rider fic with minor continuity errors: Oh ho ho, just like the books... and the important thing, of course, is that they told me exactly what kind of helicopter he got a ride in.

[icebluecyanide]

Alex has such bad luck with his CIA mission partners in this series lmao. Like first there's Turner and Troy in Skeleton Key who hate him and get all unprofessional about it and only barely manage to act a family with Alex because no one would suspect the CIA to recruit a child for the cover. And then they get themselves killed (ironically with some of their last words to Alex being that he can't come along because they don't want him getting people killed).

And then in Ark Angel there's Tamara Knight who does save Alex's life so that's nice, but also has a radio transmitter that she could use to contact the strike team waiting in Barbados and decides to wait until the tropical storm hits that might cause issues with the connection instead of, idk, letting them know Drevin already tried to kill Alex. And well, let's just say it's not Alex who sets off the trip wire as they run across the open terrain. She then promptly gets herself shot so Alex has to make his way to Barbados alone to get help.

[im-postering]

hot take: alex's very terrible year of spy nonsense is just 'isolate the feral year nines: hard mode'

[jade-die-papiertaenzerin]

He may be in love with Freddy as well. Alex isn't sure. With Freddy it doesn't feel like it did with Sabina. Less flattery, more calmness. But it doesn't matter. Alex doesn't need to know if it's love. It doesn't have to be love.

Being with Freddy is quiet understanding. It's safety. It's trust.

Their stories are different, but Freddy understands coming out of a life of spying and violence.

Freddy is strong on his own. Still unsure of himself and his place in the ordinary, but deadly and trained. Someone important to Alex who doesn't need his protection. Not like Tom. Not like Sabina. Not like Jack. He's someone able to protect himself.

Someone able to destroy Alex. Who had the chance to. The time Nightshade swore revenge. And yet Freddy wanted to be with Alex, protected Tom cause he mattered to Alex.

Alex can trust Freddy wholeheartedly. To make a plan for both of their good. To take care of himself. To listen to what Alex says.

To like him.

Alex doesn't know if it's love. It's isn't the flattery feeling he though love was. His feelings for Freddy are calmer, warmer. Less excitement, more comfort. Something rare in his life as a former spy.

[icebluecyanide]

The annoying thing about continuity moving on and contradicting itself as it does in Alex Rider (book series) is that I'm sitting here feeling like a conspiracy theorist for being like 'I don't think the Cray job was in any way Scorpia related'.

Like, obviously Scorpia is the plot hook for the next book so maybe that's why it's not mentioned more in Eagle Strike itself, but in Scorpia there's still no mention of the Damian Cray thing being a Scorpia operation. Mrs Rothman says she 'heard about Yassen' and mentions Cray casually as one of the people Alex killed. There's every implication that this is the first they come into contact with Alex, barring the John Rider connection, and that Nile almost killed him simply for sneaking into the Widow's Palace and asking questions. Even at the end of Scorpia, Mrs Rothman wants him dead for what John did, not any of Alex's own previous interference. MI6 in the same book talk about how Scorpia hasn't been very active recently, and at no point link Yassen to Scorpia's recent actions.

In fact, it's not until Snakehead when the Sayle job gets retconned to have been linked to Scorpia with them supplying the virus. The implication in Stormbreaker itself seems to point towards the Chinese government in a 'we can't say this outright but' kind of way, although fair on Ahorz for trying to retcon that kind of xenophobic plot.

But basically, I don't think Yassen was actually working for Scorpia when he was helping Cray in the books, and I don't think there's anything to suggest he would need to worry about Scorpia when thinking about his retirement plans either. He certainly doesn't when we see his POV in the book itself, and he considers killing Cray multiple times and washing his hands off the job, with no indication that he would have to answer to someone else for his actions.

[alexhatessupermarketcola]

Ooo, I love the idea that Yassen sent Alex to Scorpia not because he didn't know John's true allegiances, not because of bloodloss persay and not because he'd conveniently forgotten his desire for Alex to stay out of all this either but because he was feeling petty and his dying wish was to fuck Scorpia up.... something he felt sure that Alex could achieve 😆

[im-postering]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/66385540

Kathy "Ruskie" Lewis was expecting to receive her discharge from the SAS with a minimum of fuss. Unfortunately, she is instead manipulated into taking guardianship for a fifteen year old she is absolutely not qualified to deal with in exchange for her discharge. Alex Rider doesn't want to be here, but at least this woman's nice.

A prelude work to an AU I'm writing, where Alex is at Malagosto for 3.5 months instead of two weeks, and everything rapidly diverges from there! (I realise this suggests Invisible Sword succeeds. I am, unfortunately, not that creative.)

If you happen to read it, please feel free to give me criticism on whichever platform you prefer! It's my first time writing fic and characterisation is a concern of mine. :)

[icebluecyanide]

Alex in Ark Angel sitting on a beach in the Caribbean without a shirt with people seeing his scar from getting shot/having surgery and it's healed but 'still very red' and like yeah Alex and it's gonna stay that way if you keep exposing it to the sun in the first 12-18 months 😭😭 did no one tell this boy anything about scar care 😭😭

[im-postering]

wolf, highly qualified soldier, faced with 1 (one) teenager where he wasn't expecting to see one

[im-postering]

i personally headcanon Tom as a mad leftist. Alex told him all of this bullshit the government did to him against his will, and he rolled with it because what the fuck else was he supposed to do, and then a few days later his brain kicked in (or his year 6 'rights of the child' topic) and he was like 'wait.... that's super, super illegal' and he very carefully googled 'government comitting crimes?" and being a british teenager circa 2001 gets immediately hit with, like, a bunch of stuff about the middle east and corruption and the uk's disastrous last general election, and he's good enough at the internet to dig down into it. pre-radicalised with Alex's stuff, the anti-imperialism doesn't seem unreasonable, and being british he's probably been getting stuff about the Evils of Empire (in the abstract, past tense - i get that stuff as an aussie so they have to right?) for ages and it all just snowballs from there. it's only three steps to the actual books and he accidentally becomes a nerd because he finds it interesting. Alex is sort of like man stop telling me about the evils of imperialism you're making me feel bad about that time i did brownface to support a deeply evil refugee policy for an american stooge nation

[im-postering]

I don't know why people ship yalex when the funnier dynamic is post-canon alex claiming him as a fucked-up surrogate brother. hilarious on all levels. "oh, yassen gregorovich? the dead terrorist assassin? yeah my dad had a paternal mentorship with him in the nineties. that makes us brothers!" bonus points if this is an intimidation tactic or he's using it as a reputation builder. Hilarious when used on a civilian as well. "my dad had an emotionally involved mentor-mentee relationship with a russian teenager before i was born. he's dead now and i only knew him for a few months (you know. when i was 'sick' all the time) but i like to think of us as brothers :)" bro.

if you want it angstier you could tie it in to a desperation for familial connection - everyone related to him is dead, hunter's legacy is toxic/tainted, nobody knew helen, ian or jack, but cossack has this towering operational legacy and was passingly familiar with alex and cared about him, it's an easy way to tie himself, at least passingly, to something simpler than all the Rider Bullshit