I'm Mahina, head librarian at Malie City library!
Our hours are 8AM-8PM every day.
Come ask me for some good reads, or just about anything related to our little city!
Follows from @aceoflilies.
Welcome to the Malie City Library Official Rotomblr!
Phew, that's a mouthful.
We've of course got our open hours and any updates here, but this is also a page for anyone to post about book recommendations, library questions, and just to generally foster the community here on Ula'ula Island (and beyond)! Everyone's welcome, including Team Skull.
If you're wondering about the owner of this account... I'm Mahina! I'm 29, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm the head librarian at this old place! We've been going strong for over 100 years and I'm certainly not going to be the one to get this library shut down. (I also do a lot of work with the community center!)
Picrew link
My one and only partner Pokémon is my darling little Bookmark! They're a little sharp, but they looooove helping me cut out labels and shred papers!
Anything else you want to know about me, feel free to ask! Looking forward to getting to know everyone here! (//OOC below cut!)
Hey guys, it's Ace (21, she/him, @aceoflilies) back at it again with another blog. I don't have any major plans for this one, other than posting about some in-universe Pokémedia and creating a space for Alolan muses to chat and hang out!
Mahina herself is pretty straightforward. A bit plain, and a bit blunt at times, but generally just a nice person who enjoys both the quiet side and the public side of working at a library! (Yes, she realizes her Kartana isn't normal. She finds it funny to troll people about it, though.) (Also, she is single.)
Mahina's happy to interact with muses that are hybrids, human-turned-Pokémon, legendaries, or from other media, though she might be a bit skeptical!
Any posts that would be considered relevant to the functioning of Malie Library will be tagged #official library posts , whereas any personal posts of Mahina's will be tagged with #mahina posts .
I tag any triggering content with #tw [trigger] (though I don't expect anything major on this blog), and any OOC comments are denoted with // !
If there's any other questions, feel free to DM me or just send an ask!
I’ve been told I “can’t just abandon the library social media accounts because I don’t want to post about romance books all month”.
So! Today I’m announcing our “blind date with a book” system is returning! Some of our junior circulation assistants have labeled various romance books with tags they’d have on AO3, like “Together for the Pokémon”, “Magma/Aqua to lovers”, and “Secret Relationship (with the champion)”. Feel free to check them out, and find out what you got!
Did You Know?: The Malie City Library once had Pokémon-led book deliveries!
We unfortunately had to close our delivery option after several Pelipper got distracted by the Wishiwashi in the ocean and dropped our books into said ocean. Never to be seen again.
Well, we’ve got our end-of-year “best books of 2024” recommendations ready at the Malie City Library! Just in the nick of time! So without further ado, here’s…
Malie City Library’s 2024 Picks!
For nonfiction, our recommendations are as follows:
A Rose in Shadow is a keen retelling of the Darkest Day incident in Galar, complete with in-depth interviews with many highly relevant people. Including Former Chairman Rose himself. A strong recommendation for anyone interested in economic nonfiction, the corruption of large organizations, and modern-day Legendary Pokémon tales!
And Pocket Power is a deep dive into the history of the Pokéball, its use cases across time, and ultimately, the question of whether human-Pokémon relationships will go beyond the Pokéball. Thoughtful, with a lot of consideration to human-Pokémon relationships across time and culture!
For fiction…
Those who want a realistic fiction story should look no further than This Ninetales Of Ours, a multigenerational tale of a Kantonian family as a child’s Vulpix evolves and watches over the family’s children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren! Definitely a tearjerker at points, but also life-affirming and a reminder of the power of Pokémon. And fun fact—the author has a Ninetales of her own!
As a more irreverent fantasy tale, The Court of Legends ties together cultural tales from many different regions and records of legendary Pokémon to paint a “pantheon” of these legendary Pokémon and their interactions! Humorous often, surprisingly educational, and ultimately features a lot of relatable bureaucracy and workplace conflict. Maybe not the book for anyone particularly religious, though!
And if you want a good mystery, you couldn’t do better than That One League Party. Silly name aside, it takes a classic murder mystery format and transfers it to a modern setting, focusing on the murder of a champion in a small region’s competitive league—at the league’s Delibird Day party, no less! Every character oozes with personality, and their Pokémon do as well in this chaotic, messy mystery where everyone’s stepping over each other.
Well, we’ve got our end-of-year “best books of 2024” recommendations ready at the Malie City Library! Just in the nick of time! So without further ado, here’s…
Malie City Library’s 2024 Picks!
For nonfiction, our recommendations are as follows:
A Rose in Shadow is a keen retelling of the Darkest Day incident in Galar, complete with in-depth interviews with many highly relevant people. Including Former Chairman Rose himself. A strong recommendation for anyone interested in economic nonfiction, the corruption of large organizations, and modern-day Legendary Pokémon tales!
And Pocket Power is a deep dive into the history of the Pokéball, its use cases across time, and ultimately, the question of whether human-Pokémon relationships will go beyond the Pokéball. Thoughtful, with a lot of consideration to human-Pokémon relationships across time and culture!
For fiction…
Those who want a realistic fiction story should look no further than This Ninetales Of Ours, a multigenerational tale of a Kantonian family as a child’s Vulpix evolves and watches over the family’s children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren! Definitely a tearjerker at points, but also life-affirming and a reminder of the power of Pokémon. And fun fact—the author has a Ninetales of her own!
As a more irreverent fantasy tale, The Court of Legends ties together cultural tales from many different regions and records of legendary Pokémon to paint a “pantheon” of these legendary Pokémon and their interactions! Humorous often, surprisingly educational, and ultimately features a lot of relatable bureaucracy and workplace conflict. Maybe not the book for anyone particularly religious, though!
And if you want a good mystery, you couldn’t do better than That One League Party. Silly name aside, it takes a classic murder mystery format and transfers it to a modern setting, focusing on the murder of a champion in a small region’s competitive league—at the league’s Delibird Day party, no less! Every character oozes with personality, and their Pokémon do as well in this chaotic, messy mystery where everyone’s stepping over each other.
Now then, I have something to get off my chest. Now, I'd prefer saying this in Countryside Interpretation, a sign or pamphlet, but my artistic prowess is limited.
Please pick up your discarded Pokéballs.
Firstly, modern pokeballs are constructed out of metal. When you leave pokeballs in routes, pokemon can easily become stuck in them. I have seen many woopers become trapped in balls, many others will never escape.
Not only that, pokeballs take hundreds of years to decay and break down. These tools can pollute waterways, forests, and especially bogs and wetlands, where decomposition takes much longer. Even when the balls have fully rotted, they can send heavy metals into the water, turning the land toxic to all forms of life.
If anybody would like to help with the removal of Pokéballs, by the by, we often run Pickup days in the Malie Garden! (And I feel it would be a great idea elsewhere, too!)
Pokémon with Pickup, humans with keen eyes, or even the rare Yamper who love to fetch Pokéballs, are all great help in the effort!
I really feel for the people who have to design merchandise and the like for every single Pokémon because it’s some child’s favorite. I do.
This is as someone who has gotten requests from tired parents to find books about Lairon (not Aggron or Aron!), Bruxish, Hitmontop, and Wormadam, among other Pokémon. Every Pokémon is truly a favorite of someone! And unfortunately with likely thousands of Pokémon out there, some little kid starts crying when the library doesn’t have books about Shroodle. I don’t even know what a Shroodle is, but she needed a book on one desperately!
A fun fact for non-Alolans: due to the prevalence of the Island Challenge, sixth grade essentially doesn’t exist on the islands! (Well, it does in that it’s what happens after you do return, but there’s still a year’s gap!)
Students just return to middle school the year after their Island Challenges, between elementary and middle. Our library hosts some gap programs to assist the education of students who aren’t interested, want to keep up on their knowledge, or just need to finish assigned “Challenge Homework” for the year off!
And as another fun fact: the year in between I spent at the Malie City Library (having dropped out of the Island Challenge exceedingly early) is what encouraged me to become a librarian later in life!
I'm already seeing advice from people in the US to purchase queer books and other banned or "controversial" books on paper as a way to combat the wave of government censorship that is coming. While this is a good idea (it is! absolutely!), it's not accessible to everyone, and truly, we're not going to be able to consumerism our way out of this one.
If you can buy the books, do. Whether you can buy the books or not, borrow them from your library.
Borrow the paper versions. Borrow the ebook or audiobook versions. Request the titles you want that your library doesn't have. The more a title circulates or is requested, the better librarians are going to be able to defend keeping it if and when it's ever challenged.
Use libraries like @queerliblib too. The more members they have, the better they'll be able to fundraise.
Your community resources depend on you using them. Borrow the books before they go away.
InB4: Piracy is not the solution here. We're trying to keep community resources available, not make sure individual people can read individual books. Different problems.
The books are still available. Borrowing them from your library and returning them on time and in good condition will help keep them that way.
For some additional context, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary funding mechanism for libraries on a national level. It distributes grants to State Libraries (every state has one, though it may not be called exactly that) who then distribute that money further to individual libraries in their states. It's a federal entity that has to be reauthorized every year or that huge chunk of funding goes away, and every year of the first Trump administration the fight for reauthorization was a white-knuckle event. We got it through by the skin of our teeth each year, but it was harrowing.
Libraries are mentioned on page one of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership (the big book of horrible policy plans). Choosing not to reauthorize the IMLS will be an easy way for the incoming administration to gut library services nationwide, especially in small communities that don't have a thriving donor base to fill those budget gaps. They'll be able to stop the "porn peddlers" and "groomers" at the cost of vital services to those communities.
One of the best tools we have to try and avoid that outcome is to prove, definitively, that libraries matter by presenting robust use statistics. Checking out books, using library spaces, attending library programs, all of that gets captured and reported to the IMLS each year. They're imperfect measures of the value the library provides to the community, but they're what we have.
At the local level it's going to be just as, if not more important to educate the community about what the library does. Your local governing authorities aren't going to be persuaded by the librarian alone, but they can be persuaded by vocal community support. That will also inoculate your community against "grassroots" attempts to shut the library down, like almost happened in Dayton, Washington in 2023.
To bring it back around to OP's original point, the imperfect nature of the stats gathered can work in libraries' favor on both fronts. It might actually be detrimental to present record-breaking circulation numbers for queer titles to the incoming administration, but the IMLS doesn't collect that level of detail. Any book you check out adds to the bottom line total that gets reported, queer or not. At the local level librarians have more control over the stories they tell with their data. If you're in a progressive community, they can be open with those more granular numbers as a way to underscore their importance as a resource to queer community. If you're in a conservative community they can lean on the bigger picture to show the impact on everyone, while knowing internally what materials are actually circulating and how best to curate the collection to serve their patrons.
Are you a trainer? Did you go on a journey or Island Challenge? Do you want to write about your experience in a format other than the Rotomblr blog you’re using?
Check out our workshop this week on “Writing the Journey Memoir: Advice from A Publisher”! Featuring pitfalls and cliches to avoid (no, you don’t need to treat your fights with the Kahuna as life and death!) and ways to tell a compelling narrative from your own experience!
This month we’ll have writing workshops to help out anyone taking on their own writing challenges, including workshops on classics like writing battles, writing the “Pokénovel” (centered around the perspectives of Pokémon), and every other genre you can imagine!
So keep an eye out! Maybe we’ll post some snippets from participants as well, if people are interested!
The best part…? Well, I’d like to say it’s our library!!
…Not buying that, I bet. I love Malie City as a whole! Our gardens and city all have a blended Kantonian-Alolan culture to them, which makes the city beautiful! And the food delicious. The observatory being so close by is wonderful too!
