Formerly an RP blog, now just my main blog. Largely fandom related content from Marvel, Stargate Atlantis / SG1, probably some Supernatural, too. I'm keeping my sideblogs as the RP blogs they are, even if they are not very active. Side blogs: outofcryo (Bucky Barns); leatherstitchedwings (Daryl Dixon, TWD)
I have loaned my physical copy of Choosing Theo by Victoria Aveline to a friend. Hopefully she will enjoy it at least half as much as I did. This is her introduction to alien romance and I think its a pretty gentle and tame series to do that introduction with.
making friends via fandom is inherently hilarious because in many ways it's like a regular friendship and sometimes you'll share stuff that's going on in your lives and offer support and talk about food or pets or random cultural stuff because you live on opposite sides of the damn planet, but also some of your interactions are like "hello beloved friend whom I cherish deeply, I have brought you a deceptively platonic gift of lovingly crafted star wars porn"
realizing a headcanon of yours happens to make an element of canon even more heartbreaking when you hadn't even considered it from that angle previously
[ID from alt: emoji rubbing their hands together and grinning evilly. End ID.]
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
I think I had a pretty good month in May for reading...
23 books is a pretty solid read.
I am a little surprised by my top rated titles, but not really either? I think that is mostly because I consumed the Naga Bride series at the end of the month. So all of my thoughts have been about that series as of late
I have read the first four books of the Naga Brides series by Naomi Lucas. And I will admit that I acrually read the first book, Viper, back in March and was not particularly interested in continuing with the series. I am not sure if it was just a shift in my mood of the types of stories I wanted to read or the actual content of the book, but it left a not great impression as a romance story on me.
I decided to pick up the second book a few weeks ago because I had no idea what to read, and I was curious to find out more about the Nagas and how and why they came to be. I figured that with 8 books in the series the author must delve into their origins, and even a little more about what happened to Earth and the war with the Lurkers.
And so far, I am glad that I decided to come back to the series. I will need to re-read Viper at some point with the information we got, specially in books 3 and 4. But also, I liked the relationships/romances in Blue Coral and Death Adder (certainly more than I remember liking it in Viper, though King Cobra was alright).
(Spoilers below cut)
So, as expected, the Nagas are at least partly alien. That they were created by human scientists with a blend of Luker and Human DNA (with snake DNA used to bridge gaps) is not surprising. Not with how we have been shown humanity has "progressed". That the worst parts of us survived Earth and some how thrived in their own way. So learning that the Naga were created because of human greed, paranoia, and general sense of superiority was not shocking. But what we were shown on page about it... fuck... those were some brutal experiments.
Vagan's reaction to it was a little surprising. I thought he would be a little more... horrified? I mean he was shocked, specially watching the small female Nagas being used in the experiment and dying so horribly.
I kind of really want to know why that Lurker was in that underground dome/facility. Like, was he trying to help those humans? Was he captured? Was he part of the destruction? The fact that Vagan recognized the Lurker as one of the monsters the Nagas used to hunt and kill in their territories (though not malformed like the others had been) left me with so many questions.
And then Zhallaix! The reveal that he is deeply affected by Lurker tech, that all the Death Adders were (to the point of madness), was such a twist. Like, why only them? We got told in the other books where he was shown or mentioned that the Death Adders had been one of the oldest clans. Were they the first? Were they the closest those humans scientists came to "success" with making a controlable group?
And then the stasis facility! Holy shit. There was no clear numbers given, but the way it was described, the way he described it to Celest later, you get the impression that there are possibly still thousands of Nagas in stasis. Just waiting to be woken.
That he suspects thag maybe he came from one of those pods, rather than being born from his mother, does answer the question of how many generations of Nagas there has been. Two. Just two. Those who came from those stasis pods, and then ones who were born from them.
Because so far all of these Nagas remember their mothers and sisters dying from pregnancy and birth (a flaw in their design we learned in Blue Coral). The female Nagas were never likely to survive the gestation of an offspring with Genisis-8 (the stuff that let's them use or control Lurker tech I believe).
But now going into book 5, Boomslang, I am really hoping we get some more information or answers to what Zhallaix meant when he said the Lurker cube told him "They are coming". Who is coming? The Lurkers? Is it a new message? An old one? Was the one in the ungrounded dome part of the ones coming?
I want to talk to someone about The Clecanian Series by Victoria Aveline.
I want to talk about the social implications of a people who are verging on extinction searching for compatible alien races. And suddenly finding a near perfect alien race. An alien race that is so compatible that they can call forth mating marks. Something thought to be lost due to a lack of female births and their own genetic engineering of themselves.
I want to lament with someone over the emotionally brutal reality of a world with a declining birth rate, and a drastically reduced female birth rate on top of that. The harsh and ugly truth of each cloister or communal living arrangement for the women having some version of a Wailing Room (a place for those women to retreat to grieve their losses and sacrifices). The fucking horrific need for emotional separation from couplings, from mother and child.
The new ans terrifying risks of the return of mating marks, specially for the men. Since their people is so imbalanced in their male to female ratio, the chances of a female Clecanian finding and forming a mate bond is slim as hell. And the human women so far, they dont feel the full pull of the mate bond. Oh, they feel something, but they arent subject to the truly negative effects of rejection or separation. Something we see a little of in Luka and hear the worst about in Rheago.
I want to speculate with someone about what's coming. About where the story is going with the resistence and the wider need of the people for survival as a species. I want to speculate who the next book will have as the MMC or FMC and what role or impact the couple will have on the larger politics of the world and the interplanetary council.
Ugh... I just want to talk to someone about this. About how Theo spent the majority of his life half shunned because of his extensive burn scars. About how desperate Fejo was to be accepted, to be chosen, that he half turned himself into a play thing to please a potential partner. The way Sikthand still probably can't fall asleep with someone else in the room, not even his mate, because of the life time of paranoia and assassination attempts.
Just all of it. I want to talk to someone about all of it. In depth.
theartofmadeline
janainaart
vaporwave
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