“Are We Friends?”

Literature side blog. Main is @fireplacevibes. 20s. Australian. Lesbian.

[fireandashes]

hey so was anybody gonna tell me that the raven boys is one of the best contemporary fantasy novels of the twenty-first century and an insane study on the cycles of abuse and the mindset of rich teenage boys and class divides or was i just gonna have to figure this out on my own

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

hamlet’s “i did love you once” and ophelia’s “indeed, my lord, you did make me believe so” is such an underrated gut punch. it’s betrayal it’s heartbreak it’s vulnerability it’s so over. truly no one is doing it like shakespeare

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

“so much of hamlet is love in the past tense” HELLO @xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx

[raptorific]

I gotta love President Snow's commitment to constructing little Wile E. Coyote poison traps for people who piss him off even though he can just have people shot because he owns the police

[falloutnewnobody]

if someone lined up all the karamazov brothers and i had to guess by apearance alone which was the deadbeat highschool dropout with an inapropriate relationship with a 14 year old, which was the alcoholic who hallucinates the devil, which is the broke blackmailer, and which was the attractive guitaur player with god's most loyal girlfiend i would be zero for four

[spider-artdump]

[uponthemistymoors]

It’s now been six months since I read Wuthering Heights and I still think about this moment every single day. The anguish, the guilt, the spite, the violence. God they’ve destroyed eachother. It’s terrible. It’s in this moment the real tragedy of the story is laid bare; in another life, another time, a place where they both weren’t horrifically abused and crushed by the expectations and systems of their society, they would have been together.

And the way they change within this scene, the way they go through so many different thoughts and feelings. The anger, the regret, the obsession.

I mean like OH MY GOD

“I love my murderer — but yours! How can I?”

FUCK. Akandhwkajhrhe FUCKKKK

Anyways I’m normal about it I swear. Also I haven’t seen the new movie and probably won’t lol

[oh-jod-dammit]

Gideon is an unreliable narrator because she's so often looking in the wrong directions, sometimes lacks context to understand which things are important enough to pay more attention, and because she's a terrible terrible tsundere living in denial.

Harrow is an unreliable narrator because she's schizophrenic AND haunted AND lobotomized herself and also is prone to 99 layers of secrecy and cryptics at all times and also most of her story being filtered through Gideon doesn't help.

John is an unreliable narrator because he omits and obscures so much, is terrified of making himself truly vulnerable, and at least some of the time is also lying to himself. Of course not being a true PoV character so we never actually get in his head is also a big factor.

Nona is an unreliable narrator because she simply cannoooooot be bothered to give a shit about the main universe plot, oh my God, she has more important things to worry about, like her friends and family and all these cool dogs.

We all know these things but I've just realized what this also means is:

The most reliable narrator we've had at least in any of the novels, by merit of her only being the PoV character for one whole chapter and spending basically all of it either judging or pining, is Ianthe Tridentarius.

[deja-b00]

somehow it comes up that troy had a crush on shane and was going to ask for his number. and after troy gets ribbed by his teammates and ilya makes a big scene, shane is like, “well i never would’ve gone out with you lol.”

and troy smiles, “right, because you were with roz the whole time.”

“i mean, yes, but also because you and dallas kent spent years calling me and jj ‘rush hour’ and asking hayden if his wife was his beard to cover up his big gay relationship with me.”

the rest of the centaurs blink. harris puts his head in his hands and groans.

and troy’s like, “oh. right. sorry about that :/“

[mayjuvac]

some amazing additions from the tags

[hunybody]

the eleventh hour promise cliff marleau makes where he says Roz listen to me man Listen if it goes tits up in canada because you uprooted your life for some bitch i’ve never met—and nobody has ever met by the way—no don’t walk away. tell you what dude we’ll both trade to florida. Alright? you have an escape hatch you’re not trapped brother you say the fucking word and we are back on line together coronas in hand. fucking call whenever and i’m there i’ve got my agent on it let me know and i’ll pull trig

[ghastlycrew]

it's just that. it's so fucking important that the linguist bails on the expedition before the novel. the written word fails in area x. it becomes one of the most chilling modes of cosmic incomprehensibility in area x. the biologist's written account is a self-admitted failure. she is nameless. where lies the strangling fruit is all the more terrifying for the fact that it is in a recognizable language with an inscrutable meaning. the journals are ROTTING in the lighthouse, ink running and turning into decaying organic matter along with everything else. no one is named. the novel begins with a pointless semantic debate that everyone is fiercely invested in regarding the tower/tunnel nomenclature. no one has a name. they are instrumentalized to their professions. when she encounters the crawler, the biologist immediately compares it to an encounter with the "destroyer of worlds," a "more apt" name for the starfish than its scientific nomenclature.

"what an inadequate name i had chosen for it—the crawler."

this novel is just as (if not more) concerned with how area x heralds the failure of language, not just the failure of scientific inquiry

[ladiemars]

when your circle small but y’all doomed by the narrative

[burningfudge]

this is so funny to me for some reason 😭

[sistertaxon]

re:lrb this quote from andy weir

the fact that he thinks this way is kind of obvious i think to anyone who's read project hail mary and actually thought about its politics (e.g. the passive and unquestioned depiction of the climate crisis as not caused by economic interests) but it's still incredibly funny and the exact kind of 1800s-level take about art that you'd expect from a software engineer

[n00dlerdoodler]

Forever grateful that Suzanne Collins wrote TBOSAS in third person because 99% percent of Coriolanus' inner monologue is some variation of "Kicking puppies seems to be disliked by the districts, which is weird because it's second nature to everyone here in the Capitol. I am not like other Capitol boys, but I also refuse to expand my perspective, which limits my empathy, enclosing me into a vicious cycle of ignorance which will turn violent once mixed in with my ambitious nature. I love (dehumanizing and objectifying) my girlfriend. "

[etiennelux]

one of my favorite things in tbosas is the way other character who register as threats to snow turn out to be harmless. the most obvious is how reaper seems like he is going to be the biggest threat in the arena, but all he does is collect the other tributes bodies respectfully. and there’s also clemensia. after shes hospitalized, snow never checks up on her and she’s mad at him when she gets released. there’s this tension like clemensia is going to turn on him at any moment, or that she’s plotting something nefarious, but eventually when he apologizes for not visiting, she just immediately forgives him. like she was not sinister or evil, she was simply mad because he was dick to her. and she forgives him! but it speaks to the way snow sees enemies everywhere. and it also speaks to the way not everyone in the capitol thinks the way he does.

[c-kiddo]

one thing i thought was rly well done in tbosbas is snow's cycle of idolising and resentment towards lucy gray. he has this flat idea of her in his mind where she symbolises freedom and wildness (but not too wild, she's sophisticated enough to worry about her appearance) and talks up this sophistication during interviews to the point were he asserts that she's not district but closer to capitol. he creates an image of her while promoting her to the capitol citizens because she's very much under his control there but once she's back in 12 his control is gone and he spirals . even her mentioning her life outside of him, singing about past relationships makes him lose his fucking mind. he hates every single time she escapes the lucy gray he has in his head that belongs to him . he hates what she might've meant by living "by her charms" (its never clarified either way but he's bitter about it nonetheless) and hates too when tigris sympathises with that and implies she mightve done sex work to help them survive, because it dirties them both in his mind, that they mightve "let" themselves be tarnished. he hates when the song lucy gray's name comes from doesnt give him a clear answer and he hates that she already has a family and friends and inside jokes and songs not about him . rly such a well done aspect of the book to meee

[not100bees]

The most unrealistic part of all of the game changer books is that there are enough hockey players that are good people to make a whole team of good person hockey players