finns det nån därute som kan svara

Siiri, 30s, Finland. Well, I for one am glad for some sense of order.

[starlene]

One of my favourite things about The Blue Castle Book Club (and the previous LMM book clubs I've taken part in) is that even with short chapters, we manage to pick out so many different details and focus on so many different aspects of the text. There's never a day when everyone just goes, yeah, this chapter is about X and I feel Y about it, there's always such a delightful amount of variance.

As a lover of Swedish musical theatre and historical fiction that no one has heard of, I'm used to absolutely minuscule fandoms. And when it comes to those, it's often a bit of an opposite experience, actually: it can sometimes make me feel slightly desperate when the only other person that's ever posted in the tag focuses on a completely different aspect of the work than I do, or interprets it very differently. Like... isn't it enough that there are only two of us on the entire planet that enjoy this thing, do we also have to disagree about it? The universe truly is a lonely, dark, unloving place.

But in the book club, there are enough of us that picking out different aspects of the text doesn't feel lonely at all – instead, it feels like we're building a puzzle or colouring a picture together.

I'm so happy to have stumbled across these book clubs. I don't think I'd ever searched any LMM related tags on this site or anything, so I have no idea why the For You page showed me a post about the Anne of the Island book club back when that was about to happen... but I'm very glad that it did!

[starlene]

The Blue Castle Book Club: Chapter 15

I'm starting to feel like in the modern day, Uncle James would be some sort of a far right manosphere neopatriarchal grifter.

I mean, him suggesting locking Valancy up again, then making the "splendid concession" that a person who has made missteps in her life just might still be a human being... unfortunately, though it's been a hundred years, the Uncle Jameses of this world are still alive and well and absolutely everywhere.

~

"– –and as for the damage it will do my reputation, why, you know I haven’t any matrimonial chances anyhow, so what does it matter?"

Love to see Valancy taking something her family has used against her and using it against them, and in such a perfectly logical manner too. Really, what does it matter?

Let her say fuck, though.

~

I'm sure this has been said before, but even so: Cissy Gay is a drag name if I ever heard one.

[smallerplaces]

"She had been told that her maternal grandfather, old Amos Wansbarra, had chosen the name for her."

Let's pause ruminate over my theory for where the name Wansbarra comes from. As far as I can tell, it's entirely a made-up name for The Blue Castle. While it's possible to play around with etymologies, it's unlikely that LM Montgomery did, and the effort yields nothing fruitful.

So I believe that Wansbarra is a phonetic(ish) rendering of something more like Waynesboro, Wansborough, or Waynesbury. This kind of spelling shift happens when one generation (or more) is illiterate -- or at least blissfully unconcerned with spelling.

In that case, what is Valancy a phonetic(ish) rendering of?

Valencia. It's got to be Valencia. The "blue castle" that exists in her head is thus "a castle in Spain" (a fantasy, per Merriam-Webster) in the additional sense that it exists in the head of someone named after a place in Spain.

That's a laborious joke worthy of Uncle Benjamin.

[darkandstormyranger]

finally some relatable content on ig

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[starlene]

Earlier, I said that the way Primavera (2025) resonates with me feels impossible to really share without dredging up the entire bottom sediment layer of my soul in the process. If I don't share any of it, however, I feel like I might soon rupture my spleen or implode or something.

So, here's a little look into some of my experience with the movie, not quite from the bottom sediment but perhaps from the mesopelagic zone of the soul:

It's been very refreshing for me to absolutely fall in love with a story that 1. contains my favourite things (heartbreaking historical fiction about women being crushed under the patriarchy, some awkward dweeb teaching music) 2. has a central relationship that is everything I like (intense, tragic, forbidden somehow, feels a little bit like destiny perhaps) and also lends itself so easily to an asexual/aromantic interpretation.

I think there are some things in the movie that equally support a romantic/sexual interpretation and an aromantic/asexual interpretation of whatever it now is that Cecilia and Antonio have going on (for example, when Cecilia's cousin-in-law-to-be is teasing her about passion, is Cecilia uncomfortable because she does feel passion but not for the man she is about to marry, or because she doesn't feel passion for anyone and the entire concept feels foreign and unpleasant to her) – but there's nothing that'd tip the scale into the romantic/sexual territory, and I love that. To me, they're having a messed up squish that neither could explain if they tried.

It's never felt especially important to me to see myself in or feel represented by fiction. Romances can make for very good stories, so as someone who loves stories, they can and do delight me... and of course, one of the joyful things about fiction is that it allows us to peek into the lives of people that are different from us. I understand why people say that representation matters, it's just rarely something I go looking for in fiction myself.

Even so, I can't lie, stumbling across this fictional relationship that really makes me teeter somewhere between that could be me, that has been me, and I wish that were me has been a joy. There are platonic relationships that are just as messy and as profound as any romance you could imagine, it's just that their nuances tend to be harder to depict (or even properly understand/explain when they're happening in our own lives) because we have less vocabulary and shared cultural concepts about them... but this movie just hits the nail exactly on the head, for me at least.

It's cathartic to be kicked straight into the soul by a piece of fiction once in a while, what else can I say.

[starlene]

this 👉👈 close to starting to write Primavera (2025) fanfic

[starlene]

The Blue Castle Book Club: Chapter 14

[jumbledmesh]

[starlene]

ars longa, sommaren brevis

[starlene]

The Blue Castle Book Club: Chapter 13

"I remember Grandfather Wansbarra. He was one of the few human beings I have known—almost the only one."

Lately, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about what knowing someone really means. I haven't come to any concrete conclusions yet, I'm afraid – but I am very glad that Valancy has had someone in her life that she feels like she has known, nevertheless, even if he has long since passed away.

Grandfather Wansbarra seems to have been something of an eccentric, in a fun but also, perhaps, somewhat annoying way. So far, we've learned that he chose Valancy's name, that he claimed to be the reincarnation of his great-great-grandfather, and that apparently, he didn't have too much time for social niceties ("He talked all his life exactly as Valancy did today.")

All this makes me wonder how on earth he managed to father and raise someone like Mrs. Frederick. Perhaps that was Amelia's quiet form of rebellion, becoming someone completely unlike her father? And like someone said, she has likely had to put in a lot of effort to be accepted into the Stirling clan despite her family background, so whatever small peculiarities she might've inherited from her father must've been ironed out in the process.

~

Sidenote: I keep thinking of starlings whenever I read or write the name Stirling. That's too nice an association for this bunch, really. Starlings are such beautiful birds.

(photo by TheOther Kev on Pexels)

~

"“Fun!” Mrs. Frederick uttered the word as if Valancy had said she was going to have a little tuberculosis."

This made me laugh.

~

Anyway, this is a fun little chapter, but with such a dark undertone. This family is losing it so completely over their former punching bag saying no to them for a change that one of them is literally suggesting locking her up. No wonder Valancy used to be so afraid of them, really – it's a very sinister mindset on display here.

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

p.s. I'm coming to Germany soon with my new book of science cartoons. Details at www.tomgauld.com

[starlene]

The Blue Castle Book Club: Chapters 11 & 12

As I mentioned earlier, I have hardly any relatives alive, and there weren't many of them to begin with... but I've participated in just enough family dinners that I can relate to the "true to Stirling form" family dinner experience. Guests always making the same "hardy perennial jokes" and speculating on the next person to pass away used to be staples during the dinners my mom used to host, too.

Apparently, Valancy is not expected to really talk during these affairs, seeing how Uncle James is already convinced "that the conversation had been uplifted" and Valancy's mother "had been breathing easier" once she states her idea of the greatest happiness. I can relate to this too: during the aforementioned family dinners, I wasn't really expected to talk, either, and though I'm not an especially shy or anxious person, I had a very hard time butting into the ever-recurring discussions even when I felt like I had something to contribute. I think that's because my relatives had mentally slotted me into the role of the child and just let me remain there even as I grew up, since there were no younger people than me in the family and since I didn't show any interest in producing any myself, either. The Stirlings seem to have slotted Valancy into a very similar role during their family dinners.

Anyway, all aforementioned annoyances are certainly a magnitude easier to deal with when you don't actively fear and/or dislike the people sitting around that dinner table with you. Get their asses, Valancy.

~

"He looked enormously pleased over managing to work that quotation in at last. He had been waiting all his life for the chance."

I'm afraid I relate to Uncle James here. The only thing that stops me from being incredibly annoying like this all the time is that most of the fiction I'd like to quote is in English or in Swedish, while most of the conversations I have irl are in Finnish. Maybe that's for the better.

~

“People who don’t like cats,” said Valancy, attacking her dessert with a relish, “always seem to think that there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.”

Tumblr posts that Valancy would 100% reblog, part 1:

(original post here)

~

"Old maids are apt to fly off at a tangent like that. If she had been married when she should have been she wouldn’t have got like this."

This post is just becoming a collection of personal anecdotes, I'm afraid I've spent my daily allotment of brain power elsewhere and don't have anything more substantial to contribute here... but, inspired by the above quote, I really have to tell you this:

Eight years ago, when I was 25 years old, I went to see a doctor because I was feeling really tired all the time. He told me I should look into finding a spouse, then having children, and then having grandchildren, because – according to a book he had recently read, no less! – that's the natural course of a person's life, and those who don't stay on that course become depressed and therefore tired. The doctor didn't even order blood tests before sharing this pearl of wisdom with me and ushering me out.

Reader, it was undiagnosed ADHD and sleeping disorder, and clearly that doctor was Uncle Benjamin.

~

"Uncle Herbert was thinking that things were rather dull now that Doss had gone."

<3

~

More Blorbo Parallels between Valancy and Daniel Daréus: very mysteriously thinking about a person they've only met twice while feeling very lonely and in pain. Wonder why that might be..?

[sentienttoast]

I think about Matti every day

[only-tiktoks]

[starlene]

As many of my beloved mutuals know, I've felt exhausted and ill and just overall very bad for eons now... and it's starting to look like a considerable chunk of that has had to do with a chronic illness I've probably inherited from one of my grandparents brewing in my body for who knows how many months/years.

Exact diagnosis & long-term treatment are still pending, but lately, I've been taking some pretty strong meds to momentarily alleviate some of the symptoms while waiting for my next doctor's appointment. And wouldn't you know, they've actually been working somewhat! I've had several almost normal-feeling days in a row and everything.

So of course, I've channeled about 85% of that unanticipated energy into hyperfixating on Sad Italian Movie, and sorting through the multitude of thoughts and emotions said hyperfixation has unearthed within me.

I feel like that dude in that crab tiktok, you know, the "every time I go to the beach, some fucking mollusk or dead thing pulls up" guy... except for in my case, going to the beach is getting to experience the illusion of health for a couple of weeks, and the fucking mollusk is being back on my bullshit.

[eleancrvances]

-yes, you're right, music doesn't have a purpose, but it can do it all.

-all of what?

-everything. it can tell us of the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm. of thunder, lightning that makes the swallows fly away. or a shepherd sleeping, lying on the grass. or a barking dog. men and women who dance during a party.

tecla insolia and michele riondino in primavera (d. michieletto, 2025)